An Average Reincarnation

An Unexpected Rescue

"Can we at least wait for Donovan and Rafine to show?"

"Swift." a low growl came out of her throat; I think my tail shivered a little there.

"Okay, okay, fine. Prisilla, can you stay here to let them know the situation?"

"Gotcha, good luck."

He started picking the lock, but Sylvestra just sheared it clean off. He stared at the broken lock grimly for a second before swinging the hatch open and jumping in, not a moment later Sylvestra followed him down into the darkness below.

I sat down in the dingy alleyway and waited.

A few minutes later a panting Donovan and an out of breath Rafine came into my view. I gave them a small wave.

"What happened where are the two of them?"

I pointed at the open hatch.

"I see. Lead the way."

"Rafy, will you be alright?"

"Y-yeah... don't worry about me." she tried covering her face with her big hat, didn't work.

I sighed and scooped her up, she let out a yelp but didn't resist. With the little mage under my arms, I hopped down into the earthy tunnels of the labyrinth and began running.

If I remember correctly the reason all big human cities have labyrinths underneath is, so the monsters have somewhere to form that didn't hurt them. See, Mother Nature likes all mana flow to be in equilibrium, but if you jam back a lot of living creatures into such a small area like kittens in a litter then one of two things can happen. Normally a lot of monsters spawn nearby to balance out the flow. However, since the city needs to protect the roads and merchants coming into it, they frequently clear out the nearby area so it doesn't happen, thus the negative mana from nature builds up so either a monster flood happens, which is bad enough already, or in the worst case....

A Demon comes into existence if the imbalance is great enough.

I was part of the task force assembled to defeat a small, wounded behemoth a while back in the Osignin Kingdom. It wasn't pretty and thinking about it makes my tail stand on end.

It killed three quarters of the force before we barely managed to bring it down.

So, the humans, being pretty clever, build large underground labyrinths before constructing their cities on top, so the monsters have somewhere to go.

Though this could all be avoided if they just lived more like us cat folk. Impressive uselessness is what I call their cities.

"You can put me down now." my thoughts were interrupted by an indigent huff from Rafine.

"Okay." I let her down gently and she patted the dust off her robe.

"How far?"

"We're there actually, they stopped moving right about," I turned the corner and swung open a large wooden door, "there."

I stopped, hit by an enormous stench of blood and sweat.

"Why did you stop all of a sudden, wh-" Rafine stopped talking and just stared at the mess before my eyes.

About ten or so men of various races lay in pieces across the bloody floor.

I whistled.

"Prisilla, not the time." Donovan gave me a dark look.

"Sorry."

"We stepped gingerly over the mess of corpses and made our way to the door on the other side, the room that greeted us was so shockingly similar to the first that I did a double take.