My Last Dive [Made in Abyss Fanfiction]

08| The Curse

It was always a relief whenever I set foot on solid ground again after a descent. Even if it was a small ledge, it gave me the slightest peace of mind. I looked up to see just how far we descended. A hole of pale gray in the darkness was all I could see, and I was thankful for our headlamps.

"Damn, I haven't been down here in years," Melva said, her gaze wandering about the tunnel we stood in. It was much larger than I expected. While the roof scraped the top of my head, that feeling was much better than crouching. Melva dragged a hand across the chisel marks on the gray-tan walls, evidence that it had been hacked at by many picks. "This place has definitely gotten a bit bigger."

"We've had a while to carve it out, at least for the first four-hundred or so yards. It'll take at least another decade or two to carve a single tunnel out like this to the Fourth Layer," Vio said. He looked right at home here, almost resembling a creature of the Abyss as his eyes glimmered in the light of our lamps. According to the depth gauge, the initial drop was about eighteen feet with no branching paths. Melva was right about not being able to adhere to a limit.

Already there was a division in the direction of the tunnel, heading left and right. It seemed that Vio and Melva had already decided which way to go before I'd joined them. For now, going deeper was the biggest priority for us.

"The Third Layer has had the least documented amount of recovered Relics, so we obviously need to look harder than usual," Vio said. "All I can say is prepare for a long walk."

Okay, that didn't sound too difficult. Compared to climbing and squeezing through cracks and fissures, a walk down a tunnel that only involved me bowing my head a little was nothing. It bothered me that we couldn't just jump into Relic-searching, though I felt the same whenever Melva and I had to make our initial descents at the beginning of each delve.

We began to follow the large tunnel down. Down, down, weaving left and right but always descending. There really wasn't much to note about the terrain since it was just carved-out rock. Sometimes thin streams of water leaked through cracks, and it was in these spots where moss would coat the ground like a thin blanket. Occasionally, we'd come across Neritantans—small, disk-shaped mammals that scattered with shrill squeaks when we got close—along with dark gray-green lizards that hid among the moss and could fit in the palm of my hand.

The further down we went, more smaller tunnels began extending off from the main one. My eye was drawn to almost every one of them, curiosity begging me to squint down these passages in hopes of seeing something. Unlike me, Vio ignored them, and Melva hardly acknowledged anything except for where she would put her foot next. The constant decline was becoming an issue, as my ankles soon began aching. Still, I bit my lip and soldiered on.

What made time pass by all the more sluggishly was the lack of conversation. During our usual delves, Melva would crack jokes while I would try not to get lost in the scenery. Of course, there wasn't anything interesting here. And in place of jokes, my old mentor was silent. The brim of her helmet shadowed her eyes, so I couldn't begin to guess what she was thinking about. A sinking feeling told me that it had to do with her misgives.