Reborn with a Necromancer System - Chapter 109

Chapter 109: Hollowcrag Ravine
The descent into Hollowcrag Ravine began with silence.

Not a peaceful silence, but a heavy one. Oppressive. The kind that pressed against your skin and made the hairs on your arms rise for no reason you could name. Even the wind seemed afraid to whistle through the narrow cliffs.

Kai and Kleo moved cautiously, their boots crunching over gravel and moss-slick stone. Kai’s senses burned with input, threads of mana coiled beneath the ground like veins, denser than anything he’d ever felt. It clung to him, whispering in arcane pulses.

As they moved deeper into the gorge, the walls narrowed. Rock formations took on strange shapes, almost like ribs or teeth. Kleo glanced at one jagged outcrop and muttered, “That looks like a jawbone.”

Kai didn’t respond. His focus was entirely on the ground beneath his feet.

It throbbed.

—

They found the survivor tucked into the shadow of a hollowed out section of the ravine wall. A crude barrier of rocks and old sticks had been placed in front of the cave entrance, though it had clearly done little good. The man inside looked like he hadn’t slept or eaten in days. His beard was crusted with bile and blood, and his eyes bulged as if they’d been locked wide open for too long.

Kleo gasped when she saw him. “Gods…”

Kai crouched low and approached slowly, arms open and empty. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

The man didn’t move. Not at first. Then, in a hoarse, cracking whisper: “Don’t speak. It listens.”

Kai’s breath slowed.

The man looked around wildly. “Gone. Gone. Swallowed. I saw it. Mouth in the stone. Teeth in the moss. It ate them whole.”

Kai reached into his coat and drew a small flask of water. The man didn’t reach for it. He just stared, eyes glassy with trauma. When he finally spoke again, it was a whisper.

“Friends… H-hunters… gone. Swallowed. All gone. The beast… the ravine itself…” he stammered, voice little more than a breath. “It’s not real… not real..”

Kai knelt beside him, placing a calming hand on the man’s shoulder.

“What beast?”

“Ground opened. Flesh inside. Screaming. Screaming forever…” The hunter trembled.

Kai’s jaw tightened. His breath left him in a quiet hiss. Then a voice, calm, dry, scholarly, spoke in his mind.

“Ravine mimic,” said Winfried Drummond, his bound soul stirring from the recesses of Kai’s essence. “Rare. Devastatingly patient. Most mimics begin as small, chest-sized parasites. But the older ones? They take on whatever form yields the most prey. Houses. Lakes. Caves. Sometimes… entire ravines and mountains.”

Kai’s lips curled. “So it’s not just hiding in the ravine,” he muttered aloud. “It is the ravine.”

Kleo stepped back, her face pale. “A ravine? How do we fight something that big?”

“We don’t.” Kai reached out, gently closing the survivor’s eyes. The man had passed out. If they lived, they’d bring him back. But right now, something was shifting in the earth.

The ground rumbled.

Kai’s eyes snapped upward and saw the world above them change.

A stretch of stone behind Kleo rippled like water. Something massive and alive emerged, smooth flesh the colour of moss and ash, uncoiling with impossible grace. A vast, lidless eye blinked open in the rock wall, and a mouth, impossibly wide, ringed with jagged stone teeth, bloomed beneath their feet.

“Kleo!”

He didn’t think. Just moved.

Kai threw Kleo upward with as much strengthening magic as he could muster. She’d manage a way to survive the fall. He knew it.

The ground beneath him buckled like paper. The rock split open, and he fell.

His world twisted around him.

He plummeted into flesh.

There was no stone there, no soul or rock, only muscle, sinew, and twitching organs.

The ravine’s interior was a labyrinth of twitching biological horror. Translucent membranes beat like lungs. Fluids sluiced through pulsing veins thick as trees. And below him, a tide of boiling acid.

“Shit! Finn!”

Kai didn’t even hesitate. Finn burst his shadow space.

Once, he had been a child with bright eyes and sky-bound dreams. A hopeful would-be skyship captain in Ylthara.

For now, he was the only method Kai had to stay alive.

“Up,” Kai commanded.

With a low guttural hum and a gust of displaced air, Finn lifted into the air. Kai grabbed his friend’s shoulders as they ascended away from the churning acid.

It wasn’t elegant, riding his friend like an upright mule, but if it meant avoiding stomach acid from a magical creature, he didn’t care how he looked.

“It’s like a stomach,” Kai muttered, eyes flicking from wall to wall. “A stomach the size of a cathedral.”

Drummond’s voice echoed in his mind. “You cannot kill it from within with brute force. It would take a decade. No, you must find its brain. They’re internal. Mobile. It hides them behind its strongest walls.”

Kai looked down at his clothes, soaked in sweat and mimic mucus, and grimaced. “This is disgusting.”

He tried to imagine what flight magic would feel like. Tried to will himself upward.

Nothing.

No lift. He wasn’t there yet. His mana had no idea what to do with itself for flight.

“I need flight magic,” he muttered, “real flight magic. Not sigils stitched into robes or inscribed on boots. Not some enchanted broomstick, flying around like a witch from a child’s television show.” He sighed. “Can you imagine? A cursed necromancer, riding a broom like some village crone. The embarrassment alone would kill me.”

Finn moaned beneath him as the acid surged, bubbling unnaturally high.

A warning.

It knew he was in there. The mimic knew he wasn’t absorbed.

Kai’s heart pounded harder now. Every sense screamed.

He wasn’t sure he was going to make it out of this.

The mimic’s body was adapting. Heating. Digesting.

Kai’s body began to sweat and found it harder to breathe amongst the gasses surrounding him.

Down below, nothing remained of the hunter’s friends. Nothing remained of any of the possible thousands of millions of lives fallen prey to the beast.

And worse yet, he felt mana. Dense, aggressive mana, pulsing from deeper inside the creature.

Not just from the mimic itself.

Something else was inside it.

Something ancient. The mana Kai sensed before wasn’t just from the mimic. The mana was if a different kind.

“What the fuck could live down here in this thing? Whatever it is… I don’t want to meet it.”