A Jaded Life

It turned out, if there was one thing rabbits were really good at, it was escaping. Maybe it should have been obvious from the start but considering that we hadn’t been close enough to the stupid bunny to Observe it and learn its level, maybe it couldn’t have been. Or maybe we simply assumed that our levels would be sufficient to overcome any natural advantage the rabbit had thanks to having its fight-or-flight instincts firmly rooted on the flight side of things but now, after following its tracks and multiple false trails it had somehow created for almost twenty minutes, that assumption turned out to be erroneous.

Alas, no matter how impressive the rabbit’s abilities were, with enough stubborn determination and enough power to barrel through the bit of dangerous flora the false trails had led us into, we managed to get to the rabbit’s burrow. The stupid thing itself had long since vanished underground but given that I had been training my Earth Magic for quite some time, the ground wasn’t really the shelter it should be, even if the rabbit had Earth Magic itself. There was no reasonably realistic way for a stupid rabbit to have higher Earth Magic abilities than I had.

Upon realising that that thought was quite similar to the one that I had when we started the chase, I quickly banished it, just to make sure I hadn’t invited Fate to have a laugh at my expense and started to feel out the burrow underneath. I wanted to know what we were dealing with before I started to dig if only to make sure that it wasn’t another distraction and the rabbit had long since evacuated the place through the backdoor or something like that. Given that it had somehow managed to lay multiple false trails in ways that’d be impossible without some sort of special ability, I wasn’t taking any chances.

The more my senses told me about the burrow, the more my eyes widened. I had expected a burrow a few metres in length and maybe going a metre deep, something reasonable for a critter the size of a rabbit but what I got was more. After spreading my senses outwards as far as I could, I still hadn’t found its maximum extent with my Earth Magic, meaning that it was spread further than ten metres in the horizontal plane which made it a lot larger than expected but when I realised that there were tunnels extending out of my range downwards, I could only gawp in disbelief. These silly rabbits had dug deep enough to get a contract for subway tunnels.

“This is insane,” I muttered, before glancing over to the others and telling them what I had found. “You know what this means, right?” I asked, a grin starting to replace the expression of disbelief I had worn before.

“We’ll find out how they managed to do this. I mean, that sounds like some fairly major shenanigans, though not quite on the level of the Charlands,” Luna suggested, getting a nod from both Lia and myself. We all wanted to figure out how this worked and the only way to really do so was to go digging up some rabbits.

For a moment, I considered sending Alex in first, their small size would easily fit into the tunnel but given the dimensions of the warren we were facing, that was just not feasible. Sure, they could move through the tunnels but finding out which tunnel was the correct one would be nigh impossible. Everything down there would smell of rabbit, making their nose nearly useless, and even if they did manage to chase one or two of these rabbits down, I wasn’t completely convinced that Alex could subdue them on their own. These beasts were a lot more resourceful and crafty than I had expected, not to mention more powerful.

No, if we wanted to catch them, we’d have to dig them up and knock them out, not necessarily in that order.

With a wide grin on my face, I reached out with my Earth Magic, feeling a momentary resistance from the ground as I asserted my will. The resistance likely came from a different magical effect worked into the tunnel but at the end of the day, I wasn’t really bothered by it, it didn’t have the power to do more than briefly inconvenience me.

Moved by the power of my will and magic, the ground moved to the sides, compacting into something strong enough to support the structure I was creating on the fly, Crystal Magic helping to form the lattices that carried the weight so much better than the haphazard nature of compacted dirt. As we moved, I briefly used my Darkness Magic to feel out the shadows all around us, managing to spot the fleeing rabbits so I knew which tunnel to follow. Otherwise, I might as well have started to excavate the entire area, as there were dozens of tunnels, all of which could hold our running rabbit alongside its family.

Progress was both incredibly fast and terribly slow, depending on the comparison used. Compared to any other way of digging a tunnel through the ground, the speed at which I was moving the earth to the side and creating my tunnel was blazing fast, as I was moving around a metre every minute. But when compared to a drove of rabbits that was fleeing through familiar tunnels, it was glacially slow. Sure, we’d eventually catch up to them, especially as the tunnel they were in wasn’t showing any signs of leading back to the surface, but it would take some time. Luckily, we had that time, especially as the tunnel I was digging could easily double as shelter from the Sun for a day or two.

After digging for quite some time, I felt myself freeze, flabbergasted what my senses were telling me. There was a dark and fairly large space ahead, the ceiling almost twice the height of the tunnel I was digging. The tunnel we were following terminated in that space, making me wonder just what we were heading into but at the same time, I wanted to learn more. This might be the rabbit’s secret, the space that gave them their abilities, and I was determined to find out.

With renewed vigour, I continued to push the tunnel forward after warning my companions that we were heading into something interesting. Spreading my shadow sense through the tunnel told me that there were things in that tunnel but whether these were somewhat soft rocks, animals, plants or something else entirely, I wasn’t too sure. The Shadow Sense was fairly good at figuring out if the space I was sensing was transparent to light or not but beyond that, I could only gleam limited information at this range.

It didn’t take long for me to breach the cavern, though the last bit was a lot harder than the rest, the area around the cavern had many more rocks than the soil I had been digging through before and a part of me was wondering how that came to be. If the cave was within the bedrock, I could understand but this was weird. From what I could tell, the surroundings of the cavern were almost completely made up of stone but only the direct surroundings. I wasn’t sure to spread my senses much further, but it felt almost as if the cavern had been deliberately dug into the rock, using something quite similar to my Earth sense to make sure the sturdy shell wasn’t pierced. If that was the case, it was a fairly impressive piece of Earth Magic, though whether it was mostly due to time spent working on it or raw power, I couldn’t tell.

But even if it had been dug by somebody, that somebody was incredibly strange. Upon breaching the cavern, I had taken a quick look around, combining my normal sight with my magical sight, my soul sense and even my Shadow Sense to get an accurate picture of our surroundings and what I saw was incredibly basic and boring. A simple, roughly round cavern, maybe three metres high at the centre, with rock-lined walls that make me think they were washed smooth by water or maybe sand, with a wide variety of mushrooms growing from small, loamy patches as water was dripping into the space from above. The various fungi had only trace amounts of magic and my soul sense came up completely empty, meaning that the most interesting thing was that the cavern was continuing in either direction.

“Silva, can you start tracking down the rabbits? I’m no longer able to sense them,” I asked my companion, my mind still trying to figure out just what this space was. Or rather, how natural or unnatural it was, there was no indication of magic in the walls, nothing that gave the impression it wasn’t what it appeared to be at first glance. Nothing but the fact that the cavern seemed to fit almost perfectly into the rock it was dug into, while everything else I could sense was simple soil.