Ganta looked at the gnome with a shocked face. She didn’t expect to see someone else here in these dark caves. But here she was, looking at the terrified gnome woman.

“Hey there, didn’t expect to see a gnome here.”

Ganta felt conflicted. She was happy to see another soul. At the same time, terrified that the gnome could be the drakaina’s minion. Ganta took a deep breath and steeled herself to kill the poor gnome if she made any wrong move.

The gnome woman remained silent for a while before finally speaking. Her voice was weak and shaking.

Ganta froze the moment she heard the woman speak. Those words weren’t in the gnome tongue nor the language of any other mortal race. The gnome woman talked in the language of dragons, indicating one thing. She had lived her whole life under a dragon’s rule.

“Smell… Shadow… death.” The gnome woman gasped, and Ganta shook her head.

Ganta knew a few words but wasn’t fluent in the language of dragons. She shifted a bit, the wound in her stomach stinging. It was clear to her what the gnome woman was. She was a dragon slave, a humanoid who got captured by a dragon to serve as a minion.

By smell alone, Ganta could tell that gnome woman wasn’t a slave to the shadow drakaina but to one of the two earth dragons. Her master must’ve died, and his slaves were now lost, trying to survive alone in the dark depths of the underground.

“Damn it, what are the words again?” She looked at the gnome woman and smiled. “Me, Friend, Dragon, Eat, Me, Escape.”

The gnome woman’s face illuminated with a wide smile. “Brown, Death, Gnomes, Escape, Hide.”

Brown? She was referring to the brown dragon, the earth dragon that lived here. Death is probably referring to him getting killed by the shadow drakaina. Gnomes explains that there are more slaves than her, and the last two words are obvious. The gnomes escaped and are now hiding from the drakaina with whatever strange magic they could cast, most likely.

“Blood, blood?” The gnome approached Ganta with a worried face.

Ganta looked at her with a pained smile. It was slowly getting harder and harder to think about her wounds.

The first ‘Blood’ was spelled differently than the second one. “Yes, I’m bleeding, and I do need healing.” She immediately realized that she spoke in the human language, so the gnome looked at her, confused.

“Blood.” Ganta spelled the word the same way the gnome woman spelled the second blood, meaning healing. “Ah… second… skin?”

The gnome woman froze for a second, looked at Ganta’s bare chest, and then frantically looked around, quickly taking her jacked off and giving it to her.

The jacket was too small for Ganta to wear, so she just wrapped it around her chest. This is why she hates her beast form. In that form, her chest and shoulder are far wider than her hips, which meant that it was easy to find stretchy pants but impossible to find any suitable upper clothes.

As Ganta wrapped her chest, the gnome woman pulled a small bottle of strange cream and wiped it on Ganta’s large stomach wound to stop the bleeding.

The two of them took a minute to rest before they finally decided to move.

“Shadow, death, follow.” The gnome woman looked back at Ganta and slowly waved her hand, telling her to follow closely as if she didn’t want the shadow drakaina to find them.

Ganta looked around. The two of them are stuck inside a dark cave. The shadow drakaina should be able to sense them with ease, but something must be masking their presence.

“Darkness, shadow, obvious.” She asked why the shadow drakaina couldn’t just find them. The whole cave is shrouded in darkness and shadows. They are in her territory.

“Master, collar, safe.” She pointed at the steel collar on her neck. The brown dragon must’ve used those collars to enslave the gnomes.

The collar had magic related to earth and illusions. Ganta didn’t know how it worked, but as long as the gnome woman wore the collar, the drakaina couldn’t find her through magic.

The two walked for a while, slowly making their way through the cave. The gnome woman seemed to be terrified and worried, carefully taking each step with shaking knees. Usually, Ganta would’ve berated her for walking slower than a snail, but today, she was glad they weren’t moving any faster. Her stomach hurt like hell.

Then suddenly, the gnome woman froze in place and waved her hand, signaling for Ganta to lay down. The two immediately kissed the ground, waiting in horror as they heard distant footsteps.

Ganta recognized a few things about their approach thing. It was heavy enough to crack the stone ground, barefoot, and only had two legs.

Soon enough, they saw her, a naked, dark elf woman slowly making her way through the hallways, hunched forward, mumbling to herself in the dragons’ language.

“Shadows, return, the path, the black, spilling…” Her voice sounded both scared, hopeful, and mad.

Ganta and the gnome woman stopped breathing and didn’t dare to move an inch. The collar protected them from the drakaina’s magic senses, but it didn’t protect them from her sight or hearing.

Ganta wanted to ask if they should be worried about her sniffing them out, but she didn’t dare open her mouth with that monster being so close.

Seconds later, they saw something horrifying. Two gnomes were walking by, and they suddenly found themselves a few tens of meters away from the drakaina.

They froze for a second, terrified, and they tried to slowly back away. But they were out of luck. The drakaina was here because she sensed their footsteps, and probably the footsteps of Ganta and the gnome woman as well.

The drakaina slowly lifted her right hand, and waves of shadows burst forward from beneath her feet, fading into the ground. Silence fell for a second, and then the two gnomes screamed, their eyes bleeding out as their bodies convulsed. Ganta had never heard a man squeal like that- in utter horror and agony.

^God-fucking bitch, she wrecked their shadows, fried their souls.^ Ganta and the gnome woman kept hiding in horror, waiting as the drakaina left, slowly walking away as if she had all the time in the world.