Part of the building where he was standing right now was well-lit, owing to numerous windows and doorways. If creatures lurking here did not like the sun, there was a possibility of them hiding in some darker areas of the building. It was quite possible he was noticed already some time ago and demons were already waiting for him with an ambush - and there was a number of spots perfect for that inside this building.
From outside, it might have looked like some old, many stories tall building block, but in fact, its most important and biggest part was located below the surface. Upper part consisted of assembly lines and laboratories, while huge tubs were located mostly underground, for safety purposes. Aside from that, the building included warehouse space, offices and staff rooms. Taking into account its size, there was a plenty of spots to hide for K's potential targets. This meant he had to think carefully about directions to take.
Fortunately, words he heard from Asha earlier on, gave him some ideas.
"You said they can draw energy directly from earth, right? If that's the case, the effects should be stronger the closer the vein is."
"It should be that way, in theory at least" the sword spirit confirmed.
K nodded in reply and started looking for the passage or some kind of building plan, which would allow him to reach deeper.
He passed through the first room, where he found the corpses and reached a wide corridor, on which both sides there were numerous doors and smaller side corridors.
For now, he preferred not to stray from the main corridor, which was the only way to check the side routes, and thus, firmly continued walking forward, while keeping both his gun and sword ready, and looking around carefully.
At some point, he reached and area, where the corridor started to widen to slowly expand into a sort of an atrium. It seemed it was a spot where all the main corridors crossed. In the centre, there was a round counter, behind which, in the years back, a number of people would be taking care of some organizational stuff. K recognized this room as a meeting spot, maybe a place used as an information point and hoped he could find at least some plans on pointers as to how reach the lower levels.
It took him a moment, but he managed to find a really old level map, showing the layout of the floor on which he was right now. K immediately found the location of atrium and located the closest elevators - these were placed in the western wing, so about two hundred meters from his current location.
Without saying any word, he entered the closest corridor leading west and he was immediately surrounded by darkness - the lighting was not working and sunlight was not reaching there. While he was not really fond of doing that, he turned on a flashlight. Of course, he could have used his special eyesight, which would allow him to see in the dark, yet it would have also required him to use aura and he preferred to save it for later, when it's the most needed.
A plaster on the walls was falling apart, in many spots having huge patches lying on the floor, uncovering gray, concrete slabs. As he walked, K had to once bypass a dangerously looking hole in the ground of irregular shape, and - on the other occasion - avoid a door dropping off its hinge.
Similar spots could be found around every corner and he could only guess when would something jumped out of te darkness and attack him. Still, nothing of the sort happened, and he successfully reached the elevators without major issues. Of course, these were not operational due lack of electricity. However, K was aware that would be the case from the very beginning and it was not like he really needed an operational elevator.
"Sorry, Asha, you may not like it."
He stuck the sword's blade between the doors to force them open.
"Can't you be gentler?"as expected, Asha complained immediately after he did that "I'm not some crowbar! Who knows what would happen to me if the blade breaks?"
"That's why I apologized before doing this" K muttered.
The situation did anger Asha, but in the end the doors got opened, exposing an empty shaft. K looked up and down and confirmed there was no actual elevator in there. The whole mechanism was either disassembled or all elements simply fell down so deep, it could not been seen from his current spot. Either way, it made things easier for him, as climbing down was less problematic with all the machinery still intact - plus the elevator itself could have blocked the way to levels he needed to reach.
After confirming the walls were in decent shape, he jumped into the shaft and started descending by jumping from one wall onto another. He continued like that until his feet finally touched the destroyed elevator, which was stuck in-between floors. At first, he hoped it will be possible to somehow enter the elevator and reach further down, but cutting through all that mangled machinery would have taken way too much time.
Because of that, he returned to the closest shaft doors and forced them open, similarly to the ones he entered the shaft through. By doing so, he ended up in yet another dark area, with his back facing the shaft, therefore he had to rely on flashlight yet again.
The hall was enormous with about one hundred meters length and even bigger in terms of width. K quickly noticed damaged assembly lines and debris lying here and there, alongside numerous holes in the floor.
Original plan he had in mind for reaching deeper from this current spot relied on small explosion to cause the destroyed elevator to fall even lower, down the shaft. However, after investigating the state of the floor, it seemed much more reasonable to destroy portion of it with other means - using one of the bigger holes seemed to be a much safer way compared to explosion damage that could potentially result in the entire shaft collapsing and making lots of noise at the same time.
Obviously, in order to break through the floor, he needed to find a proper spot, a hole which could be widened enough for him to squeeze in without causing the entirety of the floor to fall apart. With that in mind, K headed forward, walking slowly and carefully putting his feet on the ground - he could see multiple cracks in the concrete and, while it was for sure reinforced, it was hard to tell if it has enough support to sustain his weight. Thus, he preferred not to take any risks and walked slowly until noticing a wider crack in the floor, wide enough for him to fit in and reaching all the way into the next level below.
K caught the sturdiest part of the concrete by the hole and jumped down from the height of about three to four meters. Moments after he landed, a cracking sound echoed and collapsing of the floor followed, making him ultimately land one more level lower.
"Ouch!"
He quickly stood up, rubbing the back of his head and, before fully recovering from the shock of hitting various rubble, K felt something in the air, which allowed him to dodge at the very last moment. Another blow he managed to avoid barely after regaining balance.
It was extremely dark, and he not only did not see what was happening around, but also under his feet. Surprisingly, he tripped over something with his right foot and fell on his face, hitting his head against some kind of edge. Soon after, K could feel a hot trickle of blood on his forehead.
There was no time to think and dwell on whatever happened, so he immediately concentrated aura on his eyes to activate his special skill, hoping to see more. Unfortunately, this bright sight of his did not help as much as K would like it to - due to a number of aura signatures, what he saw was a mixture of auras similar to what he found on higher floors, therefore even with the skill active, telling apart the foes was still a hard task.
Only now, K started to quickly consider his options and ultimately decided to adjust his skill by limiting aura flow, which hopefully could allow him to see less of aura manifests and pretty much only the outline of enemies' shapes and potential movement. It proved to work much better than standard vision with the skill active, though made it harder to watch the surroundings - on one hand, he could track movement of the demons, on the other, his own mobility was affected due to strain cause by continuous maintanance of limited aura flow and increased focus limiting regular field of vision, making it more likely for K to not spot obstacles.
The advantage of such skill usage was lower aura consumption, but it also caused a bigger mental strain in exchange. Though, however it worked now, he was no longer completely in the dark and could follow the movement of ghost-like shapes.
When one of the shapes made a sudden turn in his direction, K was able to react immediately, jumping sideways and cutting through the are, where this shadow appeared a moment earlier. A metallic sound followed, while the strength of impact caused the hunter's arm to bump off with high enough impact to hit some element of the room, which K was unable to tell what it was - it seemed similar to a column, some kind of a support beam, or maybe a load-bearing wall. Having a moment without any attack, he quickly rolled toward the other side and stood with his back against the wall, calming down his breath.
"Did we hit it?" he asked Asha telepathically.
"We did hit something, but it wasn't a demon for sure" she answered "It was something concrete, maybe a wall? Remember that when you focus your aura, you see what's non-material."
He did not need further explanation - in their current form, his eyes allowed him to see aura's of living beings, but no physical barriers at the same time. This meant he simply miscalculated about feeling his surroundings and, because they seemed to end up on a floor with numerous rooms and corridors connecting them, he simply noticed creatures located behind the walls and, stupidly, cause a ruckus that could easily make potential foes flock on him in a matter of seconds.
In such circumstances it made the most sense o use a flashlight again, which would mean a bad headache later on since one of other big downsides of his inhuman vision was susceptibility to light. Putting it in other words - it was a great ability to have at night, a cloudy day or whenever it was dark, but hard to use during a sunny dat or when there is an intense light present, and it was the worst when someone used a flashlight suddenly when skill was active in a complete darkness.
Using a flashlight was equal to selling your position in such dark areas. Nevertheless, he turned it on and allowed for the non-material and material worlds to interconnect in front of his eyes. Such usage of the skill with exposure to light immediately caused him to feel a stinging pain, which also caused a temporary blindness. With a short-term vulnerability present now, he crawled into a corner of the room, waiting for this eyes to adjust to this new setup, allowing him to move around again.
Once his eyes became ready, he leaned out his head to check the nearby area before hiding temporarily again to process the information he just obtained.
Several minutes earlier, K was pretty sure that he is up against some flying demons, maybe even wraiths of the sort, based on the height at which he was noticing the aura signatures and their presence despite the blocked passages on upper levels. However, this deduction of his proved to be wrong - enemies were Ghard hounds which were using their long claws to run on the walls and the ceiling, hence the weird positions he was picking auras from.
Being aware of the enemies' species made a huge change for K, who could finally apply proper tactics he learned when fighting hounds - the main trait of these Garths was connected to their intelligence, or rather, their lack of intelligence as hounds were, simply speaking, really dumb. It made no sense to run around trying to find these foes, it was better to stay still and wait. After all, they were extremely sensitive to smell of blood and K had plenty of that on him - even if his wounds were healed already, the stains on his clothes remained. Therefore, he found a spot in the corner of the wall to stand in a way that guaranteed he cannot be approached from behind, his back facing the corner. Placed like that, he was holding a sword in his currently lowered right hand and keeping his left hand on the eye level to have a proper aim.
The sound of bony paws hitting on the concrete, a flash of red eyes and yellowish fangs. Two shots were needed to fell the first hound, which went down with a high-pitched whine. After the first one, two others attacked from different sides, making it harder for K to react and easier for the enemies to avoid the bullets and his sword.
Of course, K expected simultaneous attack as low probability scenario, thus he had some countermeasures in place, though not necessarily something he wanted to do. Still, situation required some quick thinking, thus he waited for the moment when the paws are not touching the groung before rolling forward to reach the hounds from below and attacking with the sword. This move easily fell one of the hounds, but the last remaining one was not cut deep enough.
K was ready for the immediate attack, but the surviving hound did not attack again. Instead, the demon dog backed off into the spot in the corner where K previously stood and howled loudly.