The "door" woven from leaves and vines rustled as it retreated to either side. A petite blonde elf stepped out of the dim corridor and into the spacious chamber. Carefully stepping over the faintly glowing plant conduits that resembled blood vessels or nerve fibers, she approached Beltira and said softly, "I... woke up. I heard a lot of noise outside, so I came to take a look..."
"A lot of noise?" Beltira paused, then quickly understood. "You mean the disturbances you heard through neural resonance? Sorry for waking you—the neural signals came from the wasteland border."
As she spoke, she slowly emerged from the tangle of vines where she had been resting. The lush vines and leaves detached from behind her like a robe and withdrew, forming a throne-like structure. Her gaze settled on the petite elf before her—
The young elf called Belna wore only a simple garment. The exposed skin of her arms, back, and legs was covered in intricate runes and interconnected lines, pale green threaded with gold. Though complex, these runes and lines formed orderly tattoo-like "arrays." Where no runes covered her, her skin was so fair it was almost translucent, faintly revealing the blood vessels beneath—yet what flowed within them seemed to be some kind of glowing... "solution."
These features, so clearly unlike those of ordinary humans or elves, covered Belna's body and gave the young "elf" an inhuman quality, like an alchemical doll. She stopped before Beltira, the runes on her skin flowing with a faint gleam. Then she glanced at the vines and Neural Nodes that had contracted into a "throne" and asked cautiously, "The border... is the fighting still very fierce there?"
"The fighting is intense, but you don't need to worry about it. The enemy is just a pack of worms