I wasn’t quite sure how to fight something like this, and being level 395, it wouldn’t be easy. Already what I’d thought would take a few hours had stretched to almost a full day, and I wasn’t even halfway through according to the completion percentage. I knew I was gaining a crap ton of XP, but apparently the dungeon had decided to give it all to me at the end. I supposed I couldn’t fault it for that. This was supposed to be a test, after all, and I didn’t need the distraction of point assignment and skill advancement, as much as they might come in handy.

  I threw up layered force constructs on instinct, anchoring them to the ground and to each other, and watched them fail in seconds. The storm ground them away like grain in a mill, bone shards abrading structure while the blood mist corroded the spiritual lattice holding them together. Wayfinder cut nothing but screaming air when I swung, the blade passing through empty space as the vortex reformed around it. I was being flayed without a blade ever touching me, a thousand shallow cuts opening across my armor and skin as fragments slipped through gaps I could not seal fast enough.

  Lightning was my first real answer, but it scattered wildly, arcs dispersing as the storm swallowed them and spat them back out in useless flashes. I snarled and adjusted, threading life mana into the lightning. The arcs anchored then, crackling through the blood mist and briefly disrupting the vortex’s cohesion. It was not enough to finish the job, but it bought me a heartbeat, and in a fight like this, a heartbeat mattered.

  The storm howled louder as it surged again, bone shards ripping into my side hard enough to lift me off my feet. I hit the ground and rolled, Celestial Restoration flaring as I forced my body back together while the curse tried to dig in. Even as flesh knit, I felt something wrong inside me, a contamination spreading where blood mist had breached my defenses. Trailblazer’s Aura burned harder, gnawing at the necrotic force, but the vortex regenerated faster than I could suppress it. This thing was not meant to be worn down. In a drawn-out battle, it would always win. I needed to find a way to overwhelm it.

  Spirit Singing rose without thought, the sound vibrating through the spiritual layer the storm churned through. The effect was immediate and violent. The vortex shuddered, its endless motion stalling as whatever animated the storm was forced into coherence for a fraction of a second. Bone fragments clattered together and blood mist thickened as the storm hesitated, confused by being made briefly whole. I slammed Primordial Surge into that opening, a spiritual shockwave tearing through chaos and creation, and felt the vortex recoil as parts of it were torn apart at a fundamental level.

  But it still didn’t die.

  The blood mist surged inward, knitting bone fragments back into the storm with horrifying speed. The curse deepened, and I felt my movements grow heavier as diseased magic tried to latch onto my life force. I cast Celestial Restoration again, then again, burning mana to stay ahead of the rot, but the cost was mounting. This thing was bleeding me the way the floor was designed to, wearing me down by forcing repeated answers to the same problem. If I didn’t figure out a way out of this soon, I would become nothing more than shards of bone and flesh, doing my part to add to this gruesome maelstrom.

  I stepped into the storm deliberately, letting it tear at me, and forced myself to think. Physical structure was meaningless here. Force constructs failed. Lightning only worked when anchored. Spirit Singing bought time, but not resolution. My gaze snapped to the blood mist again, to the way it carried the animating force through the vortex like a circulatory system. The realization hit hard. The blood was not a byproduct. It was the carrier.

  Disgust twisted in my gut as I reached for Blood is Life. Every instinct screamed at me not to do this, not to draw corrupted blood into myself, but there was no other way. I seized the blood mist with Will and life mana and pulled it into me. The sensation was vile, corruption scraping against my soul as disease and curse tried to take hold. I leaned into Celestial Restoration and Trailblazer’s Aura simultaneously, purging impurities even as I absorbed the power that animated them.

  I felt the blood rush into my nose, and at some point, I must have started screaming, because my entire mouth was soon filled with it. The taint crept into me and filled my body, but Blood Is Life was a part of me. It was who I was to my core. From my first days as a Forerunner, I’d gained power from bathing in blood. This would be no different. Countess Bathory had nothing on me.

  The vortex screamed, a sound that rattled the ground as its cohesion faltered. Bone fragments lost their frantic motion, clattering to the earth as the blood that bound them was siphoned away. I staggered, blood running from my nose, ears, and mouth as I forced more of the mist into myself, my Will grinding corruption into nothing through sheer stubbornness. Lightning surged around me again, life-charged and focused, and this time it tore through the remaining structure without resistance.

  The storm collapsed in on itself, bone shards falling like rain, blood mist dissipating into harmless vapor. I dropped to one knee, chest heaving, body shredded, and mana reserves screaming. Celestial Restoration pulsed weakly as I kept myself upright, the last of the corruption burning away under my will. Silence followed, heavy and absolute, and I felt the dungeon register the kill.

  Completion: 58%

  I forced myself back to my feet, every movement a negotiation with pain. That battle had lasted another hour or more, and the caravan had regained some of the lead it had on me. My frustration threatened to overwhelm my pain, but I needed to be smart. I needed to pause.

  Finally, a notification flashed so hard that I couldn’t ignore it.

  Blood consumption is leading to evolution. Curse detected in blood. Purification will be attempted. Pain will not cease until either the blood is purified or you are dead.

  Chapter Sixty-One: Springing the Trap

  The pain built up in me, but I had to weather it. At least it never rose to the level of anguish I’d been subjected to before. This was more like a raw toothache—impossible to ignore, distracting to the point of driving you insane, but not completely disabling. Nothing like having a goddess trying to unmake you. But this was an all-over toothache, touching every nerve in my body, and it wouldn’t go away.

  Understanding dawned on me. I wasn’t meant to wait for the pain to pass. I was meant to endure, to complete the dungeon while ravaged by this agony. At the moment, I wished there was a manager to complain to. I would have happily gone full-blown Karen on whoever came up with the theme for this dungeon floor. When I got back to Earth, the first thing I was going to do was leave a one-star Yelp review. As it was, I had no choice but to move on.

  The caravan waited in a shallow valley that felt wrong, even by the standards of this floor. Dead trees ringed the depression like splintered teeth, their branches stripped bare and reaching inward, while broken stone markers and half-buried monoliths formed a loose, uneven circle. The ground had been trampled flat, mud packed hard by repeated passage, and at the center stood the line of prisoners. Chains bound them together at the neck and wrists, dull iron filled with necrotic enchantment built upon dark spirits that pulsed faintly with each staggered step they took. Heads hung low, shoulders slumped, and the life in them felt thin, stretched almost transparent under Spirit Sight.

  I didn’t rush in. I couldn’t afford to. I slowed my breathing and let Spirit Sight and System Sight overlap, peeling back layers of deception one at a time. The guards flanking the prisoners looked like simple escorts at first glance, tall figures in dark armor holding polearms and blades at rest. A deeper look with Identify told a different story. These were gravebound wardens, undead shaped by discipline rather than hunger, their movements synchronized, their animating force braided together into ranks that anticipated commands before they were given. This was what the zombie apocalypse would look like if the undead formed a military.

  Above them, the fog shifted in unnatural currents, and I felt the presence there even from this distance, a cold pressure that pressed inward on my thoughts. Sorrow dukes drifted through the mist like torn banners, wraithlike forms with elongated torsos and hollow crowns where faces should have been. Tendrils of shadow and grief extended from them into the wardens below, threading into armor joints and spinal seams. All were hovering around level 390.

  I knew this was a trap. I knew it deep down into my guts. Yet I also knew that the prisoners had been tortured. If there was a plant amongst them, I couldn’t pick out which one it was, because they all exuded hopeless, bleak despair.

  I stepped closer, careful, Here Not Here warping my position just enough to avoid setting off whatever final trigger they had prepared. It didn’t matter. The trap sprang anyway.

  The wardens snapped into motion with military precision, ranks pivoting and advancing as one. At the same instant, the sorrow dukes descended, their incorporeal forms plunging into the fog and reemerging directly above the prisoners. Pain rippled through the line as if a single nerve had been plucked, and one of the captives screamed as a warden’s blade took his head off cleanly. The death sent a visible pulse of stolen life upward, a crimson thread that flowed straight into the nearest duke, swelling its form and sharpening its presence.

  “No!” I snarled as I charged. Instinct took over for common sense.

  Trailblazer’s Aura flared outward, slamming into the valley like a pressure wave. The wardens’ movements stuttered, their regeneration faltering as the aura tore at the necrotic glue holding them together. I used Blip to skip past the first rank, reappearing beside an executioner mid-swing, and drove Wayfinder through its chest before it could finish the stroke. I didn’t stop to watch it fall. Another prisoner screamed, and another pulse of life fed the monsters overhead.

  I leapt onto a broken stone and unleashed Primordial Surge, this time wide and brutal, but carefully aimed to avoid hitting any of the prisoners. Chaos and creation rolled outward, slamming into wardens and dukes alike, tearing at the spiritual machinery that made the harvest possible. The air screamed as the pulses collided, and for a moment the siphoning faltered. I used that heartbeat to move, Here Not Here snapping me across the line as I cut down another warden before it could strike.

  It wasn’t enough. The sorrow dukes adapted instantly.

  One plunged into a warden’s body, turning it into a puppet that moved faster and hit harder than the others. Another extended its influence directly into the prisoners, forcing their bodies to arch in shared agony. When a third prisoner died, the life pulse was larger, richer, and the duke that absorbed it laughed, a sound like metal tearing under strain.

  I forced Spirit Singing from my chest, the sound vibrating through the spiritual layer that surrounded everything. The effect was profound. The dukes shrieked as coherence snapped into place, their amorphous forms forced into something solid enough to hurt. Lightning followed, life-charged and focused, tearing through the fog and biting deep into their exposed cores. One duke unraveled under the assault, its influence severed, and the wardens beneath it collapsed into inert heaps.

  I paid for that focus with blood. A warden’s blade found my side, biting deep, and another blow crushed into my shoulder hard enough to numb my arm. Celestial Restoration activated reflexively, knitting flesh even as I forced myself forward. I took hits I should have dodged, because stopping to be careful meant the death of another prisoner.

  They kept killing them anyway.

  I reached one execution point just in time to see a dwarf slump forward as his life was ripped out and fed upward. I roared in frustration and drove Wayfinder through the warden’s skull, lightning detonating inside it, then turned and hurled Acid Arrow into the fog where another warden stood. The acid splashed across its form, eating at the flesh even as Spirit Singing tore more deeply into it. The combination gave me long enough to finish it with a second surge of lightning and song.

  The valley was chaos now. Wardens fell in pieces, sorrow dukes screamed and dissolved, and the prisoners collapsed wherever chains slackened. I moved constantly, Blip and Here Not Here carrying me from one crisis to the next, Trailblazer’s Aura burning bright as I tried to suppress the life siphon wherever it formed. I killed quickly, brutally, efficiently, but I couldn’t be everywhere at once.

  By the time the last duke fell, torn apart by a combination of Spirit Singing and Primordial Surge, the ground was littered with bodies. Wardens lay shattered, their animating force spent, and the fog began to pull back in wary tendrils.

  Only two prisoners still breathed.

  I stood in the center of the valley, chest heaving, blood running freely again as the last of my mana struggled to keep up. The dungeon registered the victory, a heavy, solemn acknowledgment that felt more like judgment than praise. I had won the fight. I had broken the trap.

  But I had failed to save most of them.

  Completion: 78%

  I staggered through the aftermath like a man walking out of a wreck. My armor was split and dented, my body a map of half-healed wounds, and my mana felt thin and frayed, stretched to the edge of what it could recover from on its own. Every breath scraped, not from pain alone, but from exhaustion that had settled deep in my bones. I forced myself upright anyway, because sitting down felt too close to not getting back up.

  The prisoners’ chains lay slack across the valley floor, most of them still looped around necks and wrists that no longer moved. Bodies were everywhere, some collapsed where they had fallen, others twisted at unnatural angles from the last siphon that had torn the life out of them. The ground was dark with blood and mud, and the air carried the heavy, copper-sweet stink of death layered over rot. I’d seen battlefields before, but this felt different. This felt deliberate.

  Then I saw movement.

  The last two prisoners. Two figures, standing at the end of the broken line, swaying but upright, the last links of chain binding them together. The elven woman was tall even now, posture instinctively graceful despite the damage done to her. Her beauty was undeniable, not polished or pristine, but something raw and striking that refused to be erased by bruises and blood. It grabbed at something primal in me and made me immediately mark her. Perhaps a less experienced me would have failed to see this for what it was. The beautiful elf pleading for her life was always a trap.

  Chain marks circled her throat and wrists in angry welts. Her pale skin was mottled with purple and yellow bruising, and her hair hung in dark, wet tangles plastered to her face and shoulders by fog and dried blood. Despite that, it didn’t take anything away from her allure. I wondered if it was a magical effect or if her Charisma was simply that high.

  Most interesting to me was that Identify wouldn’t work on either her or the gnome. I got a general sense of their power, which placed them not that much weaker than the undead that I’d just fought. A part of me truly wanted to believe that they were innocents.

  The gnome was probably okay. She barely came up to my waist, smaller even than the gnome with Tad. Her clothes hung off her like rags stolen from a corpse. Her hands were raw and bleeding, skin split and swollen where she had clearly tried to worry at the chains with stubborn persistence. Dirt and gore streaked her face, but her eyes were sharp, bright with desperate intelligence, holding back the blind panic I knew she felt. She took everything in—my stance, my breathing, the blood on my armor—and I knew she was calculating even as she trembled.

  “Please,” the elf whispered, drawing my eyes to her. Her voice was hoarse, stretched thin by screaming that had already been spent. “Please don’t leave us.”

  The gnome nodded frantically, her chain clinking as she shifted. She couldn’t seem to make her voice work.

  I felt it immediately, the cold, hard certainty settling in my gut. This was the trap. But another thought hit me. Was the trap to see if I’d fall for it and let my guard down in front of the beautiful elf, or had they known my assumptions? Maybe it was really a test of my compassion.

  I hated conundrums like this. Old role-playing games were famous for it. ‘You have two choices, adventurer—sacrifice the children or let the maiden fall to her death’. Give me an enemy to slay and I’ll have a grin on my face all day long, but moral puzzles didn’t suit me. Samvek and Selena would point out that I ruled an entire world and had started a family under the Heavens. Heck, Lana and Cece would have chimed in with them. It was time for me to realize that I was going to be faced with this issue regularly from here on out.

  The necklace around my neck trembled, so slightly it barely registered. I felt the tiny vibration again, but couldn’t derive any spiritual sensation out of it. If that was Lilly’s soul trying to warn me, I wasn’t sure what she was warning me about.

  I groaned. “Give me a few minutes to rest, then I’ll get those chains off you. Why don’t you tell me how this happened?”

  With that, the elf spun a tale of how they’d been part of an adventuring party, captured on floor 362 of the dungeon. For the past few years, they had been traded around to different monsters. She made it seem like this was all just part of how the dungeon worked, but none of that made sense to me.

  From what she told me, she came from a different world than Aerth, and in fact had never heard of the only world I’d ever been on in the Fey System. I listened as she spoke, and found her melodic voice soothing. Magically, I was fine. My physical body was healed up. Even my exhaustion was more a weariness of the soul rather than flesh. The full-bodied toothache had deadened to a dull throb.

  I had been here almost twenty hours, so I was running out of time. But I couldn’t bring myself to abandon them, and frankly didn’t know if that would mess with my completion percentage, which sat at 84%. I also couldn’t strike them down when they were helpless. My dad had said that a conscience could be a heavy burden, but that no man worth his salt would try to shed theirs.

  As the elf finished her tale, I brought Wayfinder down as a heavy axe on the chains, shattering them. Three strokes and they were both free. Now it was time to see just what kind of trap this was.