“Hmmm,” Raehel said, looking at a mass of darkness that could have become a Monster. “That does look weak. Whoever cleared out this place was seriously not considering long term sustainability.”

  “Archmund did it with an Omnio agent,” Mary said, indignantly.

  “Then the Omnio was sabotaging him,” Raehel said. “You can always trust the Imperial Family to keep an eye on potential upstarts.”

  “There’s no way anyone thought Archmund was a potential threat even half a year ago.”

  “Well, maybe he’s a bit of an idiot then. Lots of book-smart people are.”

  Mary bit back a retort, torn between wanting to defend Archmund’s intelligence and agreeing with her. A fist-sized patch of her arm throbbed, just a little.

  They were at a dead-end corridor, the end of which was shrouded in darkness. It gurgled and bubbled.

  The corridor vaguely resembled the laundry tunnels, which the servants used so the residents of Granavale Manor wouldn’t have to see their spoiled clothes being ferried through the hallways, but those had ladders up into the manor proper. This one, as far as she could tell, didn’t.

  “So, are you going to kill it?” Mary said. “I heard that’s what you need to do, if you want to get the purest Gems.”

  “How in hell do you know that?”

  “Archmund told me.”

  “Either he actually is an idiot or he really does trust you that much. But no. I want to see what it becomes.”

  “He said they were either skeletons and nobles, or weird flesh things.”

  “And no servants or slaves or beasts of burden? Odd.”

  The darkness gurgled and shifted. Raehel sighed.

  “He really cowed them. Usually, they see fresh blood like us, and they’d be jumping on us.”

  Then she pulled a necklace from beneath her purple robes, a few wisps of her orange hair caught in the chain, and threw it into the air.

  There were seven Gems tied to the necklace:

  A tetrahedron, four-sided, as deepest red as the Guts of Hell.

  A cube, six-sided, as dark black as the ancient forests of Eth Darel.

  An octahedron, eight-sided, as pale yellow as the morning wind.

  A icosahedron, twenty-sided, as blue as the deepest seas, beyond even Salamar.

  A dodecahedron, twelve-sized, undulating with the brilliance of a cerulean aurora.

  A sphere, unshaped, empty.

  And a flat sliver, so thin it was almost nothing at all.

  Each floated away from the necklace, which dropped back into her hand; she wrapped it around her wrist as the Gems flew into position above her head, an orbiting halo of crystal.

  “Embers,” she said calmly.

  Her crimson tetrahedron crackled to life, glowing red and orange like a pinpoint nuclear reactor. The air grew warm. Small fireballs, no larger than Mary’s thumb, scattered like buckshot, peppering the darkness with tiny embers. Where it hit, it burned.

  The darkness yowled and recoiled back and grew ever more darker, yet remained formless.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Raehel sighed. “So skittish.”

  She scanned the corridor, adjusting her glasses and squinting. Mary wasn’t sure what she was looking for.

  “So it’s downward sloping here,” Raehel said, pointing at the floor. “So relatively safe, all things considered. You’d expect the elemental darkness to pool and rest and strengthen — the issue is there just isn’t enough of it here.”

  “And that’s an issue because…?”

  “So people like you and me can fight Monsters without, y’know, dying. That’s always an issue with Dungeons that get cleared too fast. There’s no way for normal people to get the experience against weaker monsters, so when the Monsters get strong, the only people who have any chance of fighting them are the usual batch of extremely rich adventurers who can charge any prices they want, or the Adventurer’s Guilds which do the same but act as a middleman. Wet.”

  Raehel’s navy icosahedron pulsed gently with blue light. The air grew damp, and then foggy, and then a light drizzle started coating all of them. It was cool and pleasant in the moment, but in the dankness of the Dungeon Mary had the uncomfortable sensation that she wouldn’t feel dry for quite some time.

  The darkness folded upon itself.

  “What are you even trying to do?”

  “Standard shaping technique, really. You hit an unformed Monster — there are a few different names, primordial, unshaped, elemental — and that makes it take a specific shape, which’ll have the Gemgear you want.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous? Won’t it kill us?”

  “No, so I don’t want to kill it,” Raehel said. “I want to provoke it just enough that it tries to put up a fight.”

  Mary was concerned about her nonchalance but didn’t feel inclined to argue about it. So far, Raehel had talked a big game. She clearly knew a lot.

  Though now that she thought about it, Raehel must have been holding her true power in reserve. Yes, that made sense. Surely “Master Raehel”, “Raehel the Magnificent”, “Raehel the Genius” could do more with her magic than a few piddling embers and a light drizzle.

  “Maybe you do need to seem more dangerous,” Mary said. Archmund would’ve encouraged this — drawing out Raehel’s true power or something in order to better assess it or whatever weird jargon he used. “Maybe it thinks you’re too weak to hurt it and you’ll just go away.”

  “How dare it!”

  She had been provoked by Mary’s extremely mild criticism, which was just like Archmund. Archmund never called himself a genius, but he definitely tried to act like one, and playing on those insecurities was a surprisingly easy way to get him to act. The night before she’d joined the Granavale Household, her aunt had told her that no matter where she went in life, the power to read people and needle them would come in invaluable. She was proving to be right.

  Raehel seemed genuinely insecure about this. She stretched forth her hand, and four Gems flew to rotate in front of it: her tetrahedron of fire, her cube of earth, her octahedron of wind, and her icosahedron of water. All four pulsed lightly with the light of her magic as they spun, faster and faster, until they were all but indistinguishable, a whirling bracelet of shining rocks that flashed coruscating light against the dark halls of the Dungeon.

  Dirt rose from between the cracks in the ghost-carved stone; water condensed from the mildewed air. And between them all came fire, burning fire, spawned from naught but will. And then finally a harsh wind that blasted from nowhere, slinging the dirt, water, and fire towards the pool of inky black.

  The technique was as simple as could be. Grabbing the most base form of the elements — embers, balls of dirt, water droplets, a single blast of wind — but doing so in such large numbers that they became an effective assault.

  The darkness writhed and undulated, becoming thin in some places and thicker in others, desperately trying to shift out of the way of the pelting assault to no avail.

  Raehel’s prediction had come true. All at once the darkness drew together, layering upon itself and twisting and swirling and fusing and rising upon itself.

  “Here it comes,” Raehel said. “Let’s get a good luck at you, you bastard!”

  Whatever shape it took wouldn’t be human, Mary could see that much. Four legs, so perhaps a wolf or a bear? Thick, dark feet, so paws, so a bear perhaps — and would its teeth be sharp and its claws merciless? She’d heard of big cats from the far reaches of the known world, lions and tigers, proud hunters that tore men apart limb from limb.

  Raehel closed her hand into a fist. Her fire tetrahedron, water icosahedron, and wind octahedron flew to her shoulders, but her earth cube remained before her. As the dark beast took shape, Raehel claimed the earth. She drew forth the dirt from the cracks in the Dungeon, whispered to the ghost-carved stone, shaped it to her will. She erected barriers between the beast and them, like castle parapets, with windows too narrow for man or beast alike to pass through but more than wide enough for powerful magics.

  Mary watched in trepidation. The beast had drawn so much darkness into itself that the Dungeon itself looked brighter, cleaner, less grimy. Her years as a maid had given her a good sense of cleanliness, and it scared her. Had they been breathing in all of that? Had the monster consolidated all the darkness into itself? What would they be fighting?

  There was a baleful bray.

  The darkness had almost formed completely into some fell and terrible creature, a shade between chestnut and black. A long, slim body covered in thick and sinewy muscles. A lashing tail made of thin fibers. Four spindly legs that became wide at the base. A thin, almost rectangular head. Beady round eyes that glowed orange. Ears that poked back. Bared teeth. A mane.

  The beast let out a screeching, baleful neigh.

  A pony.

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