The shine to Marcus’s gauntlets shattered alongside the metal, his feet sliding across the abyss beneath him as he recoiled from another attack. He peered over his shoulder to reconfirm Logan was still there, items disintegrating at his ally’s feet. With a shuffle of his arms, Marcus equipped another round of gauntlets to continue attacking the lord.

  Amalia replaced her shield with another, blocking every attack thrown her way. She seemed more adept at blocking than one would have assumed for the short time she had spent in combat. PCs did progress much more than NPCs after all, a byproduct of her status and determination. She could also rely wholeheartedly on her impressive gear to see her through.

  Even in his concentration on the ritual-cast, Logan could see the aura of spellforce surrounding the skeleton lord dwindling. It was a war of attrition that, sadly, the undead would win. The idea instilled in his friends of condensing power was breaching the gap between their levels, but it wasn’t going to be enough without Logan’s aid.

  “Celsius, Spark, Fahrenheit, Servoir, Umbra”, Logan called out.

  Due to having summoned his elementals earlier in the day, calling them out wasn’t counted as casting a spell. So Logan was able to call up each one by their name, sprouting more colour into the dark realm.

  “What’re your orders?” Celsius asked energetically.

  Logan didn’t answer, instead, his fingers twinged as he chanted, “I offer these lives.”

  The elementals shuddered and lost their shine, the energies that made up their bodies quickly absorbed into Logan’s body, and their cores fell to the floor.

  “Living-sacrifice rituals aren’t something I’d normally do, but my elementals can come back tomorrow”, Logan reconciled in his head.

  Combining the items’ power with that of his elementals and the time spent chanting, Logan had sped up his ritual-cast spell. He had wished he could use something like Blest 3; however, ritual-casting still had some limitations without the proper items at hand. Logan would only be able to cast a spell he could have had access to if he were at a higher level.

  Logan’s thoughts returned to a few hours ago when he had been frantically reading a book at his enhanced speed he had bought for this occasion. The grass surrounding his crossed legs was in contrast to the depictions of skeletons and puppeteer strings on the pages.

  Back on Earth, this would have been called The Danse Macabre. Any French PCs would probably even call it that, or maybe even invented the spell in the first place. But the translated and default name in Avanar was the more commonly accepted term.

  Logan planned ahead. He was prepared to face the lord alone, as he had always been forced into corners against high odds. Even with the chance of letting Cassius handle it, Logan knew he needed to be prepared, otherwise, others might die in his place.

  Turning back to the present, Logan opened his eyes, a black aura rolling around his hands. Clasping them together and interlocking his fingers, the shadows formed together and irradiated a blast of wind from the gaps in his hands. Opening them, a small orb of static-like black formed.

  Aiming the orb at the skeleton lord, Logan clapped his hands together again in the interlocked state, crushing the orb. “Dance of Death”, Logan chanted.

  The skeleton lord halted its movements immediately, thin, weblike strands connecting to all of its joints and digits, flowing to Logan’s fingertips as he opened his hands and twiddled his fingers as if controlling a marionette.

  “What is this?” the lord said in a broken-up manner.

  “Now!” Logan yelled.

  Amalia dropped her sword, grabbed the faceguard of the skeleton’s helmet, and threw it into the distance. Marcus jabbed at the lord’s wrists, disarming it, before slamming both fists together into its skull where its ears would have been.

  Cracks formed across the skeleton lord’s head, and as if trying to remove its constraints, it shifted slightly. Logan was pulled with the movement, a lot more than what the skeleton had moved, but he held on tightly.

  Marcus pulled back and continued to piston the undead’s head together, cracking it every time. The unprotected and unrelenting assault continued over and over, causing anyone who looked at it to get a headache.

  Pulling back, Logan dragged the lord to the ground, its face open to the sky. Marcus mounted the foe and began pummeling the skeleton without relenting. Anger and frustration worked out on bones, a strange sight. Amalia could only watch.

  With every punch, the darkness of the area started to crack, white lines forming over this plane of entrapment. Logan inched forward, he couldn’t go too fast or lose control over his wires.

  Marcus wrung his final punch far back, and with a massive slam and shattering of glass, the whole party and now re-killed skeleton appeared back within the boss room.

  The room had turned several shades darker than when they had left it. Thankfully, the magic granting them darkvision persisted, so it wasn’t completely beyond their sight.

  Bones and robes littered the floor, along with pieces of flesh and metal, but one startling image caught Logan’s eye.

  The Spellthief could have sworn that Cassius was enveloped in living flames, scales across his forearms and horns adorning his forehead. But as soon as he saw that visage, it was gone. Instead, Cassius just looked tired, atop two greatswords underfoot as it seemed he had taken on two of the lord clones at once.

  Looking around further, Logan counted everyone in the raid team to be present, though eight members were on the floor with Devouts over them.

  Applying shining blue dust over the corpses, the Devouts chanted, ending in the spell name, “Revive.”

  One after the other, the dead were brought back to life. Gasps of air and shaking of helmets were their first actions on returning to Avanar from wherever they go after death. This was much cheaper than having to haul them back to the city to get the churches to revive them, and the trust was easily granted amongst the raid team.

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  With access to fourth and sometimes fifth-level spells, the Devouts here could bring back the dead much faster and cheaper than the services in the cities that required more components and casters to ritual-cast.

  Experience numbers appeared over all the undead, allowing Logan to release tension from his body. However, before he could fall to the floor, wind burst from his feet to his head.

  “Level up! Gain: 8 HP, +1 Str, +1 Agi, +1 Con, +1 Int. You have 1 attribute point to spend. Several class skills have become available. You have met 2 of 3 conditions for Demonic Cultivation.”

  Several of the raid members glanced at Logan and then at Marcus, who had the same effect come over him. A double level-up might turn heads, but Marcus could always bluff away that he just hadn’t been reassessed in some time. The next turn of events took the heat off of the Devout anyway, as the same wind flew over Cassius.

  A few light claps were heard, as if cheering on a golf match, towards Logan and Marcus’s gusts of wind, but they turned into a roaring crowd for Cassius.

  “Hey, another couple goldies”, some people mentioned to the pair.

  “Congratz, Cass!” overwhelmed the earlier praise.

  “He’s in the top 100 now, right?” another added as they whistled for Cassius’s progression.

  It was rare for someone to breach the 40th rank wall; Cassius was indeed among a tier only accessed by a hundred or so people. The number dropped severely the higher you went. Archmage Sorcerer Zinzith was the only reported adventurer over rank 50, outside of the four heroes that were sent to the demon realm.

  An exclusive club that couldn’t just be beaten down. Even the Bisectors guild, which had twenty members who were over rank 30, had little chance of destroying the goliaths that Cassius had just joined.

  As if to cut everyone off and to bribe their silence, the dark sections of the ceiling continued to crumble. Instead of hiding beats within, however, it dropped down like slacking cobwebs and released several pieces of armaments, trinkets, and coins. Raining trophies down to the victors of the dungeon, the raid team danced around to catch their well-earned gains.

  Cassius paced around, ignoring the rewards falling, and after a few minutes, he requested everyone to leave the boss room to himself and Logan. The Madamra Ramparts had lost their lustre and could be easily opened and closed now that the boss had been dealt with.

  Cassius turned to Logan and asked directly, “Do you see how to eradicate this dungeon?”

  Logan raised his eyebrows, not expecting the question. Looking around with all four eyes, Logan couldn’t see anything that resembled a dungeon core nor return any results for Fol to interpret.

  “Sorry, no. This wasn’t a spellforced dungeon, so I doubted there would be anything like that here anyway. It was weird that this place had a rampart, though.”

  Cassius sighed, “I got the same impression. This is the first dungeon that wasn’t a mobile or spellforced one that held a Madamra Rampart. I”, he coughed to clear his throat, “thought you might have seen something else. Regardless. Shall we compare reckards?”

  Logan raised a single eyebrow, confused. Before he could answer, Cassius had summoned up a massive record book in his hands. The leather was warped to look like gates, archways, and doors, all toothy and holding glowing eyes. Flipping the pages to around thirty pages deep, Cassius looked into it.

  “Logan?”

  “Sorry. No. I don’t have a ‘reckard’ like that.”

  Cassius stared at Logan for a bit before asking, “Then how do you eradicate dungeons? Did you acquire a different type of artefact?”

  “Something like that.”

  Cassius huffed. “I suppose I was luckier to get something more efficient. No wonder you’ve only eradicated a handful of dungeons. Might we compare artefacts, then?”

  Logan approached and eyed the interior of the reckard. The left page contained a diagram of a dungeon core, a spiked ball that had countless hands holding it up from the floor. Underneath were a good few paragraphs of lore surrounding the dungeon, its contents, and a ranking for the boss.

  “It looks like the intel we buy from the G-Hall.”

  Cassius nodded. “Though more in-depth and accurate”, Cassius hinged on that last word as if insulting the intel he had been given in the past.

  “How do you eradicate dungeons with this?” Logan asked.

  “I find the ‘dungeon core’ as noted in the instructions page, touch it, and concentrate its spellforce into this book. After which the dungeon is disabled and slowly crumbles away”, Cassius explained before closing his book. “Why? How do you eradicate dungeons?”

  Logan felt a new sense of fear roll over his body, like when a parent asked how you did something so neatly but didn’t follow their instructions on how to do so. “It’s different each time. I worked with the MT to sort out unique measures”, Logan half-lied, as he did get the assistance of different Magi Towers sometimes.

  Cassius sighed again, more disheartened. “Zinzith, I take it? Using you as a scapegoat after your eradication of the Frost Monarch’s dungeon. Fucking mages”, he stopped and looked at Logan and more sincerely added, “Present company excluded. These experiments are dangerous, but at least you’re being cautious and going about it slower.”

  “Trust me, I wish it was someone else at times.”

  Cassius patted Logan’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Keep silent about my means, and I won’t mention yours. Either way, there’s nothing for us to do here, so we should meet up with the rest of the team and return to Gauntlet.

  As the pair walked back, Logan couldn’t help but have his mind race at the developments. “He got an artefact from a dungeon to eradicate dungeons? Something’s off here. But if he isn’t questioning it. Why should I? I’ll have to see if there are any records of reckards in the library.”

  A few minutes passed outside the now-opened doors of the boos room before Cassius ended his explanation to the main assault teams. “You all did well today. The final boss had some unique abilities at hand, and due to the Madamra Rampart appearing in a Made Dungeon, it had some aberrant phases. With no form of further teleportation magic present here, our job is done. We’ll link back with the two reserve teams and return to Gauntlet immediately.”

  One of the other team leaders then added, “We’ve gone through the rewards and divvied up the coins and items into different containers. They will be thoroughly examined by Lightbeam, and we will reconvene tomorrow for assigning of proper reward.”

  “Stay on standby until the day after next. We may be called to follow up on the seer’s tasks if the teleportations lead us anywhere with danger”, Cassius ended.

  “Yes, leader!” the raid team replied.

  With everything said and done, the raid went through rather smoothly. Logan could only ponder on how they would have faired if he had let the lord leave his trio alone and have it attack the others.

  There was also a new threat in the distance. Placido Barato, the Spanish below PC. Logan guessed the man had some form of hybrid or specialisation to do with shadow magic or necromancy for how his fights with the lord went. If it was the same person who intervened in the plague worm quest, the necromancer possibility was even stronger.

  After the two-way Q and A, Logan hoped his plea for some sort of cease-fire would be accepted. Would Placido pass along the message to Alaska to oust the cultists tracking Logan? The Spellthief already had so much to deal with as it was.

  Nevertheless. It seemed the below and above PCs were to be pitted against one another. The below PCs were tasked with interrupting or straight-up killing the above PCs. Be it full-on duels or raising armies. The plague worm could have been just one more tool used to deal with PCs.

  It certainly seemed their tasks were different. Logan was given tasks from the System before that seemingly avoided the below PCs. Dena Mor had no connection whatsoever. The question was, did the below PCs take on quests the same way? Did they deal with other factors outside of being asked to hunt Logan and his kind down?

  The woman Logan had attacked during his time with the fenwahlash, Pogo, had led him to believe that might have been the case. Her protests of Logan not following “the fucking rules” meant she couldn’t just kill him.

  This was all to be left for another day.

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