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The interior walls had large circles going from one side to the next drawn across them, each one glowing with life. There were several on each wall, popping up once every few feet, and also one painted onto the trapdoor at the top.

Zeth eyed the ritual circles cautiously, but they simply sat there glowing, clearly active, but doing nothing in particular. He had to assume these were what made the walls so tough. Must’ve been some Skill that came at higher Levels; he certainly didn’t have access to anything of the sort.

But he wasn’t here to investigate some ritual circles. Turning around, he gazed down the long, unlit hallway that extended far off in the distance, angled just slightly downward. He was here for that.

He turned to look at Astrys, who was staring vigilantly down the unknown corridor. “You ready?”

“Yes,” she said. “This is the place you were looking for?”

“Seems so.”

“Is there any intelligence on what might be here?”

“Not that I haven’t already informed you of. Keep an eye out for circles like those; there might be traps laid out on the floor.”

She nodded.

It felt strange for Zeth to talk with Astrys. Part of her was this militaristic soldier, but then he occasionally also felt a sense of fear coming from her. He supposed it made sense—she was confronting death in this fight, which no other demon he’d seen had to do while being summoned. And, of course, in speaking with Zeth, she was also inherently speaking with someone who could kill her with a thought. But still, despite any fear he sensed from her, her face never shifted from that same look of indifference, and her voice never shook from its smooth yet curt tone. It made Zeth curious about what kind of life she must’ve lived to get to the point she was at now.

But there were more important things to do right now than making conversation.

“Lead the way,” Zeth said.

The two of them began cautiously proceeding down the tunnel. After a short distance, the moonlight from the hole they’d made stopped reaching them, leaving them blind in the pitch dark.

Zeth frowned. Technically, he could use his own ritual circle lines to illuminate the space, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to mess around with that in an unfamiliar area. He had no idea what the capabilities of a higher-Level Blood Mage could be—maybe attempting to draw something in this tunnel would trigger some sort of trap. Besides, if someone found the beginning of the line, they could simply follow it and be led right to him.

“Do you have any way to light up an area?” he asked Astrys.

“Oh, yes,” she said, holding out a hand. At the tips of her fingers, a small flame burst into existence, hovering in the air right above her skin. “Is this okay?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, staring at the fire as they continued walking down the plain hallway. “Is there some sort of Skill that lets you do that?”

She gave him a strange look. “Is fire a rarity in the First Realm?”

“Well, no—it’s pretty easy to make if you have the tools. But I’ve never seen a Skill that could so easily make a source of fire with no setup like that.”

“It is a Universal Skill among demons,” she said, “and only costs nine Skill Points. As such, most demons have access to it.”

“I’ve never seen a demon make fire like that before.”

“I have heard from my comrades that most demons do not like using Skills while serving humans. You are considered below us, and as such, showing off our talents in your presence would be like a king trying to impress a beggar. Th-that is, so I’ve heard. I do not believe such things; I apologize if saying it was offensive to you.”

“You’re fine,” Zeth said, wondering what kinds of abilities his other summons had been keeping hidden from him this whole time. “What other Skills do you have? What’s your Class?”

“Unfortunately, I am a Warlance,” she said, “so the majority of my Skills will be of no use to you.”

Zeth frowned. “Warlance?”

“Ah, I suppose humans would have their own set of Classes, wouldn’t they? It is a combat Class primarily focused on riding atop a steed, using a spear as a weapon. As I have neither, most of my power will have to come from my Stats.”

“I see,” Zeth said. Then he frowned. “Wait, steed? You have horses in the Thirteenth Realm?”

“No,” she replied. “What is a horse? I ride atop a hellion. Do you not have them in your realm?”

“...No, we don’t have hellions. If anyone’s riding on anything here, they use horses. They’re just…I dunno, normal four-legged creatures. People ride on their backs, or they’ll draw carriages, or whatever.”

“Four-legged? So they do not burrow into the ground?”

“What? No.”

“Strange,” she said.

Zeth shook his head. “We’ve gotten off-track. So, you’d need a mount to use most of your Skills?”

“A mount for some, and a spear for others.”

“Well, we don’t have either for you right now,” he said. “I guess we can keep an eye out to see if there are any weapons being stored down here, though. Maybe they have something vaguely pole-shaped for you to use.”

“Having a pole weapon would be better than nothing, as that is what I am practiced with,” she said, “but unfortunately, my Skills require an System-designated spear—meaning, it has to not only be a genuine weapon, but it has to have been made by someone using a crafting Class. That would not be something one would be able to find just lying around.”

Zeth frowned. “Hm. Well, if you had a spear, what would you be able to—”

He stopped, staring down the corridor. As they turned a slight curve, he spotted a faint light glowing across the plain wooden walls.

He turned to whisper to Astrys, but she seemed to already understand. As he looked at her, she shut off her Skill, extinguishing the fire and drowning the two of them in darkness once again.

Listening closely, Zeth didn’t hear anything yet, but if there was light all the way down here, that was a good sign that someone was close.

So he and Astrys crept forward, keeping their eyes and ears out for anything out of the ordinary. Slowly, they realized that the light was coming from a door set in the walls of the long hallway, which continued past said door with no sign of stopping. But considering the light that passed from underneath the cracks in it, Zeth assumed that this was what they were looking for.

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They slowly moved ahead until they stopped right in front of it, and he nodded to Astrys. She gripped the doorknob, holding up three fingers, then silently counted down three, two, one, and threw it open.

But they found no fight past the doorway. Instead, they found yet another empty hallway.

This one, though, was different.

It was bigger—both wider and taller by a significant margin. The first hallway was just about wide enough to fit a single man lying down, so the bottoms of his feet and the top of his head would touch opposite walls, but this one could easily fit at least three people lying down one after the other—perhaps more.

And, of course, this one also had lights inlaid in the ceiling—not torches or any other mundane sources, but instead long, thin sticks that were attached to the planks, each one glowing brightly through some magical means. The sudden change from pitch dark to blinding artificial white made Zeth squint as he stared down this new hallway.

And it was a hallway. Even as large and well-lit as it was, he still couldn’t see the end. It went straight out from this door for maybe a hundred or so feet before taking a curve—who knew how much further it went from there.

Finding this hall, however, felt like progress. Not just because the new environment broke up the monotony of walking through that same dark tunnel, but also because this new hallway had something else.

It had doors lining its sides.

Each of the doors looked similar to the one Zeth and Astrys came through. They were simple wooden slabs with light spilling into the already bright room from underneath. So, hopefully, if Zeth was trying to find Garon, the man would be in through one of those passages.

Still staying cautious in this new place, Zeth continued to silence himself as he crept over to the nearest door. They appeared somewhat randomly across the tunnel, once every twenty or thirty feet on either side of the long room. Zeth just hoped each one didn’t also lead to another of these empty hallways.

But when he threw open this door, that worry disappeared from his mind. In here was what seemed to be some sort of storage room; chests and crates lined the walls of the square space, each one sealed shut. Part of Zeth wanted to go over and begin cracking them open to see what was inside, but that wasn’t his priority for now. He couldn’t allow himself to grow careless.

So he shut that door and headed over to the next one, still taking care to make as little noise as possible. Astrys stuck right by his side, ready to leap into battle the moment she sensed any danger. Zeth was, of course, still under the effects of her fear aura, but he had at least grown used to it; he’d gotten plenty of practice at functioning while feeling fear so intense it tore his mind to shreds.

And it helped that she was personable enough to keep him from feeling too afraid of her in specific—instead, he felt far more anxious about being ambushed from behind by Garon, or stepping into a horrific trap. Ironically, having someone as powerful as Astrys with him helped assuage the exact fear she was causing.

He threw open the next door, finding this one, too, to be a sort of storage room. But while the previous one had been full of boxes and chests, this one had clear glass jars full of familiar red liquid. Blood. They lined shelf after shelf—easily entire gallons of the stuff. Once again, Zeth was struck with a sense of greed, wanting to take the abundant resources for himself. But he was on a mission—all of this could come with him during his trip out of here.

So he closed that door, then went to the next and opened it, and his eyebrows climbed up his face. In here, he saw something other than a storage room—though it was something he recognized. The hulking corpse of a mannitor was lying on the ground, its body having been cut open and its guts having spilled onto the floor. Sitting on a shelf beside it were more of those glass jars from the storage room, these ones empty. Looked like he figured out where the blood in there had come from, and where the mannitor corpses had gone.

It was strange that the corpse wasn’t rotting after sitting out in here for so long, but when Zeth moved his hand through the threshold of the doorway, he felt a strange sensation pass over him—some sort of magical effect enchanting the area. It must’ve been preserving the body. He retracted his hand the moment he felt it, though; there was no telling what other effects whatever magic he’d felt may have had.

Zeth was growing more and more uneasy the longer he stayed down here, and he didn’t think it was just his demonic bodyguard’s aura of fear getting to him. The more he saw, the more he discovered just how wide-spanning this operation was. Entire mannitor corpses being stored in these rooms, gallons of blood sitting on shelves…Just what else would he find down in this—

He opened the next door, and his thoughts stopped in their tracks.

This room was larger than the others, but it contained neither piles of boxes nor a monster’s corpse. No, there was not a single object sitting on the floor. But there was something painted onto it.

The ritual circle must’ve been at least thirty—no, forty feet in diameter. And judging by the countless lines detailing the inside, it had to have taken entire weeks to draw. It was utterly insane in scale.

And on its left was another, almost the exact same size with the same amount of detailing.

And on its right, yet another clone.

The room was wide enough to fit all three of the massive ritual circles, but otherwise completely empty. Zeth couldn’t imagine the time and effort that would need to be taken to accomplish something like this. He stood there in the doorway, staring on in shock. Just what were these things for?

But, strangely, he felt a certain energy coming from these ritual circles—like he had an inherent sense for what they were meant to be. And he knew what type of rituals they existed to conduct because he’d conducted the exact same kind, countless times already.

These were Empowerment Rituals. They were going to be used to Level up.

Zeth knew his Skills weren’t the same as the Blood Mage’s, and that was the only hope he had. Because seeing a fifty-foot ritual circle only left one thought in his mind—just what does the Blood Mage’s Level have to be for them to need to draw Empowerment Rituals this big?

He could only hope their respective version of the Level-up ritual started out at something like forty feet in diameter to begin with. Because if it scaled in size the same way his did, he had no hope of catching up.

But it was as Zeth stared at these gargantuan circles that another thought ran through his head. If these had been drawn out here on the ground, all three of them fully complete, why hadn’t they been expended yet? There was a clear abundance of blood sitting just a couple dozen feet away in one of those storage rooms—why draw all of these things out and not use them? Maybe they could’ve been waiting on something to happen before they activated one of them, but all three? These things clearly took an absolutely massive amount of time to complete.

An answer to the question came to mind, though. Zeth knew that you didn’t have to be the one to draw a ritual in order to be the one to use it—that was how he’d gotten the Blood Magus Class to begin with. If that was the case, what if a Blood Mage got some other Blood Mage to draw out their Empowerment Rituals for them? It would certainly save a lot of time.

Could there be some sort of tiered hierarchy here, where there were several Blood Mages, and the low-ranking ones all served the high-ranking ones, preparing their Level-ups so they didn’t have to?

Zeth had an idea, staring at the three already-prepared Empowerment Rituals. He turned around to walk back to the blood storage room, ready to test it out, but as he did, he saw something.

Further down the hallway, a door opened, and out from it stepped a figure that Zeth knew all too well. A figure that Zeth hoped to leave broken and unmoving down here, once and for all.

Garon nonchalantly closed the door behind himself, turning around to glance up and down the corridor, and his eyes landed directly on Zeth.

The two of them stared at each other frozen in silence for a moment, as though neither could believe the other was standing in front of them.

Zeth was the one to break that silence. He set his shoulders and began striding straight toward Garon. “Alright, you stupid motherfucker. Ready to die?”

His old manager stumbled back in fear, as though afraid Zeth would somehow find a way to punch him in the face while they were still thirty feet apart. But after a moment, he seemed to find his composure, and reached underneath the collar of his shirt to pull out a strange necklace Zeth had never seen before. It was a simple leather cord, and on it hang five crystals, each one a different color.

Garon gripped the red crystal in his palm and squeezed, the stone giving way beneath the pressure and crumbling to dust that fell to the ground.

The moment the crystal broke, every single one of the white lights that lined the ceiling changed color, matching the vibrant red of the crystal that’d just shattered. And once the lights turned red, a noise began to echo through the tunnel.

Footsteps.

A whole cacophony of doors being thrown open and slammed shut, distant voices shouting at each other, and the sounds of boots on the ground began sounding out, all coming from deeper down the wide hallway. Seemed like Zeth wouldn’t have much more alone time with his old boss.

“I don’t know who you think you are, or what you think you’re doing,” Garon said, “but you’re clearly very, very ignorant if you’ve chosen to come down here.”

Zeth glanced over at Astrys. His heart swelled up with passion as reality set in more and more—this was really it. Garon was going to die today.

He couldn’t help but smile as he spoke to her. “Keep me safe. But don’t touch Garon if it doesn’t look like he’s about to kill me or get away. He’s mine.”

She nodded. “I understand. I will not get in your way.”

With that, he looked over at Garon and continued in his approach, not feeling very bothered at all by the apparent alarm system, or quickly approaching reinforcements.

“So,” he said, “let’s see how many punches you can take before you die.”