I abandoned any pretense of stealth or subtlety.

The sooner we were out of here, the sooner we could link up with Angelo and the rest of the convoy. I had a lot to tell him—things only he, Terrel, and the GC's leaders could hear.

So, the next armor we fought got multiple stabs to the chest. The two Lightning Charges stuck around, and by the time we found an enemy group that should have given us trouble, I was chomping at the bit to wipe them out.

Chains rattled on the walls as I shoved the door open and cast Thunder Wave, then doubled it twice.

The Keeper didn't even get a chance to drop their Mana-draining Script, much less wake up the armor, which also disintegrated as an entire thunderstorm's worth of lightning poured into the guard room at the end of the second floor. She survived—but she didn't survive the dueling sword through her head and Jeff's blade punching into her scorched, twitching stomach.

The fight was over in less than ten seconds, and all it had cost me was Mana and Lightning Charges.

"Okay, first floor time. I bet the monsters in the cells are alive this time," I said. Then I hesitated. "Most of them are probably portal monsters, but that woman looked human. Our best bet is to ignore any survivors."

"What?" Sophia's eyes narrowed.

I ignored her. And I also ignored Jeff, who looked just as furious. "We need to kill the boss. Once it's dead, we'll have an hour to get people out of their cells, and the portal collapse may free them into our world. It may also free the monsters, but I doubt it. My guess is that they'll either disappear or get sent to the reality they came from."

Ellen nodded. "That makes sense. I know it's important to both of you that we save everyone we can, but the best thing we can do for the most people is to kill that boss."

"Besides, that woman may still be alive," I added.

Then I hurried down the stairs.

Stamina: 280/340, Mana: 307/440

I had enough firepower to deal with the boss. That'd be plenty. Once Yaloum was dead, everything else would fall into place. I pushed the gate open at the bottom of the stairs.

The floor was a rough-hewn stone, vaguely wet, with a smell that reminded me of horses. That in itself was strange; it hadn't smelled that way higher up. I took a single step forward.

My danger sense flared, and I skipped a stone right in front of me. But no, that wasn't the trap. If it wasn't, then what was? I summoned my dueling sword and Cheddar, who took off until he was circling overhead. A beacon of light poured down, almost like a spotlight directly under him, but with dark clouds moving across it and making it fade in and out.

The C-Rank familiar had grown much more powerful. He hadn't done that outside, but in here, in the dim, dank prison, it was helpful.

"Hold up," I said.

Then I looked around. Where was the Binding that triggered this trap? And what was the trap? I didn't know. There was no hint. But my danger sense wouldn't stop.

After a moment, I let myself relax. The trap wasn't magical, and I couldn't see any of the most common physical ones. That meant only one thing. "This room is an ambush. I'd expect Yaloum, or his armors, to attack us when we enter, and for it to be a bloodbath that drains our resources."

Ellen readied herself. "I've got plenty of Mana. They won't drain me down. But there's another possibility. We could be fighting the prisoners."

"Yeah. That's what I'm afraid of," I said. "If that's the case, who knows what we're up against?"

Then I stepped into the center of the room and readied a cast of Ariette's Razor in my off-hand as the party formed up around me.

The first monster was easy.

Dark Citadel Warden: C-Rank

I'd been fighting C-Rank monsters by themselves since late E-Rank, and with the whole team, the walking suit of armor didn't even last long enough to put a groove in Jeff's shield before it was nothing but rubble.

"That's it?" Yasmin asked the ceiling. "That's all you can throw at us?"

Jeff shot her a look. "Yazzy, why?"

"Because it's gonna happen anyway, and I'm scared!" she shot back, flushing.

And that's when the first, second, and third cell gates creaked open and the trap sprang closed.

The first monster was a tall, shadowy creature with insectlike mandibles and burning red eyes—a demon from an Inferno portal world. It was a solid eight feet tall, with a sword almost as long, and two bull's horns hung from its head. It snorted and chittered as it rushed Ellen, only for Jeff to intercept it.

The second was a plain woman in a homespun, ankle-length dress. She was barefoot, and as the cell opened, she screamed.

And the third was an elf with a rapier.

Boughguard Champion: C-Rank

I didn't have time to wonder why the monsters had been imprisoned with weapons. The elf rushed the woman, and she screamed again in a language I couldn't understand. I got the context, though; fear and desperation. She needed help.

I sprinted toward the elf. My sword crossed with his, and steel ground against portal metal as sparks flew.

Then he was on me. And he was fast. His blows didn't hit hard. They barely moved the dueling blade when I blocked, and I didn't need to worry about deflection angles. But I couldn't pin him down, and I couldn't lower my guard.

Every time I did, he aimed for the screaming, cowering woman.

It turned into a battle of attrition, and I couldn't spend the time. Every parry and block, every aborted lunge, gave more time for the next monster to rush Ellen, Sophia, and the others. And even worse, I wasn't generating Charges, because I wasn't in Miststep Forms. I needed to break free.

Instead, I slid further into the cell, putting myself between the elf and the woman. The rapier slashed toward me. I went to parry, and it ducked under my guard. Instead of trying to compensate, I took the blow to the side of my chest; the Stormsteel breastplate slowed the tip and blunted the elf's weapon, but didn't stop it. Pain blossomed across the left side of my body.

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But my Razor sliced across the elf's face. An eye exploded as the windblade ripped across it, and the elf howled in agony and rage.

I tossed the windblade into his chest and followed it up with a pair of thrusts, and the elf stopped moving. Then I grabbed the woman and dragged her across the chaotic battlefield.

And it was chaos.

Two more gates had opened, and now a gigantic bone centipede was trying to run over the demonic minotaur/bug hybrid to get to Jeff. A hobgoblin was summoning E-Rank shadow goblins in the corner as Yasmin tried to hold them off in an eerily similar action to my stand in the trap portal.

And Yaloum, Prison Experimentalist, had arrived.

His translucent robes spun as he appeared mid-air. I half-expected him to rain Scripts and Bindings down on us. Instead, his thin arm reached out impossibly far. It touched the hobgoblin summoner's head just as my first Ariette's Zephyr hit the boss in the chest.

Yaloum hardly moved. But the summoner changed. One moment, it was a hobgoblin, summoning trivial E-Rank goblins. The next, its muscles bulged and twisted as fur erupted from its gray-green skin.

The next shadowy monster it summoned took a second longer, but it was a hobgoblin. An armored hobgoblin with a vicious, crude-looking axe, but a D-Ranked hobgoblin nonetheless.

"The boss is a support!" I yelled.

Then I rushed Yaloum. I had to get in his face before he could buff one of the heavy-hitters. Ellen had almost finished off the demonic monster, and the bone centipede was bashing itself to death on Jeff's immaculate armor. But if Yaloum got to either of them…

That'd be bad.

I threw a handful of Zephyrs at the boss. They hit one after the other, a rippling wave of compressed wind that tore at the monster's robes. A pair of Wind Charges appeared. I shifted stances as the gap closed, then used Gustrunner to accelerate even faster.

But the boss disappeared and reappeared as I closed in to do some real damage. This time, he touched the centipede, which grew two massive blades on its frontmost legs and started stabbing them into Jeff's shield.

And I once again tried to close the gap.

And failed.

"Ellen, switch!" I shouted.

To her credit, Ellen ignored the massive cut across her shoulder and chest that spewed blood across the poor woman I'd saved. She ignored Sophia's hand, too. I could almost feel her teeth clenched together as she channeled Stamina into the wound. But the pain didn't stop her from using Shadow Boxing on the boss.

And unlike my sword strikes, the boss couldn't dodge Ellen. Not fast enough.

I slid in between Ellen and the wounded minotaur-bug in time to parry the blow heading for her neck. A ball of pure darkness rocketed toward Yaloum; he got clear, only for Ellen to cast something I'd never seen before.

It was a spell. It was definitely a spell. And it covered half of the room in shadow that seemed to weigh literal tons. The rough-hewn stone below Yaloum cracked, and clouds of dust filled the air. Then the pressure weighed down on the boss, and it smashed him into the ground.

I didn't have time to watch more, because the minotaur-bug roared and its sword flashed forward. The dueling blade deflected it upward, and a quick riposte half-severed its sword arm.

Then I grabbed my blade with both hands, dropped into a lunge, and echoed it with Howling Gale. The attack hit everything. The minotaur-bug. The centipede. A dozen hobgoblins that were overrunning Yasmin, and the now-bugbear summoner summoning them.

And Yaloum.

The blow wasn't enough to kill any of them—with the exception of a few wounded hobgoblins whose Health couldn't heal through the damage. But I cut again, this time into the half-severed arm. It came loose, along with the huge sword.

I picked it up, letting the dueling blade disappear for a moment, and swung it. The massive thing wasn't an easy weapon to wield, but that didn't matter. As my muscles strained and the hard, stone blade swung through the air, I used Rain-Slicked Blade.

It hit the minotaur's chest. Then it sliced through the minotaur's chest. And then it sliced out the other side of the minotaur's chest.

The monster roared, mandibles clacking, but the roar cut off as air rushed from two collapsed lungs, and it died a moment later.

I dropped the sword and cast Slicing Bolt at the still-pinned Yaloum. The crushing wall of darkness Ellen had dropped on the boss was done, and Ellen herself was on one knee, panting and coughing as she tried to catch her breath, but the boss still hadn't moved. He tried to roll out of the way. Something snapped.

And then my spell hit him, a wave of lightning and air that sliced into him. Robes fell apart. Flesh parted. And I charged.

So did Jeff. He'd managed to disable—not kill, but disable—the bone centipede. "Take that boss out!" he screamed.

I was way ahead of him.

Yaloum didn't offer any resistance as my sword punched into him twice. Jeff's shield slammed into his head a moment later. Bone crunched. The boss gasped. Then he went silent.

The whole room was silent except for a dying bone centipede and the sobbing woman we'd saved.

And Ellen, as she tried to catch her breath.

I sat against the bars of an open, empty cell as Jeff and Yasmin walked from door to door, checking each of them. On the prison's far side, almost half a dozen men, women, and a single child had formed a tight, sobbing knot around Sophia and a badly injured woman who lay on the floor, unmoving.

And Ellen leaned against me, head on my shoulder, as she struggled to catch her breath.

The wound across her chest and shoulder had healed, more or less, under Sophia's magic. She kept rubbing it gingerly as we sat there, with one of my arms around her side to keep her from falling over. And she cried quietly. The pain was getting to her, and she'd listened to me when I'd told her to save her Stamina.

"What was that?" I asked.

"Sorry. It hurts a lot," Ellen said quietly.

"No, I meant the spell. I don't remember you telling me about it, but it definitely turned the tables on the boss."

"Crushing Darkness. It's an all-in spell. Consumes all the Mana a caster has—without sending them into Mana burn—and converts it to weight in an area. C-Rank shadow magic." Ellen shivered. The words were coming out in chunks, not full sentences. "I'm spent, though. Even my regeneration's going to take a while to fix this."

"That sounds a lot like Stormbreak. Except Crushing Darkness seems way safer than my old Unique skill. Either way, it probably saved the fight."

It definitely had. There were six unopened cells that still had monsters in them, in addition to the four with humans and the woman Jeff had pulled from Yaloum's experimental room. When he'd come out with her wrapped in a blanket in his arms, he'd only shaken his head. "Don't go in there," he'd said, and the muscles standing out from his neck made it abundantly clear why. What he'd seen had sent him into a cold fury; the kind of cold, implacable anger I was familiar with.

If the fight had gone on without Crushing Darkness, Yaloum would have had enough monsters to buff and transform that he could have overwhelmed the five of us. Without Raul, we were desperately hurting for a sustained damage-dealer.

Ellen pushed against me. I tried to get out of the way, but she glared at me. "Don't move," she whispered.

"Alright."

So, as I sat there, trying to prop up the shivering woman leaning against me, I pulled up my status.

User: Kade Noelstra C-Rank Stamina: 132/350 (+10), Mana: 118/460 (+20)

Skills: 1. Stormsteel Core (C-01 to C-02, Unique, Merged, God-Touched) 2. Thunderbolt Forms (C-01 to C-03, Altered, Merged) 3. Mistwalk Forms (C-01 to C-02, Altered, Merged) 4. Cyclone Forms (C-01 to C-02, Altered, Merged) 5. Stormlight Bond (C-01, Altered, Merged) 6. Energy Font (D-08 to D-10) 7. Brendan's Hymnal (D-07 to D-10)

Path: Stormsteel Path Laws: First Law of the Stormcore, Law of the Shadowed Storm

Core Instability Warning

My progress felt…slow.

It could just be C-Rank. According to everything I'd heard, it got harder to progress after the C-Rank trial for everyone, not just for people stuck at the bottleneck. As far as I could tell, for example, Deborah had been a mid-to-high A-Ranker when she'd fought at the Peoria GC Center's training rooms, and she was still a mid-to-high A-Ranker. She wasn't even close to S-Rank yet.

So I couldn't expect to be halfway to B-Rank after a few days. But I'd also been fighting almost constantly. It felt like I should have made more progress than I had.

And I hadn't merged Energy Font and Brendan's Hymnal, either. That'd have to get done, and it'd have to get done soon. Ellen had mentioned something about it, and Eugene had said I'd need to take the opportunity to learn something new when I saw it. I was pretty sure she was what he'd been talking about.

She shivered again, and I closed my status.

"So, we're just waiting for this to time out?" Jeff asked.

I nodded. "At this point, we're safe, and so is our information. The speed was to make sure we'd clear the portal; the extra few minutes we'd save are better spent getting Ellen and Yazzy—"

"Excuse me, only Jeff can call me that," Yasmin said. She had a dozen half-healed injuries, but she'd insisted that she'd be alright, and that Sophia needed to be working on the woman Jeff had pulled out of Yaloum's experimental room.

"Sorry. Getting Ellen and Yasmin back to form. So, yeah, we wait it out, work on getting our resources back, and report in as soon as we can," I finished.

And as I did, I tried to ignore the crackling feeling coming from my core. I'd overdone it, and even so, everything felt so slow.

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