“The whole dungeon is falling apart,” Torwin growled.

“We need to get the seed now, before it’s too late.”

“No.” Torwin grabbed Velik’s arm. “It’s too dangerous. This was risky enough when things were stable. What are you going to do with no lifeline to save you when the piece of core you’re clinging to falls off?”

“You said the dungeon will just spit us out when the core dies, right? Will the seed come out next to us?”

“Probably not. We probably won’t be right next to each other either, but better to search a few miles to find it than kill yourself trying to grab it now.”

Velik wanted to ignore him. He could make the jump, [Air Walk] his way back. He’d already done it once. The core was collapsing from the bottom, so he’d just circle around near the top, then pluck the seed out of whatever that plant was. He was sure it was sitting in the center, the origin of every single one of those vines.

Its guardian was gone. There probably wasn’t another one. They had minutes at best to claim the prize they’d traveled so far for. If they didn’t act, there was every chance it could slip away. Everything would have been for nothing.

“Velik.” Torwin’s hand tightened on his arm. “Let it go. We’ll catch it on the other side. Take this time to get a good, good look at its mana. Try to pick it out from the dungeon so you know exactly what it looks like when we’re back outside.”

He wanted to shake that hand off, but he knew Torwin was right. He was considering risking his life just to save himself a day or two of searching. The seed wouldn’t be right at their feet when the dungeon collapsed, but it wouldn’t be on the other side of the world, either. They had a mana compass, he had [Mana Sight] now, and Torwin had whatever it was his own [Mana Sense] skill had folded into.

The only real risk was running into the locals, but they had a good ten miles or so of forest between them and the main Verdant Belt farmlands. It would be fine. And even if they did run into someone, it wasn’t like anyone around here could stop them, anyway.

And yet, the urge was still there. He could grab the seed now. He knew he could do it, just like he knew it was a stupid idea to try. Ruthlessly, he clamped down that part of his brain and turned his efforts to studying what he could see of the mana flowing around in front of him. The drawback to [Mana Sight] was that it was tied to what he could physically see, and the bulk of the plant was still hidden away.

“I need a better angle,” Velik muttered. He glanced at the rope, then slashed it in two where it was frayed. Looping the end around his arm a few times, he added, “Just a glance. Haul me back in.”

“Wait, wha—”

Then Velik took three running steps and leaped out over the empty space. [Air Walk] kept him going as he ran over the abyss at a wide angle, his eyes locked on the dungeon core. A second and then third step got him the angle he needed, and for the first time, he got a good look at the creeper vines without a giant spider-shaped flesh beast squatting over them.

For about two seconds, he sailed through the air, his eyes wide as he stared at the mana flowing through each vine. All of it was being pulled back to a central bulb, and as it left the core, new cracks formed. The tainted stone fell away, revealing a greatly diminished but healthy dungeon core beneath the outer layer.

Then Velik ran out of rope and was jerked backward while Torwin cursed at him. He spent the last [Air Walk] to get himself turned around and send his momentum back to safety, slamming into the pit wall again a few seconds later and clawing his way back up.

“You absolute fucking idiot,” Torwin scolded him. “I just said not to do something stupid, and then you go and try to kill yourself.”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting NovelBin for this novel and more.

“I couldn’t see the mana from this angle,” Velik said. “Now I know what to look for.”

Torwin sputtered, but he couldn’t deny that everything had turned out fine. It had been well worth the risk, and it would hopefully be much easier to trace the mana flows to wherever the seed landed when the dungeon collapsed.

Silently, they stood on the ledge and watched as the core shed tons of stone over the next few minutes. When it looked like it might actually stabilize, Torwin took up his bow and finished the job. A few moments later, the dungeon broke apart and Velik felt himself being violently ejected.

Everything went black, just like when he stepped through the holes he ripped in the mana nodes, except it felt like he was being squeezed from every direction at once. Then the world snapped into place around him, and he was in some sort of lightless cellar that stank of mold and stagnant water.

At least I didn’t land in it, he thought as he noticed a pool of it a few feet to his left. With a sigh, he looked around until he spotted a glimmer of light coming through the cracks in a set of partially rotted doors set into the ceiling. The stairs leading up to those doors had long since fallen apart, but it was only ten feet overhead. After the stunts he’d just pulled in the dungeon, reaching that door felt like an extremely tame accomplishment.

When he emerged back into open air, he found himself in an old, dilapidated cottage tucked somewhere in the forest border a few miles from the old watch tower. Torwin was nowhere nearby, but they’d already established that they’d meet back up at the dead dungeon entrance and start searching from there.

* * *

She stepped through the sky bridge near the west edge of the sand sea, then quickly moved out of the way. Behind her, the massive figure appeared where she’d been standing. His nose curled in distaste.

“It stinks like humans here.”

“I seriously doubt there’s a human within a hundred miles of this sky bridge,” she said, suppressing a tired sigh. Why me?

“I know that. What makes you think I can’t smell them from where they are?”

She didn’t bother to answer. This was the closest sky bridge to the one that had been destroyed, which still put them well over a thousand miles away, closer to fifteen hundred, really. It was going to be a long two days of travel, at minimum. If she couldn’t keep him on target, it’d be even longer.

“Which way?” he asked.

“You don’t know how to get out of a sky bridge?” she retorted sarcastically.

“Which way to the victim?” he clarified with a growl.

“Southwest to the sky bridge we got the blood sample from. You’ll have to find him on your own from there.”

He snorted. “Whatever. Start moving, and be quick about it, or I’ll wring your skinny neck.”

He wouldn’t dare actually touch her, of course. If there was one thing Reisha didn’t stand for, it was infighting among the Council of the Divine. He was very big on appearances, and the councilors were a united front in public.

Then again, they weren’t exactly in public. In fact, they were as far away from her center of power as it was possible to get. Suddenly nervous, she leaped to lead the way, fairly flying down the corridors of the intact sky bridge and past its golem defenders. Those turned to acknowledge the two of them, making no move to obstruct their passage.

Soon enough, great doors twenty feet tall and made of titanium swept open on silent hinges to reveal the endless sand sea that separated the walled garden the gods had set aside for their pet humans. Ten thousand miles of desert infested with the pillars—the automatons of the gods that forged the world—under strict orders to kill anything that dared to set foot in the borderlands, stretched out behind them.

They ignored that and turned their sight west, to a range of soft, small mountains lightly dusted with snow near the peaks. They were barely more than foothills compared to the ones back home, but their purpose was to contain humans and monsters too weak to scale them. For that, they were adequate.

It was a few hundred miles across the sands to reach the human lands. That would be the most dangerous part of the journey, a gamble where they ran as fast as they could and hoped not to encounter a pillar, or at least not more than one. If it was just one, they could probably defeat it together.

She didn’t even believe her own thoughts. The idea of killing one was ludicrous, but he’d probably try, and she’d escape in the confusion of the battle before more showed up. If he died, that was unavoidable. Reisha couldn’t blame her for that.

He stared out at the sands, for the first time she’d ever seen, hesitant. Perhaps he wasn’t so brash and stupid as he pretended to be. “Ready?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the desert.

“Full speed. It’s only four or five hours. We won’t see any—”

“Shut up. Don’t even say it. Don’t invite that kind of curse down on our heads,” he snapped. With a deep breath, he leaped the three hundred feet down the side of the rocky spur the sky bridge was built on and hit the desert below with an enormous crash. A cloud of sand rose up so high that it dusted the steps she stood on.

Sighing, she spread her arms and unleashed her magic, then glided down after him.