My feet touch the solid stone, sliding a moment before sticking. I roll, the momentum from my slide into the room carrying me forward, and come up with my burning staff held high to illuminate the dark chamber. The green light at the head of my staff is hardly enough to show me everything. A walkway of stone extends out before me, five feet wide, and runs off into the darkness ahead of me. On either side of the walkway lay the oily surface of a black tar-like fluid that gives off an acrid scent–the same substance I had seen in the previous room.

I have no idea how long the pathway I stand upon is; the green light at the head of my staff gives off far less illumination than my natural dragonfire. With a bit of mana, I fire a Dragonfire Bolt down along the length of the walkway I stand upon. The glowing missile sails forth, traveling for at least two hundred feet before colliding against the far wall. The momentary flash of fiery explosion reveals that there is a closed door at the other end of the walkway, but the monster I chased into this room is nowhere to be seen.

The slight sound of clinking metal is the only warning I am given. I jump to the side, narrowly avoiding a hurled stone that collides with the space I had just been standing in. Without thinking, I fire another bolt up towards the ceiling where the stone came from. The hideous face of the red ape is revealed by my ball of fire, though my own attack comes nowhere near hitting its target.

The ape sneers down at me from among a mess of steel chains that run through the length of the ceiling above me. In the instant of light that the explosion gives off, I see energy pooling into the ape’s open palm, another jagged stone being conjured from nothing. Then, the light is gone, and darkness hangs over me once again.

Not being able to see my target comes as the first problem; not being able to see its attacks is the second. The green flame at the head of my staff transitions back to a burning orange at my will, the light brighter but still unable to illuminate the nest of chains where the monster is hiding.

Standing in a brighter globe of illumination, this time I am able to see the hurled stone coming down from the ceiling. I dance backwards, the movements that Kithkik drilled into me with her beatings coming to me without thinking. The force in the monster’s throw is enough to embed the elongated slab of stone into the tiles I stand on, sending tremors through the walkway. Above me, the monster screeches in anger at having missed twice, the clinking of the chains is the only signal I have that it has moved.

I know that I need to take the initiative. I fire sporadic balls of flame up towards the ceiling, most of my attacks not even coming close to hitting their mark as the monstrous ape moves through the chains. I only catch momentary glimpses of the creature as it swings and weaves itself through the mess of metal above me. This just won’t do.

The monster hurls three more stones down at me as I take my time to think. It has moved further away from me now, seemingly unable to understand how it making distance only helps me dodge its throws. There exists a world where I wait for the monster to exhaust its mana creating stones. If I can hold out until it depletes itself, then it will have nothing to attack me with.

I immediately discard the idea. Firstly, there is no guarantee that the monster will come down from its safe space amongst the chains even after it can no longer create rocks. Second, there is also no guarantee that I can continue to dodge its projectiles–already, the walkway is becoming crowded with the stones. Finally, that tactic seems too passive to me. I am not a defensive fighter.

It only takes a few seconds for the obvious course to occur to me. Whipping my staff through the air in front of me, a trail of fire ignites the lakes of oil on either side of the walkway. The flash of fire that spreads over the surface of the oil is like the wind, roaring instead of whispering. For the first time, I can see the entirety of the room I stand in, the pools of oil extending thirty feet towards the walls on either side of me: the chamber is a massive rectangle, my walkway dividing it in two.

The light the rising fire gives off is terrifying and captivating. Jets of flame rise from the surface of the oil for five feet, and as the seconds tick past the flames only grow taller. Mountains of billowing smoke sail straight towards the illuminated ceiling, and there, I see the red ape tucked in among a bundle of chains, fear and confusion on its face.

My grin is like a predator as I stare up at the monster hanging above me. Mana begins to pour into the head of my staff as I over channel a Dragonfire Bolt, but I do not hurl the magic towards the monster, contenting myself with watching the fire rise towards the chains.

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The odd ape begins to shriek at me as the fire rises. Instead of conjuring boulders, fist-sized rocks settle into its open hands. Some of the flaming triumph I feel in the moment vanishes from me as the monster raises both its hands to throw the jumble of stones down at me. I have barely a second to move before a wave of fist-sized stones moving faster than an arrow splash down on the walkway all around me. I dive for the only cover I can, the shadow of one of the boulders the ape threw at me earlier.

Pain rips up through my leg as one of the stones collides with my thigh, the armor there denting horribly before repelling the rock. I fall to the floor behind the boulder, hissing as my hand reflexively moves to my leg. A sheet of metal from my skirt has torn from absorbing the attack and hangs loose. The steel of my chausses, over my thigh, is bent terribly and a torn piece of metal is stabbing into the muscle beneath. I welcome the dangerous emotions that ripping the metal out of my skin brings me; I burn the scorn like fuel as greedily as I do my mana.

Another salvo of stones rips into the tiles that line the walkway around me. Hunkered in the shadow of the boulder, none of the stones reach me this time around, and I savor the enraged scream of the monster that follows its ineffective attack. I pull the wet rag out of my inventory and hold it up to my face. The flaking embers thrown off by the inferno around me bite at my eyes, drawing tears, and the flames now shoot ten feet into the air.

I listen for the movement of the monster up near the ceiling, but the roar of the fires drowns out almost everything else. Out of sight, the monster continues to scream at me as it throws more ineffectual attacks down at me. I peek out from my cover after each salvo, spotting the monster’s movements between each of its attacks and adjusting to put myself out of its sight. For some reason, whether it is the flames causing it to panic or its heeding the danger of the massive pool of mana in the head of my staff, the monster refuses to approach me, opting the throw a tantrum of stones at me from far off.

Not even five minutes pass before the red ape finally succumbs to the smoke that has been pouring up into the ceiling. With a wailing cry that pierces through the steady roar of the inferno, I hear the monster slip and begin to plummet towards the burning oil. My smile splits my face as I stand from my hiding spot behind the boulder.

In its final moments near the ceiling, the ape tries to swing itself out so that it will land on the walkway, but it has delayed too long. The monster’s lower half splashes down into the boiling oil as it lands halfway on the walkway. Burning oil clings to the ape monster as it crawls its way onto the walkway, flames eating into its fur and skin as it tries to move. It’s wails of terror and pain are muted now, but there is a defiance in its eyes.

I do not even give the monster the chance to rise from its prone position on the walkway. With two-hundred mana and a fully channeled Dragonfire Bolt, I blow its head and left shoulder away in an explosion of orange fire. The heat in the room excites something primal deep inside of me as I walk down the length of the walkway towards the dead monster. It only occurs to me as I reach its corpse that I never inspected the creature.

“Galea,” I call in my head as I nudge the dead monster with a toe, causing it to erupt in pink smoke that evaporates into the air.

“Yes?” the golden dragon answers me summons immediately. There is a look of pride and hunger on her face.

“What level was this thing?” I ask.

“Fifty-five,” Galea answers. “I have more messages that I am holding onto for you. Would you like to read them now?”

“Not yet. It would be best to leave this room first.” Pressing the wet rag hard to my mouth, I continue to march down the walkway towards the opposite end. The door at the end of the walkway has vanished, an arch of darkness beckoning me to continue forward. “Hopefully, Macille won’t follow in this direction.”

“He is a very sturdy man,” Galea tells me as she looks around at the climbing flames on either side of us. “This will not be enough to harm him.”

“I hope that is true.”

I spend a bare second in the darkness of the passageway before I am let out into another towering room of stone. A golden light suffuses the room, though its origin is unknown. The room itself is plain, a simple rectangle forty feet deep and twelve wide, but its walls are covered in intricate inscriptions of people out of history and Alucrean script. The detail in the depictions boggles my mind, each man and woman given an incredible amount of care in their carving, each scene meticulously decorated–the script carved in flowery lines that together form the shapes of monsters and men.

A ramp slopes upwards towards the end of the room, leading to a doorway that shines with the impenetrable light of the sun. In front of the ramp stand three pedestals, one barren of anything, and the other two holding treasures that glow with the light of powerful magic.

Dovik stands before the pedestals, a piece of burning paper in his hand as he turns to notice my entrance into the room. There are complicated emotions stained on the man’s face that I cannot recognize.

“You arrived here pretty quickly,” Dovik says to me with a sad smile as the last remnants of paper burn away in his hand. “I knew you were powerful, farm girl.”