No screaming came from the murderer as the flames consumed him. Instead, he just turned and looked at me in silence, even as through [Mana Sight] I watched his eyes shrivel up in his head.

And then I saw the wisps of soul affinity reaching up from the base of the dungeon and wrapping around him. [Soul Perception] showed his soul being yanked out and upwards, ripped from his carbonising body and pulling the inactive System shard and dangling chains with it.

For a brief moment, I wondered if I should use my own soul affinity to rip his soul apart, but the momentary indecision meant he was out of range before I could make up my mind.

Would I have decided yes?

With my enchanted equipment, the fire wasn't a danger to me, but I still couldn't move. The effect was strange; I was still standing, and through [Mana Sight] I could watch my muscles making the complicated dance required for something as top-heavy as a human to keep balance. My heart was still beating. I was still breathing, and that was really weird, because I couldn't control it. Not great when I was standing in a cloud of vaporised Maximilian; my odour suppression enchantment prevented it from being dangerous, or even smelly, but I still wanted to hold my breath.

So, my muscles were fine, and my autonomic system was still functioning, but my somatic nervous system was blocked? How had he done that without even coming near me? And, more importantly, what could I do about it? I couldn't speak or communicate in any way.

My finger started tingling. The one I'd left with the guards upstairs. Dammit; he'd respawned successfully, and there was nothing I could do about it. [Mana Sight] showed him right there, talking to the guard, who handed over some basic clothing. Apparently they had a stockpile for freshly dead delvers.

[Soul Perception] showed the chains of the guard pulsate, and [Mana Sight] showed his expression blank for a moment. Perhaps Maximilian was telling them how he'd died.

Or, if he knew about the Law, perhaps he was taking deliberate advantage to force them to forget him. He gave them a cheery wave and ambled off slowly down the street, while they did nothing to stop him. And I still couldn't move.

No, there was one person I could still talk to. For a slightly lax definition of 'person'.

"I found Maximilian. He admitted being responsible for the plague that killed the centaurs, then hit me with something that's completely paralysed me. I killed him back, but he just respawned outside the dungeon, and I'm stuck on floor ten."

Not completely stuck, admittedly; I could teleport away if the mood took me. And then I'd end up in a crumpled heap somewhere, without the ability to untangle myself. I could teleport home and wait for Cluma, or to the village and hope Mum was there, but there didn't seem much point. I'd just be stuck somewhere else other than here, without the ability to explain why I was stuck. I'd just worry people.

"Oh? So you're standing on floor ten completely defenceless?" came the response from not-Blobby.

"Yes, but that's not the pertinent point here."

Thankfully, there were no monsters nearby. At least, none still alive. Maximilian obviously hadn't been defenceless, given what he'd done to me, so the fact he'd made it to floor ten without injury wasn't a surprise. It was also helpful that just like his clothing, whatever weapons he had with him would have been left behind here.

Maybe.

It would depend on what, exactly, those weapons were, and how the resurrection process worked. If he was using weaponised microbes, maybe resurrection wouldn't remove them; failed delvers would have interesting issues if they'd had their gut flora wiped, for example.

"I'm not leaving the dungeon to chase him down. That grumpy demon from the guild would just stop me."

Yes, I could imagine Dru'hazzak doing that. And it wasn't as if she'd be able to explain to him that Maximilian was evil.

"Fair enough, but if I can't reverse this in the next few minutes, would you mind going to find help? I'll need someone to drag me to the hospital."

The slime sent a pretty good impression of a shrug over our telepathic link, apparently rather apathetic to my plight. What had Maximilian said to her that had endeared him to her so much? She didn't seem worried about his intentions in the dungeon at all.

"Did he tell you what he was up to? You seem... unconcerned that a murderer unbound by the Law is running loose."

"Mostly he was asking about me. What species I was, how strong I was, my favourite types of monsters. He tried asking a bunch of stuff about how Mother designed them, and how much their abilities were based on mana and biology rather than the System, but I didn't know."

"And he didn't mention the Law?"

"Nope. Not once."

That was odd. If he wanted to continue her work, he should have been pulling out as much information about the Law as possible.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He was a biologist, and a designer of custom, virulent plagues. He was asking questions about monsters. He wanted the equivalent of a tissue sample from not-Blobby, and had talked about the availability of samples. Don't tell me that by continuing her work, he meant monster design?

What the heck sort of world had the guy originally come from?!

Also, I should probably be scared of the fact I'd been effortlessly paralysed, and there was no sign of me getting movement back. Yes, thanks to not-Blobby, I could probably get to Jason fairly quickly, or in the worst case I could self-destruct with a decay grenade and hope the respawn fixed me, but whatever he'd done had slipped past armour, my endurance stat, and my array of skills and titles that boosted my health pool and regeneration. Heck, according to my status, my health was still full. And if he could do that, then why couldn't he stop my heart from beating? I had the horrible feeling that, had he wanted to kill me, he could have. Easily.

ding

Working...

Perhaps the reason [Regeneration] hadn't fixed me was that the System had no more idea what my problem was than I did. A theory granted additional credence by the way my health dropped by ten points the moment the 'working' message popped up. It had only just noticed I was injured in some way.

ding

Skill [Extended Health Pool] advanced to level 9

Skill [Extended Health Pool] advanced to level 10

Skill [Regeneration] advanced to level 10

Skill [Regeneration] advanced to level 11

The heck?

I made another attempt to move, finding a few things now responded. Not well, but I could flicker my eyes around and make jerky neck movements.

The burst of levels confirmed that the System had no idea what had happened; it always rewarded novelty, and levels came thick and fast when an event wasn't only new to me but new to the System too.

It took another minute until I could move sufficiently to topple myself over, and a few more before I could stand back up. I immediately teleported back outside, reclaiming my lent finger and looking around with [Mana Sight]. Alas, there was no sign of my quarry.

"Wh... e... re... M..." I stammered in the general direction of the guards, my motor skills not yet sufficiently recovered to speak properly.

"Woah. Are you okay? What happened?"

I didn't bother to answer. I wouldn't be able to run, let alone use [Timeless World], without more time to recover.

[Timeless World] was a good idea, though. With the time dilation and the way he was ambling, I should be able to search for him easily.

"Where... Max..." I tried again, after giving [Regeneration] some more time to stitch whatever was broken back together.

"Sorry, he had something else to get to. He waited for you for a bit, but couldn't stay for long. But what about you? Don't you need healing?"

"I'm... okay... Just... slow..."

The guard didn't look convinced, but another couple of minutes was sufficient for me to stand and move around almost normally. It had certainly been an interesting ailment; the System hadn't noticed it, reporting me perfectly healthy and leaving [Regeneration] completely ineffectual. Once it had noticed, [Regeneration] took care of it with decent speed.

With Maximilian not having told the guard anything about his next destination, I activated [Timeless World] and took off down the street, scanning inside every building with [Mana Sight] and [Soul Perception]. I was a little worried about how much I'd been using that skill recently, but my own soul looked unchanged, and I wasn't convinced it was dangerous. Certainly, finding Maximilian was the highest priority for now.

Alas, it wasn't to be. I snaked down side streets, dodging around the other foot traffic that seemed almost frozen in place from my bubble of dilated time, but saw no sign of him. He'd barely had a ten-minute head start, and dawdled at a snail's pace, yet despite me running increasingly large circles around the dungeon, I found no sign of him. Did he have another means of transport?

I stopped to ask a few people, but thanks to his change in clothing, where he'd previously been ridiculously distinctive, he now blended in perfectly. No-one remembered seeing him. Out of avenues to explore, all I could do was visit the institute to inform the other earthlings.

"Wow. Who stole your ice-cream?" asked Abigail on seeing my face.

"Maximilian. He's here. He admitted being behind the plague, and he hit me with something that left me paralysed. No idea what it was. I set him on fire, but it was inside a dungeon, so he just respawned. No idea where he is now. Oh, and he wanted you to know he's very disappointed that after giving you all that money, you sold out to the government the moment you succeeded in doing what he wanted you to do, and tried blaming the plague on you for forcing him to make alternative arrangements. Apparently he made it as payment for providing transport here."

"Well, maybe if he'd warned us we were supposed to be tunnelling to another world, we wouldn't have had such a knee-jerk reaction," responded Harry, which was possibly true, but also not the point.

"No, I'd have definitely had a knee-jerk reaction," said Cara. "I'd have quit on the spot."

"A fair point," agreed Harry.

"Anyway, what the hell is he doing here? Why put in all that effort?"

"Don't ask us. You seem to already know more about the guy than we do."

"All I know is that he's really interested in monsters."

"If he came from a third world, maybe they had monsters there?"

"That's no explanation for why he was explicitly targeting this world."

"This is pointless," said Harry. "We don't have enough information to guess as to his motives. Concentrate on finding him again, and leave us in peace."

Was he even more grumpy than usual, or was it my imagination? Although, having been abandoned by Earth, I suppose I should cut him some slack. Some more slack. I was cutting him plenty enough already.

"Actually, with all this talk of further worlds, I've been doing some thinking," said Calvin. "Back when we were trying to extract energy, there were a few parameters that we'd tuned very carefully to get the maximum energy, and if they varied even slightly, output would drop massively, but everything would still look like it was working. The magnetic vector, the angle of incidence of the gamma beam, that sort of thing."

"You think those changes shifted our endpoint?" asked Harry. "It's plausible, and there's an obvious way to check."

He glanced over at their own kit, which my visit had distracted them from. We no longer needed to rely on the Earth squad to block portals, but they hadn't let that interrupt their efforts, and the new portal generator was quickly taking shape, now a fully formed ring with lots of complex bits of machinery around it. They'd bypassed the two-year limit themselves by shipping in components from Earth, thankfully getting everything they needed before relations soured, but I noticed some amount of mythril in the construction. They'd apparently started building magical components of some sort into it.

"You want to try burrowing to a third world?"

"No; that would be far too dangerous. We'll simply use the normal setup. If Calvin's theory is correct, it won't work. We're already here, after all."

"Unless the start point makes a difference," pointed out Cara.

"True, but it's still the first experiment we need to do. We should be ready to go within a week."