Daniel awoke with a start, shooting up and nearly hitting his head against the ceiling. He’d been lying on his back on the cold stone floor and not too far up above white smoke swirled and twisted, forming a roof over his head that almost seemed like it had its own current to it as the smoke forming it shifted.

Daniel glanced to his side and found Jonathan, the ceremonial priest and third unknown man crouched there.

“How long was I out,” Daniel asked, pulling up his pant leg and checking the stab wound. Only to find the wound gone and his pant leg stained with blood.

“I healed you,” Jonathan softly said. “And you’ve been out less than a minute.”

“Then we need to move,” Daniel said, forcing himself up as much as he could in the cramped space.

“No, we need to wait for help to come,” the unknown priest shakily said, staring towards the opaque smoke like he could see through it.

“The church will notice that we lost contact soon,” the ceremonial priest said. “They’ll send in guild members, and maybe even Anton if we’re lucky enough. There are contingencies in place for exactly this scenario.”

Daniel’s mind raced in thought, waiting for help was an option, but was it a viable one? These things were more dangerous than the priests were giving them credit for.

“How do you know news of this has even gotten out,” Daniel asked as an inhuman shriek echoed on the other side of wall. The people he’d seen head towards the exit had been brutally killed, and he seriously doubted than anyone had actually made it out the room.

“Yaseb made it out,” Jonathan retorted.

At that Daniel’s eyes narrowed, “And you trust him to go get help?”

He wasn’t keen to place his life in the hands of a man who’d abandoned them at the first hint of danger.

At that Jonathan stayed quiet, listening to the sounds of battle outside the dome.

Daniel grit his teeth at the other’s laxness. It was like they wanted to get themselves killed.

“Tell me everything you all can about drifters,” Daniel said to the trio of men.

Silence hung in the air a moment, the group hesitating for some unknown reason before eventually the shaky unnamed priest spoke up.

“Drifters are extremely dangerous creatures, and these ones have access to at least one legendary card if I had to guess.”

The priest was sweating, and reached into his shirt pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his face before he continued speaking.

The slowness of it grated Daniel's nerves.

“If they kill you then you become one of them. The same thing happens if you kill one of them. That's a base characteristic of the creatures. They may not appear monstrous at first, instead keeping their human appearance. They’ll eventually drop it, but that’s why they’re called drifters. They try to sneak into towns and kill without being noticed. These ones are sharing their cards somehow. That’s not normal.”

The priest's voice gradually grew more and more shaky as he spoke. It was to the point that Daniel thought the balding man may actually start to cry if he kept going.

But still, he did, “Drifters aren’t the bodies you see walking around, they’re something else. Nobody knows what, but if you kill one without a card protecting you, you’ll find yourself dead in minutes with them taking you over. Like they’ve jumped from one ship to another.”

‘Well damn,’ Daniel thought, reloading his revolver with a pouch of ammunition that he kept on his hip at all times.

“So I’ve got some good news and bad news,” Daniel remarked, wiping the blood off his knife and onto his pants.

“I can kill them, I think.”

“What?” The shaky priest all but shouted, before quieting with a glare from Jonathan and the ceremonial priest.

“Either my legendary keeps me safe, or I ripped the drifters soul out as it died, stopping whatever it is they do,” Daniel said, watching as a drifter's soul floated throughout the enclosure unseen by anyone else. It resembled the creatures, though looked more like a real jester than some kind of horror in its current state.

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It’d clearly come from Mimics of Stone, though he still couldn’t interact with it. Mimics of Stone had an icy sort of numbness to it, and Daniel guessed he wouldn’t have it, or any of them other cards that'd been stunned like it up and running for another five minutes or so.

“We can try to wait five minutes and I can get us all out of here with one of my cards, but I don’t think we have that long," Daniel said. "There was something in the exit that was far more lethal than any of the drifters in he—“

Daniel was unable to finish the thought before a drifter came lunging through the smokey dome overhead. It’s body was horrifically burned, and the ‘petals’ made from its head were covered with burned out holes. The skin of the creature had melted, and while it was laying on the ground Daniel could see some of it adhering to the floor like melting candle wax.

The creature looked up at the group, and Daniel felt like he could see a grin form on the creature's expression despite its missing face.

In a second Daniel had his revolver in his hand, leveled towards the drifter, but was unable to pull the trigger before the creature managed to mutter out a simple phrase, A Kings Negation, as the smokey dome around them almost immediately lost its cohesion.

Daniel quickly turned his attention outward, through the dissipating smoke and found that the magic wall separating the room was still there. Ten drifters, including the one dying on the floor were spread throughout the room, but two of them looked different from the others.

Those two had actual jester outfits, one blue with red highlights and the other the inverse. Their costumes had innumerable rips and tears covering them, like they’d seen several years of use out in the woods. Their colors were muted, and while the creatures heads looked similar to all the others, they were ever so slightly different.

White bells of bone hung from the petals that’d used to be the creature's skull, and they jingled as they joyously moved across the room.

‘They’re having fun,’ Daniel realized, studying the creatures. This was a game to them. They practically pranced across the room, knives in either hand while echoing mocking laughter that Daniel couldn’t quite pinpoint the origin of.

Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel saw Jonathan blasting the drifter still melting on the ground with a thick stream of smoke before pulling out his short sword and cleaving the creature's hands off one at a time.

‘Smart,’ Daniel thought, realizing what he was doing.

Despite the rough treatment it looked healthier than it had moments before. After the smoke dissipated the drifter's skin clung to its body in a healthy manner instead of the rapid melting it’d been experiencing moments before, though it seemed to have regained some of its strength despite the horrid state of its hands.

“We need to get to the exit,” Daniel hissed to the group, and the two drifter leaders seemed to understand Daniel’s intent, because one turned towards the entrance and waved a scrawny, malnourished and bloody hand. The appendage looked like all the liquid had been pulled from the limb, like it was nothing but skin and bone.

“Stonemason’s Folly,” the creature uttered in a high pitched tone that came from everywhere, and the hallway leading to the exit collapsed downward with a deafening crack. Like meters of stone had all at once been split in a single moment.

“That was Brent’s card,” the shaky priest softly said, a hand covering his mouth as he stared wide eyed towards the monsters.

The drifter turned back from what it’d done, the jingle of its bells sounding mocking in Daniel’s ears as the creature proceeded to mime laughter, the noise not coming from it, but from all around.

‘This is bad,’ Daniel thought, staring out at the collapsed hallway. ‘They’re corralling us to the portal, leaving it as our only option. I doubt it even still works.’

Daniel gripped his revolver ever so slightly tighter, ‘It's all just a game to them.’

“Let’s all just calm down,” the shaky priest stuttered at the monsters. “You’re moon cursed, we’re not. We won’t stand in your way. You can just leave, right? Hunt each other, do what you want to do?”

The blue jester turned to the red one, and they both laughed.

A knife flew through the air. Daniel wasn’t sure where it’d come from, but it beelined towards the priest.

Jonathan stomped his foot and a wall of white smoke appeared in front of the priest to shield him.

It didn’t do a thing.

The knife cut through the smoke like it wasn’t even there, burying itself in the priest's throat. He stuttered, grasping the hilt of the blade with wide eyes before collapsing to the ground.

He gurgled there on the ground, spitting up blood onto his shirt and staining it red. Jonathan was on him in a second, ripping the blade free and blasting him with a stream of white healing smoke.

It didn’t do a thing. Whatever was up with the knives, this one seemed to be restricting any healing.

The drifters stood around, laughter filling the room. It sounded like it was coming from high pitched speakers buried intermittently throughout the roof and floor.

Jonathan’s expression soured, a frown forming on the corners of his lips as his eyes hardened.

“I’m sorry Samuel, I tried,” Jonathan before he brought his blade down on the priest's throat. Cleaving Samuel's head from his body in a single motion as the blade shined an iridescent rainbow of colors.

The ease at which it cut was clearly the work of a card, which one Daniel didn’t know. Calling out the names of cards was a sign of inexperience, or a sign that the card required you to call it out, and the ease at which Jonathan used the blade indicated it wasn’t the former.

The drifters stopped laughing, turning oddly serious now that they’d been denied a new member from joining their ilk.

Both the leaders stepped forward, but stopped when the dividing wall separating the other side of the room suddenly cracked, vines and flora piercing thought and pulling to either side, shattering the dividing wall into nothing as Vadim, the church higher up stepped through.