Eros had an arrow nocked on his bow string. Poppy hadn’t even seen him draw it. Anna’s shade’s slid across the broken dungeon chamber, disappearing into the myriad criss crossing shadows and lying in wait.

“Sai?” Poppy asked.

Her heart was pounding.

Hope, excitement, and dread fought for dominant position in her mind. The man standing across from her wore his name and face. The ruin they had found had changed their paths completely, upending their rigidly planned class selection for something better. Something unique, that no one else had even seen.

No one beside’s Poppy’s party knew he existed at all. The Trailblazer’s guild had a record of him existing, but he had never accepted a task from them. He disappeared without a trace. The local shops had never seen him, the local inns had never heard of him, and his class was a complete mystery, even to the noble libraries of the great House Vascara.

A cultivator.

Beyond that, the dungeon to the south of Spearpoint hadn’t been there. It wasn’t that people had simply missed the place — the region around Spearpoint had been thoroughly scouted. Poppy was ignorant of that at the time, but now she knew for certain that dungeon had simply appeared. Days before, there was a mountain there. Then a dungeon. Days later, Iscassia destroyed it.

Everything about it was wrong. But the sudden reappearance of Sai was even more so.

[Sai Feng, Level 49 Warrior]

She heard Eros’ bow creak as he drew the string taught. She threw up a hand to stop him.

“That’s not him.” Eros hissed. “His class is wrong. His clothes are wrong. That has to be some kind of dungeon monster. A mimic, an illusion.” Mana shifted in the air around Eros as he spoke.

Poppy hadn’t been able to sense mana before she met Sai.

Her heart jumped as thunder boomed in the cloudless sky. Artifacts of other chambers warred for the dominant sound in this broken room; it looked like someone had blended a half dozen chambers together.

“There’s no mimics in this dungeon. We’ve cleared it three times.” Poppy said. “And mimics cant read someone’s appearance out of our minds.”

Sai just sat there, smiling at them. An uneasy quiet existed between them for a moment. Sai’s companion seemed to recognize them. His eyes lit up, but his expression remained wary.

[Dale, Level 49 Shadowmancer]

“You two entered the dungeon together?”

“Yes!” Dale said. “Everyone else who entered with us split up. This is my good friend Feng. Isn’t that right, Feng?” Dale said, slapping him on the back.

Dale’s eyes lingered on him. His face looked like a warning.

Poppy turned, looking back to Eros.

“Do you think they’re a projection of the dungeon? More memories?” She asked.

Eros shook his head no.

“They’re real. And they’re here.”

Eros’ perception was ungodly high on account of his class and skills.

“The rules don’t change that much when the dungeon breaks down, do they?” Anna whispered. Her voice had trepidation.

“No.” Poppy replied.

Dale coughed, interrupting their whispered conversation.

“It is my honor to meet you. Poppy, the Black Fist, in the flesh! I’ve admired your party’s… accomplishments… for a while now. Your leveling speed is prodigious.” He spread his arms wide, smiling. There was still a tenseness to his eyes as he stepped forward passed Feng.

Anna leaned forward, ready to activate her movement skill, her dagger already free and in her hand. Eros aimed his bow. Dale flinched back.

“Sorry! Sorry. I’m just a fan. I… admire your methods.” Dale licked his lips. His glanced at the massive void to the side, then winced.

“We only level by killing monsters.” Anna said.

“Yes… of course.” Dale said. “Us too. Are you heading to the Core Chamber? We’ve been looking for the path as well.”

“We are.” Poppy said, nodding at him.

Dale’s eyes scanned the row of doorways arranged in a semi-circle beside them. Each one warbled with images of the dungeon chambers within. Poppy glanced at them and back.

“We should stick together.” Dale said.

“We should take different routes.” Anna said at the same time.

Their party had been betrayed in the dungeons too many times to trust anything even remotely strange. And this was beyond remotely strange. Poppy squinted at them. Dale threw his hands up.

“You’ve already reached your first tier. The next room might spell doom for us… but be nothing to you. We’re clearly off the dungeon’s routes.” Dale smiled apologetically. “I’m just looking out for my health.”

“Yeah. Yeah, stay with us.” Poppy said. “We’ll watch your back. And we can… exchange notes once we get out of the dungeon.”

Poppy was going to tear every piece of information out of them by force if she had to. This was the first trace of Sai’s shadow she had seen in two years.

How a man appeared and left no trace was beyond her.

She stared at Feng. He said nothing. His arms were crossed over old, bulky armor with signs of age and scars of battle. The unpolished, matte metal was pitted and scarred. Strangely, the armor seemed to be segmented in pieces, split down the chest, as if it was designed to be disposable.

“You two can go first.” Poppy said. She smiled.

Dale’s eye twitched.

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“Of course! Of course. That won’t be a problem.” Dale said. He looked over at the row of doors standing to the side. “We’ve seen most of these chambers. The only three we haven’t are… looks like a desert, a blizzard, and… a floating island? I thought there weren’t any island chains West of Illyria.”

“There aren’t. At least not any known floating islands.” Poppy said with a frown. She folded her arms, looking at the doors, but not moving any closer. The two groups maintained their position on opposite sides of the tiny chamber, a tension there even as they agreed to work together. Dale didn’t move any closer to them either.

So many people died routinely in dungeons that even ten-percent loss in life was written off as normal. Many people took advantage of that fact. Leveling into the first tier — beyond level 50 — was a near suicidal effort for the untrained. It required you to constantly risk your life. Dungeoneering was never about how many levels you could gain in the dungeon — how much power you could carved out of every room. No.

It was about surviving all the way until the exit. Some people could double their level in their first dungeon.

Rarely did those people make it out of the dungeon alive.

If the dungeon wasn’t broken, then every three chambers, the exit door would open. It would have been directly after this room. Alternate routes would lead either back out of the dungeon or deeper, toward the core. They were being herded further in.

Not keeping strangers at your back in a dungeon had become a common rule for Poppy’s team. It was considered highly impolite to trail behind another Trailblazer as they carved their way through these dungeons.

“Our party’s seen the inside of the blizzard chamber.” Poppy said. “Let’s take one of the others.”

Her eyes hovered on Sai, who stared back at them. His glaze was unflinching. He hadn’t even blinked, just smiling and swaying slightly.

Dale grabbed his arm, pulling him forward.

“Let’s go, Feng.” He pronounced the name as if he was offended by it.

----------------------------------------

FENG SAI

[Memory of a corrupted Roc, Level 79]

[Danger Sense reached level 2!]

My side exploded in pain, heat and searing agony radiating outward as I was thrown bodily from my feet and sent tumbling until I slammed into a tree. [Danger Sense] had activated, but it was only enough to avoid a direct hit, not enough to avoid it entirely. Or maybe I just wasn’t fast enough.

[Health: 50%]

The ground felt wet under my hands, layers of plants sucking the heat away. I gasped in pain. My robes, which had resisted cutting bites and acidic blood and magical fire, tore like paper. My side was bleeding. I limped in a crawl forward, gasping a second time from the pain.

[Pain Resistance reached level 3!]

There was no time to wait and react, no time to process. I forced myself to my feet and ran, shaping my movement technique as fast as I could. Each stride took me a dozen feet forward. I would have to stop to safely scale the side of the Azure Thief tree. So I didn’t.

I raced to the edge as the world bent around me. Then I jumped, sailing through the air to land on hard earth again.

The earth behind me shattered with a deafening roar as the Titan’s memory tore it asunder, slamming into the dirt with otherworldly fury. It was definitely the memory of the Titan — but it was different. Wrong. Its wing was being substituted by energy — a skill, maybe? I didn’t have time to investigate. I had to keep running.

The islands grew larger the more they neared the central island. That’s where I was heading — it was the only place with any amount of cover. I had to get closer to the trees. There were more and more the closer I got.

I jumped again.

The next island I hopped to had uneven terrain; the Azure Thief’s pulled chunks of land together until they formed larger islands, but each chunk around each tree rose to its own height, not yet smoothed over by wind and erosion.

I risked a glance backwards. The bird was gone. Smoke and dust spilled up out of the hole it had drilled directly through the island; it had shot into and through the stone. Right as I had looked back, it shot back up; more than just a black blur, it moved with the branching form of a streak of black lightning. The world darkened around it as it shot up into the sky and arced back down.

The ground exploded ahead of me — too far ahead of me. I leapt to another floating island. The acceleration of my movement technique was making my position hard to predict for the bird. My acceleration declined every time I jumped, then accelerated again, making my speed variable and hard to predict.

“What’s going on!” I shouted at little bird. “It wasn’t trying to kill me in the last few rooms!”

Littlebird chirped back angrily. Its talons were dug into my shoulder.

Was it attacking me because it was corrupted? Or because it was so much higher level than me now? Did the predators of this world have [Identify] and avoid things stronger than them?

It didn’t matter.

The bird seemed to struggle to predict how fast I would move, slamming into the ground either ahead of or behind me. It was growing frustrated with this dance, slamming more frequently or looping around me, trying to simply strike me as it flew through the air. Its wingspan cut a wide swathe.

I had no doubt that a direct hit would kill me.

“Why did the dungeon get so much more dangerous so quickly!?” I said.

Little bird chirped loudly by way of reply. I could almost hear the ‘I told you so.’

Perhaps it was because I hadn’t traveled my own course through the dungeon — falling through the shattered desert chamber had clearly locked me somewhere else entirely. But I wasn’t going to just not take the levels and xp available. Using the broken defensive formation to kill the Titan was clever! I deserved those levels!

“Cultivators are supposed to be greedy!”

The explosions around me stopped. There had only been a half dozen.

I leapt to a new island. I was only one or two away from the mainland. The variations in height were plenty, and the Azure Thief trees grew more and more massive as I approached closer. I could see arches of Azure Thieves rising out of the forest ahead of me between taller pine trees.

Almost there.

I heard the sound of wood snapping behind me, turning back to see the corrupted Roc cutting through the Azure Thief connecting my island to the one behind me.

It was okay. There were three left.

Another tree shattered to my right.

The two remaining trees creaked audibly as the entire island I was on began to tilt away. I was suddenly running uphill, turning a few degrees to the left as I shot forward. I was tearing into the earth, plants being ripped apart beneath my boots.

The corrupted Roc couldn’t kill both of the trees at once. They were too far apart to dive through.

It screamed.

A bar of black-light in the shape of a cutting crescent shot forward with the flap of the Titan’s wings. It carved through one of the two remaining trees. The island began to fall, angling downward. It wasn’t with the full weight of an island; it was floaty, as if this separated piece of the island wasn’t as heavy as thousands of pounds of rock and dirt suggested.

But the arcing band of cutting light didn’t stop at the tree. It started to split the entire island in half, and now the island leaned in two separate directions. Massive chunks of earth and stone began to fall apart around me as I shot forward.

Littlebird was on my back, screaming its head off directly into my ear. It beat its wings as if it was trying to give me more lift, but its claws were digging hard enough into my back to drop my health by a point.

The last Azure Thief didn’t need any help, snapping to pieces, the wood breaking into fibrous strands as the island I was on began to fall slowly. It tipped upwards like a ramp.

But I wasn’t going to make the jump. The island was still falling, even if it was slow, descending into the false reality below this chamber of the dungeon. I had no doubt that what was below me wouldn’t amount to anything other than certain death.

[Zone: Acceleration]

I hit the zone right before I hit the edge of the island, shooting upward. The air screamed as I went up, and up, and up — higher than the island I had been on before it started falling.

Then I fell, slamming into the earth.

The air was full of exploding splinters from the Azure Thief’s sudden, violent death.

[Health: 39%]

The shaped technique in my legs snapped apart, but I shaped my movement technique again, throwing myself forward just in time for the corrupted Roc to land like an arrow in the earth behind me.

Burning dust and dirt covered my back as I shot for the forest.

I tore up the distance. It was a hundred feet away. Then fifty.

The memory of the Titan shrieked behind me. [Danger Sense] activated, but I was already dodging as a bar of black light cut a massive swathe through the forest. Something distant roared.

I shot into the treeline. There was hardly any foliage, but there were dozens of Azure Thieves. Their hanging curtains of leaves weren’t enough to impede my movement technique as I raced deeper and deeper in, seeking cover.

I pulled Littlebird off my shoulder, holding it in my hands instead, pressed to my chest as I slammed through the curtains of foiliage.

Something in the forest roared, seemingly angry at the Titan’s rampaging chase of me, but it wasn’t my problem anymore. I raced away beneath the canopy.

I was greedy enough. I needed to practice knowing when to run.