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Avan held Linob's almost cold body in his arms while he tried weakly to lift his eyelids. The blood and the past time had done the rest and demanded more blood from the man than it had been the case with Patris.

Avan regretted coming so late, but was inwardly somewhat glad that he had at least been able to save his team mate and Dani's boyfriend. Naturally, he felt bad, but knew that it was only human to differentiate between people.

"Linob..." He whispered and put his hand on the forehead of the wet sweaty man who was visibly trying with all his might to stay alive. He had recognized Avan almost as soon as he had opened his eyes, but his body did not obey him enough, judging by the gulping in his throat, the blinking of his weak eyes, and the weak muscles in general.

"A-van..." Came a croak from Linob's parched throat, and a trembling slightly wrinkled hand tried to grab Avan by the collar of his robe. A gasp, a rattle from inside the throat. "Promise... me..."

"Take care of... Jen!" His arm sank down again, powerless, and hit the floorboards with a low, dull sound. Linob's breathing was intermittent and sluggish, his eyes fluttering open and closed.

With a visible last gasp of strength, it came in a whisper. "Take care of her... of the princ..."

And with these words, all movement stopped and the limbs fell powerlessly to the ground. The body in Avans went limp and the empty eyes stared at the ceiling.

With a heavy heart and guilt over the fact that Avan had just been glad that he had at least freed Patris in time, he placed his left hand over the face of the loyal elite soldier and gently closed his eyes. "Rest in peace... Linob. I'll get Jen out of here too..."

With stiff limbs, Avan stood up and carefully placed the lifeless body on the floor in front of him while he grabbed his own temples and was overcome by a sudden sadness. The death of his slave friends, the possible death of Elisa, of Yue, and of all the atrocities that happened here on Aorus. It all burst out, and a single solitary tear ran down Avan's right cheek as he stared at the ceiling and tussled his hair.

*I didn't know him very well... And yet... *

It was the drop that broke the camel's back, and even if it was only a single tear, it showed more pain than he had felt since his stay as a slave or the physical torture.

Deep breaths, in and out, echoed for a minute through the interior of the small house.

Two palms slapped Avan's cheeks, leaving red glowing areas. Once, twice, and a third time.

"Okay, Avan. Focus again..." He muttered to himself, looking down at his feet where the deceased Linob lay. "I will not leave the body behind... Either I decompose it like I did with the vampires, or I can pack it into the celestial storage like this. So Jen can say goodbye properly..."

Just as he was extending his mana toward Linob to stow him away, his celestial mana encountered a brief resistance inside the body. "What the bloody hell?" Avan sensed some kind of foreign object inside Linob that prevented him from stowing it. There, where his own soul core, the magical center of being, sat, was a red pulsating ball that reminded Avan dangerously close to the corrupted dungeon mana core, only in red.

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He increased the mental pressure, and after only a few seconds, the strands of gold-silver mana broke through the surface of the ball, and the red within was completely transformed and purified before Avan's mind's eyes within a second. "What the bloody hell was that...?" He had never seen anything like it, but if it reminded him so much of the miasma of the dungeon core of haipu, then it could only have something to do with corruption, vampires, and the undead.

Back from the inner scenario, Avan once again stared at the body in front of him on the floor, and what he had just wanted to do before.

Avan had never tried it before, but his gut told him that corpses could also be stored in his inventory, and so he reached out his mental and magical feelers for Linob and all his belongings in one, and the body disappeared. A brief inner glance told him that Linob had arrived safely stored in his inventory, and only now did he have the waking thought to notice that Linob, unlike Patris, had not been stripped of his belongings. "Odd..." Avan muttered, but dropped the thought for now.

With a last glance into the room, Avan looked around once more and, following his intuition, stowed Linob's blood in his inventory instead of leaving it for these monsters. The traces of a prisoner were completely wiped away, and Avan turned to the door and went to tell the two women in the cage, if possible.

The way back to the cages was, fortunately, uneventful and Avan only had to wait for the passing patrol of bored vampire guards to sneak in the shadows to the two women.

He told in quick sentences and under time pressure what had happened, and Dani was overjoyed about the news that he had been able to save Patris, but when it came to the story with Linob, Jen was devastated and sobbed. Unfortunately, the noise immediately drew the attention of the next guards, who turned away from their conversation with the others and made their way to the cage with the two young women inside, visibly upset by the disturbance of the two.

"Damn it!" Avan whispered to the two, regretting not being able to do more for them at this point, and quickly slipped away under cover of the cage on the other side.

From a distance and out of the darkness, he watched the two guards hiss angrily into the cage, and one of them utter curses in human language, telling the two women to shut up.

Reassured, as the two stomped off again, Avan took another look at the two and saw Dani gently take the young healer in his arms and speak softly to her.

Avan himself turned and crept back to Patris, finding him continuing to sleep behind the same barrel he had laid him behind. "That guy has nerves of steel too.... But if there's one thing he's good at, it's sleeping and eating." Avan chuckled lightly, and fetched a few things from the inventory, so as not to leave the young warrior, left only in his undershirts, completely without food and weapons.

Turning back to look more closely at the inner keep, perhaps to find the boss of the dungeon and the dungeon core, Avan left a small pile of items for Patris.

A slightly used short sword and on a blanket 4 piles of dried berries and two apples.

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