I was in the safe room of a fort conquered by demons. As long as I was in here, no one in the dungeon would be able to notice me. I had attempted to become the commander of the skeleton army and wage a war against the demons, but now all the skeleton forces were defeated and scattered. I didn’t know what came of the reinforcements, but they’d arrive to find their primary foothold gone. The demons had sacrificed a nearly useless fort to wipe out our forces, which was ironically what I had tried to do as well.

Furthermore, although Xin was alive, and in this dungeon, and she was just as powerful as she had been in her prime, she wasn’t willing to help. A thousand failures had jaded her and she was looking down on me. I was starting to get how it felt for Edward Aberis. I had a feeling she looked down on all men, or maybe just all men that were weaker than her, which turned out to be all men. She sort of reminded me of Alysia. Maybe that was just a trait of Osterians, although I still wondered why she wasn’t as tall as her Osterian self.

The woman in my memories was around seven and a half feet tall, but this woman was only about six feet. Had the lore been wrong and expanded her size? I mean, technically, it made her a giant by the time I met her dungeon proxy. She did have many similarities with the giant. It was at a level where if someone told me they were sisters, ignoring size, I’d believe them.

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After thinking about everything that had happened that day, I realized I had been waiting in the safe room until the night. I’d be here all month if I continued to err on the side of caution. I struggled to make decisions in my current state. It was pretty laughable that I thought I could be the commander of an army. It made much more sense that I just attack directly.

I go to the door and wait until there is a demon passing by. I leap out from my hidden spot and kill him like an assassin, cutting his throat before he can even let out a cry. I then consume his karma and steal his outfit. When I pull him into the safe room, he starts to disintegrate rapidly, the miasma dispersing. So, monsters from dungeons can enter safe rooms, but they seem to take some kind of light damage. At least, that’s how I interpreted the monster disappearing into ash.

Once I look karmically like a demon soldier, I lift my hand to create a Portal. Then, I freeze for a moment. I raise my hand and pull up my Map. Of course, my goal is to look for Carmine. She was exactly where I thought Bernard would bring her. She was in the demon castle. I start casting a Portal to the demon castle, but it failed. I let out a sigh. I had thought that would probably be the case.

The dungeon was protecting her now, so the demon castle was off-limits. With my blessings, I could probably ignore these limits, but me as I am at that moment, the dungeon wouldn’t let me take any shortcuts. I was starting to miss those blessings. I raised my hand and cast Portal to a different spot. My only chance if I wanted to beat this dungeon and save Carmine was to get stronger.