Nobody objected to Mel collecting the coins. She pressed them against the barrier and watched as the coins were consumed to dispel the magic.

Mel reached out to grasp the iron ring, but a hand clasped on her wrist to stop her.

“No,” Sabrina said. “We have no idea what’s inside there. We could be walking into a trap.”

“The chanting is loudest right here,” Mel argued. “I’m not going to turn around now.”

Sabrina shook her head. “I’m not asking you to.” She swallowed hard. “I have another idea.” She looked at the two corpses on the ground.

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

“This isn’t going to work,” Mel said, pulling the cowl low over her blonde hair. “They know each other by name.”

“I know what I’m talking about,” Sabrina said.

“Listen to her, Mel,” Shane said, his wrists bound with a makeshift rope in front of him and cut on the inside so he could break free at a moment’s notice. “She was on the fast track at a consultancy firm for Fortune five-hundred companies. If anybody knows how to waltz into a place and act like they belong, it’s Sabrina.”

Mel glanced at the young blonde woman who looked more at home as a college cheerleader than in a pantsuit in a boardroom. She did a little mental reassessment. “Fine, but I still don’t see why I have to dress in this filthy robe.”

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?” Sabrina asked, laughing quietly. “You look terrifying. That’s the look we need to sell this act. You and Bernard captured us outside in one of the tunnels. Make up something gruesome. I get the feeling they’re fond of gory details. We just need to get through the door and beyond whatever’s inside.”

“And if they’re all in there chanting?” Mel asked.

Sabrina gave her a sad smile. “Then do what you do best. Kill them.”

Mel couldn’t argue with that.

Something interesting that Mel realized as they stripped the bodies of their robes was that the Shardrune treated them differently than looted items. Mel could pick up their weapons and their armor right off their body, but they had no stats. No system message even recognized the items as existing.

Must mean that only looted items have any magic to them, Mel thought. Otherwise, the items must be no different than the clothes from Earth that the others wore. Sabrina had mentioned that her Sailor Moon shirt had no stats on it, but she couldn’t bear to part with it.

The door pushed open easily enough once they were ready. Mel and Bernard led the group with the cowls of their hoods pulled low. They tugged on the rough hempen rope they found in one of the rooms, causing their “captives” to stumble forward.

The room beyond was bathed in a red glow and more closely resembled an old gothic church than some evil den of iniquity.

There were hardly a dozen people in the room altogether. Their voices rang out clear and loud, however, filling the air with the hum of power that made Mel’s skin crawl.

A few eyed them as they walked across the faded, moth-eaten carpet that ran down the center aisle of stone pews. Clearly, this wasn’t an oddity to the Bloodtide Covenant. Nobody bothered to stop them.

At the back of the room was a raised dais flanked by burning braziers. Along with the red candles stuck to random flat surfaces, the room was dimly lit enough that Mel didn’t feel any need for her heat vision.

Which was a good thing, because it drained her mana continuously. Even though she had switched it off after the first zealot detonated, she was barely back to half mana.

On the raised dais were two figures, a high priest by the looks of his cleaner garments with their extra embellishments, and a squirming sacrifice chained to the altar.

Mel wanted to rush ahead but reminded herself that the odds of coming out alive against nearly a dozen zealots were next to zero. She was not some hero with infinite power. Her class wasn’t even Copper rank.

What was worse, she felt the presence of a Legendary title from the head priest. He was facing the crowd of Bloodtide Covenant members, a ritual blade held high in his hands over the squirming victim.

Any hope Mel had that she might stop the sacrifice was crushed when she saw the blood dripping from the knife’s sinuous blade.

“Ah, Malkor!” the priest said jovially. “You’ve done well to bring more sacrifices. Their life force will ease the way open.”

Bernard tilted his head in gracious acceptance of his patron’s praise.

Mel watched, keeping her head slightly bowed so she could hide her face as long as possible. The two guards had luckily been a man and a woman, but the woman had red hair instead of blonde. Anybody getting a close look under their hoods would see the truth about who they were.

In fact, anybody looking at Mel for more than a few seconds would notice she was several inches shorter than the guard had been. At a scant five feet tall, Mel was almost always the shortest person in any group. Luckily, the Bloodtide members were more interested in the sacrifices than the two guards.

“Act like you belong,” Sabrina had told her. “You’re doing a task you’ve done a dozen times before. It’s almost boring.”

Mel tried to keep the guidance in mind, feeling the stares of the other zealots on her back. They never stopped singing, which lent her confidence. She must have been imagining those stares.

As much as Mel wanted to rush straight up to the priest and cut him down, she remembered to keep a slow and stately march.

She watched, the edge of the hood covering her vision slightly, as the priest plucked droplets of blood from the tip of the ritual dagger as if they were jewels.

He pinched each droplet and placed it in the air as if gravity didn’t exist. Halfway to the altar, the symbol that the priest was making began to take form and alarm bells gonged in Mel’s head.

She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew something very bad was about to happen.

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The entire room rumbled and shook. The choir reached a frenzied crescendo as dust and rubble fell in streams from high up in the chapel’s ceiling, deep beneath the plateau.

Mel was keenly aware at that moment that there were thousands of tons of rock right above their head, pressing in on them. One slight shift could bring the whole place down, burying and killing them instantly.

Or worse, trapping them below ground with no hope of escape.

Despite the plan, Mel couldn’t help but pick up the pace. Bernard stumbled to her side, hurrying to match her stride.

The priest was too distracted to notice their shift. The symbol, made with droplets of blood, glowed brightly. Lines crossed between the droplets in mathematical perfection. Despite the mounting horror she felt, a small part of her found beauty in its perfection.

Before she could be repulsed by her own admiration, the symbol turned into a portal. A window into a world of unspeakable horrors, giving Mel a front-row seat to countless abominations. She couldn’t have shut her eyes if she wanted to.

The portal pivoted until it was a flat disc, thankfully hiding the worst of the nightmares from her sight. It hung over the sacrificial altar and began to spin. The edges of the portal sprayed scalding blood across the room.

A bloody umbilical cord shot out of the portal and attached itself to the poor victim on the altar.

Quest Evolved: The Descent

Having sought out the source of the chanting, you have entered a gruesome den of the Bloodtide Covenant. Your foes are more powerful than you had foreseen, increasing the rarity of your reward.

Objective: Stop the ceremony (0/1).

Reward: [Aspect Gem (Legendary)]

“Now that’s more like it,” Mel whispered with grim satisfaction.

“Legendary?” Bernard muttered. “Haven’t even seen anythin’ better than Rare before.”

“Plan’s changing,” Mel said to him. “We go now and we go hard.” More than two-thirds of the way there, Mel abandoned her disguise and rushed forward.

The zealots were too focused on their chanting, all eyes glued to the horror show on the altar. By the time anybody noticed one of the red-robed figures was sprinting toward the altar, Mel already had her twinblade in hand.

She took the steps two at a time, used the prayer stool as a springboard, and leaped over the altar. She intended to attack the priest first, assuming with his death that the ceremony would be ended.

Her first look at the victim on the altar changed her mind, and that indecision cost her greatly.

Instead of a naked human chained to the stone altar as she had expected, it was a horrible monstrosity. Though it had two legs, a torso, and a head of sorts, that was as far as the similarities went.

It had no arms to speak of. No face at all. A grievous wound glowed ruby red from its groin to the top of its head. Bordering the wound were hundreds of wriggling fingers and serrated teeth, just inside the fleshy pit.

Mel faltered, trying to cut the umbilical cord first, but she didn’t put enough force behind it and only managed to nick it.

Blood sprayed out like she had just hit an artery. Mel crashed into the surprised priest. Pain, sharp and clear, lanced across her hip as the priest’s knife grazed her on the way down.

Mel fought like a feral cat, using her twinblade when she could bring it to bear but otherwise using her teeth, elbows, and knees. Anything to stop the priest from resuming his chant.

Somewhere behind Mel, she could hear the choir stuttering as they realized something had gone wrong. Mel only focused on the priest, his coal-black eyes burning with zealous rage.

This was no time for finesse or proper fighting. Mel kneed the priest in the groin as hard as she could, using the motion to bring her boot up within her hand’s reach. She pulled the knife stored there free and stabbed relentlessly into the priest’s body.

Her knife didn’t cut as deeply as she had hoped, so she put both hands on the blade to give it all the strength she could muster. Still, the blade struggled to dig deep, even with all her weight on it.

That didn’t deter her one bit. Mel screamed and stabbed again and again, the blade biting deeper and deeper with each driving thrust.

The cold tide of fear and realization washed away the fragile flames of the priest’s rage, snuffing them out utterly as Mel vented all her anger and frustration on this horrible, wretched man.

Mel hardly noticed when his blood stopped pouring out and instead hardened into a thousand little needles. They jabbed into her as a last-ditch effort to defend himself, but Mel was beyond pain. She was beyond rage. Her attacks only grew more ferocious.

You defeat the [Bloodtide Covenant Priest (Copper Rank)].

You gain runes of Mist and Serpent aspect experience.

You gain Battle Points.

With her [Simple Dagger], she ripped and tore until the body below her stopped moving. She would have kept going until the priest was no longer recognizable from a pile of meat if she hadn’t been stopped.

Her only thoughts had been on punishment. She lost sight of her goal.

A punting kick hit her in the ribs, forcing her off the dead priest. She fetched up hard against the stone wall, her knife clattering to the floor as she desperately tried to suck in enough air to clear her darkening vision.

The nightmarish creature was standing above the priest’s bloodied body. The only thing that stopped it from killing Mel at her most vulnerable was the presence of an easy meal right in front of it.

Leaning down until its upper body was parallel to the floor, the creature’s many fingers extended several feet until they were long enough to reach the Priest’s corpse.

Cradling the body in multi-jointed humanoid fingers, the monster pulled the entirety of the Priest’s body into its massive maw, devouring what was left of the man.

Before the creature could finish its grisly meal, Mel had recovered enough to summon her twinblade and spread a layer of dense mist all around her.

The dais was covered in flames. One of the others must have knocked down the braziers to create a burning barrier of fire. It was the only reason she could see that the zealots hadn’t killed them all yet.

Even still, several burning, red-robed figures were fighting back, and they had superior numbers on their side.

Mel wasted precious time she could have spent attacking to create a patch of ice in front of the monster’s fleshy “feet”. She dove forward and rolled, holding her twinblade out and hooking the creature around the back of the knee.

Yanking with all her might, she managed to shift its weight slightly. Standing nearly eight feet tall, there was no way she had the strength to move it very much.

But she didn’t need to.

When its misshapen foot slid forward and it hit the icy patch, the creature lost its footing completely and fell onto its back right as Mel was finishing her roll.

She bounded to her feet and transferred the rest of her momentum into a powerful horizontal slash, cutting through the rest of the bleeding umbilical cord.

The fleshy tube snapped back into the portal like a snipped rubber band, and the bloody window into the nightmarish landscape shrank into nothingness.

Which just left a room full of enraged zealots, and a monster from the depths of her nightmares.