Zarian left the Man Butcher alive, wiping away his Black Fire spell.

The Man Butcher could still die from the leg wound. Zarian left just enough vitality for the hardcore warrior to have a chance at surviving.

Back on his feet, Zarian returned to the T-section. He walked past the Infernal Witch, who stayed put in her crater, rubbing the handprint around her neck. Her dark eyes set in the sunken hollows of her sockets rotated to follow his heavy march.

Zarian stopped. The Infernal Witch quivered in deep fear.

“I don’t think The Dragon is the type to care much,” Zarian said, his back still turned to her.

He waited patiently for her to answer.

“He’s the strongest of all the gods,” the witch said hoarsely. “He’ll give me more power one day. I’ll stay … faithful.”

Curious, Zarian turned to look at the witch fully. “What made you choose evil?”

She looked at him for a long time. Then she asked, “What made you?”

“I liked the class I saw. I didn’t care that it was evil aligned.”

The witch shifted in the crater but made no further aggressive moves. She took a long look at him. “It promised me a way out. And to be in charge. I took it. It’s better than waiting around to die as a reject.”

“Reject, huh?” Zarian looked over at the Man Butcher laying down and bleeding in the other hallway. “You had to have done something out of the ordinary to get to Level 10 and have some evil options.”

“Yeah, well, the noble bastards deserved it.” The witch spat. “What about you? You think you’re different from us? Just because you have a good aligned monster on your side?”

“She’s a princess, not a monster,” Zarian corrected.

The witch shrunk into herself, as if waiting for the final blow. None came. Not from him.

“I am different from you. There’s no doubt about it.” Zarian shrugged. “But, frankly, too much good has been done here already. I’m just here to have a chat with your gods.”

“Our gods,” the witch muttered.

“If that’s what you believe.” Zarian chuckled darkly as he walked away

He turned the corner. Went all the way down. He found five men waiting for him around the next corner.

They all had the Urban Assassin class, mid to high Level 50s. They dressed in dark red robes with cowls covering their lower faces. All of them were bald, with ragged scars etched into their heads.

“Your people have done too much damage here,” the lead assassin said, a Level 59. “You’ve angered quite a number of nobles, too. You’ve upset the Evil Gods. And you’ve earned the attention of the Bramblevale Assassin Order.”

“You don’t have to die,” Zarian replied. “I’m just here to talk to your gods.”

“They will have no mercy on your soul. And we’ve already received our payment for your death.” The assassins prepared to fight. “Once you die, we will kill all of your friends.”

Zarian thought hard on if he wanted to cheat. He could easily end this with Straight Darkness +2. But if he chose that option, he would get bored and sleepy. He needed to stay awake without relying too heavily on Level 0 Adrenaline Jolt. He didn’t want the lethargy effect to hit him at a bad time.

“Okay, let’s do this the hard way.” Zarian hunkered down like a bestial man.

He flicked his arms out to the sides and extended flesh-tearing bone claws from the parasitic armor. The brim of his wizard hat changed into two hardened shells that split apart at the middle. They almost seemed like mandibles set ready to clamp forward. Spikes grew from his elbows and knees. His grimoires floated around him in orbit to him and his power.

This time, he was going for the kill.

The assassins shifted to the attack. The moment they moved to intercept him, their entire game plan fell to ruin. Zarian’s form shifted, warbled, and deformed in strange ways to their perceptions.

Worse yet, Zarian knew himself as the most dominant person here. Enough so for him to sink his metaphysical fangs into each assassin’s mind and tear away chunks of what they were seeing, thinking, and planning within the microseconds of conflict. He sampled on all of those surface thoughts while also leaving holes in their minds.

Combining the Uncanny Valley Effect and Lore Eater traits made Zarian a truly terrifying entity to face. The assassins’ own minds failed them in key moments, ruining their comprehension and coordination, while driving the fear of the Madness Wizard into them.

Then, as the cherry on top, Zarian stopped giving a fuck and entered the Frenzy Zone. His toughness and vitality rose. He pumped aura into his many abilities that buffed his physicality even further. Then the hallway assassination fight erupted into a frantic mess as five more assassins burst out of hiding from the back rooms and rushed Zarian from behind.

Ten assassins.

One Madness Wizard.

A single hallway with some basic enchantments holding it together.

Go.

The assassins from behind struck first. They attacked with long knives, hatchets, short swords, and metal claws. They pushed past their eerie fear of the unknown, of the shifty and monstrous wizard, and dove their weapons into wrinkled air and shadows.

Stolen novel; please report.

The assassins from the front and the back nearly clashed with each other. They were confused, disturbed, but quick to fall on their instincts regardless of the nibbling bites on the surface of their thoughts.

They turned around in search. There was no need. Zarian reached them first.

Armored arms with long, hooked claws punched through a stone wall. Black and gray flames with an inner crimson light shone from the clawing hands as they seized an assassin’s head and pulled.

The assassin screamed as his head crashed into the ragged hole before his screaming ended. A headless corpse fell.

An assassin threw an alchemical grenade into the hole. A second later, it exploded in a show of deadly sparks. The others moved to the door leading to the room.

The sound of bone and flesh being torn apart sounded from behind them as Zarian reappeared from wrinkled air, already ripping apart his second assassin and then a third.

The others changed course to catch him. They still couldn’t.

Two of them fell into a leg-slurping pit. The others tried to stop, but their knowledge of the pit disappeared from their minds as soon as they saw it. Instincts helped them above all else, but not before another assassin fell into the pit.

Then the invisible jaws of a predator snapped upward from the pit. Three assassins turned into mulch and bloody body parts. The remaining four staggered back, shocked by the sudden deaths, horrified by the holes in their memories.

The nightmare only continued as the predator of the pit became a little more visible, showing patches of gray and green scales, before an enormous bellow resounded with so much power the four remaining assassins flew off their feet, tossed by the shockwave.

This time, they screamed and thrashed. They even fought each other, all of their assassination training stripped from them as they suffered mental trauma like no other.

One assassin broke away from the others and scrambled to his feet. He faced a walking entity with mandibles on the front of his wizard hat.

Zarian grabbed the brim and swept the hat around like a Mortal Kombat character, the mandibles snapping shut and sending the assassins’ head flying. He let go of the wizard hat, and Para reeled the shifted apparel back onto his head using threads of tethered flesh.

Another assassin hurled out knife-like bolts as he screamed. They struck Zarian’s armored hide and deflected off.

Zarian walked through each of the assassin’s projectiles until they were face to face, Zarian’s clawed hand on the assassin’s chest. He ripped out the man’s heart and squeezed it into a pulp.

The second-to-last assassin lunged to escape down the other direction of the hallway.

“Get over here.” Zarian extended his arm and whipped out a bone-tipped parasite chord.

It punctured the fleeing assassin’s back and latched on with growing quivers and hooks. Zarian yanked the man all the way back. Sprouting a bone blade from his forearm, Zarian stabbed the man in the back, then Zarian stabbed again and again, depleting his vitality until the assassin expired.

One assassin remained. The lead assassin, Level 59.

“What are you?!” the lead assassin shouted, holding a long knife and short sword. “I can sense the level of my targets. You’re below mine! How can you be so powerful?”

“Because I do what I want.”

Zarian ran at the assassin like an unstoppable juggernaut.

However, this assassin wasn’t so easily susceptible to all of Zarian’s tricks. The assassin dodged aside and struck back with blurring speed.

He stabbed his knife into a gap in Zarian’s armpit and drew blood while leaving considerable damage. His sword nearly struck the neck, but Para readjusted quickly enough to form a gorget, deflecting the blade.

The assassin whirled around Zarian’s back with magical speed. When Zarian turned to face him, the assassin hooked a finger on his cowl and lowered it to spew a poisonous substance into Zarian’s face.

The assassin did so while retreating backward, staying fast and slick and ahead of the juggernaut of a Madness Wizard.

The smartest thing would be to use Void Step again to catch the Level 59 Urban Assassin.

But Zarian was truly frenzied.

He was beyond sanity. Beyond reason. He wanted to get the assassin and put him down with his own clawed hands. So he ran harder and faster, pumping heaps of aura into Wondrous Speed.

When that wasn’t enough, he pumped heaps of aura into Willful Might, too, boosting the power of his steps to send him forward like a sprinting hulk.

Zarian ignored the hissing poison that burned and sapped at his stamina in equal measure. He rushed the panicked assassin to the end of the hall.

The last assassin kicked off the back wall at another T-section and had a large enough lead to slip away.

Arcane webbing lifted from the floor and caught the assassin’s ankle. The spectral spiders appeared to throw up a salute before disappearing and scattering away.

The assassin tumbled and lost his advantage, and Zarian bounded into the T-section wall and stomped both feet against it.

The wall was thicker and more foundational, not giving way completely except for Zarian’s body forming a big crater.

With incredible speed, he clawed along the wall like some monstrous spider man before throwing himself with a bestial lunge onto the assassin’s back. The fleeing man was doing all he could to run, but he found more arcane webbing entangling his limbs before he could escape.

Zarian crashed into his back and tore the last assassin apart.

A minute later, Zarian relaxed from his frenzied state. He used Para’s help to remove the poison, then he looked over his new gains, especially the stuff regarding his dread gator grimoire skill. It was interesting that the name changed but it retained its levels, almost similar to the black magic grimoire.

While Para feasted on the best corpses, he gave his thanks to the spectral spiders. They flickered into view to provide a victory dance, then disappeared from view.

Zarian continued his merry way back to where he was going. He turned the corner again and forced open a rusted door.

He ignored the rot and decay. He ignored the sticky dry blood on the floor and the buzzing insectoid beasts flying and crawling everywhere.

He stood between the altars of the Evil Gods. The dungeon core shone like a large pearl in the parasite basket on his back. It remained perfectly fine, still evolving.

The Lovewar Goddess had her own altar in a chapel outside the Lovewar Mansion. It was to the back. Zarian avoided it because there were too many good alignment vibes emitting from the Lovewar Chapel. He might try to push through and pay her altar a visit anyway.

For now, he had an audience with the Evil Gods.

“Alright,” Zarian said. “I don’t know you guys completely. And you might not know me completely. Or maybe you do if you’re a fan like Shadowfell. But I need you all to answer me. Can we brush past what happened here? Or are we going to have problems? Because if we have problems, best believe I will find solutions. One way or another.”