Elijah leaped free of the falling skeleton, flipping through the air until he landed on his feet a few yards away. Black bones clattered to the ground, collecting into a large pile as he clutched the faintly glowing white crystal that had been around its neck. After he skidded to a stop, he let out a deep breath and let his shoulders sag in relief.

“How many is that?” Sadie asked from the other side of the bone pile.

“Fifty,” Elijah answered. They’d been at it for almost two weeks, during which time they’d slain countless zombies. After discovering the easiest way to kill the skeletons – which involved removing their source of power from around their necks – the battles against the enormous creatures had become much easier. The things were still incredibly dangerous, but by this point, Elijah had it down to a science. The only variable was that, even with their invincibility having been removed, the skeletons were still quite tough, and bringing them down required a ton of damage.

Fortunately, with Elijah’s group, there was plenty of that to go around.

“More importantly, this is the last chamber we had mapped out,” Ron said. He’d grown more than any of them, gaining enough levels to get two new spells. One was a much more powerful offensive ability, but the other, which he’d called Turn Undead, had been much more useful in their current situation. With it, he could invoke fear in skeletons or zombies, making them flee. The group had quickly incorporated that into their tactics, and it had removed quite a lot of the danger from their subsequent encounters.

For his part, Elijah had gained two whole levels, which would put him at one-hundred-and-three. That seemed like paltry progression considering the number of zombies they’d slain, but he wasn’t going to complain about gaining so much experience so quickly. In any case, it seemed that the experience after level one-hundred was certainly more difficult to come by than it had been before that threshold. Or perhaps the pool needed to level was larger. Elijah wasn’t certain, but he knew that it would take a ridiculous amount of killing for him to progress to the peak.

“What is the next step?” asked Sadie, glancing from one member of the party to the next. Eventually, her gaze settled onto Kurik. So did everyone else’s.

“Why’s everybody lookin’ at me?”

“Well, you’re the one who keeps stepping up to the plate with necessary exposition, bro.”

Elijah asked, “You have any long-forgotten myths you suddenly remembered? An old legend about undead and white crystals?”

“A long-lost ancestor, maybe?” added Ron.

“Anything can help,” Sadie said.

“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout nothin’!” Kurik spat. “Just ‘cause I told a coupla stories don’t mean I have all the answers. I ain’t got a clue ‘bout how none of this works. No member of normal society does.”

“That sounds like the start of a story,” Dat said.

Elijah pointed out, “It really does. So, you know something about undead, right? Spill it.”

Kurik tugged on his beard, obviously agitated. “Fine. But this don’t mean I know what’s goin’ on here. It’s just that everybody knows that you don’t mess with the cycle of life and death. Once somebody’s dead, they’re s’posed to stay dead. You don’t go reanimating their corpses, or bad things start to happen.”

“What kind of things?” Elijah asked.

“I don’t damn well know, do I? Ain’t no undead or necromancers on my world ‘cause if there was, they’d have gotten hunted down. It ain’t the sort of thing any society will tolerate,” Kurik stated unequivocally. “Even undead towers get taken seriously.”

“And Primal Realms?”

“Grave threats,” Kurik said. “But I don’t need to tell you that. You know it first-hand, probably better than I do. We don’t have any Primal Realms like that on my world, but you can damn well bet that if we did, we’d have teams tearin’ through it on a regular basis. Can’t let that kind of thing spill out.”

“No. You can’t,” Sadie said, looking away. Elijah could see the pain behind her faraway expression. He knew that she had lost people – most notably, her sister – which probably contributed to her prickly demeanor. After how he’d reacted to Alyssa’s death, Elijah could certainly relate to that.

“Any useful information about all of this?”

“I told you I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout any of this,” Kurik said. “Just that I don’t like bein’ here. So, all you elites need to figure this thing out so we can move on to the next challenge.”

Dat narrowed his eyes. “Elites?”

“That’s what we call people like you,” Kurik said. “Or we did back home. Who knows what labels you humans use?”

The term certainly seemed applicable, even if Elijah thought that Kurik probably qualified for the label as much as anyone else there. The dwarf didn’t seem to grasp his own power, though.

“I say we take the crystals up top,” Elijah said. “Then, we’ll start experimenting with the black crystals in the towers. If that doesn’t work, we break ‘em.”

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“That…doesn’t seem advisable,” Sadie responded.

Elijah shrugged. “I’m open to other ideas. You all know just as much as I do about what’s going on here, so if you have a better plan, I’m all ears.”

No one did, so they began the long journey through the maze of tunnels and back to the surface. Along the way, the zombies continued their endless assault, but by that point, they group had developed effective strategies for dealing with the onslaught of undead. So, even if the way was tedious, it wasn’t nearly as dangerous as when they’d first descended into the crypt.

Still, it took almost two days’ worth of constant fighting before they finally reached the exit. The atmosphere outside was still overcast, and teal lightning still branched from the peak of one tower to the next. However, it was far brighter than the tunnels, so it took Elijah a few blinking moments before his vision adjusted. When it did, he saw much the same as when they’d descended into the depths.

Over the next few hours, they went ahead with the plan, experimenting with the crystals. At first, he was careful in his approach, but after an hour, he was banging the white crystal against the black one as hard as he could. It did nothing. Even the hordes of zombies failed to manifest, like they had the first time he and Dat had meddled with the black crystals.

“What the hell are we supposed to do with this?” Elijah wondered as he stood over one of the black crystals. It looked exactly the same as when he’d first encountered it, which was to say that despite his efforts, it wasn’t even scratched.

“Not sure, bro. Hex of Scrying isn’t giving me anything useful.”

“Anything not useful?”

“Uh…the…um…whispers are very insistent that I should destroy everything in this challenge. Towers. Crystals. Zombies. Everything.”

“Sounds…frustrating. How does that work? I mean, I know that guards have a skill that lets them identify people and monsters,” Elijah said. “But Hex of Scrying seems different.”

“It is, bro. It does what skills like Identify do, giving me names and levels and all of that, but it also comes with some unique insights. Lisa thought it was ghosts, but I think it’s just an effect of the spell,” Dat explained. “No idea which one of us was right.”

“Lisa. That was Sadie’s sister, right? Were you close?”

“Yeah.”

Elijah wanted to ask for more information, but he wasn’t so socially inept that he could ignore the obvious reality that Dat didn’t want to talk about it. That he’d even mentioned the woman’s name sounded almost like a slip of the tongue. Elijah could sympathize with that. Sometimes, he’d start telling a story and accidentally mention his sister. It was only after he said her name that he remembered that she was gone.

“And Hex of Scrying isn’t telling you anything?”

“Oh, it’s telling me lots, bro. Just none of it is useful. It keeps talking about crypts and clouds and stuff like that. It’s nonsense.”

Elijah shook his head. He’d studied the sky multiple times, and he’d even gone so far as to fly above the clouds. It wasn’t comfortable, but it had told him that there was nothing up there.

“I think we need to come to terms with the fact that we’re going to have to try breaking one of these crystals, just to see what will happen. It’s the only thing we haven’t tried.”

That much was true, though Elijah’s intuition told him that it was a bad idea. He desperately wanted to do the smart thing. To execute a real plan. He was well aware of just how many mistakes he’d made along the way. He’d had plenty of opportunities to conquer previous challenges in a more controlled way, but he had blundered ahead, trusting himself to simply overpower the obstacles in his way.

And he had done just that.

It wouldn’t always be possible, though. For a while now, he’d relied too much on his power, but in the beginning, he’d tried to engage challenges intelligently because that was the only way he could survive.

He needed to get back to that.

But the problem was that he simply didn’t know how, and he’d yet to see any clues that might give him a hint as to which way to proceed. The others weren’t much of a help, either. Sadie was too much like him to offer a different perspective. Dat was a follower down to his core, and given half a chance, Kurik would have just run away. And Ron clearly felt that he was just tagging along.

He sighed, then went on, “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it somewhere else. Maybe at the edge of the challenge area. Chances are, there’s going to be some sort of response, and we need to be ready for it.”

Dat agreed, so they retreated to their camp about half a mile from the closest tower. Once there, they explained their reasoning, and to Elijah’s surprise, the others agreed that destroying one of the crystals was the obvious next step. Even if it didn’t work, it would be one more tactic they could scratch off the list.

So, Elijah took one of the crystals out of his Ghoul-Hide Satchel, then set it atop a mostly flat rock. After that, he shifted into his guardian form, grabbed another rock, then smashed it against the crystal with every ounce of Strength he could muster.

Predictably, it shattered.

Not the crystal. Rather, the rock broke into a hundred pieces, proving just how durable the white crystal was. So, Elijah hit it again, this time with his bare fist. Thankfully, his hand didn’t break, but neither did the crystal. That elicited a growl of rage – from both the dragon and the beast inside him – and he used Savage Might before hitting it again.

This time, the crystal cracked, but only a hairline fracture an inch long. So, Elijah hit it again. And again after that. Each successive blow widened the crack until, after the tenth attack, it broke in half.

White energy erupted from the sundered crystal, then raced off into the distance, slamming into one of the nearest towers.

Then, the spire exploded, sending a dense column of turquoise energy into the sky above.

“Uh…that didn’t look good, bro.”

Elijah couldn’t disagree, especially when the clouds began to roil violently. It only lasted a few seconds before it died down, though.

Still, it seemed like confirmation to Elijah. They were intended to destroy those black crystals, and it seemed that shattering the paired white crystals was a good way to accomplish that feat.

“Forty-nine more,” Elijah growled in his deep, draconic voice.

The next crystal shattered a little more easily, and the one after that followed soon after. Eventually, Sadie lent a hand, breaking a few with her sword. Each time one shattered, one of the towers exploded, and the clouds roiled every more violently with every successive eruption. But Elijah took that as a sign that they were on the right track, so he kept going.

Then, at last, the final crystal shattered, taking with it the last unbroken tower.

That was when the clouds parted, revealing a pyramid made of black stone floating in the sky above the Spires of the Fallen.

“Any bets on where we’re supposed to go next?” joked Ron.

“Uh…I won’t take that bet,” Elijah said, having shifted back into his human form. “The real question is how we’re supposed to get up there.”

“You can fly, can’t you?” Kurik said.

“Yeah, but nobody else can.”

“Oh.”

“I guess I could carry you one at a time…”

“I take it back. We should find a different way,” the dwarf stated. “Definitely has to be a set of stairs or a teleporter around here, right?”