The lord of the mountain lowered its head, and as it did Devon came into its sightline. A primal fear shattered the bonds of shock that had held him, and he dived straight into the gap left in the broken wall of the canyon. He didn't care that he had no idea if the hole into darkness led back into a submerged ruined building or not, or that the entire canyon wall was about to collapse over the hole.

The crater represented his singular opportunity for survival and Devon sure as hell wasn't going to let it slip by.

He heard the massive jaws snap shut behind him as he flew into the hole, narrowly avoiding meeting the same fate as the ape. The lord of the mountain didn't have another chance to get at him as the shale wall of the canyon collapsed completely behind him.

Devon tumbled into the darkness until he hit the floor of the space with a thud. He willed his body into motion scrambling to his feet in his desperate need to move.

Activate magic; Light!

The last of his mana drained away as the ball of luminescence appeared, illuminating yet another barren room of the endless ruins. The ape's halfway bisected corpse sat unmoving in the center, but Devon didn't pay even a sliver of attention to it before bolting toward the first doorway he saw.

Rubble exploded from the collapsed entrance as the lord of the mountain tried to dig its way in, unsatisfied that prey had managed to elude its grasp. Devon didn't even bother looking back as he sprinted forward.

He ran through the endless dark corridors, heart hammering in his chest as Adrenaline wore off. It was only when he tripped and slid face first into a rock that he stopped to catch his breath. When he did, he almost keeled over from the amount of pain his natural adrenaline had been suppressing.

He'd been able to block it out in the moment, but the ape tossing him against the wall of the canyon had done some serious damage. He had trouble breathing and felt a trickle of blood against the back of his head.

He popped a healing pill, not wanting to let the injuries persist as he continued trudging his way deeper into the ruins. He wandered for half an hour more before he felt like there was no possible way for the lord of the mountain to follow him in.

Devon wouldn't be surprised if the lord had followed him several rooms in, as the creature was likely strong enough to bulldoze its way through any and all obstacles. He shuddered at the thought of that thing's power. He and the ape leader truly were about as significant as ants to it.

When Devon finally felt sure he was far enough away from the spot he'd entered he took his camping supplies out of his inventory. He needed rest, and he needed to steady himself or he'd fall apart.

Devon was starting to become a lot more familiar with the line between life and death he saw himself on when he fought an equally strong opponent. But being ripped out of that sublime state of mind suddenly and without warning had jarred him to his core.

He had been both incredibly lucky and unlucky. The fact that the lord of the mountain had been close enough by to notice their duel and waltz up on them should have decided his fate, but two miracles had occurred. The first was that small overhang of plantlife that was above the place the ape leader threw him into the wall. He felt certain that if that little thing had not been there to block the lord's view of him from its towering height it would have locked onto him first, and it would have been him that stood there like an idiot as he got devoured. The second was the happenstance that the lord had felt like throwing the ape into the wall directly next to him.

Devon rubbed his temples, berating himself that he had let his guard down in perhaps the most dangerous place in the tutorial besides the overseer's camp. The magic Adrenaline and his intense focus had blinded him to anything other than the ape, letting the lord simply walk up to them without him even noticing.

Still, it was just absurdly unlucky that the lord had happened to be that close. The plateau that made up the summit was a few miles wide, and Devon had specifically chosen that canyon instead of looking for somewhere else because of the distance between it and the lord's grove.

Perhaps the worst thing was that he had somehow failed his plot, though he'd technically completed his objective of killing the ape leader.

He looked at the failure notification and tried to brainstorm why it failed. The completion conditions for his previous plot that had involved the death of the trap spider and the overseer hadn't required Devon himself to kill either of them so long as they both died. His evidence of that was that he hadn't done any damage to the overseer, and even the system at the time hadn't counted their death as even an assisted kill.

Two possibilities came to mind. First, the plot may have failed because though the explicit objective had been completed, the implicit one hadn't. Devon wanted to kill the ape leader because he wanted the exp that a level 43 would give him, plain and simple. When the trap spider and the overseer had died it hadn't really mattered what killed them because both the implicit and explicit goal was to claim the terminal in that cave as a safe haven.

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Second, it was possible the system considered it a failure on Devon's part that he hadn't prepared well enough for outside variables. Though Devon really didn't think that the lord showing up at that exact moment could have possibly been prevented.

Of course, it was also possible that both possibilities were right, and he would have to construct more elaborate and detailed plots lest the system burn them down by claiming they weren't thorough enough.

Devon looked around the ancient room he was in. He hadn't cleared the general vicinity for any potential dangers, but he needed sleep. He was mentally and physically drained dry, so he laid down to sleep for a few hours. If a spider killed him in his sleep then so be it.

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Luckily he didn't get eaten by a spider in his sleep, but it still felt weird to sleep on the overseer's cot. There was something about sleeping on the possession of somebody he'd killed that disturbed him on a deep level. But he wasn't in a situation where he could be picky, so he had to make do with what he had, like it or not.

He opened the map function, and immediately he winced when he realized just how far he'd run. He'd actually covered more than half the length of the plateau from underneath, and now sat in a room far closer to the lord's grove than he'd like.

Well, I suppose this is as good a chance as any to look for the king's resting place.

Since he hadn't found anything up on the surface his next place to look had been the level of subterranean ruins running beneath the plateau. How fortunate that he'd made it here without even having to look for a way in.

He shoved his inner sarcastic humor back into the pit from whence it came and threw the cot into his inventory when he realized that he was missing something.

He'd somehow lost his backup intermediate spear in his desperate flight.

Great, so now I'm back to using the sole remaining starting spear I've got, huh? I almost regret buying this piece of junk because I feel like I might just be better off punching stuff to death.

Regardless of his reservations, he took the metallic spear out of his inventory before scrutinizing his map. Since he was already down here where he was hopefully safe from the reach of the lord he figured he might as well spend the remaining time left before the terminal lockdown ended exploring.

A part of him wanted to go back and finish what he'd started with the monkeys because they were still an excellent source of exp, but the ultimate failure of his plot made the idea of going back for cleanup leave a sour taste in his mouth. So he decided against it.

He started making his way towards what he assumed would be the central-most structure. He was using the tallest remaining ruin as a basis for where he assumed the center of the city would have been, but it probably wasn't the most accurate approximation. The tallest tower was only the tallest tower because it was the tallest tower left. There had likely been at least a dozen other towers that had dwarfed it, but because none of them remained Devon could only make assumptions based on the one he knew.

One hour of wandering the endless tunnels of the dead city became two, and three became four as Devon wandered up and down the structure. He found that the further down he went the more evidence of monster activity he found, but he never delved deep enough to have an actual encounter with the creatures in the deep. The knight had said the king would probably be near the zenith of the city, so there was no reason for him to go down.

Finally, after more than ten hours of searching, he found something that didn't belong.

Most of the ruins he'd gone through had been remarkably preserved, but there came a point as he was wandering through the structure that the hallway before him was blocked off. He initially thought it to be a cave in, but a second glance told him that wasn't the case.

The floor at the foot of the cave in was broken, revealing a narrow gap that Devon could feel a slight airflow through.

Something's here that isn't supposed to be. Is it a piece of a building that broke and fell here from above?

Devon didn't feel like breaking through walls, so he went back the way he came and started looking for alternate pathways to the same area. It only took about 20 minutes of navigating the ruins before he found another broken passage, but this time he was able to hop into the open space beneath.

Even the empty spaces of the ruins were interesting. Devon was becoming more and more confident about his theory of it being a layered city, because the spaces between the passages seemed to be rooms and structures of their own. If Devon was an archeologist this place would have been a historical goldmine.

But he had an objective to accomplish. He quickly climbed through the rubble of the collapsed space to find himself at the entrance of the fallen chamber.

The sight within was truly incredible. It was like the grand cathedrals he'd seen pictures of, only they were made with an alien architecture that captivated the mind even more. The next part of the fallen section also took his breath away, but for a different reason.

The ground was littered with thousands of tiles. Maybe even hundreds of thousands, Devon couldn't tell. All he knew was that there were so many of them that they blocked any sight of the floor beneath.

He gingerly picked one up, remembering how Trey had said they were supposed to stick around forever. He blew dust off it before considering the fact that that dust may have been the remains of the skeleton of the tile's owner.

Devon opened the system dialog and noted the name of the person whose tile he held in his hand. All of the other information was filled with null values, just like the overseer's had been. Devon opened the inventory function and sighed when he saw it was filled with nothing but sand.

That's right, the inventory can only preserve things for so long, so it was probably too much to get my hopes up for cool loot.

He briefly wondered why he hadn't seen any tiles in the other ruins he'd gone through, but he figured maybe monsters had collected them over time for some unknown use.

He walked into the final part of the structure and finally found his objective.

Alone in the biggest and grandest room so far, a lone skeleton sat atop a stone throne, a gold-tinted spear grasped within its bony fingers.