A sense of overwhelming pressure filled the room, but no monsters were visible within. Two rivers of molten glass flowed from one side of the room to the other, on our left and right. Past them, at the wall, four holes poured their own molten glass into the rivers.

“Where’s the boss?” Mimic asked.

“It’s coming.” I said. I could already feel it, but not well enough to identify what it was. I cast [Blood of the Sacrificed] and summoned [Steel of Hopeless Light] as a shield. The blood dripping into the molten glass didn't affect the river at all.

“It’s already here.” K said, “I can feel it, at the edges.”

“What?” Mimic asked.

“It’s not naturally a physical entity.” I said, “Something like a deity or a concept. It’ll have a trick for fighting us, but it’ll be handicapped, and killing the vessel won’t kill it.”

“It feels like a Primordial Demon.” K said.(1)

“Those feel like angels.” (2) I said, “It could be a lot of things, and we won’t know until it’s formed its body.”

The feeling of pressure intensified, and a single plain ring of blue glass popped into reality. It was six feet across, but the glass itself was only a few inches thick. It floated in the air.

“It’s not done. Don’t try to attack it yet.” I said, “Wait for it to commit to its form.”

With a series of pops, five more, nearly identical, glass rings appeared. A loop of eyes was carved into the outer loop of each new ring. Each was linked to the one before it, forming a chain, still floating in the air. Two thin red threads flowed from each ring to the first one. Another pop, and a radiant strand of rope hovered in the center of each ring other than the first. The other end dangled to the ground.

By now, I knew this was an angel, but if it was in a dungeon it wouldn’t be something we could reason with. Its virtue might’ve been Obedience or Destiny, or something unknown to me. That said, the thing we were facing was only a tiny piece of the whole, as much as the angel could shove into the dungeon at all. If we destroyed it, the rest of the angel would be harmless, ending the fight.

“Is it done?” Mimic asked.

The feeling of pressure reached a new height, and one lass glass ring appeared. Unlike the others, this one was covered in tiny spikes on the outside and red gems on the inside. It was fused to the link in the chain behind it, unlike the others.

In the entirety of its physical body, the angel looked like a chain of glass rings, and extended nearly fourty feet. It levitated in the air like it was being held aloft by invisible strings. I couldn’t see any emotion in its body at all. This wasn’t a form made for communication, it was a form built for a fight on foreign grounds.

“Now it is.” I said.

It hurled itself at me, even faster than the spikes had been. (3)

Mimic hurled herself forwards and smashed into it. It cracked the angel’s spiked ring slightly, and Mimic bounced off.

K had a body move to intercept as well. Her blade slammed into the ring, and caused no visible damage. Unlike with Mimic, the angel redirected to slam into K’s body. She didn’t manage to dodge, and the ring drew back bloody as her spare body faded away.

That slowed it down enough for me to hit it with [Beast in the Blood]. Something red and massive leapt from the blood, and wrapped around the middle ring of the angel’s chain. It was apple-shaped, and about eight feet from top to bottom. It tried to drag the angel under, but the ropes previously dangling from the angel’s other rings swung towards it, glowing radiantly. When they touched it, the thing shuddered, then exploded in a shower of blood.

Mimic had taken advantage of the distraction to grab the rearmost ring, and wrapped around it. She was trying to crush it. The angel paused, and sent its ropes to ram her. Mimic spread out, wrapped around the ring like a snake, and carefully darted around the ropes. Whenever a rope touched her, her flesh sizzled and dropped to the ground. Mimic just kept moving, like she didn’t even feel the burns.

Meanwhile, K sent a body to attack the ring I had hit. Unlike the frontmost ring, it made a promising cracking noise when K hit it. She kept slamming her blade into it, one swing after another. The angel was too distracted by Mimic to fight back.

After about thirty seconds of dodging, Mimic was almost completely surrounded by ropes, and she hurled herself off of the angel, passing through more ropes as she fell. It ripped through her flesh, scattering the unburnt pieces of her form. Even so, she was still moving when she hit the ground. She darted for the scattered pieces of herself.

The glass angel charged for me again, ignoring the half of K attacking it. It knocked K’s defensive half to the side as it came. However, [Beast in the Blood] was off cooldown, and I grabbed it before it reached me. This time, it hit the ring of spikes in the front. The ropes tried to swing to the rescue but the chase with Mimic had tied them into knots. They couldn’t reach.

It swung itself around, and the rearmost ring came flying at me. I turned [Steel of Hopeless Light ] into a shield and blocked the impact. It still knocked me off my feet and hurled me backwards, to only three inches from the molten glass. That

It swung at me again, but one of K’s bodies stood in the way, and slashed into it as it arrived. It was knocked backwards, and swung for K again. She managed to recover enough to block it with a blade, but it knocked her off her feet, and with another swing, knocked her body into the molten glass. It let out an agonized scream as it faded.

Her other body was fine, though not in position to defend me. I had scrambled as far as I could from the molten glass. I wasn’t confident it wouldn’t manage to knock me in next time anyways, but it couldn’t hurt..

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Then the ring of spikes shattered, and [Beast in the Blood] sank below under the lake of blood, taking the ring of spikes with it, and a chunk of the next ring as well.

The angel screamed. That wasn’t completely accurate, there was an abrupt surge in the pressure and no visible sound. The rest of the chain flailed frantically and with only the sound of glass hitting glass. If this was only a hand, it had lost a finger.

The distraction let one of K’s bodies dart forwards and cut red threads. I wasn’t certain what those did, or what cutting them did, but it wouldn’t help the angel.

Then there was a second cracking sound, and the middle ring that had been hit by [Beast in the Blood] shattered at a point. Over half of it still dangled, awkwardly connecting the rings before and after it, but it was still wrecked. Regardless of whether it was [Beast in the Blood]’s leftover blood, or [Blood of the Sacrificed], my abilities had continued damaging it until it broke.

Mimic ripped it loose and threw it into the stream of molten glass. She tried to replicate the feat with the two after it, but they were still tied in the horrible knot it had made trying to kill Mimic, and she couldn’t snap the ropes.

The angel, or what was left of it, charged at me again, but one of K’s bodies intercepted it with a shield of light. The impact made her stumble backwards a half-step, but it failed to reach me.

Then [Beast in the Blood] was off cooldown again, and I caught the rearmost ring with its effects. I held my breath, watching as Beast slowly dragged it under. Meanwhile, one of K’s bodies and Mimic continued to try to smash the other rings.

The angel took a while to die, but it could barely twitch as the pair brutalized it. The screams had broken down into helpless sobs, and I almost felt bad for it. On the other hand, it was intended to kill us, so my sympathy was limited.

[You have shattered a “Glass Angel of Fate’s” finger! +10,000 Potential, +1,000 Net Quanta]

[Congratulations! Your Significance has risen to “Who?”!]

[The Sponsored Quests system has been unlocked!]

I hadn’t seen Sponsored Quests in “No Savior Needed”, and I wasn’t sure what it meant now. Well, not outside of that the game was an incomplete simulation, which shouldn’t have felt quite as surprising as it was.

Instead, I looked for loot from the angel. Most of the glass had faded away, but a few chunks and a number of shards remained, as did the gems from the ring of spikes. That must’ve been its metaphorical fingernail. I bagged them all up, then joined K in helping Mimic find any of her slime that had been scattered about.

“This was the last room with enemies, right?” Mimic asked.

“There might be secret side rooms from here, but we shouldn’t deal with them.” I said.

“I don’t see anything.” Mimic said.

“The molten glass tunnels on the sides of the rooms.” I said, “I don’t think any of us have the skills to make it through, but if we could freeze the room, they look large enough to fit through. We can’t do it, of course, but they still might exist. Come on.”

“Clarify something for me.” Mimic asked, “Do dungeons respawn?”

I laughed, “That would be too simple. No, the rules are messier than that - each person has their own instance of the dungeon. If you bring someone back with you, the dungeon will default to the cleared sum of the group. Chests scale somewhat with group size, but the clearing rewards are still better if you solo them. On the other hand, secret areas are easier to access in a group.” (4)

“So I can bring anyone in, and the dungeon will be just as safe for them as it was alone?” Mimic asked.

“Yep.” I said, “That said, they’re not a safe place to take shelter. If you try to stay in a dungeon for too long, bad things happen. It will start with warning shots, but if you’re stubborn enough, it will kill you. But that’s just if you blatantly abuse it.”

As we talked, we walked into the next room, which was the lobby of a convention center. Chairs were scattered around the room. On the left side of the room was a door, and on the right side of the room was a massive mirror frame that covered half the wall. I came closer to inspect it. It behaved like a natural mirror until I looked at it directly. When I did, I saw streets practically out of a fairytale. I looked to the top of the frame, where it said, “the Goblin Markets”.

That was bad. You only got one portal to any given branch, at least without unreasonable amounts of travel. Since ours was to the Goblin Market, I wouldn’t be able to find another.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but my plan for resolving my deal with Eris hinged upon finding a portal to one of the other fae realms. I needed to be able to reach one of the Fae Monarchs to complete the contract. Ideally, I’d want to reach the Monarch of Endless Harvest, because she was exactly the right combination of powerful and naive to get the job done, but in a pinch, nearly all of them would suffice.

If the portal had pointed to any of the other Fae kingdoms, there wouldn’t be an issue. Even Fae that cared about keeping closed borders couldn’t keep people from wandering their plane. Given that each portal spawned in an unpredictable location, and hundreds would appear in total, none of the kingdoms could actually guard all of the entrances. But the Goblin Market wasn’t exactly a Fae Kingdom.

The Goblin Market was a pocket dimension, and was smaller than this city was. They might not have been able to guard all the entrances, but they could guard all the exits. Worse, they already made a point of it. If any Fae kingdom managed to take over the market, they could use its portals to wage war on anywhere else. The Market valued its neutrality, so they had very strict policies to avoid becoming a key player in the war. If they didn’t, they would wind up overrun.

They would absolutely not let a random human through. It was hypothetically possible I could bribe my way through, but the only successful bribe anyone had given in the game was a priceless treasure - a seraphim’s heartstone. My scraps were hardly worthless, but they were nothing compared to that. In short, any plans for dealing with Eris’ situation had been significantly delayed. There were a dozen different workarounds I could think of, but none of them could be managed anytime soon.

Even so, there was definitely some value to be gained from this. The market would be worth visiting. They would likely have some relics for sale, and there were other things I could only buy there. My scraps would be fairly valuable, even if they were nowhere near enough to buy my way through. It might’ve been a massive obstacle for my plans with Eris, but I could route around it.

I was already planning for the opportunities this rift would open, instead of the ones it would close, when I convinced K and Mimic to make a quick detour into the Market. It wasn’t hard; it was a natural extension of our current trip.

---

(1) A Primordial Demon was a lot like an angel, but in the opposite direction. An angel absolutely couldn’t act against its defining virtue, and at their purest wouldn’t act unless compelled by their defining virtue. A Primordial Demon couldn’t act in alignment with a single virtue, and could act freely outside of that. Fortunately, the more pure the demon, the more passive they became.

(2) Both were whole spiritual beings that tapped into both the pieces of a soul that they were, and an unseen, massive pool of power that couldn’t reasonably be reached any other way. There were more creatures in this category, of course, but angels and demons were the big two.

(3) In general, angels didn’t appreciate any form of dark energy, regardless of whether you called it abyssal, infernal, or something else. It wasn’t stupid enough to not realize I was the source of that energy.

(4) You can’t permanently lock dungeons in a cleared state by visiting with someone who’s cleared it, and you can’t pull shenanigans to make the dungeon suddenly respawn its monsters mid-visit. At least, in the latter case, not unless the dungeon had some rule that would make that happen, like a more hostile bonus room than the marketplace we got.