Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. Well, Urdin was the exception to that rule. It was and felt exactly as it had looked. Fantasy architecture revolved around the fact that the city itself seemed to be built on top of a mountain chain.

Despite the tension and lack of people waiting to enter the city, the inside was bursting with activity. Lively streets reflected nothing of the chaos that reigned outside.

People went on with their lives, either oblivious or ignoring the fact that their neighbor city had fallen and that a dungeon was expanding without control. I found it hard to believe they didn’t know about it; news traveled fast, and someone was bound to have found out about it.

The reason for that confidence was standing right in front of my eyes.

Two soldiers in shiny armor. A man and a woman, both looking like they were clothed from the same set of plates. Golden iron protected their chest, white stripes running from their shoulders down to their hips. A display of majesty and riches like I had ever seen.

Every inch of their body was covered in armor; not a single artery, joint, or weak point was exposed. Even their heads were covered. Completely. However they were seeing it, it was not through holes in a helm.

Even I, who considered them my enemies, was swayed by the sense of security that their armor and spears instilled. Not only that, but such pairs seemed to be around every corner of the city. No matter where I went or where I looked, there was always a pair of soldiers patrolling the streets.

I could probably take out a few of them in a direct battle. Surely a bit more if I attacked by surprise. But that wasn’t going to last. As soon as the alarms were raised, the rest of the army would defend the city, and I would be toast.

A frontal attack was out of the question. Even if it somehow worked, I wouldn’t be using my abilities as they were supposed to. Corruption was the master key that would leave the city wide open for me.

I entered shops, inns, bars, and just about any other building I could sneak into. None of them was suitable for what I had in mind: spreading corruption from within the city.

Any of those would immediately warn everyone around, and stopping me would become a trivial matter. What I needed was to corrupt the whole city at once, from zero to a hundred in not even a second. It had to be too fast for them to react.

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It had to cause mass panic. Paralyze the city and its army. And finally, corrupt everything and everyone that stayed for too long. I wasn't afraid of involving innocents; those who didn't want to fight would have time to evacuate.

It was a matter of finding the right place, and I had an intuition of where that would be. I started walking towards the artificial waterway that I had seen on my previous rounds.

I quickly reached one of the points where it surfaced. Acting in broad daylight was a bad idea: the channel was below ground level and entered below the city via grated openings.

There were too many people around—soldiers included—to do anything. I waited until the streets were dark to approach the opening. The city was asleep, but the soldiers were not.

I lurked in the shadows and took many turns and detours to avoid the shiny warriors. Maybe they wouldn't care that a suspicious individual lurked in the streets, although I highly doubted so.

Reaching the opening while hiding from the shiny armors was relatively straightforward. I had a plan for the grating: small compressed attacks with [Fusion], just enough to eat through the metal but not to blast the whole thing apart and alert everyone.

Breaking in was easy, making it seem like it hadn't happened—not so much. My energy was inherently unaffected by temperature, always at a neutral point so that I wouldn't boil myself. But it was particles, and like any other of its kind, with enough excitation and friction, they would heat up.

My dome was a blessing. The condensed energy felt like an extension of myself, to the point that I didn't even need to think about it. I was inside, holding the part of the grating right where it was supposed to be. Joint by joint, I heated them up until the hot metals touched together.

[You have learned [Controlled Heating]]

I was inside, surrounded by darkness and solitude. Not only didn't I care, it was the perfect environment for me. None of my powers, not even the dome, depended on actual sight and light. To me, I was moving under a blasting sun.

Every step I took, I made sure to sleep corruption under my feet—just that tiny bit of ground. These unconnected spots were not merging together yet. They would in time, less than a day by my estimations, and when they did, my underground dungeon would be created.

Until then, no one would know.

But that was just the first part of my plan. When the dungeon was fully created and extended below the ground, I would put my whole energy into making it surface.

And when that happened, whatever they tried, they wouldn't be able to stop it. Only by killing me would they save their city, and that wasn't in my plans at all.