They ran as fast as they could – Kwan in the lead and Nina a few paces behind him. She didn’t have to look back to know that the troll was still after them – the thunderous footsteps of its running feet reverberated through the dungeon’s tunnel, causing the cobblestone floor to vibrate. She looked over her shoulder anyway because she wanted to see where Kirk and Michael were. The enormous troll was still barreling after them, brandishing a huge saw-sword, but there was no sign of Kirk and Michael. The two of them had lagged behind Kwan and Nina and eventually might have gotten lost. With the gigantic troll following her and Kwan, she couldn’t get back to look for her friends. The only thing she could do was hope that her friends would eventually somehow catch up with her and Kwan.

The tip of the saw-blade troll was holding in its huge fist scraped against one wall. The corridor was wide enough for two people to run alongside each other; as for the huge troll, the bulk of its body took up most of the corridor’s width.

“Can you slow him down a little?” Kwan shouted as he looked over his shoulder at her.

“No,” Nina yelled back, panting heavily. “I'm too tired.”

She’d been casting various spells non-stop in this dungeon and had already used up all the mana potions she’d had on her. Employing magic used up a lot of energy, and by that point, she’d grown so tired she couldn’t cast another spell without running the risk of blacking out from exhaustion.

“Hold on for a little longer, Nina. I can see an opening up ahead. Once we get there, we’ll be safe!”

Nina ran as fast as she could. The thundering footfalls of the troll’s enormous feet drew nearer with each second. She didn’t bother to look back. Breathing heavily, she continued to race down the corridor as fast as she could. Up ahead, she saw Kwan reach the opening that led into some room. He stopped in the opening and spun around to look at her.

“Nina, come on,” he shouted to her.

With every muscle straining and heart pounding, she propelled herself forward, pushing her body to its limits. She raced at top speed, but she could tell that the troll was getting closer still. When she was sure the enormous troll was about to grab her, she reached the opening and burst through it into something like a hall with several tall columns.

Nina ran a few more feet into the room before her strength finally gave out. Breathing heavily, she dropped to her knees. She looked back in time to see Kwan cast a spell that caused a stone wall to rise from the floor, blocking the entrance to the hall completely. Half a second later, the huge troll ran into the wall from the other side. Fortunately, the magically-created barrier held.

There was another tremendous thud as the troll smashed its body against the stone wall again. A few small pebbles detached from it and dropped to the floor, but other than that, the wall remained undamaged. The troll bellowed in rage as it continued its onslaught on the stone wall, but no matter how hard the monster tried, it wasn’t able to break through the stone barrier, which was quite robust and resilient to physical attacks. In the end, the troll gave up. It emitted a frustrated groan and began to walk away from the stone wall. Nina and Kwan listened to its receding footsteps until they could no longer hear them.

Nina lay on her back on the floor with her arms above her head, staring up at the high ceiling of the hall. Luckily, there were no monsters in the room, so they could relax for a little bit. She was worried about Kirk and Michael, but before going to look for them, she had to rest for a little bit. Kwan sat on the floor next to her.

“I think the troll decided to leave us alone,” he said.

Nina didn’t reply. She was too tired even to speak. Her chest rose and fell heavily. She knew that she had to find her friends, but she was so tired she couldn’t even make herself get to her feet. All she wanted was to lie on the floor for a few hours.

“Do you think they are alright?” She asked.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Kwan replied. “Kirk and Michael can take care of themselves. Don’t worry.”

She sighed and closed her eyes. The four of them made a pretty good team, having cleared out a few dungeons in the last month without much trouble. But this was an elite dungeon, and unlike the regular ones, it was much more difficult. Having completed the normal dungeons, they’d become overconfident in themselves. They’d known it was too early for them to venture into an elite dungeon, but they’d done it anyway. As it’d turned out, it’d been a huge mistake on their part. The monsters in this dungeon were way too powerful. At some point, their party had gotten separated, and they’d had to run for their lives. All they wanted now was to safely make it out of the elite dungeon. If the four of them managed to get out of this dangerous underground place, they wouldn’t return here until they became much stronger.

Once again, Nina wondered where Kirk and Michael were. As Kwan had said, the two of them could take care of themselves, but she still couldn’t help but worry about them – especially about Kirk. She hoped her friends would catch up with her and Kwan soon.

Her ears caught the rustle of clothing as Kwan shifted. Wondering what he was doing, Nina opened her eyes. She still was in the same pose, lying on her back with her arms above her head. As for Kwan, he was also still sitting in the same spot near her, but he was now leaning over her body, looking down in her eyes.

“Is something wrong?” She asked and immediately went silent.

There was some strange expression in Kwan’s eyes that she’d never seen before. His face suddenly twisted as if in pain. He pulled back and jumped to his feet. He took a few steps back away from her, a grimace spreading across his face, contorting his features.

“Hey, are you okay?” Nina asked as she rose on her elbows.

“Nina, I’m sorry… It takes control over my body. I can’t… resist…”

The painful expression on his face was replaced with one full of cold determination.

“It’s about time I claimed what belongs to me,” he uttered in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.

“Kwan, what are you—”

Before she could finish her sentence, he cast a spell on her. Translucent glowing chains flowed from the floor and wrapped around Nina’s wrists and ankles. Before she could do anything, the magical chains pulled her limbs in different directions, spread-eagling her body. She tried to resist, but she was too weak to break free. The chains pulled tight, stretching her arms and legs wide open. She pulled with all her might, but couldn’t free herself.

“Kwan, what are you doing?” She hissed at him. “Let me go!”

When she looked him in the eyes, she hardly recognized him. The cold expression he wore on his face made him look like a completely different person.

“Why would I let you go?” He said. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long.”

He walked to her, drawing his shortsword. Nina’s eyes went wide.

“Kwan, what the hell is on your mind? Quit messing around!”

He crouched between her wide-spread legs. With his free hand, he grabbed the hem of her short tunic and pulled back, revealing her underwear. Nina felt her cheeks flush red with embarrassment.

“Kwan, snap out of it!”

He ignored her. He slid the tip of his shortsword under the fabric of her underwear. With a quick flick, he cut through the fine material. With his other hand, he pulled her torn panties from under her, revealing her mound of light, soft curls. He tossed her panties aside, a barbaric look on his face. He pulled his shortsword into its sheath, staring at her exposed womanhood.

Her cheeks burning with overwhelming embarrassment, she resumed her attempts to break free, but to no avail. She couldn’t help but yelp in surprise and anger when he put his hand on her warm mound. Her loud call seemed to wake him up. He jumped to his feet and backed up from her hastily, a mix of embarrassment and apology on his face.

“Nina, I’m so sorry,” he was babbling. “It isn’t me doing it, it isn’t me. I can’t resist, I can’t… It’s forcing me to do it!”

Kwan was speaking very fast as if he were afraid he might suddenly lose the ability to talk.

“What are you talking about?” Nina asked. “What’s going on? What is forcing you?”

On Kwan’s face once again was the pained expression that she’d already seen a couple of minutes before. Kwan appeared to be either in physical pain or undergoing a mental struggle of some sort.

“The sword,” Kwan gasped. “It has a demonic soul, and… And it controls my actions now. I can’t… resist it. It makes me do things I don’t want to.”

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Nina looked at the sword sheathed at his hip. She knew that Kwan had found it some time ago, but he’d never told them anything about it. Now she understood Kwan’s strange behavior they’d witnessed a few times recently.

The struggling expression on Kwan’s face was replaced by a cold one – the demon took over again. When he began to walk toward Nina, she yelled at him, “Leave him alone, demon!”

“Why would I do that?” The demon said via Kwan. “He belongs to me now.”

Nina couldn’t free herself from the magical chains and couldn’t throw any of her spells because she was still too tired. However, she had a few thousand unspent Essence points. While they were normally used for leveling up, upgrading spells and abilities, and other such stuff, they could also be used as mana to cast spells. Unlike regular spellcasting, using Essence points didn’t take a toll on a mage’s energy. Nina hardly ever spent Essence points for spellcasting because they were too precious to use as mana. However, it was an emergency now.

The magical chains held her wrists tightly, but she still could move her hands. With one of them, she managed to draw an arcane sign in the air, casting an offensive spell. A bolt of electricity zipped from her hand and struck Kwan in the middle of his chest. He was hurled backward with such a force as if he’d been struck by a freight train. He flew halfway across the hall and dropped to the floor.

Nina knew that her spell couldn’t have killed him, but after he didn’t move for a few seconds, she began to worry. She was about to call out to him when he began to slowly get up.

“It hurt a lot, Nina,” he said in his normal voice.

“I’m so sorry,” she replied, glad to have her friend back. “I had to do it. Did it kill the demon, though? Is it gone?”

“You wish,” Kwan said in a sarcastic voice as the demon took over again.

He continued to walk toward Nina with a cold expression on his face. She prepared to launch another bolt of electricity at him.

“Don’t make me kill you,” she said. “Just give me back my friend and go away.”

“You cannot kill me, you dumb cunt,” the demon said. “You can destroy your friend’s body, but you can’t do anything to hurt me.”

Kwan, controlled by the demon, was getting closer and closer. Nina didn’t want to hurt her friend any more than she’d already done, but she had no idea what else she could do in her situation to protect herself. Letting the demon rape her wasn’t an option either.

When he got within three meters of her, she launched another bolt of electricity at him. Only she missed her target this time – the demon managed to jump aside in time.

“You caught me off guard the first time, but it won’t happen again,” the demon said.

Nina ground her teeth in frustration. Every bolt of electricity cost more than a thousand Essence points. Having cast two of them, she now could cast only two or three more before she would become completely defenseless.

The demon continued to walk toward her. When she was about to launch another bolt of electricity at him, something happened. From across the hall, from the other side of the stone wall came the sounds of fighting. Kwan stopped and looked in that direction, furrowing his brow. Nina was watching the demon controlling her friend’s body, ready to unleash another offensive spell.

About a minute later, there was a thud as if something large dropped to the floor. Then something hit the stone wall from the other side. The barrier held. The wall was hit again, followed by a muffled shout, “Nina, Kwan, are you there?”

It was Kirk. Upon hearing his voice, Nina’s heart began to beat harder. He was alive!

“Kwan, is this your wall?” Michael shouted from the other side of the stone wall. “We just killed the troll, so you can bring it down, buddy.”

Kwan looked at Nina with an annoying look on his face. “It appears your friends have arrived. Too bad they can’t get over here thanks to your friend having created the stone wall.”

Nina knew that the magically-created barrier wouldn’t stay up for much longer, maybe for a few more minutes. Only she didn’t have that long, so she yelled as loudly as she could, “Kirk! Michael! I need help! But you are gonna have to break the wall.”

“Nina,” Kirk shouted back. “What is going on?”

“Just break the freaking wall!”

No more questions from Kirk or Michael came. The stone wall trembled as the two guys launched a vicious onslaught on it from the other side. Pebbles and small pieces of stone broke from the barrier, pelting the cobblestone floor. The wall had been weakened by the troll’s attack, but it still would take some time for Kirk and Micahel to break through.

The demon turned his attention back to Nina. “Looks like it’s gonna be a little while before they get here. Plenty of time for me to have fun with—”

Nina launched a bolt of electricity at him, putting into the spell all the remaining Essence points. Kwan yelped in pain as his body was hurled back across the entire width of the hall. His back collided with the wall on the opposite side of the room with a thud. He dropped to the floor and for some time, just lay there motionlessly. When Nina began to worry that she might have killed Kwan, he began to rise from the floor.

He looked up at her, his face a mask of rage. “Dumb cunt, don’t you understand you’re hurting your friend’s body without actually doing any damage to me? Anyway, you’re gonna pay for your stubbornness.”

The demon burst into a run toward her. She didn’t have enough Essence points left to launch another spell. The magical chains were still holding on, and she didn’t know when they would disappear. She couldn’t do anything to protect herself anymore.

Kwan almost reached her when the stone wall suddenly broke apart, and the two guys burst into the hall. Kwan came to a halt to look at them. Kirk and Michael stopped, taking in the scene before them – spread-eagled Nina lying on the ground with her private parts exposed, her body held in place with magical chains and Kwan standing before her with an enraged expression on his face.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Kirk asked, still not quite believing what he was seeing.

Unlike him, Michael grasped the situation immediately. The fifty-year-old had always treated Nina as his daughter. When he woke up in this world a few months ago, he’d found his wallet in one of his pockets. In the wallet, he discovered a picture of his family – his wife and his two daughters who were about Nina’s age. Even though he couldn’t remember them, he kept the picture and was sometimes looking at it, lying on his bed.

Nina had become his family too. He treated her just like he would his real daughters in his past life. Seeing her now half-naked and restrained by the magical chains, he felt furious.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he bellowed as he stomped toward Kwan.

Seeing the large enraged guy approach him, the demon stumbled back.

“Calm down, gramps,” he said, raising a placating hand as he continued to hurriedly retreat. “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you?”

“A good beating is what you deserve, pal,” Michael growled as he continued to stride toward Kwan, the nasty-looking brass knuckles on his hands glinting faintly.

Kwan almost ran backward, smiling apologetically at the big guy. “Hey, I thought Kwan was your friend. Was I wrong?”

“Why do you talk about yourself in the third person all of a sudden?” Michael asked suspiciously and then suddenly went silent as he spotted something behind Kwan.

He was backing up toward an arc that led into a dark tunnel. And something was appearing from the darkness of the tunnel – something huge and glowing orange. Michael came to a sudden halt upon seeing the mysterious creature. Unaware of the danger behind him, Kwan stopped in the opening, looking at Michael.

“Have you changed your mind about beating the shit out of Kwan?” he asked with a smirk on his face. “I knew you’d come around, gramps.”

“There’s something behind you!”

“Whuu—”

Kwan turned around just as a three-meter fire elemental reached him. The magical creature grabbed him with both hands and lifted him in the air with ease. Kwan screamed in pain when his clothes caught fire. Holding him tight in its hands, the fire elemental spun around and raced back into the dark tunnel it had come from. In a few seconds, it disappeared in the distance, but Kwan’s screams echoed through the stone tunnel for a little longer.

Michael wheeled around and ran back to his friends. He saw that Kirk had already dismantled the magical chains and helped Nina to her feet. She pulled the skirt of her tunic down over her legs, but her panties still lay on the floor. They were torn and therefore couldn’t be put on. Nina had been relating what had happened, but when Kwan began to scream, they both turned to see what was going on.

“What happened?” Kirk shouted to Michael running to them. “I saw something grab Kwan.”

“It was a fire elemental,” Michael replied as he got to his friends.

“We have to help him,” Nina said.

“It’s too late,” Michael replied, shaking his head. “The elemental is already gone. We can’t do anything to help Kwan. He’s probably dead already. If he’s not, he will be very soon.”

“Besides, none of our weapons can even hurt a fire elemental,” Kirk added. “That’s why we decided to get out of this dungeon, remember? There are way too many monsters that can’t be harmed with our weapons.”

Nina felt bad about leaving Kwan to his fate, but she knew that her friends were right.

While they navigated their way through the tunnels of the dungeon, she told them what had happened between her and Kwan.

“So the demonic sword was controlling him?” Kirk said. “Damn.”

Michael shook his head. “It’s my fault that it happened. I should’ve realized that something was controlling him when he began to act weird a few days ago. After all, I knew him longer than you guys.”

Nina put a hand on the big guy’s shoulder. “That’s not your fault. The demonic sword is to blame, not any of us.”

“He should’ve told us about it,” Kirk said. “Why didn’t he?”

“Probably because he couldn’t,” Nina guessed. “The demonic sword didn’t let him, I believe.”

A quarter of an hour later, they finally got out of the dungeon. Being tired and in an awful mood for losing their friend, they didn’t notice the strangers waiting around the dungeon entrance until it was too late. They stepped from the foliage, pointing crossbows and rifles at the three of them. Nina and Kirk froze, looking at the armed strangers in front of them.

“What is going on?” Nina whispered.

“Oh no,” Michael said.

He recognized these people. Many months ago, he and Kwan had been chased by a gang of armed men. Their leader was some evil sorceress who didn’t wear any clothes. Michael and Kwan had managed to give them the slip before stumbling upon the camp where Nina and Kirk lived. Since then, Michael had never encountered the sorceress and her gang and thought he would never see them again. As it turned out, he was wrong.

The three of them stood motionlessly. They didn’t know what to do, but one thing was for sure – if they attacked the gang of armed strangers, they wouldn’t be able to win. They were tired, outgunned, and outnumbered.

A few seconds later, from behind one of the trees out stepped a naked woman holding a long staff in her staff. She stood before them, her oiled body glistening in the sunlight and emitting a soft golden glow.

“That’s her,” Michael said quietly. “That’s the sorceress that was chasing me and Kwan the other day.”