I emerged from the aether in the shadow of a hydra, but I barely registered the creature’s presence. Open ground lay ahead of me, and without hesitation, I hurtled toward it. Behind me, the hydra did not react. In fact, it appeared completely oblivious to my presence.

You are hidden.

The Game message explained it all, and if I could’ve, I would have exhaled in relief. My shadow jump had put me out of range of the spores.

But I didn’t stop running. Before I investigated what lay behind me, I needed to make sure I was truly safe. I did slow my flight, though, and took more time to study the surroundings more closely.

The ground underfoot was soft and gritty, and with every stride, my paws sank deeply. Turning my head left and right, I spied more dry sand, entire dunes of them. Only in the far distance was the landscape different. There, tall peaks reached for the sky. But they, too, appeared barren.

Whatever this place was before, it’s a desert now.

There was nothing living in sight. Even the stygians to my rear had fallen out of mindsight range. Worse yet, there was little in the way of cover.

Coming to a halt, I glanced over my shoulder. In the far distance, partially obscured by the dunes, I could just about make out the rift. Most of the stygians were out of my line of sight, though. Only those winging aloft were visible, and while they appeared to be in something of a frenzy, none were flying my way.

It looks like I’ve gotten away.

Turning around fully so I faced the creatures, I flopped down on the ground, and finally spared the time to peruse the many Game messages waiting for my attention.

You have entered sector 30,199 of the Nethersphere. This area is outside the boundaries of the Endless Dungeon and has been claimed for the Nethersphere by a mature void tree. Warning: the ley line connecting this sector to the Kingdom is under the control of a young void tree in sector 18,240 and may close at any time.

You have entered the nether. The nether toxicity at your current location is at tier 10. Your health, psi, stamina, and mana are regenerating at a rate of 5.5% per minute.

You are the first player ever to have visited this sector!

Congratulations, Michael! You have accomplished the feat, Realm Explorer. Requirement: enter 2 previously unexplored sectors. Your budding explorer trait has advanced to: intrepid explorer.

This rare trait is normally reserved for rank 5 rangers and in addition to the benefits provided by the rank 4 variant, it further grants you knowledge of the safe zone location in any sector you visit, automatically adding it to your Log.

Analyzing key points in sector 30,199…

…

…

Nether portal found. Current status: disabled. This portal has been closed to safeguard the dungeon sector on the other side from the void. Its location has been added to your Log.

Safe zone not found. Current status: destroyed. Its location cannot be logged.

In the wake of the Game messages, a faint pulsing impinged on my awareness. It came from the north—the far north. It was my explorer trait at work, I thought. The pulsing was coming from the disabled nether portal.

The portal’s existence was a curiosity, certainly, but not especially noteworthy. As far as I knew there was no way to reactivate a disabled nether portal. Of more interest was the fact that I was the first player to visit sector 30,199.

How long has this sector been in the grip of the void? I wondered.

Centuries? Millenia? Given that no other player had visited the region, there was no way to tell. I sighed. That didn’t make my task of figuring out the strength of the void’s forces in the sector any easier. My gaze drifted back to the rift. I’d been right to suspect an ambush.

Even in the mad rush to escape, I’d gotten the impression of great numbers. There had to be at least a few thousand stygians assembled near the rift.

And that could not be happenstance.

Rising to all fours, I crept forward. Cataloguing the stygians at the rift was my first priority, and the sooner I got that done, the sooner I could leave.

✵ ✵ ✵

After a short internal debate, I decided to retain my wolf form for the upcoming scouting mission. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but it was still too early to tell if I would need to flee again.

Slinking through the dunes, I made my way southward. But I’d barely begun retracing my steps when I was forced to a halt.

Topping a rise, I spotted stygians ahead.

Multiple hostile entities have failed to detect you. You are hidden.

Damn, I cursed, freezing in place. A pack of hydras and serpents almost a thousand strong were heading straight for me. How they’d found me was no mystery either.

The damnable creatures were following my tracks.

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I hadn’t thought the lesser stygians were intelligent enough to do that, but I had not reckoned on a smarter stygian accompanying them. My gaze drifting to the back of the pack, I reached out with my will and inspected the colossal shape lumbering after its smaller brethren.

The target is a level 320 stygian harbinger.

My eyes narrowed. The monster ahead was a harbinger? It looked nothing like the one I had encountered in Draven’s Reach, though. For one, this harbinger was bigger. For another, it lacked wings. But in one disturbing respect, the two creatures were similar.

They were both a grotesque blend of multiple beasts.

Chimeras.

That was what the harbingers truly were. Well, that and death magic users. I refocused on the monster ahead. She had the head of a bull, the body of a woolly mammoth, and the tail of a scorpion.

A formidable foe, I thought. But not one outside my ability to kill—even if she did have a thousand lesser stygians escorting her.

Still, it was not to hunt that I’d ventured into this sector. And I especially didn’t want to become embroiled in a fight so close to the rift and the rest of the stygian horde.

No, it was best to retreat.

Slipping back down the dune I’d just scaled, I escaped the harbinger’s sight and drew psi. It was time to obscure my trail.

✵ ✵ ✵

I spent the next hour travelling across the dunes by windslide. I barely set a paw down on the sands again, and when I did it was only to transition from one air ramp to another.

My strategy worked.

While the harbinger’s party was able to unerringly follow my original trail, none of the stygians could track me further. And soon I was lost in the dunes. As far as the void was concerned, anyway.

Cutting a wide arc around the mammoth-harbinger—still vainly searching for me—I made my way back to the rift.

What I found was not a… nest, not precisely.

It was more properly a war-party. For one, no void crystals littered the ground. Nor was there a void tree or any seeds to be seen—and thank the ancients for that—but in numbers alone, the stygians encamped around the rift rivaled those on the other side. I spotted everything from nagas, hydras, and serpents to crawlers and weavers. There was also a sprinkling of more unfamiliar stygians—horse-like nightmares, devil-hounds, death crows, torpid scorpions, and the like.

None of them were Powers, though.

And in the end, while I judged the lurking stygian army to be sizable and certainly a force to be reckoned with, it was no worse than what awaited us in sector 18,240.

Still, I mused, the question remains, where did all these stygians come from?

My eyes dropped to the pristine sand of the adjacent dunes. I was on the east side of the rift, and by this point, I had already circumvented the encamped stygians twice over and knew with certainty that it was only to the south that the sands of the almost-perfect dunes had been thoroughly displaced.

As if by the passage of some great army.

South, I decided. If there is a stygian nest anywhere in this sector, it’s to the south that it lies.

Turning about, I headed that way.

✵ ✵ ✵

It took me five hours to track down the sector 30,199’s nest.

I begrudged every wasted second. Still as much as I hated the time lost, mapping out the void’s forces in the region was important—essential even.

My plan, of course, was to assault the rift from both sides.

It was the only way I could think of of stopping sector 18,240’s void tree from being reinforced mid-battle. To pull it off, however, I needed to send a small army into this sector—where there were dangers aplenty.

Discounting the region’s heightened nether toxicity—which could be managed, albeit not easily—there was also the risk of whatever force I sent into sector 30,199 being ambushed in turn by a third stygian horde.

Which was why I had resolved to find the region’s stygian nest.

Knowing its location would tell me how much time we would have during the battle. And so, as much as I hated the idea of losing nearly half a day tracking down the nest, I drew comfort from the fact that it would take any nest-reinforcements at least as long to make the same journey back to the rift.

And there were a lot of potential reinforcements to be had—as evidenced by the sight before me.

Going down on my lupine belly, I inched along a dune to inspect the nest ahead. There were serpents and hydras aplenty, of course. At a guess, they numbered in the tens of thousands. But equally populous were a type of stygian I’d not seen before.

Although, I was not sure if they could really be classified as a single ‘type.’ The nether creatures in question shared only one distinguishing characteristic—they were all amalgamations of other creatures.

Be it hounds mixed with serpents.

Scorpions with crows.

Spiders with bulls.

The variations were as endless as they were perplexing. Yet, despite the fear threatening to swamp my mind—not even in my darkest nightmares had I imagined we’d be facing thousands of harbingers!—my churning thoughts outpaced my terror, and I noticed an oddity.

There was something off about the chimeras.

The hound-serpent was missing two legs. The scorpion-crow was short a wing. The spider-bull looked too heavy to move. They’re not just chimeras, I thought. They’re failed chimeras. Reaching out with my will, I inspected the three creatures in question.

The target is a level 105 crippled stygian snake-dog.

The target is a level 145 flightless stygian scorpion-bird.

The target is a level 87 immobilized spider-bull.

I panted in relief. Most of the chimeras in the nest were no threat and looked to be the result of mad experiments gone wrong.

But most was not all.

And a few chimeras in particular were larger, sleeker, and more powerful than their less hale fellows. Three in particular drew my attention.

The target is a level 301 stygian harbinger.

The target is a level 303 stygian harbinger.

The target is a level 341 stygian harbinger.

That made four harbingers in the sector I had to worry about. Then, there was the tree, of course. Tearing away my gaze from the ominous chimeras, I let my eyes rest upon the colossal tree in the center of the nest.

The hellish thing was big.

Its trunk alone was three times the height of the young void tree in sector 18,240, and its leafless branches extended so far out it was a wonder that the tree was still standing. But then again, who knew how far its roots’ unclean touch extended? Hells, for all I knew, even the dune beneath me was infested.

Repressing a shudder at the disturbing, if improbable, possibility—my lookout point was too far out for that—I reached out with my will and inspected what was very likely the preeminent stygian Power in the sector.

The target is a level 421 mature void tree.

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