The abyssal pit that Leon found himself in was deep, so deep that he wondered how it compared to those he’d delved into in the Serpentine Isles. The serpent temple was deep and magically advanced, but the graveyard of the Primal Gods that Leon had discovered was even more so. From what little Leon could sense, this pit that the Iron Needle had cloven into the earth was tremendously deep.

However, there were complications to that estimate. For one, the walls were coated in darkness magic, interfering with what he could and couldn’t sense. Deeper in, he was sensing grass, sky, wind, light, and life, but none of that could be true—at least, not as he was sensing it. Instead, it seemed clear that after about a quarter mile, the darkness magic grew too thick for him to reliably penetrate with his magic senses, leading to intense illusions.

At least, that was his working theory, as otherwise what he could sense indicated a whole new world with its own ecosystem down below the surface of the plane, where it shouldn’t naturally exist.

Another complication to his estimate was that even from what he could sense with any accuracy, caves and branches were splitting off from the main impact path, some shallow, but others deep. Some seemed newly cut, while others were worn down with use or otherwise collapsed.

‘There are more than just a few banshees down here, it seems…’ Leon thought as he conjured his family’s blade. He was already armored following the initial banshee attack, but now the Thunderbird’s lightning coursed through his body, while he brandished the Thunderbird’s weapon, ready for whatever might challenge him in his quest for the Iron Needle.

He didn’t have to wait long for something else to make their challenge known; another group of banshees, hovering in the air, their heads turned upward in a silent scream, suddenly turned and shot towards him at great speed.

Were it twenty-two years ago and Leon still sixteen, such would’ve been one of the most terrifying sights he could’ve imagined. However, he was now thirty-eight and ninth-tier, and a group of fourth and fifth-tier banshees—while stronger than what could be found on the surface—were no trouble. Leon swung his sword in a horizontal slice and let loose with a wave of lightning. His lightning, casting the black, darkness-covered walls in silver and blue, washed across the floor of the rift, practically reaching up to the ceiling, leaving deep burns on the stone floor as it went. It hit the flying banshees and tore their cloaks of darkness from their bodies and obliterated what was beneath.

The banshees floated to the ground, now little more than clouds of ash and a few fragments of bone.

Leon savored his victory for only a moment before moving on. He moved at a fairly slow, but cautious pace, as he couldn’t quite tell what might be waiting for him further in, but he was comforted by the Thunderbird’s presence. She was there, watching his progress from his soul realm. However, she was silent, and he figured she would stay that way until he had the Iron Needle in his hand. With Xaphan taken by his healing meditations, Leon was on his own.

‘Just as it should be for something like this…’

About a thousand feet into the rift past the ravine, smaller additional caves started appearing on the walls. From what Leon could tell—and he was by no means an expert on the subject—the caves were natural. They weren’t smoothly cut into the stone and meandered with a degree of naturalism that he didn’t think any sapient being would emulate.

He didn’t bother with these first few branching caves. He couldn’t sense anything in them, and he was too close for the darkness magic on the walls to obscure much. With his focus on the Iron Needle, he kept moving forward.

Unfortunately, through the pitch-black gloom, he was suddenly confronted with a massive cave-in, barring further progress. It appeared to his magic senses about another thousand feet down, appearing through the gloom of the dark shroud cast over the caves like it was appearing from mist.

Leon paused and, after studying the cave-in from a distance, backtracked a little bit. Sure enough, only a few steps back were all that was needed to cause the cave-in to disappear once again, creating an illusion of a perfectly-cloven shaft leading straight down into the earth, where Leon could sense the charge of lightning that filled the air emanating from.

With a frown, Leon advanced once more, until he could see the cave-in with his own eyes through the darkness.

He inspected the cave-in as much as he could, but as far as he could tell, there were no ways around it without deviating from his path. But once that realization dawned on him, he noticed a small cave to his right, one that looked more deliberate than the others he’d seen. It cut into the stone and made an immediate ninety-degree left turn, appearing to bypass the cave-in. Unfortunately, Leon’s magic senses hit a shroud about halfway down this tunnel and sent back images of green fields and warm sunlight.

Leon scowled, but he saw no other immediate options than trying to dig, and he could sense no threats. So, he stuck his head into the mouth of the tunnel and glanced further down.

The tunnel was straight and narrow, but not so much that Leon couldn’t fit if need be. However, there was a shimmering shroud of darkness partway down, similar, though not identical to the teleportation shrouds in the underground temple on the third of the Serpentine Isles.

From what Leon could sense, there was darkness and lightning magic within it, but no light, ruling out spatial magic.

‘Not a portal, then…’

Leon advanced down the tunnel, stopping about a dozen paces from the shroud. He couldn’t sense what was creating it, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. He retrieved a sheet of spell paper from his soul realm that had been inscribed with the ancient rune for ‘open’ and held it in front of him. He breathed deeply, clearing his mind of all distractions, running a few bolts of silver-blue lightning through his mind just for good measure, and then concentrated on the definition of open that he wanted.

Ancient runes were imprecise things, responding to will and intent. There were bespoke runes for anything and everything, any effect imaginable, but they quickly grew so complex that they were impossible to guess and transcribe. That was why, Nestor had taught Leon, it was better to memorize a few more ‘basic’ ancient runes. After all, Nestor had argued, why memorize the runes for ‘open lock’ and ‘open door’ and ‘open barrier’ when he could just memorize ‘open’ instead? The more open concept meant that the rune needed more willpower and concentration to be effective, vastly increasing its chances of failure, but it was easier than trying to figure out the runes that had narrower and narrower scope. An ‘open lock’ rune might be better at opening locks, after all, but that was another rune that Leon would need to memorize.

So, Leon filled his mind with visions of the shroud in front of him parting like curtains, allowing him access to the path beyond. He chanted ‘open’ in his mind again and again, filling his head with what he wanted the rune to do. Once he felt like he was ready, he channeled magic power into the sheet of spell paper, activating the rune.

The rune began glowing with arcane light, and Leon felt his magic begin to turn along the lines of the rune. His magic reached out almost of its own accord, touching the shroud, and just as Leon had seen it in his mind, the shroud parted, pulled to the side as if by invisible ropes and stagehands.

With a smile, Leon strode forward, his rune still brandished, and passed the shroud unharmed. As soon as he was past, however, the shroud snapped back into place like it had never opened.

But Leon was through, and he found himself in an almost identical tunnel that he’d just come from, just leading to the other side of the cave-in—he hoped.

That hope was forgotten completely as a wave of killing intent flooded the tunnel. It wasn’t even close to the most intense Leon had ever felt, but he still felt a shiver run down his spine. He brushed aside that momentary primordial fear and advanced, and when he reached the end of the tunnel, he found that his hopes were correct, and it led to the other side of the cave-in. What he hadn’t expected to find was that that side of the rift was densely populated.

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Enormous pillars of ice stretched from the floor of the rift to the ceiling, a distance of some four stories. At first glance, they seemed to be acting as supports, holding up the weakened ceiling. They were certainly doing that as far as Leon could tell, but there was an enormous amount of water magic flowing through them, and he could see beneath the frozen white surface blue lines that resembled some kind of circulatory system.

He counted more than a dozen of these huge ice pillars just in the vicinity of the side tunnel alone, and from the wide base of each of these pillars, ice wraiths were stepping out into the rift. No openings were letting them out, they were simply walking out of the pillars like a human might through an open door. The pillars, Leon figured, weren’t hollow, but the ice wraiths could live inside them anyway, merging their icy forms with the pillars themselves.

Leon counted more than three dozen ice wraiths, all emitting vast rivers of killing intent directed at him, their seventh-tier auras towering. His eagerness immediately took a slight hit: he was ninth-tier and strong, but he was deep underground now, and thirty-six seventh-tier beings were still a threat.

So, Leon immediately made to reduce that threat. Lightning danced across his body as he lunged forward, the strength in his movement carrying him clear across the rift to the first of the ice pillars, from which four ice wraiths had come. He swung his blade and struck the first ice wraith, not giving it enough time to even raise an arm in its defense. With an explosion of lightning and thunder, the ice wraith practically vaporized on the spot, while the other three at its side were shattered, their remains scattering across the rift with the force of Leon’s magic.

The pillar, too, suffered greatly, Leon’s lightning blasting a chunk off its base and cracking much of what was left. A few errant stones fell from the ceiling, shaken loose by Leon’s uncontained strike, and he glanced back at the cave-in. These seemed like ice wraith houses, or some equivalent at least, but if they were holding up a weakened ceiling…

Leon immediately resolved to have more care in his attacks, but as the ice wraiths started moving against him, he knew that he couldn’t simply stop at this point.

With thunder and lightning that he took greater care to contain, Leon blazed around and through the ice wraiths, his sword turning their icy bodies into snow with each swing. The ice wraiths countered with great blasts of ice, attempting to catch him or hinder his movements. However, his power was great enough that they couldn’t stop his rampage.

Soon enough, he stood nearly victorious, with only three ice wraiths remaining. Not a hint of fear could be seen within them, nor had their killing intent wavered. The ice pillars had taken a little more damage, but all were reasonably intact, ensuring the ceiling wasn’t going to come crumbling down around Leon’s ears. However, the ice wraiths weren’t finished, and as Leon made to fix that particular problem, another made itself known.

Deeper in the rift, from the extensive cave system that it seemed to intersect with, darkness had gathered throughout the short fight. As Leon was about to finish the skirmish, that darkness practically exploded outward, accompanied by the wailing of hundreds of banshees. Leon, given his history, knew that something like this was going to come at some point, and wasn’t caught off-guard. That being said, his magic still became a little more turbulent and harder to control, so as he struck one of the last ice wraiths around him, an arc of lightning whipped upward and shattered one of the pillars.

Leon swore and leaped back as a large quantity of stone came crashing down, though fortunately, the ceiling as a whole remained intact.

It took only a moment for Leon to get his power back under control, and in the next moment, he hurled a pair of lightning bolts so bright that Leon almost blinded himself. Both of the remaining ice wraiths were annihilated by these bolts, and Leon was able to turn his complete attention to the oncoming horde of banshees now bearing down upon him.

Without hesitation, he pointed the tip of his blade down the rift at the banshees closest to him and released a storm that he’d been gathering within himself. Lightning surged out of his blade in a great wave, filling the rift, yet remaining entirely within Leon’s control. From the depths of this storm of silver-blue lightning, a shape emerged. This shape was a near copy of the Thunderbird, though rendered entirely in curling silver-blue lightning and barely more than half the Thunderbird’s size.

This lightning bird that Leon summoned raced down the rift ahead of Leon’s lightning wave, power streaming off its shape. It was a lightning bolt in the shape of the Thunderbird, acting as autonomously as one of Maia’s water dragons, though it wasn’t so detailed as to have feathers or eyes.

Still, as the lightning bird crashed into the oncoming tidal wave of banshees, the dark beings seemed to disintegrate as they came too close. Leon’s power streaming behind the lightning bird caused Leon’s lightning to flash across any banshees the lightning bird missed, destroying them, too. And then even further back, the rest of Leon’s lightning wave came rolling in, cleaning up those paltry few who even survived that.

With one great expression of power, Leon rendered the entire oncoming horde of banshees into dust, ash, and faint wisps of darkness magic dissipating in the rift.

As silence once more descended upon the rift, the last echoes of the banshees’ shrieks and Leon’s thunder dying down, Leon took a moment to catch his breath and savor what he’d just done. If he could’ve known twenty-two years ago that he’d be able to do what he just did in only a little over two decades, he would’ve been shocked beyond words.

And, for a second, Leon thought of Artorias. He couldn’t remember his father struggling too hard against ice wraiths, but then again, they never encountered them in great numbers while he was growing up—at least until Roland’s journey to find Heartwood Amber. And then, Artorias hadn’t been able to keep every ice wraith off their group without a little help from the knights.

That those very same creatures were so easily killed was something that Leon was having some trouble wrapping his head around. Thirty-six of the creatures, and more banshees than he cared to count, all gone in barely more than five minutes.

‘There’ll be time enough for this later,’ Leon admonished himself as he pushed forward, the Iron Needle closer now than ever.

He faced no further challenge as he advanced, though he passed by several more enormous ice pillars holding up the ceiling. Though he sensed power flowing through them, he didn’t dare do them significant damage for fear of bringing the vast amount of stone above him crashing down. As far as he was concerned, if the ice wraiths were now intimidated enough to remain in their humble abodes, then so be it.

However, as he pushed ever downwards, he paused at a curious sight. The darkness covering the walls was growing thinner and the stone around him rougher. He could still sense vast amounts of darkness magic in the rift, but it seemed that whatever power was causing it to coat the walls was weakening.

Even further in, he was surprised to find bones. Not many, and certainly not human, what he found were large bones of some creature with longer and thicker limbs than his entire body. While he couldn’t say they all came from the same creature, he only saw a single skull in the entire pile, and couldn’t help but stare in awe.

The skull was enormous, perhaps as large as the Thunderbird’s entire body. Its face was relatively small, however, located on the bottom portion of the skull. The creature’s massive forehead was dominated by a roughly triangular plate of shell or harder bone or something that Leon wished Anna were here to identify, while to the sides of the dead monster’s face were two pairs of long, curved tusks of gleaming ivory. Though the skull appeared to be old as far as Leon could tell, the tusks were still deadly sharp, and the teeth within the monster’s maw were as well.

‘A native?’ Leon wondered as a few more doubts started to creep into his mind. It wasn’t too surprising that there were more than ice wraiths and banshees down in the rift, but something so large…

Leon frowned and hoped that he wouldn’t have to encounter anything quite like it deeper in. However, as he walked past the skull and pushed even further into the rift, the large open tunnel before him suddenly melted away, revealing something he hadn’t even realized was hidden until he’d passed the illusion concealing it. And he found himself confronted by a massive wall of carved stone blocking further progress down the rift. Upon the wall were reliefs of dozens of different monsters, though in the center, dominating the entire façade, was one that looked remarkably like the skull Leon had passed by only a few minutes before.

An enormous amount of magic was flowing through the wall, and Leon saw no obvious doors nor an intuitive way to get the wall out of his way.

“Damnit,” Leon whispered as he quickly started evaluating ways to get past it. He supposed he could try to blast his way through, but the brute-force method didn’t appeal to him as a first resort. He wasn’t sure how much that might destabilize the tunnel around him, nor did he know quite how the magic flowing through it would respond. In his mind, attempting such a course would be a terrible idea.

But even with a longer, more in-depth inspection of the wall, he couldn’t see any way to get it to move out of his way.

There were, however, more caves behind him and to the sides of the wall, many of which the banshees had come from. With a grimace, Leon realized that if he wanted to get past this wall, he was likely going to have to brave this tunnel system, and whatever monsters called it home if he wanted to get past this wall and find the Iron Needle.

But the fact that there was a wall here at all concerned him, indicating some potential sapient resistance to his progress, ice wraiths aside. And as he thought about that, he stared at the monster so prominently displayed on the wall, then at the skull in the tunnel behind him, and for the first time since entering the rift, began to feel a twinge of dread settling into the pit of his stomach.