The third skeleton raised its staff and an eerie green-and-black glow surrounded it. Two green-and-black bolts shaped like crossbow quarrels shot out from the top of the staff, swerving through the air before slamming into either side of Rai and exploding soundlessly. Caught off guard by the unexpected attack, Rai lost the opportunity to counterattack the skeleton, and it swung to take off his head. He ducked, then parried its backswing with an upward swing of his sword and shouted, “Blazing Ray!” A beam of roaring fire shot from his left hand into the skeleton’s skull, turning it black and washing downward over the rest of the bones.

The skeleton mage raised its staff again, this time sending a pair of bolts at the fallen Isa as she rose. She skidded backward, halberd grinding against the stone floor.

“Healing Blood.”

No sooner had she consumed the bead of blood that formed on her hand than her opponent reached her and savaged her side with a thrust that tore through her reinforced scales. She gritted her teeth and ducked to the side, narrowly avoiding the diagonal slash aimed at her head.

“Wrath Strike!”

Her swing shattered the skeleton’s pelvis, causing it to collapse and turn to smoke. A moment later, a single green-black bolt hit her right between the eyes, stunning her.

Meanwhile, Rai parried another strike and landed another Burning Palm on his target, causing the bones to crumble to ash before a single bolt struck him in the chest. As soon as the smoke cleared, he charged toward the remaining skeleton, which fired a Blazing Ray at him. It hit, washing over his body, but the burns were relatively minor thanks to his fire resistance.

Rai lunged, his sword ablaze, and the skeleton’s skull cracked and burnt – but did not shatter. It reached out, hand trailing flames, but he spun to the side, evading the attack.

“Blazing Ray!”

Engulfed in flames, it reached out again and snagged his shirt, blasting him with fire. His palm strike returned the favor, turning it to ash.

“Shaminora omperut,” the emotionless female voice said. The pedestal rose back out of the floor and up into its original position. Both combatants collapsed.

“I-I’m coming!” Camilla squeaked. She stopped beside Isa and placed her hands on the kobold’s head, which caused Isa to hiss in pain. “Heal Severe Wounds! Heal Severe Wounds!”

As Isa blinked at the sudden and complete lack of pain, Camilla rushed over to Rai and repeated the double casting of her second circle healing spell. Rai breathed a sigh of relief.

“Thanks, Camilla. How are you doing on spells?”

“I’ve got three first circle spells left for the day.”

“So we should be careful from here on out.” He stood. “So, this is probably a training room. Don’t you think, Isa?”

“Yeah. Difficulty options, picking how many people are participating, whether it’s a real battle or an illusion… sounds like it’s made for training to me.”

“No rewards, though, beyond the experience of the fight, which is a pity. It might be worth coming back here in the future, though. Still, that was the easiest setting for a team of two? We almost died! I guess people were stronger in general back during the Tower Era.” Rai frowned at the pedestal. “I wonder why it reacted to you but not me, though. Is it because you’re a kobold? This was – probably – a city of kobolds and saurians, after all.”

“Probably!”

They left the room and entered the final doorway on the fourth floor. It seemed to be a dining hall, based on the glimpse they got before everything disintegrated. There were no treasures within.

“With our current abilities and gear, it would seem to be impossible to descend any further,” Rai noted, peering down the nearly stairless stairwell. “And even if we could, getting back up would be even more impossible.”

“Yes, it would,” Brak agreed, stepping up beside him, slitting the strap of his satchel, and shoving him into the stairwell all within a second. Rai flailed as he plummeted, hitting the stairs and tumbling down into darkness.

“Rai!” Isa shouted. Narrowing her eyes, she pointed her halberd at Brak with a snarl. “You bastard! I knew you were hiding something!”

The gnome held onto Rai’s satchel with his free hand and pointed his dagger at Isa. “You really ought not to have gotten yourself so involved, kobold. I’ll be honest, I don’t really want to kill you. I dislike killing people. Injuring and stranding the scholar is one thing, but taking lives directly is another. Back down, and I’ll let you live.”

“Back down? From you? No way! Sickening Strike!”

The stench of blood on her halberd became overpowering, and when the spear spike pierced Brak’s shoulder, the odor intensified even more. He staggered back, barely avoiding vomiting, then lunged forward, trying attack her with his dagger. The blade glanced off her scales, and her suddenly surging Berserk Mode aura punched him in the face, giving her time to step back and swing. He went flying in a spray of blood, dropping the satchel and dagger. He bounced to his feet and slammed his fists together. His wounds healed, leaving much shallower injuries and tender, acid burned flesh.

Isa charged, halberd held like a spear. He jumped to the side, then lunged for the satchel. Isa spun, smashing him in the back and sending him tumbling past the satchel. Then she stabbed at him again, but he rolled out of the way.

The light in her eyes went out and her aura vanished as Berserk Mode ran out, leaving her suddenly tired. Brak rose to his feet and grabbed her halberd with both hands, ripping it out of her grip with a sudden yank and throwing it into the stairwell. He crouched, grabbed the satchel, and jumped back toward the stairwell. Isa lunged at him, yelling, “Corrosive Claw!”

He parried her attack with his hand, grabbed her arm, and threw her down the stairwell, but at the last moment, her prehensile tail snatched the satchel and pulled it out of his other hand, taking it with her as she fell.

“Shit,” he declared.

-x-

“Ugh…”

Rai opened his eyes. My head is throbbing, my left arm is in a bad way, and my right leg hurts like hell, he thought. But I am alive… for now. I should never have let my guard down around Brak.

“You’re awake,” Isa said, and he turned his head to see her sitting next to him, an orb of light floating beside her. “The stairwell ends down here. I’m not sure how far we fell, but unless we can fly or climb like spiders, there’s no way back up. We’re both injured, but we both still have our weapons and I managed to reclaim your satchel, which is also down here with us. Accursed gnome managed to take advantage of when my Berserk Mode ran out of juice and tossed me down here; otherwise I would have killed him.”

“You got my satchel? Thank the gods. That has the dimensional bag in it with all the artifacts, books, and potions, as well as all my research. If he had gotten that…”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“That’s clearly what he was after, since he didn’t attack until we were getting ready to leave.”

“He probably belongs to the secret organization that tried to assassinate me before I started this expedition. Which means if he leaves, they’ll know everything that happened here, as well as the location of the ruin. That’s… not good. We need to get out of here and back to the city as soon as possible.”

“Agreed. But first we need to figure out how to do that.”

Rai sat up, wincing. He spotted his satchel and stretched out a hand; it lifted off the ground and floated to him.

“So you can use Telekinesis too,” Isa commented. “Quite a helpful little zeroth circle spell.”

“Too weak to be used in combat, though,” Rai said, grabbing the satchel out of the air. He set it down beside himself and opened it, pulling out the dimensional pouch. “Let’s see if any of these potions look like healing ones.”

A couple minutes later, all forty potions were arranged by color in front of him. His eyes glowed with Mage Sight as he began to study them intently.

“The ten crimson potions are all very potent healing potions, I’m pretty sure,” he said after a few minutes. “Other potions include Invisibility, Dark-Sight, Elemental Energy Protection for different elements, Water Breathing, Cure Paralysis, Cure Disease, and Cure Poison. At least… I’m about seventy-five percent sure. The only ones I’m nearly certain on are the healing potions.”

“Then we should use them.”

“Obviously. We’re both injured from the fall, and we don’t know what kinds of monsters might be down here.”

Each took a potion in hand, uncapped it, and drank the contents. No sooner had the potions hit their stomachs than they fully healed.

“Well, I feel much better,” Rai commented, stowing away the rest of the potions. He tapped the transparent material of one of the bottles. “This isn’t glass, though it looks like it is. I think it might be the same unknown material as the tetrahedron and pedestal. Worth investigating.”

After repairing the satchel with magic, Rai stood up. “If we can’t go up, we’ll have to explore down here.” Three orbs of light appeared and he sent them outward in different directions. “Wow, this is so much wider than the upper rooms. There’s a number of broken rune doorways, too, and… wait, an open doorway? The door is extra big, too. Let’s check out what’s through there.”

They walked through the large doorway and into a cube-shaped room twenty feet to a side. The floor was covered with a giant magic circle, incredibly complex with its many geometric shapes and runes, while on the opposite wall was another giant opened doorway. The other two walls had closed doorways, one of which was nonfunctional. On the walls beside the doorways were many runes and smaller circles.

Rai practically drooled as he rushed to examine them, eyes gleaming. Isa sighed and followed him.

“A knowledge-seeker to the core, aren’t you?”

“Of course! Besides, if we can learn what this room is, it might help us get out of here. From what I can see, this whole room is a single magical device, and these doorways are a bit different from the others.”

“And so far you’ve learned…?”

“Nothing yet, other than what I’ve said. I can’t analyze something so complex in an instant.”

Isa shook her head and placed her hand on a blank spot on the wall. When she removed her hand, a simple sketch of a dragon was etched into the wall. Rai looked down and noticed.

“Hey! Stop defacing the ancient ruins!”

“Defacing? They’re ruins, Rai. I don’t think anyone but you will care. They’re already falling apart as it is. Besides, I’m just putting my Mage Sign on it. ‘Isa Bloodscale was here,’ you know?”

Rai crossed his arms and frowned at her. “I get that. It’s still a historical site of great value and shouldn’t be altered like that. Can that spell even be reversed?”

“Not if it’s a carving, which is kind of the point. Maybe one day, some future historian will come down here and see my mark and exclaim, ‘Look at this! Judging by the height of this mark, Isa Bloodscale must have visited this site before she evolved from being a kobold!’” she said, mimicking the tone Rai used when excitedly making observations. “Because, of course, I’ll be a famous dragon by then.”

“…Of course. Why do I even bother,” he muttered.

Hours later, well after the sun had set aboveground, Rai announced his conclusions.

“This room connects a bunch of different locations. You use the circles on the walls to choose which door connects to which location; the doors can switch what locations they connect to. I also think… we might be inside one of the Magic Towers. I’m not sure why it’s sunken underground instead of piercing the skies, but I think this room links a bunch of different sections of the tower. With four doors, when they were all working, it could link four areas at once.”

“While that is indeed pretty cool, how does that help us?”

“Well, it means that we potentially have more areas to explore, which means maybe more stuff to find, but most importantly right now, it means there are definitely more potential exits.”

“I see. Can you close the doorways?”

“Hm? Yes, why?”

“Because we should use this room for sleeping and tackle our escape when we’re fully rested. Full magic, full arts, full stamina… and most important, clear minds.”

“I… guess you have a point,” Rai admitted. He pressed a few runes on the walls next to the open doorways and they sealed shut once more, filled with stone. “But there is the issue of food and drink, since I was relying on Brak for that… we should be fine until tomorrow, but hunger and thirst will be a problem if we’re stuck here for too long.”

“What about that thing we got from the ‘kitchen?’”

Rai reached into his satchel and stuck his hand inside the pouch within. He pulled out the empty woven cornucopia.

“You mean this?”

“It was in the food place, so maybe it has to do with food.”

“Maybe. I’m pretty sure it has conjuring magic in it. But I have no idea how it works, what it does, or how to use it.”

“Well, you’re the magic item expert. Figure it out.”

“I’m not exactly an expert. I’ll try, though.”

Isa lay down on the floor and curled up like a dog, tail in front of her snout. “Good luck and good night.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

-x-

When Isa awoke, she was greeted with the sight of a handful of different fruits and Rai lying spread-eagled on his back, fast asleep. She quickly consumed the apples, pears, and oranges (she’d never seen the latter two before, but decided that they were tasty), and then settled into a meditative position. After so much life-and-death combat recently, she felt that she was getting closer to a breakthrough to the next realm of power.

Increases in power could be divided into numerous categories: improving the body’s capabilities, improving the mind and spirit’s capabilities, improving ones various skills (including both combat and noncombat skills), improving the ability of the body to withstand damage, training to gain new abilities or improve those already possessed, learning new combat arts, learning new spells, increasing one’s qi to use more combat arts, and increasing one’s mana to use more spells. However, many of these categories were linked: to learn higher tier combat arts, one needed to increase one’s qi; and to learn higher circle spells, one needed to form additional mana circles (the way to increase one’s mana), for instance.

Those who used combat arts had something called a qi core and those who used magic had something called a mana heart. It was through meditation, exercise of abilities, training, and experience that these could be improved upon: the qi core accumulated more qi as it reached higher tiers, and the mana heart accumulated more mana as more mana circles were formed in it. Furthermore, increasing tiers or circles boosted physical or mental/spiritual capabilities as well. Thus, those who were both spellcasters and combat artists greatly improved themselves as they advanced.

This morning, Isa decided to focus her meditation on her qi core. She didn’t think she would reach the next tier today, but she felt that she was going to reach that point sometime soon. From there, she needed to reach the next circle and work on polishing her skills, and she would naturally reach the next “realm,” as she called the holistic advancements of her being. That would put her at the peak of kobold-kind’s potential, and then she would strive to evolve, whatever it took.

Stoke. Ignite. Exercise. Grow. Refine. Build. Isa repeated the steps for enhancing her core like a mantra. Polish. Reignite. Exercise. Grow. Refine. Build. Unlike mana, which permeated all things and was drawn into the body to create mana circles, qi existed only in the living, and the natural and proper way, at least in Isa’s view, of enhancing the tier of one’s qi core was to stimulate the growth of one’s own qi, refine it, and build on the existing structure of the core. She knew, thanks to her training under the Venerable Healer, that it was possible to refine medicines out of the flesh and blood of recently-defeated foes to steal their qi, but this was a shortcut that she would only take if she truly found herself hitting a wall in her advancement – especially since she didn’t really have the proper knowledge to create high-quality qi medicines, and low-quality ones could have some nasty side effects.

Hours passed before she opened her eyes again to see Rai also engaged in meditation, sitting in the lotus position. She cast Mage Sight and watched as mana swirled in a vortex around him, funneling into his chest. Ambient mana was normally invisible, even to Mage Sight, but when someone was actively building a mana circle, the concentration in the surroundings intensified as they drew it in in vast quantities. She could actually see him stealing some of the mana that should have been locked up in the runes on the walls, which was probably a sign that the enchantments were beginning to break down. She didn’t think his efforts were going to make the workings break completely, but the leaky enchantments probably made his meditation more effective.

She decided to meditate some more. Rai will surely let me know when he’s ready to move on, she figured. Might as well take advantage of this little break as much as possible.