I'd seen a lot of weird creatures, but these...whatever the hell they were, they were probably top of the list for horrifying imagery. My staff was out and spinning before a barrage of those chitin spikes rained down on me as I sailed backwards, triggering my usual combination of Touch of Tears and Consecration of Flame. The others had scattered when we started, and I saw Mel whirling a tightly contained helix of golden flames. Her rank up had given her some serious boosts to control it seemed, because the fire was so dense it looked almost solid.

A flick of her wrists had the helix whipping up and around, disconnecting at certain points and reshaping as she spun it, incinerating the spikes before they even got close. Callie had vanished, and was emerging from the wall a hundred feet up even now, driving a pair of shadow spikes into the head of one of the monsters before vanishing back into the dark, while Abel was leaning on his ability to slam blows into the monsters in tight quarters without using his manifestations.

I was forced to abandon my surveillance as I finally came down from my backward leap, feet hitting the ground and back hitting the wall just like I'd aimed for. Triggering Mountain Stance, I used the complete lack of room behind me to funnel the monsters my way as my staff swept out, crushing heads and knocking aside slashes. Poison fire licked from the wounds as the creatures fell back, some roaring in pain and some just straight up dead.

The storm of energy inside my staff grew with each hit, and I felt several more spikes smash into my armored body, bouncing off as my triple strength defense prevented them from harming me and my armor held off the piercing damage. I kept wanting to use some of my skills, but it was hard to know when I should. My tricks were mostly made for damaging single large enemies.

Using Pit of Despair on either side, I at least tried to funnel them in a bit tighter. The pits of frictionless dust created a single alley of usable stone between them that led the enemy towards me. I heard a colossal roar the shook the ground and saw a wave of the things thrown free from around Randall, who was tearing through them like paper.

There were so many of these things. I had no clue how they procreated, but however it was, they did it A LOT. Hundreds of the monsters poured out of the tunnels above us. I snarled in annoyance. "Alright, everyone group up." I bellowed. "I have a plan!"

Bulling through the enemies, I headed for where I'd left Valk protecting my cousin and Celine. Benny had stuck with his girlfriend and was putting all his unique tricks to good use, but when we all got close together again I made a gesture to Abel, who bumped his fist with Valk, then cupped a hand and created a massive blue simulacrum as a shield.

"Alright. I assume we don't have long." I nodded to Abel, who winced and returned the gesture, one of his hands clenching. "Mel, can you create a massive firebomb on a time delay? Pack a ton of flame into a sphere or something and launch it up into the air?"

The red masked woman shrugged. "Don't see why not. Worst case I just set it up to blow when it hits the ceiling. Why? I thought you said no big fire blasts because it would cook us all?"

I reached into my bag and pulled out a sparkling sphere made of chips of diamond. "This. From what Giancarlo said it'll keep us totally protected while it's up. You can't attack through it, but if you send up the attack we can raise it pretty fast. Granted, we can't take it DOWN, and we'll need to wait an hour for it to come down. I figure that works anyway because it'll give the room time to cool down."

She chuckled. "Yeah, that'll work." Glancing over at Abel, she said. "Give me a few minutes, hon. I know that has to be painful." He grunted as she cupped her own hands, beginning to condense golden flames into a baseball sized orb of fire. I felt no heat coming off the thing, but it was getting brighter as time went on, the flames becoming denser and more powerful. It was shocking to me that she'd managed to control the heat so well we couldn't even feel it.

"You ready for this?" She asked me as she focused on the orb. I grunted in acknowledgement and she let out a long breath and closed her eyes as she concentrated. After a few minutes, she opened them again, shouted. "Now!" And as soon as the hand construct vanished hurled the sphere straight up. I spat the activation word Giancarlo had given me for the defensive bubble, and a massive white shield wrapped protectively around the group, reaching about ten feet in every direction.

There was a slight shift in the light, and then the bubble was completely drowned in golden radiance as Mel's flame attack burst, completely coating the room in a powerful flame. I heard hundreds of high pitched shrieks as the creatures were all incinerated by the wave of fire, and I whistled as I watched Mel's handiwork.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Damn." I said with amazement. "You weren't messing around." Granted, I imagined having slightly more Impact than the bug things had helped. All her attacks would be just slightly higher level. Still, that kind of power and volume was nuts, and I made a mental note to trade Mel for some flame attacks at some point. Maybe I could help funnel some of her stats into Might. Even as a fire user she couldn't have gotten the kind of focused distribution Jessie had with my help.

She shrugged. As the flames faded, it was shocking to see what became of the room. Melted rock, heat warped air, blackened walls, the whole place was a burnt out graveyard. To my amazement though, the melted rock appeared to be pouring out of the way of the four exits to this place, opening it back up to the rest of the tunnels and letting the heat disperse, albeit slowly.

We sat down to wait, and I passed around some jerky I'd picked up at the bazaar. I wasn't sure what animal it was from, but they had free samples and it was really good. Sort of a naturally spicy red meat, kind of like dehydrated sausage.

Callie busted out some nice smoked cheese she had on her, and Nat ponied up some wine that I didn't have any of, and we all spent the next hour having a mini picnic and chatting over how we were enjoying the dungeon.

Finally, the sphere of energy flickered a bit (an automatic warning built into the thing) and then five minutes later went out, leaving us in a slightly warm but completely survivable room.

"Well, I have to imagine that killed most if not all of them." I said grimly. "But Callie, why don't you do a shadow check just in case." I honestly should have had her do that to start with,but hadn't thought of it. Live and learn, I suppose. Nat wasn't wrong. We'd all survived so it was a good day.

That had a lot to do with the people I surrounded myself with and their abilities, and I was silently grateful for having such good friends to depend on. She nodded, but grinned at me before dropping into the darkness. "Don't forget the loot."

I groaned as she vanished, but triggered my Eye of Revelation, looking around for anything legitimately useful. To my surprise, there was actually a lot. The mantis blades had been actual metal, and as such hadn't been vaporized in the fire. Picking one up I tapped it a few times. "Hey Benny." I called. "Come give me a second opinion on this stuff?"

He walked over to take a look. "Looks like some kind of silver. Probably F-rank based on the fact that it SURVIVED that. My Inventing Skill is decent, but I don't have the same absurd foundation at this point that I started with. The further I go on my own the less that initial knowledge matters. I'd ask a local."

Which was fair. I spun up my scan ring, a screen appearing with Ann-Marie's face in it. "Solomon." She said with a smile. "I didn't expect to hear from you so soon. Everything alright?"

I showed her the room, briefly describing the creatures. She passed it on to her research team, who were able to find the monsters fairly quickly given their unique appearance. After a few minutes, she came back, around the same time as Callie appeared from the shadows. "Apparently the creatures you encountered are called the Rakshari. Some kind of hybrid guard beast of the Binvari empire."

"Makes sense." I said with a grimace. "Nothing that ugly could be naturally occurring. How are they not dead though? Like...what do they eat? Aside from apparently handsome wishmaster candidates."

She snorted. "Personally, I find your resting expression a bit wooden." Callie snickered behind me as the princess continues. "But they seem to eat metal. That's where the blades come from. They consume raw ore and their bodies process it into the scythe blades." I held up the blade, and she asked me to do a few tests before her eyes widened. "Starbreak Silver. There must have been a small pocket of it near the main vein."

I raised an eyebrow. "What exactly is it? It sounds...dramatic. What does starbreak even mean?"

"It's poetic." She said excitedly. "Starbreak silver doesn't break stars. It fractures MOONLIGHT. It's a rare metal that can be made into special mirrors that refract and condense the light of our moon. They can be used to accelerate the condensation of the god Dew. Granted, you still need the flowers for it to work, but they can speed the process immensely."

I started immediately picking the things up and shoving them into my spatial ring. She just laughed. "Don't get too excited. I would imagine there are plenty of other metals mixed in among the Rakshari remains. Starbreak Silver is rare. Still, it will sell for quite the price back in the city."

Thanking her, I started picking up the metal blades after hanging up. Of course, Callie was grabbing them even faster, using shadow tendrils to snatch them up en masse. Once we finished collecting them all, we reoriented and headed further into the tunnels.

The Rakshari were apparently pretty vehement about territory, because it turned out we HAD killed them all. Callie had found no living being in the rest of the mines. When we reached the lower levels where the vaults were, we confirmed that they had in fact emptied out the heartstone. There were however, several caches of secondary metals left behind, including a small stack of partially eaten Starbreak Silver.

We packed it all up, and after we finished up we headed for the surface, happy with our haul and looking to head back to make camp for a while before heading out to look for more ruins. As we emerged from the tunnel though, we froze. Or at least, I froze. I could almost feel Abel and Mel shifting into position behind me, in case we needed to fight.

Staring down at me from the clearing ahead was a large blonde man with a square jaw, seated on a massive steed made of coagulated starlight, a V of similarly seated riders arrayed behind him. His piercing, slate gray eyes were focused on me intently. "Well." Said Gabriel Brightlaw. "I see another team has beaten us to this particular bounty." He gave me a cold smile. "Perhaps we can have a discussion about what you found down there."