Right. I had forgotten one of the things that Cerea had mentioned about the Sight Flayers. Specifically, about their eye-laser attack.

  Whenever the Sight Flayer caught someone in its grasp, its primary goal was to fry the prey’s brain. Easiest way to do so was to use those powerful beams of energy that its eyes could generate, firing them straight through the prey’s eyes to both blind them and vaporize their brains through the ocular nerve path. I had only intuited that last bit.

  There were other methods they apparently preferred, including driving their tendrils through a subject’s nostrils straight to the brain and then physically ripping it apart. Gruesome.

  But right now, against Cerea, the Sight Flayer was trying the former.

  To no effect.

  In fact, to its own detriment. Through the many encounters that generations of adventurers had gone through against the creature, a mass-produced means of dealing with that deadly ocular attack had been discovered. Essentially, they were reflective masks.

  Turned out the monsters’ eye-attack was almost entirely light-based. In other words, a powerful, magically-prepared mirror could reflect the blast back upon the attacker.

  Which was Cerea’s goal.

  Generally, the masks were worn as a deterrent. The monsters were smart enough to recognize reflective surfaces would be terrible for them, so most people who were able to spare enough cash to acquire them just wore them as deterrents. But Cerea had a way to put the mask on instantly. She had her Aspect of Dimensions, and therefore surprise, on her side.

  So, as the monster’s eyes fired off several beams straight at her face, her Aspect made the mask materialize right where she needed it to appear.

  The beams connected against the shiny, porcelainlike material, intensifying for the brief instant that it struck, then fired off it. Cerea’s mask wasn’t a perfect mirror. After all, they were supposed to be wards against the monster’s eye blasts, not really meant to flash them straight back at the monster. As such, their curved surfaces really weren’t meant for that sort of reflection.

  I had to dive out of the way, and I was sure I heard Khagnio curse in the general clamour. But several of the beams did reflect right back at the monster.

  With a shriek, the Sight Flayer released its deadly grip on Cerea. She was finally able to drop back to her feet, staggering away from the injured creature. Its tendrils were lashing out in agony once again, but we were distant enough for it to not be a worry.

  More importantly, it was time for us to take advantage.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted.

  Khagnio was already acting. The third knife he threw was no less effective than the others. I had so much faith in the Scalekin rogue that I was using Infusion even before the blade had sunk into the Sight Flayer’s brain-body. As soon as the blade had struck, its target crashed to the ground, harder than any of its companions had done so far.

  Ugnash, as practiced, was already jumping high. I was using Infusion on him next, raising his weight by orders of magnitude as he crashed in.

  The last Sight Flayer fell the same as its brethren, quashed under Ugnash’s massively boosted weight. As it died, its remnant rose up in black motes. But just as with the very first Sight Flayer we had killed, there were no more monsters, so the black energy just dissipated.

  We all breathed out heavy sighs of relief. It was finally done.

  “We’ll take a little break here,” Ugnash said. “Rest and clean up, then we’ll forge onwards. I think we’ve got a decent haul.”

  He meant the loot we were collecting from the monsters so far. We had gathered a good chunk of things to take back to the guild for now.

  As we settled down, I checked my status again. Nine hours. Safer to assume closer to eight since the Weave liked to round things up. It was hard to believe we had already spent that long in the dungeon.

  I took a deep, calming breath. There was enough time. Ugnash reassured me again that we’d be fine. I trusted his judgment.

  “Why don’t people do that?” I asked after we actually settled down. It had been a little hard to find a good spot to rest, what with the squashed remains of the Sight Flayers taking up a significant chunk of the available space. “Like, just go a small distance into the dungeon, gather up all the little treasures, then take that back to the guild to sell off.”

  “Are you suggesting how we could farm the tendrils from the tunnel that was flooded with them?” Cerea asked.

  “Yeah, exactly. It seems like a missed opportunity to not take advantage of that. Keeps you safe while giving you a decent profit.”

  Khagnio shook his head. “Na?ve little mageling.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “It’s—”

  Ugnash was interrupted when Khagnio cursed loudly and scooted away.

  “Keep your distance, you disgusting brute,” he hissed. “You stink of dead brains and squished eyes.”

  Ugnash gave Khagnio a flat stare.

  Cerea chuckled. “That strategy was effective once upon a time, Ross. Care to guess why it isn’t anymore?”

  I didn’t have to think hard. Basic economics was a decent help. “Because people did that so much, there’s too many tendrils and other basic loot you can acquire from the dungeon in circulation. If you want to make a real profit, you need to delve deeper and find the real treasures the dungeon offers.”

  “Exactly.” Cerea smirked at Khagnio. “I had to explain that to you, you scaly hypocrite. Ross here just explained it to me.”

  “Oh shut it, your hairless ape. I don’t know why all of you have to be so insufferable. First you with your fancy mask reflecting those lasers everywhere. Then there’s mageling devising a half-a-minute-kill tactic to take down multiple Sight Flayers. Can’t you underachieve for once, for Pit’s sake?”

  Cerea and I just looked at each other and grinned. Meanwhile, Ugnash sulked a little bit away from the rest of us, still trying to clean off the dead monster gunk from his boots. Poor guy. He did stink, though.

  Ugnash suggested taking power naps for a few hours if we could. I protested at first. Even if we wouldn’t need too long to reach the dungeon’s centre, better to get there quickly anyway. Better to be safe than sorry.

  “Relax, mageling,” Khagnio said.

  “How can I relax?” I asked. No, snapped, more like. “My mana core wants to explode!”

  “Yes, and it’ll kill us all too if we’re not out of this dungeon by the time you decide to pop. You see any of us panicking?”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “I’m not panicking.” I sighed. “Alright, compromise—two hours of rest, maximum. Please.”

  Khagnio shook his head. For once, the baring of his teeth wasn’t unkind. “Alright, alright, I’ll wake you all up.”

  “Don’t worry, Ross,” Cerea said with an encouraging smile. “When my mana core was awakening, my master had me exercise for several days straight with minimum breaks and then strung me upside down for a whole day to get my blood flowing to my core.”

  Her silly little story about her core awakening helped me settle down. It was interesting to learn that her core manifested around her brain rather than how it did in the sternum for me.

  Getting some rest early on was probably good because the deeper areas would test us a lot more. Enough that we had no guarantees if we would be able to get another opportunity to rest and recuperate like we were doing now.

  My mind was still buzzing a little too much to fall asleep easily. Aside from the imminent mana implosion, all the things with the Sight Flayers and Cerea’s mirror mask had turned the gears in my brain. I hadn’t been paying as much attention to my Illumination Aspect, especially since I had received the advice to treat it like a supportive complement to my other Aspects.

  But could I treat it as something that could offensively hold its own? Well, there was the obvious laser route. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about creating them. What did I even know about lasers…

  They needed some kind of chamber filled with a medium where the particles could be excited sufficiently enough to release their energy as light. As photons? Yes, powerful photons, I was pretty sure. And there were mirrors involved, for certain.

  Damnit. I was sure I was missing a few key details in that basic approximation of the process. If I had known holding a physics degree would have been more helpful for my future, then I’d have switched majors back in college in a heartbeat. There should be more information about it somewhere out there in Zairgon, though. I just had to find it.

  But it didn’t matter. This world didn’t care about the laws of physics. With sufficient control over mana, I could theoretically create beams even stronger than the ones the Sight Flayers used.

  But lasers weren’t my concern just now. I had seen Cerea reflect them. Could I replicate that process with my Illumination Aspect?

  I didn’t feel like I got much of a nap. It had to have been a few hours, but it felt like I had just closed my eyes and managed to drift off to a dreamless slumber before I was being woken up.

  “Get up,” came a warbled voice. Then it turned into an urgent hiss that dragged along my unconsciousness like an edged blade. “Wake up. Now.”

  I blinked my eyes open, a little groggy, to see I was being stared at. By the eyes on the walls. So many…

  Alarm spiked through me and drove away the rest of my drowsiness as I shot to my feet. The others were rising too. It was Khagnio who had been keeping watch.

  “They’re crying…” I said. “They’re crying lava.”

  They were. Not only had the eyes emerged and filled up the entirety of the chamber such that I couldn’t even see any stretch of solid rock anywhere around us save for the floor. At least a good third of them were crying out runny, burning liquid magma, slowly seeping out from around them to pool on the floor. The room was oven-hot, gradually filling up with smoke.

  “Let’s move,” Ugnash said, doing well to hide the quaver in his voice. Creepy didn’t even begin to cover what we were witnessing, so I didn’t blame him in the slightest for being disquieted.

  We got going, leaving the chamber with the weird eyes behind. Cerea didn’t offer any explanations as to where they had come from. Maybe they had grown out right through the walls in the few hours we had been resting.

  “I just saw a few pop up at first so I didn’t pay much attention,” Khagnio said. “But before I knew it, there were dozens everywhere, all of them staring at us.”

  I could imagine how unnerving that must have felt to be the only one awake and facing down all those wall-eyes that just kept growing and growing in number…

  “Then they started crying lava and I got properly spooked,” Khagnio said.

  When even the Scalekin bastard was admitting fear, things were definitely not looking good.

  At least I was able to forget about them as we kept moving forward. We walked for a good long while without meeting any real obstacles. Some more wall-eyes popped up, and some more slimes with eyeballs in them as well.

  We also met more of the flying eyeballs. They just hovered in unannounced like they owned the place, making me stop in my tracks for a second.

  The first one I encountered snapped its stony eyelids at me like sort of warning growl. When I didn’t respond, it flew at me like it had been launched from a slingshot.

  I didn’t need to react. Khagnio’s quick, accurate swipe with his dagger took it out.

  “We should take a few of those,” Cerea said. “They’re not that different from the other mana cores we’ve been collecting, but they can float, and that adds additional properties some people find useful.”

  “So the fact that they can float makes them a little different from, say, the mana cores in the slimes?” I asked as I took down my first one. It had gone down with a handy blow from my new mace. The first time I was using it for real. It felt good. Solid. Satisfying.

  “Yes. Cores that allow different properties are a little different from each other. Technically, the mana cores we collected from the Sight Flayers possess that property also, but it comes with a bunch of other ingrained properties that people looking for only flight stuff might not care about. See what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I think I do. Though, I’m left curious as to what exactly people would even use cores for?”

  “They’re what’s used to create the runes! Or, they’re an important ingredient, at least. Since cores pulled from bodies are essentially a tangible expression of mana, they can be tapped into for things like artifices and other mana-driven devices too.”

  “Pulled from bodies… so if someone killed me, for instance, they’d be able to pull my core from my body too?”

  Khagnio laughed. “Now you’re thinking like a real undercity dweller, mageling.”

  Cerea glared at Khagnio like a mother chastising the influence of a horrible uncle. “It’s possible, yes, but people’s cores aren’t as easy to extract as monsters’. Plus, it’s illegal pretty much everywhere.”

  “Laws are just sug—”

  Cerea thwacked Khagnio on the back.

  “Oi!” He pulled his frown off Cerea to give me a snide look. “It’s alright, mageling. If you’re worried about your core, we can make an arrangement to get it… preserved once you’re gone.”

  “What about making an arrangement for your core when you’re gone, Khagnio?” I asked.

  Cerea laughed at the Scalekin’s answering scowl.

  It felt like it took another hour of walking before things changed in a meaningful way. We were all moving along when Khagnio reappeared, once again with an urgent warning. And once again, I hadn’t even seen him disappear in the first place.

  “Something’s coming,” he said. “Get ready.”

  He didn’t say Sight Flayer specifically, so now I was curious. My heart thudded as my mace found its way into my hands. I froze.

  Those were…

  “Footsteps?” Ugnash growled low under his breath.

  Khagnio’s troubled expression was all the answer we received.

  My mind raced. Was there another adventurer team trawling through the dungeon? Was it even allowed for multiple adventurer teams to strike out in the same area? Considering the guild wanting intra-party conflicts minimized was the main reason for confiscating all acquired treasure, wanting inter-party conflicts minimized probably came with its own set of rules.

  I didn’t get to ask about that, though. The footsteps grew louder. Our visitor was almost upon us.

  It was another Scalekin. A weirdly familiar one. I squinted at the precisely ripped clothes, at the knives hanging from the bandolier around the undercity dweller’s waist.

  “A Roaring Claw?” I asked in a whisper. “What in the—”

  “There you are!” the Scalekin with silvery scales said. “You took your sweet time getting here. We were almost worried all our preparations had gone to waste because you lot went and died to the stupid dungeon monsters.”

  “What in the Pits are you doing here, you snake?” Khagnio asked.

  I wanted to point out the ironic hilarity of Khagnio calling anyone a snake, but we were all a bit too taken aback by the arrival of a Roaring Claw member.

  “Why,” he said, grinning with his little fangs. “Just leading your next obstacle towards you.”

  A few things happened at once immediately afterwards, which made it difficult for me to react.

  The telltale sparking swish of the Sight Flayers’ tentacles came a few seconds before the monsters themselves arrived. And there wasn’t one or even three of them this time. I was sure I counted at least half a dozen, all jostling in behind one another, vying for space and the opportunity to rip into their targets.

  The more alarming development came next. High above us, the walls cracked and then broke apart, several chunky rocks crashing down. I and the rest of my party had to jump back.

  A rope slithered down, just far enough for the jumping Claw to grab it before being pulled up into the large hole that had opened. Did this dungeon have secret walls and things like that? I couldn’t start wondering about that because, aside from the Roaring Claw members high up in the new tunnel opening, there was someone else there who was familiar.

  “Zoltan!” I shouted incredulously. “That you?”