A keening wail erupted from every side. Even with Soothe burning steady in his chest to keep him calm and rational, Nikolai couldn’t stop the involuntary wave of goosebumps that raced across his skin at the high pitched sound.

  It was sort of jagged and hollow — not loud enough to deafen, but sharp enough to scrape along his nerves like nails dragged across a blackboard. It carried no breath, no physical source, and that absence made it worse. He felt it in his teeth, in the small bones of his ears, in that primitive animal part of the brain that told him to run.

  To his shock, Kaelith started snickering beside him, then erupted into laughter.

  It was so wildly incongruous that he briefly wondered if she had lost her bloody marbles. Her laugh was giddy, almost feral — mocking, delighted, and utterly disrespectful of the situation.

  “Wraiths!? Really? Against a necromancer!?” she cackled, voice pitching upward with disbelief and amusement.

  The room answered her mirth by filling with ghosts.

  Translucent shapes bled through stone and mortar alike, drifting inward from every wall. What had once been loose garments now whirled around their spectral bodies in hypnotic, swirling patterns — like tattered storm clouds caught in an eternal wind.

  The motion was mesmerizing, almost graceful, and there was a terrible, tragic beauty to them. Their forms were blurred by age and death, but the patterns they made in the air were deliberate. They didn’t attack immediately. Instead, they encircled the trio, drifting into a perfect ring.

  Nikolai swallowed hard, Soothe or not. Wraiths were the kind of enemy he knew you didn’t want to fight unless you had exactly the right tools, how the hell was he supposed to fight ghosts!?

  He tightened his grip on his cane, already calculating angles and spell priorities, bracing for a long, and likely desperate fight for survival.

  Kaelith was still chuckling happily.

  Then she calmly drew a staff from her pouch.

  It was taller than the short woman by a fair margin, slender but ancient looking, and covered in luminous blue inscriptions that crawled along the surface like living sigils. The symbols pulsed faintly, arranged in rings and knots that made his Discerning Eye tingle even without him actively trying to use it.

  The staff felt old in the way an abandoned temple felt old — saturated with memory and power.

  With overly dramatic flair, she tapped the butt of it against the stone floor. The bloody woman did a small spin!

  Nikolai felt the energy surge instantly, a ripple that washed over the air and clung to the walls like a pulse expanding through a drum. The power wasn’t hers — it was the staff itself, humming with an authority that bent the ambient mana around it to its will. He felt a strange echo of pressure, like a door had opened somewhere distant and slammed shut again in the same moment.

  From the blue crystal crowning the staff, ethereal chains burst forth — one for each wraith.

  The chains were ghost-iron blue, shimmering with the same runes that coated the staff, and they speared straight into the chests of the circling wraiths. The wail intensified, louder now — fractured by something new. A note of fear. The sound twisted, rising from predatory lament into something hunted and cornered.

  The chains pulled taut.

  Kaelith giggled again — that small, bell-like sound he’d thought kind of cute now vibrating with something more sinister. With a second tap of the staff, she yanked the chains inward, and the wraiths came with them unable to resist the pull.

  The chains thrummed like tightened wire, vibrating with the sheer force of their momentum.

  In seconds, the wraiths collided with the staff and were sucked inward — not like a scene directly out of Ghost Buster, dragging it home and storing it for later. There was no flash. No explosion. No fading screams — just a sudden and total removal of them from reality. Like someone had edited them out of existence mid-sentence.

  The room fell silent.

  Well… silent except for Kaelith’s lingering, smug giggling.

  Nikolai stared at the staff, stunned into dumb awe. Had he come down here alone, he had no doubt at all that even if he had somehow survived the Chimera and the Myrmexen — which he definitely wouldn’t have — the wraiths would have finished him without ceremony. Intangible horrors that ignored armor, flesh, and common sense.

  “What the actual fuck, Kaelith? What was that!?” he burst out, incredulity finally overriding his attempts at emotional management.

  Kaelith turned to him. Her mask still hid her features, but the faint tremor in her shoulders betrayed her amusement. “I am very good at dealing with wraiths,” she said, voice light and cheery, like she was describing being good at baking bread instead of capturing the souls of screaming specters.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Nikolai shook his head and gave up on processing that one for now. There would be time later. Gods knew he had questions, what the hell was that staff!? There were many questions waiting in line now, not least of which was what else she had stuffed into that pouch — or who had stuffed it, or when, or why.

  He sighed. “That is a bloody understatement. Five more to go…”

  Kaelith sobered slightly at that, the seriousness settling back into her posture. “Right. Sorry. I got sort of carried away there,” she admitted, twirling the staff once before letting it hover beside her, point resting against the ground like a patient witness.

  The fourth pole ignited.

  This time, the ceiling cracked open instead of the floor.

  He had expected solid stone beyond at least until they hit the next floor, but instead, a rush of wind and motion preceded the arrival of flying undead creatures, wingbeats thumping against the air like ragged sails caught in a gale. They were fewer than the Myrmexen swarm, but each felt more powerful, his skill telling him these were no chumps.

  The harpies were skeletal-thin, bipedal, and grotesquely bird-humanoid. Two strong legs. Wings instead of arms, ending in clawed, grasping hands that looked like they just made for gory violence.

  Their feathers were patchy, molting, rotting in places, and reeking of cold decay. Their eyes glimmered with a dim, hateful intelligence that felt less like awareness and more like predatory focus.

  “Harpies,” Kaelith said simply, voice flat and calm once more. The battle-mask of her tone was back in place.

  “Harpies. Right,” Nikolai echoed, rolling his shoulders and preparing to actually be useful again.

  “This one will be interesting,” he muttered, mostly to himself. He’d never fought airborne foes before, but he’d been gaming long enough to know the fundamentals: They had to get them on the ground first of all, take away their advantage, turn aerial superiority into a liability. He had a few ideas.

  “Kaelith — I’ll cover us with a shield from above. That’ll preven them from diving on usg. And I might have a way to make them come to us instead,” he said, already shaping mana into a domed barrier overhead.

  Kaelith nodded. “Sure. I have a few ideas as well, but let’s see yours first. I’m curious what my new master has thought up.”

  “The fight has already started, get serious will you…” Nikolai said with a half-grin, nodding toward the first harpy plummeting toward the dome.

  He braced for the impact.

  It struck the shield with a violent ripple. The dome shimmered, not unlike disturbed water from a rock throw. Nikolai exhaled through his nose, feeling the mana drain tug at him. He was at maybe half capacity — the last fight had been melee-heavy, and while the sacrificial mana blade had been efficient, it was also draining.

  The Sacrificial Mana Blade itself was cheap to maintain, but expensive to create. Essence was the real currency there, and if Nikolai had one thing in abundance, it was the ability to steal more. Still, this fight would need setup. They had to ground the harpies, then let Lurk do his thing, the big guy was visibly edging to get at the monsters.

  The third harpy dove in a flurry of wingbeats.

  Nikolai cast Mind Wipe.

  The spell activated, Nikolai’s eyes flashing with darkness briefly.

  Oh like before, it wasn’t perfect against an undead foe, but it distracted it just enough. The harpy veered off, dive ruined, and crashed into the stone floor with a shriek of surprise.

  Surprise, apparently, was still something undead could feel when you slapped them with the magical equivalent of a cognitive wrench in the wheel.

  Lurk needed no encouragement.

  The battered undead brute moved like a furious toddler on caffeine, stomping the harpy’s back to pin it, then decapitating it in a single brutal, fluid motion. The remaining harpies paused their screeching just long enough to register the murder-dome of shields and retaliation beneath them before resuming their aerial harassment.

  Kaelith glanced at Nikolai with interest. “What is that spell called?”

  “Mind Wipe. It stuns the opponent briefly. Not ideal for undead, but apparently just enough,” Nikolai explained, shrugging one shoulder as he focused on reinforcing the mana barrier.

  Kaelith nodded, then sat down cross-legged like she was at a picnic instead of a murder-trial. “Alright. Your show then. Lurk likes easy prey almost as much as terrifying ones.”

  “You’re just going to relax while I do the hard work?” Nikolai asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “You said you wanted this fight, so I am simply following orders, sir,” she said, dryly amused.

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine. But I want to drain the last few. Once we clear the rest, have Lurk pin them for me?”

  “You know,” she said, leaning back on her hands, “the way you refill mana without rest or potions is basically cheating.”

  “That’s the best part,” he said with a grin.

  She laughed once, softer now. “You got it. Just don’t do it too fast. I need mana back too.”

  He nodded — and got to work.

  The next few minutes were a brutal but tidy exercise in magical denial and predictable airborne stupidity. The harpies kept diving the same way, and each time the result was the same: mana-shield ripple, veer, crash, stomp, decapitate. Some of these undead monsters really were stupid.

  He was weirdly glad these were undead actually, if you ignored the smell of course. Undead didn’t improvise. They didn’t innovate. They repeated patterns until you either died or got bored. Once you knew the said patterns, the fight was arithmetic really.

  When the last two harpies hit the ground, Nikolai dismissed the dome, leaned on his cane, and began the slow process of siphoning essence. It took a while, but it was worth every stolen drop. His mana refilled steadily. His reserves swelled. He made sure to store enough for at least one more blade summon, if necessary.

  As Lurk carved apart the final harpy, Nikolai exhaled slowly.

  Kaelith stood, brushed dust off her knees, and nodded. “four more to go.”

  He tapped his cane against the floor. “Yep, have a good rest?”

  She gave him a basic nod and walked toward the room’s center.

  He sighed, but followed.