Archmund Granavale was a bit of an idiot savant.

  This was the thought that went through Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio’s head as she watched him burst out of the Dungeon, limbs infused with furiously surging magics, and rush into the sunset.

  He hadn’t even spared a second gnce for the carriages.

  It was baffling. By all accounts, he had advanced his power in leaps and bounds, and he’d dispyed a surprising acumen in event pnning even if his decorum was… rough around the edges.

  But then again, though he was wasteful and inefficient, oftentimes he got results simply by bashing his head against the impossible until it yielded. She couldn’t begrudge him that.

  And all that was why she’d decided to let the Dungeon develop freely , after the first time she’d come to Granavale County. She’d seen how he’d acted, saw a mirror of herself, and decided that maybe he was worth giving a chance she’d never gotten for herself.

  She wrote a few notes into her Gem-Encrusted Journal, and to her surprise she received insights into his thoughts, and so she sent the carriage after him.

  With the Lord Reginald Granavale directing the town’s militia, she was unambiguously the highest-ranking noble in the area, even in her guise as Mercy Stirpstredecim di Omnio — for even the branches of that noble tree towered above all other shrubs. At the first signs of danger, “the Princess” had “fled to safety”, but in actuality she’d just slipped into her disguise, the one where she could cast magic freely and abundantly and let the energy of the universe course through her without any regard for propriety or appearances.

  Without the local lord and heir present, the youngest child from a distant Imperial branch family outranked the other local nobles. And so she was here running the defense.

  It was just theatre, though. Her real goal was to plug the monsters at the source.

  Something that she would’ve done earlier, if she hadn’t been impressed by Archmund’s reckless bravery.

  Both of them had made mistakes.

  In her guise as Mercy, agent of the Omnio, the Princess carried with her a Diamond of Annuation.

  It was a dodecahedron the size of her fist, far rger than the Gems she usually carried and cast her personal magics with, and it was not to be used lightly.

  In the short term, it would act as a seal that stopped Monsters from pouring out of the Dungeon. But it was also so much more.

  The Diamond of Annuation fell within the css of Gems that were closer to weapons of mass destruction than small arms, closer to a battleship or a zeppelin than a sword or a crossbow: the Gems of Worldsoul.

  The existence of these Gems was officially a state secret, but practically she knew that everyone in her family (who mattered), everyone in the Empire’s secret police and intelligence agency, every high-ranking member of the Church, every Master in the Arcane University, and an unknown number of brave adventurers knew about them.

  These Gems of Worldsoul differed from regur Gems in very specific ways. They had immensely deep magical reservoirs, so deep that it would take an entire lifetime for a person who Attune themselves to it. Very little of the magic poured into the Gem would flow back to its casters, but that magic had a real chance of being deeply porized, instantly leaving a permanent mark upon the casters with a single encounter. It took immense magical strength or force of will to resist the power of a Gem of Worldsoul.

  She’d never used the Diamond of Annuation before — others had been responsible for taming the Dungeons she’d helped clear previously— but she’d had an encounter with another Gem of Worldsoul, and it had changed how she’d seen the world permanently.

  The Diamond of Annuation was, frankly, weaker than the one she’d once touched. It served a different purpose.

  When the Diamond of Annuation was filled to about five percent of its magical capacity, it could be pointed at a Dungeon by its caster. It would start draining its own magic rapidly, burning through whatever had been fed to it, to seep into the cracks and crevices of the Dungeon.

  Within the Dungeon, it would strangle the building miasma, harnessing the grudges of the dead in the way lesser Gems harnessed the willingly-given souls of the living, like a strangler vine. It would give those dead back to the Dungeon, but in predictable and knowable deys. The reaction became self-sustaining — it harvested the miasma of the dead to create more of the dead. A trellis, for the strangler vine that was Dungeon miasma. The unpredictable booms and busts of Dungeon spawns and escapes would be transformed into regurly-scheduled Monster spawns.

  And the Monsters would be weakened. The quality of the weapons and Gems they dropped would be capped, since the grudges and dark miasma that composed them would be wicked away by the Diamond of Annuation as it guided them along the trellis. “Leveling out the power curve” was the parnce adopted by the power brokers of her family.

  The Diamonds of Annuation were one of the secret weapons of the Omnio Family, and how it had kept its grip over the Empire uncontested for so long.

  When Dungeons appeared, if they were given free reign, the Omnio could activate a Diamond of Annuation, drawing on the power of their Sacred Guard, in order to tame the Dungeons. That would make the Dungeons more manageable and more predictable, exactly the sorts of pces fledgling adventurers could go to cut their teeth before seeking out more dangerous and lucrative work. A life of Dungeoneering could be made to seem predictable, explicable, safe. A full and stable career, even if the Diamond of Annuation sapped the dark energies of the Dungeon, eventually causing it to run dry.

  Everyone always assumed that the Omnio Dungeon, the Sacred Dungeon, the Arcane Dungeon, and the Frontier Dungeon had longevity stretching for thousands of years because they were special, not because other Dungeons were being suppressed.

  But this was the exact sort of thing Archmund Granavale didn’t want around his neck like an albatross — an imposition from outside that reduced his potential in exchange for safety. At least, that was how she thought of him. He seemed far too smart to act as dangerously reckless as he did.

  She’d respected that, frankly. She understood where he was coming from. If she could’ve broken free of her obligations and sought power on her own, if she’d been strong enough, she would’ve.

  And so she had given him a chance.

  A chance to break free in the way he imagined. The chance she wished had been given to her.

  But he was too softhearted. He cared too much about the wellbeing of his people, and so he’d held this admittedly impressive dueling tournament, fattening them up so the Dungeon’s Monsters could take a fuller bite from their bellies.

  And he wasn’t, to her disappointment, strong enough to hold back the full forces of the Dungeon. He needed her help to clear the first level. He didn’t have an army strong enough to suppress the unpredictable bursts of monsters escaping the Dungeon. And he hadn’t kept it quiet.

  So it fell to her to keep his people and the Empire safe.

  When she was five, her uncle, the Grand Commander of the Omnio Imperial Military, had brought her and her cousin to the Frontier in a battletank, a mobile fortress what was like a ship but on nd.

  “This is what happens when a Dungeon’s not tamed properly,” he’d said, sweeping his hand against the wilderness, which spiraled with illogic. Purple-leafed forests stood right next to with bck-sanded deserts and cliffs of floating stone. “The power of the dead suffuses the world of the living, and all sense vanishes.”

  “How did this happen?” her cousin had asked.

  “Quite simple, son. A Dungeon opened, and no one fought it fast enough.”

  “So our Dungeon won’t cause this?”

  He’d been referring to the Omnio Dungeon, which y beneath the Imperial Capital and was a continuing source of their family’s power and wealth.

  The Grand Commander chuckled. “Well now, kids. Stopping that will be your job, once we get back home.”

  In retrospect, that whole excursion would’ve been a perfect opportunity to assassinate her and remove her from the line of succession to improve her cousin’s chances, which honestly expined why she trusted her uncle so much.

  As much as she personally liked Archmund, he was not at the level that he needed to be to stand as the primary defender of Granavale County.

  And so she’d made the executive decision to activate a Diamond of Annuation.

  Princess Angelina had received a full education befitting the heir to the Empire, at least for her tender age. She knew how the circuit of the soul worked. She knew, fundamentally, that magic channeled through Gems either strengthened the body or strengthened the soul, and people who did both were rare even among the idle leisure css.

  She needed people who had the power of the soul, people with high magical capacities. Not many, just two or three, but ideally ones whose spirits were already hardened and shaped, so they wouldn’t be unduly influenced by the spirit of the Gem.

  There were some people who could assess others’ magical capacity simply by looking at them, or by feeling vague ripples in nature when they passed through. She was not one of them. She had to make physical contact to perform that assessment.

  But it had been btantly obvious that Raehel was wearing the robes of master mage despite looking oddly young. The University only granted Master rank to those who had Awakened at least three Gems.

  And there was something about how everyone’s motions around Sister Catherine were distorted in the fight that suggested an unnatural outpouring of magic. Though she couldn’t tell if the other girl had Skills or Blessings. But there was little difference to the Gems of Worldsoul.

  Gelias Greenroot and Beatrice Bckstone had directed their power into the physical world. And as an elf, Gelias had access to completely different innate Skills than the average human.

  While they were more than capable of steamrolling untrained peasants, she frankly hoped that there wouldn’t be any Monsters coming their way. Maybe Archmund and Lord Granavale had confidence that their intervention would be good enough to stop the Monsters from getting to the townspeople. She didn’t share that faith.

  She had one job here:

  Stop the Monsters from pouring out of the Dungeon, and in doing so tame Granavale County.

  One day, perhaps, Archmund would forgive her — but if his home was rendered economically inert, he’d have all the more reason to leave.

  And she could find a pce besides her for one as sharp as him.