Something was deeply, deeply wrong with the scene in front of me. There Dalia was, standing in the center of a mangled village without a care in the world. Silver tears streamed from her eyes and fell to the ashen ground where they hissed and bubbled and puffed away into a cold mist that crystallized any remaining rubble around her with frost.

  Before, when I had encountered her the first time, the air had rippled and warped and it felt as though space itself had bent to her will. Mana had streamed off her in unimaginable quantities. But she hadn’t felt like much.

  Now she barely gave off a fraction of the mana she had. The air still rippled, but it was more the type of warping you would see at the end of the visible highway on a hot summer day. Not nearly the near-folding of space itself I had experienced in the first place. However her presence was far, far stronger stronger.

  Human beings, and indeed most beings in the known universe, have a presence. Not just a physical presence—everyone knows that you and I take up physical space, that goes without saying—but a spiritual presence as well, which touches on the subconscious directly. This phenomenon can be seen in the way a crowd hushes when a stranger walks in on a cold winter evening, in the way soft chills tickle your spine if someone is watching you. You can sense their presence, even if you don’t know what it is.

  There are very few exceptions, and those exceptions have proved themselves more of a threat than some of the strongest creatures out there many times over.

  Presences in this world are often a direct link to the instincts and the fundamental desires of the soul. Methods and skills have been developed to defend against this, of course, but everything has its limits and its weaknesses. The same goes for skills.

  And if she had a skill for her presence, it was even more important that I kept the others away from her. She would overrun them in a matter of seconds, shattering their psyches and subjecting them to the overwhelming tyranny of the moon. Like she had done to me, only much worse.

  Dalia’s presence felt antarctic. It wore away at the soul like gale-driven snow and ice with the slow, steady efficiency that sailors and scientists feared above all. It drilled into the mind and slowed the wits. Moving became hard; thinking became harder. And if it was this way for me even with my Mind of Steel achievement, I hated to think what it would be like for the others.

  “Guys,” I said softly, trying to avoid the witch’s attention for the time being, “I think it’s about time for you to take up your positions.” I started to push them towards the edge of the forest and out of the clearing. This was going to be even more dangerous than I had realized.

  They were sluggish to respond, Harald even answering with a slurred “Huh?” before shambling back from that oppressive aura. It took a dozen or so yards but they eventually got their act together and started whispering to each other, casting nervous glances over their shoulders at the figure in the town center.

  I turned back to my task, no longer paying any attention to my jittery comrades. They would watch my back, keeping any maddened beasts off of me as I did battle with the titanic power in front of me. They were a higher level than me, so they could at least do that better than I could. I was infinitely better suited to my task, though, and I was fairly certain I could sense a feeling of relief in the air behind me. Amusing.

  Pushing ahead felt like walking uphill. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but something was certainly resisting my advance. Her presence made me think of a castle built at the top of a high mountain—an inky black fortress, solid and sturdy with ice on the windowsills and jagged stone crenelations. I felt so small in the face of that vast outline, like I was hanging from a spire in a wrought-iron cage, exposed to the biting cold.

  And this was only a small piece of whatever god had looked on her.

  It was unnerving, but I wasn’t cowed. There was no point either way, as killing her was my only chance of getting out of the dungeon alive. I had to do that, which meant backing down wasn’t really an option. Even worse, if I did leave and come back another day when I was more prepared, there would be a whole other litany of problems waiting to be addressed in the form of the plague of madness currently running around on this floor.

  As I got closer to Dalia, her presence became subtly stronger. It infringed on the edges of my mind like darkness outside the window waiting to be let in. A creeping thing, insidious and terrible, threatening to sever the tenuous link I had to my sanity. Nothing I couldn’t resist, but it just added one more thing for me to focus on. Thankfully, she was facing away from me, otherwise the presence would have been many times worse.

  I got so wrapped up in my own head that I nearly missed the sigils on the ground. They were glowing a soft silver, barely noticeable in the late morning, partially camouflaged by what I thought must have been a crudely inscribed concealment symbol.

  Don’t blame me, I was never very good with the Archai. They just didn’t have the sort of appeal to me as they did others.

  Now that I focused on them, I realized the ground was covered in a sea of silver glyphs. They tried to brush my consciousness aside, and if I hadn’t been actively looking for them I would have walked right onto the traps set for me. The difficulty was, I couldn’t find a path through them.

  See, that’s the thing that’s so unrealistic about trap halls in all those stories out there. In those stories, there’s always a way through without getting caught. The protagonist could dodge their way through the spikes and flame-throwers; they could spritz some sort of aerosol solution into the air to be able to see the lasers and do a ballerina dance without touching them.

  The real world isn’t so kind. In the modern world, those spikes and flame-throwers are set off in tandem so an intruder gets skewered and burnt to a crisp before they can make it a quarter of the way through the room. Aerosol and ballerina dances do not work on lasers. The same goes for magical trap runes.

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

  There was just no way for me to get at Dalia without setting off at least one of the runes. But the question was, could I set off all the runes?

  Now you may think the madness was starting to get to me here, but let me tell you I actually had a perfectly good reason for it. See, every last one of those runes was a trap. I knew they were traps. It didn’t matter if all the thing did was let out a tiny puff of smoke and then die, it was still a trap set by the enemy. And every one of them I could get off the field now without hurting me was one I no longer had to worry about in the middle of battle. So, how could I do it? How could I set them all off?

  Well, the answer was simple. At least, in theory it was. Magical symbols of this kind were set off by some kind of trigger. The trigger couldn’t be random, otherwise how would the trap know to go off at a specific time when the target was in range? But it also couldn’t be too specific, as Dalia was defending against all things human. So the question was, what was within those specifications that I could use to trigger the traps?

  Blood. Blood was the answer. Human blood. My blood.

  I rummaged through a nearby pile or rubble until I found a piece of rock that looked right. Lifting it closer to my face, I examined it more closely. It was a piece of what once had been a foundation, now shattered into countless shards. Sharp and hard and perfect for the job.

  The sharp stone slid cleanly down my outer forearm—inner forearms and palms are stupid places to cut, as they risk unintended blood-loss and hinder movement due to the amount of important muscles and blood vessels that reside there. It was like drawing a running electrical wire across my skin.

  Wine-red blood welled up, flowing slightly quicker when I flexed to bring more to the surface. It smelled of steel and salt, mixing with a cold sweat which had broken out across my extremities upon entering the witch’s presence. I scraped it onto the edge of my makeshift knife little by little, squeezing it drop by drop out of my rapidly scabbing capillaries. The wound wouldn’t stay open for very long, given, as it was, by an un-tiered material and without killing intent behind the cut.

  I let the blood drip from the stone onto a small pile of dirt and gravel I had gathered until every part of it was covered in red, then kept adding more until the blood stopped flowing. Then I rubbed the entire pile between my hands to make sure the blood permeated the whole pile and that none of it clumped together.

  This whole process may seem awfully similar to a blood sacrifice ritual, but let me tell you the two are vastly different. You will find out just how different later. For now, just take my word on it. This small bleeding and such dark things have no place being in even the same room together. It’s like comparing a battlefield to a blood draw. Just thinking about such magic makes me shiver. Still, it must be addressed, as it is a part of the past—but not yet. Not nearly yet.

  Having finished with my preparations, I took one last look at the surroundings in preparation for the battle ahead. We were in the same place I had fought the witch the last time, but after that my memories were quite hazy. I had no recollection of ever making it to Dalia in the first place, only those unnatural eyes and their infinite, twisting patterns…

  Body blinked.

  …What was that? Something had just happened, and it felt like I had slipped for a second. I looked down at my hands. They were in a different position than I had held them earlier, curled in a ready position instead of calmly at my sides. Huh? How had that happened? Was it something I had been thinking? Something about those eyes and their deep, abyssal white infinities…

  Body shifted.

  …I caught myself right before I stepped down onto the nearest sigil. That had been too close. Alright, note to self, do not think about that. Moving on. In any case, the next thing I remembered was waking up half dead and in the middle of a fight with that stupid semi-sentient tree of all things. Right. And that was why I had brought friends along with me this time. Hopefully they were up to the task of dealing with the treant. They had better be, or else I was going to have a really bad day yet again.

  The surroundings had changed drastically from the original village scenery. Debris was scattered everywhere. Bits of metal and wood had been shot into the earth so rapidly they ploughed six inch deep gashes into solid stone. Shattered foundations lay in their broken heaps among bent and twisted iron tools. The blacksmith’s anvil had been pounded to dust along with its ashen counterpart. Its corresponding building was nothing but a charred hillock of jagged remains pushed outward in a roughly semi-circular shape.

  The town, which had once been so full of life and laughter was now nothing more than a graveyard for crumbled homes and razed gardens. It was quite sad, really.

  Rage boiled inside of me. This… this… monster had crushed the generational work of tens of families. She had ruined the lives of hundreds of people. And for what, her business being taken by a more skillful craftsman? Pathetic.

  I wound up to throw the blood coated gravel and dirt in my hand. Throwing had never been my strong suit, so I took a little longer to focus on where I wanted the grit to go and how I wanted it to fly. Adjusting accordingly, I uncoiled my core and released.

  A cloud of repurposed debris flew from my palm, spreading out across nearly ten yards of faintly argent rubble before sprinkling down with a light clatter.

  Every inch of solid ground within a five yard radius of Dalia erupted. Flashing explosions, hissing splats of acid, bursts of wind, spikes, and even flights of stone darts burst into the air with a WHOOMP so loud my ears were left completely deaf for seconds on end. A tide of pressurized air lifted me off my feet and hurled me bodily across the town. I crashed to the packed earth in a tumble of arms and legs and clothes tattered from shrapnel.

  When my hearing finally did come back, I was still lying there on the ground, joints creaking, blood running down my face from a myriad of small cuts and a faintly broken nose that corrected itself almost immediately. I was as surprised at that as you probably are.

  I stood shakily to my feet, rolling my shoulders and shaking my head to clear the high-pitched whining sound in my ears. I spat out a mouthful of gravel pieces for good measure. Yuck. They tasted of worms and the occasional beetle as well as a token dirt splotch.

  Anger was immediately replaced with pain. Aches ticked themselves off in my head. Unnaturally compressed spine? Check. Bruised hips? Check. Scraped knees and elbows? Check? Hyper stressed diaphragm, dislocated stomach, medium-rare liver, and kidneys that felt as though some MMA fighter had taken their best shot at pulverizing them? All check.

  Turning back towards Dalia, I breathed a heavy sigh. She hadn’t been harmed in the least. Of course she hadn’t. All those spells had been directed at whoever the intruder might be. They were intentionally designed not to cause her any damage.

  The pain rolled back into anger once again. But that was quickly doused with an icy wave of fear. Not the sort of nervous fear you might experience looking down a couple-yard cliff, but the sort of paralyzing, nerve-rending, heart-pounding terror that only stems from base instinct. The fear of a predator in the darkness, of razor fangs and gleaming eyes. Fear the An Dreores had given me, only multiplied tenfold.

  Dalia hadn’t moved. She hadn’t even flinched when the explosion had rocked the town. Not even a finger had twitched.

  But now her head was turning towards me. Further… further… further… A series of hollow pops echoed in the resounding silence as her silver eyes rotated to lock onto me, head and neck turning a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Those chilling orbs of pure silver filled with nothing but fury, bloodlust, and pure, unadulterated madness.