Jay was welcomed back by Cinri’s family with enthusiasm. And another meal. If they knew about Cinri’s goal and the argument they’d had about it, no one showed any signs of it. She didn’t say anything about it when she sat down at the long table, though she very pointedly avoided looking in his direction.

  He couldn’t even manage to signal her to meet downstairs from how hard she was avoiding him. So instead, when the meal ended, he headed down to the room they’d planned in initially and hoped she would show up on her own. And waited. And waited. And waited.

  Eventually she walked in, coming to an abrupt stop when she saw he was there. “Why are you in my room?”

  “Your room?”

  “Half of it. Why. Are. You. Here?”

  Half of the room was hers or this was only half of her room? Neither idea made any real sense, but Jay threw that in the pile of things to get an answer to later and settled for answering her question. “I found a solution.”

  Agensyx hummed in the back of his mind.

  “We found a solution, Agensyx and I, to the issue about me being too weak to take care of things.” Jay still didn’t want to say it out loud, not with how many people were in the house around them.

  Cinri sighed as she moved around the table. “Unless you jumped a few dozen levels, I don’t think you have even a shadow of a chance of that.” She pulled out a chair and sat. “But I’ll hear out whatever half-baked plan you and your snake stumbled on.”

  Jay sat opposite her. “There’s a training ground in the monastery. It seems like it can generate an infinite amount of fake creatures that count – just barely – as things that I can affect with my spells.”

  “And you think numbers will be enough to solve the leveling issue?” She scoffed. “It’s not that easy. Your kind of Class can only affect things within a certain range of your own ability. If you haven’t discovered that limitation yet, you will soon.”

  “Maybe. They can kick my ass, though. Collectively for sure and probably individually too. You can’t tell me with a straight face that you think that wouldn’t even the odds,” Jay insisted.

  “It might tip the scales a little bit. The slightest possible amount. You’re level two –”

  “Three.”

  “Fine, three, but you’re still level three and he’s at least ten times that. There’s not much that you could do that would actually be able to touch him. Weren’t you just level two, anyway?”

  “Training hall. Infinite creatures,” Jay reminded her.

  “Then clearly you needed the practice. That’s the only way anyone ever levels up that fast,” Cinri said. “That’s not a good thing, if you couldn’t tell.”

  “Yeah, I got that, thanks.” Jay tapped the table. “Look, this is the only option I have to offer. You can poke all the holes you want in it, but it’s this or nothing.”

  “Or I can go back and find someone else,” she said.

  “You and I both know that if anyone was willing to take you up on this, you wouldn’t have even still been there. You said as much yourself,” he reminded her. “So again, it’s this or nothing.”

  “I can find someone. I know it.” That didn’t sound convincing. They could both tell that it was rooted in denial.

  There were a hundred different cutting remarks Jay could make to that, a hundred different ways he could ask variations of “how long did you try” and “then why didn’t you the first time.” They all felt like dickish things to say; he didn’t voice any of them.

  He just got up and left, returning to the bedroom he’d claimed the night before. Cinri didn’t think he could help out even with the training zombies? He’d just have to prove her wrong. After all, he’d agreed to help. And for something like this, how could he go back on that agreement?

  *

  When Jay woke up the next morning, he was greeted with a slew of notifications about all the training-dummy zombies having “dissipated” – in the System’s phrasing – overnight. Valuable enough information, even if it did make him question why Alister hadn’t had the same happen. He returned to the training hall and rebuilt the horde, wincing as the stain on his left hand manifested on his right one as well.

  This time he chose three, specifically the last three, and invested Divinity into those. The golden material formed shards like fragments of a gem this time and they showed up on the creatures like an outlined triangle in the center of their foreheads, with veins of gold stretching out from there. He didn’t know what effect that would have on these things, but he hoped it’d be something impactful enough to justify the plan he had for them.

  They would be his commanders. Jay knew he couldn’t order around a giant group of creatures like that with anything that had to be conveyed more subtlety than with shouting. His first instruction was for the entire group to separate into even groups, which was followed quickly for all of the things except the one that was left over and had to be manually directed.

  Each of the commanders took one group. All three of them were going to go fight while he took anything and everything he could from the duke’s keep. Agensyx had volunteered to go in with them, so Jay promised to cast any spell he asked for through their bond.

  Then they left the monastery. The gray-skinned creatures flooded the streets, forcing all the actual people into the side alleys, though they luckily didn’t have to go far. It was just annoying to get there. Cinri had said it was all uphill toward that side of the city, and Jay hadn’t appreciated what that meant until now. It really was all uphill; the fortress was bordered on three sides by cliffs that were raised up from the rest of the city.

  It was annoying more than it was an actual obstacle. But it was very annoying.

  The thirty clay-zombies that made up Group One crashed against the doors of the duke’s stronghold, cramming themselves against the oversized slabs of dark wood until it swung open. It didn’t make any noise, but somehow the silence conveyed the weight of it easily enough. The creatures began squeezing inside the moment there was enough of a gap for their bodies to fit, squirming and writhing until they made it through the gap.

  It was disgustingly fascinating to watch. Jay counted himself lucky that no one was walking by, since the entryway was directly facing a courtyard with its front open to the road. That might have had something to do with the fact that the keep was the only structure this far up the road at all too, though. Either way, anyone who saw this kind of thing would have had something to say about it.

  Once they were all through, the groups of zombie-creatures ran off, all heading the same direction. Agensyx went with them, ready to shift their orders if the throne room was in a different spot than they thought or support them with spells if necessary. Jay headed the other way, toward where they thought the vault would be.

  He didn’t let himself get distracted by the opulence along the way. Everything in the keep’s interior was some combination of dark wood, gilding, and red fabric. It all screamed the kind of wealth that was probably excessive. It was definitely tempting to take one of the golden lanterns hanging off the wall, but whatever portions of the vault he could get into should have things worth way more, so he didn’t bother.

  The room was small once he finally found which one it was. There was a larger metal door taking up the entire back wall of the oversized closet, complete with one of the stereotypical spinning bank vault mechanisms. It almost felt cold, even from across the room, as if it was enchanted with some form of air conditioning enchantment.

  At least there were still some things in this little entryway. A few rings, some pouches that rattled like they had coins inside, a few books, some other things. Jay started with the rings. The plaque under their arrangement was unhelpfully labelled “Rings,” so he’d have to go through them one by one.

  The first ring had a small inscription on the outside of the golden band, which Omnilinguist told him meant something close to “personal gateway,” though the trait seemed to be having difficulty with the translation. The second seemed to just be a plain silver ring with an empty setting where the gemstone should have been. The third was entirely made of faceted purple crystal, and before Jay could even inspect it properly, the Crystalband flowed down his arm to engulf the thing.

  It retracted quickly, returning to its band form around his arm, but now it had a small purple circle on it instead of being purely blue. Had that been another crystal implement of some kind? Some fuel for his own Band’s expansion?

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  Jay put the remaining two rings on. The one with the empty setting didn’t seem to do anything, but the first ring changed something immediately. It felt like he could think in another direction suddenly, like the gateway the inscription referenced was some kind of wormhole to…another closet?

  It was an inventory. An empty inventory. Jay thought about putting the second ring into it and it vanished off his finger. He could feel it hovering in the empty space inside.

  This was perfect. This was exactly what he needed! It literally could not have been more perfect to cover the gaps he had remaining if he had personally gotten to choose it from the entire world’s supply of enchanted items. Also, it was just really cool, which was a perk in and of itself.

  Jay, Agensyx said. His voice was grave. The throne room was exactly where we thought. Get here now.

  Why?

  No arguments. Now.

  Damn. The spirit was serious. On my way. Jay scooped the remainder of the entryway’s items into the ringspace and ran.

  That was only the second time that kind of tone came out of the spirit. The first was about the plateau, which had been justifiably dire, even if things had ultimately worked out. What could possibly have been on that level here?

  Crossing the stronghold didn’t take long, but Jay stopped dead in the doorway to the throne room and gaped at the scene inside. The zombies were all piling on top of each other, melding by layers into a single mass of the gray material, the edges webbing to the surrounding floor and wall with tendriline offshoots.

  Leaned up against the throne itself was the duke, dead with a puddle of blood beneath him that was just starting to crust at the edges. He wasn’t wounded that Jay could see, but the blood had to be coming from somewhere. And the dead man clearly didn’t write that name in his own blood, not with how high on the wall it was.

  Zirrus wasn’t a name he knew. It might not even have been a name but Omnilinguist wasn’t giving him a translation for it, so what else could it be?

  “What happened?” Jay asked.

  Agensyx swung his head around from behind the throne. He was already dead when we arrived. There was…someone else here, painting that in his blood. They fled through a shadow.

  Jay pointed toward the growing mass of flaking flesh. “And that?”

  I can apparently release your creations.

  “That’s what you call that?”

  Yes. It is a necessity.

  “For what? If he’s already dead, we can just take them back to the monastery and wait for them to dissolve away there.”

  Waiting overnight for your power to relinquish its grip on them would take too long.

  “Too long for what?” Jay asked again.

  Too long to escape.

  Jay started to tell the spirit just how much the vagueness was pissing him off when it clicked. “Because they’re going to immediately link this to necromancy. Somehow. And then maybe to me.”

  Yes.

  “How?”

  Look at the body. Move closer if you have to, but do not touch the blood.

  Jay did so, stopping just shy of the pool of blood, and looked. He still couldn’t see the wound that was leaking so much, but from here he could see something that he’d missed earlier. There were thin lines of vivid green tracing up the duke’s veins. They looked to be squirming slightly, and were visibly spreading despite the corpse’s lack of beating heart.

  “I don’t get it. How is this going to get linked to necromancy? What even is it?” Jay’s first thought had been that it was some kind of poison, but that didn’t sound right with the movement.

  It is venom. A particularly potent type of poison, from a much stronger type of creature than anything you have ever seen.

  Dammit. He should have stuck to his guess. “Stronger than you?”

  Yes. There was grim resignation in the word. And it is precisely the same color as your magic. The same color as all necromantic magic.

  “And everyone knows that.”

  Yes.

  “Shit.” Jay tapped his foot twice. “So we need to leave. Again.”

  Yes. The sooner the better. The creatures should continue to fuse into that thing even after we have left.

  “Fine.” Jay turned and took two sticky steps toward the exit. The puddle of blood had moved under his shoes. He couldn’t bring himself to care about the footprints he’d leave.

  As he and Agensyx ran back down the mountain to the monastery, Jay found that his fists were clenched. It wasn’t a conscious clenching, but with every step they squeezed tighter. He mentally traced the source of the involuntary action as he ducked into the hidden passage. It was an emotion. A very simple emotion, reminiscent of the one he’d felt when he’d resigned himself to fighting the Mushkhushshu in Olras Os but harder, more refined.

  Jay was very tired of running. He’d run from the horseman. He’d run from the Mushkhushshu. Now here he was running again, and was so tired of doing so that it was boiling over into anger. If he had his way, he’d never have to run from anything ever again.

  Fuck the curse. He’d get to it eventually. For now, his goal had to be strength.

  *

  Something was very wrong in this building. It was putting Tybalt on edge, some primal instinct breaking his composure training. He had expected this to be nothing, and certainly nothing worth both a highly ranked Inquisitor and an Inquisitor-Exalt crossing continental borders.

  This? This had him wondering if they should have brought more. If they should have brought everyone, even, or at least as many Inquisitors as could be scrounged up on short notice.

  No sane person would scrawl the name of an archdevil in a throne room, much less do so in the blood of the closest thing the island had to a legitimate ruler. And the amalgamation of flaky gray flesh that was fused to the floor and wall around it was an even worse sign. The traces of green poison that were writhing across Duke Kinicier’s skin in spite of his exsanguination were the cherry on top.

  The Exalt twitched twice, once bodily and once facially, then slackened. “He has answered. I am the Mouth of Kisyon. Address him with all due respect.”

  The older man’s face twisted into a scowl, then a different, much more resonant voice, spoke from his mouth. “Inform me, Inquisitor.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Tybalt said. He began pointing out the things Exalt Wiscar and he had noticed: the signs of an inexpert robbery of the keep’s vault, the wide arcs of spatter thrown about the hallway outside, and everything in the throne room itself.

  “This should not be,” Kisyon declared. There was no doubt in his voice, no room for incorrectness. He gestured toward the wall of gray material. “This matter is from a gift I gave to the Haven’s monastery. To see it turned to such purposes as this should not be possible.”

  “Then what does it mean, my lord?” the Inquisitor asked.

  “You tell me,” the god commanded.

  “I don’t want to say it.”

  “Then you already know the answer. Good. It means that this island is no longer untouched by the tendrils of necromancy. A new breed, this time, to be able to do this.” Kisyon’s voice turned melancholic. “A worse breed, I fear, if Zirrus claims their loyalty to this degree.”

  “That is what I was afraid of, my lord,” Tybalt said.

  “A sensible fear.” The god paused. “You encountered something recently that you advised the Order to keep an eye on.”

  “Yes, my lord. A man fled into the Blight. He seems to have vanished, as I could not find him after multiple days of searching.”

  “What stood out to you about this man?” Kisyon asked.

  “Mostly the part where he went into the Blight instead of running from it.” Tybalt paused, then elaborated. “The only other thing that made me think something about him was off was the skeleton wrapped around one of his arms. It looked like a snake of some sort.”

  “A snake.” The god tapped one of Wiscar’s fingers thoughtfully. “Do you know the nature of the substance that even now twists through the dead duke’s veins?”

  “No, my lord, but if I could hazard a guess, I would assume it to be some form of venom,” Tybalt said.

  “Good, my inquisitor. Very good. It is a material called lakite, formed from the distilled venom of a particular variety of Tier Six snake.”

  “I will hunt the man at once,” Tybalt swore. Any hybrid of necromancy and demon worship needed to be stamped out with as much speed as was possible, but if they had access to creatures – or worse, people – that were into the triple digits, it had already been allowed to go on for too long.

  “Yes. You will. I will return my Exalt to himself and you will explain to him this charge I have set you. Then you will leave, and you will not return until you have either found this man and confirmed his involvement or recovered his corpse.”

  Tybalt saluted.