Level 50.

  The last one was nineteen. This was arithmetic from a predatory universe. The hobgoblin’s terror made perfect sense now.

  “Okay,” David said, his voice perfectly calm. “I’ve seen the brochure. The amenities are terrifying. We’re leaving.”

  David took a full step back from the temple entrance, putting the threshold at his toes. The hobgoblin thrall moved with him, and the emotional signal that came down the bond was as clear as a status light switching from red to a shaky amber. The creature’s rigid posture loosened a fraction. It was still standing in a magical ice dome in a hell forest, but it was no longer sharing air with a chained apex predator. The improvement was relative, but measurable.

  They walked to the ice wall.

  Okay, David thought. You find a soul-eating Level 50 demon with a name like 'Thar’Zul the Devourer of Penitence' wrapped in enough magical chains to power a city, and your personal demon-plane elite warrior finds it pants-shittingly terrifying. The correct next move is to leave without fighting for no reason, not to scheme. Leaving.

  Of course, a part of him wanted to kill it and steal its power. A larger part of him, though, simply enjoyed being alive. Or more accurately; life-preserving caution—approaching it in a potentially magically booby trapped temple with company that couldn't see magic was a potential disaster waiting to happen. David would inspect the place, but safely. No accidentally freeing the trapped soul eater because Jamie stepped on a magic Claymore, or the hob’s fear forces me to micromanage.

  He looked at Jamie. The kid was staring into the temple’s gloom, his face pale but his eyes wide and alive with a kind of frantic processing. He looked like he was trying to calculate the square footage of his own mortality.

  “Jamie.”

  Jamie jumped, his head snapping around. “Yeah! What’s up?”

  “You’re our way out. This,” David said, tapping the ice wall beside him with a knuckle. It made a sound like hitting a bank vault.

  “My ice?” A flicker of something that wasn’t fear—excitement, maybe—crossed Jamie’s face. A problem he was allowed to touch.

  David studied him, caught the faint tracks of dried tears, and recognized the behavioral shift for what it was—performative bravery dialed up in response to a real threat. Excitement layered over something unstable, buried deep enough to function.

  For a kid, it was impressive. Also concerning.

  He found himself wondering what kind of life taught someone that young to mask fear and grief so efficiently.

  “Your ice. You put a shard in that first demon’s neck. That was a direct hit. Your skill leveled from that?”

  “Yeah! Cryokinesis is level 4 now!” Jamie’s words came in a quick, rehearsed burst. “Before, it was just ‘make it cold over there.’ Now I can feel where I want it to go!”

  “Good. That’s the control.” David gestured at the dome. “You’ve been building from scratch. Summoning ice out of thin air. That’s a heavy lift. Drains your battery. Try a shortcut.”

  Jamie blinked. “What shortcut?”

  “The dome is all ice. It’s already built. Your skill isn’t just ‘make ice.’ It’s ‘command cold.’ So stop being the construction crew. Try being the guy with the remote control.”

  Jamie’s face lit up with understanding. “Oh! So, like… I don’t make new ice, I just… tell this ice what to do?”

  “Tell a piece of it. A tiny piece. Don’t try to move the wall. Try to find one little bit that’s willing to listen.”

  “Okay! I can do that!” Jamie turned to the wall, his focus sharpening. He lifted his hands, and a wisp of frost curled from his palms. “Just a little bit. Come on, move…”

  David watched Jamie strain, his own mind flashing to fire academy rookies white-knuckling a pressurized hose—they’d fight the torrent, trying to muscle the water into submission until they burned out, until you showed them the trick was in the grip and the stance, in letting the tool do the work while you just pointed. “You’re trying to shove the whole river,” David said, his voice flat. “Stop pushing. Feel for the current. Your mana’s the grip. The ice is already the water.”

  "It's like... trying to shove open a steel door that's bolted shut!" Jamie grunted, his hands trembling as the pale blue mist of his mana crawled over the dome's surface in futile, spreading patterns. David watched the energy move, noting how it flowed from Jamie like a leak, trying to coat and push against the entire wall at once—a rookie's mistake, trying to apply force everywhere instead of finding the latch. The Cryokinesis skill was working, but Jamie was using it like a battering ram instead of a lockpick.

  While Jamie wrestled with the ice, David turned his attention inward. The Soul-Manipulator skill sounded like it should come with a tank of blue glitter he could spray at problems. He tried to circulate soul energy like he would demonic energy. Nothing moved. No reservoir, no current. He checked the skill description again. Infused with his cells.

  Okay.

  So I don't have soul energy to spend. That was like saying he had ‘skin juice’ or ‘hair power.’ I have a soul, and my body's marinated in it. The skill's not about spending juice. It's about... being the marinated thing. Which meant soul magic probably worked on a different set of rules. Rules he didn't know yet.

  So instead, he reached for the new energy he did have. Death energy. His body was already a constantly circulating machine of demonic energy—it never stopped moving, never stopped circulating through his veins and channels—a background hum as constant and unnoticed as his own pulse. With his demonic energy a constant background hum, he nudged the cold, black force of death inside him, willing it to circulate.

  It slid into the flow without resistance. The demonic energy, that hot, corrosive current, didn't fight it. The death energy wove right into it, fitting into place like a second strand in a braid, with the demon stuff as the anchor. Weird. A chill spread out from his core, deep and settling. It wasn't uncomfortable. It was like stepping into a familiar, quiet room.

  His body temperature dropped. He felt it go, a warmth leaching away. His heart gave a single, heavy thud in his chest, and the next beat took what felt like a full minute to arrive. The world got quieter. The sharp ache from old bruises faded. The constant background fear-itch in his nerves smoothed out.

  In its place, a new map drew itself behind his eyes. He could feel the living and the dead. Jamie was a bright, jittering spark of life beside him. The hobgoblin thrall was a muted, greenish ember of demon-touched vitality. And on the other side of the impossible ice, he could feel the rest of the group—Rhea, Corbin, the others—as a clustered bundle of warm, frantic signals.

  He felt strong. Really strong. A lot stronger than usual. He also noticed he’d stopped breathing.

  He could also feel the dead. Specifically, he could feel Mara’s undead. Five faint, frayed tethers of her mana, each one knotted with her own fading death energy, hanging on by a thread on the far side of the dome. They felt like cold pins stuck in a corkboard.

  I knew it. He knew she’d circumvented the order to drain her undead completely and pass everything they had to him. Even on her deathbed she was still annoying. Dying hadn’t improved her attitude in the slightest.

  His senses swelled. He could feel the bodies in the clearing, the old bones buried in the cold dirt under his feet. He ignored that. A sound rushed in instead—a faint, distant shrieking, like hundreds, maybe thousands of voices, all smeared together into a whispering wind. It was coming from the temple.

  He looked up. The giant, bloodshot eye floating above the roof stared back. The screaming whispers were pouring out of the chained demon inside. They were the sounds of the souls it had eaten.

  David turned to Jamie, a cold creep of understanding going through him. Jamie was frowning at the ice wall, his tongue poking out in concentration. As David looked at him, the noise seemed to shift. He could vaguely see the shape of Jamie’s soul. It wasn’t a shape you saw with your eyes. It was a pressure, an impression of space.

  It felt like looking at the walls of a fortress. Not a grim, dark castle, but something more like a bright, noisy community center. The walls were thick, built to take hits, but the gates were wide open. The whole structure hummed with a relentless, borrowed energy—the echoes of a dozen other voices, other laughs, the phantom weight of smaller hands holding on. This was the soul of a kid who’d learned to be a pillar because the house was always full. It was built to support others, to project a loud, unshakable ‘fine’ no matter how much the foundations shook. The walls were strong, but they were made to hold everyone else up first. Looking at it, David understood the exhausting, permanent work of Jamie’s positivity. The kid was a bastion. He probably didn’t know how to be anything else.

  He noted the demonic energy acted like a multiplier. It changed whatever he mixed it with and made it ten times stronger. It was powerful and dangerous and a little hard to control. The results were unpredictable if you didn't handle it right. It was like pouring jet fuel into a Zippo, or holding a lighter up to a can of hairspray.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  David pointed at the ice wall. The death energy was a cold sludge moving through him. He focused his will on the empty air in front of his finger and commanded the energy to form there, in his magical field.

  A ball of pure darkness congealed at his fingertip. It was a spherical hole in the world.

  He compressed it. He squeezed the darkness mentally, packing it down into a dense, vibrating marble. He spun it. The black marble began rotating so fast the air around it warped with a sickly shimmer.

  He added demonic energy. He fed a thread of the hot, corrosive power that always circulated in him into the spinning marble. The darkness swallowed the demonic heat and began to glow a deep, bruise-colored purple around its edges.

  He added heat energy. He focused on the reservoir of raw thermal force he now held in his body, a byproduct of the demonic energy and his own metabolic furnace, and fed that into the construct. The black edges of the marble ignited. They transformed into a wreath of screaming, impossibly-hot and impossibly black glistening flame. He was now holding a spinning ball of death, demonic force, and violent heat.

  He willed it to accelerate. He shoved the construct forward with his mind, aiming for maximum velocity.

  It shot from his fingertip. It crossed the twenty feet to the ice in a streak of purple-white light and a sound like a high-pressure drill hitting steel. It impacted.

  It seared through. The projectile didn't blast; it drilled. It vaporized a perfect, pencil-thin tunnel straight through the magical ice. A jet of superheated steam and black energy blasted out the opposite side.

  David briefly caught a glimpse of the others on the other side. He saw Rhea's sharp features frozen in surprise, Corbin's hand reaching for his weapon, and the group clustered together. Then the ice snapped shut with a wet, deafening crack, healing itself as if the hole had never existed.

  [Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 6 ? Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 7]

  Finally. He would’ve liked a ‘Deathshot’ skill, but no dice. He wondered what it would take to develop an entirely new branching skill, like his portals. Probably something drastic.

  Then he felt the cost in his gut. A significant portion of his death energy reserve was gone, leaving a cold hollow feeling. It refilled at a slow, creeping pace. A smaller chunk of his demonic energy was also spent, but that reserve began bubbling back immediately, regenerating from its infernal wellspring. His available heat energy dipped slightly too. The trio of forces was depleted. The death energy was the real bottleneck.

  "Holy crap!" Jamie yelled, flinching back from the wall. He stared at the spot where the steam was dissipating. "You made a... a drill-ray! You drilled a hole with a ray!"

  "Tried to," David said, looking at his blackened fingertip. The pain was muted. It stung, but it should’ve felt like he’d touched a hot stove. "The wall heals. It's a very stubborn wall."

  "Can you do it again? But, like, make the hole stay open?"

  David glanced at the temple entrance. The giant eye stared back, unmoved. He’d just spent a small chunk of his new energies to make a point that didn't stick. The only result was a depleted reserve.

  So death energy mixed with demon energy makes me a lot stronger. It also made him mostly dead. That explained the fine print about only dying if his heart or brain got taken out. He was already in the neighborhood.

  The death part also seemed to be a ticket. It let him touch dead things. Ghosts, maybe. Definitely the undead, which he could now feel sitting out there like cold stones.

  And now he could see souls. I guess it’s too late to bring sunglasses, he thought. Jamie's soul looked like a public building that was always open. He hadn't checked for anyone else.

  Jamie finally tore his gaze from the spot on the wall and looked at David. He jumped back a full step, his eyes wide, a sharp, genuine yelp escaping him. “Jesus! Your eyes! What the hell happened to your eyes? They’re… all black. Like, completely.”

  David blinked. He hadn’t considered the cosmetic side effects. “It’s the new diet. Low-carb, high-soul. It’s a side effect.”

  Jamie shuddered, but his fear was already getting crowded out by his need to talk.

  “Side effect of what? They’re like… pools of ink. It’s not a good look.” Jamie leaned in slightly, his own fear warring with morbid curiosity. “Does it hurt? Can you even see?”

  “I can see you being dramatic. The vision works.” David’s tone was a flat doorstop against Jamie’s momentum.

  “Right. Okay. Creepy.” Jamie shook his head as if to clear it, physically trying to shake off the sight. The fear was still there, but already being crowded out by his need to talk. Jamie was no longer messing with the wall, he was just staring.

  “Your eyes, man. I can’t get over it. They’re gone. It’s just… black. Like, full-on void.” Jamie took a half-step closer, his head tilted. “Is that a skill thing? Can you turn it off?”

  David considered it. He hadn’t tried. “Probably. It’s not a priority.”

  “It’s gonna freak people out,” Jamie said it like it was the biggest logistical problem they faced. He shook his head, as if clearing a browser tab, and switched topics. “You know, my aunt texted my mom a bunch of weird stuff before our flight. Freaking out. She lives in Denver.”

  David waited. The hobgoblin thrall shifted its weight by the temple entrance.

  “She said a neighbor’s kid, a whole soccer team, they just didn’t come back from a park. Vans, coaches, kids—poof. No note, no crash site. Nothing. And then like two days later, she’s on a video call with her friend in, I don’t know, Minneapolis, and the friend just vanished and dropped. For real. The feed didn’t cut. The lady just dissolved.”

  Jamie’s words were coming in a rapid, nervous stream. He wasn’t looking at David’s eyes anymore; he was looking past him, talking to the awful air of the dome.

  “And I saw a thread online about a ferry in Korea. Empty. Just… cruising into the dock with lunch still on the tables. Everyone said it was fake. But my friend Darnell, his cousin was in the Coast Guard there. He said it wasn’t fake. They just had to shrug and call it a mystery.”

  David listened. It was a torrent of half-remembered news blurbs and panicked family texts. The kid had been sitting on this theory, compiling it.

  “So our plane isn’t special,” Jamie said, his voice firming up with the realization. “We’re not the first batch. We’re just the latest shipment. That’s what the ‘Dungeon Forum’ thing in the rewards has to be, right? It’s not for us. It’s to connect to the other people who got shipped.”

  “Makes sense.” David’s reply was a verbal placeholder. This was all news to him—he barely had an online presence as it was. He was more interested in how Jamie’s soul-structure seemed to vibrate with the effort of holding this theory together.

  “We should make an alliance!” Jamie said, the idea hitting him like a shot of caffeine. “That’s the move. Team up with the others who’ve been here longer. They’ll know the ropes. We could be, like, a branch office.”

  David stared at him. They were standing in a magical ice dome next to a temple containing a chained soul-eating demon, a dying necromancer was propped against a wall, and Jamie was talking about guilds. The kid’s brain was a spectacular monument to misplaced priorities.

  “A franchise,” David said, the word dry as dust.

  “Yeah! Survival franchising!” Jamie grinned, then the grin faltered. “But why are we in the demon theme park? If this is like a test with difficulty levels, why did we spawn in the final boss lobby? Did we do something wrong?”

  “We bought a ticket,” David said. “The destination was printed in fine print.”

  “And if we somehow… I don’t know, win? What’s waiting back home?” Jamie’s bravado finally cracked, showing a sliver of the kid underneath. “You can’t just walk back into a Starbucks after you learn how to throw ice shards and hellfire. There’d be agencies. Tests. News vans. It’d be a mess.”

  David looked past him. The giant eye over the temple stared back, unblinking. Jamie was worried about news vans. David was worried about the chained entity whose silent screams he could still hear, and the slow, cold refill of the death energy he’d just wasted.

  “Worry about the vans if we see pavement,” David said. “Right now, the agenda is more immediate. Like not dying in the next five minutes immediate.” He nodded toward Mara’s still form. “And deciding what to do with our failing health plan over there.”

  The conversation about ‘back home’ felt like debating the interior decor of a house that was currently on fire, with them trapped inside. Earth felt abstract, distant. Governments and chaos were problems for people who weren’t currently trapped in a demonic snow globe.

  He couldn’t give a single, solitary damn about what happened after. The ‘after’ required a ‘during,’ and the ‘during’ was currently trying to kill them.

  “One apocalyptic nightmare at a time, Jamie.”

  David pressed his palm against the ice wall. The cold felt dry and sharp. "Jamie. Look at my hand. See where it is."

  Jamie leaned in, his shoulder almost touching David's. "Okay. What am I doing?"

  David kept his hand flat against the wall. "When I melt it, the wall will steal ice from around the hole to fix itself. You grab that ice and pull it the other way. Hijack the repair."

  David focused. He felt the three separate reserves. The death energy was a still, cold weight. The demonic energy was a hot, constant churn. The heat energy was a banked fire he could poke. Three fuels.

  He pushed death energy into the wall first. The ice under his palm went dead and brittle. He wrapped demonic energy around that dead spot. The heat turned brittle ice into boiling slush. He dumped raw heat energy on top.

  A bright flame, edged in searing black, roared from his hand. It drilled, burning, corrupting, and killing everything it touched. The ice vanished into a hissing jet of steam. The wall around the hole glowed violent blue, pulling frozen mass from the surrounding area to fill the gap.

  "Now, Jamie! Steal it!"

  Jamie's face tightened. He glared at the steaming edges, his hands making grabbing motions at the air. Frost crackled over his knuckles. He was no longer making cold. He was bossing the water molecules around—moving energy—David could see it clearly. The angry blue light stuttered. A visible wave of half-formed ice lurched sideways, yanked away from David's hole by Jamie's will. The hole deepened, fighting to stay open.

  A beam of vivid black flaming light stabbed through into the dome. They were through.

  On the other side, a blurry eye filled the narrow tunnel. Rhea. "Are you injured?"

  "We're lighter on magic gasoline," David called back, his arm tired. The hole shimmered, Jamie's will and the wall's healing in a shaky tug-of-war. "But we've got a peephole. An ugly, high-maintenance peephole."

  "Can you make it bigger?" Corbin's voice, all business.

  "Bigger requires a different budget. This is the model we can afford." David pulled his hand back. The flame died. He felt emptier. He'd spent a lot of heat energy, and good chunks of the other two. The heat would come back slow. The demonic energy was already refilling. The death energy was a slow drip.

  Jamie shook, his arms trembling, but the palm-sized hole held open. "It's staying," he grunted, sweat on his forehead.

  "It is." David turned to the hobgoblin thrall. It hadn't moved. "You're on guard duty. He keeps the hole open. You keep anything from coming out of that temple and eating him."

  The hobgoblin adjusted its grip on its sword and planted itself between Jamie and the temple entrance.

  David stepped back and walked toward the temple's stale air, returning to the giant soul-eating lion’s cage.

  He had a two-item agenda.

  First, check the place for loot. Maybe the previous tenants left something good lying around. A forgotten weapon, a half-eaten sandwich of power, instructions. The odds were terrible. But you still looked under the couch cushions.

  Second, Mara. She was currently his only available test subject for his new death-and-soul skills. Poking her with them was pragmatic. It was a functionality check. She was the practice dummy.

  He stepped inside. The sound of a thousand whispers filled his ears. He didn’t look at the huge demon chained in the middle. He looked at the room. Old stone, dust, shadows. Nothing jumped out.

  Time for the first experiment.