The plasma arc cut through the air with divine judgment—a concentrated beam of orange-white energy that Malcolm had been holding back this entire time. I'd seen him demonstrate it once in Sylvarus, cleanly cutting through a foot of solid metal and the door behind it. But watching him weaponize it against the Goreback was something else entirely.

  The leftmost head that blasted us with flame simply ceased to exist from the jaw up, vaporized in an instant that left the smell of ozone and something worse hanging in the air.

  "Holy shit, Malcolm!" Cass shouted from behind her rapidly dissolving boulder. "Where was that at the tournament?!"

  The Hydra reeled backward, its remaining two heads shrieking as black and purple ichor fountained from the cauterized stump. The smell that followed made me gag—not just the expected stench of burned flesh and monster goo, but something fundamentally wrong. Where normal monsters bled in single colors for reasons nobody really bothered to explain to me, this thing leaked darkness mixed with the distinct reek of Hollowflame.

  It wasn't Hollowflame though—I'd felt that wrongness before, and this was different. But they were definitely related. Ashes from a fire that had burned out centuries ago but still somehow radiated heat.

  Red bounded past me, all seven of his tails fanned out in a display that would've been majestic if he weren’t currently covered in dirt and Marigold oil. He darted between the Hydra's tree-trunk legs, snapping at tendons and being an absolute menace while the creature tried to track him with its remaining heads.

  Above us, Malcolm's illumination spell hung in the air—a simple orb of light that shouldn't have been doing what it was doing. I'd felt something shift when I'd pushed light-aspected mana into it earlier, and now it pulsed with subtle waves of healing light that helped soothe the burning patches where acid had gotten through my defenses. The really weird part? It didn't seem to use my mana anymore. I'd just... edited whatever the rune was doing, turning a basic light source into something that actively healed.

  That shouldn't have been possible. But then again, neither should fighting a three-headed snake monster in an underground cavern.

  The Goreback stumbled backward, apparently deciding we were more than just a convenient snack. Its retreat gave me a moment to really look at our surroundings. The chamber wasn't natural—too regular, too purposeful in its construction. Two tunnels branched off from the main space, their walls bearing the telltale smooth-carved look of the Old Pathways beneath La-Roc.

  Great. We'd fallen into some ancient basement and found a monster that had been marinating in something corrupted for the last week.

  The creature's wounded neck was already bubbling with fresh growth, tissue knitting together at a speed that made my stomach turn. It backed against the far wall and inhaled deeply, the jagged runes on its spine flaring.

  "Move!" I shouted, but the warning was barely necessary.

  Twin streams of purple-tinted acid erupted from the remaining heads, sweeping across the chamber in devastating arcs. The stone liquefied, running in newly formed channels down the floor. Malcolm threw himself behind a pillar that immediately began smoking. Cass blurred through my aura as she engaged the swiftness side of her Seal, disappearing from the spray before it had even reached her previous location.

  Valor pulsed through my aura, and I let it expand outward in a wave of pure challenge.

  The message wasn't words so much as pure intent, broadcast directly into the Hydra's primitive consciousness. And the monster, being what it was, happily accepted.

  Both acid streams converged on my position with the focus of industrial cutting lasers.

  I dove sideways, knowing even as I moved I wasn't going to clear the spray pattern completely. Mana reinforcement would do exactly jack shit against acid that could melt stone, so I did the only thing that came to mind—I grabbed for spirit-aspected mana and shoved it outward in a desperate barrier.

  The acid hit the barrier and... stopped.

  Well, not stopped exactly. The major streams curved around the translucent wall of spirit mana, flowing around it rather than through. But droplets and vapor still got through, each one a tiny brand of agony as it ate through the Marigold oil and started working on my skin. The smell of burning hair filled my nostrils—apparently the oil in my hair wasn't as effective as advertised.

  But I wasn't melting. That was a significant improvement over the alternative.

  "Alright, you ugly bastard," I muttered, gripping my spear tighter. "Let's dance."

  I charged straight at the Hydra, my mana burn igniting as I pushed my body past normal limits. Beside me, Cass's green aura blazed to life, and she did something I'd never seen her do before—she ran straight up the cavern wall, her feet finding purchase on vertical stone through pure mana adhesion.

  "Gaia's tits, this is stupid!" she yelled, but she was grinning as she said it. "My boots keep slipping!"

  “I fucking told you!” I laughed.

  She reached the ceiling, pushed off with enough force to crack the stone, and plummeted toward the Hydra with all the grace of a green meteor. Her twin blades caught the light from Malcolm's modified illumination orb as she fell through the air.

  I reached the creature just as Cass landed on its back, her swords punching through scales with a sound that reminded me of breaking ceramic. The Hydra bucked, trying to throw her off, and I took advantage of the distraction to drive my spear through the base of the middle head's skull.

  The creature's scream made my ears ring, but I held on, twisting the spear as Cass systematically carved through neck muscles with surgical precision.

  "Malcolm, now!" I shouted.

  Another plasma arc lanced out, catching the rightmost head just as it turned toward Cass. The head tumbled to the ground with a wet thud, and suddenly we were facing a zero-headed Hydra.

  For a moment, I actually thought we'd won.

  "I thought we were supposed to just take all three heads off," Malcolm said.

  The Hydra's body hadn't fallen. Instead, black ooze was bubbling from all three neck stumps, forming into rough shapes that were definitely becoming new heads. The stench of corrupted Hollowflame intensified, filling the chamber with that terrible ash smell—burning since before time had meaning.

  "This is definitely Hollowflame fuckery," I said, backing away as the first new head began forming eyes.

  "No shit!" Cass landed beside me, her blades dripping with ichor that was eating holes in the stone floor. "Any brilliant ideas?"

  The new heads were almost fully formed now, and they looked worse than the originals—covered in the same jagged green runes that decorated the creature's back, pulsing with sickly green light.

  I settled into a low stance, spear held at an angle that would let me redirect incoming attacks. The mana burn was taking its toll, that familiar ache building in my pathways, but I pushed through it.

  "Same plan," I said. "But harder."

  "That's not a plan!" Cass protested, but she was already moving, green aura flaring as she circled left.

  The Hydra, now sporting three heads covered in black crystal lumps that had been its blood, fixed all six eyes on me. Valor's challenge was still ringing through the air between us, and the creature seemed offended by my continued existence.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  It lunged forward with a speed that it definitely hadn’t had a minute ago. I flowed into a defensive spin, using the spear's length to redirect one head while my body twisted away from another. The third head, though…

  The third head got me.

  Massive jaws clamped around my torso, teeth punching through my scale mail as if it were made of paper. I felt ribs crack—definitely not break, thanks to mana reinforcement, but crack. Then the creature started squeezing, crushing me with jaws that had decided I was a jawbreaker and it wanted to test the name.

  The acid was the worst part.

  Each tooth that pierced my armor became a channel for concentrated acid to pour directly into the wounds. It wasn't just burning—it was liquefying flesh on contact, eating through muscle and scraping against bone. My scale mail dissolved around the puncture wounds, the metal bubbling and running down my sides in molten streams. Every breath brought fresh agony as the acid vapor filled my lungs, and I could taste copper and something chemical that made me want to vomit.

  The pain was almost unbearable. My vision went white at the edges, then red, then tunneled into darkness. Some distant part of my brain noted that this was probably what dying felt like—being slowly dissolved from the inside out by a monster that had marinated in corruption for who knows how long.

  Red's bark carried genuine alarm as the creature lifted me off the ground, squeezing harder with each second.

  I screamed, pushing back with everything I had, mana burning through my pathways, fighting against the crushing pressure and the acid that was literally eating me alive. My arms were pinned, but I still had some movement in my shoulders. The acid had eaten through enough of the muscle there that things were loose—horrifically, agonizingly loose—but that gave me options.

  I dug deep, pulling on reserves I didn't know I had and shoving them into Valor. My muscles strained against the Hydra's bulk, tendons standing out as I fought for every millimeter of space.

  Something in my shoulder gave way with a wet crack—not just dislocating but tearing as acid-weakened tissue finally gave up. But the sudden looseness let me shift my weight. I got my arm into position against the roof of its mouth, channeling every drop of mana into pure physical force.

  The Hydra's jaws split.

  Not completely—I wasn't that strong—but enough. The crack that ran along its bony head gave me the leverage I needed, and I tore myself free with explosive force, landing hard on the acid-scarred ground. The bottom jaw now hung limp on the monster's center head, dripping with my blood and its own corrosive saliva. Blood ran from a dozen spots through what remained of my scalemail, and patches of exposed bone showed where the acid had done its worst work.

  "Red, now!" Malcolm shouted.

  What happened next was something I had seen before, but still wasn't prepared for.

  Red inhaled deeply, his chest expanding with the distinctive preparation of his fire breath, and exhaled a stream of concentrated flame that would've made military-grade flamethrowers jealous. But Malcolm didn't just let it fly—he caught the fire with a Mudra, shaping and focusing it into something that looked more liquid than flame, more death than element.

  The shaped flame carved through the Hydra with the precision of a welding torch through butter. One head gone. Then another. The body split in half, then quarters, the flame not caring one bit about the creature's regeneration. It just kept burning, reducing everything to smoking char and that terrible ash smell.

  "Holy shit!" I gasped, clutching my dislocated shoulder while the healing light worked overtime trying to keep me from bleeding out. "That was way more ridiculous than Sylvarus, what the hell?"

  Malcolm's grin was slightly manic. "We've been practicing! I wasn't sure it would work!"

  The flames finally died, leaving a smoking pile of what used to be a Hydra. But there, in the center of the devastation, something pulsed with diseased light.

  A mana core, perfectly spherical as all the others I'd seen, but wrong. The normally pristine blue glass was shot through with black tendrils that writhed with their own terrible life. It looked exactly as if the poison that had tried to burrow into my soul had crystallized into physical form.

  "I wouldn't touch it," Malcolm said unnecessarily. Anyone with functioning eyes could see that thing was bad news.

  I reached out with my thoughts. "Ted, if I store this thing in my soul-space, is it going to kill me?

  "No idea, kid. But I wouldn't risk it. That thing reeks. Fucking disgusting, I can smell it from here.

  Yeah, that tracked with the Hollowflame connection. I turned to Red, who was panting but still alert.

  "Think you can do that fire thing again? On the orb specifically?"

  Red sent back a complex emotional response that roughly translated to:

  "Deal," I said immediately. Cheese buns were a small price to pay for not having corrupted monster cores lying around.

  Malcolm stepped forward, his hands already forming the same Mudra. "Ready when you are, Red."

  The second blast was smaller but more focused. Malcolm shaped Red's flame into a tight beam that hit the corrupted core dead center. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, hairline cracks spread across the surface, purple light beginning to leak through.

  "Might want to take cover," I suggested, already shuffling toward a tunnel.

  The core exploded.

  The shockwave was pure wrongness given physical form—black and purple energy that made my vision swim and my soul want to crawl out of my body and hide. The entire cavern shook, dust and loose stones raining from the ceiling as the corrupt energy dissipated into nothing.

  When the dust settled, there was nothing left of the Hydra except scorched stone and a lingering smell of ancient rot.

  "Okay," Cass said, breaking the silence. "We killed it. We don't get a core because we had to blow it up. Now what?" She gestured at the surrounding walls. "How exactly do we get back up? Because I don't know about you guys, but I can't really climb a fifty-reach smooth vertical pit."

  "You just ran up a wall," I pointed out, swallowing a healing pill and feeling the bizarre sensation of my skin regrowing and knitting together.

  "Yeah, for maybe twenty reaches," she shot back. "That's not the same as climbing straight up for fifty reaches while carrying Malcolm."

  I looked around the chamber, then at the two tunnels I'd noticed earlier. They definitely had the same smooth-carved quality as the Old Pathways beneath La-Roc. "We're in the Old Pathways, or at least connected to them. Maybe we can find a way out through there?"

  Malcolm pulled out his Manascript, frowning at the display. "It’s dampened. Definitely the old pathways," He oriented himself, pointing toward the left tunnel. "That should lead roughly toward La-Roc, assuming we didn't get turned around completely when we fell."

  "Better than sitting here. Maybe there are more monsters," Cass said, already heading for the tunnel. "And we've still got Diana's deadline if we want that bonus."

  Red padded over to me, his entire body radiating exhaustion and the promise of future cheese-bun extortion. I scratched behind his ears, wincing as the movement pulled at acid burns that were still healing. Whatever Valor did with that light, I needed to figure out how to do it again.

  "You did good, buddy. We all did."

  came through our bond, along with an undertone of satisfaction at a job well done.

  "Hey Ben," Malcolm called from the tunnel entrance. "Your shoulder's still dislocated, isn't it?"

  "Yeah, but the healing pills are working on it—"

  "Those won't reset a dislocation properly. Here." He walked over with the confidence of someone who'd done this before. "This is going to hurt."

  Before I could protest, he grabbed my arm and shoulder, made a sharp rotating motion, and…

  "FUCK! Come on, man! You're supposed to count first!"

  The joint popped back into place with an audible crack, sending fresh waves of agony through my entire upper body. But immediately after, the healing pill kicked in properly, bones and muscles knitting back together with that familiar warm tingle. The acid burns finally sealed over, leaving angry red marks but no permanent damage.

  "Thanks," I groaned, rotating the shoulder experimentally. "Where'd you learn that?"

  "Mother insisted all her students know basic field medicine," Malcolm said with a shrug. "You can't always rely on healing pills to fix everything properly. It s a Striker tradition—we… they break things frequently."

  "Useful," I admitted, testing my range of motion. Everything seemed to work again, though I'd definitely be feeling this for days.

  "Great, Malcolm's mom is secretly helpful sometimes," Cass called from the tunnel. "Can we get moving? This place is giving me the creeps, and we've got a deadline if we want Diana's bonus."

  She had a point. We'd already burned through at least an hour or two, maybe more, and we still had to find our way out of here and make it back to La-Roc.

  I grabbed my spear from where it had fallen, noting with annoyance that the Hydra's blood had eaten several holes in the shaft. Still functional, but I'd need to replace it soon. .

  One more reason I needed to get Winchester fixed as soon as possible. Though if there was going to be an auction I needed to attend, I was going to need significantly more money than Diana's quest would provide.

  "Alright," I said, joining the others at the tunnel entrance. "Let's find our way out of this hole and go collect our money. And Red needs his cheese buns before we head to Sylvarus."

  Red barked in agreement, already trotting down the tunnel with his tails morphing back into a single wagging appendage. Even exhausted and covered in dirt, oil, and whatever else we'd been splattered with, he maintained that endless dog optimism that suggested everything would work out fine.

  As we descended into the darkness of the Old Pathways, following tunnels that had been carved before the harbor city was even an idea, I couldn't shake the feeling that the Hydra had been more than just a random monster. Those darkness-aspected traits, the Hollowflame connection, the way it had been feeding on the other monsters around it...

  Something had happened here. Something was still happening here. And we were going to have to report it to the Monster Hunters as soon as we got back.

  I'd have to add this to the growing list of problems Diana had brought with her from Sylvarus. Between the corrupted creatures in the Old Pathways, and whatever was going on with that frog-infested spirit realm Cass and I had visited a while ago, La-Roc was feeling less safe and more like a powder keg.

  But that was a problem for after we got paid. Right now, I just wanted to get out of this hole, clean myself off, and watch Red extort an entire bakery's worth of cheese buns from Katie.

  The tunnel stretched ahead into darkness, Malcolm's healing illumination orb casting dancing shadows on the ancient walls. Somewhere up there was sunlight, fresh air, and a bag of gold mana coins with our names on it.

  Time to go collect.