Vin stared at the lizardman’s severed head as it rolled across the ground before coming to a sudden stop against the tunnel wall with a wet thud. From all the bruises it was covered in, the divine warrior looked like he had in fact spent his last few minutes of life running blindly into wall after wall before he finally got tired and Alka relieved him of his head.

  Based on the gasps beside him, he wasn’t the only one surprised that it was actually over.

  “Damn, I didn’t expect you to get your hands on him so quickly,” Scule admitted, hopping off Shia and walking over to examine the divine warrior’s head. “What happened in there?”

  “The gas worked even better than we’d hoped,” Alka shrugged. “Forget not being able to talk, the guy could barely even breath from what I could tell. After dashing around in a frenzy for a minute, I think he was starting to lose consciousness, either from a lack of air or repeatedly running headfirst into the tunnel walls. Wasn’t very hard to grab him at that point, and without his divine boon, his rapier wasn’t able to do so much as scratch Blossom or me.”

  “Well, excellent work waiting until our signal,” Shia said, directing Blossom back to her side and transforming her back into a staff. “I know waiting inside that tiny hole for almost an hour must have been boring.”

  “Are you kidding? I would have waited in there for a week in order to get my revenge against that overgrown lizard,” Alka snorted, turning toward Alice. “I can’t thank you enough for all your help with this. Turns out you’re just as terrifying as I imagined you would be.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” Alice giggled, shoving her spent remote triggers into the satchel at her side. “And it’s not like I didn’t get anything out of this. Not only did taking down that divine warrior bump me up almost an entire level and a half, I have a feeling such a well planned and executed trap might even count as my ‘worthy’ action for my next prestige. Sure would be nice getting that out of the way early so I don’t have to worry about it.”

  While Alice and Alka began chatting about different traps, Vin turned to Lumel, offering the pulmon a weary grin. “Thanks again for agreeing to help us with this. Without your teleportation, I don’t think we could have pulled it off.”

  “Please. I’m just happy I could make up at least a little bit for my embarrassing display back in the library,” Lumel said, sighing as she watched Scule and Shia begin arguing over who had been more influential to the plan. Vin didn’t miss how despite doing her best to keep her features hidden from everyone else, she pulled back her hood enough to reveal her face while talking to him. “You have an excellent team here, Vin. I’d be careful to make sure you don’t find yourselves in any more situations as dangerous as the one in the library.”

  “Unfortunately, it feels like those situations have a strange way of finding us,” Vin chuckled, scratching his head sheepishly. “Oh, I learned Sense Dimensions by the way. Real tricky tier 0 spell, that one.”

  “You have no idea. It took me ages to learn that as my first spell!”

  “I guess I’m lucky that I didn’t have to start with that one then,” Vin laughed as the Dimensional Mage glared jokingly at him. Lumel’s pouting face was equal parts adorable and absolutely horrifying. “I don’t suppose you could give me another dimensional spell to work on..?”

  “I can, just be careful. I’m not exaggerating when I say dimensional spells are way more dangerous than anything you’ve worked on so far. The one I’m about to show you is the last one you can learn without risking severe injury from runic backlash.”

  Raising a glowing purple finger, she carefully drew out an incredibly complex runic formation, explaining its purpose as Vin memorized it with Iron Mind. “This is the runic formation for Isolate Dimension. Trust me, it’s not nearly as cool as it sounds. Honestly, the spell itself is pretty much entirely useless as anything except a building block for higher tier spells, because you can’t actually do anything with the dimension you isolate.”

  “Are you kidding? I don’t care what it does, of course I’m going to learn something called Isolate Dimension!” Vin grinned, already imagining the spells to come after this one. He could only assume this had to be the first real step toward his own dimensional storage spell, and after witnessing Scule pull all manner of things out of his cape, he was more than ready for that.

  “I have to say, studying all this dimensional magic growing up would have been a lot more fun with someone like you to work through problems with,” Lumel said, giving him a warm smile as she let her glowing finger fall to her side. “Things were always rather quiet in the palace, and my mother isn’t exactly a good conversationalist.”

  “Well I’m happy to chat magic with you whenever I’m in the dungeons, and I’m sure Shia would love to compare experiences as well!”

  Vin thought he saw a flicker of a frown on Lumel’s face as he mentioned Shia, but before he could think too much about it, he heard a startled gasp from behind him.

  Spinning around, he prepared an empowered Stone Shot by reflex, but froze and let the spell dissipate as he realized it was merely Alice. The Trapper was staring off into space with a concerned look on her face like she wasn’t sure what was going on.

  “Alice? Everything alright?”

  “Yeah… Maybe? I don’t know,” Alice said, looking more and more worried by the second. “Remember how I told you my class started with the Personal Trap Sense passive? Well, I just sensed the first ring of the traps I have placed around the camp trigger. I don’t know what tripped them, but…”

  Alice’s eyes widened as she trailed off, the blood draining from her face in an instant. “We need to get back to camp, now!”

  “You can sense them all the way from here?” Alka asked, stepping closer to the Trapper and narrowing her eyes into pinpricks of light as if she personally would ensure whoever had upset Alice would pay for doing so. “How many are being tripped?”

  “All of them!” Alice shouted, spinning around as if searching for the dungeon entrance. In order to bypass the death fragment and save time, Vin had shown Alice the secret of the dungeons and led their team directly from the Earthers’ fragment to the infernals’ before trekking over to the trogum’s fragment on Edregon proper. “I have hundreds of traps set up around the camp perimeter, and something is tripping all of them, right now! We have to go help!”

  “We’ll go as fast as we can!” Vin said, before realizing it would take them at least an hour or two to make it all the way back to the infernals’ dungeon. “Shia! Can you use your boon to find the dungeon entrance in this fragment?”

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “On it,” She said, her eyes glazing over for a moment with golden light before she snapped back to attention. “We’re only a few miles off. Get us back to the surface and I’ll lead the way!”

  “Got it!” Vin said, blinking as he realized Scule was missing. “Scule! Where the hell are you?!”

  “Sorry! Right here!” The petian called out, coughing as he popped up at the entrance to the divine warrior’s final resting place with a rag tied around the lower half of his face. “What did I miss?”

  “The Earthers are in danger, we need to go, and fast!” Vin said, already focusing on his Mental Map and plotting a way back to the surface. He briefly considered asking Lumel to teleport them all to the surface, but that would require that they leave Alka behind because of her golem body’s natural resistance to teleportation. And if something had in fact tripped all of Alice’s traps at the same time, they’d no doubt want the Slayer by their side when they confronted it. “Lumel, are-”

  “Don’t worry about me, I’ll make my way back to the dungeon we came from. You worry about your people!” She said, giving him an understanding nod.

  “I’ll make it up to you for leaving you here like this! Alka, Alice isn’t fast enough to match our speed. Grab her and follow me!”

  Vin had just enough time to hear a second surprised gasp come from Alice as Alka scooped her up in a princess carry before he sprinted down the tunnel, confident his friends would be right behind him. As he ran, he quickly went through the list of what could possibly trip so many traps all at once.

  It has to be some sort of horde. Either a large number of roaming monsters like the ones that Alka talked about, or those prisoners Alice mentioned making a second attempt to free that knowledgeable man for some reason.

  Whatever the case, if the camp is being attacked by a large enough force to trip so many traps at once, they definitely are going to need our help.

  Popping up onto the surface, he did a quick scan for anything threatening, but didn’t see so much as a single animal, let alone monster. It seemed either the trogums did an excellent job keeping their fragment free of threats, or they all just lived within the tunnels like the trogums themselves.

  Running up next to him on Blossom, Scule and Reginald on each of her shoulders, Shia pointed toward the middle of the fragment. “This way, follow me!”

  Shia took the lead, and their group quickly began making their way across the deserted fragment. They had to adjust course every so often to navigate around ravines too large to jump across, and Vin did his best to avoid looking down when they went straight over the thinner ones, all the while sweating as he wondered just how many people were dying every second they spent running.

  Not even the sound of Alice screaming as Alka leapt across the occasional chasm with her in her arms was enough to stop him from worrying.

  With Shia’s boon leading the way, it wasn’t long before they came to an abrupt stop. Pulling up next to her, Vin frowned as the elf hesitated, staring at the ground beneath her feet.

  “It’s here! Just… about eighty feet below us .”

  Gritting his teeth, Vin resigned himself to what he was about to do as he prepared his spell. Taking a deep breath, he put together an empowered version of Sense Earth, casting it just like the time he’d been hunting down the divine warrior. Although this time, knowing the dungeon entrance was only about eighty feet down, he lightened up on the power a good bit and had the bright idea to try aiming the spell in the direction of the dungeon rather than let it pulse out all around him.

  He didn’t know if it was the reduced range, his higher focus, or his new Total Resistance skill, but whatever the reason, rather than accidentally killing himself and tripping his divine boon, he instead ended up feeling like he’d hit himself in the head with a sledgehammer.

  Made entirely from darthsteel.

  Staggering, Vin’s vision went blurry as Shia grabbed his shoulders and kept him on his feet. As tears welled up in his eyes from the pounding migraine, he was just able to make out the notification that popped up before him.

  Total Resistance increased to lvl 3! 600 exp gained.

  “Fantastic,” he grunted, casting a quick Renewal at his own head and thanking the Gods when it actually helped with the pain a little. “I know how to get there. Follow me.”

  Rushing through the tunnels, Vin actually noticed a few trogums here and there, each one busy doing their strange things, but he was in too much pain to really focus on any of that.

  With Shia’s divine boon and his Mental Map, it didn’t take long for them to find the dungeon entrance.

  Not surprising, it was a tunnel type.

  Dungeon Type: Tunnel

  Primary Monster Type: Beast

  Hazards: Poison

  Grouping: Small Packs

  Movement: Fast

  Dungeoneering increased to lvl 8! 800 exp gained.

  They didn’t exactly have time to worry about the dungeon monsters right now, so Vin let Alka take the lead as they ran through the winding tunnel making up the dungeon. The monsters inhabiting the trogum’s dungeon looked like creepy combinations of frogs and lizards, and small swarms of them kept on rushing out of cracks in the walls and attacking them. They didn’t look very strong, but thanks to Vin’s Dungeoneering skill warning them about the poison ahead of time, the group made sure none of them got even remotely close.

  After dispatching their seventh group of the poison monsters, Vin spotted the sudden appearance of the strange corridor and called for a halt. Shepherding them all inside, the group sped down the corridor and back into the strange extra dimensional area running parallel to the fragments.

  “Come on, the Earther dungeon will let us out right beside camp!”

  Vin picked up the pace and practically sprinted across the giant empty room, memories of their last giant battle playing through his mind as he was forced to watch person after person die right in front of him once again. He was so much stronger now, but that didn’t do the Earthers any good if he was multiple fragments away across Edregon when disaster actually struck.

  He waved away the notification that his Running increased to level 14 as he finally reached the Earthers’ dungeon.

  “Come on, come on!” He called out, waving everyone through as he tried to catch his breath. As soon as Alka ran past with Alice still in her arms, Vin chased after them.

  He emerged from the dungeon, preparing to fire a Stone Stot at one of the beast type monsters that inhabited the forest dungeon.

  But it was entirely empty.

  “That can’t be good,” Shia muttered, glancing around them.

  “We’re nearly there,” Vin said, silently agreeing with the elf as he took off toward camp. Now that they wouldn’t get lost without him, Vin ran at a dead sprint, leaving his teammates behind him as he rushed on ahead. Even with his incredible endurance he couldn’t keep this pace up for long, but he was close enough that he didn’t have to.

  Vin had pushed his team as quickly as they could reasonably go, but they had still been multiple fragments away. After making it out of the tunnels, crossing the trogums' fragment, making it back into the tunnels, and then traversing two dungeons and the strange extradimensional space under Edregon, over an hour had passed since Alice had first felt her traps triggering.

  Emerging from the forest dungeon, Vin’s blood froze and he stumbled to a stop, staring in horror at the remains of the blood-soaked battlefield surrounding the Earthers’ camp.

  They were too late.

  The battle was already over.

  Far faster than having to run across X number of fragments, but not quite fast enough to respond to something like a surprise attack.

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