Jokes aside, Josh couldn't help but remember his own experiences fighting higher-level humans. Against Mizuno, he had gotten lucky and been able to drown him, which had bypassed his shroud and most of his other advantages. Against Hou Zheng, he had leveraged his superior skill and combat experience, as well as the fact that Hou Zheng had underestimated him.

  The problem with fighting people was that they learned. There was a reason Josh had gone for the lethal option with Mizuno. Trying and failing would mean that he'd never get an opportunity to try again. He had known attacking Hou Zheng was unlikely to work, but he'd had to try. If he had known his “mysterious ally” was actually Jael, Josh might have done something differently.

  Well, probably not. He had already correctly deduced her class and knew there was a chance she could do exactly what she did. He might have put more effort into talking her down, though.

  He shook his head as he finished gathering up the dust from the metal slime. “Let's close this rift and be done.”

  All four of them stepped up to the rift, which wasn't strictly necessary. Technically any one of them could do this bit. That was probably an intentional design choice, so a single surviving party member could close a dungeon if need be. Josh placed his hand near the rift, and a prompt appeared.

  Josh wondered about that last bit. One of the reasons people left dungeons up, in addition to the training opportunities, was because they were more predictable than stomping every new rift that popped up. The wording had always bothered him, though. Were the rifts really prevented from forming? He'd heard one theory that it was more like the dungeon was absorbing other rifts that tried to pop up in range. That would explain why the rifts kept getting bigger.

  In this case, though, the rift was small and pitiful. It had apparently existed for less than a week. Josh doubted anything more than the initial batch of monsters had even had a chance to wander through. No wonder they were all so weak. Josh reached out to the “close rift” option.

  He was interrupted by someone stumbling out of the rift and nearly knocking him over.

  Josh was a big man. He knew that. The body that hit him, though, was bigger still, and easily knocked him off his feet by sheer weight of mass. Thankfully, Josh recovered quickly, and rolled to his feet, sword in hand, to see what had hit him. He assumed it was some monster, maybe even a new boss-tier enemy. It was rare to actually see a monster come out of a rift, but it happened.

  Instead, it was Hou Zheng.

  It was hard to tell who was more surprised. Hou Zheng wasn't wearing his full-face mask, so Josh could see the look of utter shock on his green face. His mouth hung open, and he just stared for a moment. “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing?” Josh asked, and he couldn't help his voice from screeching a bit. “I'm just finishing up a bloody dungeon. You're the one falling out of a rift like a monster on a bad drug trip!”

  “Think you're missing the point, Josh,” Mary said in a conversational tone. She had her guns leveled at Hou Zheng's head. “The why isn't important.” Without another word of warning, she fired both her guns.

  Hou Zheng's shroud protected him from the first few shots. A blue-white energy field appeared to absorb the bolts of magic firing out of her guns. That gave him enough of an opening to throw a ball of silver fire at Mary, forcing her to dodge. Ruth tried to come around with her hammer, but the fireball exploded, forcing her back as well. Darius boosted both of their shrouds, then stepped up with his shield to block another bolt of fire. Josh threw an [Empty Chop], forcing Hou Zheng to dodge back into range of Mary's attacks.

  Josh's mind was racing. Hou Zheng had come out of a rift. People had tried to enter rifts before, many times. No one had ever managed it, not even with high-level Explorer classes with access to strange dimensional magic abilities. Josh wasn't going to call it impossible, but there was definitely something more going on here. Hou Zheng didn't just know some weird trick, there had to be a reason he could go through the rift when no one else could.

  He threw another [Empty Chop] in Hou Zheng's direction to distract him briefly, but otherwise stayed back to observe. They had him contained, at least for the moment.

  This wasn't an ambush. Hou Zheng had left the rift alone, without backup. He had been surprised to see them. So he was using the rifts for his own purposes, not just as some back-alley way to attack them. Rumor was that the rifts led to other worlds, and now that Josh had met an elf and an orc, he was even more sure of that. Was this how they had entered this world in the first place?

  He had always assumed that the dragon had entered its dungeon through the rift. He still felt confident on that. But... the seals around dungeons were for monsters. A human could walk in and then just walk right out again. Did it matter if you were from another world? Maybe, if you had a way to step in and out of rifts, you could use them as some sort of portal network. A thousand holes drilled through the fabric of the world, leading anywhere you might choose.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  He was interrupted from his musing by Hou Zheng raising his voice. “Jael! I need backup!”

  Josh didn't know if Hou Zheng's voice was carrying through the rift, if he had some device he hadn't seen, or if he had cast some spell. All that mattered was the bit where the rift was about to spit out a high-level assassin. Hou Zheng had minimal direct offensive ability, and he was still pressing them hard. A bolt of silver flame sizzled past his head even as he thought that.

  It was all that the four of them could do to keep him distracted, and Josh could see the signs of shrouds beginning to fail. If Jael joined this fight, even while trying not to hurt Ruth, she'd end it in moments.

  Josh didn't hesitate. He reached out to the rift and clicked the menu option to close it.

  It was like a soap bubble popping. One moment they were in the middle of a stone chamber, fighting over a glowing tear in the fabric of reality. The next, they were outside again, standing on the exact spot that the dungeon hatch had been before. The hatch was fading even as he watched, dissolving into mist like dry ice.

  Josh blinked at that last line. It had been so long since he had an inventory, at least while running a dungeon, that he had forgotten that it could drop the crystal in there directly. He focused on his storage ring, and found a small crystal inside, in addition to a few supplies and far too much metal slime dust. He didn't have time to investigate further, because they were still in a situation.

  Mary, Ruth, and Darius all had their weapons pointed at Hou Zheng, who was half-crouched with his hands ready to cast spells. They had only been out of the dungeon for seconds, but everything would erupt back into violence at any moment.

  Then Josh realized that he didn't actually have any reason to want it not to erupt into violence, and channeled an [Empty Chop] through his ax.

  The art shattered the last vestiges of Hou Zheng's shroud, and then the bolts from Mary's guns started shooting through his clothes and creating spurts of blood. Josh highly doubted that those would keep him down for long. Any front line [Healer] would have plenty of self-buff and self-healing spells.

  Ruth's hammer came down with the weight of a building behind it. Hou Zheng dodged, but it still blew a crater in the dirt of the Jungle four meters wide. Mary's guns started to glow brighter—her own Gravity spell, Josh thought—and he moved to cover her by throwing another [Empty Chop] at Hou Zheng. Darius, meanwhile, cast a buff to recover Ruth's shroud.

  Josh recognized the mistake immediately. Hou Zheng wasn't focused on Ruth right now, so Darius should have moved to cover Mary with his shield. Without him physically in the way, the Battle Mender threw a bolt of colorless energy at Mary that disrupted her spell. Not much, not enough to cause her guns to explode, but enough to ruin the spells she had been preparing.

  She cursed and backpedaled, trying to get more room so she could dodge next time. This was why mages normally fought at range. There were too many ways to disable them in close combat.

  However, Hou Zheng wasn't giving her a chance to do anything else. He muttered something in Chinese that sounded annoyed and dismissive. Then he pulled back his sleeve, revealing a large gold bracer carved with runes, studded with gemstones, and filled with so much magic that the air rippled when it was exposed.

  Josh didn't wait to see what it did. He threw an [Empty Chop] at Hou Zheng. He would have liked to aim at his arm, chop it off entirely, but he operated entirely on instinct. He went for center mass.

  His attack hit the orc in the torso, throwing up another spray of blood and causing him to grunt in pain. Unfortunately, it didn't stop him from sending mana into his bracer. The gemstones started to glow, brighter and brighter. After a second of building up, they flashed...

  Hou Zheng was gone.

  In his place was a rift.

  For a few long moments, Josh and the others couldn't do anything but stare. The rift looked exactly the same as the one they had just sealed inside the dungeon. Maybe it was a slightly different color or a slightly different shape, but for all intents and purposes it was the exact same.

  Josh had so many questions he didn't even know where to start. Had Hou Zheng created this rift? Revealed the old one? What was up with that bracer? If this was a real rift, then what about the monsters—

  A clawed arm reached out of the rift.

  All four of them flinched back, raising their weapons. Before they could do anything more than that, however, the arm froze. It stopped moving, as assuredly as if it was a photograph. Not just the arm, Josh realized. The ragged edges of the rift, normally flapping like a rip in fabric, had frozen as well.

  Lines began to draw themselves around the rift and the arm, as if some divine architect was sketching out a room with a pencil. First, the rift was contained in an octagon of lines, then another at a slightly different angle. Then another, and another, until they were coming too fast to track. Like an accelerated drawing of a building, Josh could see the dungeon coming into shape around them. The boss chamber around the rift, and the rooms around that. More details were added with each passing second, and Josh started to see walls, then runes.

  Just as Josh began to worry that they might be trapped in this new dungeon, the air snapped, and they were outside. Well, no. That was what it felt like, but they hadn't moved. It would be more accurate to say that the lines that had been sketching themselves had disappeared. But they had felt so real by the end, despite their lack of density, that it felt like Josh and the others had been transported.

  All that remained was a hatch on the ground. Slowly, hesitantly, Josh crouched down and placed his hand on one of the spots.

  “Well,” Darius said. He pulled his hand back. He had checked it as well. “I suppose that explains a few things.”

  Mary gave him a glare. “That all you got to say?”

  Darius pushed up his glasses. “I think any further theorizing can be saved for after we get back to the town, don't you?”