All Sacrifice really did was amplify what Ritual had granted me. Mostly. For instance, all the rank-up boosts were half a point stronger than before. They’d last longer too. Over an hour longer.

  [ Sacrifice

  You have Sacrificed 3 Ritual Rewards. Windfall bonus activated.

  Reward [1]: Rank gain hastened by 4x for Iron-ranked Attributes, Aspects, and Paths, by 3x for Silver-ranked Attributes, Aspects, and Paths, by 2.5x for Gold-ranked Attributes, Aspects, and Paths, with learning rate for new Augmentations and Affixes raised by 3x, for 4 hours and 30 minutes.

  Reward [2]: Vitality raised by 8 ranks, resistance to afflictions raised by 60%, and Agility raised by 8 ranks for 1 hour and 40 minutes.

  Reward [3]: Every 10 casts increases the rank for an Aspect or an Augmentation-related Attribute for 4 hours and 30 minutes. ]

  That last modification was actually really interesting. So now, if I kept casting a certain Aspect—or “cast” an Attribute by using its Augmentation—it’d grow on its own at every cast threshold? That was sort of like what happened naturally with Aspects. But in this case, it was sped up and also time limited.

  Huh. I could see myself getting crazy powerful with a buff like that. Every ten casts… I was already channelling Gravity to modify my weight. Just in case, I stopped doing so, then restarted, then made sure I kept doing that every so often.

  “Temporary rank-ups,” I said. “Here I come.”

  The dungeon turned metal almost as soon as we were past the initial Warded entryway. I didn’t want to immediately think of the Nether Vein, but my experiences had naturally left a powerful impression on my mind, so that’s exactly where it went. Luckily for me, the Scarthralls were blissfully unaware.

  “I thought dungeons were usually just cave systems and tunnels,” Lujean said. “This one looks a lot more… artificial.”

  “It’s most likely the dungeon core’s Unique Aspect,” I said. I was reminded of the little chat I’d had with Cerea back in Eversight dungeon. “I’m not sure what it is. None of the information I went through detailed that specifically, just hinted at it with all the things we’re going to face here. But Rackshift dungeon has always been this way.”

  Our steps clanked as we made our way through the tunnel. I was at the back of the little party. This wasn’t a delve I was supposed to participate in. Basically, I was a glorified chaperone for the Scarthralls, a backup just in case they faced something a little stronger than expected.

  I noted their stances, their preparedness, and was glad to see they weren’t too tense. Lujean and Atholaine had taken point, sword-and-board at the ready. At the rear, Sigrouen and Jalais were just ahead of me, both with crossbows nocked with bolts. Vandre was in the centre, the party’s resident mage well protected no matter what they faced.

  Well, Lujean had awakened his mage-like Aspect recently too, so it wasn’t like Vandre would have to carry all the magical slack. But like me, he wasn’t about to shy away from frontline fighting just because he had magic.

  We came across our first encounters before long. The metal-lined tunnel widened until it was big enough to fit a rail line. Literally. I saw tracks running along the walls and the ceilings, which felt odd since there were none on the floor. But I didn’t get to consider whether they were operational or just a decoration.

  The monsters were rising off the floor.

  “Get ready,” Lujean yelled from the front. His voice was loud and clear. He was good leader material. “Fleshtanks won’t go down easily through physical force alone. We’ll need to combine all that we have.”

  It was also nice he was recalling everything we had gone over together to prep for the dungeon.

  “Don’t forget the runes,” I said quickly. The Scarthralls were at least consistent in forgetting to use buffs, first with Ritual and then with runes. Hopefully, they’d get used to applying them before battles over time.

  “Right,” Lujean said. “Gather round for the runes, hurry!”

  Lujean brought them out and crushed them. I was there too. While I wasn’t supposed to interfere, my version of Sacrifice would ensure they all received the rune effects since Sacrifice turned them into aura buffs.

  [ Sacrifice

  You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Rune of Transferring. Windfall bonus activated.

  You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Rune of Ailment Ward. Windfall bonus activated.

  You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Rune of Regeneration. Windfall bonus activated.

  You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Rune of Lifesteal. Windfall bonus activated.

  Reward: Aura of Transfer reaches into all positive and negative buffs within a radius of 16 meters and transfers the totality to caster for 4 hours and 30 minutes.

  Reward: Aura of Ailment Ward negating all damage from [Minor] statuses and debilitating effects engaged.

  Reward: Aura of Regeneration restoring health, stamina, and mana at a [Minor] rate engaged.

  Reward: Aura of Lifesteal restoring all lost energy upon enemy death engaged.

  Reward: All effects engaged in a radius of 16 meters for 4 hours and 30 minutes. ]

  “Now we’re ready!” Atholaine said with a hard grin and a harder light of ferocity in her eyes.

  The monsters were back upright by now. Their names were apt. They were humanoid constructs, weird automaton-cyborgs of flesh and steel, tall and gangly and covered with hard metal plates that were resistant to brute force just as Lujean had said. But brute force wasn’t all the Scarthralls had.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  With a roar, the Scarthralls charged. That was another thing we had trained about. It didn’t matter what we faced. As long as we knew what kind of opponent we were up against, if we were the ones making the first move, we’d have an advantage.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  The Fleshtanks rushed the Scarthralls down. Their metal feet screeched and sparked along the floor, their arms slashing in with blinding speed. At Rackshift dungeon, even the very first monsters were at least high-Silver, if not low-Gold. Considering the Scarthralls were mostly just into Silver, that might not have felt like an even matchup.

  But we had all the buffs from the Rituals and the runes to count on.

  Lujean and Atholaine were perfect at tanking the monsters’ blows head-on, taking the brunt of the impacts on their shields. The little shield wall they created refused to let any of the monsters past them.

  From the back, Jalais and Sigrouen fired their crossbow bolts one after the other. Several pinged off the metal plates, but they had practiced enough that their accuracy was spot on when it mattered. Multiple of the bolts found their mark, stabbing into the fleshy bits in between the armoured plates.

  Hissing sounds emanated as soon as they struck true.

  “There!” Vandre said. “My blood’s working!”

  He had daubed the bolts with his blood earlier, and his Aspect of Aetherblood had imbued the quarrel tip with an acidic property. Now, with the crossbow bolts firmly lodged in between the metal plates, they were eating the monsters away from the inside.

  Still, they weren’t going down that easily. Their overwhelming might was forcing Lujean and Atholaine back step by step. They were barely able to remain upright.

  “Next plan, Vandre,” Lujean called in between defending against the hammering blows from the Fleshtanks. “Now!”

  Vandre didn’t waste any time. The frontline fighters leaped back at the same instant that Vandre threw forward a wave of blood, all of which hissed and sizzled through the air, their burning, melting power intensifying as they landed on the targets.

  Metallic groans and screeches followed, the monsters held back and struggling for the moment.

  “Now, watch this,” Lujean said, stepping forward.

  He put away his sword for just a moment as he extended his hand, pointing it at the blood-covered Fleshtanks. Then fire burst from his hand.

  Apparently, Lujean had been heavily inspired by me to get the Aspect of Wildfire. He hadn’t been able to manifest the Aspect of Aetherblood, but I didn’t think Wildfire was bad by any means.

  One of its special properties was how easily it spread from one target to the next. With a pretty neat Affix called Fuel, Lujean had the power to designate any specific material as fuel source for his flames, which allowed his Aspect to be extra effective. In this case, the Wildfire latched onto the blood that Vandre had thrown over all the monsters.

  As if being eaten by acid wasn’t bad enough, now they were burning alive too. No surprise that the monsters’ metallic shrieking got even worse.

  “It’s working,” Atholaine said. With the firelight dancing on her face and eyes, she looked almost maniacal. “We’re killing them!”

  “Don’t let your guard down,” I said.

  My warning proved fruitful because despite their horrific state, the monsters still attacked as furiously as they could. Even as they burned away, they slashed in with their claws, rammed into the Scarthralls with their gangly bodies flailing every which way, and even threw chunks of themselves at the Scarthralls that were burning and bloodied too.

  The chaos really tempted me to jump in. I wanted to hammer the Fleshtanks with my mace, pin them down with Gravity, vaporize them with precise applications of Flare.

  But no. I had to restrain myself. This was all about the Scarthralls and I was only here to jump in if it was absolutely needed. So while many of my instincts were trying to tell me to interfere and take care of the monsters before the Scarthralls suffered, I overrode the impulse and stayed put. They could handle this.

  Which they did. Eventually, after a good bit of struggle and a few cases where one or more of them needed to back off to perform some quick regeneration via their Aspect of Bloodsalve, the Fleshtanks were all done.

  “That… took a little too long,” Lujean said. The Scarthralls didn’t sweat much anymore, but he had been human not too long ago, so the sweat-swiping motions were likely instinctive.

  “This is the strongest dungeon in Zairgon,” I said. “I’d have been surprised if you made it through without any trouble at all.”

  We spent some time looting the monster corpses. Unlike the other dungeons, there wasn’t much we could recover externally from the dungeon walls and the like. No deposits of mana stones, no weak monsters like slimes that we could harvest.

  Instead, we mostly had to rely on cutting apart and pulling out what we needed from the monstrous corpses.

  What we recovered was pretty interesting, though. The Fleshtanks were one of the rare cases where mechanical automata were connected to living bodies via mana. They were a prime example of physical biology mixing with metaphysical magic. As such, when we recovered the manatech hearts from within the monsters, we knew we were basically making a killing.

  “Are you sure you’re good to continue?” I asked.

  The Scarthralls all nodded pretty exuberantly. Their wounds were gone, and though the armour they had come in with were scorched, pitted, and bloodied, their grins shone bright.

  “We’re not stopping here, Cultist Ross,” Atholaine said with her customary ferocity.

  I smiled back at them all. “Then let’s keep going.”

  Monsters weren’t the only obstacles we faced in the dungeon. If that was the case, we could at least have taken solace in the consistency of what we had to deal with.

  “What the…” Vandre stared a little slack-jawed at the huge shaft in front of us. “How in the world is anyone supposed to get through this without magic?”

  Our goal was the passage that continued onwards, but about two hundred feet higher up.

  “You and your magic,” Lujean said. “This is why we got all the picks and ropes!”

  Right. We had done our best to prepare for most eventualities. But that didn’t mean we had to resort to them.

  I cleared my throat. “Just give me the rope. I’ll get us across.”

  They didn’t argue. Sometimes, I felt like it should be a little scary how much faith the Scarthralls had in me.

  I took the rope, then used Siphon to lower my weight before jumping up at an angle. I had overshot it a tiny bit, but increasing my weight and pulling out Flare with Manifestation had me shooting straight into the passage opening. Then I turned around and threw the rope to the other side. My aim needed a little bit of work, but eventually the Scarthralls were able to catch it.

  They could have tied the rope down at their location and then used it to cross, slowly and carefully. But who wanted to take up that much time?

  I just had all the Scarthralls hold the rope together, then swing over as one to my side of the large shaft. They had to smack into the shaft’s walls, which produced a painful thud that made even me wince, but once I got a bunch of thumbs-ups, I hauled them right up.

  Pretty neat that my Gold-ranked Power was more than strong enough to drag up five armoured Scarthralls. It wasn’t an effortless exercise, but the fact that I managed it just went to show how different I was from my time on Earth. Went to show how real and effective mana was.

  We proceeded through a few more non-monstrous obstacles, like a wide arena where the floor threatened to collapse if we stepped on the wrong metal grates and also vault doors we had to unlock after solving a weird puzzle.

  Unfortunately, we opened the wrong vault.

  “You think the right one has treasure behind it?” Lujean asked at a very high volume to compensate for the stampede of the horde of monsters emerging from within the vault.

  “Maybe this dungeon is a trickster and they all have monsters!” Jalais said as he dodged a swipe from a Fleshtank that reminded me of elephants.

  I wasn’t sure what exactly the Scarthralls were planning, but for the first time, I had to admit they were in actual danger of being overrun. There were a lot of the monsters behind that vault door, and all of them weren’t even out yet. Assuming they were anywhere near as strong as the first Fleshtanks we had encountered, this… was not looking good.

  “You got a plan, Lujean?” Sigrouen asked. “I’m running out of bolts!”

  “Uh… we can try to lure them to the tunnels?” Lujean suggested, sounding highly unsure.

  “That’s too far away!” Vandre said.

  “And we’ll be locked inside too,” Sigrouen said. “Because I don’t know if there’s another tunnel opening.”

  Lujean looked like he was seconds away from tearing off his own hair. “It’s the best I’ve got, sorry!”

  “Well, we can’t—”

  Loud screeches and cries interrupted their little conversation. The monsters were falling. As one, the Scarthralls all turned, standing witness to fields of purple energy weighing down and trapping the monsters, making the whole rushing horde stumble and fall.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But at this point, even I’m in danger, so I had to act.”

  I wasn’t sure, but it appeared they were a tiny bit too awed at the entire horde of dozens upon dozens of monsters all coming to a stop together to state their business. The monsters were trying to rise, to force themselves forward. But I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  Before they could free themselves from the trap, I focused on combining my Aspects. Flare getting compressed with Concentration and also imbued with Illumination, all held together with Gravity’s Massless Interaction. It came so much easier this time, although I noticed it felt like I was holding a nuke in my hands. Like the energy was desperate to be unleashed.

  So, I let it. The lance of power I had constructed was turning everything impossibly bright, and when I relinquished control, it devastated forward in an avalanche of sunlike energy.

  [ Rank Up!

  Your Thauma and Fervour Attributes have risen by one Rank.

  Your Illumination Aspect has risen by one Rank.

  Your Path of Starforged Firmament has risen by one Rank.

  Thauma: Silver IV

  Fervour: Gold IV

  Illumination: Silver III

  Path of Starforged Firmament: Gold III ]

  “Um, Cultist,” Lujean said. “Is it safe to go through all that?”

  I surveyed the destruction I had dealt for a few moments. “Maybe we can take a little break here before we forge on. Sound good?”

  Resting wasn’t just a necessary pause. It wasn’t like the mess of molten metal, precariously piled debris, and burning monster matter was about to dissipate anytime soon. But besides helping us regain our bearings, it also allowed me to focus on the other thing I wanted to accomplish in this dungeon.

  Getting my new Vitality Augmentation.