There were a great many things everyone could be doing. I could be sitting around all day Energizing Diamond Golum Hearts and Resurrecting the Undead of Mayoi and Hebian-to. There were still people who needed arms, legs, or other dire wounds they’d been living with for years regenerated.

  I could Energize limitless amounts of precious gems and metals.

  I could shape up homes, walls, buildings, and the like.

  I could start on a new Pyramid if I was so inclined.

  But, no. The very first thing I did was ask the Mick for his Sword, and then do a Divination at VI+1, looking for the soul of the person who had worn the wedding ring around the socket in its pommel.

  The Mick didn’t know why I asked for his Sword, or why I was performing a Divination over it. However, when the Holo of Dereth popped up and zeroed on the stretch of road between the Obsidian Arches and Cragstone, he had to lift an eyebrow in confusion.

  Briggs was there. Kris was off with Master Oswald, chasing another short-term objective she’d be back with soon enough, and then they’d be off to scout ahead on Corcosi Island, the Island of the Red Auroch.

  Briggs took a look at the location, and exhaled softly. “Lord Mick, do you remember what is at that location?”

  Our Black Aluvian Royal Warden frowned as he contemplated it. “A Dungeon were there. I were in it a few times. Had something t’ do with, ahhh, Weeping Weapons, things ye’d call Human-slayers now. It were, it were staffed with… cultists and bandits…” he trailed off as his eyes went wide, staring at me hard.

  I offered his Sword back to him. “She’s in there, somewhere.”

  His hand trembled just a touch as he reclaimed his Claymore, touching the ring in the pommel once as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The Heart o’ the Innocent,” he said suddenly. “They sacrificed the first mayor o’ Ayan Baquar t’ somethin’ nasty t’ make a Jewel ye could fit into an Isparian Blade an’ make it into a Weeping Weapon, made t’ kill other humans. Place was full o’ bandits an’ their cultist leaders, an’ some tough bastiches among them there was.”

  “She might be one of them, if they’ve upgraded,” I told him. I tossed a thumb at Briggs. “He’s ready to release her with you. You ready to go?”

  His expression wavered a little bit. “I should, I should tell Elysa…”

  “I did before I Cast the spell. She said if it came up, go to your bride.”

  He took a really deep breath then, and dropped his head so we wouldn’t see anything unsuitable for his tough, carefree, and manly image. If his nose was a little red, and he sniffed a bit too loud, nobody noticed.

  “Right then.” He got to his feet as his voice and eyes steadied, and went past it to hard as steel. “They were fuckers in life, an’ they’ll be fuckers in death. How close can you get us?”

  “Kris and I ran by it in the river, so half to a quarter-mile.”

  He looked at me, then at Briggs. At the same moment, their boots rose up an inch off the ground. “Then let’s go.”

  ---

  The Teleport back down my Lived-Line did indeed drop us on the top of the River Esper coming south from the Olthoi North and past Holtburg. I was just using Footsteps of the Mage, while Briggs and the Mick came down on top of the water and stood there on its surface.

  The Mick looked east. “Know what direction?”

  I was slightly amused. “Put the Lost Light through the ring and follow it.”

  He blinked at me, then laid hand to his hilt and focused for just a moment.

  Light swirled up and off the Sparking Stone in Bunita’s hilt, currently inactive, and little popping motes extended out past him, pointing west.

  He was off immediately. My Disk came up for me to step on, Briggs tapped it, and was off after the Mick at a dead run.

  ---

  Straight as an arrow, the Lost Light(ning) led us straight to the cliff bank. Neither man slowed down, racing right up the vertical side, doing experienced tuck and rolls at the top, and landed without issue as I simply rode in their wake, kept on my Disk by its attraction power.

  We could see the stone structure there at the edge of the woods, growing thick and strong up to a precise point, and then not an inch closer to the ancient road, only small shrubs and short grasses between us.

  That, and a whole bunch of drudges camped about the place.

  Drudges who bleated the alarm, and two of whom instantly sent spells racing into the sky in alarm.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  There was absolutely no mercy in me as the Shards tore through the entire company, and Briggs and the Mick were charging them with even less mercy in them. I lit up the entire batch of them with crisscrossing Shards, slaughtering half of them outright. The others had just enough time to raise their weapons as the two men came in and executed a Cleave Train completely through them all, wiping them all out in under fifteen seconds and spraying a lot of very real gore around.

  “Not Summons,” the Mick declared, Lost Light incinerating the real gore on Bunita. “Why would they be camping here?”

  “There might be someone or someones inside they followed here, and knowing its a Dungeon with respawns, they don’t want to go in themselves.”

  “Who would… ahhh. Freebooters, recruiting Summons for help or minions, aye?” The black death in his eyes only grew deeper.

  “Our timing is both very good and very bad. There’s a fair chance Bonecrunch is already on the way. At his speed, he’ll be here within fifteen, twenty minutes tops.”

  “Then we be wasting time!” Without an ounce of hesitation, he started towards the bunker that led into the earth.

  “I’m taking lead,” Briggs interrupted him, catching his arm. “Traps, remember? Ryin, will she look like herself?” he asked me directly.

  The Mick blinked, not having considered that.

  “She’ll match genders and probably be Roulean, but none of the Viamontian Summons or the Fiuns have the same face and body that they once did,” I answered. “We don’t have enough data to know if they swap between Aluvian, Sho, or Gharu’n, either.”

  “So we need only worry about the women as far as being careful. Got it. What were the traps, Lord Mick? Mechanical or magical?”

  “Mayhap both. Been fifteen years for upgrades, an’ the chances the Freebooters not been using this place as a base be small, I be thinkin’,” he replied coldly.

  “Then in we go.”

  ------

  There was immediately a locked door facing us, and it was trapped. Briggs expeditiously crushed the dart mechanism with the spike on Endure, then stood aside as the Mick picked the lock with the deft ease of a master.

  The first Vulning trap was just beyond. Endure crashed down and shattered the tile and the trap in one blow that nobody heard, because his Sound Bubble was up. Then we were past and heading down some stairs towards a wide open room ahead.

  There were a dozen human Summons in the room, four of them Casters, four of them Archers, and four Melees.

  Three of them were female. Bunita had been no Caster, so that reduced matters to two. The Lost Lightning, however, was pointing past this room.

  “Any worth saving?” Briggs rumbled gently, looking at me.

  Detect Non-Good VI+1 was roving over them, looking deep, informing me of the nature of the souls and the persons within the Summoned.

  I shook my head. Briggs settled his helm into place, and his Shield grew to full size, an indication that he was taking the Archers and Casters here seriously.

  He led the way with a throw, bursting out of the darkness of the hallway and Endure a crackling bolt of lightning that hit one archer, blowing him back off his feet, then caromed off into the next archer and sent him flying as well, before streaking back to Briggs’ hand in time to bat away one of the swordsmen with a bone-crunching, armor-crushing blow that hurled the man forty feet through the air into one of the mages, sending them both tumbling across the floor.

  The Mick split off to the side as the Summons focused on the Source and his nice wall of a shield. Without need to use a Shield, he was employing the Tsunami of Steel, flowing past his targets and leaving a solid wall of liquid lightning behind him in a ferociously dangerous blur of swordwork that exploded through swords, bows, and wands, destroying them before biting into the person wielding them and sending them reeling in literal shock at the speed and power of his assault.

  He and Briggs crossed paths without slowing, drawing long arcs of violence, and the reeling Summons who were not already dead could only look at what was coming for them with such devastating speed.

  Three bright green Shards hissed down the middle of the room, and the man in the hallway racing for the door out took all three square in his back. He stiffened instantly, limned in emerald fires, and crashed into the door stiffly before falling uncontrollably to the ground.

  I entered the chamber, going right down the middle of it without a worry as Briggs and the Mick finished their arcs. At pretty much the same moment, the two of them stopped, pivoted, and a bouncing ping-pong of a Greathammer and two Sword-Shardings lashed out, crackling wildly, and the two men who’d somehow managed to survive the two passing by were blasted open by the impacts of the lightning.

  The paralyzed man was bleeding from a smashed nose as I put Crown under his chin and telekinetically lifted him off the ground by the contact point.

  “You’re real,” I informed him, but that only made his pupils dilate, because he was still paralyzed. “Konrad Junipril. Ring a bell, Lord Mick?”

  “Aye. He’s a toady of that leech MacTavish what headed up the Black Market on Freebooter,” the Mick called out coolly from the other room as he and Briggs drove Weapons of the Lost Light down on Spawn Points and made sure they’d not be coughing up more enslaved souls here. “Was a fair hand at ambushing merchants and putting knives into them so he could steal their goods, usually by outnumbering ‘em three to one or more.”

  “Deathstones back then, brigandry was just theft with a free trip back to freedom, right?” I looked into the watery blue eyes of the robber. I ran TK fingers in the convenient places, lifted the key to the door at his waist out of his purse, inserted it in the door behind me, and stepped out of the way.

  He took the Platinum Piercing Bolt right in the face, and it pretty much wiped away his head rather violently, spraying blood and brains over the hallway behind him.

  The Black on his soul indicated that he’d done murder that didn’t involve Deathstones, and quite a bit of it. I hadn’t really meant to do that, but I wasn’t too sorry it had happened.

  Vivus lit up on Crown and set his corpse en vivus as the green fires of the Emerald Shards faded away, having no effect on a dead man.

  Briggs strode up, Endure still in hand, and took a look at the headless corpse and the vivus eating away stains on the wall. “Oops?” he asked fatalistically.

  “I opened the door with the key. Didn’t disarm the magical trap. Oops,” I agreed, shrugging. “And now you know the Freebooters are indeed here.”

  “Be no goods stacked around. They ain’t using this place t’ store shite…”

  “The exit Portal is normally at the bottom of the Dungeon, so if they were going to set up a cross-Portal that’s where the connection would be.”

  The Mick grunted, then held up an amulet one of the Casters had been wearing. We looked at the symbol of the Raven Hand. “Never occurred to me it would be them, but another brainfart later…” he trailed off.

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