Briggs plucked the Raven Hand symbol from the Mick’s hand and held it to the face of Endure. We all watched the motes of Lost Lightning attack it and reduce it to charred bits quite quickly, reacting to something unclean inside the metal.

  “No reason to keep those folks alive, either.”

  “I hear that,” the Mick said plainly, and we proceeded on.

  ---

  Briggs led the way with his Tremblesense. All the mechanical traps were obvious to his Tremblesense because they were part of the walls and floor, and the magical sensors and results didn’t mean much to his Source Sun. He calmly and brutally reduced all of them to scrap with single flicks of Endure which likely would have been audible throughout the Dungeon without his Sound Bubble up. The magical discharges fizzled against his Sun, but shone out enough to see where they were set up. A little tap of Endure, there was a nice crater a meter wide in the stone, and nothing intact was left behind us.

  We pressed forward, Briggs singularly unimpressed with the bandits and cultists we were running across… and the living brigands who ran at the first sight of him, which was definitely the smart thing to do.

  They just couldn’t outrun Seeking Emerald Shards, which were perfectly capable of following them around corners and the like.

  ---

  “You know the names?” Briggs grunted as we looked out into the next room.

  Five each melee, Casters, archers, plus five people with custom armor and weapons.

  “Aye, surprisingly enough. They all earned some reps in the unkind parts o’ Society before they wound up here, an’ they never left. Freebooter Council considered them useful and stupid diversions, them setting up a hideout here and working with the Raven Hand. I dinnae ken they be NPC’s, but it be likely. They Assay with names, not as what.

  “Torgrym the Magnificent. Blowhard egotistical guy who lives fer dueling others, thinks he’s something great. Androth Salson, grimly practical merc. Itala the Knife, throatcutter an’ assassin, rarely speaks. Li Fanli, the archer an’ sniper of the lot. Den-ru Chang, kind o’ the smartest of them, support Caster.”

  “I gather they don’t work together too well?” I asked.

  “Den-ru will Vuln and Imperil. The rest will go right t’ attacking. But none o’ them are paramounts, like, so I don’t think they be ready for what we be capable o’ doing to ‘em.”

  “Well, they are best served taken by surprise, especially with all the support.” I lifted my hand. “I’m going full double Shardrays. They will all live through it, but you should be able to Cleave Train through them all and clear off the mercs and the like.”

  “Negative on me lass?” the Mick asked, checking the direction of the motes coming off his Claymore’s pommel quickly. They pointed sharply off to the right. “Ah, she’s in the sacrificial chamber, where most of the lot were gathered…”

  “Go to it, Ryin,” Briggs rumbled, setting his feet to take the right side. The Mick set opposite him.

  I targeted everyone in my Detect Non-Good, no soul out there we wanted to salvage, including the spotter in the room at the back of this large chamber.

  Arcane Fusion, Shards flickering up, converging into a point of light, racing out, hitting a prism of will in midair and breaking apart into two Rays that diverged onto separate sides of the Formation out there.

  They hit the two shield-wielding Mercenary Summons there, drilling completely through them and nearly killing them on the spot, and then began to Chain.

  The Linejump swept past me and deposited me behind the watcher sitting bored at his post, jumping to his feet with a shout when two beams of coruscant light blasted left and right in front of him, connecting every single being in the chamber in front of him with a dancing, crisscrossing web of Light and Fires that had him flinging up his hands to protect his eyes from the sight of them.

  He turned around to flee, and stopped cold when he saw me there.

  Three Emerald Shards took him in the chest, and he dropped, stiff as a board.

  He was Raven Hand, too.

  There were cracks and crashes and shrieks of metal being cut by adamantine, oaths and curses that became screams cut off by the sound of meat being chopped through and bone cracking as bodies flew wildly.

  Two blurs crossed one another, and bodies dropped behind them, the NPC’s with names falling in sprays of blood as they tried to recover from the Shardchains. Vivus crawled over them, and even their stoic curses and oaths of disbelief faltered as the vivus did its work.

  They weren’t coming back from a System Respawn this time.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  They gasped and staggered and shook and bled out, and the vivus popped as whatever resurrection mechanic they were under faltered and lost them.

  The Mick and Briggs came strolling up, and I levered the guy on the ground up to face them firmly. I tilted him back so he could look up at Briggs, who looked down with those really intimidating pale green eyes of his.

  “There a reason he’s still alive?” he asked me calmly.

  “I’m not sure. Just had a feeling, based on his age, and the fact he’s Brown.”

  “Brown, huh.” He reached out, grabbed the young Sho’s skull with his palm, and dissipated the green glow about the fellow’s head. As the guy started to say something, Briggs clenched his skull lightly in warning, and he could only close his eyes and shut up instantly.

  “You’re wondering what Brown means. It means you’re an animal. You act on instinct, you don’t think about why you do stuff, you just obey your bosses, do what you’re told, and look out for yourself and your mates. It’s the Color of kids brainwashed all their lives who just ignore the why of what they do and go along because they don’t care, they’re too dumb, or they remain willfully ignorant.

  “What it means here is you’ve got a chance to do what is totally and completely the right thing, or just die with everyone else here.” Bone creaked as Briggs exerted just a touch more pressure on the cultist, his gaze unblinking. “If you answer the questions truthfully, you get to run out of here, and maybe you won’t die to Bonecrunch who is coming outside. If you lie or refuse, well, there’s a Truthspeaker standing right here, and we’ll just kill you, you’ll die forever, no coming back with whatever Deathstone method Nuhmudira gave you,” the fellow’s eyes bulged in disbelief at the name, “and then we’re going to go kill a whole lot of people.

  “So, what’s your answer going to be?”

  He stared at Briggs, then shifted his gaze over to the flat expression of the Mick, who looked exactly like someone about to slit his throat in passing.

  “What, what do you want to know, sir?” he managed to squeak out.

  “What living people are here, and how many of them,” Briggs stated in a voice like iron. “Start talking. We don’t have a lot of time before Bonecrunch shows.”

  He obviously didn’t want to mess with the Butcher of Cragstone. “Proctor Grammelin runs the supply room at the back of the Dungeon. He is assisted by…”

  ------

  We all watched him shed any sign of his Raven Hand affiliation before taking off for the surface entrance. We’d told him to take a side passage and wait for Bonecrusher to run by, rather than risk running into the slaughtering Prodigal Drudge. Whether he did so or not was up to him, but we’d also told him that taking the road across the Obsidian Span to Arwic was probably a good way to rejoin real society…

  With that, we headed down the hall to the ceremonial chamber where sacrifices and offerings to the patron of the Shadows by the Raven Hand took place.

  Sound Bubbles and Illusionary Walls made for great stealth takedowns in the antechamber to the ceremonial hall. I let Briggs and the Mick handle the light stuff while I walked past and out into the chamber while Invisible, gliding past the Summons there who had no reason to suspect I was there or even think Invisibility was possible.

  There she was, inside a Mercenary on the far side of the chamber, and even bearing a rapier. However, she looked like a southern Aluvian or Roulean now, with curly red-brown hair and hazel eyes, and even bore a shield and heavier armor.

  All ectoplasm, as it were, so immaterial.

  I sectioned off another area with Illusionary Wall, and Briggs and the Mick rolled out to bring down the two guards concealed by the image with coldly brutal efficiency. Neither Summons had much of a chance to fight back.

  “She’s on the far side of the chamber, upper level like us,” I told the Mick after entering their Bubbles, pointing her out to him, verified by the Motes from Bunita’s pommel.

  He took a long and deep breath, while Briggs made sure to memorize her appearance. “What’s the play?” the Mick asked after a long and quiet moment.

  “The only real folk are those two guards playing cards behind the altar. Everything else is programmed Summons. A Wall in front of the slits from that guardroom, and then more sectioning things off as we go. As long as no alarm is sounded and they can’t hear or see combat, we can roll right along this and wipe them as we go. Ryin, I’ll ask one spell to soften them up if there’s more than two,” Briggs said instantly.

  “Got it.” Unlike normal people, there were no conversations going on, call outs, shifting positions and patrols, or anything. Only the living did that, and the only living in range were the two men playing cards down there. “Let me start with a Wall around those two twats down there and tie it off for continuity. Then I’ll start sectioning and you can start taking them down. None of the Summons should react if the Walls drop and there’s nothing there, as long as they aren’t attacked themselves.”

  Both men nodded, and Briggs went on, “First priority is getting Bunita out of here. Mick, when we take her, you immediately leave with her, no buts.” There was a brief moment of hesitation, but the Mick finally just rapped the breastplate of the bigger man and nodded. Briggs grinned grimly. “Our secondary goal is to Seal the Portal they are no doubt using to get in and out of here, and then leave ourselves. How far away can you feel Bonecrusher coming?”

  I considered that, looking back towards the entryway. “I’ll know the moment he enters the Dungeon, certainly.”

  “He can’t be far away now. Let’s get Bunita quick and clean. If we can run into the Portal room, Seal it, and ‘port away while leaving an Interdiction behind, I’ll be satisfied with the Drudge killing everything.”

  “We Stealth in, then. I’ll have to treat the room for Final Rest if you actually want them dead.”

  “I totally do. I can smell the blood of drudges coming off that altar there. They’ve been sacrificing them to their Patron.”

  “Everyone concerned deserves what is going to happen to them,” I said, lifting my hand. “Ready?”

  Hammer and Claymore rose, posed to take action. I brought up an Illusionary Wall in front of the next set of guards, a two-dimensional snapshot in each direction nigh-impossible to detect visually. The two men zipped on ahead of me, Sound Bubbles concealing all sound as they closed in on the two unaware Summons.

  There was a flurry of bladework and a single One Strike. The two Bandit Summons fell suddenly, surprise frozen on mostly blank features.

  Both men pivoted, eyes on the next pair of targets they could see through the Wall. I extended the next Wall along the edge of the walkway overlooking the main sacrificial chamber below, looped it around the next set and across the windows of the guardroom. Briggs and the Mick zipped into motion in perfect sync, the Waveskating Step matching longer strides perfectly as the two flashed in on the attack on the startled Summons who basically saw them appear out of nowhere.

  ============================

  For those who would like to support me and my daily updates, my Patreon Link is at:

   Ebook Series: The original Power of Ten: The First Day, The First Week, and finally The First Month, Vol Five and Six!