By the time Deacon made it to the top of the massive sandstone staircase, after having struggled with fully zipping up his fly and not having it nick skin, he was greeted with Bonehead putting away some smelling salts and standing a few feet away from the rest of the Ravenlight Party.

  Sam and Jass were standing a few meters from the portal, both of them holding Esmerelda upright between them as she rubbed at her temple with one hand, her other arm slack where Jass had it hooked over her shoulder.

  Her posture was limp and unsteady, and the only reason she remained on her feet was that Sam and Jass were physically holding her upright.

  “What happened? Is everyone okay?” Deacon asked, confused enough that the words came out sharper than he meant them to as he stepped closer to his Party. His eyes flicked over Esmerelda first, then to Sam, Jass, and Bonehead, who was shrugging in confusion, before finally drifting back toward the massive golden portal that burst into existence within the massive archway in front of them. “And why is there a portal?”

  “I dunno,” Sam answered, shifting his grip slightly as Esmerelda leaned more heavily into him, her body trembling in what he assumed to be exhaustion. He looked back at Deacon with a tired, unsettled expression. “One second she was fine, then the next she just… wasn’t. She went all blank and unresponsive and not like normal, it was like—”

  “—like the time she suddenly learned how to cast Nature magic,” Jass muttered, realization creeping in as her brow furrowed as she kept her gaze on Esmerelda. “When she stopped that boar from trampling Deacon during the hazing, he got.”

  Sam slowly nodded, glancing at Jass in surprised realization. “Yeah. Like that... exactly like that.”

  “I’m… fine,” Esmerelda said softly before either of them could continue, her hair slipping forward to partially hide her face as she gently wriggled free from Sam and Jass’s grip. The moment they released her, though, her knees almost buckled, her body swaying before she forced herself upright again. “Just a bit woozy, but… I’m ready to go.”

  “Yeah, the fuck you are,” Deacon said immediately, raising both hands in a calming, placating gesture as he stepped closer to her. “We can continue the quest after a bit. We just finished hours of fighting, and you nearly passed out on us, we’re not—”

  “No!”

  The word tore out of Esmerelda so suddenly and so loudly that it made everyone freeze.

  An awkward, heavy silence settled over the Party as her head snapped up, tear-filled eyes staring at them with a raw intensity that Deacon hadn’t seen from her before. She brushed roughly at her eyes, trying and failing to wipe the tears away as they spilled over despite her clenched jaw.

  “We have to go— like, we really have to go,” she said shakily, her fists curling tight at her sides as she turned away from them toward the massive golden portal looming in the doorway. “Or else…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, nor did she need to.

  The feeling that followed her words and her seriousness was immediate and deeply uncomfortable, like someone had dumped a bucket of ice-cold water down all of their backs at once.

  Deacon swallowed, wetting his lips as he took a breath and stepped forward, placing a steady hand on Esmerelda’s shoulder.

  Esmerelda was having one of those sixth-sense feelings she’d had whenever something unnerved her, the very ones that they’ve come to learn were always right.

  And this was the first time they’d seen her make such a reaction before.

  For a brief moment, he didn’t say anything, just stood there grounding her and himself both.

  “Come on,” he said finally, forcing energy into his voice as he glanced back over his shoulder at the rest of the Party. “We’ve got a Hidden Quest to complete.”

  For a heartbeat, none of them moved.

  Then, one by one, they straightened themselves, ignoring the tightening feeling in their chests and the sense that something unseen already wrapped a noose around their necks. The Ravenlight Party steeled themselves.

  Without another word, they followed Deacon and Esmerelda forward, stepping together into the golden portal as the light swallowed them whole; all too aware of the noose growing tighter around their necks.

  They emerged from the portal in a cluster of overlapping ripples as the Ravenlight Party stumbled forward and found tiled flooring beneath their boots, the warmth of the mid-day sun touching their faces.

  They were now inside some sort of overground, open-aired desert temple.

  , Deacon mused, recalling the time he spent in the Sovereign Blade’s training field, and how, according to his uncle, it was remolded from the J?tunn village he and his father stayed in.

  ? He asked himself as he warily gazed at the open-air sand temple he and his Party passed into.

  Between the gaps of the columns and set before them, braziers burned small, rich brown roots, their reddish-gold flames casting steady light up sandstone pillars carved with sun motifs and worn, complicated-looking sigils.

  Golden banners hung between the columns, draped loosely and swaying faintly in the heated air, while lengths of cloth and decorative hangings broke up the vertical space, framing what was unmistakably a ceremonial hall rather than the subterranean passage they expected to be walking into.

  Ahead of them, an ornate carpet stretched toward a raised altar set beneath a broad arch, its centerpiece marked by a radiant sun emblem worked directly into the stone, while pale desert light filtered in from somewhere beyond the far end of the structure, catching dust and sand suspended in the air.

  Sam turned slowly in place, his shoulders easing despite himself as he took everything in, the tension he’d carried through the portal bleeding away as reality failed to match whatever worst-case scenario he’d been bracing for.

  “What the actual fuck…” he muttered.

  No one disagreed with his statement, having expected to see some sort of nightmarish creature given how Esmerelda reacted as a result of her sixth sense.

  Despite Esmerelda’s warning still sitting heavy between them, the Party began to spread out almost automatically, not straying far but clearly searching for anything out of place, whether that meant the amulet itself or a ward or mechanism they needed to either destroy or find in order to reach the next place to find the amulet.

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  Sam drifted left, lifting himself into the air with his much-improved air manipulation and application of , his attention latching onto the golden banners hanging from the ceiling between the columns where he stood.

  Grabbing the fabric, he paused in confusion before rubbing it between his fingers and letting out a sharp noise of surprise.

  “Oh— shit,” he muttered. “This is high-quality stuff.”

  Before Deacon could say anything, Sam tugged the banner free and folded it over his arm, already moving toward the next one with far too much enthusiasm.

  “I’ll check the ceiling,” he said, floating higher as he eyed the upper corners of the chamber while stuffing the two golden banners he’d collected into his Spatial Satchel. “If there’s a hidden ward, it’s probably tucked up there – ya know.”

  Deacon stopped walking and stared at him, jaw tightening as he watched Sam drift past carvings and ledges like they hadn’t been told, very clearly, that danger was behind them.

  He turned away before the irritation could boil over and headed toward the northern end of the temple, forcing himself to refocus on the actual objective.

  Near the wall stood a low table flanked by offerings of fruit, gold, and jewelry, and behind it, resting on the floor, was a polished golden idol depicting a nude female goblin posed sensually, one hand on herself while the other reached toward the raised altar.

  Deacon grimaced as he stared at the rather unflattering sight of the female goblin, not understanding why this supposed great mage had a golden statue of a goblin in his temple.

  , he thought to himself as he grabbed the statue by the arm and shoved it into his Spatial Storage without ceremony.

  “Gold is gold,” he muttered, already stepping forward.

  That was when he noticed the carpet beneath where the idol had laid rose slightly just as he dragged his left foot back.

  With furrowed brows, he crouched down and pressed his fingers into the fabric, feeling it give and confirming there was no stone beneath it.

  Drawing one of the daggers sheathed just above the small of his back, he drove the blade into the center of the depression and dragged it outward. The fabric tore loudly as he widened the cut and pulled the edges aside.

  A vertical shaft was revealed beneath it, a ladder bolted into the sandstone wall and descending far below. Periodic bursts of glow lit the depths, making it clear this wasn’t merely a maintenance crawlspace, as the color of the glow looked to be fire – either brazier or torches. Judging by the flickers of flame below, the ladder led to an underground hallway.

  “I think I found it,” Deacon called out to the others, lifting his head from his discovery— only to find the rest of his party going wild and ransacking the temple for all its worth.

  The sole exception was Esmerelda, who remained fixated on a lit brazier, one arm clutching the bracelet she’d received from her mother after being christened with the middle name Yggdrasil — at least according to her.

  “Fuck me man...” Deacon muttered to himself.

  By the time the last of them reached the bottom of the ladder, the Ravenlight Party found themselves standing in a wide underground hallway. While it was not as grand as the temple above, it was still quite ornate: the tiled sandbrick ceiling and floor were intricately designed, their carved shapes depicting the visages of various sand-dwelling creatures.

  Another thing they noticed was that, contrary to what they’d assumed, the space wasn’t lit by torches or braziers at all.

  Instead, long tongues of flame spewed rhythmically from the ornate dragon busts embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling. The bursts ignited in varying intervals, their paths crossing in a way that made it impossible to just walk straight through without getting burned.

  Well, if you hadn’t just dumped every stat from the very beginning into Agility or Dexterity – which none of them had.

  Deacon took a few steps forward before stopping, eyes tracking the timing of the bursts, the order in which they came in, along with the directions they spewed out from.

  “Huh,” he muttered, brow furrowing as he took it in – having calculated just how fast someone would need to go to reach the end of the hall while avoiding the blasts. “I really should have gone out to find a rogue to join the Party; no way any of us could rush through all of that.”

  , he told himself.

  Suddenly, a thought hit him.

  From what he could see, there were no pressure plates in sight, at least within the first couple of feet that he could clearly see. Nor were there any mana sensor traps that he could feel around.

  It didn’t make sense to him. If you set up a trapped hallway, why not have pressure plates and or mana sensors set off the flame traps? Why just have them out there for people to already know about them and get rid of the element of surprise and kill off the unwary and unknowing?

  he thought, eyes flicking from one dragon bust to the next.

  “I got it,” Sam said suddenly, a grin tugging at his face as he planted his feet and lifted his staff, mana already pooling within him as he began shaping the spell. “I’ll just plug/destroy them.”

  Slamming the butt of the staff against the ground with a solid clang, releasing what should have been a barrage of Earth Spears meant to plug and or destroy the dragon busts to prevent them from spewing fire.

  However, nothing happened – the flames continued their rhythmic tempo of spewing fire.

  Sam blinked, then stared down at his staff like it had personally betrayed him, turning it slightly in his hands as if inspecting it for cracks. “…What?”

  “You good?” Jass asked, glancing over her shoulder at him as Sam started smacking his staff as though that would make it start working.

  “Performance issues?” Bonehead said, his shadow-flame like eyes and brows expressing far more sympathy than what could ever be displayed on a skeleton.

  “No,” Sam replied, then more pointedly at Bonehead, “and I never have those.”

  "The mana in the air here- it's inert," Esmerelda said in realization as fingers pinched at the air as if testing its texture, “It’s actively deactivating any mana that gets released.”

  Jass exhaled sharply. “Which means spells aren’t going to work.”

  “…Balls,” Sam muttered.

  With a tired sigh, Deacon reached into his Spatial Sling Bag and pulled out his Bearclaw Heater Shield, the heavy metal settling onto his arm as he shifted Echoform Reliquary into its crowbar form and wedged it securely at his side.

  He raised the shield high enough to cover his head and most of his upper torso, angling it toward the nearest set of dragon busts. With his free hand, he signaled for the others to hang back, knowing he was the only one carrying a physical shield; a result of his understanding of how his friends tended to operate and what they usually carried on them.

  “Let me go first,” he said, his eyes tracking the intervals at which each dragon burst spewed flame, from which direction and at what time, while also scanning for hidden pressure plates or other triggers. With the inert mana, he might have to rely on spotting wires or suspicious-looking flooring instead. “I’ll see if there’s a lever, a valve, or at least figure out the pattern so we know where not to stand.”

  “Anyone else have a shield?” Jass asked, not having packed one herself.

  “We’re mages and an alchemist,” Sam scoffed. “Why would we carry shields. Why don’t you, Ms. Warrior, have one?”

  “Because normally I can kick the ground and make one,” Jass shot back, irritation clear now that her option to do so was gone, and she would have to sit back and wait for Deacon to deal with it all while she couldn’t help out.

  “I get that you’ve got higher fire resistance than us on account of you having a high Fire Affinity,” Esmerelda called out as Deacon passed through the first four fire-spewing dragon busts, “but be careful.”

  He made it three more dragon busts forward before a jet of flame erupted from the ceiling just above him, scorching across his right tricep, easily searing through the metal plates and tough leather of his armor as though they were tissue, and forcing him to lunge ahead to avoid being doused by another burst from a dragon bust set low along the same line.

  Breaking his fall with a roll, Deacon came to a stop in a narrow pocket of space between the fire-spewing dragon busts, slapping his right tricep with his left hand.

  However, instead of pain alone, or even just the feel of crisp, seared leather, he froze as a faint crunching sound greeted his touch.

  He twisted his arm to get a better look at his tricep and saw that small, jagged shards of ice had already begun forming across the exposed skin where the fire had touched him. They crawled outward in sharp, crystalline veins, biting painfully into his flesh.

  “What the—” Deacon hissed, brushing at the ice before it could sink deeper, sending mana surging into the armor’s Self-Repair enchantment, and with a cautious gaze, watched as the scorched leather returned to its normal state and began to reknit itself.

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