Dain would like to say the six of them hacked and slashed their way through the narrow mineshaft, but it was mostly the frontliners doing most of the work. Anisa couldn’t even get a single crossbow bolt in before the frontliners ripped the scorpions apart, and neither could he get a windsphere in to help out from the center of the formation. All the better, he supposed. It left him more mana for the tamer.

  There were several branching tunnels within the infested portion of the mine, but they went straight, straight, and then straight, using Sahlir’s keen nose and Kargun’s underground instincts to find their way. Five minutes later, the six of them burst out into the infested nest proper—and Yasmin immediately slammed the butt of her swordstaff into the ground, creating an earthwall behind them to block off the scorpions.

  Then they looked around, weapons steaming, lungs hot.

  The vast infested cavern was about the same size as their camp, but organic growths littered in places that should never belong on stone. Slick, slimy sacks dangled from the ceiling like bloated grapes. A resinous lattice webbed the walls and crusted old rails and wooden pillars, while bioluminescent orbs glowed pink, red, and purple all over, casting an eerie light across the cavern.

  … Hm.

  At first glance, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly wrong about this place. There didn’t seem to be another way out of this nest—no sixth tunnel cleverly concealed behind a false wall—but then all of their eyes naturally drifted to the far back of the nest, where a giant shadow dominated the entire back wall.

  The five-meter-tall steelplated scorpion queen.

  At least, he thought she was supposed to be the queen, because she looked nothing like what he’d expected. Her legs were removed, leaving it completely immobile, while its back was completely bloated with bulging egg sacs in obscene bundles. Some were taut as drums, others puckered and laced with metal veins. Every few heartbeats, a sac would twitch, and a pale ripple would race across the membrane.

  Suddenly, the bloated queen trained its tired, beady yellow eyes on the six of them, and a low mental pressure immediately rolled off her in waves.

  Ilvarenn, Kargun, Sahlir, Yasmin, and Anisa flinched. The elf bit her lip. The dwarf swore. The hawkkin cracked his head as if that’d do something to alleviate the dull headache starting to wash over all of them, and Anisa and Yasmin, well… they were the least prepared for receiving the queen’s attempted emphatic connection, which she used to connect to all of her children, so they winced and took a few steps back, panting hard.

  Dain felt the headache hammering into him too, but strangely, he wasn’t as affected by it as the others were.

  Maybe I’m just too used to nausea already, so this amount is nothing?

  Whatever the case, the mental wave broke against him and kept rolling.

  “It’s just a stress impulse from the queen. She can’t actually take over your mind like she can her children,” he said, glancing at Anisa and Yasmin. “Deep breaths. You’ll get used to it soon.”

  “Very… comforting,” Anisa wheezed. “Is this… what all adventurers have to deal with… when they have to clear out a steelplated scorpion brood?”

  “Well, I guess most adventurers would come with relics that strengthened their mental fortitude.”

  But while the rest of his party members continued trying to steady themselves, Dain scowled ahead, tightening his grip on his oreblade.

  … She does have a point, though.

  Her mental waves shouldn’t be this powerful.

  And the fact that her legs have been cut off… and the fact that she’s also this bloated with eggs…

  The reason—and the answer—was right in front of the queen.

  A dark-haired man in dusty researcher’s robes ferried syringes between the queen’s abdomen and a makeshift workstation of crooked benches, stained test tubes, and poorly-labeled notes right beside the queen. Even across the cavern, Dain heard him humming cheerfully to himself as he continued taking and measuring samples—seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that the six of them had entered his lair.

  Only when Dain took a slow step forward did the man pause mid-hum and turn slowly.

  The mask he wore struck out first: alabaster white, with one black eye painted in the center.

  Dain’s right eye twitched. He felt a little itch on the back of his neck just looking at that mask. Maybe it was a Cognitum-Class relic that had a terrifying effect on anything that looked at it, just like his Bloodlight Eye?

  “... Oh!” the man said, voice mild. “I see Braskir finally scraped together a set of adventurers capable of reaching me. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to relocate my research deeper where adventurers can't sniff me out again.”

  Despite her headache, Anisa stepped forward as well, narrowing her eyes in poised disgust. “Would we be correct in assuming you’re the one who tamed the scorpions and endangered the local miners?”

  The man offered a theatrical bow, robes fluttering. “Oh, yes! I am Denkesh, ‘Scholar’ of the Lithic Academy currently studying conductive brood-linked nervous systems. Pleased to meet—”

  Dain lifted his prosthetic and fired before Denkesh finished.

  The windsphere ripped the air open. Denkesh shrieked and dove to the side, but the blast shredded his entire workstation, shattering tubes, flinging glass, and tearing paper into confetti. A rack of organic samples vaporized, and a cabinet even split in half, shrapnel exploding everywhere.

  “No!” Denkesh wailed, scrambling after the scraps of his papers. “No, no, no, my… you!” He glared back, his black eye warbling with outrage. “How rude! That was completely uncalled for—”

  Dain snapped another string of low-mana windspheres loose, but Denkesh twisted between them with an agility that made his lip curl. One windsphere howled past the man’s shoulder, another smashed against the cavern wall, and another bounced off the queen’s bloated body.

  “... Mother!” Denkesh shouted, screeching at the top of his lungs. “More scorpions! Now!”

  The queen answered with a wet, rattling scream, and her swollen back convulsed as all of her egg sacs ruptured.

  Out come a dozen three-meter-tall steelplated scorpions—all significantly larger and shinier than the scorpions outside the nest—and Dain grimaced as they charged forward, stingers and mandibles dripping with venom.

  These ones are gonna be a problem.

  “I’ll get the tamer! You four keep Anisa safe and wipe them out as they come!” he shouted at the frontliners. Then he flung himself into the air, wingcloak giving him lift, and looked the entire nest over from his vantage point.

  Denkesh was still hunched over before the scorpion queen, riffling through ruined papers as if they mattered more than the adventurers who’d come to take him in. Dain wasn’t going to bother with that. Flapping his wings once, he dove in like an owl—and Denkesh whipped around faster than he expected, meeting his oreblade with a segmented blade that snapped and locked solid like a scorpion’s tail.

  Though he ignited his firelight right before impact to temporarily sharpen the blade, Dain still felt pain in his wrist as he was sent skidding back, one wing stabbing into the ground to slow himself down.

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  “You can’t be doing this to me,” Denkesh grumbled, shaking his head madly. “No, no, this… my work must be completed. I must obtain results with my serum. Hey, how about you and your friends let me off just this once? Give me two… no, three more weeks in Mine Kormuhan. I’ll even give you partial credit in my paper once I—”

  Despite the tight pain in his lungs already, Dain whipped his prosthetic up and fired one more windsphere. Denkesh moved nimbly this time, jerking his head aside to dodge.

  “Are you a brute?” Denkesh snarled. “Stop shooting for a second and—”

  “Who are you?” Dain snapped back, prying his Bloodlight Eye open and making the man flinch for a second. “Where did you get that mask?”

  The question made Denkesh hesitate only a beat, but Dain asked only because he knew only one thing: that one-eyed mask did not belong to Denkesh. Of the three one-eyed who destroyed Corvalenne, they all had one prosthetic arm, and there was only one man amongst them: a well-spoken, far western man from the Curator Church. A golden-haired Ostravian from across the sea. Denkesh was too gruff a man with too thick an Obric accent to be the same man, so even if he was a one-eyed in affiliation, he wasn’t the man Dain was looking for.

  A decoy, then?

  The one-eyed I’m chasing knew I was on their trail, so they abandoned their mask to this guy to throw me off?

  Denkesh didn’t answer.

  He simply drew his robes tighter, and—without warning—a metal scorpion tail shot out, tipped with a hooked barb.

  Dain caught it with his oreblade, slapping it aside, but it had more reach than he’d expected. Six meters long. It was almost inconceivable how Denkesh had even hidden it underneath his robes, but relics were relics for a reason, and that surprise stab bought the man enough time to lash out his segmented blade at the same time.

  The tip grazed Dain’s chest as his wingcloak jerked him back.

  Denkesh continued lashing out with both scorpion tail and segmented blade. Dain had to watch both threats at once. He ducked, sidestepped, and winced as the segmented blade grazed him in more places than one. Grimacing, he caught the next drafts with his wingcloak to throw himself high up where the segmented blade couldn’t easily reach—but then Denkesh’s robes split into two ends and became wings as well, leaving behind a trail of metal dust as he followed Dain up with a burst of speed.

  He’s got a wingcloak too?

  Dain yanked his wings forward to shield himself from Denkesh’s imminent stab, but it wasn’t a stab. Mid-air, Denkesh curled his segmented blade in spirals—hardening the joints and locking them in place—until it became a giant drill.

  The drill spiralled through his silverplume feathers. His wingcloak physically screamed—vibrations rippling from the tip of his wings to his shoulder blades—and Denkesh drove him down into the ground, making his back arch, pain flaring all over.

  Shit!

  He didn’t stay down. He shoved the pain aside and fired a windsphere to his side, shooting himself out of the way as Denkesh crashed down with the drill. That attack would’ve impaled him to the ground. Instead, he managed to throw himself back on his feet, panting and spitting dirt as he hunted for balance.

  Then he hunted for Denkesh himself, but the man was gone.

  Nowhere to be seen.

  … What?

  Dain snapped his head around, but all he saw were his party members fending off the giant scorpions—until faint footsteps scraped behind him.

  A metal tail arced for his back.

  He spun, his wings slamming the tail aside, and then fired a windsphere point-blank in Denkesh’s face. The tamer cut through it with his segmented blade back in its normal form.

  “You saw me?” Denkesh muttered in surprise, before his silhouette rippled and wavered again. “Do people ever say you have good eyes… well, a good eye?”

  Then the tamer vanished again, right before Dain’s eye, and he immediately realized what was going on.

  Camouflage-type relic.

  The tamer darted around like an insect—flash, lash out, then vanish—each pass forcing Dain to defend on instinct. Slashes bit at his sides and thighs. Each block cost him breath, and each graze put more blood on his skin. His clarity flagged and his right eye struggled to keep up. If not for his wings being sentient and automatically blocking several hits, he thought, he’d be folded and done by now.

  It’s not actually invisibility, he thought, gritting his teeth as he blocked the next lash of the segmented whip, then backstepped to dodge the follow-up scorpion tail. But I don’t have enough clarity to see through the camouflage anyways.

  As he caught Denkesh’s outline for just a heartbeat—long enough for the shimmer to stutter—he scanned all of the man’s Tags while bracing for the pain in his right eye.

  ***

  Name: Skittering Scorpion Tail

  Type: Passive Implement-Class Relic, Uncommon-1

  Attribute Addition: +1 Might

  Ability Description: The holder can control the segmented chitinsteel scorpion tail, which can be stuck to the holder’s back. The passive drain is 2 mana regeneration per hour.

  ***

  Name: Metalmolt Wingcloak

  Type: Active Armament-Class Relic, Uncommon-2

  Attribute Addition: +2 Swiftness

  Ability Description: When mana is channeled into the wingcloak, the holder can flap the wings to flutter-dash in short explosive bursts, leaving behind glittering metal dust. The activation cost is 1 mana.

  ***

  Name: Modular Serrasegment Blade

  Type: Passive Armament-Class Relic, Common-9

  Attribute Addition: +2 Might

  Ability Description: The holder can extend, retract, coil, and lock the serrasegment blade into various forms. The passive drain is 1 mana regeneration per hour.

  ***

  Name: Mirage-Husk Brooch

  Type: Passive Implement-Class Relic, Uncommon-2

  Attribute Addition: +1 Clarity

  Ability Description: The holder can create a shifting camouflage effect around themselves, which will be disrupted when the holder is attacked or the holder makes any drastic movements. The passive drain is 4 mana regeneration per hour.

  ***

  But Denkesh’s relic Tags aside, the name on his personal Tag was… troublesome to look at, and it wasn’t because Dain’s right eye was already threatening to burst from the pain.

  ***

  N????a?????m????e????:????? ????D???e???n???k????e???s????h????? ???M????a?????v???r????e????n???k????

  Grade: Uncommon-0

  Title: Scholar

  Title Ability: Inkworn Mind

  Acquired Skills: None

  Might: 11 (+3)

  Swiftness: 11 (+2)

  Resilience: 12

  Clarity: 10 (+1)

  Mana: 55/83 (+0.4/hr)

  Relics: Skittering Scorpion Tail (Common-9), Metalmolt Wingcloak (Uncommon-2), Modular Serrasegment Blade (Common-9), Mirage Husk Brooch (Uncommon-2)

  ***

  It wasn’t the first time Dain had seen a nigh-unreadable personal Tag, but considering the last being he failed to use his Eye of Belara on was Belara herself—a Curator God—he couldn’t help but glare daggers at the one-eyed mask Denkesh was wearing.

  Even through the pain, he could tell that mask was a relic given how mana seemed to be flowing inside it, but he couldn’t see its Tag. It simply wasn’t showing up with the other four.

  So that mask’s ability protects him from my title ability?

  As Dain’s wings snapped up and shielded him from yet another slash from behind, he twisted with the same motion and drove his oreblade backward. Firelight lit up. The strike caught Denkesh’s blade squarely and sent the man skidding back across the ground in a harsh spray of dust and chitin scraps.

  But now Dain dropped to one knee, panting hard. Blood welled in his mouth, and his vision pulsed at the edges.

  No good.

  I need… a different strategy.

  And the bloated queen’s back kept splitting again and again, new steelplated scorpions forcing themselves out in swollen clusters. Ilvaren, Kargun, Sahlir, and Yasmin were still holding their line, but they were getting pushed back. If this continued, the brood would overrun all of them—and Dain would lose to Denkesh’s relentless dashing and circling attacks long before he ever reached them or the queen.

  He needed to stop Denkesh’s movement. He needed to box the man in. More importantly, he needed to get his strength back, but how could he…

  …

  He glanced back for another second.

  Ilvaren, Kargun, and Sahlir were too busy fending off the giant scorpions.

  They wouldn’t notice.

  So, despite his nausea, he launched himself up and twisted mid-air to shout:

  “Earthwalls, Yasmin! Box me in with the queen!”

  Somewhere in the distance, Yasmin shouted back, “Are you—”

  “Just do it! I’ll take care of the queen!”

  And then there was no hesitation. Yasmin drove her staffblade into the ground three times—thump, thump, thump—and three massive stone walls rose around the back of the cavern, creating a new area that separated Dain and the queen from the rest of the cavern. Scorpions clashed and screeched outside the walls, but the sounds were muffled. Distant.

  Dain immediately landed, raised his prosthetic, and fired a windsphere straight at the queen’s head, but Denkesh suddenly appeared in front of him and sliced it apart with the segmented blade.

  … As expected.

  “She is my test subject to hurt. Not yours,” Denkesh growled, standing between Dain and the queen, scorpion tail arched and segmented blade trailing on the ground behind him as he stepped forward, camouflage be damned. “I gave you all a chance to leave and let live, but no, no, no—you just had to ruin everything. Tell me, you fucking brute: what’s your plan now?”

  Dain clicked his tongue.

  “Well, I knew you’d follow me here where nobody can see us.”

  Then he reached into his Void Archivist’s Satchel, and one by one, he tossed wrapped chunks of scorpion meat onto the ground behind him. Each piece was heavy, dense, and perfectly as fresh as when he’d snuck them away from Rena’s butchery station over the past two weeks.

  He’d been carrying them around at double their normal weight, so once he tossed out his twelfth chunk, the first thing he did was roll his shoulders back—and the crack in his bones felt so good, he almost let out a sigh.

  “Ah,” he muttered. “It feels so much lighter now.”

  He cracked his neck once more, stabbed his oreblade into the ground, and looked at Denkesh directly.

  “Watch this.”

  Then he clapped his hands together.

  After all, by the time he was done, Denkesh wouldn’t be in any condition to tell anyone what happened here.

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