The walls of the fortress breathed cold.
Moisture clung to the stone like a second skin, and every corridor seemed to swallow sound rather than echo it. The torches along the hallway sputtered with a sickly, restrained glow—barely enough to outline the edges of the labyrinthine prison.
Caelus led the way, hyper-aware of every minute detail as he made sure that they avoided any traps or magic circles.
"This way," he whispered.
"How can you tell?" Elise murmured behind him.
"I can feel his mana—like a beacon. Weak, but there." Caelus replied without turning back
Mira scanned every shadow as they crept deeper. "I hope they're alright..."
They continued their slow descent of the Isole, with Caelus exploiting every blind spot in the established security network to sneak them inside, but the deeper they went, the more the fortress felt like it was clenching its jaw around them. The lack of windows made it hard to realise where exactly they were in the dungeon.
The air thickened.
The pressure grew.
Then—
A hum.
Elise froze. The edge of her shoe chipped on a dislodged stone, her hand instinctively moved to rest on the patch of wall next to her, just to find her hand placed a faintly glowing glyph in the stone.
"Oh shit!" Caelus muttered
The walls answered first. The magic circle had fully materialised, releasing a great gleam of light that went down to the lower level.
"What the hell was that?!" Mira asked
"It was probably an alarm..." Caelus answered, "We were just about to get to the lowest level too, dammit!"
From the direction the light moved in stepped out two men in silver scaled armour.
"Dammit, they're Magic Knights!" Mira noticed
"You three shouldn't be here." one of them called out, "Now why would a child of the royal house come to the Isole?"
"No matter," the other followed, "we've been instructed to kill any intruders."
The hallway exploded into chaos.
The first knight lunged at Caelus and Elise, a dark green barrier domed around his arm. The second slammed his hand into the ground, a flurry of thorned vines emerging from the ground and whipping toward Mira like angry serpents.
She reacted instantly, drawing her sword and fending off the vines as she tried to understand the situation.
"Caelus! What should we do?"
"Beat the crap outta them—It's what we do best!" Caelus replied, dodging the barrier user's attacks with relative ease
Caelus waits for a moment before dodging again, this time aiming a strike at the knight's torso. However, upon contact, he found that a magic-fuelled barrier had taken the blow.
"Cocky bastard!" the knight pushed Caelus off him as Elise rushed toward him, striking at the gaps in his armour with her dagger but soon faced the same problem as her friend
Caelus quickly recovered his footing and moved in again to strike, finding that the barrier user can't easily hold up barriers when faced with two attackers.
"Keep that up, Elise!" he shouted
"I know!" Elise barked back
The knight's attack sent Caelus up near the ceiling. He rebounded quickly and started his attack mid-air, driving his heel down as his enemy set up another barrier. With his falling strike, Caelus notices subtle cracks in the barrier.
"Impossible!!" the knight utters in disbelief, "My barriers are unbreakable!"
"That's rookie talk!" Caelus replied, as he drove his fist into the barrier user's stomach, "All it takes is one opening! And the rest is easy from there!"
He delivers a flurry of blows across the barrier user's body, his fists barely registering the man's armour as an obstacle. As Caelus lays waste to his foe, Elise takes notice of a gap in the knights' attention to the path to the lower level and slips away while they're occupied.
Behind them, Mira slid back from another volley of vines, expertly manuevering her body as she found her opening. She inhaled sharply, fire spiralling up her sword as she initiated a sweeping arc.
"Flamme Danse!"
A blazing crescent tore through the vines and scorched the ground, forcing the vine user to leap aside.
"Tch—nobles…" he muttered, "Always want to show off."
"Says the man trying to kill us with house plants." Mira replies with a smirk
Footsteps trampled from the floors above. The trap's activation seemed to not only signal the two Magic Knights but the rest of the active guards. Caelus sending his opponent flying into the wall also had plenty contribution to the newly focus of attention.
"What are we gonna do about their backup? And where is Elise?" Mira questioned
"I don't know where she went off to..." Caelus replied, "We just have to hope she's safe. But about reinforcements, we'll have to fight them off."
"I see you're still crazy as ever, Captain."
"Haven't heard you call me that in a while." he chuckles
As Caelus and Mira prepare to fight the approaching swarm of guards, Elise found herself in a seemingly endless spiral into the depths of the fortress. The deeper she reached, the colder it got, even reaching the point that her breath fogs up in front of her face.
At the bottom, a sealed chamber awaited.
A slab of reinforced stone, lined with magic locks.
She presses her hand into the door, the locks easily giving way for her, presumably due to Caelus' meddling with the security network. As the door cracked open and her eyes settled to the darkness around her, she saw the sight of something—or someone—wrapped in chains in the centre of this chamber.
As she ventured deeper, she saw a young man with dark hair slightly slumped with faintly glowing chains from the walls around him; his torso, wrists and ankles all bound.
"C-can you hear me?" she asks as she rushes to the man, undoing his chains, "What is your name?"
For a moment, no sound came from him. Then, a sound that was hoarse and barely above a whisper escaped from his mouth.
"...Dante. Dante Corvolegno."
Elise's breath caught.
"Then we've found you."
As she finished with the last few chains, the man's body almost collapsed to the ground, with Dante holding himself up with all the will and strength he could muster. Elise quickly wraps his arm around her shoulder and stands from her crouched position.
"I'll get you out of here. I promise." she mutters
With a single step, the two begin their ascent out from the Isole.