The thought of how he was already imagining the usefulness of the ritual clung to him long after he closed the grimoire and stuffed it back into his Spatial Sling Bag, dragging at the edges of his mind as he left the library and retraced his steps through the empty hallways of Fortress Moore to back to the original fork where he and Esmerelda decided to split up.
His boots scuffed quietly against the lightly carpeted stone floors and could allow him to faintly see markings beneath them that looked like someone or something was dragging something large and heavy.
The only other sounds that could be heard around him as he walked back were the faint groaning of the chandeliers above him, as well as the flapping of the drapes near the windows.
And still, his head wasn't clear.
The pages wouldn't leave him alone. The Lesser Rite of the Sun's Maw bled into the next horror that had burned itself into his memory: the Lesser Rite of the Sun Blight.
That one had been worse in every way, to the point where stabbing some poor bastard at sunrise was comparatively much saner than what the Lesser Rite of the Sun Blight required him to do.
No, this ritual called down a plague – a fast-spreading magical plague. The infection, known as Sun-Blight, rotted flesh, blackened crops, and spread sickness, turning everything living within the circle into walking husks before they finally collapsed.
"Like… when the hell would I ever need to even use that?" Deacon muttered aloud, rubbing the back of his neck as he made his way toward the fork where he and Esmerelda had agreed to regroup.
But his brain didn't let him off the hook.
"No– wait. I do remember reading about Floors like that. Ones that drop you into a city, or a massive village, and make you wipe out everything breathing inside just to tick a quest box." His mouth pulled tight as the memory surfaced from a threadbare journal he'd once borrowed from the Academy's restricted section.
"Still, even then… four hundred meters. That's all the damn circle covers. What town is even that small? Some farming hamlet? Half a market square?... But if the plague is able to persist after someone has left the ritual circle, and you could have multiple going all at once, then…"
His lips pressed into a grimace as he thought about the procedure. A ritual circle wider than most training yards, all the materials, the setup, the chanting. And the price. The description hadn't exactly glossed over that. It demanded blood in the meters to keep it active for just a bit.
He spat off to the side, disgust bleeding through his voice. "Yeah, no thanks. The last thing I'm doing is turning into some knockoff plague-mancer just to kill people on a floor like that, who's to say that the plague couldn't spread to me or anyone else in my Party?"
Still, the doubt crept in again, sharp and needling. If he didn't use tools like that, would the others? Would someone like Jeremiah hesitate? Would the higher guilds do that if the boost was big enough? Do they already do that to clear Floors?
By the time he snapped out of his musings, he found himself standing at the fork where he and Esmerelda had split up earlier. The exact spot they'd agreed to meet once the sweep of their assigned sections was done.
But there was a problem.
She wasn't there.
The passage to the left stretched on, empty, dim torches guttering against the draft. He could see signs of where she walked due to the faint imprints her boots made on the thin carpet that spanned over the entire room, but… there was nothing else he could see that he could conclude that she was still in the hall.
When looking up, he saw that the room's roof was short and not open, so that knocked out the idea that she floated up to the next floor.
Deacon stood still for a long moment, his hand unconsciously sliding to rest on the hilt of his short sword. The unease that had been gnawing at him since cracking open the grimoire coiled tighter now.
"…Shit."
He leaned out past the archway of the hall Esmerelda was walking down, then slipped back into the forked corridor.
"Where the hell are you…" he muttered to himself as his jaw tightened. "Did her path lead her closer to the inner castle?"
He yanked open his Sling Bag, rummaging until his fingers hit parchment and his beat-up charcoal pen. Crouched down, scrawling fast, barely caring how crooked it looked:
"If you circle back and I'm not here, I just went down into the hall you went down when we were met with a fork. If we still haven't found each other, and there are less than 10 hours left, then just wait for me at the castle entrance. I'll wait for you there if I am unable to find you then. —D"
"Good enough," he hissed under his breath, shoving the charcoal pen back away. He grabbed one of the bone lampposts from beside the wall and used its legs to pin the parchment in place in the middle of the room so it was obvious that it was moved. He then also set the candle wick alight with Ignis, so that it would catch anyone's eyes.
Glancing down the hallway behind him, Deacon tensed his grip on Echoform Reliquary's broadsword hilt and licked his dried lips. Seeing nothing, he let out a sharp and deep exhale through his nose.
"Alright, Esme… don't make me regret this."
And with that, he stepped into the hallway.
Casting another Ignis, the flame began to rise from the space in between the fingers he snapped and kept on rising until it hovered above his head and lit up a long stretch of the dark hallway. His right hand never left the broadsword's hilt, fingers flexing against the leather wrap every few steps he took as he immediately became aware of the claw markings he hadn't seen before across the walls as he got closer to the end of the hall and towards the next one.
***
By the time he reached the seventh hall, Deacon's nerves were still on edge as he had yet to find either Esmerelda or the creature that had caused the claw marks he'd seen earlier.
That was already two more corridors than it had taken him to reach the small library earlier. "How far did you wander, Esme…" he muttered, voice low, boots muffled against the carpet runner beneath him. "Did you really find an entrance way into the inner castle?"
He was just about to step through another archway when a voice cracked the silence: "Over here, Deke!"
Deacon froze mid-step as his head immediately snapped to the side, giving him a brief, but painful experience of whiplash that he forced himself to ignore and focus on the fact that he heard Esmerelda's voice.
"…Esme?" he called out as he saw no one either on the roof of the hallway nor anything around him other than hallway furniture and doors that he'd opened before.
Nothing answered but the sound of his own breath echoing back at him. He opened the nearest door, throwing it wide with his boot. Empty room. Dust and chairs. Same with the next.
"Over here!" the voice rang out again.
He pivoted fast, sword half-lifted, peering up and down the corridor. With no sign of her still. Each doorway he peeked into showed him nothing he hadn't seen before: neat bone furniture, cobwebs, and tapestries of various undead races.
His brow furrowed hard, suspicion cutting through the confusion. Is it a mimic?... It would explain the clawing on the walls I saw earlier… And maybe it was also what was being dragged in the fork I went down earlier, back when it was in its chest form, Deacon mused to himself.
The thought lingered sharp in his head as her voice called again, this time from straight ahead, somewhere within the hallway itself. He edged forward, Ignis drifting low with him, and stopped at a plain brick wall partly hidden behind draped banners.
Deacon pressed his hand to the stone, testing if it might be an illusion. The solid weight beneath his palm told him otherwise, but from between the cracks, he felt a faint breeze. His lips thinned, eyes narrowing. He drew his fist back, ready to drive it straight through the brick wall – he had more than enough Strength to do so now, 101 if his memory and math were correct – with that in mind, his right fist shot forward.
"Stop!" Esmerelda's voice from behind the wall shouted, causing him to stop his fist from connecting with the wall by less than an inch, and in the same moment, the bricks suddenly shuddered and folded inward, stone pulling back like some hidden mechanism had been triggered.
And standing just behind where the wall should have been was Esmerelda, albeit she looked like she came out of a hurricane given how wild her hair was and how out of breath she looked like, and judging by the large gangly and clawed corpse covered in hundreds of bloodied cuts and holes slumped against a far wall, he now knew that there was a mimic and that she'd dealt with it.
She blinked up at him, uncaring of his fist that he stopped and now hovered just inches from her forehead.
"You weren't even going to tell me to back up before pulling something like that?" she said, sounding exasperated. "I would have d- the wall could have even collapsed," she said as she gestured to the numerous claw marks and gouges in the library-looking room she was hidden inside.
"Uh," Deacon said, blinking owlishly at Esmerelda as his fist still hovered awkwardly in front of her for a moment before he finally lowered it. "Sorry."
"Boys," she sighed, throwing her hands up in mock exasperation, "ever the muscleheads. They always wanna punch their way through everything."
"Well… not just boys," Deacon interjected, quickly shaking off the embarrassment curling up his spine from almost hitting her forehead. "There's always Jass, who thinks the same as us. She'd have done the same."
"Nope," Esmerelda rolled her eyes at him, back turning as she smirked. "She has an Earth Affinity, remember? She would have just parted it aside without damaging the walls around it," she chirped, amusement clear in her tone, leading him down a path winding between tall, haphazardly stacked bookcases and scattered tables, and away from the mimic's corpse.
Deacon gave up trying to argue or come up with an excuse for why this was a one-time thing. Eight years of knowing Esmerelda had taught him one simple truth: in their group, no one ever won an argument against her, especially so if you were caught red-handed like he was.
"So, what are–" he started, eyes scanning the shelves and briefly glancing over a few open books and upturned parchments, when the scent of old paper and candle wax filled his nose, he froze at what he saw Esmerelda lead him towards.
The object in question that froze him in place was a large, intricately detailed map that sat atop a broad table, beneath countless figurines of various shapes.
"What the…? Is that… a map? Like a war map?"
"Yup," Esmerelda said, turning slightly so he could see her expression, her eyes tracing the miniature figures with sharp precision. "Plans for the undead kingdom once the war officially kicks off. I believe that's the warfront that Floor Six will take place on."
"No fucking way," Deacon muttered as he stepped closer, eyes widening as he took in the sheer scale of the map. Wooden blocks, miniature towers, tiny drawn roads, and dozens of meticulously placed figures. His focus snapped to four red circles drawn directly on the map. Three contained feathered caps, one held a horse.
"Holy mother of hacks," he muttered, crouching slightly as he pulled his manaphone from his Spatial Sling Bag. Fingers already snapping pictures, he captured every detail he could, thinking ahead to when he'd review it with the rest of the team. "If this is what we think this is, then we should join the human side, because with this – this should make Floor Six a cakewalk."