The passage beyond the spider lily cavern descended for a long time.
The walls pressed closer as he went, the crimson veins thickening until the stone between them was almost an afterthought — thin grey lines between dense networks of pulsing red, as though the rock itself was being slowly replaced from the inside out. The air grew heavier. Not hot, not cold, but pressurized somehow, like the deep sections of a mine where the weight of everything above makes itself felt. His Mana Sense ran at a constant low hum, reading the space ahead, and what it found waiting at the bottom of the slope made him slow his pace and study carefully before entering.
A chamber. Smaller than the lily cavern but taller, the ceiling lost in shadow above. And within it — three signatures. Golem signatures, dense and crystalline and familiar. Smaller than the ones at the entrance, but still large, still thoroughly saturated with corruption.
He almost smiled.
Almost.
He stepped into the chamber, and the nearest golem's eye crystals flared.
He activated the First Technique before his foot fully cleared the passage threshold.
The mana flowed from his palm into the blade in a thin, controlled current — not forceful, just present, settling into the iron the way heat settles into metal left near a fire. The sword's weight redistributed, the edge sharpened past what the enchantments alone could achieve, and a faint crimson shimmer ran along the flat of the blade: the bleeding effect, ready and waiting. He held it loosely, feeling the difference. Like the sword had woken up.
The first golem charged.
He let it close half the distance, then triggered the Fourth Technique.
Mana flooded his legs — a sensation like plunging them into cold water, sudden and total — and then he moved. Not ran. Moved, the way light moves, no intermediate steps between here and there. The chamber strobed past him in fragments as he traced the triangular path around the golem, each vertex a point where he changed direction without slowing, the sword trailing behind him in arcs he didn't consciously aim. When he stopped, three meters behind the golem, the slashes arrived.
Six of them, from three different angles simultaneously. The golem's chest crystal fractured along every line at once and burst inward. It was still falling when he turned toward the second one.
This one was faster — it had read the distance and come to meet him rather than waiting. He planted the sword point-first into the stone floor, used it as an axis, and pulled himself upward with the Third Technique — the vault carrying him over the golem's swinging arm — and at the apex of the spin, gravity and rotation combining into a single downward force, he drove the blade through the crystal cluster at the crown of its head. The grounding strike hit with a concussive crack that he felt through both arms. The golem dropped straight down, no stagger, just structural failure and collapse.
The third one was already moving.
He met it with the Second Technique.
The first slash was measured. The second was faster. By the fifth the sword was moving in accelerating curves that he felt more than directed, each strike feeding momentum into the next, the blade tracing arcs that overlapped and diverged and overlapped again. At one hundred and fifty strikes the technique plateaued — his body's ceiling, the hard limit of what thirteen-year-old muscles and bone could sustain — but one hundred and fifty strikes in five seconds was more than enough. The golem's crystal core didn't shatter. It disintegrated, the accumulated cutting pressure too distributed and too rapid to resist. What remained of the golem settled to the floor in pieces, fading slowly from red to dark.
The chamber was quiet.
Draven stood in the center of it, breathing steadily, and felt something shift in his chest — a familiar internal click, like a lock turning. The blue light appeared without being summoned.
[LEVEL UP]
[Name: Draven Whitlock]
[Class: Unknown][Title: "Reborner"]
[Level: 20][Rank: S]
[HP: 67/80][Mana: 44/90]
[Strength: 58] ▲[Agility: 61][Intelligence: 34][Vitality: 45 (+22)][Magic Power: 38][Sense: 49] ▲
[ACTIVE ABILITIES]
Thorne's Blade Dance [Rank: E] — Mastery: 71%
Iron Body Conditioning [Rank: D] — Mastery: 68%
Mana Sense [Rank: D] — Mastery: 55% ▲
Whitlock's Sword Techniques (1 → 4) [Rank: Unclassified] — Mastery: 100%
[New passive gained: Blade Precision]
[Blade Precision] — Sword strikes apply optimal force distribution automatically. Critical hit chance increased by 15%. Effective against crystalline and armored targets.
He dismissed the window.
Strength and Sense — the two stats that mattered most down here. His body had caught up with itself slightly, the training and the fights compounding into something measurable. Blade Precision was a welcome addition; he'd felt something like it during the Second Technique, the way the strikes had found the crystal's fault lines without him consciously targeting them. The system had simply named what his body had already learned.
HP at 67. Mana at 44. The forearm and shoulder wounds from the lily cavern had stopped bleeding but hadn't healed. He could continue. He would continue.
He picked up his sword and followed the passage down.
He smelled them before his Mana Sense found them.
A thick, rancid smell — decay and old blood and something beneath both that was purely, specifically demonic. He'd spent enough years on the front lines to recognize it without thinking. He stopped, pressed against the wall, and sent his Mana Sense ahead slowly, carefully, the way you extend something fragile into uncertain dark.
The signatures came back, and he counted them twice because the first count seemed wrong.
Fourteen.
He counted again. Fourteen corrupted signatures, and these were nothing like the golems or the crystal beasts. These were alive in the full sense — irregular, dynamic, constantly shifting as they moved through the chamber ahead. And they were varied. He parsed each signature carefully: dense, immovable mass at the center, built to absorb and hold ground — tank. Two large signatures flanking it, carrying the particular weight distribution of soldiers trained to swing heavy melee weapons — knights. Spread across elevated rock outcroppings at the rear, four smaller signatures with the rapid, twitchy energy of ranged attackers — archers. Two more with mana actively cycling through complex patterns, building and releasing in measured intervals — mages. And threading between them all, three signatures pulsing with warm restorative energy entirely unlike the aggressive signatures of the others — supporters.
Corrupted orcs. Organized. Structured. Given roles and positioned deliberately, as if by a commander who understood battlefield formations.
He stayed against the wall and thought it through.
The calculus was the same as it had always been: supporters first, or the damage you deal gets undone faster than you can deal it. Mages second, before they build charge. Archers third, to reclaim movement. Knights, then tank — save the heaviest for last when you have room to breathe.
He studied the chamber entrance, noting the position of the outcroppings, the spacing between the knights and the tank, the routes the supporters walked in their slow circuits. Then he stepped inside.
The first supporter died before the orcs registered his presence.
It was the smallest of the three — slight even by orc standards, moving in a slow loop along the chamber's eastern edge, a pair of daggers hanging from its belt, crimson crystals set into each handle glowing with the same dull pulse as the cave walls around it. The daggers were its tools, not its weapons — he could see it now up close, the way its hands moved as it walked, trailing faint threads of restorative mana from the crystal-laced hilts into the air around it, weaving a slow ambient heal that drifted toward its allies like smoke. Subtle, patient work. The kind you didn't notice until you realized the damage you'd done three minutes ago had quietly closed.
He crossed the chamber at full Fourth Technique speed and the slashes opened across its back when he stopped. It went down without a sound.
Then the chamber erupted.
The archers on the elevated outcroppings responded first. Their bows were long and black, the limbs coated in that same ash-dark corruption as the beasts in the lily cavern, and along each bow's grip, large crimson crystals had fused directly into the wood — three on each side, pulsing steadily, channeling corrupt mana into every arrow the moment it was nocked. He saw the first volley leave the strings and was already moving, the Fourth Technique burning through his reserves as he broke the triangular pattern into something more erratic, harder to predict. The arrows hit stone where he'd been standing and the points discharged on impact, small bursts of corrupted energy scorching the rock black.
Enchanted arrows, he noted. Every hit carries corruption. Don't get pinned.
The knights advanced from the tank's flanks, and he got his first clear look at them — massive even for orcs, their bodies encased in black corrupted plate, crimson veins running between the armor sections like a second skeleton. Each carried a longsword nearly as tall as he was, the blades dark metal embedded with crimson crystals along the fuller that burned with a low, steady light. When the nearer knight swung, the crystal discharge followed the blade's arc through the air like a comet's tail, a streak of corrupted mana that hit the stone floor beside him and cracked it.
He disengaged immediately. Fighting a knight in close quarters while archers had elevation on him was the fastest way to end this poorly.
The second supporter was repositioning, moving toward the tank's shadow — exactly where it should be. He cut laterally across the chamber, drew one knight into a pursuit route, used the Third Technique to vault over its horizontal swing and land behind it, opened a bleeding cut across the back of its neck with the First Technique's edge, and kept moving without following up. Let it bleed. He had other priorities.
The supporter reached the tank before he could intercept.
He spent twenty seconds drawing the tank sideways, exploiting the slow, grinding quality of its movements. It was the largest creature in the chamber — broader than a doorway, its corrupted plate so thick the veins between the sections were more crystal than metal now, fused into a single continuous structure. In both hands it carried a war hammer of extraordinary size, the head studded with crimson crystals the size of his fist that pulsed in deep, slow waves. Every time it swung and missed, the hammer's impact on the stone floor sent a shockwave of corrupted mana radiating outward in a disc — low to the ground, fast, the kind of thing you had to see once before you learned to jump it.
He saw it once. He jumped every subsequent one.
The tank's movement finally opened the angle he needed. He slipped around its right side, closed on the supporter, and ended it with a tight Second Technique burst — twenty strikes in a second and a half, contained and precise, no wasted motion. The supporter's restorative pulse went dark.
Now they could be worn down.
The mages had been building charge throughout, and they released their first volley the moment the second supporter fell — coordinated, simultaneous, two compressed bursts of corrupted mana that converged on his position from different angles. He read the trajectories and moved between them, the discharge hitting the stone behind him with enough force to gouge the rock. He noted the interval. Approximately forty seconds between volleys. He built his movement around it — press forward during charge, disengage and reposition during release, never be where they were aiming when they were ready to aim.
He tracked the mages between the intervals. No weapons — they needed none, their hands moving in slow, deliberate patterns as the corrupted mana cycled through them, their black-veined fingers trailing red light with each gestural component of whatever working they were building charge for. Without weapons or armor to slow them, they were the most mobile targets in the chamber, constantly repositioning to maintain their angles on him.
The first mage he took with the Third Technique — vaulting over a knight's swing, the grounding strike coming down through the mage's shoulder on the descent, the First Technique's bleeding effect opening the wound as he pulled clear. He was moving again before the mage hit the ground.
The second mage had anticipated something similar and moved. He found it repositioned behind the remaining knight, the archers covering every direct approach route with overlapping fields of fire. An arrow caught his right forearm — clean through, nothing severed, but his grip loosened involuntarily. He transferred the sword to his left hand, adjusted his stance to what Gareth had drilled for exactly this contingency, and kept moving.
The second mage cost him the most mana of any single engagement. He circled it three times, spending Fourth Technique activations to stay ahead of the archer volleys while probing for an opening, before a momentary gap appeared between one archer's reload and the knight's repositioning. He hit it in a straight line — not a triangle, just a direct dash at unsustainable speed — and the mage went down to a Second Technique burst before it could release its building charge. The discharge bled out of it harmlessly as it fell, a wave of corrupted mana washing across the stone floor and dissipating against the walls.
Mana at nineteen. He felt it the way you feel a low fire — still warm, but aware of its own limits.
The archers were next.
The elevated outcroppings had defined the entire shape of the fight, forcing him to keep moving, preventing him from committing to any engagement long enough to finish it cleanly. Reaching them meant threading through the knights, and the knights were disciplined — not chasing, not overextending, simply maintaining their positioning and letting the archers work. Someone had trained these orcs. Something had.
He spent what he least wanted to spend.
Fourth Technique, full commitment — an extended path that didn't trace a clean triangle but wove between the knights at a speed that forced reaction rather than anticipation, giving them nothing to predict. He hit the first outcropping at the peak of a dash, the Light enchantment making the climb immediate, and the Second Technique cleared both archers on the ledge before they could adjust their bows to contact range. The two on the opposite outcropping loosed the moment he appeared in their sightline. One arrow missed. The second caught him across the cheek — a grazing cut that opened immediately, bleeding into his right eye in a thin, warm sheet.
He wiped it with his sleeve. Crossed to the second outcropping. Finished it.
Then it was the remaining supporter, the two knights, and the tank.
The third supporter he'd been tracking throughout — the most cautious of the three, hanging furthest from the fighting, keeping the tank's bulk between itself and him at all times. Its daggers were out now, the crimson crystals in the handles burning brighter as it actively channeled through them, feeding a continuous stream of restorative mana into the tank and the surviving knight. It was good positioning. It had cost him through the entire fight, that slow constant healing undoing work he'd already paid for.
He didn't try to reach it directly. He stopped trying to reach it at all, and instead turned his full attention to the knight — Second Technique, sustained, bleeding effect stacking with each hit, not stopping, not repositioning, simply pressing until the knight's movements slowed and then stopped. Without the supporter's healing keeping pace, it took less time than he expected.
The supporter, suddenly exposed, broke its pattern for the first time. It tried to run — along the chamber wall, toward a shadow where the rock formations created a narrow gap. He crossed the distance in a single Fourth Technique activation and that was the end of it.
Then the tank. Alone. The war hammer swinging in slow, heavy arcs, each impact sending its corrupted shockwave across the floor, the crystal studs in the hammerhead burning redder with each swing as the weapon built its own charge from the impacts. He kept the Blade Precision passive in mind, finding the joint gaps in the corrupted plate where the crystal formations hadn't fully fused — inside the elbow, below the pauldron, the seam where the chest plate met the abdominal section. He didn't try to hurt it quickly. He tried to hurt it correctly, building accumulated damage through the First Technique's edge until it was bleeding from a dozen carefully chosen points simultaneously.
When it finally knelt, the chamber floor cracked under the weight of its falling.
Draven stood in the quiet that followed, breathing in measured pulls, and took stock.
Arrow through the right forearm. Cracked or bruised rib on the left side. Cheek cut bleeding into his eye intermittently. Left forearm wrapping soaked through. Right shoulder from the lily cavern still open. He was a catalogue of things that needed attention.
He sat against the wall and spent ten minutes on field dressing — tightening, repacking, tearing fresh strips from his inner tunic until he'd done what he could do without a healer. His mana sat at eleven out of ninety. His hands, held flat in front of him in the red light, were steady.
Still standing.
He looked across the chamber to where the passage continued. Narrower than any before it. The corrupted veins on the walls here were so dense and bright they needed no other light source, pulsing in deep, slow waves that moved with the rhythm of something far below — something that breathed in intervals too long to count. The pressure against his Mana Sense was no longer something he read. It was something he felt in his chest, in the space behind his sternum, a pull like standing at the edge of something very deep.
Whatever was down there was close now.
Draven picked up his sword, exhaled once, and walked toward it.