Sophia Walker.

The last time I'd seen her, she'd been dressed to the nines for Carlos's remembrance service. She'd declined to rejoin Jeff's team, and I hadn't pushed her. The woman had been shaky, nervous, and probably needed some therapy after the trap portal. Healers always blamed themselves for every death, no matter how much it was or wasn't their fault.

Just like Jeff.

And now, they were trapped—and not by a trap portal. Or if it was, it was a weird one. Jessie's research had made it clear that Paragons never showed up in trap portals. That meant that whatever had sprung the trap around the exit wasn't the portal itself; it was a monster inside of it.

Jeff: We're going in, even if you two can't make it.

Karina: I'm sorry. My sister's an E-Ranker, and I'm already committed.

Jeff: That's fine. Raul, you in?

Kade: We can do it with four. When we link up with the GC team, we'll have plenty of firepower, and Sophia can patch us up.

Raul: I'm in Tucson.

Ellen: Why are you in Tucson?

Jeff: It doesn't matter. Kade, Ellen, Yasmin, you're in, right?

Kade: Absolutely.

Ellen: Yes

Yasmin: Uh huh.

Ellen ended up paying, and the meal ended up uneaten. It was faster that way. Her car was on the way before we even left our booth. She got in Deimos's driver's seat and, before I could even buckle up, we were rocketing toward Yasmin's house, right up against the edge of Sky Harbor. I clambered into the back seat, Yasmin hopped in, and Deimos took off.

The GC had the portal surrounded, and Councilwoman Myers waved us past the barricades without bothering to check us in. "We don't know anything about what's inside. Delver Smith managed to stay conscious long enough to warn the rep outside about the trap, but she hasn't woken up, and she's responding slowly to healing. We think there's a poison in her system."

"Are we cleared to proceed?" Jeff asked tightly.

"Yes. Keep in mind that this portal is extremely critical, but that maintaining its secrecy is more important than either the team or preventing a break. If it's a choice between clearing and maintaining confidentiality, let it break. We'll clean up the mess later."

"And the team inside?" Jeff's voice was so low it was almost inaudible, but I could feel his tension from feet away.

"Expendable," Myers said curtly.

"Right," I said before Jeff could react. "Let's get moving."

The streets were too narrow. The architecture was too sharp and thin. And the sun overhead…wasn't.

It was a circle of black, with a blood-red disk circling it. An angry, furious black hole that cast only enough light from its accretion disk to bathe the city we'd stepped into in shadow. I glared in frustration. Another core for Ellen, most likely.

Then the first drops of rain fell on us, stinging my bare arms. They sizzled wherever they made contact. "Get inside!" I yelled and headed for the nearest door—a double door leading to a wide, open room filled with tables and broken chairs. Dust covered every surface, thick enough that I left boot prints behind, and the pale pink haze in the air blurred out the far side of the room. But it wasn't raining acid, so that was good.

"Check the portal," Jeff said quickly.

Ellen turned. "It's there, but it's walled off. I can't tell if it's a ritual of some type or something else. It's like a barrier of light around it. I think I know what kind of portal world we're in, though. Eldritch City. Expect, uh, anything. There are no rules in an Eldritch City."

"No rules at all?" Yasmin said.

"I mean, the standard portal mechanics apply. The world only has C-Rank power to draw on, so we shouldn't expect to see Cthulhu or anything, but I can't tell if we'll be dealing with traps, sentient monsters, or anything like that. It could be a cult, or it could be abominations like the labs we cleared out."

I summoned Tallas's Dueling Sword and the Stormsteel breastplate, applied my Scripts, and while Yasmin got to work buffing, I quickly pulled up my status.

User: Kade Noelstra D-Rank Stamina: 330/330 (+10), Mana: 413/430 (+20)

Skills: 1. Stormsteel Core (D-06 to D-10, Unique, Merged, God-Touched) 2. Thunderbolt Forms ( D-06 to D-09, Altered, Merged) 3. Mistwalk Forms (D-04 to D-08, Altered, Merged) 4. Cyclone Forms (D-04 to D-08, Altered, Merged) 5. Sunbeam Bond (D-03 to D-05, Altered, Merged) 6. Energy Font (D-03 to D-06) 7. Brendan's Hymnal (D-02 to D-05)

Path: Stormsteel Path Laws: First Law of the Stormcore

I was making strides, and under any other circumstance, I'd have focused on fighting with my weakest skills to try to catch them up. But now wasn't the time. Right now, I needed to fight as hard as I could. "We have three objectives. First, and most important, is linking up with Sophia's team. Second, we need to find the portal's boss and kill it so everyone can escape. And finally, I want to track down the Paragon if we can. It's either a Rain or another Shadow, and either way, we can benefit from it."

"Agreed," Jeff said. He was still fuming—waves of frustration and anger rolled off of him like a physical weight—but now that we were inside and I'd said what he was thinking, he was starting to calm down. The GC's priorities might have been to keep their secrets and those of the Paragons, but ours was our friend. "Let's take a second while we're alone to figure out our strategy."

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

We weren't alone, though.

Fleshweeper Shoggoth: C-Rank

The ground seemed to bubble in the center of the room, and a monstrous blob of flesh appeared. Bones seemed to form from nothing as tentacles wrapped around them, and in moments, the monster had taken the form of a woman—albeit one dressed in flesh and with long, writhing tentacles for hair. "Intruders. Be. Aware. This. City. Will. Be. Your. Doom." Her voice ripped at my mind, and I felt my Mana dropping just from her presence.

Ellen didn't bother responding. She cast an Orb of Darkness; she'd been using her spells more and more now that she'd leveled, since they cost less than her Shadow Boxing skill. The ball of pure darkness hit the shoggoth, and writhing tentacles exploded across the room.

They squirmed toward each other, and in a moment, a seven-legged, roughly dog-shaped monstrosity was loping across the room. "I got it," I said. I launched into a stop-thrust, and the monster's tentacles wrapped around my sword blade as electricity surged into them and they convulsed. At the same time, they changed shame, cutting and burning themselves as they tried to work their way up the dueling sword's portal metal core.

I flicked the blade. It cut through the binding, crawling tendrils. As the monster came loose, I backstepped once. My blade hovered in between Ellen and the offshoot—which grew rapidly. Where it had once been a dog-sized monster, it took the form of a second woman and threw itself at me. "How do we kill them?" Jeff asked.

"I'm not sure." I hacked at the woman's tentacle-formed body. Tendrils came off.

"You. Cannot. Kill. What. Is. Beyond. Death," she said haltingly.

Mana: 386/430

I hadn't even cast a spell, and I was already dropping rapidly. "Ellen, Mana check."

"287 of 500," she said. "How is that…"

We couldn't stay and fight these things. I didn't know how they worked, but I did know that Ellen and I needed Mana to be effective. Until we could come up with a battle plan to deal with them, we needed to avoid them like the plague.

"Okay, we need to leave," I said. "Everyone to the door. Jeff, rear guard. I'll take point."

I dashed for the door, Ellen and Yasmin right behind me. As I stepped out into the red-lit street's shadows, a shiver washed over my spine. I ignored it. Instead, I looked around. Nothing but a lamppost, a faint yellowish flame flickering in it. "Clear. Go!"

Ellen and Yasmin rushed out behind me, followed by Jeff. He slammed his shield into one of the now three Fleshweeper Shoggoths, pushing it backward. I threw my weight into one of the doors. "Get the other! Jeff, the lamp post!"

"What?" he asked as the girls threw their weight into the other door.

"Tear it down! Set the doors on fire, then jam them shut!"

He did. It took him a minute; his armor hid his straining muscles as he wrenched at the lamp post. The whole time, the door shook as the three tentacle things crashed into it. Then, suddenly, the door was ablaze, and the twisted, bent lamp post was jammed in place. "Back off, team!" Jeff yelled as the blaze started.

The Shoggoths inside began screaming, as eerily monotone and mind-shredding in pain as they were when they'd taunted us. The doors kept thumping, and a single tentacle squeezed its way through. I shouldered the door shut on it, and the wriggling thing withdrew inward.

After a minute, the screaming had stopped. I didn't know if the Fleshweeper Shoggoths were dead or not, and I didn't care. "Let's get out of here," I said.

Ellen nodded. "Agreed. Deeper into the city?"

"Yeah. Look for any signs of delvers as we go," I said. "We're going to find them and get them all out."

I didn't say what everyone was thinking: that none of us knew if any of the GC party was still alive.

Everything about the city felt wrong.

The buildings' doors were too wide for one person to block them, the windows too narrow to escape from in a pinch and barred with black metal. The smell of lye and burnt flesh hung in the air, along with a fog that the blood-red accretion disk slowly setting overhead turned into a pink mist eerily reminiscent of aerosolized blood. And the streets weren't straight. They curved slightly, causing even the mist-free sections to offer almost no visibility.

Worse were the phantasms that had started to appear in the street as the accretion disk and black hole cast longer and longer shadows. They seemed almost ethereal—red, shimmering figures dressed in clothes that might've been Victorian, their bodies stretched slightly taller than they should have been. Not a single one of them looked at us, stepped aside for us, or noticed us in any way.

But when one walked into Jeff, it fell apart almost entirely. A single arm and half a head kept walking as if nothing had happened. Jeff shivered. "What was that?"

I didn't know. Neither did Yasmin or Ellen. The problem with Eldritch portal worlds was that there was no way to properly record what was inside of them; for all we knew, the phantasm phenomenon was a common trap, but Ellen's studies hadn't turned up anything about them. "I think we want to avoid touching them," I said. "I might've hit one earlier, too."

The Shoggoths were free, too. And they were pursuing us. Not closely enough to fight, but closely enough that they were a constant menace.

And, of course, we were lost. We wandered for nearly an hour on the curving, cobbled streets before giving up to regroup.

"It doesn't matter," I said. My voice echoed, slightly higher-pitched than it should have. We'd holed up in an alleyway this time. It felt more exposed than the tavern or inn or whatever we'd fought the Fleshweeper Shoggoths in had, but it had the advantage of multiple lines of escape. "Our goal isn't to keep track of the portal—that's blocked anyway. Our goal is to find Sophia, and I think we're on the right track."

"How do you figure that?" Yasmin asked.

"Because the team we were after lost its archer, and they didn't have a mage. We've been following blood this whole time. The Shoggoths didn't bleed, and the Shift Souls bled yellow, so there's a good chance this is the team. If we keep pushing, we'll get to them." The Shift Souls had been miserable to fight. They were only D-Rank, but there were dozens of them, they wouldn't stay still, and their blows caused no injury but massive pain, making it impossible to mitigate with Stamina.

Ellen shivered as I mentioned them. I put an arm on her shoulder; it had been the worst for her, since they'd ambushed us and she'd been covered with them. Pain was hard for her.

"Okay, but we're outgunned by the Shoggoths, and the fire back at the inn didn't work," Jeff said.

"Partially correct. Which is why we need to rethink our strategy and deal with them before we find Sophia and the others." I tore a sheet of paper from my Script notebook. It was looking thin; I'd have to replace it soon, but it had enough blanks that I could afford to lose this one. "Remember the trap boss? Great. Here's what we need to do."

Jessie wasn't worried about Kade.

Not today.

It was just a C-Rank portal, after all, and she was on the bus to the hospital for her therapy and injections. Now that was something to worry about. The driver wasn't weaving through traffic quite as fast as Deimos, but it was close.

At least Stephen was riding with her again. So that was good.

He'd been doing that recently. It turned out his apartment complex was in that direction; he'd ride to the hospital, get off with her, and then catch a bus heading the other direction. It gave them a few minutes in the back, with no one around. And even though Jessie's wrists and elbows hurt, she was determined to make those few minutes count every time.

Not that either of them knew what they were doing. Jessie wasn't afraid to admit that. Neither of them was what she'd consider a top-tier kisser. But it was fun, and keeping their twice-weekly bus ride make-out sessions a secret from her older brother was fun, too.

They took breaks when the bus stopped, of course, and it was during one of those stops that a familiar-looking delver boarded. "That's Caleb. I helped him get registered for delving work two weeks back," Jessie said, pointing.

"Uh-huh," Stephen said. He glanced over at Caleb, then at Jessie. Then he sighed. "You probably want to go say hi, huh? I'll help you up."

"Thanks," Jessie said, smiling. She leaned on Stephen as they walked down the bus's nearly-empty aisle and sat on the bench across from the delver. "Hi, Caleb. Jessie Gerald. I got you signed up for delving in and around town. How's that been going?"

For a moment, Jessie thought she saw a look of panic in Caleb's face, but it smoothed over almost as quickly as it passed, and Caleb nodded. "You would not believe the week I've had. I'm building my reputation here, and that means helping out noobie delvers. I'm not cut out for babysitting."

"Oh?" Jessie asked. She ignored Stephen's sigh and the finger poking her in the rib as he put his arm around her waist. "Tell me more!"

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.