They ran for what felt like hours, though in truth it was Joey who did the running, carrying Mathew with both arms while the latter struggled to gulp down the last of his healing potions between shallow breaths.

The liquid stung as it passed his throat, and though the wounds did begin to close, it was painfully slow, almost reluctant. Whatever corruption lay in the monster's blood seemed to resist the healing properties, dulling their effect to a crawl.

"Hey… I think you can stop now," Mathew muttered weakly, glancing over Joey's shoulder. The echoes of pursuit were gone, no footsteps, no shrieks, only the low hum of silence that followed devastation. He could tell they were safe, for now, at least.

Joey slowed his pace, his steps faltering as he turned to look behind him one last time. When he saw nothing, not even a shadow moving in the distance, his body gave out. He dropped to his knees, the force of the motion sending Mathew tumbling awkwardly to the floor. Joey's breaths came in sharp, uneven bursts as he clutched the satchel hanging from his shoulder, rummaging through its contents with shaking hands.

Mathew watched him in silence, curiosity winning over fatigue. Joey's hand finally emerged holding a small metallic flask, simple, unadorned, sealed tightly at the top. Without hesitation, he twisted it open.

A faint scent of damp soil filled the air, oddly natural and out of place in the ancient, dust-choked corridors. Joey raised it to his lips, took a long, deep swallow, and then let the flask slip from his grasp as he leaned back against a bookshelf, closing his eyes in exhaustion.

The flask rolled along the ground until it stopped by Mathew's foot. He picked it up absently, tilting it slightly as he peered inside. At first he thought it was empty, but then he saw it, darkness, thick and swirling like a liquid shadow, coiling inward toward a dim flicker of light. That faint glow wasn't a flame but a rune, or perhaps several interwoven runes, forming a pattern so complex that it seemed alive, moving faintly with each breath he took.

He didn't understand what he was seeing; he wasn't a rune user, and even if he were, he doubted anyone could easily decipher something like this. Still, something about it unsettled him. The darkness didn't look natural, it had depth, weight, like it was something that shouldn't exist in a bottle.

Driven by curiosity, he turned the flask upside down. Nothing spilled out, not even a trace of liquid. He frowned slightly, staring again into its depths. The darkness seemed to shift in response to his gaze, curling and pulsing faintly, almost as if it were aware of being watched.

He looked away after a moment, suddenly uncomfortable, his skin prickling with unease. There was something deeply wrong about that darkness, something he couldn't name but instinctively wanted to avoid.

He dipped a finger into the flask, and the moment his skin touched that swirling darkness, a freezing chill surged through his body, spreading from his hand to his spine. His finger trembled inside the flask, and for a second he couldn't breathe.

"What in the world is this…" he muttered under his breath, his voice quiet but tense. That coldness wasn't natural, it carried something heavier, darker, the unmistakable sensation of death itself, as though even a small mistake, a moment of carelessness, might be enough to end him right there.

Joey's eyes opened slowly, their faint glow cutting through the dim corridor. He glanced at the flask in Mathew's hand, then let out a tired sigh before raising his own. The flask slipped from Mathew's fingers as if snatched by an invisible force, sailing smoothly through the air into Joey's waiting hand along with its cap. Without a word, Joey took another long drink, his expression unreadable, then sealed it again and tucked it carefully into his satchel.

They stared at each other for a while, Mathew's eyes filled with curiosity that he didn't bother to hide. Joey finally gave a short answer, his tone flat and final. "Medicine."

Mathew wanted to press further, but Joey didn't give him the chance. Pushing himself to his feet, the younger man dusted off his clothes and turned toward the dark passage they had fled from. "Shouldn't we leave the site while we still can?" he asked, his voice steady but carrying a trace of fatigue.

"Mm… unfortunately, I don't know where we are, so I can't find the exit." Mathew rose as well, stretching his shoulders as he felt the dull ache in his back fade. The wounds had mostly closed by now, slowly but completely, and that was a relief. If the damage had been permanent, he knew he wouldn't have been able to keep going for long.

He rummaged through his bag, his expression darkening when he saw what was left. Eight healing potions, three for mana recovery, that was all. Aura couldn't be replenished by potions, and that meant every fight from here on would cost him dearly.

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Joey frowned, his brow creasing slightly. "So what do we do now?"

Mathew unsheathed his katana, the faint hum of its enchantment filling the silence as he turned back toward the corridor they had escaped from. A faint smile appeared on his face. "What else? We kill those things. Then we find the exit without having to look over our shoulders."

He didn't wait for a reply. His steps were already echoing down the hall, steady and purposeful. Joey exhaled heavily, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Two of us against dozens of monsters, including a rank nine?" Joey asked quietly, his voice caught somewhere between disbelief and resignation.

Mathew didn't even look back. "What do you suggest then? That we creep around in the dark, jumping at every sound until we maybe stumble across the exit? No. It's better if we clear them out one by one until only the rank nine remains. That way, we'll know exactly what we're dealing with."

There were countless reasons Joey could have given to argue against that plan, reasons that were all perfectly logical. But even as he opened his mouth, he stopped himself. He had watched Mathew fight earlier, had seen the way his eyes lit up when the danger grew, and he had understood something essential about him. Mathew wasn't reckless for the sake of it; he was addicted to the edge itself, to the feeling of being one step away from death and still pressing forward. He was a thrill seeker in the purest, most dangerous sense, and Joey knew that no argument would dissuade him from chasing that feeling.

Besides, Joey wasn't confident he could survive alone.

"I shouldn't have taken this job," he muttered under his breath, his words half-buried in the sound of their footsteps as he followed Mathew deeper into the endless corridors.

They moved without a real plan, turning corners and passing through archways at random, guided only by Mathew's restless intuition. The silence around them felt almost alive, broken only by the occasional creak of old shelves or the soft sound of their boots on stone.

Joey, perhaps out of boredom or unease, began to pull books from the shelves as they passed. The covers were covered in dust, some half-rotted, others preserved unnaturally well. He flipped through them idly, finding every page written in a language he couldn't read, filled with symbols and strange illustrations that seemed to blur the longer he stared at them.

Sites were peculiar things. No one truly knew what they were or where they came from. The most accepted theory, the one repeated by researchers and priests alike, was that Sites were remnants of the past, echoes of lost civilizations preserved by the saturation of mana over countless ages.

Nobody knew how old the world really was; the numbers didn't exist to describe it. Civilizations had risen and fallen beyond memory, and the traces they left behind had been twisted by time and power into these strange, self-contained spaces.

But even that was speculation, the kind of idea born from scholars who needed an explanation for the inexplicable, and from gods who were too bored to care whether it was true or not.

The books they found were, as far as Joey could tell, completely useless, filled with unreadable scripts and incomprehensible drawings but he still stuffed as many of them as he could into his satchel. Items taken from Sites almost always sold well, even when they couldn't be read or understood; their value lay simply in being relics of a place no one else had reached.

It was while they were moving that they stumbled across something unusual. A sharp, acrid smell hit them all at once, making them both recoil instinctively; Joey even broke into a rough cough as the scent burned his throat.

They turned toward its source and saw it, the body of one of the monsters sprawled on the floor, green blood pooling around it in a spreading stain that gave off that overwhelming stench.

Mathew stepped forward slowly until he stood at the very edge of the blood, leaning down slightly to study the corpse. It was a brutal sight. The creature's body was riddled with holes, its eyes, its throat, its chest, arms, legs, even its gut, pierced so cleanly and so many times that the blood still gushed from the wounds like open taps. There was no mistaking it; the monster was dead.

"Do you think they're fighting each other?" Joey asked, moving closer, his eyes narrowing as he examined the same details.

Mathew shook his head. "No. They're all under the control of the rank nine. These wounds don't look like something one of them could make. All these piercings, this looks like a weapon."

He fell silent, his expression thoughtful. A faint smile began to tug at his lips even as a frown deepened on Joey's face. After a long pause, Mathew said aloud what they were both already thinking. "Either there are others like them who can use weapons and are fighting the rank nine's forces… or there's an entirely different race of monsters roaming this library."

They both stared down at the corpse, their thoughts diverging. Mathew's excitement grew steadily, like a spark catching flame, while Joey's unease deepened into a quiet, heavy worry.

After a few moments they moved on, continuing their search in silence. Hours passed, at least it felt that way before they found another body. This one was slumped against a bookshelf, its torso marked with deep, deliberate slashes from some kind of blade. Its head had been completely severed and now rested on the floor in front of it, the once-vivid green blood already dried into a dull stain.

"I think it's safe to assume something, or someone, in this library knows how to use weapons, and knows how to use them well," Joey murmured as he studied the mutilated corpse.

Mathew didn't answer right away. His body trembled slightly, not from fear but from some building anticipation. "Do you think… it's another rank nine? A war between two rank nines…" His voice was low but filled with a clear, almost tangible excitement. Joey felt a headache forming just listening to him, but he couldn't dismiss the possibility entirely.

'Another rank nine,' he thought grimly as he looked at Mathew. 'If we can't find the exit, we're dead.'

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