One moment Kael stood on the Divine Tree's formation—caught between alarm, betrayal, and rising red light—and the next he was somewhere else entirely.
He lurched forward as the world slammed back into place. Grass crunched under his palms. Cold wind cut across his cheek. The aftershock of spatial displacement twisted his stomach, a nausea inducing vertigo clawing up his throat. He forced a steadying breath and pushed himself to his feet.
He stood in a valley surrounded by towering trees, ancient trunks rising like pillars holding up a sky smothered by clouds. Mist clung low to the ground. Everything was still.
The silence was not the patient hush of a forest; it was the hollow stillness of a cave emptied of all life. A slow chill crawled up Kael's spine.
He still could not process what had happened—what James had done. The memory of that trembling apology in the formation burned behind his eyes. Why? How? What did they plant on him?
He reached toward his robe pocket, and his new senses screamed.
Not a sound. Not a thought. Not even an instinct. A jolt, sharp, cold, and absolute, hit like someone flicking ice water across the inside of his skull. Danger.
Kael did not question it. His body moved before his mind caught up, Arcane Shield surging over his skin in a thin, flickering film of mana.
Impact hit a heartbeat later.
A shockwave slammed into him, throwing him off his feet and skidding him through dirt and dead leaves. His ribs flared with pain. If the shield had not been active, his bones would have been powder. He tasted blood.
"What—"
A thunderous crack shook the clearing. Trees toppled like matchsticks, uprooted by raw force. Kael rolled behind a slab of stone and pressed low, peering from behind the jagged edge.
And finally saw what caused the tremor.
Two giants were fighting. No, one giant, one nightmare.
On the right, a troll. Twelve feet tall, skin the color of muddy granite, arms knotted with corded muscle. Wielding a stone club thicker than Kael's torso. But what set Kael's pulse racing was not its size. It was the way it moved. Calculated. Deliberate. There was intelligence behind its footwork, not instinct. It shifted its weight like a trained warrior, meeting its opponent with timing and experience.
On the left, a massive, bat like beast, wings tattered yet powerful, fangs like hooked daggers. It dove and slashed, tearing long strips of flesh from the troll's arms.
The troll barely reacted. Wounds closed within seconds.
Kael's heart dropped. A sentient troll with a swift, high-grade regeneration. He knew exactly what book he had seen that description in.
"Compendium," he whispered, voice thin and steady, "analyse what rank this dungeon is."
[QUERY INITIATED: Dungeon categorization from archival knowledge…]
[Result: Probability exceeds 90% — Low Tier Magus Dungeon.]
Kael's breath faltered.
A Magus dungeon. Not Initiate. Not a low tier of student. Magus.
His survival odds sank through the floor. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from cold calculation. What did James put in my pocket? What has the formation judged me as? Something pulsed against his ribs. He did not dare check it now.
Another shockwave erupted.
A boulder—no, an entire chunk of the hillside—launched from the troll's swing and hurtled straight toward him. The ground quaked beneath every step of the monsters. Kael darted from cover, mana surging into his legs as he leapt aside.
He avoided the boulder itself…
…but the impact of it smashing into the earth sent a ripple of force that hit him like a hammer. He felt weightless for a breath before he struck the ground and rolled, dirt filling his mouth.
He staggered upright.
If the troll won, he was dead. If the bat won, he was dead. If he ran… He scanned the terrain, a narrow valley, a vertical tree line, no clear exit.
The ghost of the orphan Kael screamed: Run! He locked the thought down, a mental vice crushing the instinct. Running was not survival. Running was dragging out the inevitable.
Kael steadied his breath. The Entity cocooned within his soul stirred faintly, sensing conflict. The Soul Devourer's shackled face deep in his mana gates shifted, as if tasting opportunity. An idea bloomed in his head and he did not have the luxury to test things.
He needed information. He needed an opening. He needed anything. But above all, he needed time.
He crouched lower behind an outcrop of stone, eyes narrowing as he watched the titans clash again. Leaves screamed through the air like razors. The wind carried the scent of blood, moss, and something else—a whisper of intent.
The battle had ceased to be a simple clash of muscle and fang. It was now a grinding war born of attrition, and Kael had just volunteered to be the tactical wedge.
The Troll, ignoring its still weeping wound in its shoulder, swung its massive stone club, a furious, sweeping blow that forced the Bat to ascend high into the misty canopy. Kael knew the sequence: the Bat would try to drain mana, the Troll would retaliate with blunt force. The Troll was winning, its sheer mass and environmental mana absorption overcoming the Bat's agility. Without intervention, the Bat would be broken, and Kael would be the next morsel.
He needed to be smart. He needed to be invisible. And he needed to hit where nothing else had.
Kael waited, heart hammering a frantic rhythm against the Bronze Token still clutched in his left hand. The moment the Bat completed its descent and covered the Troll's massive head in a flurry of biting and clawing, Kael began his casting.
He channeled Arcane Mana, his primary energy, to shape the spell, but he laced the core of the projectile with something rarer, colder, and far more dangerous: Soul Mana. An ethereal spike, shimmering silver and radiating a deep, bone shaking cold, manifested above his outstretched hand. He did not wait. He forced his mental focus and doubled the effort. Another spike. And another.
Multiple ethereal spikes, twelve in total, hovered above him now, each a needle tipped with the very essence of spiritual corrosion.
He targeted the Troll's back, aiming for the massive nexus of muscle where its regeneration was strongest, and hurled them all.
But Kael did not stay to watch the result.
The second the spikes launched, he poured the last dregs of his operational Arcane Mana into his legs and right arm, swiftly shaping the intricate rune for Phasing. The glyph, a complex spiral of overlapping lines, sank into his skin, infusing his body with a temporary state like that of a wraith.
He did not run. He slid.
Kael moved through tree trunk after tree trunk, bypassing the solid, material reality of the forest. He became a blur of motion, a shivering ghost passing through wood and leaf until he was on the far side of the colossal battle, safely hidden behind a cluster of shattered stumps. The infusion faded off, leaving his mana channels raw and empty. He was breathing hard, the metallic taste of overexertion sharp on his tongue.
He looked back. The spikes had hit their mark. Twelve silver needles had sunk into the Troll's granite hide, disappearing into the dark, resilient flesh.
The Troll was standing upright, but confusion, not injury, was etched on its face. It did not flinch. It simply raised a massive hand to swat the Bat away, its movement only fractionally slower. Kael watched, his last hope sinking. Soul attacks had seemingly no effect.
He was thinking to make a desperate, straight line of a sprint into the deep woods when he noticed the change. The deep slashes the Bat had inflicted were no longer healing instantly. They were lingering, closing sluggishly, still weeping black blood. The steaming rate of regeneration had halved.
It worked.
Soul damage was there, but Kael's rank was too low. The attack was piercing the Troll's defenses, but only just. He would have to fill the sea with drops if he wanted even to survive.
At that exact moment, the Troll's gaze, slow but terrifyingly precise, swept across the clearing, focusing on the fresh disturbance of the ground where Kael had been. Its massive, stone fist opened, and a beam of pure, focused Mana erupted, obliterating the exact spot where Kael had been standing moments before.
A deep, smoking crater was formed where the stump cluster had been.
Kael's heart thrummed against his ribs, a frantic, desperate bird. He would have been mince meat if he had hesitated for even a breath. The sheer, concentrated power of the attack was a stark reminder of the impossibility of his situation.
Kael's whole body was shivering, but he buckled down, drawing upon the icy clarity of the Compendium. He forced his burnt channels to open, pulling Soul Mana with the Devourer aspect, ignoring the searing pain.
He channeled more spikes—double this time, twenty four points of silver light—and targeted the Troll again. He followed the same desperate, ruinous tactics.
Cast. Phase. Run. Hide.
The Troll's wounds were healing too slowly now, the silver corruption from Kael's attacks forcing the creature's own healing essence to fight an internal battle. The Bat, seeing its advantage, redoubled its efforts, tearing more and more at the giant's limbs. Both titans looked worse and worse as the fight continued—one weakened by attrition, the other by the sudden, debilitating corruption of its soul.
Kael's mana channels were burning furiously within him, screaming for rest, but there was no rest. There was only the battle, and Kael had just made himself the indispensable, invisible architect of its destruction. He had to keep hurling magic spikes with Soul Mana infused at the Troll until one of the behemoths finally collapsed.
Kael's lungs were screaming, his mana channels were a burning ruin, and he felt the sickening tremor of exhaustion setting into his bones. Yet, his mind remained terrifyingly clear.
The Troll was now staggeringly slow. The lingering silver corruption from the Soul Spikes had finally tipped the balance, forcing its incredible regeneration to grind to a halt. It was bleeding from twenty different wounds, its movements desperate and clumsy. The Bat, on the other hand, was now moving with renewed viciousness, drawing strength from the air and the Troll's failing life force. Its wings had stopped twitching; its attacks were precise, aimed at the neck and vital points.
The Bat was winning, and the Troll would die in minutes.
Kael knew the terrifying reality: if the Bat survived this fight, it would be satiated, fully healed, and alerted to the presence of an intelligent, unseen attacker. A fully energized Tier III Vampiric Bat would track and kill him with brutal efficiency.
If the Bat lived, he died. This was the equation James had thrust upon him. There was no mercy here; there was only a calculation of two dangers and one indispensable survivor—himself. He could not allow a survivor. He had to ensure the death of both behemoths.
He channeled the last, excruciating remnants of his inner essence. It was not Arcane Mana; it was the Soul Mana, pulled directly from the Entity, burning a hole through his exhausted channels. He forced his body to comply, ignoring the agony of spiritual depletion.
A final, magnificent spike of silver light manifested above his hand. It was thicker, denser, and radiated a pure, cold malice that threatened to extinguish his own consciousness.
This was the most dangerous magic he had ever cast, a true, focused strike of the Soul Devourer's power. He was not just burning Mana; the sheer force of the channel was consuming the first, weakest layers of the Bat's ingested memories for fuel.
This time, Kael did not target the staggering Troll. He targeted the Bat.
The Bat was a creature of shadow essence and high frequency movement. It relied on absolute mana efficiency and perfect physical control. A single, focused hit of soul corrosion would be catastrophic to its delicate internal systems.
Kael waited for the Troll's next exhausted swing. The great stone club arced high, momentarily obscuring the Bat from the ground.
Now.
Kael threw the single, heavy Soul Spike not at the Bat's body, but at the space where its left-wing joint connected to its spine.
The projectile was silent, fast, and absolute.
The Bat had sensed the movement, but its shadow-based radar was momentarily confused by the chaotic mana lingering from the Troll's club swing. It turned its massive head just as the spike punched through the air.
It did not strike the wing joint. The Bat reacted just fast enough for the spike to sink deep into its chest.
The effect was instantaneous. Unlike the Troll, whose defenses were based on brute physical resilience, the Bat's shadow essence was fragile against direct spiritual assault. The creature shrieked and wailed, its cry a high-pitched sound of pure, metaphysical pain.
The silver Soul Mana, delivered directly into its core, erupted like a supernova of cold, corrosive light. But the beast was a very advanced rank compared to Kael, and it stabilized itself mid-flight, fighting the spiritual corrosion with a terrifying willpower.
Kael's job was done. The Troll, having finished its massive, lumbering overhead swing, now brought its stone club down, not on the ground, but on the now flailing, momentarily compromised body of the Bat.
It was a perfect, thunderous hit. The Bat plummeted, a dead, ruined mass of flesh and bone, slamming into the Troll's enormous granite thigh.
In the last moment, the Bat, in its dying throes, opened its mouth. A beam made of condensed shadow pierced the Troll directly in the sternum.
The impact was the final straw. The Troll was already weakened beyond its capacity to stand. The shock of the Bat's heavy, sudden mana beam, combined with the residual pain from its wounds only half healed and the systemic corruption of Kael's first attack, forced its knee to buckle.
The twelve foot giant collapsed.
The sound of its fall was seismic—a deafening, earth shaking boom that sent every remaining tree in the valley shuddering. The stone club flew from its grasp, skittering across the clearing and finally shattering the slab of rock Kael had first hidden behind.
Kael, now completely empty of mana and soul energy, sank to his knees behind the burnt stump. He was trembling uncontrollably, his vision swimming with black spots. The only sound was his ragged, desperate breathing.
He looked across the clearing. The battle was over.
The agony in his mana channels was a secondary calculation. He had pushed his vessel past its critical limit, yet it held. The cost was measured, the transaction complete.
But his job was still pending. He raised his body with effort and ran towards the dying behemoths. He attached a small, shimmering Stone Beetle, a mechanical essence extraction artifact, onto both creatures to extract their residual mana.
First, he got to the Bat, as it was closer to death. Kael channeled a final flicker of Arcane energy, twisting the familiar shape into Lightning Mana. A small, buzzing blue spike manifested, and he pierced the Bat's head, finishing it.
The moment the beast died, Kael activated the Devourer aspect of the Entity, sucking its soul into his mana gates. The beast's memories hit like an avalanche, a chaotic cascade of primal instinct and aerial hunting patterns, but the Compendium moved forward like a hungry warden, separating and compiling the raw data.
[Input received: Vampiric Bat memories. 200 CP gained.]
The Troll was a massive, broken monument to resilience, lying still, a slow stream of corrupted black blood pooling beneath its head. Kael knew that given time, the Troll's remarkable resilience would kick in; even its soul would slowly be repaired, and no simple spell could pierce its hide except fire.
Kael quickly retrieved his Stone Beetles from the Troll's body. He then started channeling Fire Mana. It was the element used least, but it was the one necessary for true Troll annihilation. He touched the Troll's massive forearm and focused his consciousness. The fire took the Troll's body like dried cinder, crackling across the damaged skin.
The smell of burning flesh and stone filled the air. Kael steadied himself, waiting until the last ember faded, ensuring the death was absolute. Just as the Troll died, Kael activated his Devourer aspect again, sucking its vast, heavy soul into his being. The memories of a thousand years of valley warfare—the strategies, the weaknesses, the pathways—slammed into him. He sent all the memories to the Compendium before they could halt his brain to stop.
[Input received: Rakshar of the Valley Troll Tribe memories received. 1050 CP gained.]
Kael slumped back. His eyes, fixed on the dark, misty sky, were not afraid. They were satisfied. He had just gone to war with a Magus dungeon and won the first engagement. 1250 CP. Enough to begin planning his real survival.