The gear Arlan assembled was practical, not standard-issue. Dark, durable syn-leathers treated to resist minor mana burns. A belt stocked with basic healing salves, mana-restoration pills (bought with his hard-earned points), and his tools. He also brought the runic fragment—a talisman, or a puzzle to ponder in the quiet moments.
He met Selene at midnight at the old alchemy wing door. She was dressed similarly, her burgundy hair tied back, her vials and charms clinking softly. Blythe was there too, the resonance adept, looking serious with a newly polished sonic amplifier on her wrist.
"No Jax?" Arlan asked.
"Tech is great, but this is a living dungeon. The mana interference scrambles delicate electronics. It's a magic and muscle job tonight," Selene said. She applied the same graveworm essence to the door, and they slipped out into the night beyond the academy wards.
They moved quickly and quietly through the academy's outer forests, then into the rocky, wild lowlands. The air grew colder, and the mana in the atmosphere felt thicker, heavier, tinged with a coppery scent—the smell of rift-spawn.
After an hour of hiking, they reached the fissure. It wasn't a dramatic tear in the sky. It was a jagged crack in the side of a rocky hill, about ten feet tall, pulsing with a sickly purple light. The ground around it was scorched and stained. This was a D-Class Rift, the smallest stable kind. To the academy, it was a training tool. To them, it was a goldmine.
"Stay close," Selene whispered. "The rift's ambient energy messes with senses. Stick to line of sight."
They stepped through the crack. The world twisted, a familiar nausea of spatial displacement hitting Arlan—his own affinity making him acutely aware of the wrongness. Then they were through.
The dungeon was a cavern system, but not a natural one. The walls were slick, organic-looking stone that pulsed with the same purple light. The air was hot and humid, smelling of rot and ozone. Strange, glowing fungi grew in clusters.
Umbral Sight was even more effective here. The shadow-energy was plentiful, pooled in every crevice. He could see the life-signs of creatures as moving blobs of heat and mana ahead.
They hadn't gone fifty meters when the first creatures attacked. Skitterlings. They looked like oversized beetles with razor-sharp mandibles and chitinous shells. A swarm of six, each about the size of a dog, scuttled from the walls. Their power level was low—1st Order threats.
"Blythe," Selene said.
Blythe raised her resonator and hummed a single, sharp note. The soundwave hit the lead Skitterling, and its entire carapace vibrated violently. With a crack, it shattered. The other Skitterlings recoiled, disoriented by the noise.
Arlan didn't wait. He focused on the space around the legs of two Skitterlings. He didn't freeze it solid—that took too much power. He made it sticky, like spatial glue. The creatures' legs locked in place, trapped.
Selene finished them with precise bolts of dark energy that pierced their eyes and found the soft brain beneath.
The fight was over in seconds. They harvested the small, dull beast cores from the creatures—worth a few points each.
Blythe affinity to manipulate vibrations and sound waves at a fundamental level was valuable. It allows a user to generate, control, and amplify sonic frequencies for various effects—from shattering objects with precise notes, creating disruptive pulses to break spells, to weaving protective harmonies or disorienting mental attacks. It is a potent mix of physical force and esoteric control.
"Good coordination," Blythe said, her first words of the night.
They moved deeper. The dungeon had a simple, looping layout. They encountered more Skitterlings, then a pair of Gloom Stalkers—panther-like shadows that could blend into the dark. These were 2nd Order, Rank 2.
The Stalkers were faster, smarter. One pounced at Blythe. Selene threw a curse that made it stumble, its shadow-form flickering.
Arlan saw his opening. He didn't try to hit the fast-moving creature. He focused on the space it was about to land in. Just as its paws were about to touch the ground, he warped that space, creating a sudden, invisible dip—a spatial pothole.
The Stalker's leg snapped as it landed wrong. It yowled in pain. Blythe hit it with a focused sonic pulse that turned its insides to jelly.
The second Stalker turned to flee. Arlan acted on instinct. He reached out with his hand, focused on the space in front of the fleeing creature, and folded it back towards himself.
The effect was like a short-range, one-way portal. The Stalker, running forward, suddenly found itself teleported three meters backwards, right to Arlan's feet, disoriented and confused. Selene put a dark spike through its skull.
"Teleportation?" Selene asked, raising an eyebrow as they harvested the larger, brighter cores.
"Small-scale spatial redirection," Arlan corrected. "A fold. Not true teleportation. Yet."
"Show-off," she said, but she was smiling.
They cleared two more chambers, collecting cores and a few rare, rift-grown herbs Selene identified as useful. The teamwork was smooth, silent, efficient. They were becoming a unit.
In the deepest chamber they dared to enter, they found the mini-boss. A Cave Crush Crawler. It was a massive, worm-like beast with a circular maw of grinding teeth, its body covered in rock-like plating. It was a 2nd Order, Rank 5 creature—a serious threat.
It sensed them and let out a ground-shaking roar, charging.
"Plan?" Blythe yelled, readying her resonator.
"Slow it down!" Selene shouted, beginning a complex chant, her hands weaving dark purple energy.
Arlan had an idea. The Crawler was big, heavy, and moved in a straight line. He couldn't stop it. But he could change its direction.
As it thundered towards them, Arlan focused all his spatial energy. Not on the creature, but on the path in front of it. He visualized a slanted plane, a spatial ramp. He poured mana into bending the reality of the ground at a forty-five degree angle in front of the charging beast.
To everyone else, it looked like the floor in front of the Crawler suddenly tilted. The creature, unable to adjust its momentum, hit the slanted space and was launched sideways, crashing with tremendous force into the cavern wall. The impact stunned it, cracks appearing in its rocky armor.
"Now!" Arlan gritted out, the effort of maintaining the spatial ramp draining him.
Selene unleashed her spell—a Blood Chains of Binding. Dark red chains, cold as a grave, erupted from the shadows and wrapped around the dazed Crawler, siphoning its vitality and holding it fast.
Blythe charged her resonator to its maximum. She placed it against the creature's head and unleashed a Resonance Cascade. A sound so high-pitched it was almost silent vibrated through the Crawler's skull. Its eyes burst. Its brain turned to paste. It went limp.
They stood panting in the sudden silence. The creature was dead.
"Wow," Blythe breathed. "That worked."
They harvested the prize—a large, pulsating beast core the size of a fist, glowing with dense earth and shadow mana. A Grade-2 core, worth at least two hundred merit points on the black market. They also found a small cluster of Shadowmoss growing behind where the Crawler had been nesting—a valuable alchemical ingredient.
As they were dividing the loot, Arlan felt a tremor in the dungeon's mana. A deep, wrong vibration.
"The rift is destabilizing!" Selene said, her witch-senses flaring. "We need to go. Now!"
They ran, retracing their path. The purple light in the walls began to strobe erratically. The ground shook. Behind them, they heard the screeches of more creatures, drawn by the disturbance.
They reached the entrance fissure just as the walls started to weep corrosive purple slime. They dove through, tumbling onto the scorched earth outside.
Behind them, the rift crackled and collapsed in on itself with a final, sucking whump, sealing shut. They had gotten out just in time.
Lying on the ground, catching their breath under the real stars, Selene started laughing. It was a wild, relieved sound. "We did it! A full clear! And we didn't die!"
Blythe was grinning, clutching the precious core.
Arlan sat up, his body aching but humming with satisfaction. It was the first real, life-on-the-line fight he'd been in since his parents. And he hadn't frozen. He'd acted. He'd used his power not in a controlled trial, but in the messy, dangerous real world. And it had worked.
He looked at the core in his hand, then at Selene and Blythe. They were covered in grime and minor burns, but alive and triumphant.
For a fleeting second, he felt something other than cold focus. He felt… camaraderie. The bond of people who have faced death together and won.
He shoved the feeling down. But not all the way.
"Good hunt," he said simply.
Selene nodded, her amber eyes soft. "Good hunt, partner."
They walked back to the academy as the first hints of dawn colored the sky, richer in wealth, experience, and a new, unspoken trust. The dungeon was gone, but the path ahead was clearer.
He had tested his power in fire and shadow. And he had not been found wanting.