The biting wind howled like a wounded beast, whipping the ashen snow that covered the iron spine mountains into a frenzy. The sky was a perpetual mixture of violet and black, and completely devoid of the sun and stars.
The world of Mag Ársa was dead and had been rotting for close to four hundred years. And Aldritch of clan Blackshield knew it better than anyone.
The half giant dwarf had been there for it all - he was present when the first dungeon opened. He was one of the first to kill a demon. He was the first to kill the boss of the dungeon, closing the portal to hell off from their world. For 632 years, Aldritch fought against the never-ending tide of demons, sacrificing what little chance he ever had at having a normal life.
As a high priest, his healing ability was second only to the Saintess of legend. But he still lost comrades. No matter how deep his mana pool ran, eventually, even he would run out. And when he did, casualties followed.
Aldritch had only survived because of the grace given to him by his patron deity - Oakairo; Dragon God of Pride… However, it was because of that grace that he had to watch helplessly as people grew sick from the poisonous water supplies, developed diseases from the miasma polluted atmosphere, and starved after the food ran out.
His people died because he was too weak to save them, even with God’s divine protection. He was a failure…
Aldritch was sitting by a small campfire, his only source of warmth and light in this wasteland. He stared at the dwindling fire through incandescent golden eyes, made even more ominous by the slitted pupils that openly pronounced his service to the Dragon God. After centuries of wandering in search of other survivors, Aldritch was left with very little to remind him of how things used to be. His only possessions were the old cleric’s robe that covered his massive frame, a golden wrist brace with the image of a kite shield emblazoned on top, an old stone amulet he’d had since he was a child, and finally the custom poleaxe he’d forged from the bones and claws of a lesser Dragon.
The poleaxe was truly a thing of beauty - a wide Axe blade on the right, a deadly hammerhead on the left, and just because he could, Aldritch forged the very tip of the handle into a wicked spike that could be used as a thrusting weapon.
Aldritch wasn’t ashamed to admit that the weapon had saved his life more times than he could remember. It had bathed in more demon blood than Aldritch dared to remember, and Aldritch was truly thankful to the Dragon who sacrificed his spine so Aldritch could forge the handle of such a weapon. Were it not so tough, who knows how many times his beloved weapon would’ve shattered.
“Even if your weapon did somehow break, we both know you would’ve taken out your anger on the cause and then used it to forge a replacement. And knowing your penchant for creativity when you’re angry, I’m almost sad it never happened. Who knows what kind of demon slaying weapon would’ve been born out of your malice.” A disembodied voice said from deep within the recesses of Aldritch’s mind. The voice was regal, powerful, godlike… And getting on Aldritch’s last nerve.
Aldritch rolled his eyes at the disembodied voice. “I’m not in the mood for your jokes, Oakairo. Besides, the demons are dead and so is their devil master. The time for demon slaying weapons has long since passed.”
“Oh, lighten up a bit, will you? It’s your birthday. Do you know how many mortals live to be a thousand and seventeen years old?”
“Counting elves or -”
“No, not counting the tree huggers. They haven’t counted since that nasty goddess gifted them with immortality. I’m talking about normal mortals, like you.”
“Right, because a seven-foot-tall dwarf who can’t grow a beard is ‘normal’ by your standards?” As if to emphasize his point, Aldritch pulled down the hood of his robe and ran his thick fingers through his mane of dark red hair. His face was rugged, and his large nose was clearly of Dwarven make - but the absence of a beard made him look much younger than he actually was. For despite being a thousand years old, Aldritch could technically pass for a large human in his late thirties… So long as you didn’t look too closely at the shape of his body.
“By ‘normal’, I meant mortals who weren’t blessed by a god or goddess. And before you say anything, my blessing did not grant you immortality. You have your genetics to thank for your longevity. To my knowledge, no one like you had ever been born. It’s why I knew I had to have you from the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
“You mean as a piece of your hoard,” Aldritch said blandly.
“Of course. I was a Dragon before I was a God. And as a dragon, my hoard drew envy and hatred from man and God alike. To be part of such a hoard is a blessing in and of itself. You should be proud.”
“Oh, I’m proud alri -” The ground beneath Aldritch’s feet shook violently as the sound of an explosion reached his ears. The shockwave that followed threw hundreds of pounds of ice, snow, and ash against Aldritch’s body. Despite the weight crashing into him, Aldritch appeared to not have noticed, as his eyes remained transfixed on the horizon.
“That was divine magic.” Aldritch muttered, more out of shock than any attempts to tell Oakairo. The latter was a God, a literal source of divine magic. Of course, he had sensed it too.
“Someone tried to cast sanctuary and failed. The explosion was caused by a backwash of arcane magic interrupting the spell.”
Aldritch took one final glance down at his now extinguished fire. He should be disappointed - like the many people he'd lost, he’d failed to protect this meager flame. But he wasn’t. No, he was excited, and growing more so by the second. Spells meant survivors. Survivors meant people. And people meant -
“Someone new to talk to!” Oakairo said Aldritch’s thought aloud.
“Exactly.” Aldritch’s smile was vicious, but his eyes were alight with child-like excitement. He grabbed his beloved weapon and slung it over his shoulder before taking off towards the source of the explosion. In between one step and the next, Aldritch bent his knees slightly - he shoved off the mountain with enough force to cause his own sonic boom. Within a matter of seconds, he’d pierced the clouds high above the mountain and disappeared from sight.
An hour ago.
Sulika and her team had prepared as best they could, but now that the warehouse was right in front of them, nerves were starting to get to them.
Approximately three months ago Sulika had received information from an extremely credible source - an Oracle with a 90% accuracy rate had a vision that a manic cult would attempt to cause a ‘dungeon break’ smack dab in the middle of the city.
Sulika’s team was the third closing team under the Azuris branch of the Hunters Guild. It was their duty to shut down dungeons before they could harm any civilians. However, aside from a few unlucky souls every year who have a dungeon form on top of them, most dungeons are only deadly to those who willingly enter them... Except in one case.
A dungeon break.
The dungeon break phenomenon happens when a dungeon is left alone for too long. The mana inside continues to build, which causes the monsters to propagate and the miasma to grow denser with each passing day. And if the dungeon continues to be left alone, eventually the weight of the mana pressing against it will cause cracks to appear - leading to a dungeon break. Once a dungeon breaks, the monsters and miasma inside will overflow and pour into the outside world.
The monsters attack without discrimination. Countless lives will be lost in the first few hours, and even if the monsters are waylaid by hunters, the miasma is almost impossible to stop. It poisons the air with a toxin that brings paralysis in minutes, and death in only an hour to normal humans. And while hunters can somewhat resist the effects of the miasma, eventually, they too will suffer the effects.
A dungeon break is one of the most disastrous tragedies that can occur in the modern day.
So, when the Oracle predicted a dungeon break would happen inside the warehouse just five minutes away from the hunters’ Guild, she was met with derision from the higher ups. Not because of the prediction itself, but because of what she said caused the break.
The idea of a group of people, manic cult or not, willingly bringing such a travesty upon their fellow citizens was unthinkable to them. And they refused to hear her out.
But Sulika listened. She trusted this oracle’s words more than anything, and knew that if she said it was going to happen, then it would happen. The only thing she had ever gotten wrong was the timeframe in which it would happen.
She was lucky to have a team that stood behind her. Without them, she would be preparing to charge the warehouse alone since her superiors refused to give their support... Although, she had to admit, from the outside the warehouse appeared no different than the twenty others that surrounded it.
She expected the cult to have spooky paraphernalia all over the place; religious symbols blood on the ground, people walking around wearing hooded robes - something. Instead, all she saw outside the warehouse were normal looking dockworkers going about their days of moving freight from sky dock to the warehouse and back.
Which is why it was so important they spent the last few weeks performing nightly recon on the place. While most of what they had was technically illegal, Sulika believed they had enough to form a decently strong case to present to her boss - they had photographs of magical artifacts being present inside the warehouse, while they could find no documents showing them being brought into the city. Several members of her group had seen strange men and women coming and going from the warehouse at all hours of the night, a few of which never left. And perhaps the most damning evidence was the photo Oladi had taken the night before.
As her team’s resident druid, Oladi could get herself into almost any place she wanted. Which was how she’d found herself in the main storage room, near the back of the warehouse. In the photo you could see several corpses purposefully laid out inside a twenty foot runic circle, while five blurry figures stood outside the circle, seemingly in a deep conversation with one another.
Sulika was up half the night trying to make sense of what she was seeing in the photo. She poured through runic textbooks, contacted several experts on ancient runic symbols to ask for their opinion, and finally resorted to scouring the Internet for anything she could find. By the time she went to bed, she was well and truly exhausted, but she thought she had enough evidence to sway her boss’s opinion and finally get some support from the Guild.
Instead, he berated her for going against his orders and even threatened to fire her if she didn’t immediately drop the investigation.
As if she would do that.
So, there they were. Five off-duty hunters hiding behind a wall within spitting distance of the warehouse, about to storm a privately owned distribution center to prevent a dungeon break from destroying the city, and break about half a dozen laws in the process.
And all Sulika could think about was the fact that they were probably screwed, no matter what happened. If they failed to stop the dungeon break, the city would take a vital blow, and who knew how many people would die. And if they succeeded... The look on her boss’s face earlier that morning told her they likely wouldn’t have a job if he found out.
She exhaled and quietly drew her sword and wand. She held her sword in her right hand, since that was her dominant hand, and her wand in her left. This way, she could focus on casting spells with the wand and easily switch to melee combat if anyone got too close.
Copying her movements, her team also drew their weapons and prepared themselves for her signal.
“Oladi, dim the lights. Ralocan - prep for vision correction.” Sulika whispered.
“Right,” Oladi whispered back.
“Understood,” Ralocan, the cleric, replied while pulling his amulet out of his shirt and gripping it tightly in his left hand.
Oladi looked to the sky, and her mana swelled. “Eternal mother, my guardian, origin of the natural world. Shield me in your darkness so that I might hide from mine enemies. I beseech you, mother, grant me your blessing; Darkness” Oladi’s open hand reached for the sky - her index and middle fingers crossed, while her ring finger, pinky and thumb curled inwards until they touched her palm. From her outstretched index and middle fingers came a cloud of darkness that floated into the sky above the warehouse. Within seconds the cloud had grown large enough to serve their purposes, so Oladi flicked her fingers towards the ground.
The cloud suddenly expanded by half, and dropped like a stone to cover the warehouse and its grounds in absolute darkness.
“O’ honorable Cyndarr, my keeper and guardian, hear my despaired prayer. Grant me sight so I might be lost no longer. I ask this of you as your humble servant: Darkvision.” Ralocan brought his amulet to his forehead as he finished his prayer and held it there for a single second, then opened his hand and let the amulet fall against his chest. As the amulet fell past his eyes, the spell ‘Darkvision’ took effect for not just him, but his teammates, too.
A magical, transparent film slid over their pupils that pierced through the magical veil of darkness conjured by Oladi, enabling them to see through it as clearly as they could through a sunlit window.
Sulika raised her fist and waited... Panic stricken shouts filled the air as the warehouse workers realized they were under attack.
They waited until the warehouse workers ran out of the building to search for their attackers before making their move. Some workers had makeshift weapons - axes primarily used to cut firewood, small knives. One guy even carried a wooden chair into battle.
But they weren’t there for the workers.
Sulika gave the signal to move forward and led the charge into the magical darkness. She darted around the wall and sprinted into the warehouse yard while her team followed her shadow.
The workers had gathered up near the center of the yard, so Sulika led her team to skirt around the edge to avoid running into any of them. The workers were most likely innocent in this, just normal people trying to feed their families... But, just to be on the safe side, when Sulika and her team neared the large double doors that served as the primary entrance to the warehouse, she brought her mana to the surface and prepared to cast the spell as soon as they were all inside.
She passed through the opening first and jumped aside to allow the others enough space to enter. Right behind her were Oladi and Ralocan, while Derrik - the Dwarven heavy and Zarud - the half-orc barbarian, brought up the rear.
The moment Zarud passed her, Sulika flicked the tip of her wand towards the floor and funneled her magic into it. “Conjus: Mud Pit” She muttered. Her body shivered as an arc of mana leapt from the tip of her wand and pierced the gravel floor.
Within moments, a dark, viscous liquid bubbled up from beneath the loose gravel and formed a large mud pit across the entrance to the warehouse. Anyone who stepped into it would find it incredibly difficult to get back out again, especially once they were up to their armpits in mud. “That was a first level spell. Hopefully, that’ll be enough to delay them long enough for us to put an end to this. I’d hate to waste more mana on the workers.”
While ‘mud pit’ wasn’t an advanced spell by any means, it still required a deceptive amount of mana for a first level spell.
Magic was divided into three categories; divine, arcane, and pact. Sulika used arcane magic, while Oladi and Ralocan used divine magic. This was the reason Sulika didn’t have to recite a prayer before using her spell, since arcane users only needed to declare what type of magic they wanted to invoke before saying the spell name. In return, arcane magic had to be prepared in advance before it could be used.
At Sulika’s level, she could cast up to third-level spells. However, that was only if she had the mana to fuel such a spell. And after casting ‘mud pit’, that was no longer the case. All of her third level magic required too much mana to use as she was now, which was unfortunate, since most of her prepared attack spells were third level spells. But she would have to make do with what she had left.
“Eyes open people. The real thing begins now.” Sulika motion for her teammates to follow and headed for the warehouse’s main room.
They’d chosen to attack tonight, specifically because she’d learned from her research that they were in the process of setting the coordinates for the portal. Once that was finished, a sufficient mana source was all that was required to set things in motion. However, this was supposedly one of the most critical junctions in their ritual. One misstep could cause the portal to collapse in on itself... Or open at the bottom of the ocean. Either way, they couldn’t let them finish setting it up.
The sooner they stop them, the easier it will be to shut down the portal in its entirety. Sulika could only hope they’d gotten there in time.
