Slowly, but surely, he managed to descend to the first basement level over the heads of many, many NPC guards and arrived into a much different world.
The floors above ground looked like a standard castle in disrepair or in mid-repair, but as soon as he arrived at the first basement level – where a very convenient map affixed to the wall showed the general layout and exits how many levels were there – everything changed.
Darkness covered the corners, no matter which angle he looked at them (even when illuminated by the rare torches), the ground was filled with black carpets with ominous symbols sewn into them, and the walls were similarly covered with tapestries showcasing various scenes. Upon a further look, Sam realized they were showcasing scenes of a particular demon winning battles and gloating over their enemies.
‘The Shadowed One…’ he realized. ‘Ego visible from the moon…’
Thankfully, the beams up high continued to be present, so he could simply use them to traverse the floor. Granted, it didn’t allow him to take a look into the rooms behind the doors appearing between the massive tapestries. However, his mana senses told him enough.
Most of them were empty, filled with enchanted beds and a few more items left behind by their users. Probably the barracks for the rank and file.
Using the map, he headed toward the stairs that would lead him to the second basement floor.
Surprisingly, nothing happened as he descended one floor further. There were no players, just ominous shadows and darkness, tapestries about an egomaniac, and fewer and fewer NPC guards.
As Sam snuck down to the next floor, he wondered what Tim was doing. Then he shook his head and refocused. He was the big boom while Tim was the silent boom.
‘Hehe…big booom…’
The second floor changed things.
As soon as he swung down, and landed on the last protruding beam, he saw that instead of NPC guards, players were standing around, sitting on various things, and doing everything but watching the presumably only public entrance to the second basement level.
Just at first look, he could spot at least two card games, one dice game, and a group of players, dressed in very cultish robes, playing with an actual hacky sack.
Then, as he squatted high above the idiots, he considered the situation.
He could go in and kill them, they were honestly not that strong. Not one of them has reached Level 100 yet. However, if he did that, they would just log out and sound the alarm. Sam squinted and watched as one of the guys actually raised on a pair of twos, then made a simple decision.
He closed his eyes and focused on his mana, spreading it thinly around him, grimacing at the feeling of demonic mana, then reached beyond the barricade of stupidity, looking for something useful. A minute later, he smiled as he found his target.
An enchanted torch holder, probably there to keep it burning longer (it was hard to discern the purpose of the enchantment from this distance), merely sitting on the wall in a corridor connected to the main one.
With very precise motions, he sunk his own mana into the enchantment and began to, for lack of a better term, inflate the structure of the enchantment with his own mana while holding the same structure together from the outside.
Then when he judged that it had enough punch for his purposes, he let it go.
BOOOOOMMM
The walls shook a little, and suddenly the area around the door was filled with frenzied activity.
“GET DOWN!”
“Are we under attack?”
“Don’t you dare look at my cards!”
“You threw them!”
“I don’t care!”
“Fuck! I broke my record!”
Then, as the players under him ran around a little like headless chickens, finally one of them managed to find the remaining brain cell.
“ENOUGH!”
The people around him stilled – one pair almost at each others’ throats over a bunch of playing cards – and looked at the man who yelled out.
“Team three, go and check it out. Team two, go up and see what’s going on. Team one spread out and look for infiltrators.”
Several people saluted, a few cursed and began climbing the stairs, and the rest began to spread out, doing exactly what Sam wanted.
He watched as the area emptied of guards and waited for the perfect moment when nobody was looking exactly in one direction, he activated all his speed enhancement, covering himself in nothingness, and with a whoosh he was off, covering the distance behind the guards’ back, heading deeper into the floor.
Behind him, he heard one of the players call out.
“What was that?”
“I sensed nothing…”
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Sam grinned and began running faster.
The second basement level was a little bigger than the last one, visibly rebuilt from torture chambers and storage rooms, though still covered by tapestries dedicated to the ego of one particular demon.
A few times he had to duck into a room to avoid patrolling players, which put him face to face with torture racks piled together in heaps, covered in the dried remains of suspicious dark liquids. Still, the miasma in the ether was starting to grow thicker and thicker, which led to him believing, that either he was getting closer to the central area of the Silent Step guild’s base, or that the ritual they were planning to conduct was starting soon.
And just as he finished that thought, a weak pulse, familiar to him from all sorts of ritual swept through the ether. The pulse was weak enough that he doubted anybody but him sensed that it told him one thing.
The ritual has been started.
Which, in turn, meant that the clock was ticking.
Excited by the situation, he began sneaking toward the next stairs while avoiding the patrols made by the weaker members of the guild.
Based on the number of weak players he sensed, Sam suspected that the guild leadership made sure that the weaker, and probably less loyal, members would stay well out of their way.
Descending the last staircase, he girded his loins and prepared for an epic battle.
But then he looked up at the last second, and there were once again wooden beams on the ceiling, supporting it and allowing him to do his favorite activity.
Being sneaky…
“Nin-nin,” he murmured with a grin and he launched himself upward with one motion, landing on the closest beam before heading downward.
Thankfully, the third level of the basement seemed to be the last one, as he arrived in a small area, that contained another group of clearly not qualified guards doing anything but guarding, and a clear path forward for him over the heads of everyone.
Behind the small antechamber was a wall with a giant door on it. However, for reasons unknown, the wall didn’t actually reach the ceiling fully. Instead, there were slots carved into the stone, thick enough for a person of his proportion to slip through.
‘Weird, but useful… Wonder why they left it there…’ he mused as he quietly as possible squeezed through the opening. ‘Maybe for ventilation?’
The moment his head was through, he was practically slapped by the sound of dark, guttural chanting.
Positioning himself on a small stone perch jutting out just under the slots, he turned fully around and took in the sight that greeted him.
A giant hall, filled with robed figures radiating magic with cores of the blackest black, standing around an altar filled with enough blood to choke an orphanage, and across from the doors, behind the ritual circle stood a giant statue of the shape of a long animal. It had mammal-like legs, a scaled body, occasionally broken by fur, arms were clawed with seven wicked claws that glinted blood red in the flickering light of torches, and the head was a curious mix of snake, moose, and bear with horns that looked like fractal trees, their very edges turning into a weird mist like sight.
The eyes were the weirdest. Dark, darker than anything in the room, yet Sam could spot it clearly, even from across the room.
Mostly, because the moment he appeared, the eyes moved and found him, which meant he was having a staring contest with a statue that had eyes more disturbing than whatever Katie called her cat.
‘Alright, so stealth is pretty much shot if the head honcho knows me…’ he grumbled disappointingly. Still, if the Shadowed One was watching him, that meant that it wasn’t watching Tim.
Not having any idea what to do about the creepy statue, he looked back at the ritual and began to analyze it.
‘Let’s see what we have here… No containment, quite the opposite. Summoning, targeted. Connected to one particular entity,’ he listed while making mental notes. The symbol in the place of focus was unknown to him, but with the way it had a slight fractal pattern, Sam was pretty sure it was connected to the statue. ‘That’s the mana gathering array… that seems to be some kind of divine obscuring part. Probably doesn’t want the divine to interfere…’
However, as he took in the ritual and the players standing around it, thirteen to be exact, with the rest standing respectfully silent on the edges of the hall, or sitting on some basic benches, he saw the mana gathering in large swathes of darkness and frowned.
‘Well, that’s a bummer…’ he grumbled to himself once again. Apparently, he was just a moment too late. If he interfered with the ritual, it would either explode or explode with an even bigger explosion. Tainted with dark magic that would in turn pollute the area around the mountain for ages.
As the realization hit him, Sam would have sworn the statue was laughing at him. The eyes were really expressive…
Sighing silently, he opened the messenger screen and began to type. However, when he pressed the send button, instead of sending it, another screen popped up.
[You’re in an event area. Your ability to send and receive messages through the game interface has been disabled. It will be re-enabled when the event ends, or you depart the area!]
With a sigh, he closed the screen and hoped that Tim was having more luck than him.
Then, extremely slowly, to avoid spooking the players below him, he summoned Lucky in armor form while strengthening his Mana Scales further, trying to inject a little bit of nothing mana into it. He had a feeling he would need it.
Then, he pulled out his shiny new sword and readied himself before turning his attention to the ritual. Might as well learn something…
The darkness around the chanting people began to slowly swirl, picking up speed every second, before becoming a tornado of smoke and shadows. Then one shout from all thirteen people, and the statue, with a great creaking sound, opened its maw, and sucked in the shadow, leaving the area momentarily devoid of the familiar dark miasma and the cult members panting, some of them even falling on their asses.
Then within a few heartbeats the shadows exploded from the same maw, flooding the room both with darkness and a dark miasma, much stronger and thicker than anything Sam had experienced before.
The expelled cloud of evil swirled around for a moment before seemingly coalescing into a tall form, with arms and head, while the body stayed square-like, and where the legs should have been it flared out into a pool of ever-moving darkness. It was as if a giant reed stood in a very small pond and then grew arms. Then the head grew innumerable horns in the now familiar fractal pattern and two angry red eyes showed up with deep, dark irises. And a grinning mouth, much bigger than it had a right to be…
“AFTER AEONS OF WANDERING IT FEELS GOOD TO STEP ON THE MATERIAL PLANE AGAIN!” it spoke, a voice like velvet, yet still causing Sam’s spine to shiver. Hell, he could even feel the goosebumps appearing on his arm.
One of the cultists stood up and bowed.
“Oh, Shadowed One! What is your first order?”
The being looked down at the person asking the question and grinned. It was an ugly grin, stretching from one end of its ‘head’ to the other, showcasing black, metallic teeth – more like fangs – and a tongue made of dark flame.
“IT SEEMS WE HAD A WITNESS! ELIMINATE THEM!”
“What witness?” came the surprised reply as the players began to look around and remove their hoods to show who they were one by one.
“Look around!”
“Roll call!”
“Check the door!”
Sam simply sprung forward, jumping on another beam, then took a deep breath, said a prayer to whatever god was listening, and jumped.
“Where could he b…urk,” came from one of the thirteen people doing the ritual on whom Sam managed to land.
He straightened out, holding his sword in an idle guard position, glanced at the incredulous crowd, then stared directly into the demon’s eyes and nodded at them.
“Gentlemen.”
Owed bonus chapters: ---
Character Sheet
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