Part 1: Dogs of Coin
They handed him the mission scroll like it was a receipt for a funeral.
Cassira didn't even look at him when she dropped it on the desk. "You're being reassigned. Squad slot opening in twenty minutes. Catacomb sub-delve. Signed and stamped. Refusal is breach of probation."
Yuji didn't bother reading it. "Soloing's not an option?"
Cassira's lips twitched. "Probationary mages don't solo. Especially not ones with 'light' magic."
Behind her words, he heard it clear.
You're dangerous. You're not trusted. So we're throwing you in the hole to see if you stay buried.
He nodded once. "Sylvia comes with me."
Cassira finally looked up. "No. Rank restrictions. Sub-delve is Tier II. Your beast hasn't qualified."
Sylvia, standing behind him with arms crossed, didn't move. But her jaw locked tight enough to tremble.
"She's not a beast. She's my bonded."
"Then bond her somewhere else," Cassira said sweetly. "Stables await."
Yuji turned, met Sylvia's eyes. "Can you handle a few hours apart?"
"I can handle a war," she said. "But if anyone touches me—"
"I'll kill them," Yuji finished.
She nodded. No smile. No dramatics. Just faith—ice-cold and absolute.
They separated at the threshold.
Yuji arrived at the guild's southern gate to meet his "squad."
There were four of them. All wrong.
The leader was a man with tattoos up his neck and one eye cloudy with mana-rot. Bress. Spear-wielder. Ex-militia. Talked with his tongue half out, like a dog sniffing rot.
Then there was a twin pair—boy and girl—red hair, matching knives, matching smiles too wide to trust. Tillo and Kess. Whispered in sync. Probably thieves. Definitely sadists.
And finally: a sallow, mute man in a rusted robe carrying a lantern that didn't glow. No name given.
Bress looked Yuji up and down. "Mage, huh? The one from the pit fight?"
"Something like that."
"Good. You die first. Draw attention."
Yuji didn't blink. "Sure. But if I come back alive, you don't."
Bress laughed. But something in Yuji's eyes made the sound die halfway.
They left Ironhorn before dusk.
The trail led northeast, where ruins of the old city slept under moss and rot. The "abandoned" church wasn't abandoned—just cursed, too low in divine rank to draw Church attention, and too filled with bad memories for settlers to squat in.
The cathedral stood half-collapsed in a sunken grove. Vines clung to the bell tower like desperate hands. Stained glass lay shattered across the stone floor.
They lit torches and entered through the side.
The air turned cold fast. Magic cold. The kind that whispered down your neck even with nothing behind you.
The trapdoor to the catacombs was obvious—too obvious. But they opened it anyway.
Yuji went last. He didn't trust anyone's back. Especially not his own.
Beneath the church, the passage narrowed—brickwork warping, bones poking from the mortar. Faint glyphs glowed with divine language that had long since lost meaning.
Bress muttered something about mana pressure rising.
Then the smell hit.
Death.
Not the kind from fresh blood—but old, trapped, preserved.
The mute man's lantern flickered once.
Then something in the fog ahead moved.
And someone behind Yuji whispered: "Guess the real test starts now."
Part 2: Sewers Beneath God
It started with a scream.
Short. Wet. Cut off.
The mute with the lantern was the first to die.
One second he was walking ten paces ahead, illuminating the path with soft blue light—and the next, he was yanked upward by something made of shadows and bone. There was no time to shout. His body twisted in the air like a marionette, then slammed into the ceiling hard enough to snap.
CRACK.
He dropped without his head.
Yuji didn't hesitate. He whispered a command word—"Veil"—and snapped his fingers.
A pulse of light burst outward from his chest, illuminating the tunnel. Not a spell, exactly—just a trickle of mana forced through his skin, flaring like a camera flash.
The corridor lit up in ghost-white, and what it revealed made even Bress hiss.
The ceiling and walls were crawling with dead things. Not corpses—mockeries.
Unfinished bodies, stitched together. Skinless hounds with two heads. Half-formed humanoids whose limbs moved like broken clock hands. Mana spikes jutted from their spines, glowing the same sick red as the corrupted lion.
Kess whispered, "Those aren't undead. They're… spawned."
Yuji's eyes narrowed. "Mana-spiked biomass. Animated without souls."
"Which means someone down here's still making them," Tillo added, voice no longer joking.
The things didn't wait.
They dropped.
Yuji kicked off the wall and rolled sideways as one landed where he'd stood, teeth first.
Bress shouted a formation—but the others were already scattering. Kess dove behind a support column. Tillo vanished into a shadow like smoke.
Yuji spun and cast. No chant. No flourish.
"Burn."
Fire exploded outward in a whip, severing three spawn in half. Their insides hissed like acid and steamed against the stone.
"Fall back!" he barked. "Tight corridor. Control the line!"
Bress listened—barely. He lunged with his spear, pinning a creature to the floor, then crushed its skull underfoot.
Kess got caught. One of the spawn tackled her, driving claws into her side.
Yuji moved without thinking. A pulse of wind magic, launched from his heel, launched him forward. He caught the creature mid-air and slammed it into the ceiling with both palms flaring.
It shrieked and disintegrated in flames.
Kess stared at him, pale.
"You're not just a support mage."
"Never said I was," Yuji muttered.
After ten minutes, it was over.
Six corpses burned. The hallway was blackened with soot. Bress had a gash across his neck. Kess was limping. Tillo had reappeared, muttering about his shoulder being "dislocated in four dimensions."
Yuji stood in the center of it all, untouched.
Breathing hard.
The core inside his chest still throbbed—but not with fatigue.
It pulsed like a warning.
Something deeper was calling him.
Down this corridor. Beyond the spawn.
A door.
A resonance.
An invitation.