The fall was not long in absolute distance, but it felt stretched.
Raylan dropped through a choking cloud of dust and loose soil, the world reduced to grit and blurred motion. His instincts screamed at him to reach for an anchor, but there was nothing to grasp.
He twisted his body, trying to orient himself.
Shapes flickered in the dust around him—chunks of stone, splintered roots—and something darker. A demonic silhouette tumbled through the collapsing shaft as well, but its movements were controlled, deliberate.
The Rank 4.
It used the falling debris as platforms, pushing off stones that had not yet realized they were falling. Its descent was not helpless. It was guided.
Raylan's options were simpler.
He gathered mana around his legs and tried to slow his fall by pressing against the crumbling sides of the newly formed chasm, but the earth here was unstable. His hands slid, fingers scraping furrows in the dirt.
The ground rose up.
He hit hard, rolling by instinct to bleed off the impact. Pain jolted through the shoulder and ribs. Air fled his lungs in a sharp exhale.
He skidded to a stop on rough stone.
Dust rained from above, followed by heavier chunks of debris that shattered around him.
He pushed himself to his feet.
He had fallen into a broad passage—too structured to be a natural cave. Carved stone walls rose on either side, etched with faded lines that might once have been patterns.
A labyrinth.
The Rank 4 demon landed a short distance away, its fall ending in an almost delicate touchdown. Its feet hardly cracked the stone.
It straightened slowly, eyes never leaving Raylan.
"Alone," it said.
Its voice carried no breath, just sound vibrating through mana.
Raylan lifted his sword.
He did not answer. The sword's tip pointed toward the demon, steady despite the lingering ache in his arm.
Chaos Energy still coiled around his core from earlier, restless.
Above, the sounds of the surface battle were muted now, distant thuds and echoes reaching them like noises through thick walls.
The demon spread its arms slightly, as if welcoming the space.
"Show me," it said. "How far the vessel has awakened."
It moved.
The demon crossed the distance between them in a blur, faster than most Rank 3s Raylan had faced. Its first strike was a sweeping blow of its forearm, bone ridges along it aimed at his neck.
Raylan's body reacted.
He stepped into the attack rather than away, minimizing the arc. His sword rose, meeting the forearm at an angle.
Chaos-laced mana surged down his blade.
The impact jolted his bones. The demon's strength was immense, but the enhanced edge bit into the carapace. A thin line appeared along the demon's arm where none should have formed.
The demon's eyes narrowed.
"Interesting," it said.
Its next attack was a flurry—short, brutal blows aimed at joints and vital points, testing his defense. Raylan parried some, slipped past others by the width of a hair. Even so, a glancing strike caught his side once, sending pain lancing through his ribs.
He gritted his teeth, forcing his breathing to remain steady.
Too slow. Even with Chaos amplification, matching raw speed and power head-on would lead to attrition. And attrition favored the one whose body was built for this environment.
He needed something else.
The Chaos Energy buzzing at the edge of his perception surged again, as if reacting to his thoughts.
An innate memory, dragged up from somewhere deep in his blood, brushed against his mind.
A step.
Not a large leap, not a long-distance spell. Just a single, focused displacement. Space folding in a narrow arc rather than a broad jump.
Raylan moved.
One moment, he was in the demon's direct path. The next, he was a body-length to the side.
It was not true invisibility or speed. It was absence—his presence slipping out of one point and reasserting itself in another, the world taking a heartbeat to notice the change.
The demon's strike passed through where his head had been.
Its eyes flared.
Raylan's sword lashed out.
Chaos-wreathed steel cut into the exposed side of the demon's neck, not deep enough to decapitate, but enough to sever a portion of its armor and draw thick, smoking blood.
The demon staggered half a step, then straightened, hand rising to touch the wound.
"You borrow more than you understand," it said. "Tearing at rules with unshaped will."
Raylan did not understand.
He blinked again.
Short-range displacement—blink—tugged at his senses. It felt unstable, like stepping onto a bridge that might decide at any moment that it preferred to be a river.
He used it anyway.
The demon attacked with renewed intensity now, no longer testing. Each missed strike shattered stone. Its claws gouged long furrows in the floor. Its mana flared brighter, the air around it thickening with oppressive heat.
It opened its mouth and spewed dark flames in every direction.
Raylan abandoned the idea of blocking fully.
He shifted, blinked, and pivoted. Each displacement cost him Chaos Energy and left a faint ache along his bones. Each one, however, turned fatal blows into near-misses and near-misses into clean escapes.
In the narrow window that followed each dodge, his sword struck.
Cuts accumulated.
Superficial wounds at first—lines across limbs, shallow stabs into joints—but Chaos Energy ate at them from within. The demon's regenerative capabilities, whatever they were, did not have time to fully engage before the next injury layered on top.
Then he realized something.
The demon's blood, splattering across stone and air, was releasing traces of Chaos Energy as well. The very residue it left behind carried the same jagged signature that now coiled in his own core.
Breathing quicker now, Raylan felt that core throb with strain. Chaos Energy was not gentle fuel. It scraped along his channels even as it empowered his strikes.
This is unsustainable in the long term, he thought. Fortunately, this is not meant to be a long-term engagement.
He timed his next blink for when the demon overcommitted.
It swung with both arms, claws laced with black fire, aiming to crush rather than slice. The blow would have reduced his torso to pulp if it landed.
Raylan vanished.
He reappeared behind the demon, already mid-swing.
His blade carved a deep line from the base of its skull, across its neck, and down between its shoulders. Chaos-laced mana surged with the strike, sinking into the wound.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the cut flared from within.
Cracks spiderwebbed through the demon's carapace, radiating out from the wound. The burning lines raced across its form, tracing its internal pathways. Its eyes widened—not with fear, but with a flicker of something like recognition.
"Ah," it whispered. "So that is—"
It exploded.
Not in a burst of fire, but in a violent, outward rush of shredded flesh and armor. The force threw Raylan backward. He hit the stone hard, sliding along the floor, ears ringing.
He forced himself up onto one knee.
The space where the demon had stood was now a crater of scorched stone and smoking fragments. No cohesive body remained. Only scattered remnants of demonic matter—and traces of Chaos Energy drifting like invisible smoke.
He involuntarily drew that energy in with his next breath.
His chest heaved. Sweat ran down his face, stinging small cuts he had not noticed receiving.
His core felt… altered.
Above, the distant rumble of the surface battle continued. Down here, however, the labyrinth remained quiet for the moment, the noise muffled and distant.
On an upper ledge, half-hidden in shadow, something watched.
The wooden doppelganger had not followed directly through the same collapse, but there were other paths in the labyrinth.
Now it crouched, wooden flesh mimicking the appearance of a student's cloak and limbs, rune-cores glowing softly beneath the surface.
It had watched Raylan fight.
It had watched Raylan absorb Chaos Energy, blink, and destroy a Rank 4 demon in a manner that even now made the demonic residue in the air shiver.
Perfect, it thought.
The moment it had been waiting for was here.
It shifted, preparing to descend.
"You do not seem to be human."
The voice came from behind.
The doppelganger turned its head.
Valen stood at the edge of the ledge, a short distance away, one hand resting lightly on the stone wall. Dust clung to his cloak from his own descent. His expression was as calm as ever, eyes half-lidded as if observing a mild curiosity rather than a construct poised over the protagonist.
His gaze took in the doppelganger's posture, the way its limbs tensed, the slight misalignment in how its hood sat on its shoulders.
"You chose a good vantage point," Valen said. "Close enough to watch, far enough to avoid stray blows."
He tilted his head slightly.
"You are patient and have good knowledge of the area," he added. "There is definitely an organization behind you."
The doppelganger's lips curved in a too-studied smile.
"Flattering," it said. "Most humans simply scream 'monster' and throw spells."
"That would be inefficient," Valen replied. "You have already gathered information. Killing you without asking anything first would be wasteful."
"Assuming you can kill me," the construct said mildly. "Or do you plan to bore me to death with analysis?"
Valen's eyes flicked once to the runes faintly pulsing beneath the creature's skin.
"Your posture gives you away," he said. "You are leaning forward. Ready to move, not to fight."
"Or perhaps I am simply eager," it countered.
"Eager things do not keep their weight on their back foot," Valen said. "You are planning escape routes, not attack angles."
The doppelganger chuckled softly.
"Very well," it said. "Since you insist on talking, what gave me away first?"
"Hmm... should I give the answer away?" Valen asked, rhetorically.
"You are sharp, Ashford."
Valen narrowed his eyes, just slightly.
"So you know my name," he said. "That narrows the list of possible handlers further."
The doppelganger's gaze gleamed.
"Oh, I know many things," it said. "Chaos Heirs. Chaos Crystals. Multi-dimensional gazes."
"I noticed," Valen said. "You were watching a lot many students. Why?"
"Curiosity," it answered. "And opportunity. Some are born to be harvested."
"And your conclusion?"
The construct smiled.
"Do you want to know?"
Valen's fingers brushed against the Soul Crystal beneath his cloak. Iris stirred at the edge of his thoughts, attention sharpening.
"Master," she murmured. "Its mana fluctuations are very stable. Like someone very old."
"Expected," Valen replied. "We will peel away what we can and mark the rest."
Aloud, he said, "Now, I believe I ought to stop you."
"Bold," the doppelganger said.
The doppelganger reacted instantly.
Its body flowed backward, wooden flesh rippling as roots burst from the stone beneath its feet, wrapping around its legs and flinging it away from the ledge's edge. At the same time, its right arm elongated, bark and bone twisting into a spear-like limb that stabbed toward Valen's chest.
Valen had already raised his hand.
A layered shield of compressed air snapped into existence in front of him, translucent and thin. The spear-limb struck it, diverting just enough that it scraped past his shoulder rather than piercing his heart.
Splinters of wood spun through the air.
Valen stepped in rather than stepping back.
He slammed his palm into the ground.
Spikes of stone erupted from the ledge floor, thrusting upward toward the doppelganger's twisting body. The construct twisted further, joints bending beyond human limits. Two spikes grazed its side, tearing chunks of flesh-like wood away, but none impaled it.
"Close," the doppelganger said, voice tight with controlled strain.
Its expression did not match its words. Its eyes were bright, almost delighted.
"Analysis confirmed," it added. "You are more dangerous up close than I anticipated."
"You are more flexible than most targets," Valen said.
Roots burst from the wall behind the construct, forming a lattice it could retreat along. They writhed like living serpents, piercing stone, opening pathways deeper into the labyrinth.
It stepped back onto them.
Valen's eyes narrowed.
He extended his hand, fingertips brushing the stone beneath the receding roots.
"Trying to chase me through the roots will not work," the doppelganger said. "This network covers half the valley. Your mind would break before you mapped a tenth of—"
Valen formed a series of runes.
Lines of faint light spread from his touch, vanishing into the stone and the root. They branched and branched again, tracing the paths the root network had carved into the labyrinth.
A search pattern.
It should have overwhelmed him.
Even a basic wide-area tracing spell generated streams of geometric data—intersections, angles, distances— enough to bury an ordinary mage's senses in tangled information.
Valen's expression did not change.
Behind his calm eyes, Iris moved.
"Input received," she said. "Converting spatial branches to a weighted graph. Initiating layered search. You may ignore the noise, Master. I will chew through it."
The flood of data that should have crashed down on his mind instead hit a barrier—then funneled sideways, drawn into the vast processing capacity of Iris.
"Left branches are dead ends," Iris reported. "The primary escape path is descending, angling toward the central node of the labyrinth. It is following a designed route, not improvising."
"Your roots are showing," Valen said mildly with a smirk.
The doppelganger paused halfway along the receding root path, head tilting.
"It should not be possible for you to track this cleanly," it said. "You are not a pure Diviner. And your rank is… low."
"Naive," Valen said.
The doppelganger's wooden face shifted, an approximation of a grin.
"Is that so?" it said. "Try to keep up."
It sank into the roots.
The wood swallowed it in an instant, its body dissolving into strands of bark and sap that vanished along the twisting network. The roots themselves pulled back, retracting into the stone and leaving behind only faint grooves.
Valen straightened slowly.
Light patterns continued to flicker at the edge of his perception—lines representing possible paths, nodes, branch points. Iris's presence glowed brighter in his mind, threads of attention stretching in multiple directions at once.
"I can maintain partial trace," she said. "But the network is complex, and it is actively obfuscating. Some branches are decoys. It is trying to drown us in false routes."
"Can you differentiate?"
"Given time," Iris answered. "It is like unweaving a tapestry while someone is still weaving new threads. But we have one advantage."
"Being?"
"It thinks in roots", she said. "We think in graphs."
Valen's lips quirked faintly.
"Continue tracking," he said. "Mark any route that approaches the surface."
"Understood, Master."
He glanced down into the cavern where Raylan still knelt amid the wreckage.
Raylan slowly pushed himself to his feet.
The lingering Chaos Energy in the air still brushed against his skin, a constant, low-grade hum that made his teeth itch. His core drank it in in small threads, even when he did not deliberately draw.
He did not try to push more.
He had just proved that the power would answer when he called. That was enough for now.
He looked around.
The labyrinth passage stretched in both directions, vanishing into shadow. The walls bore patterns half-eroded by time—a language he could not read, symbols worn down by centuries of pressure.
The air felt old.
Above, the distant rumble of battle had faded even further. Stone and earth lay between him and the surface. Between him and his allies.
He could stay. He could search for other paths, explore the labyrinth.
Or he could leave, before whatever else dwelled down here noticed fresh prey.
Raylan tightened his grip on his sword.
"This is not my dungeon yet," he muttered under his breath.
He turned toward the direction where the collapsed ground seemed closest—the shaft through which he had fallen. Loose debris still settled there, dust drifting like thin mist.
He gathered mana into his legs, not Chaos this time, just his own refined reserves. He dashed forward, using footholds in the rough stone, leaping from shattered outcrop to jutting slab.
Once, his foot slipped.
He caught himself, fingers biting into a crack in the wall.
The memory of blinking tugged at him.
It would be simple to use it now—to fold space and reappear halfway up, then again, and again, until he reached the surface.
He did not.
Blink had answered under mortal threat when his blood remembered for him. Down here, alone and not yet dying, his control was still uncertain. A misstep with that technique could end with him embedded in stone.
He climbed.
Hand over hand, foot over foot, he forced his way upward through the fracture. Dust filled his throat. Stone scraped his palms raw.
Eventually, light appeared above—a thin grey glow, broken by moving shapes.
The sounds of battle returned, louder now.
Shouts. Roars. The heavy tread of forest spirits. The shriek of demons.
Raylan dragged himself over the edge of the fractured ground and rolled onto solid earth.
The sky was still cracked.
The eye still watched.
The battlefield had shifted while he was below. Forest spirits strode across blood-slick grass. Adventurers and Academy students fought in tight clusters. Demons and Blights lay strewn in pieces.
No one had noticed his reemergence yet.
Good.
He took a slow breath, forcing his heartbeat back under control.
Then he pushed himself upright and moved to rejoin the battle—not as a hunted target in a maze, but as one more blade in the storm.