Corvis Eralith
With Olfred, things moved with a precision that bordered on the surreal.
His summoned golems—mere shadows of what I knew he could create, their forms crude and limited, clearly holding back despite a display of strength unlike anything I had witnessed in this world—marched at the vanguard like living battering rams.
Each swing of their stone fists sent snarlers flying in explosions of broken bone and black blood. The creatures came in waves, a tide of grey fur and gleaming tusks that should have overwhelmed us, should have buried us under sheer weight of numbers.
Instead, they died.
The Twin Horns worked in that seamless unison I had only read about in the novel and had only imagined when picturing what true adventuring parties must look like.
Helen's bow sang with each release, arrows finding eyes and throats with mechanical precision. Jasmine's wind slashes carved through the horde from her position at the flank, her short swords extensions of her will rather than mere weapons.
Adam's spear thrust through gaps in the golem formation with the kind of timing that spoke of years spent trusting others to cover what he could not.
And behind them, Angela and Durden wove their magics—wind to redirect, earth to shield—creating pockets of safety within the maelstrom.
I should have felt safe. I should have felt that with power like this surrounding me, nothing could touch me.
But I had already died once in this place. Safety was a lie I could no longer afford to believe.
A scream cut through the chaos—not the shriek of a snarler, not the cry of a Phoenix Wyrm, but something far more human.
A man, his voice raw with terror and exertion, burst from a side tunnel with a pack of snarlers snapping at his heels. His face was a mask of dust and blood, his legs pumping with the desperate strength of those who know death breathes down their necks.
"Help!" The word was a knife through the cacophony.
Olfred moved.
I had seen him fight. I had watched him crush Sand Dwellers in the desert tunnels, had witnessed his casual manipulation of stone and earth.
But this—this was something else entirely.
His expression, caught somewhere between annoyance at the interruption and the grim acceptance of unwilling duty, shifted as he launched himself over his own golems with the grace of an athlete clearing hurdles.
His hand closed around the miner's tunic, and with a motion that seemed almost gentle despite its speed, he threw the man backward. Durden, despite his shock, caught the flying body with reflexes that spoke of years in the field. The miner landed in his arms with a startled grunt, alive, breathing, saved.
"Does this seem like the way to help people to you, Malaisson?" Adam's voice carried over the sounds of battle, his spear finding another snarler's throat even as he shot Olfred a sidelong glance.
Helen's arrow followed a heartbeat later, punching through the beast's left eye and emerging from the other side in a spray of gore.
Olfred said nothing. His golems continued their advance, their stone feet crushing the fallen as they marched.
"Were there other people with you?" I asked the miner, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.
Angela had already begun tending his wounds—rough field medicine, the kind you learn when you don't have a dedicated healer in your party.
The Twin Horns had adapted to Alice Leywin's absence, but I could see the gap her magic left in their efficiency.
The miner blinked at me. Twice. The sight of a child in this hell clearly short-circuited his already overloaded mind. I bit the inside of my lip hard enough to taste copper, forcing myself to meet his gaze without flinching.
Then he shook his head, looking past me to the Twin Horns with desperate, pleading eyes. "There are many more in these tunnels! You need to help them! Please—they're trapped—"
Of course there are. The thought was cold, clinical, a survival mechanism wrapping itself in cynicism to protect against the weight of so many lives. If that Phoenix Wyrm—the one that had killed me—decided to return, everyone in these tunnels who wasn't Olfred or a seasoned adventurer would die.
Another shockwave hit.
The fire mana crystals embedded in the walls flared crimson, their light pulsing with angry intensity. Around us, the true nature of this place began to emerge—ancient Djinn stone pushing through dirt and rubble like corpses clawing free of shallow graves.
"The Reset i—"
The world revolted again.
An explosion like a volcano's birth convulsed the dungeon with force that dwarfed every shockwave before it. The fire crystals detonated all at once. A wall of flame roared toward us, hungry and absolute, promising annihilation in shades of white and gold.
Olfred's hand rose and stone answered.
Walls of solid rock erupted from the ground, sealing the corridor ahead with centimeters to spare. The inferno slammed against them, and I felt the heat even through meters of earth—felt my skin prickle, my eyes dry, my lungs seize with air that had suddenly become a weapon.
Then the moment passed, and we were alive.
If not for Olfred, I would have died. Again.
"That wasn't the Reset." Durden's voice was the first to break the ringing silence. My ears screamed with feedback, the aftermath of that blast a constant, piercing whine. "Was it?"
"It wasn't." Helen's response was flat, certain. "It couldn't be."
"Those were explosives!" The miner's voice cracked with hysteria. "Someone set off explosives! We'll be buried alive! We'll all be buried—"
"Bring the miner back." Olfred's command cut through the panic like a blade. He didn't look at any of them, his gaze fixed on the sealed corridor ahead. "I continue with the kid."
The silence that followed was its own kind of explosion.
"You are completely mad, Malaisson." Adam's voice dripped with disbelief and something that might have been respect, or might have been the early stages of genuine concern for a man's sanity.
"I am better off without you hindering my way." The words were stone—hard, absolute, immovable. "Now do as I said."
Another shockwave. The walls groaned.
"You want to bring a kid down there? Alone?!" Angela's snarl was pure maternal fury, the kind that transcends logic and reason and becomes something primal.
Another shockwave. Closer now. More violent.
I stepped toward Olfred. I didn't know his full plan—couldn't read the calculations behind those old, slightly eyes—but I understood this much: he was committed.
Whatever exact directive Rahdeas had given him, whatever obligation bound him to this madness, he intended to see it through.
And somehow, impossibly, he was willing to let me see it through with him.
The snarlers' roars cut off the argument before it could escalate.
Behind us, where the tunnel remained unsealed, a fresh wave poured forth—eyes gleaming in the darkness, tusks wet with anticipation, hunger given form and fangs.
I reacted on instinct. Earth magic surged through me, desperate and uncontrolled. The dust and pebbles that filled the air—debris from the constant shocks, the Reset's chaos—answered my call, merging into rough projectiles that I hurled toward the oncoming tide.
It wasn't enough. It was nowhere near enough. My stones scattered, my aim was wild, my timing an embarrassment to anyone who had ever called themselves a mage.
The Twin Horns, however, were not hindered by my inadequacy.
Angela and Jasmine moved in perfect sync, their wind magic weaving together into a barrier that slowed the snarlers' charge, buying precious seconds. Helen's arrows sang their deadly song. Durden's earth magic rose in jagged spears that impaled the beasts from below. Adam's spear was a blur of motion, each thrust a death sentence.
They made it look easy. They made it look like they could do this forever.
Another shockwave. The tunnel wall beside us fractured like a sand castle meeting the tide, great chunks of stone falling away to reveal—
To reveal more.
Djinn architecture. A tall, arched doorway, its frame gleaming with that impossible metallic sheen I had seen in the novel's descriptions, the kind of material that shouldn't exist in nature but clearly did in the hands of Ancient Mages.
The door itself—that classic barrier that in other dungeons would seal a mana beast's den—stood wide open, revealing a chamber beyond shaped like a vast crescent, its walls curving away into shadow.
Before anyone could react, before anyone could process what we were seeing—
Another shockwave. The ceiling above the newly revealed chamber cracked. Light poured through—not the orange glow of fire crystals, not the pale illumination of magical constructs, but sunlight.
Golden, impossible, skylight, piercing stone that had been sealed for millennia.
"The outside?" Jasmine's confusion was audible, a rare crack in her stoic armor.
"Is the Reset making the dungeon... rise from the ground?" Durden's rhetorical question hung in the air, too absurd to answer, too real to dismiss.
Olfred stepped through the doorway. "That means we can exit from there." His voice was calm, measured, utterly at odds with the chaos surrounding us. I felt mana gather around him—vast, deep, the kind of power that could reshape mountains.
And I recognized this moment.
This was too similar. Too close. The observatory had risen from stone. The sun had poured in. And then—
"Damien! Don't use magic!" The words tore from me with a force I didn't know I possessed.
Olfred stopped. The mana that had been gathering, the power that had been building toward some monumental release, simply ceased. He looked at me, and in that look was a question I had no time to answer.
"Stand down!" I shouted.
The ceiling crumbled. Faster now, more violently. And from somewhere above, from the space where sky was replacing stone, a sound descended.
The screech.
I knew it. I had died to it. Volcanic roar and eagle scream, merged into a single note of pure, apocalyptic fury. The sound that had preceded the beak, the twist, the end.
Sunlight flooded the chamber, blinding and golden, and then—then it was blotted out.
Wings. Vast and majestic, wreathed in flames that cast shifting shadows across the ancient walls. The Phoenix Wyrm descended like a falling star given flesh and purpose, its eyes fixed on me.
But this time, Olfred was here.
The ceiling gave way. Thousands of kilograms of rock and dirt plunged toward us, a burial before the Wyrm could even reach us. Olfred's right fist rose, and the falling debris shattered—not blocked, not diverted, but annihilated, reduced to harmless powder that rained around us like gray snow.
Then the S-Class mana beast struck.
Not at Olfred. At me.
Its talon—a razor of diamond-hard bone, strengthened by mana that dwarfed anything I had ever sensed—descended, but Olfred intercepted.
The collision produced a shockwave that dwarfed every tremor and every reset-induced convulsion that had come before.
I was thrown backward, my small body slamming into something solid—Adam, I realized distantly, his own form stumbling from the impact. The Twin Horns scattered like leaves before a hurricane, their formation shattered by forces far beyond their ability to counter.
From the cloud of dust and cinders that now filled the chamber, through the haze of debris and the glare of Wyrm-fire, a figure emerged.
Olfred clad in his iconic Hell's Armor.
I had read about this. In the novel, in those pages that had become my bible and my curse, I had seen descriptions of what a Lance could do when they stopped holding back. But words on a page were shadows, echoes, lies compared to the reality before me.
The armor that covered Olfred's body was grown like an extra skin. Stone blacker than obsidian, darker than the space between stars, yet gleaming at its joints and edges with light the color of molten lava.
The slits where his eyes should be glowed with the same infernal fire, and when he moved, the air itself seemed to bend around him.
His golems, those crude constructs he had been using as shields, transformed. They ran toward the Phoenix Wyrm not as defenders but as hunters, their forms shifting, growing, adapting to the task of pinning those massive wings.
I stood frozen.
I had read about battles like this. I had devoured descriptions of clashes between adventurers and S-class beasts, had imagined them in the safety of my room in Zestier, had used them as mental rehearsal for the conflicts to come. But seeing it—
There are no words. No combination of syllables, no arrangement of adjectives, no carefully constructed sentences that can convey what it feels like to witness a white-core Lance release their restraints.
The Beginning After The End lied. It had to. Because nothing on paper could prepare you for the weight of it, the pressure in the air, the way reality itself seemed to hold its breath.
...and Olfred was "just" a Lance.
"Finn!" Durden's hand closed around my arm, yanking me backward.
Fire erupted from the clash—Olfred and the Phoenix Wyrm, locked in combat that was already reshaping the chamber. Golems shattered into a million fragments, their remains scattering like shrapnel.
How strong was that creature? To fight a Lance—to match a Lance—even momentarily?
"We need to help Malaisson!" Adam's shout was pure instinct, the reaction of a man who had spent his life fighting alongside his comrades.
Helen's response was ice. "And do what? He was right. We would only hinder him."
The words were cold, clinical, true. And they burned.
"We need to get out of here before this dungeon becomes ashes!" Helen continued, already moving, already calculating the fastest route to the surface.
Shockwaves rained upon us—from the Reset, from the battle, from whatever fresh hell was unfolding elsewhere in this cursed place. The chamber shook. The walls cracked.
The sun poured through a dozen new gaps, each one a potential exit, each one a reminder that the sky was so close and so impossibly far.
And behind us, Olfred fought a god-like monster made of fire and scale.
I looked back once, just once.
Through the chaos, through the dust and flame and the constant, grinding roar of destruction, I saw him—Olfred Warend, foster son of Rahdeas, Lance of Darv, a dwarf who had chosen to walk into hell because a child asked him to.
The chamber that had revealed itself was no mere room—it was a theatre, vast and crescent-shaped, its tiers of stone seats rising into shadow, its stage a broad platform where countless Djinn had once performed... what?
Something else entirely, something the Indrath Clan had erased so thoroughly that even the resurrection of the structure couldn't restore its purpose.
From every opening, every doorway, every crack in the ancient stone, the snarlers came.
"Jasmine!" Adam's shout was raw, desperate, as three of the beasts lunged through the door we had been approaching.
Their claws missed Jasmine's face by less than an inch—I saw the wind of their passage stir her hair, saw her eyes widen with that split-second recognition of how close death had come.
The snarlers flooded the theatre mindlessly, their shrieks merging into a single, deafening wave of sound.
Most of them died before they reached us—caught in the inferno of Olfred and the Phoenix Wyrm's battle, their bodies incinerated mid-leap, reduced to ash that mixed with the dust of Djinn ruins.
But others survived. Others pushed through, their hunger overriding every survival instinct, their single-minded fury driving them toward the only living things small enough to seem like prey.
Us.
I enhanced my body with mana—Pseudo-Mana Rotation flooding my body and keeping my core fueled—and sidestepped as a snarler's claws raked through the space where my face had been.
The air hummed with the proximity of death. I pushed earth beneath the beast's feet, a crude, desperate move that cost me more concentration than it should have. It stumbled. Durden's spike of rock found its chest a heartbeat later, and the snarler crumpled, its shriek cut short.
Helen's voice cut through the chaos—shouting orders, coordinating, trying to bring order to madness—but the snarlers' cacophony swallowed her words.
The battle between Olfred and the Phoenix Wyrm shook the very foundations of whatever this place had become, each impact sending shockwaves through stone that had slept for millennia.
The Reset added its own rhythm to the destruction, a constant, grinding pulse of change and renewal and violence.
Now I understood. Now I knew, with a clarity that burned, why the Lances in the war had never led troops directly despite their titles as generals.
This power—this scale—was not something that could be coordinated with lesser fighters. It was a force of nature, a hurricane given form, and trying to fight alongside it was like trying to hold formation in an avalanche.
The Phoenix Wyrm inhaled.
I felt it more than heard it—a sudden, terrible stillness in the air, a vacuum forming in front of that massive beak.
Then it released.
A cylinder of white-hot mana, so bright it left afterimages seared into my vision, erupted from the beast's throat and scoured the chamber. Stone vaporized. Air itself seemed to burn. The heat was a physical force, pressing against my skin, drying my eyes, making every breath a battle.
Another shockwave—Reset or Phoenix Wyrm or both, I couldn't tell anymore—convulsed the dungeon. The ground shifted beneath my feet, tilting, sliding. I reached for wind magic instinctively, a small gust to keep me upright, to stop me from tumbling into the maw of a snarler that had been closing on my position. The wind answered, barely enough, but enough.
My cover, I thought distantly, even as Jasmine's wind blade removed the snarler's head from its shoulders. I just used wind magic. If anyone noticed—
But there was no time for that fear. The Red Gorge was crumbling.
The Djinn structure, that ancient masterpiece of a murdered people, was finally, fully revealing itself. Meter after meter of mountain fell away as the dungeon rose—literally rose—from its stone grave.
Walls that hadn't seen sunlight in millennia emerged, their surfaces pristine, their lines impossibly clean. Tiers of seats, their purposes lost to time, climbed toward a sky that had been denied them since before the first human kingdom drew breath.
And the sun—that indifferent, eternal sun—continued its rise. As its rays climbed higher, they aligned with the theatre's architecture in a way that could not be coincidence.
Light poured through gaps in the structure, through openings that had been designed for this exact moment, creating patterns of gold and shadow that transformed the space into something almost sacred.
It reminded me of ancient Greece. Of theatres built into hillsides, where crowds had gathered to watch tragedies and comedies, to experience catharsis and wonder. The Djinn had built something similar here, once.
The thought was a wound, and it bled.
Then the earth split.
From the gut of the mountain, from the depths that still held secrets I would never know, they came. An entire flock of Phoenix Wyrms—not one, not two, but dozens—erupted into the light.
Their wings blotted the sun, their cries merged into a single, world-ending shriek that dwarfed every sound that had come before. They dove toward us like vultures descending on carrion, their eyes burning with ancient hunger, their talons extended, their maws opening to reveal the furnaces within.
The flock descended and the sky became fire and scale and the promise of annihilation.
A/N:
Sorry for the delay, but from now on I won't be uploading RE: Corvis Eralith during the weekends as those are the days when I can revise and finish most of the chapters.