The miasma trail led northeast for forty kilometers before it turned into the mountains.
Owen had been flying high enough to stay above cloud cover, tracking the corruption through his Mana Sense the way a predator tracks a scent. Faint. Intermittent. But unmistakable — the same wrongness he had felt when Rogers's smoke bomb detonated at his feet, the same fingerprint of something that didn't belong in this world.
The dungeon gate was hidden in a canyon so narrow that human hunters would have had to enter single-file.
Owen spotted it from three hundred meters up. The blue-white shimmer of a stable portal, unmarked and unregistered, tucked between two rock faces like a secret kept by the mountain itself. No Hunter Association tent. No monitoring equipment. Just a bored-looking guard who was currently staring at his phone.
Owen folded his wings and dropped.
