The Adventurer's Guild License was a piece of cheap parchment that felt absurdly flimsy in my hand. Kael – F-Rank Adventurer. The script was generic, the wax seal unremarkable. A far cry from the cosmic ledgers I once maintained to track the fall of civilizations.
I stood before the Quest Board, a physical slab of corkwood plastered with handwritten notes. The cacophony around me was a study in mortal desperation.
"—need two more for a wolf-pelt run, share profits sixty-forty—"
"—anyone with Herbalism above Level 3, urgent gather quest—"
"—guards say the southern bridge is haunted again, but I think it's just goblins playing tricks—"
My Analysis Mode passively processed it all, categorizing threats, noting lies in body language, calculating probable success rates based on party composition. It was tedious, but data was data.
<< RECOMMENDED QUEST FILTER APPLIED >>
Criteria: Low Conflict, Low Visibility, Minimal Party Dependency.
Result Found: [Sewer Rat Infestation – Old Quarter]
The note was simple: "Rats in the service tunnels under the Old Quarter have grown large and aggressive. Clear the infestation. Proof: 10 rat-tails per person. Reward: 5 coppers per tail, plus 1 silver bonus for colony source elimination. Guild Points: 5. Risk Assessment: Minimal (F-Rank)."
"Perfect," I murmured. Dark, confined, unsupervised. An ideal environment to test my new [Fault Sight] without observation.
"Taking the rat job?" Lira appeared at my shoulder, her own new license clutched proudly. "Ugh, sewers. Bran is trying to form a party for the wolf pelts. Better money."
"Money is a secondary concern. Environmental control is primary," I stated, peeling the quest note from the board.
She blinked. "You mean… you want to go into the smelly tunnels?"
"I want to go where people do not."
The quest clerk, a different, even more exhausted-looking woman, barely glanced at the paper. "Rat job, huh? Standard kill-quest. Report to the maintenance hatch behind the tanner's on Ash Lane. Here's your sewer map." She slid a crude, waxed parchment across the counter. "Don't get lost. And don't drink the water."
The entrance to the underworld was a rusted iron grate set into a cobblestone alley. The stench that wafted up was complex—decaying organic matter, chemical runoff from the tanneries, stale water, and something else… faintly metallic.
Fault Sight Activated.
My vision shifted. The mundane grate now glowed with stress points at its hinges. The stone around it showed hairline cracks where groundwater had seeped. But deeper, from the darkness below, I saw something else: faint, pulsing lines of corrupted mana, seeping through the stone like slow, toxic veins. This wasn't just a rat problem.
"Discrepancy detected," I muttered, unlocking the grate with the key provided. It opened with a scream of rust.
The tunnels were exactly as unpleasant as predicted. Knee-deep, viscous water flowed sluggishly. The air was thick and humid. Glow-moss clung to the brick arches, providing a sickly green illumination. The sounds were a damp orchestra of drips, scurries, and distant, echoing groans.
I proceeded, my cheap boots sucking in the muck. [Fault Sight] turned the tunnel into a blueprint of decay. I could see which bricks were load-bearing and which were mere filler. I could trace the paths of old, collapsed pipes. And I could see the rat trails—not as footprints, but as disturbances in the ambient mana, little frenetic scrambles of life-force.
The first rat appeared around a corner. It was, indeed, large—the size of a small dog. Its eyes were a furious red, and its teeth gleamed with a unnatural sharpness in the gloom.
<< Target: Plague-Touched Sewer Rat >>
Level: 3
Status: Mutated (Source: Corrupted Mana Leak)
Flaws: Overdeveloped incisors create imbalance in skull structure. Agility reduced by 20% during lateral movement.
It charged with a hiss. A simple, linear attack. My body's reflexes were slow, but my mind was not. I didn't meet the charge. I sidestepped, letting its momentum carry it past me, and as it scrambled to turn, I brought my sword down not on its body, but on a specific, glowing weak point my Fault Sight highlighted—a slight malformation in its spine, just behind the skull.
The blade bit deep with a wet crunch. The rat collapsed, twitching. Efficient. Minimal energy expenditure.
I collected the tail, my mind already analyzing the data. Plague-Touched. Corrupted Mana Leak. This suggested an environmental hazard, not simple overpopulation. The quest was misclassified. A flicker of my old administrative irritation surfaced. Inefficient. A leak of this nature could destabilize the foundational mana of the entire district if left unchecked.
I followed the corrupted mana trails, a ghost in the green-lit dark, dispatching six more rats with the same clinical precision. Each kill was a data point. Their mutations were increasing the deeper I went.
Then the tunnel opened into a wider chamber—an old, forgotten cistern. The water here was eerily still. The corrupted mana lines converged at the center of the room, not from above, but from below. They snaked down into a pile of collapsed rubble and sludge.
And there, half-buried in the muck, was a stone.
Not just any stone.
It was a dark, purplish shale, veined with gold. A stone that resonated with a frequency I hadn't felt in seventeen years of this new life. A harmonic echo of my own past power.
My breath hitched. A Dungeon Core Fragment. A shattered piece of a dungeon's heart. Not one of mine—the energy signature was wrong, more bestial, less structured—but from a dungeon. A dead one. Its lingering, corrupted emissions were mutating the local fauna.
This was a significant anomaly. Core Fragments were not supposed to exist on the mortal plane. They were supposed to dissolve upon a dungeon's death, their mana returning to the ley lines. For one to be here, physically present, leaking…
I approached, my Analysis Mode going into overdrive.
<< Target: Dungeon Core Fragment (Corrupted – Beast-Type) >>
Origin: Unknown. Estimated Dungeon Tier: C.
Status: Dormant but leaking. Corruption spreading at 0.3 meters per lunar cycle.
Containment Protocol: Standard sanctification or high-yield magical disintegration required.
As I reached for it, a new, far more urgent warning flashed.
<< WARNING: PROXIMITY ALERT >>
High-Tier Entity Signatures Detected.
Distance: 30 meters and closing.
Signature 1: [Holy] – Paladin/Inquisitor Class.
Signature 2: [Arcane] – High Sorcerer/Observer Class.
Analysis: Signatures match 66.7% of entities that detected Final Boss resonance during Guild Assessment.
Conclusion: You have been tracked.
They had found me. And they were not in the sewers by coincidence.
I had seconds. My eyes swept the cistern. Fault Sight highlighted everything. The crumbling archway I'd entered through. A rusted, broken pipe spewing water high on the north wall. The unstable pile of rubble around the Core Fragment.
A plan, cold and precise, formed in milliseconds. Survival was not about overpowering a threat you couldn't possibly match. It was about controlling the narrative and the environment.
I sheathed my sword, grabbed the Core Fragment—it was cold and hummed unpleasantly in my grip—and scrambled not for the exit, but for the shadows behind the flowing pipe. I shoved the fragment into a gap in the bricks, covering it with loose sediment.
Then, I took my own sword and, aiming carefully at a Fault Sight highlight on the pile of rubble above the fragment's original location, I threw it like a javelin.
The iron shortsword, with its flawed microstructure, shattered on impact. But the force was enough. A cascade of bricks and sludge tumbled down, obscuring the spot entirely.
I rolled into the stagnant water just as two figures descended into the cistern—not from the tunnel, but from a hole they had melted through the ceiling. Stone dripped like wet candle wax.
The first landed with a soft, metallic chime. A woman in silver-and-white plate armor that gleamed with its own light, banishing the sewer gloom. A holy symbol of a sun cradled in a blade hung from her neck. Her face was all sharp angles and severe focus. Seris, Knight-Inquisitor of the Dawn. The tag above her head was bright gold.
The second floated down, robes of deep blue settling around him. An older man with a long grey beard, eyes glowing with soft arcane light. He held a staff of polished whitewood. Arion, Mage of the Azure Scroll. His tag was a cool, intellectual blue.
"The resonance spiked here, then faded," Seris stated, her voice echoing in the chamber. Her hand rested on the hilt of a longsword that radiated pure, destructive sanctity.
Arion's staff glowed as he swept it around. "A conflict occurred. Residual life-force signatures of… mutated rodents. And one human. Faint. Weak." His eyes narrowed. "But the other signature… the anomaly… it's buried." He pointed his staff directly at the pile of rubble I'd just created.
My body, submerged in the foul water, was perfectly still. My heartbeat, that traitorously loud biological function, sounded like a drum in my ears. I lowered my Vital Sign Output using an old core-admin technique, forcing a state of near-hibernation.
Seris approached the rubble. With effortless strength, she began clearing stones. "There is something here. A power… old and tainted. Not demonic. Not undead. Something… architectural."
"A dungeon relic," Arion breathed, a mix of academic hunger and deep concern in his voice. "In a city sewer. This is a catastrophic containment failure."
"The human must have found it. Triggered it." Seris pulled the last stone away. She stared at the empty, oozing hole. "It's gone."
Arion joined her, scanning. "No. The human took it. The resonance trail is muddied by the collapse and the water, but it leads…" He turned slowly, his arcane gaze sweeping past my hiding spot once, twice… and then locking onto the broken pipe.
He took a step toward me.
This was the calculated risk. Would they see a terrified F-Rank adventurer hiding? Or would they see a piece of the environment?
"The conduit is broken," Arion said, studying the pipe. "The leak may have flowed that way, carried by the water. The human was likely just a vector, now dead or fleeing mindlessly through the tunnels, contaminated."
Seris scowled. "We must find the fragment. A rogue core piece could seed a new dungeon under the city. Or worse, be used as a focus for…"
They began discussing protocols, containment grids, city-wide scans. They were no longer hunters with a specific target; they were crisis managers with a city-sized problem. I had successfully reframed the incident from "anomalous person to capture" to "hazardous material to contain."
After five agonizing minutes, they melted back through the ceiling, already issuing magical commands to unseen subordinates.
I waited another ten minutes in the silent, filthy water before moving.
I emerged, dripping, and retrieved the Core Fragment from its hiding place. It pulsed faintly, as if in recognition. A broken piece of a broken world. Like me.
<< NEW QUEST LOGGED (HIDDEN) >>
Objective: Secure the Corrupted Dungeon Core Fragment.
Risk: Extreme (Pursuit by High-Tier Entities)
Reward: ??? (Potential Legacy System Access)
Failure: Death or Eternal Containment.
I looked at the fragment, then up at the hole they'd left behind. A cold, analytical smile touched my lips—a ghost of Zarathos's expression.
They were looking for a dangerous object and a contaminated fool.
They were not looking for the fool who understood the object. Who saw its flaws, its purpose, and its potential. Who had once built realities out of such things.
I slipped the fragment into my pack, next to the rat tails.
The game board had just gotten more complex. And for the first time since my rebirth, I felt a flicker of something akin to… engagement.