Warring instincts fought within the Lady Verin as she sat ramrod straight in the common room of the cabin, idly casting off minor frost spells to further train her magic.

  On the one hand, her outing with the Lady Calilah had been a rousing success. Not that it had been pleasant, per se. The initial week of scouting out new regions alongside the princess had been a perpetual slog, hiking all over while getting constantly ribbed with Calilah’s signature brand of irksome mirth. Not that she minded all that much by now. Certainly, the roguish warrior kept things more lively than any of the nobles back home ever had.

  That had only been the start, however. The biome they’d settled on had been distasteful, to say the least, styled after an abandoned cemetery. As best she could tell, it was created with a rarer intent-altered composite of death and earth mana: Necro-golemancy, if she wasn’t mistaken. With every step, they were beset by zombies which shambled out from their graves. For a fleeting moment, she’d had flashbacks to her near-death experience in their first serious fight in the desert crypt, where similar undead had torn through her ice walls. Thankfully, she’d changed quite a bit since back then.

  Unlike standard undead, however, the zombies were covered with compacted dirt. If the earth had just provided them with some extra armor, that would have been one thing, but it also made it nearly impossible to put them down for good. Any flesh torn off and any bones broken would slowly get replaced with dirt and stone until each monster fully reconstituted itself. Even Calilah, with her overpowered mana-charged strikes, was unable to easily defeat them, essentially having to grind them into dust before receiving a kill notification.

  Which was, ultimately, why part of Verin was in a very good mood. To Calilah, the region was essentially unclearable. As best as Verin knew, Tess wouldn’t have had much better luck, either.

  To Verin though? Child’s play.

  Already slow and rigid from the onset, the standard undead barely made it a few steps into her Glacial Zone before freezing solid. For most of them, she didn’t even have to use her active class skills or spells, just letting the passive freezing effect take care of them.

  Of course, that still meant that Calilah had to go through each zombie and methodically grind them down, but that was a fairly trivial -- if time-consuming -- endeavor once they couldn’t fight back. A large portion of the region had thus been Verin sitting smugly within her Advancing Glacier as she watched Calilah do all the heavy lifting.

  If not quite graceful, the warrior seemed particularly fierce during those moments. It made for a good form study, in fact. While Verin wasn’t sure if any of the zombies deserved the honor of being placed within her sketchbook, if she ever found the time to start drawing again, perhaps she’d pen down a few action scenes of Cal chopping them to bits.

  Impossibly, the boss turned out to be even better suited for her toolkit, to the extent that she didn’t even feel bad that they’d challenged it without Tess. Rather than throwing some giant skeleton at them, or something equally garrish, the dungeon pitted them against the region’s Necro-golemancer, who threw an entire swarm of more powerful undead after them. When these, too, ended up freezing just as easily, the fight essentially ended before it truly began. Were she capable of feeling any shred of sympathy for the grotesque, soulless creatures, perhaps Verin would have pitied them.

  Alongside a good chunk from wrapping up a duo of class quests, the sizable amount of experience from so many kills had finally catapulted her to level 20, letting her pull ahead of Calilah to once again be the highest leveled in the group. The final icing on the cake was a Rare pendant which enhanced her frost effects on earthen or undead creatures, the first reward she’d been given by the dungeon that was better than Uncommon. After that, they’d scouted for a few more days before summoning Tal’Ket and heading back. They even managed to find some interesting regions to potentially check out next.

  It was, thus, slightly perturbing when they at last returned to find that the Lady Tess was still absent. Verin had been looking forward to gloati- recounting their exploits to her, and more than that, she could use a Tess-cooked meal after over two weeks of field rations.

  That minor annoyance slowly morphed into a more persistent, nagging worry as the days dragged on. As reliable as Tess was, when a full four days passed without any sign of their companion, Verin couldn’t help but voice her fears to Cal. Cornering her in the common room, Verin petitioned her to go check on the mountain cave they’d left her at.

  While not completely flippant, the princess largely brushed her off. “Eh, not saying it’s a good thing she’s taking so long, but it’s Tess. What kind of situation can you imagine where she’s in trouble, and we can help by checking up on her days after the fact? But sure, I can go tomorrow if you want me to.”

  If not quite the level of gravity I would wish from her, I suppose she does have a point. It was rather macabre to say so, but if Tess discovered some form of trap or monster she couldn’t handle, it was far more likely that she was dead than that she was stuck waiting for them for days. More than that, anything that could take on the gods-blessed Protagonist would almost assuredly do them in as well, especially given their lack of darksight.

  Verin berated herself for even having such dark thoughts to begin with. Tess was fine. Surely, she would come waltzing through the door at any-

  Abruptly, the door to the cabin slammed open. As if having waited for that exact moment, their previously erstwhile Protagonist at last returned home.

  “Lady Tess. I speak for both of us to say that I am heartened to see you returning safe and…” Verin trailed off as she realized her friend was repeatedly muttering something under her breath. More than that, she was in quite a state, wasn’t she? Having passed the first Charisma threshold, Tess should have been largely immune to dirt and grime latching onto her pores. In this case, though, her entire form appeared to be covered in a thin coating of gray dust. And were those a few flecks of stone matted into her hair?

  Any further observations were cut off as Tess walked up to her, grabbing Verin by the shoulders as she began to slowly shake her back and forth. At this range, Verin could finally hear what it was that she was mumbling.

  “... Initiate rank. Initiate rank. It’s gods-damned Initiate rank.”

  Bewildered, it took Verin a moment to even formulate a response. “Pardon, but what exactly is Initiate ranked?” She barely dared to consider such a thing, but had Tess somehow backslid in her mental healing?

  Tess only managed to confuse things all the more when she croaked out an answer: “Move Earth. It’s Initiate rank.”

  Her earth spell? That couldn’t be right, could it? “But Lady Tess, was that not one of the spells you received perhaps three weeks prior from the grand magus?” It was an Apprentice-level spell, too. It was hardly as easy to level up as a cantrip.

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  With a firm pat on the shoulder, Tess nodded. “Exactly. Exactly! Fucking cave-ins…” Seeming to fully scan the room for the first time since entering, Tess at last noted Cal sitting off to the side. “Hi Cal. Bye Cal. Bye Verin. Glad you’re both okay. Haven’t slept in four days. I’m going to bed.”

  Leaving them both behind -- and notably confused -- Tess then trudged over to her room.

  By the time the two of them checked on her to get some more answers, she was already out cold.

  When I eventually woke up, I was in a considerably better mood, if still a bit grumpy. Only belatedly realizing how disheveled I was, the first thing I did was take a quick bath, scrubbing off the visible signs of my recent time within the mountains.

  A time, which, quite frankly, I was doing my best not to linger on. Despite all my advantages, it turned out cave-ins weren’t that easy to deal with.

  True, Internal Breeze dealt with the air issue and Satiated Stomach kept me nourished, but to begin with, that was only true as long as I was awake. I hoped to eventually figure out a way to keep my favorite Arcane Choker variants running passively, as I’d been too afraid to let myself fall asleep in case I suffocated once my skill fell off.

  And that was only the first issue. The real pain was actually getting out. Pinned down and unable to use my limbs, I’d had to rely on Move Earth just to give myself the tiniest bit of wiggle room. From there, things got a bit easier once I could break rocks up and stash them in Arcane Storage, resummoning them to my sides and beneath me. With each rock I removed, however, new ones constantly fell in their place, often crashing into me and restarting the entire process.

  It had taken me days to make it back up to the top of the pit. To add insult to injury, if I ever wanted to grab all the incredible metals the Ore Muncher had been feasting upon, I’d probably have to return and clear out that entire pit, too.

  But it’s done. The region was cleared, and as much as I did want to play around with metal, I refused to even look at the mountains for the next few weeks.

  Thankfully, there was no need to. When I was finally up and about, the others caught me up on their own outing, which had seemingly gone much better than mine. It also sounded like they’d found a few new options for us to explore next, with one region in particular being directly on the path towards the next mana-collection site. It was an oddball, and they hadn’t figured out what kind of mana it had, but we could figure it out together.

  To that end, we only stuck around for as long as it took for Tal’Ket’s summoning disk to recharge. In the interim, I introduced the others to the oil I’d made, using it both as an accompaniment to crackers and as standard cooking oil. With salt, sugar, and oil all taken care of, I found there were fewer and fewer things I couldn’t make anymore. Milk, butter, and eggs were still high up on my list of desires, but otherwise, we were largely set.

  And so, after a few days of lazing about, and a few more of my standard training regimens, I was ready to head out once again. At our current rate of clearing new biomes, we’d be done with the dungeon in no time, and with any luck, the three of us would blaze through the next region just as quickly as we had the last two.

  “I’m going to be honest. I’m not really sure what I’m looking at.” After soaring over the wandering woods and one particularly creepy-looking graveyard, the three of us had landed just shy of the next region. The only issue was that it looked exceptionally… plain.

  The loamy graveyard dirt abruptly cut off directly ahead, shifting into a hard black floor of some unrecognizable material. It wasn’t quite dark enough to make me think there was actual darkness mana at play, and according to my mana sight, it was completely mundane too.

  I would have loved to use some context clues to figure out more about the floor, but sadly, there were none. As I gazed into the next region, I saw absolutely nothing.

  “Well, damn. I was kind of hoping it would be obvious to you. Like, maybe it was illusion mana and you’d just see straight through it.” Getting right up to the region’s border, Cal squinted hard as if that would somehow help her unravel the mystery.

  All I could do was shrug. “So? You said this one is directly in the direction we need to go in. Do we want to try it out, or do we go with more obvious regions and take a detour?” Anything unknown tended to set off alarm bells for me, but then again, one unknown region might be safer than having to traverse the two or three we’d need to clear if we wanted to skirt it.

  “I can at least scout it, I guess. That seems relatively safe, right?” Cal poked at the black ground with her sword, her words becoming more confident as nothing happened. “Apex Shroud should protect me from pretty much anything if I use it at full blast from the start. How about I dip in and see if anything happens?”

  After talking it through, even Verin agreed that the plan seemed reasonable. If anything was waiting within, it wouldn’t sense Cal in the first place, and if it did, she’d be entirely protected as long as she wrapped up in her skill. The number of vulnerabilities she had while fully in her Apex Shroud was vanishingly small. On top of that, Danger Sense wasn’t reacting whenever I approached the border, so I was hoping there was nothing to worry about.

  Thus settled, Cal dramatically waved us farewell as if going on some grand adventure. “All right, wish me luck! I’ll start with one step in, and then one step back out.” As per usual, she then went completely invisible, vanishing from sight.

  Verin and I waited for her triumphant return, expecting her to be back within a single second, if that.

  As one second turned to two, and two into three, however, the two of us shared a nervous glance. Exactly how long did it take to step forward and then step back?

  “Cal? If this is a prank, it’s a bad one. Are you there?” I activated Arcane Vision as if that would somehow help me see through her Legendary skill, obviously coming up blank.

  “Lady Tess, I’m left feeling rather uncertain as to how to proceed. Do you think she requires assistance? And if she does, do you think we’ll fare any better against whatever’s preventing her from coming back?”

  My mind raced through all the possibilities, trying to narrow down just what could have happened to her. Clearly, she hadn’t died, as her Apex Shroud would have dropped, rendering her visible. So what? Was it actually an illusion so powerful I couldn’t pierce it? Another variant of mental mana that had her standing there dazed while invisible? Maybe a light-mana region that played with optics? I had no idea.

  Even so, the answer felt clear.

  “I should go after her. If it is something dangerous, she might need the help, fast. And if it’s not, then it’ll be fine anyway.” I didn’t like feeling rushed, but for all I knew, every second might count. I was hoping we weren’t dealing with anything all that dangerous or fatal, but if we were, I wasn’t going to let Cal die from a bit of indecision.

  I expected Verin to urge me to reconsider, but to my surprise, she nodded.

  “Very well. Not ideal, but so be it. In that case, I would suggest we don’t get separated. I will be coming along.”

  Not wasting any time arguing, we only waited long enough for Verin to climb onto my back and activate her standard Advancing Glacier, giving her a layer of defense against anything unexpected. For my own part, I overloaded my armor as much as I could before stepping into the mysterious region just as Cal had.

  For a second, I thought nothing had happened. Everything before me looked just as it had before. Nothing attacked us. No notifications arrived, and nothing locked us in place.

  It was only when I turned about that I realized just how wrong I’d been.

  As I spun about expecting to see the graveyard behind me, I was instead greeted with the same expanse of featureless black once again.

  The way back had vanished.

  How? And why? I tried and failed to understand what I was seeing.

  Right as I began to panic, however, one familiar princess popped into existence at my side. I heaved a sigh of relief, only for Cal to drown me out in a cheery tone that didn’t at all match the circumstances.

  “Hey! So, I’m pretty sure I figured out what region we’re in!”

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