Aliandra Ali gnced up from her book as Mato stirred and finally got up. “Good m,” she said.

  “Bleh,” he managed, rubbing his eyes.

  “The bear emerges from his hibernation,” she chirped.

  “Too early, Ali. Way too early.”

  She left him to stomp around auro her story. Ryn, she reflected, was a genius at finding the best books, and the tiny colle in their library had more than doubled in size already. By the time Ali was done reading, Mato was chopping up strawberries and walnuts to put on top of the oatmeal he had just made for breakfast.

  “What are you going to do today?” Ali asked, putting the books ba the shelf and joining him at the table.

  “There are still many farms that need my help, but Eliyen gave me a couple of cheap potions that increase my regeion, and that seems to make it go faster,” he said. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to check the trash my Kobolds collected st night and see if there’s anything I learn,” Ali said, wrinkling her brow as she mentally scrutinized her to-do list. “After that, I was thinking of reopening the passage down to the ruined city – the ohat the Town Watch blew up. That way, I reinforce my domain by eg it to the top through a third area.”

  “Sewer first?” Mato asked.

  “Yup.” That’s where her industriues had been dumping whatever they could y their talons on.

  “I’ll walk with you,” he said. Ali helped him up after breakfast and thewo of them headed out while she expihe details of her trash colle scheme.

  “So, you’re the town’s trash collector now?” Mato said, his eyes kling with amusement.

  “I guess so,” Ali answered, w if anyone would notice the town mysteriously ing itself ht. She was gd to have his pany – she’d spent most of yesterday hunting alone, and she was sure he was beginning to feel just as lonely as she was.

  It was right as they approached the shrine in the forest cavern that she heard a mournful moaning and saw some shambling figures shuffling around in the light of the ruched onto the stone.

  “Zombies!” Mato shouted, transf quickly.

  “Again?” Ali said. “Where the heck from this time?” It took only a moment for her to ect with her Kobolds at the far south end of the cavern but, aside from a few piled-up bones and corpses, the Grasping Roots traps were clear, and her minions still lived.

  Ali dropped herself to the ground a her slime and Kobolds off as she resummoned her barrier to protect herself. Using the remaining capacity, she fired off two barrier shards, slig into the shambling undead monsters, while her Kobold mage began to fire spears of bohat easily impaled rotting flesh.

  Mato smmed into them with a huge crash, sending several monsters flying, and it was all over in seds.

  Yroup has defeated Warrior – Zombie – level 2-7 x15.

  Oh. No real reason for panic. Ali eyed the scattered and mauled corpses littering the Grove. “They’re obviously from the blighted forest, but how did they get in?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mato said. “It’s a good thing they’re all low levels.”

  “Give me a moment,” Ali said, and then hopped onto her barrier with a Kobold aated high above the trees. Using the eyes of the Kobold, she surveyed her Forest Cavern, her brow furrowing at the sight, and then flew back down.

  “Find anything?”

  “They’re everywhere again,” Ali said, “but I ’t tell where they got in. Strange.”

  “I help you clear them,” Mato said, but his expression was flicted.

  “No, you have a itment to keep at the farms,” Ali said. “I hahis.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “Thanks, Ali,” Mato said, smiling at her. “Maybe try out your new bats?”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, summoning the barrier again and resuming the flight to the sewer. “Wolves cover a lot of ground too; I might make some to help with up.”

  Mulling over her pns for how to deal with the mess in the cavern, she deposited Mato on top of the giant trash pile that had formed ht at the bottom of the sewer grate and bade him good luck. As she had dohe day before, she worked her way down from the top, destrug everything her Kobolds had collected.

  Variant: Walnut added to Imprint: Wood.

  Variant: New Darian Silver added to Imprint: .

  She discarded several worthless imprints, including one for bread. For a town that was supposed to be struggling for food, it was surprising just how much of it she found irash pile.

  Just theopped, her blood running cold at the sight of a bed foot poking out of the pile. Gingerly, she destructed the trash around it, revealing precisely what she feared: a corpse.

  What the fuck?

  Her eyes wide the mangled remains. Something, or someone, had removed this body’s skeleton – with extreme force. The flesh had been torn apart as if something had reached in and simply ripped the bones out. Struggling to keep her breakfast down, she destructed the remains. This town is awful.

  There were no further surprises, and Ali’s stomach had settled by the time she disposed of the rest of the pile.

  “Ok, you two, e with me, we have work to do,” she said, direg her voice to the two hidden Kobues. Both of them appeared instantly and hopped onto her barrier with her Acolyte and Bone Mage, and she flew all the way back to the shrine before nding.

  “Go clear the zombies,” Ali anded as soon as she nded, awues vanished once more. Then she opened her Grimoire and began summoning monsters. She would have called her Forest Guardians to e up, but she hadn’t figured out how to get the behemoths up or down the library stairs. With Mato’s caution to keep strong minions nearby still fresh in her mind, Ali created a fresh Guardian instead.

  There’s so much ground to cover, she thought, studying the cavern. Then, she got to work. For her first choice, she summoned five Timber Wolves, and they of the much cheaper Starving Wolves. As she created eae, she sent them off into the cavern with instrus to hunt down the undead and protect her domain, but before long she noticed the wolves grouping up together. Each paed around the nucleus of a siimber Wolf with four or five of the smaller Starving Wolves.

  How does that work? They’re not even the same species. Ali studied them for a while, but finally cluded it was simply the wolves’ instincts to fight as a pack. Perhaps it’s because everything shares my mana? They feel like the same pack…

  Whatever the reason, the wolves worked well in their packs, so she let it go and began summoning bats. Ali started with several Giant Bats and then a whole flight of the smaller Cave Bats, sending them out into the forest to help with the up, and the her Grimoire away.

  Grimoire of Summoning has reached level 29.

  . Ok, now where did you all e from?

  She racked her brain for the answer, but no suddeions were forthing. If I ’t figure it out, I’ll just have to search, she decided, splitting her awareness into a few of the Timber Wolves and Giant Bats. I he practiyway. Sooner or ter, her minions would run into the gap in her defenses, all she o do was keep watch.

  Leaving the up of the zombies to her wolves and bats, she flew off to tackle the item on her checklist. Arriving at the northwestern area of the cavern, she set herself down by the giant rockfall that now blocked the passage to the ruined city gates. Someone had detonated something powerful io cause so much damage, but she had pnted her Living Bamboo Forest all the way to the edge and her domain already extended deep into the rock, clearly visible with Are Insight.

  She flexed her Domain Mastery skill, feeding it an enormous amount of mana, and then walked into the rockfall. All that shattered and broken rock flowed, reg from her path, withdrawing up into the walls and ceiling of the unnel she fed. With her Grimoire out, she augmented her domain skill with more robust stone variants, f arches from Aether-Fused Obsidian and lining the ceiling with solid granite.

  She stopped for a while, destrug rock to refill her mana pool and fill the ground with moss and mushrooms before she resumed her slow walk, b through the rockfall.

  Half an hour into her work, her tunnel broke through a jagged opening in the side wall. In an instant, the tunnel filled with low moaning as a thick press of zombies and skeletons spilled out of the dark crack.

  Shit! The moment she saw the undead, she switched pces with her Kobue and shot out of the tunnel on a hastily summoned barrier disk, heart thumping rapidly. That’s where they’re ing from!

  had surmised that the cave system his passage had somehow ected with the northern farms, resulting in the Kobold iions they had to quell back when they had triggered the dungeon-break. Ali had assumed the rockfall had blocked them – but evidently not all.

  “Help!” she called, summoning all her nearby moo herself as the rogue backed out of the tunnel, overwhelmed by the sheer number of zombies spilling through. As the tremor of her Forest Guardian rushing toward her shook the ground under her feet, Ali scrambled to summon barriers to bloe of them.

  Her Bone Mage unleashed its Bone Spears into the crush of undead flesh, filling her nostrils with the sulfurous odor of burning fme, as the first Timber Wolf arrived, howling for allies.

  Wait… fme? She g her Kobold mage, doubting herself for a sed. But the steady stream of Bone Spears was better thaify. I don’t have a Fire Mage…

  She she air but caught nothing. No, it’s not me. She g her Timber Wolf and suddenly uood; she was still splitting her awareness into the wolf, borrowing its senses – and the wolf, with its vastly more sensitive olfactory senses, could smell fire.

  She slipped her awareness into her Luminous Slime, but it couldn’t sense anything unusual using its senses. Puzzled, she checked with the wolf once again, but the acrid odor persisted, overriding even the foul stench of the press of zombie flesh.

  On a hunch, she sed to a swooping Giant Bat and activated its echolocation.

  A dark shape sprang into her mind, h about fifteeers behind and above her, entirely invisible to all her other senses.

  Someone is here! And not just floating about either; it was casting a spell that was somehow entirely invisible to her mana sight. The rapid-fire clicks of the bat picked out the shape of the person clearly. H above their outstretched hand was a diffuse ball that had to be magic – a creation of much lower density that appeared tenuous and blurry to the senses of the bat.

  But after so many times of using the spell, even with the unfamiliar perception mode of echolocation, she reized the Fireball just by the size and shape, and how it twisted, roiling above the outstretched hand. And the stench of fire in the nostrils of her Timber Wolf.

  Her heart pounded in her chest, but she forced herself to remain calm, deliberately fag the press of zombies and the crash of her Forest Guardian as it trampled the undead. Whatever she did, she wasn’t going to let the invisible flying mage know she had seen them. Clig tinuously with ultrasonic pulses behind her, she tio study the spell.

  Nht when she was certain the Fireball was about to plete, she summoned a barrier with all the rea speed and haste she could muster. Drawing heavily on her domain mana, she infused her barrier magic with as much density and strength as she could, and the instantaneous glowing globe snapped into pce around the flying mage, right as the Fireball left their fiips.

  The muffled detonation filled the magical sphere with sudden roiling fme and bck smoke. Ali held the barrier spell in her mind, not relenting for one moment, even with the wince of referred pain from the detonatiohrough the ears of her bat.

  You have defeated Fire Assassin – Human – level 43 (Fire / Illusion).

  Grove Warden has reached level 50.+10 attribute points.

  Barrier has reached level 37.Martial Insight has reached level 29.

  Panting from tension, she gripped her magic tight and stood in sileill using echolocation to see if she was truly safe. But nothing other than her minions moved, and no sound broke the sileher than the squelg of zombie flesh under her Forest Guardian’s feet. That was far, far too close.

  She released the barrier and grimaced as the charred remains of a person dropped to the ground with a siing thump.

  “He should have put some points into vitality,” Ali said, using draic.

  “That would have been wise,” her Acolyte said, nodding in agreement. Her Bone Mage just chuckled evilly.

  Am I being desensitized? Ali thought, staring down at the corpse at her feet. It was her sed human corpse today. Uain, she destructed him and his ruined gear. I just killed a person. And I’m making jokes with my minions. But while she didn’t immediately feel anything, her heart was still pounding, and she could see her hands shaking.

  That’s quite an assassin. A Fire Mage with invisibility and a way to cloak his mana signature. Someone had goo quite extraordinary lengths to kill her without being noticed. Without the Timber Wolf’s keen sense of smell, and her bat’s echolocation, she would never have even seen him before the Fireball hit her in the back. Even her slime hadn’t been able to sense him flying so high in the air. She had her new magic resistance armor, courtesy of Lydia, but she wasn’t certain that would have been enough to save her.

  She had a millioions running through her mind. Who sent him? Why do they want to kill me? Is it just because I’m a dungeon? But most of it she already khe ao.

  Lyeneru was right. I o get stronger.

  She grimaced, destrug the mess her Forest Guardian had made, auro her task of finishing the tunnel – this time keeping her Guardian closer, atention locked on the various senses of her minions.

  Domain Mastery has reached level 17.

  She reached the entrance hall to Dal’mohra without further i, at least if she disted the stant trickle of undead crawling out of the walls, but her minions took care of those. Ali breathed a sigh of relief when her domain ected with the work of her Spore Spreaders and Moss Creepers w hard among the ruins of the city. One more eeant her domain was that much more secure.

  Now, zombies. Again, she could easily just close up the holes, but she just khat was making a bigger problem for someone down the line. Undead never went away unless you took care of them explicitly.

  On the Dal’mohra side of the unnel, in the a entry hall, she summoned rock, reshaping the shattered boulders and stone doorway into a narrow el, just wide enough for a Forest Guardian to traverse, and then she filled it with Grasping Roots runic circles. It’s a good thing these traps don’t take mana.

  Variant: Lavafed Granite added to Imprint: Stone.

  Oh, nice! Heat-resistant rock. It seemed that the a city gates had been well fed.

  On the Forest Cavern side, she had a little more work to do. First, she lowered the ground and raised rock walls oher side, making a ravine or el that extended out into her Living Bamboo Forest before fttening out. She filled in some more bamboo, making the forest a bit denser and then summoned some Bamboo Crawlers to hide there. Along the banks of her structed ravine, she pnted Luminous Glos and Radiant Larches causing the entire length of it to light up like the main street during the Harvest Festival. At the bottom of the ravine, she created several more traps and then stood baire her handiwork.

  Wait, zombies are stupid… Most of the lesser undead were not known for their dizzying intellect – how smart could a skeleton or a zombie really be with ay hole or rotting mush for brains, respectively. Ali spent a good fifteen minutes digging three-meter-deep holes in the ground with Domain Mastery. Watch out, they don’t call me The Dungeon of Obvious Traps for nothing! You might trip over a rod stub your toe!

  Domain Mastery has reached level 19 (+2).

  It didn’t take long before a zombie appeared to run her gauo her utter amazement, it fell into the first pit trap. It took three tries before o as far as the first Grasping Roots before it got caught. The sniper Bamboo Crawlers immediately opened up, peppering it with thorny darts dripping with poison. It was not perhaps the most effit match-up, given that undead were typically immuo poison, but the racted the bats and the wolves, and in short order the zombie was dead.

  And everything is cheap.

  With the zombie incursion taken care of – or at least, managed – and her domain reinforced, Ali ged tack, pnting patches of pea throughout the Living Bamboo Forest on her way back to the Grove. When she reached the Grove, she pnted more around the shrine. She decided she loved the little flowers and the ambiahey provided. Besides, they reminded her of Malika.

  They really do have a lovely st. I wonder what Malika’s up tht now?

  Malika

  Malika sat gingerly on the bench beside Rezan, her body ag and sore, and studied Ha and Basir cirg each other in the ring. It was not that she was hurt – her own healing had taken care of that in short order – but her quick bouts against Ha and her lightning magic always left her feeling ragged and smashed. The girl was simply too fast and powerful for her to nd a si.

  She g Rezan sitting calmly beside her. No, I’m too slow. I o get faster.

  “Begin,” Rezan instructed, and Malika glued her eyes to the match, studying the explosion of hasted movement from Ha and the deliberately solid stance Basir employed. She used both her eyes and her Soul Sight – now having grown her perception skill’s spherical rao cover most of the ring. Part of her difficulty with Ha was that so many of her most powerful attacks used mana and, even though she was making enormous progress on anticipating attacks with her Soul Sight, she was still blind to mana itself. This time, she focused on Basir instead – somehow the bulky, heavier rock mage had figured out how to anticipate Ha’s much faster attacks, and she wao uhe secret.

  Rezan, of course, insisted it was simply practice. He sat calmly beside her, and she expanded her awareo include his energy as he had taught. It did no good to foarrowly during bat and miss the surprise attack, so her awareness o be traiister everything her perception skills showed her. It was tricky to achieve even just sitting here on the rough-hewn wooden bench, let alone i and thrust of a tough match. She found it no problem duriation, but everything was harder when you were being punched in the face.

  She held both Ha and Basir in her awareness as they flickered and surged with the energy of their skills and added the Elder’s overwhelming presence beside her. In her mundane vision, he was quiet and posed, but her Soul Sight revealed an unbelievable well of energy that flowed through his body, pulsing with exquisitely trolled power even whe at rest. It was awe-inspiring that a human could achieve such a state.

  Before she had unlocked Soul Sight, she would never have been able to perceive the vast gulf between herself and the Elder, ahat thought did not fill her with despair or discement. She had taken the first step. She could see the path now – the path revealed by the transtion of the aext Rezan had made her study, and that sparked a prickle of excitement for what she might bee.

  She tinued breathing quietly, calmly expanding her awarehrough the full extent of her Soul Sight, including the handful of students and spectators who watched Rezan’s disciples sparring. Basir used a defensive skill, his stamina shaping within him in a distin that Malika was learning to read, but in the er of her awareness, like a tiny echo, she saw the same pattern duplicated. Surprise skittered across her deep pool of ess, and she turo see Sabri emuting Basir’s stance while keepimost attention fixed on the fight. In the ring, Ha’s energy surged as she blurred into a, and beside her uhe tree, Sabri’s form shifted. Malika’s breath caught at the echo of her father’s defensive footwork, the drills she had practiced for hours every day, and the foundation of her Diviep skill.

  No, not his… she copied me.

  Ha’s lightning attack smashed into Basir’s chest, sending ks of his rock armor flying into the air. He had dodged the wrong way.

  But Sabri had not. Sabri’s unstructured energy was and pure, and her movement almost perfect – although without skills to back it up, she cked any signifit power or speed. But she had somehow seen through Ha’s incredible speed, reag without any perception or haste skills of her own, and had created the forms that would have moved her into a perfect striking position if only she had access to Diviep.

  No, she didn’t react, Malika realized in that instant. Sabri had moved before Ha had even begun to activate her skill. Which meant she had known which way Ha would move before she even started. She stared at the cssless girl, her amazement growing as she realized that Sabri had ‘merely’ predicted Ha’s movement with her knowledge and intuitioirely unaided by magic or skills. Not to mention that she had learned her father’s footwork by simply Malika’s bouts in the ring.

  “Do you see?” Rezan said calmly, and if Malika were being uncharitable, she might have said a little smugly. “Do you uand now why I say you need more practice?”

  Malika looked up to see Rezan watg her studying Sabri. Her time in Kezda uhe Elder’s tutege had been short and intense, and he had been sistently harsh on her for overrelian skills. He had even forbidden her from pining that Ha was to, frustratingly insisting that she was just not good enough to win.

  And now… “Yes, I see it now,” she answered soberly. If it had been Sabri in the ring instead of Basir, with nothing more than Malika’s own Diviep, she would have avoided Ha’s potent strike and nded a hit on the lightning-ented monk – something Malika had yet to achieve.

  “Good,” Rezan said after watg her for a moment, a ghost of a smile creasing his lips. “You have learhe most important lesson I have to teach you.”

  “Thank you, Elder,” she answered, bowing her head briefly to aowledge his teag and sat in silence, just watg Sabri emute the two powerful fighters in the ring.

  “She’s a genius,” Malika finally said, after watg her adapt the footwork to her copied impression of Basir’s fighting style.

  “She studies every fight, and she practices hard,” Rezan corrected.

  “She’s going to be an amazing fighter when she earns her css,” Malika said, w what kind of css might best suit the dirty, overly skinny girl who seemed to love martial arts as much as she did.

  This time the wince flickering across Rezan’s features was obvious, and Malika’s curiosity would not be denied.

  “What is wrong, Elder? That’s the sed time you reacted when I spoke of Sabri. Is there something wrong with her?”

  “No, there is nothing wrong with her,” he said, and fell silent again, but before Malika could muster the ce to push him on it, he spoke again. “She suffers from the misfortune of being born to a poor family, in a poor vilge, to a culture in dee. I would help if I had the resources to do so, because wasting potential such as hers is a tragedy, but the reality is most of Ahn Khen’s youth are forced to accept the natural css they are offered. No one afford the thirty-gold fee to travel to Vertias and use the shrihere. She will be offered Laborer or Farmer for her css because that is what she helps her mother with, just for them to scrape by every day.”

  The injustice of it ighe burning fires of fury within Malika, shattering the calm of her meditative awareness in an instant. She had faced exactly this inequality in Myrin’s Keep. Never, never had she expected to see it here in Kezda – in the heart of the Ahn Khen nds! The wealthy trolled the shrines, granting access only to the wealthy, growing the divide between those who had the opportunities provided by powerful csses and those forced into lives of bor aude.

  Why shouldn’t she be able to choose the css she loved? Malika wasn’t quite sure if she meant herself or Sabri. She had been fortunate io meet Ali and have access to her powerful shrine, but Sabri would never have that opportunity, and her immeential would be dashed forever upon the rocky shores of poverty.

  I’m sorry, Ali, she thought. Ali’s secret was not hers to share, but she couldn’t let such a travesty go without trying to fix it. Besides, Rezan was too perceptive to keep the secret from him for long.

  “My friend Ali has a shrine, and I’m certain she will let Sabri use it for free,” Malika said.

  “The Fae girl?” Rezan asked, a ripple pulsing through his energy as he snapped his head to stare at her in surprise. “How does she have a shrine?”

  “She is a… a dungeon,” Malika answered, her voice crag despite her attempt at calm. Please five me, Ali. Muyrin’s Keep already knew of Ali’s css, but it was not her pce to be sharing it. What else I do? She did not relish the versation she would have wheurned, she just hoped Ali would uand.

  For the first time since she had met the Elder, she saw him speechless.

  “You keep dangerous friends. I will not allow Sabri in a dungeon,” he finally said, a frown of disapproval creasing his face.

  “Elder, I beg you to resider. I know it is hard to believe, but you have met Ali, she is a good person. I owe her my life many times over, and I owe her for the css I have. Without her shrine I would be a Thief or a Pickpocket. Her shrine is extremely powerful – it offered me six alternate css choices and the option to unlock my soul magic affinity. Is the dungeon prejudice worth wasting the potential of someone like Sabri?”

  “Thank you, Malika. I see your heart believes this is the right path, even if it is with a dungeon. I think you may be blinded by your affe for this Aliandra and willfully ign the danger.” His words were polite, but his face bore a frown of worry.

  Malika’s fragile hope guttered and died. That sounded very much like a no – and even a warning that she was wrong to trust Ali.

  But he doesn’t know Ali the way I do.

  Malika fell into an awkward sileudying Sabri as she practiced a new form uhe tree, a new sadness filling her heart.

  ----------

  https:///DungeonOfKnowledgehttps:///series/1135403/dungeon-of-knowledgehttps:///fi/80744/dungeon-of-knowledge-raid-bat-litrpg

  timewalk