Earth sylphs began to push through the stone and congregate towards the new-forged Scarseeker, landing along the curved spine of the blade, or tapping against the teeth that hung from the haft to make crude music.

Nic smiled. He settled back, meditating, breathing in the energy of the world and rotating it through his veins. He waited until his leg was good and truly healed, the bone knitted together without lingering damage and the scar above barely visible against the pink of his skin.

His cultivation base was only half-full, but if F-Class had been a small lake of energy flowing within his chest, E-Class was a massive sea. When he made the deep foundations of the sea turn and rotated his entire core, the air around him darkened and filled with crackling energy as massive amounts of ambient Essence bent inwards, pulled by the gravity of his power.

The only shame was Nic didn’t have any long black hair to billow dramatically in the wind.

He could’ve easily pushed through to another milestone in strength, or powered up one of his Shards, but he chose to hold back the sea of energy. If the worst came to worst in his fight against the sand devil’s monarch he intended to use the Concept of Sacrifice and burn his entire reserve to fuel a single deadly burst of Primordial Mist.

If nothing else, he was confident that would kill her. The newly formed Shard with its powers of time truly seemed like an apex killing tool- it had the deadly, life-stealing corrosion of poison, but unlike poison, no creature he’d met had any natural resistance to the ravages of time. The fact that it could double as a tool of defense, cloaking him and granting him glimpses of the of the future, gave it flexibility on par with Mire-Caller.

Standing, he pulled down the false wall he’d created in front of his cave, focusing on his Eight-Eyed Mantle. The nearest threats were simple sand devils in their caves-

But a sour smell drifted in the air. A lingering, metallic stink, one that gave Nic the uncanny suspicion he’d been right to hide his lair while he recovered.

Something had moved through here, hunting him.

Nic followed the scent, tasting the air with his tongue. He wasn’t sure whether to follow the pursuers and try to sneak up behind them for an ambush, or go the opposite way, and try to clear out some of the treasure of the buried city.

He could feel the earth shake through the walls as the sand devil monarch moved through her labyrinth. Nic had only explored the outer edges of that zone, charting a half-circle path around the monarch’s territory, but that path had led him to the teleportation tower, and now the bathhouse.

Two locations where the System had hidden lore fragments. Finding the remaining two would weaken the monarch- and unlock the secrets of the ancient language.

Meanwhile, following the sand devils to ambush them was anything but surefire. His ring had shifted from silver to gold, and any defense he had against their detection Shards and keen senses was gone. Instead…

Instead he retreat back into his lair and pulled a flash-lob grenade from his bag. Rigging it together with a thin wire of spidersilk and two spiked lengths of wood he drove into the tunnel walls, he strung it at neck height. The normal sand devil’s moved while hunched over, scuttling across the ground- only the Ascended devils would stand high enough to trip the lure. There was the chance they’d spot it, even after he concealed the spikes and the grenade underneath a covering of adhesive mixed with sand- but it was better than trying a trigger based on pure motion and setting it off when a regular devil wandered past.

Hopefully, the distant sound of the flash-lob would warn him when they came back around. He added a second layer, leaving the opening his abandoned lair undisguised and securing a small trap to the ceiling above the entrance-

When they found a passage that hadn’t been there before, they’d surely investigate.

And they’d get a shrapnel mine suspended from the ceiling for their trouble. Nic used the motion-trigger runes he’d learned from Moira, Sunfire’s explosive crystal spit, and a mix of shavings from shaping the scorpion blade into Scarseeker doused in Redjaw’s poison. The little centipede was looking battered and bruised, but Nic gave him a scrap of healing fruit and pet his poison-haired antenna, soothing the beast.

They’d get their revenge yet.

Leaving his wake strung with traps, Nic proceeded in the opposite direction from the hunters. He slid down corridor after corridor, cutting down any sand devils he saw with a flick of his axe. Blood soaked his path as he proceeded through the sunken city, through caverns formed by submerged houses and the remnants of ancient statues lifting their arms from a sliding wall of loose rubble.

Until he came to the temple.

Wide steps proceeded towards an enormous set of bronze gates, guarded by marble pillars that had somehow held up the masses of stone that had buried so many smaller buildings. Nic pushed his way through the bronze doors expecting a fight-

But someone had beaten him to it.

Red, flesh-like vines surrounded the pillars and statues within the grand temple. They filled the fountains and oozed across the floor, centered around an enormous tumor of purple-red flesh that hung from the ceiling.

That thing- which resembled a human heart at massive size- had been torn apart. Blood poured from deep gashes and wounds, and the flesh-tendrils were beginning to wither down to nothing. Someone had come here before him and finished off the guardian.

As he swept through the room he found spaces cleared of dust on the altar where something had been taken from its place.

He clicked his tongue against his new teeth in annoyance.

Someone had stolen his fight. But near the end of the temple, he discovered a mural, a tall and beautiful collection of colorful stones set into the wall to form an image of a lion-headed warrior. Three different images of this warrior sat side by side-

One was fighting a horde of lesser warriors, leaping from atop a pile of corpses to sweep downwards into a mass of spearmen with a massive axe.

The second was the same lion-headed figure kneeling before a shadowy throne, holding up a lump of sacred flesh.

The third was the warrior fighting against a familiar shape. The sand devil monarch curled around the lion-headed warrior’s waist, trying to crush the giant soldier, and the axe was embedded into the monarch’s skull.

Beneath the mural was a massive sarcophagus sunken into the earth. Nic grasped the edges of the stone coffin and pulled it open-

There was nothing inside.

An empty, ceremonial coffin. A fight with the sand devil monarch.

And now she was one of the four false gods, taking the position from the lion-headed guardian.

Because she had eaten the old god.

You have discovered

Lore Fragment of the Scales of Sand

200 Essence Awarded

Discover four Lore Fragments to bind and weaken the Guardian ‘Sand Devil Monarch’

Three down. One to go.

---

Nic’s danger sense began to buzz and prickle as he entered the final stretch. It was a scrapyard, and the walls were embedded with corroding metal things. Blades bristled out of the earthen walls, alongside crashed chariots, pots and pans, and dozens of others; actual flowers of living rust grew among the metal graveyard, twisting around the ruins of the buried city and making the air sour with the smell of rotting metal.

Ahead, something that made his danger sense scream was moving forward. Nic slid back into a darkened tunnel mouth, waiting, hand on his axe.

The Ascended devil stepped into view, pausing to sniff the air. The earth began to shake as the sand devil monarch rumbled through her endless maze.

The Ascended had a masked face, pale white chitin covering an arrow-shaped head and extending up into curved, high horns. Luminous patterns covered its dark armor in spirals of orange, flickering like fire, and black bristles ran down its hunched spine.

The aura coming from this one was far, far more concentrated than the other three Nic had encountered. His grip tightened on his axe as he considered whether to attack directly, to try and take it out before it saw him.

If he put everything into one attack…

Tiny beetles scuttled across the walls. They were bright-shelled, with waving antenna, and Nic immediately began to retreat as they poured down the tunnel. Spiders and centipedes followed, a crawling army flooding through the cavern.

Searching for him.

A grasshopper leapt towards and on instinct, his hand shot forward, crushing it.

His danger sense flared and he instantly knew he’d made a mistake.

The Ascended devil spun around, its bone-white mandibles cracking open with a sudden, violent hiss. It bent forward, and the bristling black hairs that ran down its spine lifted up like spikes. Fire beaded on the tip of each hollow hair.

And sprayed forward.

Chemical-orange flame rushed out of the beast, filling the cavern and turning the air into the painfully hot, sweltering heart of an oven. The Ascended devil was a shadow within the roaring inferno, and it lifted one clawed hand to point towards Nic.

The flame surged forward, becoming a rushing wall of fire. The swarms of beetles and other insects made a high-pitched scream as the moisture in their body was turned to steam by the raw heat and their shells exploded into ash.

Nic turned and ran, diving down side-tunnels, trying to escape the blaze as it slammed through the interconnected web of caverns. But it wasn’t just a wild fire- the devil was controlling it, directing it. It was cutting off passages ahead of Nic, twisting to deny him an escape and cover the exits before he could reach them.

The air was growing deadly hot, filling up with a black, choking smoke. Nic’s eyes watered and his skin singed. He coated himself in a glistening, wet layer of muck from Mire-Caller, trying to hold off the heat with an armor of mud.

The devil was a black figure inside the flame, marching forward, moving like a hunter- slow and relentless movements as it stalked its prey. With the fire acting to cut off his retreat, Nic was being herded, slowly driven backwards.

Towards the monarch.

Nic hissed, but there was only one path left to him. The fires were blazing, so hot Nic couldn’t even approach, but they couldn’t last forever- the devil only had so much aura to burn away. The longer this fight lasted the more chances he’d have to wear the enemy down.

Turning, he retreated deeper, outrunning the flames and heading down, down-

Into the maze of the sand devil’s monarch, where the earth shook with the movement of her thousands of legs.