Nic flung the Pyromaniac devil from his back, swinging it down into the hard earth with a bone-crunching crack. He followed through with a downwards swing of the Sandrider Blade, cutting its remaining hand off at the wrist with a single downwards strike.

The devil was already as good as dead - the enemy who’d been able to escape him by creating walls of fire and controlling the distance had sacrificed that distance to defend its queen in a crucial moment, and in that moment, it had lost.

A wave of flame shot upwards from the devil’s mouth. It seared across the side of Nic’s face, roasting one of his eyes in its socket with a hideous, sickly pain.

He slammed the Sandrider Blade down again - this time into the devil’s skull. The light left its dark eyes and he swung again, cleaving its head fully in half and making damn sure it was dead.

The fight was over.

Nic straightened up, holding a hand to his ruined eye. One of his arms had been fully cut away and, if not for his axolotl-form’s regeneration, the fight would have been a crippling one.

As it was?

He would be ready to hunt again soon.

As Nic scanned the chamber he found no sign of the Glass Cannon, as expected. Once again she had retreated into the caves as soon as her companions were past saving. It was a cowardly way to fight-

But Nic respected it. There was no goal to combat - no honor - beyond being the last one to die. Cowardly tactics and retreats were all in the game.

He looked around the cavern one last time.

The Monarch’s enormous corpse had been torn apart by the ship expanding within her. The Puppetmaster was nothing but a stain of acid. The Pyromaniac was torn to pieces.

With a long, slow heave of a sigh, Nic allowed himself to sink back into axolotl form. Since he’d lost one of his extra arms, a limb that didn’t exist in this form, the injuries were dragged inside to become internal bleeds and ruptured organs. He coughed up blood, circulating the meagre aura he had left into his regeneration.

As his wounds sealed he examined the dead Monarch. He groaned, but there was no way around it. She had eaten her way to godhood.

What he needed was probably still in her stomach.

Drawing out his axe, he began to hack and break through the carapace where it was already weak, climbing into the bloody breach. It was unbearably hot, grossly wet, and smelled of death, but he expanded his cultivation senses even as he closed off his mortal ones. He could feel an object of power deeper within, and he blindly reached through the mess of the sand devil’s guts until his hands closed around the prize.

Pulling himself free and retching, Nic looked down to the thing in his hand. It was an ancient, petrified organ, looking like nothing more than a shapeless blob of stone. Veins of crystal ran across the dark surface.

Liver of the God-King. E-Class // Medicine. A fragment from the body of an ancient king, who prepared himself for godhood all his life, cultivating great strength in the four organs. Because of that bounty of essence, this liver petrified rather than rotting, and became a potent medicine.

He grinned. There was nothing like a rich reward to make the pain and suffering, the fear and brutal tension, of combat feel worthwhile. But he didn’t immediately reach to devour it.

Gaining all four was the goal here, right? Whatever benefits he got from eating one alone was probably nothing compared to the gains of consuming all four organs together.

Stuffing it into his bag, Nic rose to his feet. He laid his hand on the side of the expanded ship, and gently willed it to shrink back down. In the blink of an eye the ship went from filling nearly the entire cavern to being a miniature sat in the palm of his hand.

It was badly damaged, but the fact its ability to shrink and expand remained suggested nothing too vital was broken. And speaking of injuries, the worst of his own had already sealed up. Since reaching E-Class his regeneration was simply staggering.

The vision was slowly fading back in from his damaged eye, although the process of feeling the hollow socket in his skull fill back up was nothing short of grotesque.

But the important thing was that he could continue.

Stumbling through the maze of tunnels, Nic searched for the heart of the labyrinth. The walls of the passageways had been worn smooth by the Monarch’s constant movement, and his hand ran down the left side, the old trick for navigating a maze.

It could have been minutes or hours before he found it.

In the center of the maze was a massive chamber, the walls carved with deep grooves by the Monarch’s legion of crawling legs. At the center was a massive axe sunk into a pillar, covered in flaking rust. A skeletal hand still clung to the haft.

Nic approached, climbing up and wedging his body between the blade and the stone to rip it free. As he toppled back to the earth with the axe gripped in his hands, nearly the length of his body, a voice began to speak.

As he looked up, a ghostly figure was standing over him. It was a tall, strong man, with a lion’s head set on his shoulders. Hieroglyphic tattoos covered the power of his arms and his eyes were ablaze.

“HEAR MY FINAL WILL.

AS GUARDIAN OF THIS GREEN LAND, I TURNED MY BLADE AGAINST MY RIGHTFUL KING-”

“Sofia?” Nic asked. “I think I want to hear the original version of this.”

“Right. Hold on.”

A ringing sound filled his ears and he felt the crystals growing from his eye begin to swell outwards.

But the System’s illusions fell away, revealing the true message.

“MY KING WAS A WEAK MAN. HE SOLD OUR PLANET AND OUR LIVES, IN EXCHANGE FOR SECURING HIS OWN IMMORTALITY.

I STOLE THAT FROM HIM. WE SUNK OUR CITY BENEATH THE EARTH TO SNATCH IT FROM THE SYSTEM’S GRASP.

WE LIVED STOLEN LIVES.

AND THE SYSTEM CAME FOR US. IT UNLEASHED EVIL BEINGS INTO THE STREETS, SENT EARTHQUAKES TO BRING DOWN THE CEILINGS, THREW EVERY CHALLENGE AND WEAPON THEY HAD AGAINST US.

I AM PROUD TO HAVE SURVIVED AS LONG AS I COULD.

I AM PROUD TO HAVE LEFT THIS AXE BEHIND.

CARRY THAT PRIDE AND KNOW IT LIVES IN YOU.”

As the final word echoed out, the lion-headed ghost faded from view, dissolving into mist.

You have discovered

Lore Fragment of the Scales of Sand

200 Essence Awarded

Together, four Lore Fragments combine to seal the powers of the Guardian ‘Sand Devil Monarch’

As the System chimed into his head, Nic scoffed. It was far too late for the sealing effect to help him now. As for the axe, perhaps it would’ve been key to taking the Monarch on head-to-head…

But he preferred his way.

Nic examined the axe in his hand. As he ran aura through the weapon, the rust began to flake away, leaving a weapon that was one-part axe and one-part scimitar, a curved moon-sickle blade.

Khopesh of the Desert Lion. E-Class // Treasured Artifact. This heavy weapon was once wielded by a fierce guardian of the ancient lands, half-god themselves. The bastard son of a divine emperor, they were gifted this weapon as a sign of protection, and it holds the power to repel curses and evil magics.

It was far too heavy to wield in his axolotl form, but his warform could do so easily. Considering he needed six weapons in all to fill his six strong arms, this khopesh was a good find, and the liver was even more appealing.

He stowed it into his bag, and clapped his hands.

The underground caves were empty of treasures now. He’d collected the four scraps of knowledge from the past, slain the sand devil’s queen, and killed all but one of the ascended devils the heretic had created. That last one was likely to turn up again - she was too human to hide away here forever, and too insectoid to hide among the natives.

As for the heretics themselves…

No sign. Nic was beginning to think they’d unleashed the ascended devils simply to buy time, and distract their enemies. Or maybe it was pride? If they truly didn’t care about human lives, maybe they’d created their artificial devils simply to prove they could.

If Lavhin had proved anything, it was that the System’s enemies weren’t necessarily good people. Good people who got caught in the System ended up like the lion-headed warrior…

Dead. Brave, noble, and dead.

He’d flown close enough to the sun in that regard already.

Shouldering his bag, he began to pick his way out of the labyrinth. He had a final task to complete here...

---

It was increasingly easy to slip through the enemy’s lairs unnoticed. Nic could crawl over the walls by coating his hands with sticky tars, and he could track his foes through the Eight-Eyed Mantle. Together, it was easy enough to never be where they were looking.

The main trick was to suppress his fear. Flinch when someone looked your way, and the motion would draw their eye. Panic when they came close, and you’d move too hastily.

Nic already knew he could kill his way through if he needed to. He’d killed the fear he’d felt the first time he was plunged into the underground city and could barely manage to fight a single sand devil. Now, he simply felt masterful as he retraced his steps through the caverns.

Until he came to the massive cave with the teleportation tower.

This was how he’d escaped the first time. Now that he had a crystal to power the teleportation ring again, he could leap directly out of the dark caves and into the sky.

But he also wanted to make sure the sand devils wouldn’t cause more problems for the people above. Reaching into his bag, he drew out a series of bamboo tubes filled with a thin amount of Sunfire’s crystalline spit; just enough to make a nasty amount of noise. The runic patterns he’d drawn on each canister were meant to produce blinding flashes of light.

They were flashbangs. Loud, bright, and harmless.

He wound up, taking a good few steps back. The cavern tunnel he came out of emerged onto a balcony- a balcony with a clear shot to the teleportation tower. With his new strength, he could just leap across.

Grinning, Nic bent low to the ground, gathered power into his limbs-

And burst forward into a dazzling bound that carried him like a shot from a bow. He slapped against the walls of the tower so hard that the ancient bricks shook and dust cascaded down, but clung fast with the tar on his fingers.

Several of the sand devils swarming below were already looking up. They got the first eyeful of the flash canisters Nic threw out as he clung to the walls.

The sound - and the light - made the hordes of scuttling insect-devils scream in rage. Immediately, flying devils began to swarm towards Nic as he climbed up the last few feet of the tower. They dove for his back - only to be swatted aside by his tail. At this point, he could handle them that easily.

Clambering onto the edge of the ruins where the tower’s top had been broken away, Nic looked down. The entire floor was covered by a carpet of swarming insect bodies. They made the dark earth completely black as they crawled upwards towards him.

He jumped down towards the teleportation circle, casually tossing the power crystal from hand to hand.

The circle was a model of the desert, with each important location marked by a small statue and a brass inset that could hold the gem, fueling the circle up to take him to that destination. The first time, he’d been in too much of a desperate panic to pay much attention to the long brass poles that extended up over the carved ‘earth’ of the desert, with brackets to fit a gem at their tops.

Now he realized- they were marking locations in the river of water that hovered in the sky above.

Picking one that had a view over the human camp, Nic slotted the gem in as the first of the insect devils reached the top and leaped down. He kicked it aside, throwing it out of the circle as he spoke the three words of power that activated the teleportation device.

He’d been here before.

And he’d nearly lost his life.

Now, he walked through them like they were nothing, swatting them aside like droplets of rain. And as he flickered out of view in the circle’s magic, he left behind a parting gift.

A trio of gunpowder barrels bought from Ben Thick and marked with every explosive rune he could muster.

There was a brief pause as the devil’s stared in confusion at where their prey had simply vanished into thin air.

Then the barrels detonated, and a massive wave of fire swept through the top of the tower, purging them into shadows of charcoal and dust. The ceiling above cracked apart and began to fall, sealing their doom.