With Cal on the ground, I cast Minor Healing and fired an arrow as fast as I could, ready to heal her back to full health. Unrelentingly, however, the shades fired off another wave of bolts. Even if I healed her back to tip top shape, she was done for if all of those hit, and while she was already pulling herself from the ground, I could see she wasn’t going to make it.

This isn’t actually happening is it? Please tell me I’m not about to watch Cal die in a shitty dark cave. My heart rate spiked as my mind raced, my enhanced Intelligence accelerating each thought to breakneck speeds, but still too slow.

What was I supposed to do? Finish healing? Jet step over to her and push her out of the way? I entertained the idea for a split instant before realizing I wouldn’t be fast enough.

Hoping against hope that Cal had some super skill I hadn’t seen before, I did my job and finished my healing cast, watching in horror as the bolts flew closer and closer.

It was right then when a dozen small projectiles shot past me at unbelievable speeds.

I watched slack jawed as they raced towards the incoming bolts, and less then a second later, the two groups of attacks collided, exploding outwards and largely canceling one another out.

With the small respite, Cal completely regained her footing, once more able to weave between the incoming attacks. Despite my disbelief, I continued healing, spamming the spell until she was back to full health.

Once she was, I spared a glance behind me, finding Jason grinning.

“Did you… did you just throw a bunch of rocks at those spells?” I vaguely remembered seeing something similar when I’d bumped into the man at the archery range in Drawgin, but still, the notion seemed absurd.

“It’s how I’ve been making sure none of the stray shots hit Hartha.” His smile disappeared, suddenly replaced with a sage look as he continued. “As is often said, the best defense is a good rock.” He nodded as if to agree with his own words and gave a scaled thumbs up to punctuate them.

I shook my head. One day I’d have to sit down with the guy and get him to explain his abilities to me, but now quite clearly wasn’t the time. For now, I’d just be happy that he saved Cal.

It was right about then, after my heart had just barely started to recover from the fear of losing Cal, that the entire room began to shake.

Once again, a few bolts managed to find their marks, bringing Cal down to half health as the unexpected shaking caused her to lose her balance. Even Rock managed to lose his footing, though he caught himself before he could actually fall.

The shades, however, seemed just as thrown off, and no follow up attacks were launched.

I healed both of the tanks, wincing as I caught sight of my rapidly depleting mana. I wanted them both to be back at full steam before the attacks resumed.

However, the attacks did not resume.

A second later, the cause of the shaking made itself frighteningly clear.

Around the perimeter of the room, the ground exploded, clumps of dirt raining outwards as thick tendrils reached out from the earth. Black veins coursed through the probing tendrils, and for a moment, I worried that we’d somehow attracted another of the dungeon’s monsters before I took in their otherwise gnarled and brown appearance.

They’re roots, I realized with a start.

As if waiting for my realization, the masses of roots darted towards the shades, each one sinking into their wispy flesh. I worried that, being physical, the roots would have no effect, but no sooner had the roots connected with the shades than their black veins began to pulse.

The shades cried out horribly, filling the entire room with deafening hisses, while bit by bit they seemed to grow more and more transparent. In a matter of seconds, they disappeared completely, and the room, still strewn with a moat of roots around us, fell into complete silence.

I turned back, seeing Hartha still sitting by the spell walls, her look of concentration replaced by one of exhaustion. That, however, was not the only visible change.

Much like the roots that surrounded us, she too now had dark veins running all throughout her body. The effect was particularly prominent around her eyes, giving her an eerie, almost demonic aura.

I examined her, unsure what I would find, and more than slightly shocked at the result.

Hartha: Level 16 Forest’s Dark Heart, 320/320hp

Had her class changed? Mid-battle?

I found myself too tense to speak for a while longer, still certain that some bolt would slam into one of us, but as the silence fully settled in, I heaved a sigh of relief.

The fight was blissfully over. Off to my sides, the others visibly deflated as their nerves began to calm down.

Still, what had just happened?

“Uh, Harth? First off, thank you? Think you kind of just saved all of our lives. But are you okay?” With the amount that Hartha loved to chat about her class abilities, I wasn’t really seeing how the “I have a super ability that can kill an entire room full of shades” conversation hadn’t come up yet.

Slowly, and with a look of utter exhaustion, she opened her eyes and raised them to mine. “Not particularly, no,” she sighed out. She pulled herself from the earth, dragging her gaze across the group of us before it came to a rest on Rock.

“We… We will need to talk. Growing the darkened forest helped me unlock a variant of my class. I didn’t want to take it, but the fight forced my hand. It has… consequences.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what those “consequences” entailed, but seeing how Rock looked like he’d swallowed a bag full of lemons, he seemed to have an idea of what Hartha was talking about. Regardless, he wiped the expression off of his face, replacing it with a sterner, more measured look.

“Noted. You did what you had to do, and you shouldn’t regret it. This is not a conversation we should have now, though. We need to move. We have no idea why the priest activated the portal or what he’s doing right now, and that’s something we need to change, immediately.”

Though it had only been a brief stint, the ex-therapist side of me was notably unhappy. It was clear that Hartha needed some time and space to process whatever strange class change she’d just undergone. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. After all, working through trauma was generally a good thing, but you had to be alive and well to enjoy the benefits of it.

Rock’s words were met with nods all around. With three of us having delved a dungeon together, and the other two being no strangers to fights, we moved quickly, exiting the circular cavern and making our way deeper into the dungeon.

As we neared the next room, all of us were tense, expecting bolts of darkness to strike us at any moment. When at last we reached the next room, however, our expectations were dashed.

“Hells…” Cal whispered, her voice trailing off.

Silently, I thought much the same.

Much as we’d expected, there were a large number of enemies waiting for us in the next room.

Only, they’d already been defeated.

Giant, pitch-black bats littered the floor with their corpses. Wary of some sort of trap, Rock inched forward, checking on the nearest of them, but he soon determined that things were just as they seemed: The bats were dead.

I joined him up ahead, looking over the dungeon creature for any visible cause of death. Just barely, I saw it: A razor thin wound on its chest. Nudging the creature over with my foot, I spotted a similar mark on its back.

Likely, the line would have been more obvious, but whatever had dealt the blow appeared to have instantly cauterized the wound, preventing any of blood from leaking out. With the bat’s naturally furry chest, I doubt I would have noticed it at all without the boost to my Perception. I pointed it out to the rest.

“That’s a light beam kill,” Cal offered. “If the person who cast it has enough control to make it that thin, and enough power to pierce something like this in one shot… Well, their level in Light Magic is a lot higher than mine, at least.”

The five of us eyed one another, all thinking the same thing. Hartha voiced our collective thoughts. “High level light mage who’s also running around the dungeon with us… Pretty good bet that’s our priest, yeah?”

It was just about a certainty at this point. At least we knew definitively that Ephesis had finally woken up. Presumably he’d entered before us, running ahead and entirely skipping the first room. Either the shades hadn’t fully formed by the time he’d left, or he’d simply outran them.

The real question though, was what he was planning on doing here. My quest rewards seemed to suggest that he was here to help us with our dark god problem, and from the vision crystal he’d given us, clearly the guy had some skin in the game. How exactly he was supposed to help, though, I couldn’t say.

“Well, this makes our job easier, I guess. Less fighting for us, and not like he’s going to be too hard to find if he’s running deeper into the dungeon and killing everything.” Frankly, after the horrible shitshow that the last fight had been, finding that Ephesis was on some sort of dungeon murder spree was actually a relief.

“Indeed. We should move, then. It looks like the rooms aren’t giving him much trouble, but if he has to fight his way through them, we might be able to catch up to him.” Rock was already following his own advice, making for the other side of the room. Leaving the dark bats behind us, the rest of us followed suit.

When we hit the next room, it was much as we expected. Corpses lay across the floor, though this time of wolves whose fur grew wispy at its ends, melting into an oily darkness. We moved on as quickly as we dared too, still cautious in case there were any traps or stragglers left alive.

And in fact, our caution was well warranted. “Trap,” I called out. My Detect Trap skill made itself useful as I spotted a tripwire in the next hallway. For all that Ephesis seemed to be blazing through the dungeon, he didn’t appear to have set off or disarmed the traps on his way.

Cal disarmed it easily, and we moved on, although slower than we’d been going. Our desire to find the priest quickly was high, but considerably lower than our desire to not die.

The next room was much the same, and so was the next after that. Somehow, despite not having to fight, I found myself with much tenser nerves than I’d had at any point in the Drawgin mud dungeon. The worst were the rooms that were completely empty, likely having held more shades or some type of enemy that didn’t leave remains. Despite evidence to the contrary, I kept expecting for us to get ambushed.

And then, after what felt like hours, but could have only been a matter of minutes, something changed.

There was light up ahead.