We’d been looking over the dragon’s corpse, searching for a hint that might take us in the right direction, when I heard a snap and a crash, and Shiro yelling in shock.

I turned to check on what had happened, but before I could see anything, a System screen appeared, blocking off most of my vision.

Trial One

Task: Return the Argent Spear to its rightful place.

Task description: An artifact of great renown, the Argent Spear is known for its ability to alter its size to fit its user. In times of peace, it resides upon the altar of the Argent Temple. Find the temple at the center of the Canher Bog and place the Argent Spear on the altar to complete this trial. Failure to complete the trial within the allotted time will result in a penalty.

Time limit: 12 hours

“Huh. I only just touched it, and…”

I pushed the screen to the side, not dismissing it—apparently that was possible—and was greeted by the sight of Shiro holding a much diminished version of the spear, with the original nowhere to be seen. One of the dragon’s ribs had fallen to the ground with the spear no longer supporting it and was now sinking into the bog.

The others were quietly looking over the quest screen, and I returned my own attention to the text.

Alexis breathed a sigh of relief. “This… doesn’t sound too difficult,” she finally said. “At least, given how much the dragon lady hyped it up…”

“It’s the first trial. Maybe it’s meant to be easy,” Shiro said as he looked over the spear in his hands. Cam had already approached him to take a closer look.

“Or maybe it’s just pretending to be easy, so that we let our guard down,” Sarah said.

I cupped my chin in thought. “Either might be true, though we should assume “dungeons back home,” dungeons can often can often set up traps and the like. With an intelligent one—well, I’d be more surprised if it didn’t.”

“Well, then. Clock’s ticking,” David said, tapping absentmindedly at his wrist.

And he was right, in a quite literal sense.

Time limit: 11 hours 57 minutes

“Right, just need to find a temple in a swamp,” Sarah said, scrunching her nose. “Kind of a weird place for a temple, don’t you think?” She tried to peer into the distance.

“Weird is one word. Big is another,” Shiro said.

“It should stick out, at least. Argent this, argent that—probably one of those big marble things,” David said.

“If the spear is anything to go by, you’re probably right,” Cam agreed.

It wasn’t as obvious in its smaller form, but the spear’s handle was adorned with the same kinds of carvings you’d find on the most ancient of columns back in the Archipelago—adding to that was how it seemed to be made of some kind of blindingly white ivory. Ostentatious, but without being completely gaudy.

“It will be a challenge to find it, still. Not even twelve hours, and the bog is quite vast,” I mused out loud.

Sarah turned to me and asked, “Do you think you can do the same radar thingy you did earlier?”

Radar—that sounded like another one of their Earth things, but given that I’d only cast one spell recently, I understood what she meant. “It involves a wholly different Aspect of magic,” I said as I shook my head, “and not one I would consider myself particularly good at.” It was among Cam’s best, though—

I paused, losing myself in thought. The spell itself wouldn’t be too different. I could guide it, while Cameron infused it with his own Matter mana and I with Origin. It had a chance of working, except…

There was a reason mages rarely worked in tandem. It made any spell take half again as long to cast for each additional mage, and twice as likely to explode in your face.

No, casting it together wasn’t an option.

“We could split,” Alexis offered.

“Yeah, no,” Sarah said. “You read the quest, right? The spear scales. I’d bet anything that we split, whatever the spear’s last wielder was will just pop up and smash you to pulp. It’d have to be like, what, twenty feet tall?”

I glanced at the spot where the rib had been ripped off. “Something along those numbers, yes.” Having powerful monsters sit about, waiting for stragglers to appear, was a fairly typical occurrence in dungeons as well.

Meanwhile, the clock continued to tick.

Time limit: 11 hours 52 minutes

“Well, then, what do we do? We can’t just sit here twiddling our thumbs,” David said.

The group turned to me, looking with unstated expectation. Winnie snorted.

I frowned as I worked to think of a solution.

Wandering the swamp aimlessly was not a solution. I didn’t have a clear view of the swamp’s size, but it was big enough that it would take much longer than the allotted twelve hours to search to any degree of thoroughness. What I needed was a scouting force, but there was a large setback in that direction as well.

I didn’t have any dead things to work with, my lone quasi-canary having been trampled into uselessness barely an hour ago. The corpse of the dragon was out—the age of the body was important, and this one was beginning to fossilize. Sticking a soul to it was all but impossible at this point.

At the same time, dungeon creatures were mostly beings of pure mana, and dissipated upon being killed, so killing them and turning them into undead was also out—unless, perhaps, I could capture them alive and forcibly replace the mind with a construct of my own, while making sure not to kill the creature.

That was an option, though not at all optimal—testing out new magic in the field was generally considered a poor idea.

Even so, a pulse of Mind revealed little of use nearby—while the swamp was teeming with life, it was mostly frogs, lizards, and—was that an alligator rushing our way?

“Alligator from the south-east,” I mumbled, and to her credit, Alexis had gone from relaxed to ready to fire in the space of a second.

I felt the alligator’s mind dissipate before I even heard the twang of her bowstring being loosened, and I couldn’t help but be impressed.

Sarah frowned and walked up to the alligator, crouching to get a better look. “This is just a normal gator,” she confirmed. “I—thought dungeons are supposed to throw big scary monsters at you?”

I approached the body, frowning as I bent over it and inspected it with soul sight. “How odd. I didn’t believe dungeons could house mundane creatures.”

“So,” Shiro said, his mouth curved in the beginning of a shit-eating grin, “would you say that’s a bog-standard alligator?”

A metallic thump rang out, and Shiro yelped in pain.

“Wait, did you just throw your glove at me?”

“It’s a gauntlet, not a glove. Not that you’d know the difference.”

“So you’re throwing down the gauntlet, is what I hear?”

“No, I’m throwing it at your face, you—”

I tuned out the arguing children and instead focused on the alligator. Indeed, it wasn’t a typical dungeon creature, though at a closer glance, it wasn’t entirely normal either. Even now, as mana clung to its frame much more closely than it would outside the dungeon.

On a whim, I sliced off a part of its soul, collecting the rest for safekeeping, summoned a mind construct on a whim and tied the two together. The result was…

The body had accepted both the crippled soul and the new mind with a surprising ease, and the body’s high mana content meant that the mana I had to actively supply to the new Wight was minimal.

This posited some interesting developments, but not ones I had time to analyze in detail. Suffice to say, I threw away the assumption that monsters would dissipate upon being killed.

I sent the alligator on its way with instructions to report back if it found anything that looked like a building—actually, that wasn’t entirely true. The Wight mind didn’t have any baseline for what a ‘building’ should look like, so what it was searching for was more along the lines of ‘regular structures with lots of straight lines.’ Hopefully, it wouldn’t point us to a giant beehive.

I sent out another scan, this time with a greater radius. The alligator was fine, but it was hardly the optimal shape for a scout, and we needed more than one scout if we wanted to find the temple in time.

My eyes widened a bit at what I found, and called out to the children to stop bickering. I’d found the animals for the job.

~*~

“Why me?” Shiro whined as my newest scouts flew off, each in a different direction.

“You’re the tank,” Cam hedged. “Well, so’s the bear, but you’re better at taking a beating.”

“And I don’t mind taking a beating if it means we all get to go home at the end of the day,” Shiro agreed, “but I didn’t sign up to be pecked by a flock of wild geese!”

He yelled those last words loud enough that the turtle that had been sitting on a log nearby fell backwards and splashed into the muddy water. The few birds who hadn’t been spooked by the goose massacre were definitely spooked now as they took off to avoid the irate boy.

“It’s what you get for making shit puns,” Sarah said. “The dungeon probably summoned them just to get you to shut up.” Her delivery was deadpan, and for a moment, I wondered if she actually believed it.

I had been inclined to chalk it up to coincidence that a sizeable flock of geese had been close to where the dragon had fallen, but if the dungeon was intelligent, then there was a chance their presence had been premeditated. Though, in that case, it would have meant that the dungeon knew Shiro would play the role of bait, while we rounded them up, and then tank after the proper battle began—which was an intimidating line of thought and I immediately abandoned it.

This dungeon was complicated enough without assigning human feelings and emotions to it.

Another surprising thing of note had been finding that I’d gained a level while fighting the wild geese—which meant that either I’d been close to a level up before, or that the System considered the geese to be particularly fearsome opponents. Which, judging by the still-healing peck marks on Shiro’s skin, wasn’t that far off.

I dumped the new point into Intelligence, since I’d yet to find a reason to put points into anything else, and looked at my Status.

Name

Julian Crane

Level

43

Class

Archmagus of Life and Death

Species

Lich (Human)

Status

Health

100/100

Stamina

∞

Willpower

100/100

Attributes

Strength

1

Dexterity

1

Intelligence

44

Constitution

1

Endurance

1

Will

1

Unassigned

0

Skills

Soul Magic

30

Mind Magic

36

Force Magic

35

Matter Magic

25

Fate Magic

32

Dimension Magic

23

Multi-disciplinarity

17

Legacy of the Creator

1

Perks

Arcane Savant

Paragon of Humanity

Nothing else had changed, probably since all the magic I’d cast during the past few days had been things I’d known by rote. From what I’d noticed, the System only rewarded people when they applied themselves, or discovered something new—which explained why, in terms of skills, those I was the best at lagged behind the ones I was merely mediocre at. Or rather, had been lagging before I’d created Etin.

All in all, it felt like a good omen to start the dungeon with a level up. All I needed now was to wait for my new army of undead geese to report back with good news, and we’d be clearing this trial in no time.