Octavius held his left hand out in front of him as he ran. With his left hand occupied with preventing any unfortunate collisions with the hard stone walls, his right was left to hold his weapon, a jagged rock.

His footsteps were uneven, and every dozen steps he would brace himself against a wall. While he might have healed quickly over the previous handful of hours, his leg was still far from its optimal condition.

It was incredibly difficult to tell in the dark, but he guessed that he had traveled about a hundred feet before the hallway changed. His left hand failed to contact the wall that would signal a turn, but the gentle draft coming from his right convinced him to use his shadow sense spell. The core of mana in his chest was just more than half empty, but the spell wouldn’t use more than five points of mana. Concentrating, he connected himself to a thin layer of the darkness that was against the floor. Once a small circle of shadow was under his control, he began to move it around. What he found confused him.

He was standing in the middle of a four-way intersection. There wasn’t the slightest hint of slight from any direction. The draft that came from his right lent credence to the thrall’s directions, but that didn’t explain where he was. Frowning, he decided to continue forward for a minute. He had a sneaking suspicion about what he would find.

The hallway continued for another hundred or so feet before his fingers brushed against cold stone. Stopping his limping stride, he felt along the wall with his hand. Sure enough, the wall contained three small holes at about knee height. His jaw clenched at the thought that the thralls had an entire prison set up for humans.

He doubted that there was anyone in the cell at the moment. If someone was, they would have easily been able to hear his approach. The shape of the tunnel caused even the soft sound of his boots against the stone floor to echo in the confined space. Even then, he softly called out to anyone that might have been in the cell.

“Hello!” his voice was barely above a harsh whisper, “Is there anyone in there?”

He breathed a sigh of relief when he realized that the cell was empty. While it would have been good to know if the thralls had imprisoned other humans, he hoped that they hadn’t. In his injured condition, he wasn’t sure that he could escape alone. Escaping with another lower-level human would be impossible for all intents and purposes.

Forcing himself back up to his feet, he limped back to the four-way intersection. Turning to his left, he followed the hallway that the draft came from.

Two rights and a left, he remembered, but that isn’t exactly clear.

Concentrating, he realized that the draft carried the sounds of voices with it. There were three voices. They all had the gravelly tone that he had come to associate with the thralls. The three sang a strange chant that made no sense to Octavius.

Are they not singing in a common ranked language? He wondered.

Shaking his head, he forced himself to continue onward more carefully. It wasn’t long before light entered his eyes. A large wooden slab of a door was opened inward. Beyond the door, the gentle glow of the thralls’ magical lights cast long shadows into the hallway.

Octavius crept forward along the left wall until he was behind the door. Peering slowly into the large corridor beyond the doorway, he found it entirely deserted. The three low voices came from his left. The corridor to his right stretched into the distance. It started to tilt slightly upward after a dozen feet. He could only see about two hundred feet down the corridor before its incline hid it from view.

With no thralls in sight, he stepped into the plain, wide corridor and peered in both directions. The corridor was merely a larger version of the hallway he had just exited. Its walls were made of grey stone and stood six feet across. Every dozen feet, an orb of gentle light floated lazily on the ceiling.

The corridor that extended to his left seemed to end rather abruptly at a ‘Y’ junction. The voices echoed up from the right fork, while the left fork sloped downward and out of sight. Frowning, he considered his options.

The exit was almost definitely to the right. His problem was that there were also likely thralls in that direction. His chances of escaping while largely unarmed, injured, and with just about half his mana were slim. He needed potions.

The three voices were the only sound that came from the tunnel, ruling out any possibility of a concert-like performance. No, Octavius decided, It’s more likely to be some sort of magic.

The three thralls might be his best chance of getting potions before his escape was noticed. As soon as it was, it would likely become almost impossible to find a small group of thralls unaware. If the thralls were singing, it meant they definitely weren’t ready to be attacked.

I might be able to kill them all with a shadow grenade, he decided, It would put me into the range of mana exhaustion, but a mana potion would fix that. I may as well go scout it out.

As he turned left, he moved slowly. The corridor left him exposed visually, but it also left him far more exposed auditorily. Any sound he made at that point would echo through the tight stone confines and likely alert the thralls that someone was coming.

He clenched his jaw and lifted his right leg off the floor to avoid the scraping sound of his boot against the stone floor. It protested the movement vehemently, but he ignored it. If there was one thing that everyone learned when becoming a special operator, it was how to push through pain and discomfort.

The voices grew increasingly louder as he approached the fork in the corridor. Soon enough, he was following the smaller hallway toward them. The lights became more spaced out as he entered the hallway. Instead of every dozen feet, these lights were positioned every two dozen.

The effect was eerie. Long shadows gave the irregular stone walls a strange appearance. That, along with the strange chanting of the thralls, created an unearthly ambiance.

Every step threatened to send a cascade of echoes down the stone hallway. As he followed the right fork, it curved to the right. After two hundred feet, the end of the hallway came into sight. An arched wooden door blocked the way through. The thrall’s mysterious chanting came from the large gap below the door.

Even through the door, the voices of the thralls had become louder than a spoken voice, covering any soft sounds that he made as he crept forward to the door. He gently laid his left hand on the wooden grain. The contact sent vibrations down his arm from the thralls’ chanting. Moving slowly to his knees, he placed his ear to the ground and peered under the door and into the cavern.

The moment the path of the sound reached him unimpeded, his whole body shook. The large arched ceiling of the cavern sent reverberations of the haunting chant around the room. The cavern itself was circular, maybe a dozen yards across. Three large orbs of light that were suspended against the walls illuminated the room with a dim glow.

The three thralls knelt in a circle in the middle of the room. Their four-fingered hands were extended to a perfectly spherical object that hovered between them. The scene had an ancient, almost religious, aura that was only broken by a plain wooden table that stood to one side of the thralls.

The table was low and plain, with four legs and a small top. On its surface was a strange container that held a series of objects that reflected the dim glow of the lights into Octavius’s eyes. Vials, he realized, they must be potions.

His identify skill had leveled up significantly since the tutorial. While once he couldn’t have gotten any information about an object that was so far away from the skill, that was no longer the case. He used identify on one of the vials.

Mana Potion (Tutorial) - A potion that restores all of the user’s mana over 3 seconds. Can only be used in the tutorial. Only one can be used per day.

A smile snaked its way onto his lips. They had potions and a lot of them. He then used identify on each of the thralls. They each wore a plain white robe in a similar style to the grey robes of the shapers.

Kridr - Thrall (F) (Lvl 25) (Mage*)

Grujz - Thrall (F) (Lvl 26) (Mage*)

Dixzli - Thrall (F) (Lvl 25) (Mage*)

They all have relatively high levels for thralls, he noticed, but they are mages, and that stone shaper was instantly killed by a shadow grenade. I bet that I can get them all if I use almost all of my remaining mana; if I do, then those mana potions would fix me right up.

Before he began his attack, he used identify on the sphere that they were all touching.

Mental Suppressor (Epic) - This feat of artificing was created by a Lord Artificer of Cadila to aid in controlling his house’s thralls. It creates a field that compels those within its range to avoid thinking of something. The artifact only affects those below a threshold of mental strength. Cost (500 mana/minute)

His eyes widened dramatically. The Suppressor is here? He shouted to himself, There’s no way that it isn’t guarded.

He looked over the edges of the room again, searching for the telltale shimmer of an invisible thrall. While three level 25 mages made a formidable guard force, none of them seemed to be actively paying attention to their surroundings.

When his thorough examination revealed nothing, he started scanning the rest of the cavern. He just couldn’t believe that the thralls would leave something so important unguarded. Sure enough, an irregularly shaped shadow caught his eye where it clung to the arched ceiling. Another shadow was just across from it.

Cedr - Thrall (F) (Lvl 21) (Rogue)

Hikzl - Thrall (F) (Lvl 22) (Rogue)

He worried his lower lip in a nervous tick he had begun to pick up over the course of the past handful of days. With two more thralls separated from the main group of three, it would be entirely impossible for him to kill them all with a single shadow grenade. Not to mention that the rogues almost definitely had put most of their points into the physical stats instead of into intelligence.

One part of him wanted to turn around and leave. That the potions and weapons weren’t worth the risk. That part of him thought that his slim chance of escape would turn into nothing if he was killed in the cavern.

Even then, however, another part of him wanted to follow through with his original plan. He could take out the three mages easily enough, and with any luck, the Suppressor itself would be damaged or even destroyed in the attack. His problem then would be the rogues. He would be essentially out of mana, injured, and mostly unarmed. The chances of his survival in such a scenario were slim.

He warred with himself over the problem. The chance to destroy the Suppressor was too good to let slip through his fingers. If the compulsion was lifted, it would make the process of assaulting the thralls’ base en masse much easier. Of course, none of that was worth his life.

He knew that every second that he stayed where he was increased the chances of his escape being noticed. If he was going to make a decision, he would have to make it quickly. His eyes scanned desperately around the cavern for anything that might give him an advantage in a fight.

If I detonate the shadow grenade correctly, the rogues will likely be confused as to what happened, he reasoned, They might even think that the Suppressor just exploded. Even then, that wouldn’t help much if I don’t have a way to attack them. Maybe if I use shadows to cover the lights? No, I doubt I even have enough mana to do such a thing. Just being in the vicinity of Psiz’s robe forced me to use a ridiculous amount of mana to stabilize the spells.

He grit his teeth through the powerful voices of the chanting thralls. It all came down to the fact that he didn’t have enough mana to attack all of the thralls. If he were at his peak condition, he bet that he could’ve taken the two rogues in CQC while he was unarmed. Unfortunately for him, he was not in his peak condition.

He looked at his mana counter. It had regenerated back up to 319/520. A grimace flashed across his face. The shadow grenade he had used to take out Psiz and the stone shaper cost him slightly less than one-hundred-fifty mana. The process of making another and then transporting it across the chamber to the right location would almost certainly cost more than two-hundred. That would put him into the range of the mana exhaustion debuff with two more enemies to fight.

He didn’t know how low his mana could go before he passed out. The lowest his health had gone was when he had fought with the bear. That encounter had left him with about fifteen percent health, and he had barely been able to move and drink a health potion from his belt.

His stamina, however, had dropped to almost five percent when the tutorial first began. While he was entirely exhausted, he knew he could power through that type of pain with the aid of adrenaline and discipline.

Now the question stood like a monolith in front of him. Would mana exhaustion affect him more like having low health or low mana? The answer would decide whether he attacked or fled.

The name mana exhaustion made him think that it would be similar to fatigue. His mind flashed back to the thrall that had gone into a seizure and died from mana exhaustion, but he forced himself to remember that people died from regular exhaustion as well.

His jaw clenched as his mind raced to the resonant chanting of the thralls. The more he thought about it, the more he was leaning toward attacking. The chances of success weren’t very high, but he knew that the chances of his escape would increase drastically if he could get his hands on real weapons and potions.

In the end, it was the opportunity to destroy the Suppressor that tipped the scales. He knew that if having low mana affected him like having low health did, then his chances of survival were virtually nothing. However, if it didn’t, then he was confident in his ability to take out the five thralls and get his hands on the potions.

With his decision made, he began the creation of another large shadow grenade. A headache began to prick at the edges of his consciousness, and it was only exacerbated by the deafening chanting that filled the hallway.

He forced himself to concentrate as he hardened the large portion of shadow that would create the launcher. Next, a dozen spikes of hardened shadow were embedded in it along its horizontal axis. The fact that he only put the projectiles around its horizontal circumference allowed him to save on almost twenty mana.

Next to the first shadow grenade, another ball of shadow began to harden. This one would take out one of the rogues. With only one target, he could afford to make it use only a single projectile. It was formed into the hollow cone shape of the shadow grenades he had used to mine through the stone door of his cell.

By the time he was finished with the grenade, he had to bite his lip harshly. The iron taste of blood filled his mouth, sharpening his focus through the blinding headache. His hands shook violently as he moved the two completed spells below the door and into the room.

The larger of the two was nearly invisible as it inched along the shadowed stone floor. The mana it drew from him increased from almost nothing to about one per second by the time it reached the Suppressor in the middle of the cavern.

Allowing the shadow grenade to remain hidden near its intended target location, he switched the majority of his concentration back to the smaller of the two constructs. It moved quickly along the wall toward the closest of the two rogues. He would have liked to target the higher level of the two, but he needed to conserve as much mana as possible.

As spots grew in his vision, he was thankful that the rogues hid in the shadows and far away from the lights. The moment that the second shadow grenade was in place, he lifted them both to aim at the necks of the various thralls. With the grenades barely a foot or two away from each of their targets, he knew he couldn’t miss.

His entire body was shaking as if he were hypothermic as he detonated the grenades. He didn’t have the mental wherewithal to pay attention to the locations of each of the individual projectiles. Instead, he just waited for a split second and detonated them as well.

He couldn’t see through the spots in his eyes, but he could definitely hear the deafening chanting cut out in an instant. The sound of collapsing bodies reached his ears, and he scrambled desperately to his feet. Any relief that he had gained from the lack of loud sound disappeared with his quick movement. The dim blue lights at the corner of his vision told him that he had killed at least a few of them, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to count the notifications.

Fuck, he cursed, It feels like a fucking migraine.

Even still, he fought through the pain. If he wanted to survive, he had to execute the rest of his plan. When he was lucid enough to think, he guessed that the single surviving thrall would rush through the doors and run to get help in the absence of an obvious target.

Thus, as it slammed the door open with a single blood-soaked, gray hand, it was entirely surprised when it came face to face with a human. Its large black eyes didn’t even have time to widen before Octavius dove onto it.

The soldier might have planned to tackle the thrall, but that wasn’t what really happened. As the thrall pushed itself through the door, he forced himself off the wall that he had been supporting himself with. Adrenaline barely made a dent in the fog of his thoughts as he collapsed onto the thrall. The smaller creature went down more from the sheer weight difference than any amount of skill or technique on Octavius’s part.

When he was level 10, Octavius had overpowered the knife arm of a thrall rogue. Now, his strength stat was much higher. Even with the mana exhaustion debuff, he was able to force the knife that was clenched tightly in its hand back on it.

It brought up its other hand to catch the knife before it entered its eyes, but that barely slowed his progress. Desperately, it began to throw knee strikes into him. The pain they caused didn’t even register through the storm of agony that encompassed his brain.

With a final push, the knife pierced the thrall’s eye, and it went limp. Octavius rolled on to his back next to it. His chest rose and fell with short, shallow gasps that were loud in the sudden silence of the hallway. After a long minute, he was able to regain his faculties enough to read his mana counter.

Mana

43/520

A smile made its way onto his lips as he rolled onto his stomach and forced himself to his feet. He didn’t even feel his injured leg as he stumbled toward the mana potion that he knew was in the cavern. The promise of relief from the blinding pain in his skull was the only thing that allowed him to force one foot in front of the other as he entered the cavern.