Leornal moved around the space and placed several magical defenses- wards, he called them. They weren’t his specialty, but since the grotesque gremlins were fairly weak individually, he believed they would serve to give the two of them enough time to rest before they settled on a plan.

Meanwhile, Mason began digging into his status screens, channeling Recovery all the while. There were several skill gains; two to Stamina Drain, Focus, and Blade Specialization, three to Mana Sight and Staff Specialization, and one to Mana Manipulation. His intelligence focus point had been integrated, and he noticed he also received an inexplicable improvement to wisdom as well. He took it as a sign that stats could definitely improve even under normal circumstances if he trained properly.

He also had a new challenge.

Congratulations, you’ve unlocked the challenge: Scourge of the Rotten Gremlins.

Scourge of the Rotten Gremlins: Trapped underground for centuries for their sentience to decay, all that is left of these creatures is hunger and curiosity. Contribute to their eradication, for the weak must perish or rise stronger.

On a whim, he used Analyze on the challenge, and saw his skill level flick up one- the first time in a while.

The Rotten Gremlins are the remnants of an unidentified race. Corrupted down to the mana of their souls, they are beyond redemption. This challenge will reward meaningful contributions toward ending their suffering. Rewards will vary based on methods utilized.

Though it was still a non-specific explanation, Mason took that as intentional based on the final message. These challenges didn’t seem static- they would actually reward him based on what he accomplished and how. Since he was low on Focus Points, and clearly needed to grow stronger if he were to match Torysen in any meaningful way, he couldn’t help but settle on the fact that he’d have to take this seriously.

He was shaken from his musings by Leornal talking. “What makes you change when you fight?” His voice was gruff and not altogether friendly.

Mason looked over at the man with Focus active. It was the only way he could see him in the dim light besides Mana Sight which he still didn’t have a handle on. He was crouched in a comfortable position, waiting, and staring intently at Mason as if looking into him.

“I don’t know what you mean. I just try to use the skills I can think of and swing my staff hard. It’s all part of not dying, I guess.”

“No, it’s not your attitude that changes. You change. There’s darkness, and chaos, and anger. It looks as if your very mana is trying to pull you to pieces. And you fight much better than someone of your nature should. Not well, but better.”

Looking at his hands, Mason saw the same disorienting delusion that had plagued him after his first cast of soul steal. His body shifted before him: first with a reddish tint to his skin, and then Mowry’s darker hands, and there was even the faintest sign of the greyish color of Geralt. He was changing. He just didn’t always notice it.

“I’ll have to pay more attention next time we fight those ugly things, then,” Mason replied quietly.

“There are many things you should pay better attention to,” Leornal responded with a huff.

They both rested for a while longer, and Mason asked, “So you were an accountant?”

That prompted a wry smile on the older man’s lined face, “It was boring, but safe. I worked for a company that sold toilets.” He shook his head, remembering. “Can you imagine? I spent my life counting how much money people spent on toilets, and now I live in a world that doesn’t even have any.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way but I always forget you guys were normal, modern people before this. A few minutes of sparring with Torysen and I start to believe you all were born and raised fighting monsters.”

Leornal laughed at that, and the smile looked pleasant on his age-worn face, “Our world was not without threats, but few ever made it much further than the source points. Definitely nowhere near the cities. And what about you? Were you some warrior apprentice or the child of a great king?”

“I wish. I was a student, mostly. Studying business management and leadership. It was a joke, and at this point,” Mason gestured to the pile of bloody corpses down the passageway, “A rather tragic one at that. I can’t say I did much of anything to be proud of back in my old life. I worked delivering pizza for a time, and interned for a company that, after six months, I still could hardly tell you what they did.”

“Ah, looks like we have more in common than I would have thought. We both wasted our lives. But I’m curious to know what this pizza is. Is it food, or some sort of furniture?”

“It’s a food, but please don’t get me thinking about that now,” Mason began rummaging through his bag, and pulled out a few of the nuts and berries he still had from his previous foraging. “These are not nearly as delicious as a fresh, cheesy pizza. But you’ve got to tell me, how do you go about becoming an accountant in a world with actual magic?”

Leornal shook his head, “Magic didn’t quite feel like it does here. You could have learned how to use a sword to slay your enemies in your world, right? But you didn’t, because you had those pizzas to deliver and your studies to bore you. Civilization takes something from people. Makes their lives damn boring, if you ask me.

“I did learn archery on Marra,” Leornal continued, “but I shot targets for fun. I didn’t have any of these powerful skills that I have here. I bought a bow at a fair where people dress up and pretend they were still living hundreds of years ago. Please, don’t judge my people for being idiots.”

It was Mason’s turn to laugh, “We have that too, we call it a Renaissance Fair. They’re actually pretty fun.”

“The word you use sounds like the same word we use for ours, so it must be the same thing, to some extent.” He sighed, “at least the Trials make communicating easier. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hear whatever backwater slurry your human language sounds like.”

“Thank god for small miracles, I guess,” Mason said non-committally, not really willing to probe too deeply into the mysteries of communicating with an alien species.

“We have a decision to make now, you know,” Leornal’s face turned serious, the stern look creasing his face. “Do we go back through the sealed door, and struggle to find our path through the maze back to the entrance? Or do we continue down this dark passageway into another maze, hoping to find some other entrance? I presume we’ll be swarmed by a legion of biting, scratching, feral beasts no matter which option we choose.”

Mason shrugged, hard. “You present such great options, I really don’t know how to choose. At least whichever route we take, I have a challenge that should reward me for killing enough of these guys.”

An eyebrow raised, “Oh, you got that too? Well then, more to bind us than just our unavoidable deaths. So still, you have to choose. It’s your fault we’ve been trapped away from the others. I’d like to collect reasons to blame you.”

“It wasn’t my- nevermind. I really don’t know, which do you think is smarter? You’re the one with experience.”

“I thought youth meant you were supposed to be decisive and reckless? How am I supposed to know which path is going to kill us faster?”

“Listen, just pick. I won’t even blame you when it ends up being a horrible decision.”

Leornal snapped, “This is how I die, bickering with a pale child who can barely use mana.”

“Why does everyone keep bringing that up? I’m getting better at it. For a human, I’m the most powerful wizard to ever live!”

“A wizard?” Leornal sneered, “You’re hardly a caster, let alone a spellcrafter or a source master. And if you’re the best humanity has to offer, then I very much pity your people when they enter the Trials.”

Mason sobered up at this very real reminder of his circumstances. “Let’s go down.”

“And what makes you so decisive now? Trying to bury yourself now so nobody need worry about your grave?”

“If we go deeper, we have a chance of finding something to make me stronger. If I’m the best humanity has to offer, I’m going to become damned powerful just so I don’t have to keep listening to people bitch about my decisions."

“This is a fool idea,” Leornal complained as they began their descent further into the dark passageway.

Mason pivoted and pointed angrily, “You told me to choose, so I did.”

“You’re right, and I was a fool to say that and you were a larger fool to take me up on it,” Leornal shrugged, walking right past the boy.

“We can always turn around.”

“We’d be fools to go back,” was Leornal’s only response, and the two carried on, weapons readied. “There’s more mana down this way too, which, after that fight, I need.”

From time to time, they’d see a gremlin or two scurrying in or out of some dark hole. Leornal twitched each time, and Mason froze solid, but neither were willing to risk engaging in case they brought on another onslaught.

The caverns were dark, and cold, but beyond that, there was little to interest the eye. Paths branched this way and that, but it would take an expert tracker to make any sense of them. Consequently, every time they passed a particularly unsettling fork in the path, Leornal made certain to note that if they hadn’t been separated from their team, they would have had an expert tracker in Sentir.

After ages of seeing almost no change in the sloping, winding corridor besides a small increase in mana density, the pathway eventually began to widen out. They were deep underground now, much farther down than the castle of the Biord had been.

Then the corridor widened to a cavern, and they were met with a sight neither of them had imagined. Small orbs dotted the distance emitting a small amount of light and mana, and the two could see a city quite unlike the Biord’s. Whereas the latter had been dug into the stone itself, here the city was merely housed underground.

The ambient light was enough for them to notice that the steep external walls of this place were hewn and carved by tools. They weren’t exactly elaborate, but clearly were done by something akin to professionals. The tunnels they had just been meandering through, however, looked like they may just have been dug by hand. Gremlin hands, if they thought it through.

How long had they been down there to dig such an extensive network of tunnels?

The ceiling of this chamber could have been several hundred feet high for all Mason knew, and there was almost no seeing the ends of the chamber in any direction. Looking back, there were a great many entrances to this room, many leading to bridges which led to terraces along the smooth-cut, stone buildings which rose several stories and wove and interconnected from one end of the cavern to the next.

The buildings were immense, as if New York City had been built right into the walls and spires of an ancient cave. They weren’t unimpressive, either- even with the poor lighting, Mason could make out elaborate trims on the doorframes, patios off the higher floors, and thankfully railings on the myriad walkways.

This wasn’t anything like what he would have suspected from an underground city. The multi-colored lights glimmered off the silver, greys, and blues of the stones, as well as the water which dripped and pooled in the ruins. It was unquestionably beautiful, and drew plenty of questions in Mason’s mind of what kind of people could have built this.

And a worse realization came to him: To fully explore the city before them would take months.

“Good a place as any to die, I guess,” Leornal said, destroying any sense of wonder Mason had been holding onto

“Maybe all its inhabitants were wandering in the upper passages, looking for a meal. This place could be deserted,” Mason suggested hopefully.

“I’m certain we’ll find out soon.”

The passageway that had led them into the city had been right on the ground floor, so they were forced to weave their way between the buildings to reach an entrance that they thought would take them up. A tingling sense of regret filled both of them as they recognized the likelihood of finding a way from this city back to the surface was little to none, but to their credit, they were committed to their choices.

They encountered the first of the enemies on the second floor, deep enough within the maze of the city to have lost any hope of turning back. This time, Leornal stilled his bow.

Taller than the gremlins from before, this was clearly still a relative of theirs. The white skin and contorted muscles were proof enough, though Leornal’s senses stuck on the impossibly disturbed flow of mana. But this was larger; slightly shorter than a human, but with wide shoulders that looked more swollen than strong. It hunched over something, turned away from the two, and shook as it crouched and babbled.

To get a better look, Leornal gently cast out a burst of loose mana, and almost the moment the mana hit the creature, it turned wide around and stared with bloodshot eyes out of a puffy, swollen face. It lunged for him with a snarl and a gurgle and was only barely intercepted by Mason’s sword plunging into its chest. Both of them were stunned for a moment, and Mason knew that the only reason his sword had made it even a few inches into that thick skin was because of the beast’s own momentum.

As Mason stood there, stupidly, it made several more grotesque noises and then continued trying to charge even as it pushed itself deeper onto Mason’s blade. It had only been a split-second attack, but its claws left several deep gashes on Mason’s chest and arm since he failed to back away after attacking.

Leornal drew his dagger and stabbed it swiftly in both eyes, and as a putrid black goo seeped out, it finally went limp and collapsed.

Mason swore as he looked at the state of his arm, and the disgusting remnants left on his sword. “That’s going to get infected. God that thing is… it’s atrocious, really,” Mason exclaimed, kicking the body onto its back.

“I wish I could deny it, but you’re right, it’s more sickening than you, Demon,” Leornal stated calmly, reaching for Mason’s wounded arm.

He muttered a long incantation and eventually funneled mana into each of Mason’s wounds. Though they didn’t quite stitch up, a bit of the sharp stinging pain left them, and Mason breathed a sigh of relief at that. “You’re a healer, too? Is there anything you can’t do?”

Leornal looked perplexed, “You really don’t know a thing. That was Tralskies First Aid rune, they teach every child on Marra that one. It purifies the wound and activates the body’s natural healing. It’d take a greater magician than me to even learn the source rune for a true healing spell.”

“Okay, I’m going to need to ask you about twenty questions on runes and spells later, but for now…” Mason knelt on the ground near where the beast had originally stood, “What the hell is this?”

It was a small pebble with a smooth texture, but with evenly spaced divots throughout its whole surface. Its black luster seemed to reflect even the palest bit of light, which meant a lot in that particular environment.

Leornal took the stone from Mason, “That is the puniest mana crystal I’ve ever seen. Looks professionally crafted, but its old. It was probably ten times this size once, before it’d been used to suck mana dry from the air about a billion times. There’s almost nothing in it, either.”

“What do you think it was trying to do with it? Cast a spell?” Mason asked.

“With its mana channels? No, it probably couldn’t conduct mana half as well as you. Might be why my mana sight enraged it so much. Or,” he held the stone in front of his eye, “It might have just been hungry. Mana races really don’t do well when they’re deprived.”

“I thought you said the mana density was high down here. Why would it need some pebble if it can just generate the mana or pull it from the air?”

Leornal looked at Mason like he was crazy, “Few people can generate enough mana to get by for long without needing to feed off a mana source. Ambient mana in the air is nice, it can make you comfortable if you have healthy mana channels to pull it through. But the ambient mana in these caves is not nearly enough, and his mana channels were mutilated. May be a disease, might be the backlash from sort of spell.”

“We have no idea how long he was down here then, I guess. Well, note to self, keep up with the juice,” Mason said as he started to rummage through the rest of the room. It looked as if it had been ransacked, and he wondered if the mana crystal had been hidden here.

There was an overturned table that had scattered its contents to the room- some sort of stoppered containers which had shattered, and all sorts of objects which were busted and cracked when they happened to be in less than a hundred pieces on the floor.

Looking back at the creature, it was covered from the waist down with what was basically a skirt, though made of a fabric that was nothing Mason could identify. He couldn’t imagine this beast once having a concept of shame enough to dress itself.

They moved out of the room and out onto one of the many suspended bridges which connected the tall, seamless structures. From here, the city actually looked beautiful. The stone that made up the buildings was a greenish white, cracked and aged, but sturdy enough in most places.

Looking in the distance, there was actually a great deal of light in the city was well, small sources that flickered and glowed, presumably out-of-reach devices that pulled on the low ambient mana, or bioluminescent plants. The light was soft enough that the buildings seem to bathe in it, and the few shadows were pale.

Still, especially when under the cover of the buildings, Mason could hardly see more than a few feet with any clarity when he didn’t have Focus up. Thankfully, his higher level in the skill meant that it used less stamina, and his endurance had improved to the point that he could recover fairly quickly. A small blessing of the Trials, he figured.

They’d gone through several dozen ransacked rooms, treading carefully around broken tables, vases, items and artifacts of various natures so as not to injure themselves, when Leornal finally found something worth noticing.

In a much larger room, lined with the remains of destroyed tables, he scrambled up to a tall device. There was a flat, crystalline disc hidden behind a translucent stone case. There were runes inscribed all over it in a very orderly fashion, and panels lower down looked shaped for humanoid hands.

“Mason, do you know what this is?” Leornal almost shouted, running his hands up and down the device excitedly.

“Some sort of get-the-hell-out-of-here device?” Mason asked with a shrug.

“It’s a device used to store information, and lots of it at that. It could contain maps, histories, spells. It could tell us what we need to know to get the hell out of here,” he added helpfully.

“Alright, so turn it on,” Mason said, sitting down on a pile of stone.

“Right, right.” Leornal touched the panels at the bottom, sending in a few testing bits of mana. He grinned when it seemed receptive, and then he poured a lot of mana in it.

A few seconds passed, and he made a strange noise. Mason watched him curiously, but Leornal just kept pushing his mana and moving his hands. Then, Leornal muttered, “Fuck, oh fuck.”

Maybe that was okay. Just some bad news about this place. Considering the state of it, there probably was some sort of disease floating around. It probably turned people into raging, mana hungry beasts, he figured. Were diseases even able to spread across species? Maybe it was a magical disease.

Finally, settling the matter, Leornal turned back to Mason with a look of panic just as a loud crash sounded from somewhere above them, “Cover those doorways, now!”

Mason didn’t ask questions at first, just began hauling rubble to the doorway and cramming it in unceremoniously. He noted with satisfaction that he could move pieces he never would have been able to a few weeks ago. Still, stronger didn’t mean he was strong, and he had hardly moved much rubble before he felt the building shake, and then was momentarily blinded as runes in the ceiling lit up brightly.

The light wasn’t contained to that room, he saw each of the walkways beyond the doors begin to glow brightly at the sides, and to the best of his comprehension, it sounded like he was hearing the whirring of motors a few floors up as well. He turned back to his companion, “What the hell did you do?”

“This,” he hesitated, turning between Mason and the machine several times, “Is more than a storage device. It’s actually a terminal of sorts. It seems to be connected to a whole chunk of the city, if not the entire thing. And to power up the storage functions…”

“You need to pump it full of enough power to turn on the entire fucking city? Do you even have that kind of strength?” Mason asked, even as he began throwing debris in the doorways faster and faster.

“It’ll only turn on the functions of this building, I think. These runes are incredibly efficient, the lights came on with just a few points of mana… but it needs more. A lot more.”

“Okay, can you do it?”

“Yeah, maybe.” Leornal pounded his hands on the console and hissed, “No, definitely. It won’t take a whole lot, but it will take time. The terminal seems to be doing a lot of things now that it’s awake for the first time in who knows how long,” he looked in the distance as the two of them heard a huge crash in the distance. “Updates, god dammit,” he swore.

“Do you remember how that beast drooled over that tiny mana stone? Are you lighting up a giant beacon of mana right now?” Mason asked, certain of the answer even as he asked.

“I hope you’re good at barricading the doors. We need this information,” Leornal said even as he turned back to the machine and pumped in more mana.

The sounds of far off rumbling and crashes continued, and Mason had a bad feeling that Leornal had activated something a lot more serious than the emergency lights. He glanced through the cracks in the rubble he had piled at the doorway, and saw that the dim smattering of lights outside had become a prominent glow, and although it was dimmer in the distance, it still seemed brighter than before.

“How long will this take, Leornal? I really don’t think we should stay here long,” Mason worried.

“Do you want the information or not, Mason?” He turned around, but kept his hands working on the panels. “Now would be a good time to start pulling out that darker mana, and your sword.”

Mason looked at the open wounds on his arm and felt a pang of pain as he remembered them. Nevertheless, he pulled out his short sword and looked it up and down. It was thin and unadorned, but the edge was sharp and the tip was pointy. He then looked at his fortifications and felt uncertain. If he had been able to pile them up in a few minutes, he didn’t think they would last long against enraged, mana-starved beasts.

But both entrances were sealed, for now.