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Tonight, we have a special guest: Eric Lancaster, the head of NYPD’s newest unit, the Unusual Events Response Team! He’ll be here to walk us through what they do and don’t do (and we’re even going to ask him some questions about the mysterious Tutorial!)

Serenity woke to a hand on his back. “Rissa?” He moved to snuggle closer to her, only to realize that she wasn’t there.

It wasn’t Rissa’s hand on his shoulder. It was a colorful, heavily scaled lizard-man. It took Serenity a moment to put the pieces together in his still-sleepy brain. “Raz?”

“Serenity?” Raz’s voice sounded doubtful.

Serenity blinked and looked up at Raz. He caught Katya from the corner of his eye; unlike Raz, she didn’t look confused. Worried and prepared to fight, but he didn’t get the impression that she was about to attack. Her attention was focused on him.

Why?

Serenity knew he wasn’t really awake yet when he realized they were worried because he was in his dragon form. He should have realized that much faster. “Oh. Yeah. It’s me. Sorry.”

He ducked under the covers and shifted as quickly as he could manage. Once he was back to his normal form, Serenity poked his head out of his bedroll. “Sorry about that. I guess I should have warned you. I, er, have a bad habit of shapeshifting into a baby dragon when I fall asleep.”

“Ahh. Woke your bloodline up recently then?” Katya sounded surprisingly sympathetic. “One of my uncles did that when I was a child. He turned into a housecat. I seem to remember he wasn’t very happy about it.”

Serenity chuckled. “I think a housecat might be more useful than a baby dragon. At least you expect to see cats everywhere, no one’s going to assume you’re a big threat.”

Katya grinned. “Yeah, but he did it any time he got upset for months. Some of my cousins would tease him just so see if they could get him to shapeshift. Granda let them, said it taught control. I don’t think Uncle Rey liked learning that way.”

“I can see why not. How long did it take?” Serenity wasn’t sure it was really comparable, but he really wanted to stop shifting in his sleep.

“Not sure. He went away for a few years to learn a new engraving method, I think his mentor had a work requirement before he’d teach it. When he got back, he only shifted when he wanted to. Didn’t stop Alithen from trying, until he got a faceful of Uncle Rey’s claws. He’d picked up partial shapeshifting sometime when he was gone.” Katya was still smiling.

Serenity pulled himself out of his bedroll and started getting ready for the day.

Once they were ready to start the delve, Serenity stopped and tried to direct his thoughts at the Voice.

It says to request that my Death affinity be blocked for the duration of the dungeon. I’d like that route, please.

[Path Selected: Reinforcing the Path]

[Path Rejected: Take No Unnecessary Risks]

[Path Rejected: Fight for Dominance]

[Path Rejected: Threading the Needle]

Serenity felt an oppressive force wash over him. He recognized it as Death-attuned mana, but it didn’t feel comfortable or welcoming the way it usually did. Instead, it seemed both hostile and curious. He felt it move around him. Oddly, it felt like there were two separate flows of Death mana - one centered on and controlled by the Heart in his chest and one from outside.

The hostility seemed to emanate from the Heart, while the external mana felt curious and seemed inclined to move around and through him. He’d never felt mana behave like that before. It was almost like it had a mind behind it.

Could it be the dungeon?

Serenity looked around and tried to focus on the mana. “Hello?”

Nothing happened other than making himself feel silly.

As they headed towards the temple in the distance, they ran into a few skeletons. The first few were dressed in rags that had probably been rags even when the people wearing them were alive. They threw themselves at the group individually and any of the three could handle them with ease.

Once they got close to the temple, they started seeing groups of skeletons dressed in the rags of clothing that had once been decently made. These skeletons had weapons, if you could call them that. They were really the tools of everyday life, and it was clear the skeletons did not truly know how to use them as weapons. They were still easily defeated.

One of these skeletons had the first monster core in the dungeon. The monster hadn’t been anything special, but when Serenity stepped near the corpse, he felt the core. He quickly looted it, then mentioned it to the others. Katya suggested he hang onto it; as far as she was concerned, they could split up loot when they finished the dungeon. The only reason to expect much of the dungeon was that it hadn’t been explored in a long time, if ever. Unattended dungeons were more likely to have interesting things.

There was no door on the front of the temple; it appeared to have been made without one.They walked through the entrance and found themselves in an enclosed courtyard completely filled with the skeletons of priests and priestesses. None of them had weapons; instead, they all used magic.

Serenity decided to use his spell deflection bracers; while these skeletons weren’t a particularly large threat, he did want to be certain he could use the bracers, and this was the perfect time to test them. Hopefully the relatively small amount of magic the skeletons were using wouldn’t damage them too much.

He picked a good moment, when he could take a shot squarely on the bracer instead of simply avoiding it, and splashed it back at the skeleton. It was intuitive and simple; Serenity wasn’t sure why the bracers called out “sufficient control” as a requirement for redirecting the magic.

The reflected firebolt slammed into the skeleton and it fell. Good enough. He’d definitely be able to use them when it mattered. Serenity went back to avoiding what he could and taking what he couldn’t avoid. They didn’t really do all that much damage, fortunately. There were a lot of them, and if they’d been as dangerous as they could have been, it might have been a problem.

Serenity ended up in front, keeping the skeletons’ attention and preventing them from reaching Raz and Katya. He wasn’t even using Infused Strike; his weapon alone did enough damage to severely injure or kill them, so there wasn’t any reason to spend the stamina. He destroyed quite a few in the process, but it was Katya’s large-area spells that took out the most.

After a handful of skeletons were down, Serenity started noticing something odd. When one was damaged but not destroyed, one of the other skeletons would often stop attacking to do something to the damaged skeleton; it seemed like they were trying to heal them, but each time the damaged skeleton fell apart instead of getting back up.

There was no way he could tell what was happening with as much magic as was being thrown around. Life-Sight was fast enough but insufficient - it couldn’t see spells being cast - while any other way to see the magic would be too slow. It was too bad he’d gotten Essence Sight instead of Magesight.

If he’d prepared for it, he knew a spell that could grant an enhanced form of Magesight … but his Evoker level wasn’t high enough to infuse a spell yet. He’d definitely want to infuse a Magesight in the future, until he had it as a Skill. Until then, he’d have to depend on others. “Katya! Can you watch for when one of them gets damaged? The other skeletons do something. Is it Life magic or are they stealing the Death magic?”

There were only a few skeletons left when Katya replied. “Life magic. They’re … killing the injured with Life magic? How can skeletons do that?”

“Lack of intelligence,” Serenity called back. “I think they’re an echo of a living temple, doing what the people would have done in life.”

“No, I mean - how can they use Life magic? They’re undead! That’s supposed to be impossible”

Serenity killed the last skeleton as he snorted. “That’s like saying a living person can’t practice Death magic. Undead mana channels work really well for Death magic, but Life magic isn’t any more of a problem than say Fire magic. Certain kinds of Divine magic don’t work, but that’s because the deity doesn’t permit their use by undead, not because the undead is incapable.”

“You sound like a teacher.” Katya looked around the room at the skeletons, most of which were quickly vanishing. “Are there any cores?”

Serenity walked around the room, but only found two cores. “I am a teacher, but I didn’t mean to lecture you.”

Katya ignored his semi-apology. “I see two doors out of here, both at the back of the courtyard. Right or left?”

“Do you know anything about ancient Tzintkra temples? They probably lead different places.” Serenity walked to the back of the courtyard, between the two doors. They looked identical; both painted wood, with a symbol that seemed embossed instead of painted, though he expected it was painted as well. Serenity compared the two symbols, hoping they would help, but they were identical as well - at least, as far as he could tell. If they were different in color, that was the only difference; the shape was the same. At Katya’s headshake, Serenity shrugged and opened one of the doors. “I’ll just pick one then.”

He was pretty sure the only reason he was leading was that he was the only person good at fighting in melee between the three of them. Katya and Raz both had a strong tendency to stand still and chant to cast spells; they didn’t seem to have ever been taught to weave spellcasting into their fighting style. Admittedly, Serenity wasn’t doing much of that right now; he didn’t have the Skills to accelerate his casting yet, though he knew Evoker would change that.

The door led to a passageway that wound around another room, before opening into it with another doorless opening. The opening led onto a large hall that seemed studded with alcoves. Each alcove held a statue or carved symbol of some sort, with a basin in front of each. From the opening, Serenity could only see five of the alcoves. Two of the basins had something in them - a pair of shoes in one and what looked like coins in the other. There were a few skeletons dressed in what looked like ordinary clothes scattered around the room, at different alcoves. One alcove held someone in rich clothing and two guards.

Serenity turned to Raz and Katya. “You two ready? I think this will be easy if we can get them to come to us.” They nodded and he stepped a couple paces into the room, then clanged the butt of his naginata on the floor to get the skeletons’ attention. As the skeletons charged him, he pushed mana into his scales, hardening them with Scale Hardening. Someday he’d have to see if he could do it with Essence the way the skill said, but today wasn’t the day.

The fight was almost ridiculously easy. As each skeleton charged him, Serenity sliced it and it fell. If more than one arrived at once, Raz or Katya would blast the second skeleton. The two guards took a few extra hits, but even they only managed to get one hit on Serenity between the two of them, and it skidded off his armor.

The only damage that got through was from the skeleton the two guards had been with - she was apparently a mage of some sort, and kept throwing firebolts at Serenity until he had a long enough moment to Infuse a strike with plasma and Far Strike it back at her. It ate a hefty portion of Serenity’s stamina, but she fell to a single attack.

The damage to Serenity’s armor was slowly repairing itself, but he’d be lucky to have it fully recovered by morning. The damage to his body was all to his scales; with the hardening, they’d stopped everything. He finished healing and brushed the ash off as best he could while the other two walked into the room.

“Your armor sure takes a beating,” Katya observed.

“Better it than me. That’s what the Self-Repair enchant is for, after all.” Serenity was smiling. It’d been an easy fight, but a fun one. He was looking forward to whatever else the dungeon held; so far, it’d really been too easy, but at least it hadn’t felt malicious. This dungeon seemed more like a game than a real deadly fight.