The drone of a far away helicopter reached us in the early morning quiet. A spotlight appeared and washed over the forest canopy.

“We need to disappear. Now!” Xiphos shouted.

Stiletto leapt out of a nearby tree and beckoned everyone over to him. “I’ll camouflage everybody! Squeeze in tight!”

We did. The stealth field crackled out from Stiletto and hung around us like a tv tuned to the wrong station.

I smiled as I remembered trying to explain the static of dead air to Seth once and he just didn’t understand what I was talking about. He’d grown up in an era of streaming and digital downloads. The whole idea of television being beamed into the spiky thing on top of our house just didn’t compute.

A shiver of fear washed over me. What happened to Khopesh could have easily happened to me instead. The only reason it didn’t was because I wasn’t the one who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the varcolac and the capcaun weren’t the worst that the Dragonslayer could have on offer, then there was always the chance that next time it might be me.

We all stayed inside Stiletto’s stealth field and headed towards the crack in the foot of the mountain that led into the cave system.

The helicopter lowered its altitude as we grew ever closer to safety. Emblazoned with the Edgebreaker symbol, there was no doubt that Bastard and Scythe had survived. The chopper was too far away to see who was piloting it.

Two bright lights bloomed from under one side of the helicopter, followed by another pair from the other side.

“Oh shit, we have to run!” I said.

Those ignitions were missiles, and they were aimed right at where we’d left our snowmobiles.

We broke into a sprint, trying to stay together, but inevitably our formation broke as the snow-covered ground exploded all around us. The missiles slammed into the ground around us, pelting us with dirt and rocks and causing trees to topple.

One tree landed right in front of me, but Kaiser and I hurdled it easily. I slotted Forest Strider into my anima skill slot and boosted my movement speed. I collected Naginata on the way through, grabbing her unceremoniously from behind before depositing her at the mouth of the cave. Then I went back for Xiphos, who was lagging behind Stiletto.

Xiphos had seen when I’d done for Naginata, and she was ready. She met me face on, and wrapped her arms and legs around me. It still took a lot of muscle to hold another full-grown human aloft, but Forest Strider made it considerably easier to run at speed while doing so.

I was about to turn back for Stiletto, but he was already at the cave mouth. Wide eyed and gritting his teeth, he waved for us to go into the cave.

Stiletto barely made into the mouth of the cave before a marriage of missiles slammed into the cave mouth and caved it in.

The others switched on their flashlights, but I summoned the claws on my right hand instead. They emitted a green glow naturally, which revealed how much trouble we were in.

That last missile blast had completely sealed the exit to the cave. The walls and floor around us were stone. I placed my hand on a nearby wall and called out to Balaur, trying to connect with him, but that connection was nowhere to be found.

We were alone, cut off, but exactly where we needed to be.

“If you have points, invest them now,” Xiphos said as she headed towards the unknown blackness of the cave system. “Be prepared for anything. Edgebreaker are attacking the castle above, and Trajan’s forces have already taken Balaur’s obelisk. Even if we manage to cleanse the corruption from the obelisk, we still need to fight our way back to the surface if we want to make it out of here.”

I nodded in agreement. “I can’t connect with Balaur here either. We might not be able to until we cleanse the dragonslayer’s corruption. We might be on our own.”

Stiletto slapped me on the back. “We’ve survived so far. We can do this. We just need to work as a team, right?”

Kaiser barked. Yes.

Stiletto grinned. “You’re damn right!”

“We must triumph,” Naginata said. “I-I have things I must do back in the world. My parents- I refuse to die here.”

I reached out and put my hand on Naginata’s shoulder. Green claws illuminated her face. “We won’t.”

She smiled. “When you say that, I believe it.”

Kaiser barked in agreement.

For a second I thought I felt some kind of energy pass between myself and Naginata. An impression of familial warmth, combined with a hint of parental fear passed through me.

Pressure? From one of her parents? Yes, that might be it. Or maybe one of her parents was sick and they had unfinished business. It was impossible to know.

Her eyes went a little wider as though she felt something too, and we both parted. Had she felt something about what I had back in the real world that kept me fighting? Maybe. I glanced quickly back at her just in time to see her look away.

My kids always joked that I should go to a wine and painting class to meet someone, or a farmer’s market. I wonder if they even thought I might find someone I’d want to ask out on a date underneath a mountain in the middle of Romania.

Probably not, though stranger things have happened.

“We’re going to survive this,” Xiphos echoed. “There’s no way forward but forward, so let’s go.”

I invested my next point into Wanderer’s Wisdom, which increased the experience gains by everyone else by 6% and reduced my own gains by the same amount. In a balanced setting, I’d be putting myself at a serious disadvantage, but thanks to Balaur’s blessing the only thing that stopped me from levelling was not defeating enemies and draining them of anima.

The coolest thing about having invested 20 points into the skill tree was that the next level I hit would let me unlock Now You’re Thinking With Portals, which removed the requirement that I could only open a portal to an enemy.

That skill would let me use stable thirty second portals to easily traverse rough terrain and change my position once every two and a half minutes. It would make any exploration we had to do much easier.

Compared to the constant danger of racing through the forest, these tunnels were monotonous and confusing, but safe. It felt like the branching tunnels were taking us in a huge circle, but there was no way to know for sure. Eventually every section looked the same as the last.

“What if there’s no way out of here?” All trace of bravado had fled Stiletto’s voice. “How do we know that this is the right entrance, huh?”

“Balaur led us here,” I said. “I trust him.”

“Sure, trust a dragon. That’s what your book says, doesn’t it? He’s a literal dragon with seven heads, right?” Stiletto’s voice took on a panicked edge the longer he talked.

But he was right. I’d been so caught up in rescuing my friends and exploring my new powers that I hadn’t even looked at that book of Romanian myths and legends I’d taken from the gift shop in the ski lodge.

“Great idea,” I said with a grin as I retrieved the book from my inventory. “You let us know if you sense any threats, okay Kaiser?”

He woofed once and trotted by my side. His enemy detection radius was much improved thanks to my Houndmaster’s Jacket.

I opened the book and watched as the both familiar and unfamiliar letters of the Romanian alphabet rearranged themselves like tiny black worms wriggling across the surface of the pages into text that I could read.

There were many entries for monsters that we’d seen, and monsters that we hadn’t. Balaur had an entire section devoted to him.

Depending on who was telling the legend Balaur had anywhere between three and twelve heads, but most often seven. I wondered if that meant the understanding of this entity changed over time as it expanded and contracted its influence. The legends said that Balaur was considered an evil force who either demanded or abducted young maidens and princesses, and was always defeated by a hero known only as Handsome Lad.

I chuckled at that. I’d watched enough YouTube videos from BookTubers lamenting the use of the Prince Charming trope to last me a lifetime. In truth, that storytelling mechanism had been around for thousands of years.

Every line I read about Balaur-the-legend made more and more sense with what I knew of Balaur-the-entity. The legends said the dragon could live in many states, appear in many different forms, travel through the earth, the water or the air, and the precious stones are made from its saliva.

The legends were just talking about anima and that Balaur could manifest in any number of ways.

One of my favourite things about myths and legends from years gone by was that if you looked deeply enough into the more fanciful elements, a certain truth began to coalesce from the exaggerations.

There were entries in the book about the baubau, the capcaun, leshies, upyr, prykolic, nemorti and the varcolac. Every enemy type we’d encountered so far was represented in this book, but there were many that we hadn’t seen yet.

The vodyanoi was a water spirit who attacked from rivers with thin but powerful arms, drawing people into watery graves. The strigoi was similar to an upyr, but feasted on the blood to absorb life energy, not the flesh. It was said that the strigoi and the upyr were the basis for our modern day understanding of vampires.

A dread through crossed my mind. If ghosts existed, then why not vampires?

The nature of the world was breaking down at an alarming rate.

Other monsters like the moroi, muma padurii, samca, sobolan, the vasilisc and the zmei were entirely new to my knowledge, and each sounded more terrifying that the last. Muma Padurii sounded a lot like the witch of the woods in Hansel and Gretel, or Baba Yaga or Russian folklore. But it was the zmei that gave me most cause to fear.

The zmei was another type of dragon, which was considered benevolent rather than evil like Balaur. The colour red was almost exclusively associated with the zmei, and references in the book stated that it was not uncommon for a zmei to fall in love with a human woman. Sometimes, the zmei may even take human form to reproduce.

Another section referred to the zmei as a multiplicitous being, who could have multiple different dragons at once. Yet another section said that zmei was chained beneath a lake. All of the disparate elements failed to come to a coherent core like Balaur’s entry, but maybe I just didn’t understand it enough yet.

Is this what Trajan truly was? A dragon, or a part of a dragon, in human form? I doubted it. Nevertheless, I had to check something with Xiphos.

“You remember those lab reports we saw about Trajan in the EDGE Force facility?” I asked.

“I don’t have a photographic memory, but I remember the gist of it,” Xiphos answered.

“Was there any mention of an anima network inside Trajan Cel Tradat or his family while they were being experimented on?”

Xiphos shook her head. “Not that I recall.”

“Hm. There are two dragon legends around this area according to this book. One is evil, which is our friend Balaur who allegedly only wants to heal and purify corruption. The other is supposedly good, but heavily aligned to the colour red and seems to have regenerative capabilities.”

“We’ve seen the dragonslayer’s forces regenerate, right?” Stiletto asked.

I nodded. “Yes, and everything in this book fits with Balaur, except for all the evil shit it says he’s supposed to have done.”

“Is there anything about underground cities?” Naginata asked.

“Not that I’ve seen so far. Let me keep reading.”

I flicked ahead and came to a page titled Scholomance.

Deep in the Transylvanian mountains, in the centre of a vast lake, hidden from view from the rest of the Godly, pious people of Romania there is a school of dark magic run by the Devil himself. An exclusive school that one must be invited to, the Scholomance is heavily shrouded in secrecy.

It is said that only ten students are accepted into study of this dark magic each year, and these Solomonari spend seven years learning the dark arts from a force of darkness that human men and women cannot comprehend. This dragon of dark magic safeguarded the source of its power in this impenetrable place of learning, demanding complete submission and subservience from its subjects.

These Solomonari in training do not feel the warmth of the sun for seven years while they toiled and learned evil magics from the dragon chained beneath the mountain. These students would learn to speak the language of all living things, the secrets of nature, and magic that allowed them to cast spells, ride flying dragons, and to control the weather.

I cleared my throat. “Um, guys. I think I found it. I don’t think this is an ancient city at all. I think it might be an ancient school for evil wizards.”

I half expected the rest of the team to laugh, but they didn’t. I read out the whole section about the Scholomance to them and we tried to puzzle out if there were any clues that might lead us to the entrance.

Naginata was the one that made the connection between something in the zmei entry and the Scholomance entry.

“You said that zmei was chained beneath a lake, and Scholomance itself is located in the centre of a lake. What if those two lakes are the same, and it is hidden from view because it is an underground lake?”

My eyes widened. “Holy shit, you might be right.”

“So if we’re looking for an underground lake, then we need to follow the sound of water,” Xiphos said.

We set out with renewed purpose and it didn’t take us long to hone in on the sound of rushing water. I placed my bare hand on the stone and felt a slight vibration there, as though a raging underground river wasn’t too far away from where we were now.

Following the sound and sensation, we continued on into the dark.