The next day, I awoke surprisingly well-rested. It was obvious the headless innkeeper took good care of his establishment. Just a shame I was one of his only customers.

I packed up my gear and headed to the ground floor of the wooden hovel, where I found a warm breakfast waiting for me. Ten minutes and a full stomach later, I bid goodbye to my gracious host, who sent me off with a gurgle that I decided to interpret as a ‘goodbye’.

I hadn’t fully placed the previous day’s happenings, though. Truthfully, there wasn’t much to consider. Even without his direct presence, I was well aware that the dry man had a proverbial knife to my throat. There was no escape. My only hope was that he would stick to his side of the deal. If I got back to his territory on time and maybe even received a good reward, I could still come out ahead from this.

That made me think... the dry man hadn’t seemed like he ‘wanted’ my help, he had acted like he ‘needed’ it. Maybe I could push that angle...

Meh, that was a thought for later. For now, I had a dungeon to focus on. Or a castle, or whatever. I supposed I would have to wait and see what this place was all about.

The dry man hadn’t let slip much about the place, only that the artifact inside held more historical value than practical. A matter of wounded pride, perhaps? I wouldn’t put it past the church to place importance on something like that. To any big organization, pride and reputation were their lifeblood. To be fair, the dry man hadn’t mentioned this in so many words. If anything, his attitude towards the relic had been suspicious. As if it was no big deal for the cup to disappear. Something about this whole thing was suspicious. One thing was for sure, though. I was never inserting myself in squabbles between tier 6es again. I hadn’t even gotten started and a headache had already come on.

Once I got out of the village, I summoned Revan and hightailed it out of the cursed place. I wasn’t sure whether to attribute my latest chance encounter to that little shithole or simply to fate, but I couldn’t care less at this point.

At least my new skills had gotten a proper workout. My [Onyx chain wind] had worked exactly as expected, no, performed even better than expected, while [Sword laser] had even been powerful enough to attract the area’s ruler. Not altogether surprising, considering the crater I left on the nearby hill.

The artifact was about an hour’s travel away from the village, and I was well prepared to dig that old thing out of whatever dung heap I came across. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for my troll-sized companion.

While we traveled, Revan gave me the cold shoulder. I had told him what had happened the day before, and he had only snorted, before refusing to give me even a passing glance from that point on. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was mad I hadn’t summoned him in the thick of battle.

I had to admit that after the most recent tournament, where all summons had been strictly prohibited, I had grown overly used to fighting by myself. It didn’t help that I was probably still underestimating Revan subconsciously. All the same, he wouldn’t have made a difference against the dry man, though I appreciated his courage.

In hindsight, I probably should have given Revan the proper respect and summoned him.

I told my bony friend as much, but he seemed unimpressed, only snorting a second time.

As such, we spent the rest of our journey in silence.

-scene transition-

“What part about this is ‘a tiny dungeon’?!” I screamed at the sky, demanding answers.

In front of me, an average-sized castle dominated the landscape. Actually, it would be more appropriate to say it was dominating the view. You know, since it was floating.

The castle. Was. Floating.

The obsidian-coloured compound seemed ready to float into the clouds at any moment, if not for the lengthy steel chains that held it several hundred meters above the ground. Each chain was about two meters thick and attached to a metal peg that was nailed into the side of the hill the castle was floating above.

I had had a hard time seeing the castle from a distance because of the mist, but now that I saw it up close, it became more obvious that this wasn’t a dungeon.

For one, it was too small. For another, it was floating. I had never heard of a floating dungeon, and I doubted one such as this would just be left alone by the nearby classers.

Revan and I continued to scout around the base of the hill in search of a way up, but we found none.

That left two options. Either I used [Overloaded step] to catapult myself up, or Revan and I crawled up the chain.

Both methods had their own issues. Number one meant alerting all the monsters in the vicinity and any enemies that might be laying in wait inside the castle.

Number two, on the other hand, left us a sitting duck while we were climbing. If we could get up there silently, great, but if we failed, then we were back to square one.

In the end, I decided to go with the second method. At least that way, we had a chance of success. Revan agreed wholeheartedly, perhaps because in this plan he was involved.

A few minutes later, we had decided on which chain we would climb. There was a single chain right underneath the floating castle. It was the steepest, but also the shortest, which was the clincher to our decision. Its shorter length and the fact that it was taut meant it wouldn’t swing around as much.

I jumped back onto Revan and held onto his ribs like a ladder while he approached the first link carefully. I had considered climbing up by myself, but was too afraid that any classer inside the castle would notice the shift in dark mana. Furthermore, the oversized links were far too large to climb by hand.

As such, Revan had been delegated the task, an assignment he took to with great fervor.

Too great a fervor, in fact. Contrary to my expectations, the rusty chains were as fragile as glass. The moment Revan clamped one of his sharp claws onto the metal, it bent under Revan’s grip and weight, nearly shattering.

For a tense moment, we floated two meters in the air, waiting for the chain to fall on top of our heads. But it didn’t.

The chain held, if only barely. I told Revan to head back down and try another chain, but he was far too stubborn. Instead, he started climbing higher and higher. Cold sweat dripped down my back as Revan’s claws dug into the brittle metal, leaving claw marks on each chain we passed. And yet, each chain held.

Like this, we climbed higher and higher, Revan ever careful not to shift too much weight onto a single link. Before I knew it, we had reached the chain boom, our sneaky way into the castle.

The chain boom was just large enough for Revan to squeeze into, and after a bit of climbing, we found ourselves inside a stone chamber, which was filled with separated links and smaller chains. A maintenance room of some kind.

I had to wonder why the creator of this place would first make a castle float, only to then nail it down to the ground. Were the chains acting as some kind of anchor? The existence of the chain boom and maintenance room was evidence that these chains were deliberate, not some haphazard attempt to spite an old enemy by trapping him in the between lands...

Slowly and carefully, Revan and I headed deeper into the old fortress, which didn’t look like it had recently been occupied. In fact, the numerous skeletons that might one day have been undead were now as lifeless as... well, an actual skeleton. It was as if the necromancer controlling the undead guards had left centuries ago, and left some of his units behind. Was this why the church was confident in sending me? Had they known this place was deserted? Had they known the dry man would seek me out...?

I shook off the panicked feeling and distracted myself by focusing on my environment. A defenseless fortress was all well and good, but I still had to find the tier 6 relic, a chalice of some kind.

After a few rooms, I found myself in a dusty parlor. Golden goblets lined the table, that seated several dozen skeletons hunched over and covered in cobwebs. Light from the sun filtered in through windy, gaping windows, giving the room an almost ethereal glow. I grabbed each goblet and stored it, but found none out of the ordinary. I had to continue the search. A few hours later, I had inspected all but one room, the cellar. All other chambers had been some variant of a typical necromancer’s hideout. Embalming room for ghouls and other esoteric undead, butcher for normal skeletons, a few dozen rooms that I could probably find in any castle, like a kitchen or a bedroom, and a grand hall with a throne at the end.

All of them represented what must have once been a rather comfortable castle, apart from the necromantic rooms and such.

Unfortunately, none of these deceptively ordinary rooms had held the item I was looking for; the relic.

That left one final room to check. The cellar. I had called it as such because it was the lowest place in the castle, even lower than the chain boom and prisons on the lower levels. A seemingly endless set of twisting stairs hidden behind a bookshelf (the oldest trick in the book, by the way) led to what was undoubtedly the deepest part of the castle.

I left Revan in the throne room, which he filled up nicely with his bulk, and headed down the single-file stairs, which twisted and turned around other rooms until it passed them and ended in a small hall with a black set of doors.

Both were adorned with ornately carved, black bones, which represented some kind of animal skull. Strange, for a necromancer. Most of their kind stuck to human corpses, for some reason. The ability for those skeletons to wear equipment, maybe?

I attempted to open the doors, but was instead thrown back. It was only after I recovered and sat up that I noticed that some of my mana had been absorbed by the doors. I got up and tried again, only to feel next to no resistance this time. The doors gave and opened up to show me the true identity of the room. A treasury.

And, sure enough, on a pedestal in the middle, a single wooden chalice was on display, unmarred by time.