Eric was momentarily consumed by blackness, then light. Feeling an inevitable cord of doom linking him and the horrific being at his back stretch impossibly tight, so tight that he choked back a scream, terrified that his soul would rip in twain… and then it was gone.

He jolted a single step, alarm bells momentarily shrieking in his head as he stumbled forward, desperate not to allow the mithril blades to slide free of their sheaths and slice clean through his neck… before falling to his knees in the uncaring pitch darkness, realizing that somehow, by some miracle, he was alive.

The awful cold that had given his entire body frostbite, that had frozen multiple Contenders, delvers, and an entire forest to solid ice… was no more.

The awful sense of an ancient dark god pressing his clawed finger against Eric’s soul had vanished.

And it was only now, as he panted and sobbed for breath that he realized that the pain… the awful hideous unending pain that his desperate use of internal blood runes had actually managed to mitigate… was now gone.

The most painful agonizing endless ordeal that he dare not even THINK about, lest he fall into a worthless catatonic heap, was finally over.

Trembling hands went to feel the mithril collar.

“I beat you, you stupid motherfucker. Bronze tier torture device… I fucking did it!”

He sobbed the words with furious satisfaction.

Because in his desperate attempt to melt steel, those final moments when he had released all restraint, he had also managed to obliterate the pain chip that was inside his collar.

“Never again!” He swore to himself, tears streaming freely from his eyes in the endless pitch darkness all around him as he crumpled on what felt like a hard granite floor. “I will never play the pawn for anyone, ever again!”

He closed his one intact eye while whispering words to numb his pain once more, this time enduring the comparitively mild agony of his torn eye bubbling back to full utility inside his head even as his right forefinger budded anew from the stump he had so willingly sacrificed to force that fourth mithril blade back inside his collar.

You have successfully recovered missing limbs and organs in record time!

You have managed to keep your physiology intact while undergoing prolonged physical degradation via a device designed to torment beings a full tier beyond your own.

Congratulations! Unified Restoration is now Rank 11! (Perk deferred.)

Even now he shuddered, knowing he had to take in his environment, that death could be stalking him even now… but desperate to do something to secure his collar and kit himself for what he feared would be a very grueling delve.

He had, after all, landed smack dab in an Orange-tier dungeon his enemies had deliberately maneuvered such that his entrance would both doom and trap him. Of course, all that was actually redundant. They had merely wanted his head to be snicked off the second he entered, compelling him to do it by his own two feet, twisting the words of their oaths such that fleeing into the dungeon was his foolish choice while staying outside was willing suicide. A head’s I win, tails you lose scenario, and somehow, those slimy bastards had gotten away with it.

Then he choked out bitter laughter as he desperately tried to think of a way to secure those four still horrifically lose mithril blades that he feared would slide right out of their sheaths to snick his throat if he so much as shifted his painfully stiff neck.

In the end, mind racing with everything his enemies had let slip in a language he should have had no chance of knowing, he had jumped through that portal of his own volition. Even when the white hot steel springs had lost all tensile strength before they melted to slag.

Truth was, he could have technically run free at that very moment. But by that time, Sylvis had been the last thing on his mind. By that time he understood that terrible things far beyond a sadistic gnoll contender were haunting those woods. Things promising a far worse doom than a quick decapitation. A doom he now feared had been stalking him long before his enemies first felt that bitter, biting cold.

Yet so bad had his pain been, he had paid absolutely no heed to it at all.

Didn’t dare to. Not until those final, horrific seconds of torment and desperation outside the rift had finally played out, Eric suddenly finding himself before a rift that led directly to a maze desperate to reset.

He already knew that jumping into rifts was like entering separate pocket realms, and his panicked gambit had actually worked.

Because sure, he might be utterly lost with a collar that STILL blocked his magic or ability to use external runes, he found to his horror… but the important thing was, he was also lost to the nightmare abomination that had been hunting him as well.

Whatever connections of arcane magic, fate, or, as much as it horrified him to think it, blood that had been binding them… had been snapped like threads before a sheer.

And that was all that mattered, he decided, face widening in a bitter furious smile as he jabbed his restored middle finger at the world.

“I’m alive, motherfuckers. You hear that? I’m alive!” He shouted with tears in the darkness.

A stupid thing to do, but the agony he had endured, the tension and frustration had warranted a shout against uncaring fates and oblivion’s disdain.

He was alive and his tormentors were not.

Granted, he had serious mixed feelings about that. The awful bastard and his mocking goblin companions who had so savored his torments were now forever beyond his reach. Having been frozen alive in mere seconds… when Eric wanted to give those bastards absolute hours to remember him by.

But they were dead and he was alive, and even if the dark, like this dark, would soon be the thing of nightmares for him… he still took cold comfort in the knowledge that of all the assholes riding that velimobile, the sucker they had savored torturing and planned on executing was the only one to break free of death’s hoary grasp.

Now if only he could survive this rift and actually keep it that way.

He took a deep breath, smelling the musty chalky tang of limestone and the brooding weight of granite bedrock as well. His infravision made out a quartet of massive arched passageways in shades of cool blue he saw in such detail that he could clearly make out the gaps between each granite block.

And the place was massive.

Endless 90 degree tunnels, and each corridor was over twenty feet wide and soared a good fifty feet high with arched ceilings, and he had appeared right in the center of multiple intersecting corridors.

At first, he sensed neither sound nor any scent beyond the chalky tang of stone. He didn’t even feel a breeze moving against his cheek.

The he heard them, the tiniest hint of far-off chittering.

His stomach twisted with sudden tension. He forced himself to snap out of his daze, for all that he was utterly exhausted and mentally drained beyond belief.

He could deal with the trauma he had endured later. All that mattered right now was surviving as best he could.

Moving extremely slowly and carefully, he slinked over to the very side of the corridor, well out of the central passageway, looking for any sign of dips or crevices he could shelter in as he took personal inventory… and finding nothing.

Cursing softly under his breath, he pressed himself against the farmost wall, and turned his focus inward on the mithril collar, the impossibly sharp blades and the fried electromana circuits within.

The first order of business, he thought, was to secure those damned mithril throat-cutters.

He closed his eyes to help himself focus, for all that even his skin was aware of his environment, so acute was both his Perception and Infravision, and focused on the four mithril blades with their impossibly sharp, near frictionless surfaces.

Except for three points.

One was the pivot point where the blade was peened directly into the collar, a second was the now defunct trigger latch, and the final spot was where the spring was slotted.

The solution was obvious, even to his exhausted mind. He had to use the very slots that had once locked sheering death, just a single mistake away to his advantage.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, already knowing what his next move had to be.

First, he poured more heat into his blood to easily reach the 4000 F mark, as hot as he had ever dared while still a Conscript. A temperature that now cost him only the tiniest fraction of his temporary Soul Reserves and experience pool, and more than enough to assure a homogeneous mixture of melted steel and bits of obliterated circuitry in his superheated blood.

He couldn’t help but flash a quick smile of satisfaction, even as the distant squeaks of rodents grew ever closer. A realization that sent fresh chills racing down his spine. Because if rats in a white tier dungeon fit for level 15s was bad… How fucking bad would Orange tier rats be?

He realized he was in no real hurry to find out.

“Alright. My blood covers this entire hell-contraption, and I’ve fried out the inside. If I can’t claim it by this point…

You have FAILED to insert Bronze-tier Slave-collar into your ES Storage space!

You have FAILED to summon lightning!

Eric hissed and cursed, his head throbbing from the arcane backlash. He cursed bitterly under his breath, sensing more than seeing the arcane runes that had been painstaking etched inside the mithril collar, no complex hybrid mana circuitry needed. Just a pure arcane ward against arcane magic… and whoever had inscribed the ward into the mithril had clearly been Bronze tier and light years out of Eric’s league.

He choked back a furious scream.

He was bound to this collar, was unable to claim this collar, and could cast no magic through the collar.

Equally infuriating… as much as his blood now effectively had mastered its insides, class skills or some other art was warding the lock. And he didn’t need any interface message to know that unless he had an actual Thief class, golden key, or the original control stick now frozen in a doomed contender’s eternal grip… he wasn’t slipping free of this hell-vise anytime soon.

All he could do was turn his hot frustration to ice cold focus… cooling his growing panic to deliberate calculation, drawing all the heat from the blood that had claimed molten metal at its core. Cooling it to the point that it gelled then hardened to the equivalent of steel slag… completely gumming up peen, slot, and trigger latch.

Then making it colder still. Because mastering heat meant the lack of it as well, and it was high time he embraced that inverse to the utmost, drawing every last speck of heat from the collar that he could. Until the entire collar was reminiscent of the bitter hoarfrost that had frozen his foes alive… mitigated only by the slick sheen of pearlescent blood that he had coated over the outside during his first furious dash… making sure the surface was no warmer than himself.

And all the while, the chittering grew in pitch and volume.

Eric’s heart began to pound, knowing that unseen enemies were closing in.

Considering his experiences during his last delve, he counted it a miracle he hadn’t already been run down and eaten alive by prehistoric abominations.

He clenched his jaw and shook his head, feeling the bite of the mithril collar around his neck, knowing that things were so much better than he had any ripe to hope they would be. Had he been just a couple seconds slower, he’d be dead! He wanted to sob with relief that those awful mithril blades were stable. At least for now.

And he was still rocking almost 350 Quickness. Which made him faster than pretty much anyone else in this corner of the country, region, or state… he still wasn’t quite sure which.

But it was also a trap, if he wasn’t careful, because even with his Speed Racer bonus perk allowing him to manipulate G-force and air resistance, so he truly could pivot to a degree worthy of both title and his Quickness… he was damned well aware that any furious jerk strong enough to shatter the frozen slag holding his mithril blades in place would be the last mistake he would ever make.

Regrettably, he had absolutely no idea how much force was required for any of the slick mithril blades to slip free of what was effectively their frozen sheaths. And there was no room for experimentation either. He’d either be alright, or multiple mithril blades would slip free and quite literally clip his head off.

Definitely not something he wanted to fuck around with, that was for damned sure.

“So, ranged sniping it is then,” he whispered to himself, even as he recalled all too well the curse a former orc shaman had placed on him, making it so damned hard to pull anything out of his ES Storage space.

Save for one item. The sling he had had custom made from a classer who had been grateful as hell that Eric had been all about second chances, even if he had been playing for the wrong team at first. But with his pregnant girlfriend depending on him, it wasn’t like the poor kid had had a choice. And all things considered, that sling had paid back the inconvenience of getting beamed in the head many times over. As far as Eric was concerned, Billy and Lana were good people, and would one day run a fine inn for what would hopefully eventually become the most prosperous and profitable territory on the entire planet.

Eric could only hope that he’d survive long enough to meet up with them once more, and thank Billy for his sling.

You are attempting to pull free lesser artifact: Soul Bound Indestructible Sling.

Contest of skills vs. Bronze Tier Ward.

ES Skill check has FAILED!

A sling that he found himself unable to pull free, much to his surprise and dismay.

Eric grit his teeth in frustration as he caught scent of what was definitely animal musk, and closing in fast. And here he was, with no good options at all.

“Save the gifts I bet that damned collar can’t block. Essence and the power of blood. And if I’m lucky, Spiritual Energy as well.”

Eric wasted no time even as he whispered the words, preparing to bite through his own flesh to draw that much-needed fluid. But despite his new pain blocking chant and stronger than ever healing ability, he was damned tired of self-mutilation and pain.

He couldn’t help chuckling as the vampiric elements of Blood Mastery elongated his fangs once more… before realizing that he didn’t need to hurt himself at all.

The blood, unlike everything else he had tried during that day of torments, came to him as easily as thought, dripping free from micro pours from his index finger. Blood which he used to inscribe a ritual circle with himself at the center, but he cast no arcane magics through it. Didn’t dare to.

Instead, he pressed his finger to his double circle of crimson and fill it with all the wrath, fire, and fury that he could.

Blood Mastery skillcheck made! You have effortlessly infused your blood with the essence of Flame! Critical success: Basic use of Elite tier skill and Rank 3 essence is now virtually effortless! You suffer no drain to Potency or Soul Reserves!

Blood Ward is now Rank 3!

You can now see those who would happily devour you… just as they see you!

Finally, success! Even if his flaming ward did have the drawback of filling the hallway with light as the outer two rings of blood blazed with the essence Flame while innermost one acted as a buffer of sorts, absorbing heat and pulling down fresh air from above so he needed no bloody sponge to safely breathe. Which was a good thing, since the only fabric he had on hand were his pants and shoes. Otherwise, he was bare-chested and weaponless as he caught sight of the light reflected off a dozen pairs of beady eyes from rats the size of warthogs filling up the farmost corridor, all of them glaring his way.