Angel watched the fight between man and witch with a forced lack of emotion. She wasn’t entirely sure what to think about Felix anymore, really. At first, she had been absolutely terrified of him. Then she had been shocked by the knowledge that he had known her brother. Then she had found out he and the rest of whoever he had been talking about—including her brother of all people—had conspired to hide the war from her. That made her angry, irrationally so. They had no right… no, she couldn’t be too mad at them. Her brother had been in on it, after all, and she knew he had always had the best intentions at heart for her. Foolish he may have been. But cruel? Careless? Never.

  Now, just a day after she had met him, Felix had dragged them into a fight with quite possibly the worst monster on this floor of the dungeon. Very few kinds of monsters could trigger a floor-wide warning that she knew of. All of them—every last one—was incredibly dangerous. And Felix was taking this one on face to face with no armor and no weapons to his name. Either he was very brave, or incredibly dangerous, or both. Not to mention the face he had shown when they had first met him.

  She hadn’t liked the look in his eyes then. They had been dark and foreboding, like rumbling storm-clouds bearing those malevolent thunderbolts that struck without warning or care for who died. He had moved like a wraith, here one moment and gone the next. It was creepy. When she had arrived on scene, he had been on the brink of death just waiting for the fatal blow to land. But when she had been in the same situation, he had changed.

  And suddenly, the monster had been on the back foot with bits and pieces being torn off of it before Felix had just… ripped its head off. Just the thought of the sight made her shudder from disgust.

  He was going to do the same thing to this creature in human form in front of them without even blinking. This terror whose very presence made her speech falter and her thought slow to a mere crawl—he was taking it on seemingly without a care in the world, completely unaffected by its aura, having tanked a veritable explosion to the face without much issue.

  Angel watched as the woman built a spell piece by piece out of thin air. Now, she quite obviously—to her, at least—did not know nearly as much about spellcraft as Felix did, but even she could tell that what the witch was doing was incredibly high level magic for her level. But the she was doing it with relative ease, which made Angel decidedly uneasy.

  All the more so when she saw Felix’s eyes open wide in alarm and watched him bolt forward with the speed of a jackrabbit. Then it was her turn to balk as he bounced off an invisible shield and just barely threw himself out of the path of a beam of pure energy the size of her waist.

  She was even more amazed when Felix picked himself up from the ground and tore the magical barrier apart. The mechanics behind him doing that must have been overwhelmingly complex, but he did it with a casual ferocity that made her shiver.

  Then he started beating the ever-loving pulp out of the witch.

  His left arm was unresponsive and stiff, leading her to believe he had been hit by that glorified energy cannon of a spell, but it didn’t seem to slow him down too much. Small pops and bits of debris flew whenever he struck the witch, and she staggered back, leaving a trail of glowing things behind her.

  This went on for a minute or so, that ethereal Shadow trailing along behind the two and just watching the fight take place. Felix kept beating on her with blow after sickening blow until he stepped on one of the glowing markings on the ground.

  Angel didn’t see exactly what happened. But she heard his shout of pain and watched him stop dead in his tracks. He limped forward a single step then stopped again, obviously in extreme pain from whatever had happened. He looked around, eyes brushing over her and the two boys before landing squarely on the Shadow. He examined the thing slowly, perhaps pondering something. Then he nodded to himself. Whatever decision he had been thinking over, it was made now.

  And then, something changed. It wasn’t something she witnessed so much as felt. Even from so many yards away, she could feel a shift in the air. A weight settled on her shoulders. It was kind of like a putting on a lead jacket, except the inside of the jacket was covered with a sewn-together undershirt of those hand warmers you stuck in gloves to keep your fingers warm on a freezing night while watching the sport of your choice. It felt raw, untethered, angry. A caged beast had just been freed from its pacing and would now run amok among the scared observers.

  All these thoughts ran through her mind in the blink of an eye as she watched him turn and take a single step back towards Dalia, leaning all his weight on his injured leg without flinching.

  Then there was a gigantic crashing noise and a sledgehammer hit her in the side.

  Mark saw almost the exact same thing as Angel did. He had better eyesight than her, which was funny because she was the archer of the group. This being the case, he also caught some details she missed. He watched Felix cut his arm and gather together a pile of blood and dust to scatter on what he assumed was a field of traps. That assumption was proven correct when an explosion about the size of a Fordline G-3750 obscured his field of view for a moment.

  He watched as Felix picked himself up and went back to fighting, having tanked an explosion that any of the three of them would likely not have come back from in less than two pieces. He watched as Felix’s arm was frozen solid with a colossal light-saber made of the very essence of ice that lanced across the town and cut a tree down in half a second flat, which would have unmade himself in bare moments. He watched as Felix beat up the witch, receiving wounds in return as her defenses activated, and he watched his leg be rendered inert by a force well past anything he could have withstood.

  Then the witch healed somehow, and he saw Felix give up on his current plan, look around, then become something different entirely. Oh Mark felt the aura, but that didn’t concern him nearly as much as the physiological changes Felix had undergone.

  Felix’s eyes were the same dark, dead pits of empty rage that he had witnessed the day before when the An Dreores had overrun them and nearly killed Angel. His posture changed, too, somehow becoming both more and less hunched if that was even possible. His hand curled into a fist, and he stepped forward on a leg that physically could not bear his weight without excruciating pain without showing a hint of it.

  That alone was creepy, but Mark had just seen Felix reach over with his good arm and grasp his bad one.

  Then all hell broke loose as Angel was hit with a punch from a literal tree that flung her across the clearing and into a tree nearly twenty yards away. After that, he didn’t have any more time to observe Felix’s battle. He had one of his own to begin.

  Harald watched the fight between Dalia(He was the only one to remember her name of the three) and Felix in much the same fashion as his two companions. He was less interested in the fight itself, though he was definitely impressed by the sheer amount of damage Felix had taken seemingly without issue. What he was more interested in, however, was the magic. There was a certain texture to the air he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Sure, he could blame the oddity on Dalia’s overwhelming aura, but that wasn’t quite it. There was something else at play here and he wanted to figure out what.

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  He saw space warp and bend in patterns that made his mind want to tear itself limb from limb. At the same time, another piece of him examined the intricate patterns in that ritual he instinctively knew was the peak of all tierless destructive magic. It was incredible, simply marvelous—detailed beyond the skill of any mage he or his family had ever met, which was saying something. He had met some competent Journeymen in his time.

  The weird thing was, this was being done by a tierless mage—ritualist was just a sub-class of mage—who couldn’t compete with said Journeymen in any sense of the word. Oh, any Journeyman could have pulled off this tierless version of the ritual with more ease than a category five hurricane could blow a leaf off a tree, but very few Journeymen worth their salt, even the elite among elite, could pull something like that spell off. To make matters even more confusing, Dalia was modifying the spell on the fly as well. That was exponentially harder to do.

  Then he saw the glyphs she was leaving on the ground. They weren’t nearly as impressive as the ritual she had just slung at Felix, but they were a field he knew at least something about. And he was willing to bet he was the only one in the group that did.

  Those were self-contained spellwork. They were fully realized spells in the shape of a single glyph. He couldn’t read them, of course. There hadn’t been anyone able to read them in decades if not a century. But that didn’t matter, since one didn’t have to read their own spells in order to know what they did. The system did that for them.

  Dalia’s intent for them was clear. They were basically small bombs similar to the first trap Felix had successfully “disarmed.” This was confirmed when he accidentally stepped on one and nearly had his leg ripped off by sheer gravity.

  Harald dissected all this with interest. He wasn’t too overly concerned with what would happen to Felix; he didn’t even really like the guy. Felix had just shown up the day before and helped them out. Then he had flexed his knowledge about obscure facts in front of all of them. That, of all things, sealed the deal for him. While he had agreed to let Felix into the party, he had only done so because he was curious about him and because he was strong for his level. Now that curiosity was all but fulfilled and Harald was beginning to get sick of the man despite the fact that he had known him for all of about a day and spoken to him for a grand total of about half an hour. He didn’t really know why, either.

  That dying curiosity was rekindled in the next few moments, however, as Felix did… something to make the hairs on Harald’s arms stand to attention. There was no magical signature to what he did, but whatever it was, in warranted enough attention so that he ignored Angel’s flight across the clearing just to watch a few seconds more.

  Then he turned, sighed, and pulled out his shield. He was going to have to fill the role of tank one more time. If only he could have been a bit more fragile, then Mark would have had to.

  A pair of eyes watched from high in a tree at the edge of the clearing. They were focused solely on the man in the center of it, examining his every action. Their owner was nothing but a ghost on the breeze. He swayed with the branches, his movements natural and fluid like that of an older leopard waiting for its next meal. A pair of daggers jutted from his hips and his leather armor was dyed in various shades of gray. Shadows dappled his cloak, mimicking the patchy shade given by the coniferous tree he was resting in. It was a miracle that the sun reached him at all, really, so recessed into the boughs was he.

  A small bird came fluttering by and landed on his shoulder. It looked down, searching for seeds on the ground below that it could scrounge. This forest must have been hard for birds. Cones seemed to be rather rare, as the trees lived to be several dozen millennia old and had no need to reproduce so often. Flowers were sporadic, with the shade the trees cast making it difficult for even the hardiest blossoms to thrive. The underbrush was tough and dense with little room to maneuver in, and the many spaces that lay clear of any vegetation were suffocated with a thick layer of dead needles shed during the winter. No seeds there for a hungering fowl.

  The bird looked around warily. It must have heard some small sound just unnatural enough to set it on edge. Its eyes landed on the ghost on whose shoulder it was sitting, and it gave a start. It flapped away quick as it could, off to search for food elsewhere.

  The ghost gave a small sigh. The bird’s company had been nice—not every day you fool nature like that. Still, it had been a distraction. The ghost could not afford distractions. They led to unnecessary deaths.

  His eyes darted to and fro, taking in details very few others of his tier would actually notice. Details such as the Shadow, which he was very keen on observing. It moved too fluidly, too gracefully for one such as itself. Mortal Shadows were always a bit awkward for their tier, such as it was. They were mortal, after all, and bound by imperfections and flaws like men were. This Shadow wasn’t truly mortal.

  And yet, it wasn’t truly divine either. Divine Shadows were overwhelmingly powerful and the man fighting would never be capable of taking one on at his tier.

  So what was it, some kind of Scion or something? The question was troubling.

  And then there was the man himself. The ghost watched him in his flagging state, head tilted slightly to the side. If the man was taking on this fiend now, it must have been because he felt ready, and the ghost tended to trust the man on his assessment of competence. However, things weren’t faring so well at the moment. The man was flagging, tired deeper than could be known.

  The Moonkissed Ritualist was an issue as well. She had been divinely fashioned into a paragon of magic for her tier, as attested to by her resourcefulness and the strength of her spells. She was constantly being replenished by divine mana, meaning her pool would never run out as long as she lived. This wasn’t too bad on its own, as mana wasn’t the only component to a ritual.

  However, the divine wasn’t the only complication: the moonstruck creatures she had set loose on this level had spread their infectious curse widely enough to become a major problem. Adding on to all that the fact that each time one of them either died or killed another living thing counted as a sacrifice to fuel another ritual in the witch’s reserves meant that she could never run out of rituals and spells until either she or all of her creatures were killed. And even then, there had to be fallback plans in place for that very occasion.

  The man knew all this and more, the ghost knew. It wasn’t like him to rush in without first taking the time to think everything through thrice over. Doing that would be going against his very nature unless somebody was in immediate and grave, perhaps even life-threatening danger.

  There must have been a plan in place that the ghost wasn’t seeing.

  That was the moment the man stopped. He had taken enormous quantities of damage, enough to kill any normal tierless twice over with some to spare. Yet it had only been the last injury that had ground him to a halt. His leg had been crippled beyond repair. It had long passed the point of failure, but he had kept going even then. Only when the leg had lost the ability to bear his weight had he ceased moving forward.

  A peculiar look came over him, then—a cross between resignation and concern. He glanced around, eyes brushing over his three companions and finally coming to rest on the Shadow. He even held eyes with the ghost a second, enough to give him the barest of nods. The man had seen him, acknowledged his presence, and was reassuring the ghost that he had everything under the greatest control he could exercise. That was enough.

  The ghost was satisfied with that answer to his unasked question, but he remained where he was, wanting to see what tricks the man held up his sleeve. Of everything he knew about this man, foremost among them was the knowledge that he never entered a fight without the reassurance of a hidden asset or two. That was one of the many reasons he was so dangerous.

  His patience was soon rewarded.

  A light went out from behind the man’s eyes. Normally, that would signify a loss of life, but this was different. He had allowed it to happen. It wasn’t some involuntary spasm as the the Reaper took his shade, but a voluntary recession into madness. And it wasn’t a kind of madness the ghost had seen before either. This was magical madness.

  The ghost had witnessed regular madness before: the appearance of being normal while retaining a layer of abnormal insanity beneath. It was an unfortunate set of circumstances—a deterioration of the mind through aging or cruel and unusual happenings or the silence of absolute solidarity over weeks, months, and years.

  Magical madness was different. It was a condition forced upon an individual by the will of another, and it wasn’t usually resistible after being inflicted. The man must have had a mind made of whatever composed the heat-shields of outer orbit spaceships to have been able to withstand such a devastating, debilitating affliction. Not to mention the will required to bend such a condition to his will. Astounding! What an incredible trump to play.

  Now if only he could deal with the Shadow in this state…