"In dungeons where monsters dwell,
it's not always the beasts that betray you —
sometimes, it's the people who fought beside you."
Character Roster!!!—
Mina – The Null Brawler (Age 16) A fierce, rising fighter with no magical affinity—only raw strength and grit. Brawls with her fists, breaks bones with her will. A walking contradiction: cheerful, but terrifying in a fight.
Ashe Vaxille – The Illusionist (Age 16) Quiet, calculating, and clever. Master of deception and shrouding veils. While others fight with brains & brawns, he fights with misdirection—and always knows more than he lets on.
Sir Harlen – Knight & Bladeharper (Age 24) Charismatic, cruel, and precise. Swings his arming blade like a conductor's baton. Once loyal, now bitter—and dangerous. Wears betrayal like armor.
Sir Trevus Killian – Knight & Bladeharper (Age 26) Disciplined, quiet, and lightning-fast with twin curved sabers. The shadow to Harlen's flame. Still holds the old knightly code deep in his scarred heart.
Camylle Moosevelt – Battle Mage of Flame (Age 22) A whirlwind of heat and fury. Her fists erupt like cannons, and her rage burns hotter than her magic. Fights like every battle is personal—because it is.
Lotha – Priestess & Aspiring Paladin (Age 20) Earnest and soft-spoken, but brave when it counts. A support caster with a warrior's heart. Her holy light shields the team—at the cost of her own stamina.
Nira Devurra – Shadow Rogue (Age 24) Silent, sharp, and ever in motion. Moves through darkness like it's her home. She strikes from places you never expect—and is gone before the body hits the ground.
-The Price of Retaliation-
Harlen watched.
From the upper ledge, his eyes followed Ashe and Mina as they plummeted into the pit—right into the lair of the Dungeon Master.
And as he watched the dust rise, a memory struck.
Flashback — Post Chapter 3: "Dungeon Cleaners"
Harlen had always been a product of hardship. Born into the gutters of Elynthi and raised under the rigid discipline of the Tropico Guild, he clawed his way up from nothing. No family, no guidance—only steel and sweat.
He trained relentlessly in the Combat Sectors, sharpening his skills with an Arming Sword—a weapon most dismissed as secondary, subpar. But Harlen made it sing in battle. Its balance suited his raw, grounded style. It wasn't fancy, but it was brutal.
He spent four years serving under Captain Ferris, an old warhound of the Royal Army. Ferris was gruff and hard, but to Harlen, he was more than a commander—he was the closest thing to a father, a teacher.
That made it all the worse when Ferris' attention turned elsewhere.
Two street rats he found in the slums of Elynthi and placed into the Dungeon Cleaners:
Mina—a girl with no magical affinity, born a "null," yet unnervingly stubborn.
Ashe—a quiet boy wielding Illusion Magic, a dead art amongst fools.
Harlen watched as Ferris took them in, mentored them, protected them.
What did they have that he didn't?
He had fought, bled, and clawed his way here. And yet, they were the ones Ferris cared about.
Bitterness crept into his heart. Not envy—but a need to prove something.
He earned a knighthood. Formed his own squad. Rose in rank.
But all the accolades felt hollow when Ferris still looked at those two with that same damn pride.
And so, something in Harlen broke.
He stopped chasing Ferris' approval—and began plotting for his attention.
The change was slow. Subtle. He became hostile toward Dungeon Cleaners, treating them like disposable pawns. The lowest rung in the Tropico hierarchy.
Then came Kaltar's Spine—a mission that changed everything.
Harlen intentionally omitted a death trap in his report: a collapsing corridor rigged with mana-runed crushers. He knew the Dungeon Cleaners would pass through. He hoped Mina and Ashe would die there.
Nine did die that night.
But not them.
Then Ferris found out.
He read the survivor testimonies, especially from the two mappers.
He clenched his fist and walked out of his office that night, as an angry knock hammered Harlen's door.
He ignored it.
Ferris kicked the door off its hinges.
"Out," he growled. He dragged Harlen by the hair—half-naked, stunned—out of his quarters and into the open courtyard, where the outpost's searchlights lit the rain-slick ground in haunting pale.
The whole outpost began to stir.
Harlen's squad had been called to witness it—Trevus, Camylle, Lotha, and Nira.
The courtyard fell silent as Ferris threw Harlen to the ground.
Then he beat him.
No magic. No weapons. Just fists and fury.
Lotha turned away, wincing with every blow. Nira held her tightly, saying nothing.
Trevus stood cold and unmoved, feeling as if Harlen deserved this.
Camylle twitched with conflict, but didn't dare intervene.
In the midst of beating and disciplining Harlen, Ferris muttered.
"You think Dungeon Cleaners are disposable? You think they're rats?
Those rats are the reason your name ever made it on the board."
Harlen tried to fight back. A fist there, and a kick here.
But Ferris was stronger. Faster. Older. Every strike was a lesson.
The beating ended with a boot pressed against Harlen's chest.
"You're still alive because I want you to remember this:
You're not a hero. You're a hazard with a title. You're still a knight but, you're a fucking poser."
Then, Ferris turned to the squad.
"Hide anything from me again—and next time, I'll bring a rope."
Harlen was left there. In the dirt. In the rain.
Face bruised. Pride shattered.
As dawn broke, he couldn't even speak through the rage burning in his chest.
Camylle found him later. Quiet. Patient.
After a shower together, she sat beside him, treating his wounds with Stitch Magic and Scorch Healing. He stared at the wall as the light crept in.
Then, bitterly, he muttered:
"Let's kill them. Ferris… that bastard. I-I can't stand it."
Camylle responded with a cold, measured voice:
"No, not now. Heal first. We must wait.
When we strike, it must be steady… not spiteful."
Harlen nodded, the venom still simmering.
Then he looked out the window.
There she was. Mina. Doing morning drills in the courtyard like always.
The sight twisted the knife deeper.
It wasn't about her.
It wasn't about Ashe.
It was about Ferris.
And the price of touching what he held dear.
-The Explosion That Didn't Kill-
Back to the present—
Mina and Ashe slammed into the pulsing, fleshy floor of the dungeon pit, winded but alive.
They didn't waste time.
Taking off their porter bags packed with explosives, they rolled aside—just in time before Camylle surges mana into the rune-linked tattoos on her forearm. The charges activated with a flare of violet light.
The blast detonated.
Flames and shockwaves rippled across the Dungeon Master's lair—but only partially.
A quarter of the payload didn't ignite. The rest were duds, unresponsive to the initial activation.
Ashe quickly conjured Simple Hex Shields, forming overlapping disks of refracted energy around himself and Mina. The shields barely held against the explosion's edge.
Smoke billowed.
The Dungeon Master roared, staggered—but far from dead.
Above—chaos.
Trevus lunged at Harlen, sabers drawn. Nira joined him, knives flashing and the shadows following.
"They're kids! You want to kill cleaners just to get at Ferris?!"
Harlen blocks & fends off their initial attacks as he spitted out;
"Ferris breeds traitors! Protecting them so they can grow fangs!"
Camylle stepped forward—not to stop them, but to side with Harlen. Her fists ignites with embering flames.
Trevus froze at the betrayal. His brow twitched.
"Lotha. Nira. I've got this, go get the kids. Now!"
Nira and Lotha moved.
Lotha shouted over the clamor:
"Nira! Get us down there!"
Nira nodded, wrapping an arm around Lotha's waist. As the shadows obeyed her call.
She & Lotha lept into a Shadow.
They sank.
Harlen moved to intercept—but he was too slow.
The shadow folded inward and spat them out into the pit below.
Lotha landed first, sprinting across the uneven ground toward Mina and Ashe—who were staggering upright.
"Get behind me!" she shouted, casting defensive blessings mid-run.
The Dungeon Master let out a maddened bellow, dozens of eyes turning toward them again.
And the fight—was far from over.
-The Dungeon Master's Awakening-
The Dungeon Master: "Armored Flesh"
It rose from the writhing ground like a heretical idol of gore—a towering, grotesque mound of living red flesh, pulsing and breathing as if it were a singular, monstrous organ. Jagged armor plates, rusted and warped, clung to its surface like parasitic shells—fragments of fallen adventurers, their gear and bones twisted into a makeshift exoskeleton. Helms, broken swords, and splintered shields jutted from its mass like tombstones, screaming silently of past failures.
From its heaving core extended tendrils slick with blood and sinew, flailing erratically with mindless intent. At the ends of these muscular whips were jagged, tooth-like bones—barbed and serrated, gnashing like the mouths of deep-sea beasts. Each strike left the air howling, and the walls themselves recoiled as if the dungeon feared its own master.
Its moans echoed with a chorus of stolen voices, some sounding human, others not—a distorted choir of every soul it ever consumed. Eyes opened and closed beneath its skin—hundreds, blinking in no pattern—watching, remembering.
It was not just a creature.
It was a graveyard in motion.
Lotha raised her trembling hands grasping unto her staff and chanted, her voice cracking but firming with resolve: "Paladin's Shield"
"By light unbroken and will unshaken,
By vow of flame, and star forsaken—
O radiant shield, O sacred might,
Guard the worthy in holy light!"
A golden shimmer flared into form just in time.
The spell Paladin's Shield deployed—a glowing golden barrier wrapping around Ashe and Mina as the Dungeon Master's jagged tendrils whipped toward them. The first strike landed with a sickening crack, the bone-toothed limb colliding with the shield—but it didn't break.
It slowed.
Lotha flinched, gasping as the impact drained her mana.
"I-I'm just a priestess," she confessed, panting,
"but I want to be a paladin someday. I learned this from a friend… I'm still getting used to it."
The Dungeon Master let out a guttural roar, swinging again.
Each attack ground to a crawl as it touched the shield, halted mid-air between the surface of the barrier as if time itself resisted the impact.
Lotha's mind raced.
The Paladin's Shield isn't a wall—it's a force field. Anything that touches it slows down infinitely. Nothing can break through… but every hit chews through my mana like wildfire. I can't keep this up and I need have enough mana left to heal…
The next strike slammed in, and Lotha winced harder.
But the barrier held.
She stood her ground.
Lotha cast a quick glance at Ashe, her eyes wide with urgency and strain.
"You! A-Ashe, right? You're an Illusionist—r-right?" she stammered. "As soon as I drop this barrier, use your cloaking spell. I've seen your illusions before... I trust you!"
Ashe gave a small nod, already focusing.
He raised a hand, the tips of his fingers glowing faintly as he drew in a deep, measured breath. Whispered words—his personal incantation—slipped from his lips like vapor.
"May the air forget your presence,
May the light forsake your trace…"
"Shroud"
The mana around him rippled like disturbed water, ready to unravel the illusion.
"It's prepped," Ashe whispered back. "On your signal."
Lotha nodded, her arms trembling as she maintained the last thread of the barrier. "When it drops—run, or hide. Don't fight. Just disappear."
Mina clenched her fists, but nodded too.
"Please… make it count," she muttered to herself, eyes flicking to Ashe and Mina behind her.
The Dungeon Master—Armored Flesh—reeled back one of its tendrils. Lotha braced herself.
Now!
The moment the tendril recoiled for another strike, Lotha released the Paladin's Shield, letting it unravel in a fading flash of gold.
"Ashe—go!"
At once, Ashe released Shroud.
A wave of distortion washed over them. Light bent. Air shimmered. In a blink, all three of them vanished from sight—invisible.
The Dungeon Master's tendril slammed forward, obliterating the stone where Lotha once stood.
But they weren't there anymore.
The creature paused, tendrils twitching with uncertainty. Its many embedded eyes flicked wildly in all directions. Confusion rippled through its grotesque mass as it searched for prey it could no longer see.
And then—
A sudden sting.
Followed by another.
Then another.
From beneath the Dungeon Master's bloated body, a shadow moved. Flowed like black water.
It was Nira.
Using her advanced technique—Shadow Swim—she had melded with the dungeon's ambient shadows, gliding silently beneath the monster like a shark beneath a ship.
The Monster was just a heaping mass of flesh, it was big sure. But below it gives a ton of space and a huge shadow underneath.
From the dark, her dagger lunged.
Shink—
It tore through flesh with surgical precision. One, two, three punctures into the Dungeon Master's underbelly—each attack striking between bone plates or slicing into pulsating organs that had never seen sunlight. Before shifting the edge of her dagger as she leaves a long gashing wound that pours out blood into the pool of shadows.
The beast shrieked. A guttural, bubbling roar that echoed through the dungeon halls.
It writhed violently, slamming its tendrils into the walls, cracking stone, spewing ichor.
But Nira had already vanished again—back into the shadow.
Nira slipped back into the shadows.
Her body melted into the darkness like ink spilling into water. But this time, we follow her—not just into a hiding technique, but into an entirely different realm.
-The World of Shadows-
"The World of Shadows" or simply called the "Shadow Realm"
It's a place only accessible by Adept to Expert level Shadow-users. It can only be casted on a normal shadow, setting up a link to a parallel space layered beneath reality, invisible to the naked eye—dense, fluid, and silent. Everything in this realm shimmered with a bluish-black sheen. The ground, the walls, the air itself felt like water with just a hint of weight—as if time moved thicker here, muffled and viscous. Enemies who have been lured into the dark realm unfamiliar with shadow magic would find themselves continuously sinking into the bottomless shadows.
Nira swam through it with practiced ease, her form sleek and nimble in the gelatinous dark like a shark smelling blood in the water. Bubbles of mana drifted like jellyfish; faint silhouettes of the real world pulsed just outside the surface—like she was swimming beneath an ice sheet.
But then—her eyes widened.
She twisted mid-swim, instinct taking over.
It saw her, she shrieks in a panic "Sh–ggh—ghhht!"(Shit!)
From the upper surface of the World of Shadows, massive jagged tendrils punched through the veil. Dozens. All at once. The Dungeon Master had sensed her presence—and now it was stabbing blindly into the shadows, sharp tips glinting with tooth and bone.
The water-like space erupted into chaos. Fangs tore through shadow currents. Limbs struck out like harpoons. Nira's breath caught as she twisted and darted through narrow gaps, barely avoiding impalement. She clenched her jaw, pumping her limbs hard.
One strike grazed her calf—blood clouded the shadow-world like dark ink.
With no other choice, she surged upward and burst free of the shadows—gasping.
Fwump!—
She dove into a wide fracture along the dungeon wall—a jagged crevice just deep enough to slip through.
Panting heavily, she pushed back against the stone to catch her breath—when she froze. She gasped, breath catching in her throat, chest heaving.
Then—
"GAH! Stars above!" she jolted backward, startled.
Because in that very same hiding spot were Mina, Ashe, and Lotha—all of them pressed against the walls, panting in silence as it seems like their shroud spell just dispelled.
Nira blinked. "W-what the hell!? How did you all get here?!"
Mina, half-crouched behind a stone pillar, looked equally surprised. "We—we were hiding! Ashe cloaked us after Lotha had the shield dropped!"
Lotha added, "We didn't have many options, I was running out of mana fast."
Nira swore under her breath and peeked out of the crack. Just above them, chaos reigned:
Trevus was engaged in a desperate clash against Camylle and Sir Harlen on the upper level—blades colliding, fire flashing, shadows twisting.
Below, the Armored Flesh thrashed in blind fury, tendrils carving craters into the ground, flailing at nothing, bleeding profusely from the wounds Nira had inflicted.
"Grrrh—so annoying!" Nira growled, her voice low. "Trevus is holding off two traitors alone, and that thing's still not dead! And I'm just one blade—I can't finish that Dungeon Master on my own!"
Frustration twisted her face. Her breath caught between resolve and helplessness, she takes a close look at her dagger and see's just from striking its thick underbelly, its close to chipping.
But then, Mina's voice broke through the tension.
"W-wait," she said, eyes darting with sudden realization. "The explosives…! Not all of them went off. Remember? They were mana-triggered. If we can set them off—that might be enough to kill the Dungeon Master!"
Nira's sharp eyes met hers. "You're sure?"
Mina nodded, more confident now. "I—I saw where they landed out from our packs when Camylle remotely detonated them, but some of them failed. Some are still probably lying around—still intact."
Lotha, still catching her breath, chimed in with a nod. "It's worth a shot. A direct confrontation isn't going to work—not in this state. We use what we've got."
There was a beat of silence.
Then Nira exhaled through her nose. "Risky. But it's a plan."
She turned toward Ashe, sharp eyes softer than usual.
"Cloak me."
Ashe blinked. "Huh?"
"I need to move unseen," Nira said. "I'll get the charges. Set them off. Boom. You're the only one who can make that happen."
Ashe nodded, swallowing his nerves.
He held out both hands, conjuring the glow of shifting mana.
"May the air forget your presence,
May the light forsake your trace…"
"Shroud"
The shimmer of magic rippled through the air once more.
Ashe exhaled slowly, hands raised in focus—bending the light around Nira's form with surgical precision.
His illusion spell surged at full strength—flawless, seamless.
She vanished.
Cloaked in near-perfect invisibility, Nira drew her second dagger with a soft click, the twin blades now gleaming faintly in her grip—sleek, curved, and deadly.
Her outline flickered briefly… then dissolved like dust scattered in the wind.
The plan was in motion. Now, it was up to her.
End of Chapter 6...