"I still don't like this," Lohan said, taking another random turn as they searched for the stairs.
Laurencia frowned, staring impatiently at her relic.
"Well, he calls the shots," she replied absentmindedly. "You could've tried arguing with him some more."
In all honesty, the merchant had mentally checked out hours ago. The promise of wealth could only motivate her so far. There wasn't much value in getting rich if she died before she could spend any of it.
Reoloy, however, had a way of dragging people back into his madness. So somehow, despite every opportunity to leave, she was still here.
Far too deep to turn back now.
She looked up and sighed when she finally took in the young girl's expression.
"Look," she started. "You fell into the ocean hundreds of kilometres from land and somehow made it because of him. Then there's whatever the hell he pulled off with me…"
Her thoughts drifted toward that mystery for a moment before she forcibly pushed them aside.
"The point is, he keeps pulling off impossible things. Trust him."
Lohan's eyes softened.
She opened her mouth to respond, only to freeze as the staircase they had been desperately searching for came into view.
The two exchanged a glance.
Then, without another word, they nodded and sprinted upward.
It was still quiet, so maybe the enemies in the ballroom had been the bulk of the ruins' forces.
It was wishful thinking, but they needed whatever hope they could get right now.
Both of them quickly snapped back behind a corner when they caught sight of one of the swordsman golems patrolling the corridor branch to their left.
'Great...'
Laurencia leaned past the corner just enough to get a better look at the scene ahead.
They could probably sneak past it and continue straight, but from what she could tell, that route only led to a series of doors, and there was no guarantee any of them concealed another staircase.
"It looks like it's alone," Lohan whispered.
Laurencia immediately retracted behind the corner and shot the younger girl a cautious look.
"You can't be sure of that," she whispered back. "Please, please don't do anythi—"
The teen dashed out, sweeping the golem's feet out from under it before dropping a brutal axe kick that silenced it instantly.
"It's clear now."
The brunette's heart felt frozen, and her stomach was doing front flips, but from the looks of it, they were in the clear for now.
She stepped out from the corner and fell into line beside the girl, staring at her with a tired expression as she briefly considered once again whether this was some kind of karmic retribution.
"...Why are you kids like this?"
Lohan tilted her head, brows lifting slightly.
"Um... human experimentation?"
Laurencia blinked and then walked ahead, simply deciding that this was not the time to unpack that answer.
"You know… thinking about it now, it's all great that we're finding our way," she said, swinging the mace, which had now darkened by a shade. "But are we even sure he'll be able to find us before something goes wrong?"
Lohan nodded. "I've been saying—this wasn't a good idea."
She jumped in front of the woman, arms raised emphatically.
"What if he gets hurt?!"
Laurencia stared. 'I was worried about us...'
The girl could fight, though, so it would be fine.
And if push came to shove, she'd use the blast staff—Reoloy and his dumb ruins be damned.
The next twenty or so minutes were relatively uneventful, save for having to backtrack multiple times after running into dead ends. It was starting to feel hopeless, until they stumbled into a much larger hall—smooth, carpeted, and lined with portraits.
And there it was.
The staircase.
All the way at the far end.
Laurencia let out an exhausted laugh.
"He really must be some kind of unlucky charm," she said, carefully scanning the space as they moved forward. "Everything started working out as soon as he was gone."
Lohan almost leapt to Reoloy's defence, but realised she was mostly joking... and that she couldn't actually refute her point.
The older woman studied the paintings—describable only by one word: unnerving.
They all depicted variations of the same thing.
An enormous skeletal figure looming in the dark clouds, and the back of a blond, white-garbed man seemingly walking toward it.
Even without seeing his face, there was something inhuman about him—ethereal even—absurdly seeping through the brushwork. It only made the discomfort worse.
Because it wasn't the skeleton that unsettled her.
It was him.
"Can we move faster?" Laurencia muttered, chills crawling up her back. "I don't feel good in this place."
"I agree..." Lohan nodded.
As absentminded as she could usually be—and even more so now, with whatever was gnawing at her from within—she still felt an unearthly fear just standing anywhere near the images.
They quickened their pace, only to slowly notice something they hadn't earlier.
"We're not getting any closer," Lohan said, stopping in her tracks, her eyes narrowing as she looked up at the bright white lights illuminating everything.
Suddenly, the air fizzled—and in the timeframe of a single blink, the room was flooded with enemies, appearing as if torn straight out of empty space.
"The hell?!"
"Miss Laurencia, get closer!"
Chaos erupted.
Without even pausing to orient themselves after teleporting in, every monster closed in from all around.
Swordsman golems lunged clumsily, blades carving through the air as crawlers dropped from the ceiling and walls alike—strangely steering clear of the paintings as if repelled by them as well.
The sea creatures shoved past one another in a frenzy, shrieks overlapping into an unbearable chorus as the entire hall descended into a life-or-death brawl in a heartbeat.
Lohan clicked her tongue.
She couldn't move around as freely as she wanted. If she strayed too far from Laurencia, one of them would inevitably get swallowed by the tide of monsters.
Ki formed around her as she intercepted a sharp-toothed, serpentine-crab creature, her heel crashing into its jaw hard enough to send it skidding across the carpet.
Two more came that she quickly dispatched with low spinning kicks before ripping through a flying monster with her bare hands and throwing the remains at a group of swordsmen, following it up with a punch that generated a forceful gust that swept them back while they were distracted.
Before she could even breathe, a bat grabbed and lifted her, then dropped her over an awaiting cluster of spiky spheres. She quickly recognised them as some kind of urchin and just as rapidly noticed the sharp ends secreting a substance that would probably do her no good.
Forcefully kicking free of the beast's grasp, Lohan propelled herself with a short burst of ki, landing atop a bird monster and violently steering it as close to her original position as she could before crushing it into the ground with a heavily ki-reinforced punch.
The impact scattered—or outright obliterated—whatever had made up the congregation in the surrounding area.
She stood soaked in all kinds of fluids, catching her breath, then immediately turning her focus to the flow of her ki, in a near panic.
"Miss Laurencia, are you okay?!"
The merchant wrestled an alligator monster off herself and then battered it over the head with her relic—carefully so she wouldn't set it off.
Doing so would trigger the very disaster she'd spent the entire time she'd owned it trying to avoid discovering.
"I'm better than I was a few weeks ago, but worse than I've ever been in my life."
Lohan took that to mean she was fine.
She cleared some spearmen flesh golems and made to regroup with the woman in a burst of motion, but—
Crack
"Huh?" Lohan muttered.
Her ears rang.
And her head felt like it was vibrating and rolling at the same time. Judging by the agony radiating through her neck, it was something of a miracle that her head was still attached after whatever had just happened.
She tried to stand, only to collapse again and realise she had been embedded in the wall.
Through blurry eyes, she watched Laurencia take a careful, wide arc toward her instead of approaching directly, as though she were avoiding something standing between them.
Following her line of sight, Lohan saw the enemies freeze—as if in reverence of the being that now stood somewhere in their centre.
The same being that had intercepted her before she could even comprehend what had happened.
Unlike the other flesh golems, this one was scrawny—feeble, even—holding a thin double-edged blade that looked better suited for ceremony than combat.
Yet the air around it was suffocating.
As if the entire area was in the range of a sword that had already cut you.
Lohan felt blood trickle down her face, likely a result of a head injury she'd suffered from the blow.
She forced herself to her feet, leaning against the wall and utilising ki and ki breathing to manage her injuries, but she was unsure how much that would actually accomplish.
Laurencia put much more desperation into her sprint, trying to meet the teen before that absolute monster made its next move.
She reached into her pocket storage, summoning her blast staff because this was exactly the kind of situation where caution had to be thrown to the wind; however, before the call for the item could fully register within the relic—
The swordsman moved.
In a single step, it was crouched directly in Lohan's face.
Suddenly, it became painfully apparent just how tall the creature truly was. Like the other golems, its skin—and by extension its face—was purple, but weathered, resembling that of an expressionless old man. A spiky white mane framed its shoulders, and set within its gaunt features were deep black eyes with blue irises.
Looking at the scene from a distance, Laurencia recognised the pristine white gi it wore as attire popular in the Western Empire—the detail only clicking into place through the technique it had just used.
'Burst Step?!' she thought in a panic. 'It's a ki master!'
The golem studied Lohan's face with a quiet, almost curious fascination, as though it were contemplating something with a level of awareness it shouldn't possess.
Then, slowly, it extended its fingers toward the frozen girl.
And Laurencia was forced to accept she had no choice.
She drew her arm back, the mace's now-purple hue intensifying before she swung it toward the monster.
"Roar!"
A wide wave of concussive force erupted from the arc of the strike. The impact shattered every bone in her arm instantly, but the attack was already released, and all she could do was pray that it did something despite its incompleteness.
It surged forward, erasing countless enemies in its path, but the elderly golem didn't even turn toward it until the last possible moment—brushing it aside with a single palm.
Despair settled in the brunette's heart.
This being went beyond anything she understood right now. She staggered back, then, with a shout, attempted to summon her strongest relic.
But the swordsman was already in front of her.
A single backhand sent her flying into the wall a few metres away from Lohan.
The lavender-haired teen snapped out of her fear-induced stupor, her gaze slowly drifting to Laurencia's motionless form. Her senses offered no immediate confirmation of whether she was alive.
Her heart beat fast.
Bile rose in her throat as guilt and regret quickly grew louder than they had already been.
She could have prevented this.
If she fought for real, she could have prevented this, but—
"The moment you exhaust your ki," a vague jumble of voices chimed in her mind. "You will die."
"However, rejoice! Owing to our procedures, you now have an excess of ki!"
'But what if I use it all up?!' Lohan panicked, clutching her head. 'I don't want to die!'
Her arms fell weakly to her sides, her expression going blank as her eyes hollowed.
The elder golem sneered at her in what looked to be disgust and walked away, allowing the other monsters to move in and finish the job.
It tore through a hidden distortion in the air and revealed the staircase not even twenty metres away, and made its way.
As soon as it covered the first step, ki flooded the hall, shifting the pressure significantly as quakes rocked the entire structure.
Its head snapped back—only to be met with a fist driven by such momentum that it hurled it back into the grand chamber's floor.
It rose again, only to receive another strike, this one barely deflected as it raised its sword in time.
A manic smile split its face.
It looked like it was trying to laugh, but no sound came out.
Lohan didn't care.
The air around her buzzed and vibrated, raw power seeping from her very pores. Though it wasn't without a cost—portions of her skin peeled back under the vivid blue glow of her ki.
Yet she rushed in all the same, using a bastardised version of the step her opponent had used twice earlier.
The golem steadied itself, mustering its own flood of dark green ki as its sword was coated in a black sheen with similarly green outlines.
Just as they moved to clash—
"That's enough."
Slash
The swordsman's black eyes widened. Its blade remained raised in the air as its body split cleanly in two.
The last thing it saw was Reoloy still in the finishing posture of his strike—right hand drawn past his left foot, face obscured by falling hair.
He straightened slowly, forcing himself to remain upright as he took in the situation.
'I overdid just then,' he thought wearily. 'But...this is insane...'
Reoloy looked around the chamber at the sea of corpses—most of them freshly dead—with a mixture of awe and fear.
Not one was left alive.
And as far as his senses had indicated before his arrival, at least seventy percent of these had been active only moments ago before dropping all at once in a blip of a moment.
His eyes fell on Lohan, drenched in all kinds of artificial residue, yet still violently glowing with unstable ki.
"You should stop that now," he said calmly. "It's not safe. You're not using the right method for the technique."
It took Lohan a moment to register the last minute.
Reoloy was suddenly in front of her.
The danger was gone.
And with the relief came collapse—she fell forward and slipped into unconsciousness.
The reincarnator caught her and laid her down gently, catching sight of Laurencia and standing with a sigh.
"What are the chances you would see it twice today?"
Gaiskas regarded the unconscious Lohan with a silent respect, though it still carried a hint of condescension.
"You mean the fake attribution thing?" Reoloy asked, then sat against a pillar, staring at one of the paintings flatly. "It's different for her than it is for you. For a ki user, especially, her body was going to give up on her."
"But it was impressive, was it not?"
Reoloy paused.
"It was."