Chapter 15: The Headless Rider
"Zangika."
"Wake up, my baby."wake up
Karn opened his eyes to the ceiling of his lodging room — plain stone, a single crack running from the corner where the roof met the wall. He lay there for a moment, blinking.
Is that a mini drone
"Oh my god," he said. "You're starting again."
"Come on," Zangika said. "When was the last time you gave me any attention? When, Karn? When?"
Karn sat up slowly and rubbed his face. He thought about pointing out that she was an AI. He had made that mistake twice before. Both times had ended badly.
"Well—"
"Tell me. To my face. Say it."
"How about we go into the city today?"
A pause. Then: "We always go out."
The sigh she produced was the particular kind — the one that managed to carry the full weight of genuine emotional exhaustion just like a woman who hasn't been given any love and attention.
"Zangika. Just—" He held up a finger. "Wait a second."
"One. Two. Three. Four. Five—"
"Can you please stop doing that?"
"Six. Seven—"
"Zangika."
"Eight—"
"FINE. We go to the city, we sell the excess loot we pulled from the dungeon, we figure out what the Griffin was actually doing in that boss room since that still doesn't make any sense, and then we do whatever you want. Is that acceptable?"
A beat.
"...What I want is to materialise."
"People will think I'm a necromancer."
Zangika laughed — and it was a real laugh, the kind that didn't calculate anything.
"You're right," she admitted. "Okay. Research first. The Griffin analysis and the weird Goblin results are both ready — I'll explain on the way. And yes, we're running low on funds, so selling makes sense." A pause. "Also the Goblin results are... interesting."
Karn stood and stretched. "Define interesting."
"The ones with the abnormal cores weren't entirely Goblin. I'll tell you later. Don't make that face."
"I'm not making a face."
"You are absolutely making a face."
The Guild HeadquartersThey walked through the city toward the guild headquarters, Karn keeping pace with the morning crowd while Zangika explained guild structure in his ear at a volume that made it sound like he was having a conversation with himself.
"—so the continent runs on two parallel power structures," she said. "Noble hierarchy on one side — kings, princes, dukes, counts, all the way down. Guild associations on the other. They balance each other, in theory. The eight Dukedoms each have their own guild association, the main kingdom has the top one, and whoever is the strongest adventurer leads it. No bloodlines, no inheritance — just strength."
"Why?" Karn asked, keeping his voice low.
"Goes back to the third generation after the original Hero. He saw the power imbalance clearly — nobles accumulating everything, adventurers getting nothing. He married a female adventurer named Kracy, who was by all accounts just as strong as him, and together they established the current system. The rule held because nobody was willing to challenge two people simultaneously who could both break a mountain."
"Isn't it too much information to just dump on someone like this?"
"You literally just said you wanted to understand this world better."
"I said that two days ago."
"I have perfect memory. Also — we're here. Stop talking to yourself. People are looking."
The headquarters was built from old dark wood and pale stone, wide and imposing at the end of a broad avenue. Inside, the first thing Karn noticed was the warmth — fires burning low in iron brackets along the walls, long tables full of people talking in low voices over maps and food. The second thing he noticed was the receptionists.
All of them were wearing armour that seemed to have been designed by someone who misunderstood what armour was for. Some covered everything. Some covered roughly the same surface area as an independent woman think is right to cover more or likely a swimsuit with a few decorative plates attached. The variety was, to put it simply some are like thongs and some was like normal.
Karn stared for approximately two seconds longer than he intended.
"Hormone levels spiking," Zangika noted. "As always, when you encounter step-sister adjacent content."
"Stop—"
"It's just data, Karn."
"I was looking at the armour. It's a completely legitimate observation — half of them have full coverage and the other half seem to have left the legs entirely unprotected and I'm just saying from a tactical standpoint—"
"If you look at another woman like that again I will de materialise the Shadow Nexus and let the demons find your room and touch you."
Karn cleared his throat and walked to the counter.
The receptionist who handled exchanges looked up at him with the particular expression of someone who had been around for years . Her name was Cersy, and her attention sharpened noticeably the moment she registered Karn's outfit — something about it read expensive, foreign, and possibly aristocratic to her trained eye.
"She's into you," Zangika said flatly.
Karn placed the stones on the counter without reacting — a spread of dungeon crystals, mostly dark green and one noticeably lighter one that caught the attention of the cersy it was light differently from the rest.
Cersy looked at the stones. Then at Karn. Then back at the stones. A single person had brought all of these out.
"Your adventurer card?"
He handed over the forged card Zangika had made. Cersy placed it on the verification stone — a faint magical instrument built into the counter — and the stone did nothing. No pulse, no reaction. She frowned, turned the card over, frowned again.
"It feels... off," she said. "The material isn't registering properly. Normally a card interacts with the stone like a key — but this one just sits there."
"What should I do?" Karn asked.
She told him to wait, disappeared upstairs for about fifteen minutes, and came back with a fresh blank card and a different verification globe — larger, sitting on a wooden stand, glowing softly.
"Name?"
"What do I say?" Karn muttered.
"Nexus."
"What about Shadow?"
"Copyright."
"Nexus," he said.
Cersy wrote the name and asked him to place his hand on the globe for mana measurement.
"We don't have mana," Karn muttered.
"Don't worry. Just place your hand."
He pressed his palm to the globe. Through a void channel Zangika had prepared without telling him, the Griffin stone passed through the suit and into contact range — its mana pouring into the measurement in a quiet flood. The globe lit up brighter than Cersy had probably seen it go in some time.
"Plenty of mana," Cersy said. She looked impressed and slightly flustered. "You're quite strong."
She finished the card and slid it across the counter. Two cards now — the old forged one with its faint odd trace and the new one bearing his registered name. He looked at the rank printed neatly on the face of the new card.
Rank B.
"Nexus," karn said, "are you sure it should be B? The reading was—"
"B is fine," cersy said.
"What the hell was that?" Zangika said privately.
"At least it helps us," Karn said under his breath.
* * *
Second FloorThey went straight back to the dungeon.
The second floor was colder. The crystal light had shifted from blue-green to a muted grey-white — dimmer, pressing closer to the walls, the corridors narrower. Other adventuring parties moved through it in clusters, most of them glancing at Karn as they passed, eyes drifting to the suit, looking for a bag, a pack, a weapon case.
"Where does he keep his gear?"
Karn caught the whisper from a group of three men he passed. He kept walking.
"Sub-skeleton species ahead," Zangika said. "They're carrying weapons they've picked up from previous parties. Adventurers who didn't make it."
She paused.
"Normally you'd want mages for a group this size. But lasers work just as fine."
The skeletons didn't last long. Zangika's targeting was precise and powerful — thin beams, surgical, each one dropping a skeleton before it could take a full step. Karn moved through them at a walk, the suit cutting out anything that slipped through the firing pattern. Clean, fast, and quiet.
They pressed on until the corridor opened into a wider passage and the temperature dropped another degree. The air smelled different here — older, and something else underneath it. Something burnt.
At the end of the passage, a door.
Heavy. Older than the rest of the floor. The markings on it were different from the ones upstairs — not decorative. Something else.
"Boss room," Karn said.
"That's odd," Zangika said. "Dungeon records show this floor should have a Skeleton Knight as the boss. Standard — powerful swordsmanship, fairly predictable pattern."
Karn pushed the door open.
"What the hell is that?"
The chamber was wide and high-ceilinged, the crystal light on the walls here burning a deep, sickly orange. In the center, something large stood in the shadow.
A horse. Black — not dark brown, not shadow-grey, but the specific black of something that had stopped living and kept going anyway. Zangika added just like a black person dad.karn stop ok continue with the explanation Its hooves didn't quite touch the stone the right way. Its breathing was wrong. Its eyes were empty plates of dim amber light.
And on top of it — a rider. Fully armoured, broad-shouldered, one gauntleted hand resting across the pommel of a long curved sword. The armour was old — black iron, the kind that had been through more than any record would show.
Where the head should have been, there was nothing.
Just empty air above the collar. And from the neck, slow black flames burned upward — silent, cold-looking, giving off no heat. The head sat tucked under the rider's left arm like a carried helm, its jaw closed, its eye sockets full of the same black fire.
"Zangika," Karn said.
"Dullahan," she said. "You had it right. Old mythology — a headless horseman, usually associated with death omens. But this one is inside a dungeon, which means someone put it here, or something summoned it." A beat. "It's also not in any dungeon record. This floor shouldn't have this."
The Dullahan's grip on its sword shifted. The black flames burned a little higher.
"There's also something else in here," Zangika said. "Behind it. Something pinned to the wall."
Karn could see it now. A skeleton — armoured, chained to the far wall with thick rusted links, its head drooped. A sword of unusual length was pinned beside it, flat against the stone.
"That's the Skeleton Knight," Zangika said quietly. "The actual boss. The Dullahan chained it up."
The Dullahan turned its horse to face them. The severed head under its arm tilted slightly — like it was watching.
* * *
The Dullahan"Combat mode," Karn said.
The HUD flooded with data — threat mapping, trajectory prediction, the horse's weight distribution across four points on the floor, the angle of the sword resting across the pommel.
The Dullahan moved first.
It charged without warning — no shift of weight, no intake of breath, no tell. The horse's hooves struck the stone and the sound was wrong, too resonant, as though the ground itself were a drum. The Dullahan raised its sword overhead as it closed the distance and brought it down in a straight vertical cut.
Karn threw himself sideways. The blade hit the stone where he'd been standing and a black arc burst out from the point of impact — not fire, not lightning, but something like a pressure wave dyed dark as ink, carving a furrow twelve feet across the floor and gouging the far wall.
Karn hit the ground rolling and came up already moving.
"One swing did that," he said.
"The arc carries residual death energy," Zangika said, already cross-referencing. "Each swing extends roughly fifteen metres. Do not get caught in it."
"Noted."
The Dullahan wheeled the horse hard and came again — this time a horizontal sweep, low, angled to catch Karn at mid-body. He dropped under it, the black arc howling over his head and splitting a column of crystal behind him clean off the wall. He planted his foot and launched forward at full speed — closing inside the sword's reach before the Dullahan could reset.
His fist connected with the side of the horse — the impact shuddered up his arm and the horse lurched sideways, hooves scraping against stone. The Dullahan rode the stumble without flinching, already twisting the sword in its grip.
"Spear," Karn said.
It materialised in his hand mid-stride. He drove it forward in a thrust at the Dullahan's armoured chest — the tip hit and skidded off the black iron, sparks cutting sideways, the impact jarring enough to slow both of them. The Dullahan backhanded him with a gauntleted fist. Karn caught it on his forearm and took the force on his legs, feet dragging back several inches across the floor.
"The armour's too thick for a direct shot," Zangika said. "Joints. Visor gap. Base of the neck."
"Working on it."
The Dullahan raised the sword again and swept it downward in a diagonal — Karn broke left, air walk engaging at the apex of his dodge, his foot finding a direction that shouldn't have been there and pushing him up and sideways along the chamber wall. He ran along it for three steps, horizontal, and the Dullahan had to track him with its headless neck, the burning eye sockets of the carried head trying to follow.
He launched off the wall toward the back of the Dullahan's horse and drove the spear tip between two of the creature's armour plates at the shoulder — into the joint.
"Water pressure — short burst."
A concentrated jet fired through the spear tip and into the joint gap. The armour plate buckled outward with a grinding shriek of metal. The Dullahan's sword arm jerked off— for the first time its movement had been disrupted. It wrenched away from Karn, the spear pulling free, and swung its elbow backward in a blind strike that caught him in the chest and launched him across the chamber.
Karn hit the ground hard, bounced once, and came up on one knee with the spear still in hand. His chest cavity registered impact — suit integrity at eighty-seven percent.
"That worked," he said.
"The joint is compromised. If you can get pressure into the neck gap consistently, it'll restrict the sword range significantly."
The Dullahan charged again — straight line, full speed, the horse's hooves throwing orange sparks from the crystal-lit floor. The sword trailed back and then came forward in a massive horizontal arc, the black death energy trailing it like a wake.
Karn didn't dodge sideways. He pushed forward — straight at the horse, ducking under the arc as it passed over him with centimetres to spare — and drove his shoulder into the horse's chest at full speed.
The impact was like hitting a wall, but the horse's momentum had nowhere to go — it reared, hooves driving upward, the Dullahan thrown back in the saddle. Karn used the rearing chest as a surface and ran straight up it, planting both feet on the creature's neck and launching himself up to the Dullahan's level in a single burst.
Eye to burning eye socket.
He drove the spear toward the neck gap where the black flames burned brightest.
The Dullahan caught the shaft with its free hand.
Karn held on. The grip strength in that gauntlet was enormous — he felt it torquing the spear sideways, trying to twist it free. He fired a short water burst through the shaft instead, the jet punching into the hand's armour and blasting the grip loose. The spear drove two inches into the neck gap. The flames there flared violently — pure black, hotter than the rest.
The Dullahan grabbed him by the chest and threw him across the room.
He hit the wall, cracked into it shoulder-first and dropped, and before he'd fully found his feet the Dullahan's sword came down in an overhead strike. Karn got the spear up horizontally and caught the flat of the blade — the impact drove him straight through the wall section behind him.
Dust. Stone everywhere. Suit integrity sixty-two percent.
"Karn."
"I'm good."
"No, I mean — it's waking the Skeleton Knight up."
* * *
The Skeleton KnightThe chains on the far wall had begun to rattle.
The Dullahan's energy was feeding it — the death aura pulsing through the chamber with each swing, each black arc, was acting as fuel. The Skeleton Knight's skull lifted. The empty eye sockets ignited — no colour, just white light, clean and cold, nothing like the Dullahan's black flames. The chains snapped.
The pinned sword wrenched itself free from the wall.
The Skeleton Knight caught it without looking — the blade floating through the air toward its outstretched hand as though it had always been going there.
"Telekinesis," Zangika confirmed. "And the swordsmanship data coming off that thing is — Karn, this one's different. That sword has been swung a very large number of times by something that never gets tired."
Zangika and how did you know that karn thought it might sound cool and said it ., zangika shut up.
The Skeleton Knight raised the blade and turned its gaze toward the Dullahan first — then toward Karn. Then it swung.
A black arc — different from the Dullahan's, this one denser, heavier, like someone had compressed dark matter into a line — erupted from the sword as it moved and streaked across the chamber floor. Where it hit the far wall, a five-ton section of stone split clean down the middle and the two halves separated and fell.
The Dullahan didn't dodge it. It raised its own sword and met the arc with one of its own — the two death energies collided in the middle of the chamber and detonated, blowing Karn off his feet.
They were fighting each other.
"Of course," Zangika said. "The Skeleton Knight was the floor boss. The Dullahan displaced it. Neither of them is happy about the other one being here."
"So they're going to destroy the entire chamber trying to kill each other."
"Yes."
"And us along with it."
"Also yes."
The two undead creatures circled each other, arcs flying between them in short savage exchanges, each one hitting the walls and floor and ceiling with impacts that shook loose chunks of stone from above.
Karn stood up, assessed the situation, and decided on something that was arguably reckless but was also the only option he could see.
"Zangika — the Griffin stone."
"What are you thinking?"
"The stone holds mana. High-density. What happens if you run the pressure water through it?"
A pause — short, but real.
"The water would absorb the mana signature during pressurisation. It would become mana-laced at molecular level. Moving at high speed, it would cut through anything with a mana core." Another beat. "Including an undead powered by death energy."
"And the whip configuration — can you run that through the spear?"
"Yes. But this isn't a test, Karn. If I open the stone fully and run maximum output through it, the residual mana after the strike will probably strip the chamber bare. Everything gets cut."
"Then we better be fast."
* * *
Maximum OutputThe Skeleton Knight had driven the Dullahan back against the far wall, three successive arcs pinning it, the Dullahan's blade meeting each one but losing ground with every exchange. The room was falling apart — crystal brackets dropping from the walls, sections of the ceiling cracking open, dust filling the air thick as smoke.
Karn moved into the open space between both of them.
Both creatures turned.
The Skeleton Knight swung first — a diagonal cut, the arc erupting forward. Karn ran directly at it and jumped, the air walk kicking in at the peak and driving him upward and over the arc as it passed beneath him, the death energy shredding the floor where he'd been standing. He planted a foot on nothing, pivoted in mid-air, and came down behind the Skeleton Knight.
He drove the spear into its shoulder joint — same principle as before — and fired a burst. The armour cracked. The Skeleton Knight swung its elbow back and Karn took the hit glancing, using the momentum to spin away rather than absorb it, landing low.
The Dullahan used the break to charge — horse thundering across the chamber, sword raised for a downward split. Karn rolled between the horse's legs, came up behind it, and drove the spear tip into the Dullahan's back armour. The water burst blew the back plate off entirely. The Dullahan's body lurched forward.
He was between both of them now — the Skeleton Knight to his left recovering, the Dullahan to his right wheeling the horse. Both turning toward him. The Skeleton Knight raised its sword. The Dullahan raised its sword. Both arcs built simultaneously — he could feel the pressure in the air, like the moment before thunder.
"Now?" Zangika asked.
"Now."
The Griffin stone opened.
The mana flooded the water system in an instant — Karn felt the spear shift in his hand, the whole shaft humming with built pressure, the material vibrating at a frequency he could feel in his back teeth. The water inside reached maximum output and the mana saturated it completely, the two elements binding at molecular level into something that was neither one of them separately.
"Whip configuration."
The stream released from the tip — not a jet, not a beam, but a long continuous arc of pressurised mana-laced water that moved like something alive. Karn drove it forward at one hundred and seventy miles per hour.
It hit the Dullahan first.
The whip passed through the armour like it wasn't there. Through the chest. Through the horse. Through the rider and mount simultaneously — the mana in the water reacting violently with the death energy, detonating it from the inside. Hairline fractures opened across the armour surface like a broken plate, and then the entire thing came apart — not shattered, not blown, just separated, every piece falling away clean as meat slices .
The black flames died.
The pieces hit the ground.
Karn was already pivoting. The whip still carried mana. He swung it wide — the arc coming around in a full circle — and drove it into the Skeleton Knight before it could complete its swing.
The Skeleton Knight had time to raise its sword. The whip hit the blade first — the steel split like wet paper, both halves spinning away — and kept going through the body beneath it.
It separated into pieces at every joint.
Clean cuts. Absolute cuts. The white light in the eye sockets went out mid-fall and didn't come back.
The mana residue discharged outward in all directions.
Every remaining crystal in the chamber walls shattered simultaneously. Three more sections of ceiling dropped. The floor cracked in a web pattern that spread from the point Karn was standing to every wall. The two halves of the stone section the Skeleton Knight's arc had split earlier finally separated completely and fell with a sound like a controlled demolition.
Dust filled everything.
Karn stood in the middle of it, spear still in hand, the last of the mana-laced water dripping from the tip and cutting small furrows in the cracked floor wherever it landed.
Everything was still.
* * *
Aftermath"...Suit integrity at forty-one percent," Zangika said.
"That bad?"
"You went through a wall. You took an elbow from a creature with the physical mass of a small carriage. And the mana discharge burned through two of the secondary systems." A pause. "So yes. That bad."
"Griffin stone?"
"Spent. Completely. I pushed everything out of it." She paused. "The mana it held was — actually, I want to analyse the residue pattern before I say anything else. But the water interaction was more effective than projected."
"Good to know for next time."
"There's a core," Zangika added. "The Dullahan's. It survived — it's in the debris near the horse remains. You should collect it. The system won't have a record of a Dullahan core. That'll be worth something to the right person."
Karn walked over to where the Dullahan's remains were scattered and crouched. Under a section of armour plate, still faintly warm, was a core the size of a clenched fist — not the clean crystal green of a Goblin core, but a deep, translucent black, almost like looking into smoke trapped in glass.
He turned it over in his hand.
"The head," he said. "Where's the severed head?"
"Destroyed with the rest. The black flame is gone."
He pocketed the core and straightened.
"We should go before this floor decides to follow the ceiling."
"Already calculating the fastest exit route." A beat. "Also — Karn."
"What?"
"That was good."
He didn't say anything. But she felt the change in his posture through the suit's pressure sensors and filed it away without comment.
They moved through the cracked corridor at a pace that was just fast enough to be efficient and just slow enough to not look panicked to the adventurers they passed on the way out — some of whom had felt the vibrations from two floors up and were now moving cautiously toward the stairs with drawn weapons.
"The third floor will need to wait," Zangika said as they reached the entrance and stepped out into the afternoon.
"Agreed."
"Also we have no funds again. You spent the Griffin stone."
"We have the Dullahan core."
"Which nobody has a reference price for."
"That's not our problem. That's their problem."
Zangika was quiet for a moment. Then:
"You know what — fair enough."
They walked back toward the city as the dungeon entrance sealed by guard's behind them — .
Neither of them mentioned what the fuck was Dullahan had been doing in a floor it didn't belong to. Or who might have put it there.
That question could wait.
For now.
End of Chapter 15