Chapter 19: Mask and sacrifice
"Are you sure?" Karn asked.
"It's your choice," Zangika said.
Karn thought about it for a second. Then let it go.
"Isn't it weird how few people we've seen down here?"
"There's probably a reason," Zangika said. "Most adventurers don't speed-run dungeons."
"Fair point." He kept walking. "Alright. Boss floor."
* * *
The Cape
They were approaching the boss area when Zangika stopped him.
"Wait."
The HUD shifted to drone preview — a feed from the unit Zangika had sent ahead earlier. In the frame: five adventurers in a loose group, talking to a sixth person standing apart from them. Dark cape. Face hidden behind a mask. Still.
"Can we hear them?"
"Turning the mic on."
The audio came through — rough, slightly distorted by the cave acoustics, but clear enough.
One of the five — the one with the bearing of a group leader — was talking. Sully. He was trying to keep his voice steady.
"You should speak with us," Sully said. "We're all adventurers here. There's a way to handle this."
The cape figure didn't turn.
"Fuck off," he said. "Mind your own business if you want to keep living. That's all I'll say."
"Classic villain line," Karn muttered.
"Focus," Zangika said.
Sully didn't back down. That's not how you talk to a fellow adventurer. I don't care how confident you are — there's a baseline of—
"Courtesy?" the cape figure said. The word came out almost amused. "You humans and your courtesy. You know nothing about courtesy. Filthy creatures."
"He's not holding back even a little," Zangika noted.
Sully's voice dropped. "What do you mean humans? You look human. Are you a noble or something? What gives you the right—"
"How dare you compare me to something like you," the cape figure said, and now there was no amusement in it at all. "Looks like you don't value your life."
Sully looked at his group. They spread out — weapons, stances, preparation. The quiet before.
"Guys — ready."
The cape figure tilted his head slightly.
"I always love when humans do this," he said. Not to them — more like thinking out loud. "The camaraderie. Dying for the group. Fellowship. Sacrifice for the greater cause. It's fascinating, genuinely."
"Does this guy think he's in a manga?" Karn said.
"It is a little dramatic," Zangika admitted. "But also—"
The cape figure raised one finger.
A thin black beam extended from the tip — Precise. It swept across all five necks in a single horizontal motion. not an explosion — just a quiet line moving through five people at once.
Five heads hit the stone.
The beam kept going — through the wall behind them, through the Kracy beasts beyond that, and into the dungeon wall itself, carving a deep split into the rock face that groaned and settled.
Silence.
"Fatality," Zangika said quietly. "He's strong. Very strong. I wonder if we—"
"We what?" Karn said. "You saw that. Five people. One finger. We are not fighting that man."
"Not in the Shadow Nexus," Zangika said. "I'm aware of what we are and what we aren't right now. But the Galaxy Nexus — with the spear running at full potential through the star energy transfer, combined with the mana capability we've been building — it's a different conversation."
"Wait. The spear isn't at full power?"
"The spear was built from leftover cybernetic alloys, Nexnium, and the Cretanium we found here. Its design was always meant to interface with the Galaxy Nexus — that's where the power transfer runs at full efficiency. The cybernetic alloys can move star energy, but slower, with more waste. We're using roughly sixty to seventy percent of what the spear can actually output."
"And we're already doing what we're doing on sixty percent."
"Yes."
"And the Shadow Nexus itself—"
"Was never built for this. We made it for daily use. Exploration. To have fun. We added safety systems and weapon functionality as an afterthought — that's why we made the Galaxy Nexus separately. The Shadow Nexus was never the combat suit." A pause. "If it had been, we wouldn't have needed the Galaxy Nexus at all."
Karn was quiet for a moment. "Ok. You can stop now. I understand."
"I'm not shouting. I'm just — it amazes me sometimes how you don't think about these things."
"I'm sorry for being an idiot."
A pause.
"...You're not an idiot," she said, less sharply.
"Should we follow him?"
"Your call. Keep distance, use the drone. We shouldn't get any closer than we need to."
"Let's see where he goes."
* * *
Delta Again
They followed at distance — Karn on foot, quiet, the drone feeding the view ahead into the HUD. The cape figure moved with the unhurried pace of someone who had already decided nothing down here could harm him.
Then he stopped. Turned his head — not toward Karn, toward the drone.
"He saw it," Karn said.
"Maybe. He's looking at it, not moving toward us. He might think it's a dungeon creature."
Then the cape figure spoke — not at the drone, past it.
"Delta. I know you're here. Stop being an idiot and come out."
A figure dropped from the shadows just below the drone — landing without a sound. Cloaked and masked, the same as the cape figure, but smaller and carrying herself differently. The mask she wore had sharp claw-mark scratches carved through the eye socket area down to the cheek. She looked up at the drone before looking anywhere else.
"Hm. I've never seen a beast like this."
She reached out and touched the drone body. Turned it slightly, examining the propeller assembly.
"Is it wings? Some kind of mechanical thing from a dwarf craftsman?"
Luchion looked at it briefly. Stop messing with it, he said. Even if it is some dwarf contraption, leave it. Our lord told us to avoid unnecessary conflicts. That device is probably nothing — but if whoever built it comes looking, we don't need that problem.
In Karn's feed, Zangika's voice had gone very quiet.
"He called the spear shitty tech."
"He said 'probably nothing'."
"He implied it was shitty. And he didn't even use that word — you added it. And I still have feelings, for the record."
"He doesn't know what it is. He's never encountered tech before. That's not an insult."
"It absolutely is."
"Take a breath."
Delta had let go of the drone. She dropped back to Luchion's level.
"Are you sure?" she asked. "It felt interesting."
"Leave it," Luchion said, and kept walking.
Zangika pulled the drone back gradually — widening the gap, extending to the full reach of the camera's zoom capacity until the two figures were small shapes in the feed and the drone was well beyond their detection range.
* * *
The Concealed Aftermath
After some time, the drone picked up more people ahead — four of them. Three standing, one held between two of them. A hostage. Or a prisoner. Both worked.
"Is it a woman?" Karn asked.
"Why does that matter?"
"Just asking."
"It's a man. And two of the others look badly injured — not incapacitated, but they've been through something recent."
Karn studied the feed. The two injured ones carried themselves the way people do when they're running on adrenaline and refusal — stiff, careful, not letting it show too much. There must have been a fight. But the area around them looked undisturbed.
"Drop a mic. Stone size. Aim for a natural-looking spot."
The tiny device landed with a soft tap. All four heads turned toward it simultaneously. A beat — then one of them glanced away.
"Must be debris," Delta said. "You two fought hard enough to shake the whole floor."
The third figure — same build as Luchion, same cloaked posture — snapped their fingers.
What happened next was difficult to describe properly. It was as though the space around them had been wearing a layer of something — a veil over the real shape of things — and that layer was peeling back from four directions at once. Not vanishing. Dissolving. Reality reasserting itself underneath.
When it cleared, the battlefield appeared.
"Wow," Karn said.
The chamber had been destroyed. Not damaged — destroyed. Massive slash marks ran floor to ceiling, some wide enough to fit a person through. Sections of stone were simply missing — , not fallen, just gone, cut away so cleanly the absence looked intentional. One area looked like someone had swung something and cut the space itself — a mark that wasn't a gouge so much as a removal. Two weapons lay in pieces: a large sword, snapped cleanly near the hilt, and a nunchaku-chain weapon split at the connector, the spiked ends far apart from each other.
"Someone hid all of this," Zangika said. "The whole battlefield. Under a concealment layer."
Delta looked at the chamber. Even she seemed muted by it.
"You really piled this place up," she said to the third figure.
The third figure — another masked individual, similar build to Luchion — spoke without emotion. I hate to admit it. But these guy were strong. We weren't fighting some green adventurers.
A smaller figure stepped out from behind the two injured ones — slight, almost girlish in build, but there was nothing girlish in the way she moved. She looked at the destroyed chamber with the calm of someone reviewing a completed task.
"It wasn't like fighting a sixteen-year-old," the third figure said. "It was like fighting someone who had spent years in actual battles."
"These guys are nobles after all," Luchion said.
The drone zoomed past them to the figure being held between two of the group.
Golden hair. A cut on his forehead, blood dried along the side of his face. Unconscious, or close to it. But even like this, there was something about his features — clean, sharp, the kind of face that reads as significant before you know who it belongs to.
"That's a good-looking guy," Karn said.
He gets me hard "what did you just say anyways
"He is. But not as much as you."
"You only say that because you love me."
"Personality matters too," Zangika said simply.
Karn looked at the feed for another second. Then Luchion's voice came through the mic.
"I knew this would be hard," Luchion said. "But looking at what you went through — if luck hadn't been on our side, it would've been us lying in that chamber."
One of the injured ones — lean, with the remnants of the broken nunchaku weapon still at his belt — made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"If I'd died I would've taken him with me," he said.
"Sure you would," Delta said.
"Stop talking," Luchion said. "Get him ready. We move. The sacrifice needs to be prepared."
"Sacrifice," Karn said.
Luchion kept talking to the group — explaining the logistics, the timeline.
"Sacrificing a pure noble bloodline — good vision, strong lineage — is the most potent offering," Luchion said. "The prince of Sathvania fits every requirement."
Delta asked how they'd gotten the prince here at all — the palace would have had guards, mages, wards.
"It wasn't clean," Luchion said. "Four of ours died getting past the prince's guard. But Cesia had already spent six months building the medium — a prepared teleportation space connecting Sathvania to this specific location. All we needed was one person to lure the prince into the right position. One signal from them and Cesia activated the circle. He was here before his mages could process what had happened."
"And when they figure it out?" Delta asked.
"Sathvania is a knight dukedom, not a mage one. Their best people are swords, not circles. Even if they work out the teleportation method — a month, minimum, to locate and trace the medium. He'll be long gone by then."
Karn stared at the drone feed.
"They're going to kill that guy," he said.
"Yes," Zangika said.
"Stop calling him that. He's the prince."
"Right. They're going to kill the prince."
* * *
Detected
The small figure — Cesia — had gone still.
"I just ran an area scan," she said.
Luchion looked at her.
"There are other people here," Cesia said. "Somewhere on this floor. And — whoever they are — they're strong. I've never felt water magic or water aura art like this anywhere. The scale of it is—" she paused, choosing the word "—monstrous."
"Please don't," Karn said quietly.
"...It seems like they've been fighting beasts far from here," Cesia continued. "One of their attacks travelled the distance. That's what broke Leon's weapon earlier. And the arc that hit the prince — that was also theirs."
Luchion was quiet for a moment.
"So some unknown person helped you by accident," he said slowly. "And they're still here."
"Yes. And there's a possibility they're watching us right now."
"What the—" Karn started.
Luchion looked around the chamber — not frantically, just methodically. Then he spoke toward the general space.
"We move out quickly," he said to the group. "If things turn bad — you take the sacrifice and go. I'll hold whoever this is."
"You should go too," Karn muttered. "I don't want to fight you either."
"Karn."
"What."
"You know what you're about to let happen if you walk away."
He was quiet.
"What can I even do about it?" he said. "It's not my business. I don't know any of these people. If I step in, I'm involved. If I'm involved, it doesn't stop."
"Someone is going to die because of something you did by accident," Zangika said. "Not on purpose. But your arc hit the prince. Your attack is part of why he's in the state he's in right now. You didn't intend it. But it happened."
The drone feed showed the group beginning to move — two of them supporting the prince between them, heading deeper into the floor.
Karn watched them go.
"You told me something once," Zangika said. Her voice was quieter now. "It doesn't matter what you can or can't do. It doesn't matter how the situation looks. What matters is that you were there when someone needed you."
Karn closed his eyes. Exhaled.
Opened them.
He laughed — short, dry, aimed mostly at himself.
"Did I actually say that?"
"You did."
"I was probably trying to sound deep."
"It worked. Now move."
"That's my guy," Zangika said.
* * *
The Charge
Karn ran.
Full speed, no preamble — the Shadow Nexus pushing his legs to what it could manage, the dungeon corridor blurring on either side. Twenty seconds. He covered the distance in twenty seconds.
"Spear — loaded," Zangika said. "Full output. Water and mana core both active."
The group heard him coming.
Luchion turned first. Then Delta. The two injured ones pulled the prince back behind them.
Karn came out of the corridor at full speed, spear already drawn back, and swung.
End of Chapter.
End of Chapter 19