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Chapter 7 Chapter seven

Chapter Seven

The briefing lasted three hours.

Aldric was thorough in the way that only people who had spent entire lifetimes studying a single subject could be — precise, unhurried, and completely unbothered by the fact that most of what he was saying was deeply alarming. He walked Ethan through the map level by level, explaining what was known, what was suspected, and what was simply marked with a symbol that apparently meant 'unknown, proceed with extreme caution.'

There were a lot of those symbols.

Level one was the most documented. Shadow wolves primarily, pack hunters that operated in groups of three to six, fast but not particularly durable. Bone crawlers — low to the ground, armored, slow, dangerous only if they got underneath you. Lesser wraiths that drifted through walls and corridors but were weak to direct light and dissipated quickly if struck with enough force.

Level two was where the records became inconsistent. Different survivor accounts described different creatures, which Aldric theorized meant the dungeon's population shifted depending on conditions inside. Tentatively documented were something called hollow knights — animated armor with no living occupant, driven purely by the dungeon's corrupted energy — and a creature the old records simply called a stalker, described only as large, fast, and silent.

Level three had three documented entries and all three of the people who had provided them had died shortly after giving their accounts. What they had managed to convey before dying was fragmented and in some cases contradictory, but the consistent thread across all three was this: don't stop moving.

Levels four and five remained largely blank.

"You're telling me to walk into a building where the instruction manual cuts off halfway through," Ethan said.

"I am telling you everything we know," Aldric replied. "Which is admittedly incomplete. But incomplete information is still better than none."

"Debatable."

The old mage almost smiled again. Almost.

By the time they finished, grey morning light had deepened into the full, honest light of midday. Sela appeared at the study door with food — the same thick bread as the night before, cold meat, and a hard cheese that turned out to be sharper than it looked. Ethan ate while Aldric rolled the map back up and handed it to him without ceremony.

"Take it with you," the old man said. "It won't tell you everything, but having it is better than relying on memory alone under pressure."

Ethan tucked it into the pack that had materialized in his inventory alongside the Ashen Blade — another feature of the system he was still getting used to. Things he was given or acquired seemed to exist in a suspended state, available when he needed them, absent when he didn't. It was convenient in a way that still felt slightly unreal.

"When do I leave?" he asked.

"The king wants to meet with you first," Aldric said. "This afternoon. After that, tomorrow morning at first light. We will provide a horse, supplies for ten days, and a guide who will take you as far as the mountain base."

"Just a guide? No soldiers?"

"Soldiers cannot cross the dungeon barrier any more than our knights can. Sending them would only put more lives at risk for no tactical benefit." He paused. "The guide will wait for you at the base. If you do not return within fourteen days, they will come back to the palace alone."

Ethan nodded slowly. He had expected as much. It didn't make it sit any better.

He spent the hours before the meeting with the king doing the only thing that made practical sense — moving. He found a quiet corner of the inner courtyard, drew the Ashen Blade, and began working through the forms that the Swordmaster skill had deposited in his muscle memory.

It was a strange sensation, practicing techniques he had never physically trained. His body knew what to do before his conscious mind finished forming the intention. Footwork, grip adjustments, transitions between offensive and defensive stances — it all flowed with a smoothness that should have taken years to develop. But underneath the borrowed knowledge, he could feel the gaps. The skill gave him the architecture. The actual strength and speed to execute it properly still had to come from him.

He pushed harder. Faster transitions, wider movements, working until his arms ached and sweat soaked through the plain shirt Sela had left outside his room that morning along with a set of traveling clothes that fit him well enough. He didn't stop until his breathing was ragged and his grip was slipping.

Then he started again from the beginning.

A small cluster of palace guards had gathered near the courtyard wall by the time he took his first real break, watching with the careful, evaluating expressions of men who spent their lives around weapons and knew what competence looked like. None of them said anything. But a few of them nodded, almost involuntarily, the way people do when they see something that meets a standard they hadn't expected to be met.

Ethan noticed but said nothing. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and kept working.

King Caelion received him in a smaller room than Ethan had anticipated. No throne, no formal arrangement of courtiers and guards. Just a rectangular table, two chairs, a window overlooking the palace gardens, and the king himself already seated when Ethan arrived, a cup of something steaming in front of him and a second cup waiting across the table.

"Sit," the king said. Not unkindly, but not a suggestion either.

Ethan sat.

For a moment Caelion simply looked at him — the same measuring look from the night before, but quieter now, stripped of the audience and the ceremony.

"Aldric tells me you asked good questions this morning," the king said.

"I asked obvious questions," Ethan replied.

"In my experience, the obvious questions are the ones most people are too proud or too afraid to ask." He wrapped both hands around his cup. "How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

Something moved briefly across the king's face. Not pity exactly. Something more complicated than that.

"The last hero was twenty-three," Caelion said. "We thought that was too young at the time."

"Did you send him anyway?"

"We did," the king said quietly. "We had no choice then either."

The garden outside the window was well kept — neat rows of something flowering in pale yellow, a stone path cutting through the middle, a single tree at the far end heavy with dark leaves. Ethan looked at it for a moment, then back at the king.

"I'm not looking for an apology," Ethan said. "I just want to know one thing."

Caelion waited.

"If I destroy the soul stone and make it back out — what happens to me after that? Do I go home automatically or is there something else?"

The king held his gaze steadily. "Aldric believes the system that brought you here will return you once the mission is complete. We have no way to send you back ourselves. That power belongs entirely to whatever force summoned you."

Ethan absorbed that.

"So you genuinely have no control over any of this," he said.

"None," the king admitted. "We can send you toward the dungeon. Everything after that gate is yours alone."

The courtyard outside was quiet. Somewhere in the garden below, a bird landed on the stone path, pecked twice at nothing, and flew away.

Ethan picked up the second cup and drank. It was the same spiced tea as the night before, still warm, still settling in the chest like something steady and reliable.

"Alright," he said.

The king looked at him. "Alright?"

"I'll leave tomorrow morning. Like Aldric said." He set the cup down. "But I'm coming back out."

Caelion studied him for a long moment. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find enough of it.

"I believe you," the king said simply.

And somehow, in the quiet

of that small room with its one window and its flowering garden and its two cups of tea, that was enough.

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