“Our young master had a sudden attack of compassion?” This time, the teasing did not come through the earpiece. It sounded right beside Lance.
Under normal circumstances, a human gland matured at sixteen, completing secondary-sex differentiation before the person could begin cultivating abilities of that attribute. An eighteen-year-old Alpha, even one awakened at S-rank, could at most have mastered a first-stage ability. Against another S-rank ability, whether he could gain the upper hand was hard to say.
One sentence Lance often repeated was: The miserable death of someone drunk on their own triumph is the highest form of art.
Yet just now, Lance had chosen to press the button early and order him to activate a second-stage ability belonging to a control-type A-rank Awakener: [Shadow Anchoring].
The ability used fragments of the caster’s soul as anchors, fixing them within the shadows of objects. Once anchors were established, passages formed between them, allowing objects to be moved at will, as though the hand of God were manipulating an entire chessboard.
Lance had used the freshman talent test to send one such anchor into Ediv’s shadow.
Moments ago, that anchor received a forced command. The shadow was recalled, dragging Ediv with it. That was how he had been moved from the campus into their “trap” in an instant.
They could easily have waited until Zhan Pingchuan died before making their move. But because they had saved his life, they were forced to bring along two extra pieces of trouble.
Unfortunately, when the lightning flashed, the shadows of those two university workers happened to overlap Ediv’s, so they were anchored too.
A smiling face painted in bizarre clown makeup emerged from the darkness. He was not naturally ugly, but his makeup was outrageously exaggerated. Cyan greasepaint covered his eyelids, while his lashes were an unsettling white. Two lines of dark red bloody tears were painted beneath his eyes, and his deep blue irises shone with fanatic excitement.
“What’s so special about him? He actually made you go soft.” The clown’s bright red lips curved high. The makeup extended all the way to his ears. When he spoke, neat white teeth showed between those red lips, while his laugh was shrill enough to raise gooseflesh.
Lance simply raised a hand and pushed his cold cheek aside. “Shut up.”
How could an S-rank this stupid exist in the world? He hated idiots. He hated it even more when an idiot’s death had anything to do with him.
The clown did not get an answer, but wisely put away his manic smile. After giving Lance a meaningful wink, he looked eagerly into the depths of the darkness.
The surroundings were unnaturally quiet. Only a bone-deep cold drilled straight into the marrow.
“Director, what happened just now?” One worker kept rubbing his exposed arms. It was far too cold here. He could clearly feel his body temperature dropping rapidly, even though he remembered perfectly well that it was midsummer.
“It feels like… something dragged us here.” The other worker’s teeth chattered as he swallowed with difficulty. He cautiously reached toward Ediv’s position, terrified of being abandoned.
Ediv said nothing in the darkness.
He remembered clearly that his attack had been about to reach Zhan Pingchuan’s back when an irresistible force suddenly seized him and dragged him without warning into a nauseating vortex.
The force had come from beneath his feet, as if glued to his skin. He could not break free.
At the last second, he had transformed both feet into magma and burned away his shoes. Not only had he failed to escape, the light from the magma had allowed him to see something horrifying.
The thing dragging him into the vortex was his own shadow!
Now that the wrenching sensation had stopped, Ediv found himself standing in a puddle of something sticky and cold. Vigilantly gripping the bone whip, he turned one arm into burning magma and illuminated a small area around them.
“Th-this is…” One worker poked his head out from behind Ediv and stared.
They were at the bottom of an enormous glacial fissure. Above them, stalactites clustered like dense tumors. Honeycomb-like ice tunnels riddled both sides, branching in every direction. No one knew where they led, much less how far below the surface they were.
Ancient mud had accumulated beneath their feet, damp and freezing. Twisting crawl marks from some unknown creature crossed the ground in a panicked, messy trail before stopping abruptly at the entrance to one ice tunnel.
Around them stood eerie blue walls of ice. Indistinct dark shapes were sealed within, and from behind the walls came the faint roar of an underground river.
Looking back, they saw a rusted, ancient iron door tightly shut. Its carvings resembled an old man’s face, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deeply sunken, his mouth stretched greedily wide to reveal a strange, dark throat.
Inside that throat, a line of crooked ancient script had been written in an unknown language—Locus ubi moritur (The Place Where One Must Die).
“It’s the A-rank dungeon Glacier Corpse Forest!” After recognizing the words and connecting them with recent news, one of the workers shrieked.
Since dungeons had suddenly appeared a century ago, humanity had classified them by danger level into six ranks: S, A, B, C, E, and F. The closer to S, the more dangerous the dungeon.
Inside them, humans encountered unknown things beyond imagination. Those creatures were vicious, cold-blooded, and devoid of emotion. They eliminated every living thing that entered their territory.
Only when a person’s ability rank exceeded that of the unknown creatures was it possible to survive the many dangers, obtain dungeon resources, and escape intact.
For that reason, awakened human talent was divided into the same six ranks.
“Isn’t Glacier Corpse Forest controlled by the Black Lantern Society?” the other worker asked with a frown.
Only a month ago, the assassination organization had publicly announced that it had named the newly manifested A-rank dungeon Glacier Corpse Forest, and that the Black Lantern Society’s Third Executive, Mad Clown, and Seventh Executive, White Pharaoh, had completely taken control of it.
The news had caused an uproar across the federal network. Under current federal law, dungeons were public resources. Any guild holding a federal permit could enter and compete fairly to mine resources, yet the Black Lantern Society had now attempted to monopolize an entire dungeon.
Outrage aside, the federal government had no solution for the moment. First, they had not located the entrance to Glacier Corpse Forest. Second, to this day, only the codenames of seven Black Lantern Society executives were publicly known; all other information was blank.
Some people therefore suspected the Black Lantern Society was being sheltered by a major guild—or that some great guild was itself merely the Society’s public disguise. Otherwise, an illegal organization this brazen could not possibly have remained hidden until now, much less grown stronger.
Just then, cracking sounds echoed around them. The tumor-like stalactites overhead suddenly split open with countless fissures and began to shake violently.
Those “tumors” shed gray-white flakes like molting pythons. Salty, bloody fluid dripped down, revealing what was inside—one mangled corpse after another!
The bodies crashed to the ground, then crawled up from the mud. Their ice-encrusted eye sockets slowly turned toward Ediv and the two workers.
“Ahhhhh! Ghosts! They’re ghosts!” The worker hiding behind Ediv clutched his head and screamed, nearly losing his mind.
The other was much calmer. Malice flashed across his face as he pulled a dagger from his waist—[Black Mamba Fang], coated with black mamba venom.
“Fuck. They’re just a pile of dead people. What’s there to be afraid of?”
He swung the dagger at the corpse in front. Half its body had already rotted away, its organs trailing across the ground. Just as it reached for him, the dagger split it cleanly in two from head to groin.
The corpse froze. Within seconds, all its bones scattered and dissolved into foul black smoke.
The worker turned around arrogantly, shook the filth from his dagger, and said smugly, “Glacier Corpse Forest? Looks like it’s nothing but—”
His voice stopped dead. The arrogant expression slowly drained from his face. Disbelieving, he looked down. A hand covered in blue-purple corpse blotches had punched through his heart from behind. Its five fingers were like ravenous mouths, tearing at his chest without restraint. In moments, his torso had been ripped into bloody ruin.
He tried to speak, but managed only the shape of a word before collapsing with a white face, eyes still open in death.
Blood gushed onto the ground and quickly froze beneath a layer of ice crystals. In his final moments, his eyes had filled with unprecedented terror.
“H-he… he’s dead! Director, he’s dead!”
A warm stream ran down the remaining worker’s crotch. His legs gave out and he dropped to his knees in front of his colleague’s corpse.
“Shut up!”
Ediv’s face was dark. By now he knew he had fallen into a trap; he simply could not understand when the enemy had made their move.
Given his noble rank, it should have been impossible for an enemy to approach and ambush him without his noticing.
But there was no time to dwell on it. With a sweep of his hand, rolling magma erupted from his palm and burned several lunging corpses into black ash.
That was not enough for him. Ediv shouted, and an enormous sphere of magma formed above his palm, swelling larger and larger until it could have enveloped a fully grown man.
Elemental A-rank Awakener, second-stage ability—[Lava Erosion]!
Ediv hurled the magma sphere. The superheated ball rolled toward the hanging stalactites, melting the tumors into liquid. They dripped into ankle-deep water with a hiss and turned to tar.
In an instant, the stalactites that had encased the corpses disappeared, opening a wide, black passage ahead. Much of the thick stone on both sides melted as well, coated in pitch left behind after the magma died out.
“Petty tricks.” Ediv sneered.
No matter how dramatic the spectacle, this was only an A-rank dungeon. As an elemental Awakener among A-ranks, retreating intact would not be difficult.
He flicked several more magma balls outward, using severed limbs as lamp oil until the entire fissure was illuminated.
“Ghost! There’s a ghost… Director, save me!” The remaining worker had lost an ear to the magma and was now completely hysterical.
Ediv looked at him in disgust and cleanly drove the bone whip through his throat.
The worker’s scream stopped abruptly. He clutched Ediv’s whip in both hands, mouth stretched wide in terror. The little black insects swarmed over him and sucked him dry in an instant.
“Trash.” Ediv withdrew the whip. The worker’s corpse crumbled like sand and became fuel for the magma.
Ediv felt no guilt. An F-rank Awakener was nothing but dead weight in an A-rank dungeon. He had plenty more such trash. Nothing worth cherishing.
From deeper inside the cavern came the crisp sound of applause. Reflected between the ice walls, the echoes traveled long and far.
“You’re this ruthless even to your own people, Director?”
The voice was cheerful and clear, carrying malicious amusement with tremendous power to infuriate.
Ediv’s face turned livid. By the bright flames consuming the worker’s body, he finally saw the figure deeper in the cavern.
Someone sat atop the enormous skeleton of a mammoth, one knee raised and his chin resting on his right hand. Firelight illuminated his luminous pale profile and the devastating, utterly confident smile at his lips.
He had discarded his plain disguise and tied up his long auburn hair. His gaze had completely changed: no longer restrained, forbearing, or bewildered, but filled instead with an almost seductive enjoyment.
It was as though he were savoring a rich black coffee or watching a magnificent musical. Perhaps only when carrying out a mission could he truly experience the pleasure of being White Pharaoh of the Black Lantern Society.
The clown, dressed in evening formalwear, stood beside him. His vivid red lips curved high as he lightly spun a ring threaded onto a chain.
One revolution per second, like the final countdown.
“You.” Ediv spat the word, gaze cold as a blade.
Back in the classroom, he had seen through none of this person’s disguise. He could never have connected that sickly Omega with the ruthless White Pharaoh.
“Surprised?” Lance asked casually.
“What exactly does the Black Lantern Society want?” Ediv narrowed his eyes. The tiny black insects on the bone whip silently crawled into the dimness, inching toward Lance.
Lance stroked the mammoth’s massive skull and smiled unhurriedly. “To kill you.”