Ronan flexed his soul, and basked in the nigh-orgasmic sensation of oneness with the cosmos for an infinitesimally brief moment. Then, his entire being deflated as he lost connection to that grander part of himself and the wider world. The notification that appeared helped to alleviate the hollowness that soul cultivation left behind, but it was like slapping a plaster on a gunshot wound.

Congratulations! Your hard work and effort have allowed you to reach the third realm of Prismatic Soul Cultivation!

Prismatic Soul Cultivation has advanced from [Red ★★] to [Red ★★★]!

Soul weight is increased by 3.3%

Cultivation talent is increased by 18%

Efficacy of intelligence, tenacity, and luck +15%

In the end, by burning through every single shard he had on him, Ronan had pushed himself all the way to the third realm of soul cultivation. Using the energy-aspected mini-boss shard at just ten percent efficiency felt egregiously wasteful, but he was forced to remember that he had to access to potentially infinite copies of said shard.

That was a thin silver lining to an ominously stormy cloud, but it helped cheer him up marginally when the energy-aspected shard crumbled to dust that fell through his fingers.

Soul cultivation was proving one of the most powerful of the four paths, given that it increased raw cultivation talent across the board. Ronan had yet to actually cultivate the other three paths since beginning this particular iteration, but he was sure he'd noticed the marked improvement.

What he was looking forward to more than the actual improvements, were the potential rewards waiting for him at the end of this iteration. He might be chasing a red herring, and his heritage might not have a reward waiting for his accomplishments in soul cultivation, but Ronan felt he was on the right track.

In any case, he wouldn't find out until his death. A death that might come sooner than he expected, if the goblin lich was as deadly in its final form as he suspected.

As he shook his stiff limbs and stretched them out, he caught sight of something unexpected. Jenna was running around the cavern, weaving around the pillars, while being chased down by Howard and Alyssa.

Through a combination of the man's magic throwing knives, and Alyssa's prodigious speed, they eventually cornered the smaller woman, who threw her hands up in surrender. Howard had a satisfied smirk on his face as he moved to place a hand on her shoulders, when a bolt of lightning arced from the tip of her right hand's fingers and struck him.

As he convulsed on the ground, Jenna burst out laughing. "You're too naive for your own good, Howie," she teased, leaning over the poor man. "That little goblin will be much meaner, so you need to be prepared."

"You're a lying bitch, Jenna!" Alyssa exclaimed. "I love it."

Ronan helped Howard to his feet and threw a scolding glare at the two women. Then he burst into laughter himself. He was growing closer to the three. Not quite to the level of shared suffering and camaraderie he'd had with Keith, Terry, Dana, and Jackson, but it was close.

"I'm all done. Let's head up these stairs and kick some skeleton ass," Ronan said, rubbing his hands together.

"Finally! I was beginning to wonder if I needed to go over and poke you awake. You just sat there with your eyes closed like one of those buddha statues. You're weird, man," Jenna said, poking him in the ribs.

"Trust me, when we get out of here and you try cultivating yourself, you'll see why I'm making sure to get the most of it. Shit's overpowered," Ronan replied. "Now, let's go."

The others had no qualms about continuing, as they were growing bored of their sparring session. All of them wanted to get out of the tutorial, and hopefully defeating Tharaxes once and for all would be their ticket back home.

The other two corridors proved dreadfully boring, compared to the chaos of what led up to them encountering the mini-boss. The corridor on the left, which Alyssa had said gave her a bad feeling, proved to be completely mundane.

Besides the hordes of skeletons, the occasional group of goblins, and a few traps built into the stone, that is.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The group emerged with a lot more useless loot. Ronan had managed to gain just a single level from the fighting, as he out-leveled all the regular and elite monsters in stage 4 after taking down the goblin lich and its minions.

That he was so close to level 50, and likely wouldn't reach it before taking on the boss itself, stung. If he'd been able to evolve juggernaut, potentially earning an epic class and another chronos merit, before fighting the boss, it would've been an incredible accomplishment.

Then again, if they were able to defeat the boss, there was no doubt that Ronan would achieve all of those goals in one fell swoop, along with earning all the rewards for the hard difficulty tutorial completion. He couldn't wait.

And he didn't have to, for much longer.

They'd battled their way down the central corridor, taking out a load more goblins, a few skeletons, and dodging more than one trap along the way. The simplest path proved to be the correct one all along, and they found themselves outside a rather plain-looking wooden door set into a stone archway.

Completely unassuming, they would have dismissed it as simple decoration if not for the two flickering cyan flames inside the braziers set on either side of the doorway. Even the flames wouldn't have helped them deduce what lay on the other side, if not for their first encounter with Tharaxes.

"Do you think we'd just be able to waltz in and fight the final boss even if we hadn't defeated the mini-boss first?" Alyssa asked.

None of them had a real answer to her question, not even Ronan. It was a scenario he'd not considered or even encountered until now.

Vulparis was the first mini-boss monster he'd met, and while he suspected he might be able to claim the sector pillar simply by defeating the nine-tailed fox boss, there was no doubt that Vulparis would rush to its aid if he attempted to skip the trickster's ploys. "I'm not sure. If what Howard said about liches is true, defeating the boss might not have been enough, as it could use that other skeletal body to reincarnate, provided its phylactery existed. Then again, maybe the phylactery is in this room, and we'd only have to destroy it once, without bothering to fight that mini-boss version," Ronan rambled on, simply giving voice to his thoughts on the matter. "Ultimately, the way we've done it is probably better. Taking the mini-boss down means we're fighting the boss with more levels under our belt. I'd say we shouldn't dwell on the past, as we can't change it."

The others nodded in agreement. Alyssa seemed mollified at the answer, but still had a furrowed brow. Ronan was also lying. Sort of.

He couldn't change the past, but he could relive the events again, and change how he approached them. He had no idea whether each iteration was him reliving the timeline in the same universe, or the parallel-universe theory was right all along and every iteration was a new version of him. He wouldn't know for a very long time. Perhaps not ever.

He didn't really care.

Ultimately, whichever way it was, he only had one real choice. To keep pushing onwards and destroy every obstacle in his path.

Without any hesitation, Ronan pushed open the wooden door using the heavy iron handles, and stepped inside. His party followed after him, and when the last of them was inside the short corridor, the doors slammed behind them.

Howard rushed back and attempted to pull them open, but they refused to budge. "We're trapped." His voice was flat. It spoke of resignation to his fate.

Ronan didn't like that. Howard had seemed fairly driven at first, but the more they fought together, the more cowardly he'd proven to be. Whether he was simply growing tired of the constant threat to his life, or being around others had brought out the worst in him, Ronan didn't know. As long as the man fought with his all, he wouldn't need to correct his behaviour.

"Oh well. We always knew our only way out was through. Let's show this undead goblin prick what it means to fuck with us," Ronan said cheerily.

"Damn straight, Ronan! You tell that shorty," Jenna cheered, pumping a fist in the sky.

Alyssa smiled, and was about to contribute her own pun, when the ground began to shake.

The corridor opened up into a huge room, lined with pillars and covered in elaborate tapestries. It was lined with braziers, all burning with cyan flames that cast the room in an eerie glow reminiscent of mana. A wall of giant skeleton soldiers stood on either side of a crimson carpet that ran down the centre of the room, leading up to a seven-step stone dais.

A thirteen-foot tall skeleton sat on a stone throne that was almost identical to the one that the mini-boss had sat in. Unlike the mini-boss, however, the fearsome undead that reclined in this throne resembled Magriz'al, if all of its hideous green flesh had been peeled away and the rest stripped from its bones.

"Are you blind, you impudent little girl!" The towering skeleton roared, slamming a nine-foot bone scepter against the ground. "What part of this majestic form seems 'little' to you?"

Jenna looked sheepish. Ronan was taken aback by the lich's fragile ego, but he supposed being an immortal undead probably led to some odd personality quirks. He'd developed a few himself already, and he was only forty or so deaths into his own quasi-immortal journey.

"Let's see if you can remain in such a jovial mood while defending yourself from my masterpieces. Those fragile toys in the side chamber are nothing compared to these beauties. You don't deserve to die by my own beautiful, bony hands." With another tap of the scepter, the two walls of giant skeleton soldiers stomped their feet, then turned to face the four-person party.

Ronan wasn't so sure about their chances of victory, but at the very least, he was going to enjoy the hell out of this battle. When the soldiers took their first step forward in unison, he raised his mace and activated vital surge. The pounding of his heart drowned out the clattering of bones, and as he took his own first step towards his foes, he let the distracting thoughts slip away in favour of his battle instincts.

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