We hit the next group of enemies—a pair of massive golems made from the same brick as the wall below our feet—fast and hard.

Ellen's aura had just risen back above half of its normal strength; she dumped most of her Mana into a Shadow Box that rippled across the left-hand golem. It tore bricks from its massive, rectangular body and ground them to reddish dust. The monstrosities hadn't even aroused themselves from their stations halfway down the wall before I hit the same one.

Wallwatcher: D-Rank Monster

I went in with the Stormsteel rapier in its two-handed grip, thrust into a spot where a half-dozen bricks had been powdered in the monster's leg, and twisted the blade as I pulled it free. A Lightning Charge appeared. I slashed and turned the motion into a transition to the one-handed, defensive stance. A split-second later, a massive brick-lined fist slammed into the ground as I leaped backward, and a Rainfall Charge appeared opposite the first one.

I grinned. Then I watched the monster's other fist rocket toward me. The Lightning Charge vanished as I used Flashstep and disappeared with a burst of light, only to reappear on the golem's flank.

Jeff slammed his shield into the other golem, and it raised both fists for a crushing blow. I didn't have time to help him, and he was a tank; getting clobbered was his job. Instead, I shifted back to the two-handed Thunderbolt stance. As the first golem turned ponderously, I used Rain-Slicked Blade.

This time, I aimed high.

The hypercompressed blade of water sliced through brick, spewing rust-red water across the battlements. My smile widened. That was the closest to drawing blood I'd come this whole portal. The golem's knee collapsed as half the bricks in it simply…disappeared. It hit the wall hard enough to crack the crenellations. Two fell into the darkness outside the wall, but the golem wasn't dead yet.

Instead of fighting it, I turned, raising my now-free hand and Overcharging a single Ariette's Zephyr to two times its normal cost. With Yasmin's Mana regeneration buff, I could afford to spend it.

Stamina: 128/250, Mana: 98/250

I aimed. Then I fired into the monster's head and abandoned the downed golem as the impacts shot up puffs of dust. Either Yasmin would do her job and finish it off with her Stamina and whatever weapon she had, or Jeff and I would come back to do so later. But right now, he had a second golem, and I needed to help bring it down.

Just like we'd planned, I focused on efficiency over speed for the second golem. Whenever it left itself open, I stabbed or cut, even if it didn't do a ton of damage, but I focused on making my movements use as little Stamina as possible, and on letting my Mana recover. It took a good solid minute, and Jeff's shield was starting to look pretty crumpled by the time it finally fell over.

He still managed a smile, though. "Good job, team. Resources looking good? Great. Let's keep pushing."

I started walking toward the front of the group as I unsummoned the Stormsteel rapier. He was right; that fight had gone well, and we had done a good job.

Dad would have been proud.

We hadn't even passed the brick corpses when a rhythmic barrage of thudding sounds filled the air.

They came from behind us, and Jeff and Yasmin both flinched with every one of them. "Holy shit."

"What was that?" Yasmin asked.

Jeff turned around. He stared at the door. "Were those our reinforcements? We should check on them."

My first instinct was to agree. If those thumps were our backup, they'd be massively helpful in patching up our team's weaknesses—even if they'd just been wounded by the fall. But something felt off. There shouldn't have been so many of them; no full group of delvers would head in after a partial team. Splitting the portal's rewards six ways was fine, but ten?

I shook my head. "Let's keep moving."

"Those guys just dropped forty feet into a hole," Jeff said. "They probably need help."

I stopped. "First, if those were delvers, that's a full team. Have you ever heard of a full team reinforcement for anything except an accessible, obvious trap portal? Something feels off about it. And second, if it's not more delvers, we're looking at six portal monsters we don't need to fight. We just said we were avoiding unnecessary fighting for a little while so we could regen our Stamina and Mana."

"Yeah, but if they're people…" Jeff trailed off, staring back at the door. "I can't just leave them if they need help."

I glanced at the door we'd come out of, then shook my head. "They might have a healer. We don't, and we can't get them back up to the portal with the skills we have. The best thing we can do if they're all hurt is try to kill the boss and get them out of here. I'm more worried about what'll happen if they're not hurt. Ellen and I both need more D-Rank boss cores, and if they beat us there, we'll fall behind."

That wasn't the real issue, though.

I didn't think that sound had been delvers. It'd been the right number of drops, but I hadn't heard a single voice—no screams of pain, no yelps of surprise. Nothing. We weren't that far from the entrance yet. It'd be easy to double back and check. Too easy.

This was bait.

And Jeff was desperate to fall for it.

I kept walking, checking the floor as I went and shrugging. "It could also be another trap. If I were the portal world, I'd bait in delvers exactly like this."

Ellen fell in about eight feet behind me, and we headed across the wall. A huge, square-based tower loomed ahead, with a wide, open top. The same blood-red bricks lined its battlements, and torches flickered in the arrow slits and windows.

Ten steps. Fifteen.

"Kade, you can be a real ass sometimes, you know that?" Jeff said. His armor shifted as he started walking, with Yasmin right behind him.

I nodded. "I know. But I'm pretty sure I'm also right."

The next trap was a classic. So, of course, I almost fell for the second part.

The tripwire was obvious enough, and I could even see the crossbows angled down through holes in the tower wall that loomed overhead. I pointed it out, and we stepped over it. Then, once everyone was clear, I summoned the Stormsteel rapier, cut the wire, and watched a hail of bolts clatter against the bricks we'd just been standing on.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"That one's clear," I said, "even if the crossbows reload, the trigger's busted."

I took another step. My danger sense flared, but even as I tried to throw myself forward, my foot brushed a second, smaller wire. I hit the brick battlement elbow first, hard enough to send waves of static up and down my arm, but I was already rolling. The Stormsteel rapier lashed out, slicing the tip off of a spear that launched itself from a nearby crenellation. It still hit me, and it still punched through my shirt to draw blood, but the shaft hit a full three inches from the tip.

That impact was enough to drive me two feet to the side and slam me into the brickworks on the wall's inner side, but instead of skewering me, the speartip left a two-inch puncture in my side that scraped ribs but didn't crack them.

Jeff was on me instantly. He rolled me to the side before I could get my feet back under me, staring at the wound and reaching for his belt for a medical kit. "Are you okay, Kade?" he asked breathlessly.

"Yeah." I coughed. The spear's shaft had knocked me breathless; I was lucky it had been rotating instead of a straight-on impact. I pushed Stamina toward the gouge and the bruise forming across my chest. It was less of a threat. Then I slowly—with Jeff's help—got to my feet. "I got careless."

"Yeah, you did," Ellen said.

Jeff backed off a little as my wound's bleeding began to slow. "Recovery?" he asked, eying the gouge.

"Not quite. I merged it. This'll be a lot slower, but more consistent across several injuries. It's an enhancement to my healing speed," I said.

"How long until you're good?" Jeff asked.

I shrugged. "I'm good to keep moving now." Then I gritted my teeth and pushed ahead, toward the tower in front of us.

It loomed overhead, red bricks reflecting flickering torchlight from the arrow slits and windows. Its broad base narrowed as it rose, from a footprint almost the size of a football field to a turret less than half that size. Even though the tower…towered…overhead, it somehow managed to look squat and clumsy.

And its gate looked almost identical to the one we'd come out of. The only difference was that it was shut.

"Same plan, different order," Jeff rattled off. "I'm first. Ellen, Kade, you two kill the biggest target. If there's no biggest, kill the leftmost one first. Then we work our way left to right. Stop using resources when there's half the enemies left, or if I tell you to stop. Got it?"

"Got it," Ellen said. I nodded, and Yasmin readied herself to pitch in where she could.

Jeff opened the door. Three of the Dark Citadel Guardians greeted him, armed with shortswords and shields instead of halberds and spears. I grinned as the first one's armor began to fall into squares of shadow and light.

This was going to be quick.

It was, in fact, quick.

Ellen and I shredded the first suit of armor, then did enough to the second that Yasmin could use her mace to beat it to death without too much risk. Then, while the shadow mage conserved her Mana, I helped Jeff slowly wear down the third.

It was still over in less than a minute, even with me holding back. Rotating between stances and using the Charge-powered abilities let me move faster and hit harder than the D-Rank monsters, and we outnumbered them. They didn't fight with any strategy, either—not like the elves in the giant forest portal had. They just waded in with their armor and shields, then hacked away with their shortswords.

Which made sense. This was supposed to be a weaker D-Ranked portal. That and its likelihood of breaking were the only reasons we'd agreed to delve it with four instead of waiting for six.

Yasmin was staring at the jumbled piles of armor. I joined her. "What do you see?"

"They almost look like Scripts," she said, "but we broke them up too much for me to be sure, and I definitely can't learn them from these corpses. But they might be script-powered enemies, in which case, they probably qualify more as Bindings or traps than monsters. It's weird that the system categorizes them as monsters anyway, though."

"Boss up top, you think?" Jeff asked.

Ellen nodded. "If it were an Abattoir, I'd guess he was in the butcher's room. An Oubliette world boss would be in the most heavily secured cell. But assuming this is a quick D-Rank world and not an Abattoir or Oubliette, the top of the tower makes sense."

"Let's go," I said. "We'll see if we can find more evidence of how these Guardians work up top, but you're right. There's nothing to learn here."

We pushed up the stairs, past arrow slits armed with crossbows, but no crossbowmen. I stopped by one and examined it. "These are Scripts," I said.

Yasmin pushed me aside and stared. Then she nodded. "They're using Scripts in this portal world, to trigger their traps."

I stared at the trapped, Scripted crossbow for a minute, then kept moving up. "That would explain why I couldn't see where the danger was earlier, only that the trap trigger itself was a part of it. If we take that with the armored script knights, it might also mean we're dealing with a Script-based portal boss."

"Good call," Jeff said.

I readied myself, checking my Stamina and Mana. Both had stabilized thanks to Yasmin's own Scripts; it was nice being on the receiving end of Script-based support casting instead of the one doing it. If the boss was a script-user, I expected Binding-based traps, buffs that'd push it close to the peak of D-Rank, and a lot of chaos—but there'd be patterns in that chaos. Once Yasmin and I figured out what those patterns were, we'd be able to take advantage of them.

The stairs narrowed as we marched upward, past floor after floor of closed doors and arrow slits. Every time, Jeff pointed and shrugged, and I shook my head; we weren't here to fight every monster; we were here to shut down this portal before it broke. And to do that, we had to reach the boss.

By the time we reached the top, it wasn't even a stairway anymore. Instead, a thin ladder hung over a gap that seemed to stretch down forever, with an open trapdoor above. I stared at the ladder, then slowly started to work my way up it. "The third rung from the top is trapped. Don't put your weight on it, or it's going to collapse. Other than that, it looks safe."

Then I cracked the trapdoor.

"It's empty," I reported a moment later.

"What do you mean, it's empty?" Ellen asked, glaring up at me.

"I mean, come on up. This is definitely an arena of some kind, but there's no boss here. We have a few seconds to get organized."

As the team clambered up behind me, I finished pushing the door open and climbed onto the roof. It was a square, about sixty feet to a side—an absolutely massive space for a tower along a wall. Torches lined it, but while they'd glowed red-orange as we'd approached, they now looked almost purple. Our shadows danced across the red brick—and the gap in the brickwork that someone had crudely lined with boards.

Those boards sagged under my weight, creaking ominously, and I pointed them out. "Jeff, you can't go anywhere near those," I said.

"Understood."

Then, before we could prep any more than that, the boss appeared.

Mardou, Tower Scriptsmith: D-Rank

Carter was pissed.

He was also terrified.

Right now, fear had a death-grip on his anger, and he couldn't shake it. It was bad enough that Deborah had decided to deploy his team now, in some sort of crazy attempt to…what? Kill Kade? Capture him? Bring him over to Deborah's cause somehow? Carter had no idea what he was supposed to be doing.

"Do what you need to do, make sure he's not a threat to my plans," she'd said. That was incredibly vague. So vague, in fact, that Carter couldn't even make a good guess at what she meant.

Of course, he didn't need to, because the team he'd been saddled with would almost certainly understand exactly what his boss wanted. If her orders weren't clear, the black armor they all wore over their regular gear definitely was. This was the kind of gear you wore when you wanted what you did to remain anonymous. The false identities they'd given the GC rep had been pretty obvious to Carter, too.

That was why he was terrified. He hadn't signed up for this. Intimidating a bunch of E-Rankers into giving up their core and loot? Sure. But potentially killing them in their own portal? That was a bridge too far. And Kade had saved his life—and Lizzie's. That meant something.

He owed Kade and that shadow mage—and the tank. He owed them something.

But that wasn't why he was pissed.

He was pissed because Kade was already outsmarting him—even with his new D-Rank, his set of merged skills, and the C-Rank tracking stone Deborah had given him. He knew exactly where Kade was right now. He just couldn't get there. The whole team had fallen into a trap literally before they'd gotten their feet under them, and now they were fighting through hordes of magical somethings. They looked like they were made completely from symbols, but they died to arrows and axes just like living flesh.

If he could figure out how to navigate the labyrinth they'd found themselves in—and do it quickly—Carter could still catch Kade and his underpowered team. Maybe not before they killed the boss, but before the portal's timer expired and ejected them all.

He just had to be careful. Carter couldn't afford to walk into another trap and lose his chance of redemption with Deborah Callahan—even if he wasn't sure redemption with her was worth the risk.

There were some things you didn't say out loud when an A-Ranker's loyalists might be listening. Some things you didn't even think about too hard.

Carter focused on the fighting and on getting to Kade. The rest could sort itself out later.

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