Chapter 32: Flicker in the Sun
Azazel rose from his spot beneath the ancient oak, the deep chill of rest replaced by a simmering, kinetic energy. The simple beauty of the field was now a training ground. The spear in his hand felt different—not just a dwarven relic, but an extension of a new understanding.
He started slow, forgetting the Mythic, the darkness, the inverted tree. He remembered being a kid in another world, in a dusty lot, finding a long, straight stick. The game was simple: see how fast you could make it move, how many imaginary enemies you could strike before they "got" you. He fell into that old rhythm, the spear becoming a wooden stick. He practiced basic thrusts, recoveries, spins—not with warrior's grace, but with a child's experimental focus, feeling the weight shift, the air part.
A few paces away, Reginleif watched for a moment, then drew one of her daggers. She held it flat on her palm. With a subtle exhale and a flick of her wrist, she sent it spinning into the air, not to fly away, but to orbit her in a wide, controlled ellipse, guided by a persistent, gentle current of wind. It was practice in sustained, fine control—keeping a lethal object in motion without ever letting its energy go.
Azazel saw the orbiting dagger from the corner of his eye. It sparked a memory, not of this world, but of pages filled with dynamic lines. Speed blitz. After-images. Movements so fast the opponent loses track. He stopped the simple drills.
He planted his feet, then exploded forward in a short, powerful dash. He stopped, reset. He tried a leaping lunge, extending his lead leg far out, trying to cover more ground in a single, committed motion. He did it again. And again. For hours, under the sun's slow arc, he practiced raw, physical acceleration. He wasn't trying to be graceful; he was trying to be sudden.
Sweat stung his eyes. His breathing grew ragged. He paused, leaning on his spear, and looked at the long, deep shadow cast by the oak tree across the bright grass. The contrast was absolute—vibrant green and solid black.
The shadow.
My power is shadow.
What if… I don't run to the tree…
The thought wasn't fully formed. It was an instinct, a synaptic leap. He focused on the pool of darkness at the base of the tree's trunk, twenty feet away. He didn't command his body to move. He willed his presence to be there.
He blinked.
There was no sensation of movement. No wind in his hair. One moment, he was standing in the sun, spear in hand. The next—
THWOCK.
A jarring impact shuddered up his arms. He was standing in the shadow, nose pressed against rough bark, the head of his spear buried three inches deep in the oak's trunk. A wave of dizziness washed over him. "Damn," he grunted, forehead resting against the tree. "What just happened? Why did I hit the tree?"
Reginleif, who had been focusing on her orbiting dagger, spun around. Her dagger clattered to the grass, forgotten. "What did you do?" Her voice was sharp with disbelief. "You were there. And then you were just… here. At the tree."
Azazel carefully turned his head. "Yeah. Did you see what I did? How I moved?"
"No," she said, walking closer, her eyes scanning him and the spear pinned to the tree. "I saw you there. I looked away for a split second to catch my dagger. When I looked back, you were here. There was no movement. No blur. It was like a… a bad edit in a play."
"Okay," Azazel said, the analytical part of his brain booting up, pushing past the disorientation. "Just gotta… redo it. Without the tree." He braced his foot against the trunk and heaved. The spear came free with a reluctant crack of splintering wood.
He backed up to his original spot. This time, he kept his eyes wide open, fixed on a patch of empty shadow a few feet to the left of the tree. He focused on the concept: Here to there. Not a journey. A change of state.
He blinked.
Again, no sense of travel. One frame of reality was replaced by another. He was now standing six feet to the left, his boots planted firmly in the cool, dark shade. The spear was held loosely, point harmlessly aimed at the ground.
"Reginleif," he said, his voice calm. "You see that?"
She was already staring, her face a mask of stunned comprehension. "Yeah. I saw it that time. You didn't move. You… replaced yourself."
"Okay. So what's the range on it?" Azazel wondered aloud. He looked at another shadow further away, near the edge of the field. He focused, willed the transition.
Nothing happened.
He tried a shadow halfway. A faint pull, a flicker behind his eyes, but his feet stayed planted. He looked at a shadow only ten feet away. He blinked. Success. He tried again, pushing to twelve feet. The disorientation was stronger, the mental cost higher.
"I think it's medium range," he concluded, walking back to her, a slight headache forming at his temples. "There's a limit. Maybe… line of sight to the shadow? And distance. I don't know the exact formula yet."
Reginleif just shook her head slowly. "Okay. So what na—"
"I call it Voidfool," Azazel announced.
She snorted, the tension breaking. "You are not very creative with names."
If it's easy to say, I don't care, he thought, but he offered her a faint, tired smirk.
---
Many hours later, the sun was dipping towards the city walls, painting the sky in shades of burnt orange and deep purple. They trudged back through the gates, muscles aching, minds buzzing with the day's revelations. The quiet inn was a sanctuary.
They claimed a corner table in the common room. Azazel nursed a tankard of dark ale, his senses stretching beyond his own fatigue, tuning into the low hum of conversation around them. He was a broker again, listening for the market's pulse.
Rumours swirled like the tavern's smoke.
"...Brotherhood's got scouts all over the western pass, heard they're not just after dungeons anymore..."
"...Fresh Tears, you hear? Some idiots tried to push past the new maps, the ones that Iron-rank duo sold. Got to floor twenty-six, they say. Then something exploded. Not a monster. The floor itself. Half the party gone, the rest came back babbling about 'shifting gears' and 'the dungeon waking up'..."
"...The Saint's party has left the capital. Headed east, towards the Scarred Wastes. Whatever they're after, it's big enough to pull them away from the border wars..."
Azazel filed each piece away. The Brotherhood expanding. The dungeon reacting violently to deeper intrusion. The Saint moving on a major objective. The board was being reset.
His ale finished, the useful gossip dried up into mundane chatter. He caught Reginleif's eye and gave a slight nod towards the stairs.
Fatigue was a heavy blanket, but a deeper curiosity burned beneath it. They retreated to his room, the one with the solid lock. The mysterious Ruined Book and Scroll from the Hound's chest awaited. The day had been for physical and mystical advancement. The night was for intelligence.
The real work never stopped.
---
Azazel unrolled the first of the ancient scrolls on the small, sturdy table in his room. The lamplight fell on brittle, water-stained parchment. The script was elegant but faded, parts eaten away by time or damp.
He began to read aloud, his voice low in the quiet room. "The biology of the Fresh Tears is not of stone and beast alone, but of solidified lament and geological grief. Its terrain shifts not at random, but in accordance with the depth of sorrow absorbed. The guardians are not mere sentries, but the… souls of the believing world. Your trials in Fresh Tears will be many, in order for yo…"
The sentence disintegrated into a blotch of faded ink and a ragged tear. He scanned further down, finding fragmented phrases. "...past the Sentinel of Tears, the stone learns to breathe…" "...the Weeping Citadel takes form…" "...the core's melancholy becomes a symphony…"
He let the scroll curl back up with a soft sigh. "Reginleif, this scroll just explains why the dungeon shifts after the twentieth floor. Something about 'solidified lament.' It also vaguely mentions the next terrain—something about a 'Weeping Citadel' and the 'stone learning to breathe.' But half the words are ghosts. It's a puzzle with missing pieces."
Reginleif looked up from her own reading. She wasn't studying the bestiary. She was engrossed in a beautifully illustrated, obviously well-kept volume titled 'The Art of the Ceremonial Tea-Set: A History of Pouring.' "Azazel," she said, not looking up, "trying to understand a dungeon from a ruined scroll is like putting your hands in a jar of needles, blindfolded, looking for the one needle that isn't rusty."
Azazel stared at her, then at her book. "...Why are you reading about tea-sets?"
"It's interesting," she said simply, turning a page with a delicate illustration of a porcelain pot.
Tea-sets. A book about tea-sets. Azazel decided to file that under 'Reginleif's Unfathomable Hobbies' and moved on. He picked up the second scroll.
This one was more practical. It was a mineralogical ledger, listing crystalline formations found within the Fresh Tears Dungeon, their properties, and their estimated alchemical or enchanting value. His eyes scanned the entries with the focused intensity of a broker assessing inventory.
'Sunken Amethyst (Floor 18-21): Not true amethyst. Conducts and amplifies sorrow-based magic. High value for curse-weavers, spirit-binders. Fragile.'
'Tear-Sapphire (Guardian Drop, Floor 20+): Aqueous crystal formed from a guardian's core. Potent stabilizer for healing and purification elixirs. Extremely rare.'
'Blighted Citrine (Floor 22+): Formed in areas of fungal bloom. Holds pockets of toxic or hallucinogenic spores. Useful for debilitating poisons, less so for constructive enchantment.'
He took his sweet time with this one, cross-referencing the notes with his own maps and observations in his notebook. This was actionable intelligence. This was a shopping list for future fortune.
After meticulously transferring the data into his coded notes, he carefully re-rolled both scrolls. They were too valuable, even in their ruined state, to leave lying around. He left the inn briefly, returning with a small, iron-banded lockbox from a general store. He placed the scrolls inside, locked it with a heavy key, and willed the entire box into the violet space of his inventory cube. Safe. Even with the information copied, the originals might hold clues only a master linguist or restorer could find.
The final item was the ruined book. Its leather cover was peeling, its pages soft as cloth. It wasn't a manual or a ledger. It was a storybook. A myth.
He opened it to a surviving illustration: a knight in ornate armor, kneeling not before a king, but before a weeping, crystal-crusted maiden made of stone. The accompanying text, where legible, spoke in flowery, tragic prose of the First Tearbound Sentinel, a noble protector who made a pact with the dungeon's nascent heart to guard a great sorrow, becoming one with the tears and stone forever.
So the boss we killed had a prequel, Azazel thought, a grim amusement touching him. He closed the book. It was folklore, tragedy. Maybe there was truth in it, maybe not. It would be something to read when he was bored, a glimpse into the world's own ghost stories.
He looked over at Reginleif, who was now carefully sketching a teapot from her book into the margin of her own journal. "Hey," he said. "Tomorrow. We should take a harvesting quest. For Blue-Fleck Mushrooms and Silverroot. They're the base ingredients for a Lesser Stamina Potion."
She glanced up. "I'm okay with that. But who's going to brew it? We're not alchemists."
"I'll make it," Azazel said, his tone matter-of-fact. "It's basic chemistry. Precise measurements, controlled reactions, distillation. It's not that different from…" he caught himself, "...from other precise crafts I've seen." He'd almost said it's not that different from cooking crystal meth. The principles of illicit chemistry—purity, yield, avoiding explosions—were weirdly transferable.
"I didn't know you were an alchemist," Reginleif said, suspicion and curiosity warring in her voice.
"I'm not. Yet. It'll be trial and error. We learn on the way."
"Please," she said, her expression dead serious. "Do not make us drink poison."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Azazel replied, though his confidence was that of a man who'd read the instructions and was sure he could skip a few steps.
He blew out the lamp, plunging the room into darkness save for the silver moonlight through the small window. The day had brought a new weapon, a terrifying new ability, and fragments of ancient secrets. Tomorrow would bring mushrooms, roots, and the delicate, potentially explosive art of potion-making.
In the dark, Azazel listened to the quiet sounds of the sleeping city. His mind traced the lines of his inverted skill tree—You Shadow, Black Ice, Kinetic Tether, Voidfool—a dark geometry of power growing in the silence. Beside him, Reginleif's breathing was even and soft, the strange girl who fought like a demon and read about tea-sets.
They slept. The dungeon waited. The work, in all its forms, continued.
End of Chapter 32