The Fireside Ascent tore through the dark of the dungeon. Floors flashed past in a rhythmic strobe of biome light, magma orange, fungal blue, void black. Each sector blurring into the next as they dropped past the 230th marker.
On the gravity plane, the wind was quiet, a steady hum that did nothing to drown out Lynder's heavy sigh. He sat near the edge of the formation and looked tired. Not just dungeon-weary, but deeply, existentially drained.
"This pace is unsustainable for a living soul as old as mine," Lynder muttered, glaring at his own hands. "My reserves are dangerously low. I feel… heavy. Like luggage."
Roy glanced over from where he was reviewing a map on his Allphone. "You doing okay, old man?"
"I am 'fine' in the sense that I am breathing," Lynder snapped, his pride bristling. "But in terms of utility? I am a glorified lantern holder. I haven't cast a spell of consequence since floor 170. My mana pool is a puddle compared to what it once was. Relying on potions and rest breaks while you monsters sprint… it is undignified."
He looked pointedly at the Presidroids, who showed zero signs of slowing down, and then at Eryndra, who looked like she was just warming up.
Roy shrugged, popping a grape into his mouth. "Well, we've got a solution for that. Why don't we have Rava link us? Use me as a battery."
Lynder dismissed the suggestion with a scoff. "Preposterous. I shall not deplete your reserves on such insignificant adversaries. We may require your capacity should a genuine threat materialize. I refuse to be the cause of our exhaustion in a critical moment."
"I bet you can't," Roy stated nonchalantly.
Lynder stopped. "Pardon me?"
"I bet you…" Roy began, a mischievous twinkle in his gaze, "that you cannot draw even five percent of my mana, regardless of how hard you try."
"Don't be ridiculous," Lynder huffed. "I am a Grand Magus. If I were to open my conduits fully, I could drink a dragon dry in minutes. Your pool is impressive, Roy, but it isn't infinite."
"One thousand gold," Roy said, his lips curling into an easy, dismissive smirk.
Lynder froze instantly, plunging the space into absolute silence. Glazed eyes fixed on unseen point, engaging in frantic, silent calculation. Lips moved in quick, soundless pattern. Fingers drummed against chest, performing mental arithmetic driven by pure terror.
"...carry the four… ignore the unsettled lawsuits… subtract the impending settlement with the Dryad Queen…"
He snapped back to reality with a terrifying intensity. "Seven years," Lynder whispered. "That covers seven years of back-pay up to Ex-Wife number four…hundred." He looked at Roy, his expression grave. "You have a wager, Captain. But do not come crying to me when you are empty and headache-ridden."
"Deal," Roy smiled and motioned for Rava to approach.
"Wait," Roy said, holding up a hand before the kid could cast. "Quick question. If Rava links us, and your 'Magic Prowess' or whatever gets diluted with mine, and let's be honest, my magic stat is probably garbage, won't that make you too weak to do your largest spells?"
"A novice's understanding," Lynder corrected, straightening his robes. "You are thinking of direct casting. I am speaking of Castration and its second form and name, Concraze. Though no one agrees which name applies to each form."
"Lynder, I'm not totally following you," Roy sighed.
"I told you before! Both stand for 'Casting-In-Concentration'," Lynder continued loudly. "It is an ancient, refined technique designed specifically for mages who possess supreme technical skill but lack raw mana or talent. Instead of casting one massive fireball which requires high stats to shape, one casts a simple candle-flame spell, a thousand times. In a single second, layering them over each other."
He raised a finger, lecturing. "The result is a firestorm that rivals the gods, using only the mana cost of a cantrip multiplied by volume. It requires no strength, only mana and a mind capable of handling the cognitive load." He swept his hair back. "Even if you diluted my intelligence by half, I would still remain the foremost magician on this planet in terms of pure technical manipulation."
FDR raised a hand as if to interject but he seemingly decided the argument wasn't efficient and lowered it. Truman, however, had no such restraint. He opened his mouth, and a deafening, metallic buzzing sound erupted.
Lynder jumped. "What? What was that? What does that sound mean?"
"Uh, nothing!" Roy interjected quickly, stepping between them. "It means… he's repairing himself! Mechanical hiccups! Rava, let's try something new. Can you link just me and Lynder? Keep yourself out of the pool. I want to be a pure battery for him."
Rava looked uncertain, shifting his weight. "I've… never done a remote link before. Administrator usually requires me to be the anchor. But… I can try to weave the conduit between you two and just maintain the bridge without stepping onto it."
"Do it," Roy ordered. He tapped FDR's shoulder. "Drop us off."
The Fireside Ascent decelerated as it emerged from the preceding floor's boss chamber, inclining toward the nearest open expanse.
Floor 235 presented itself as a colossal, corroded industrial complex, distinguished by iron gantries and effervescing vats, and overrun with armored, bipedal beetles of considerable equine size.
"What manner of architecture is this?" Lynder inquired softly.
Roy landed upon a metal walkway. "Excellent," he proclaimed. Lynder joined him, preparing himself for action. "Rava, commence at your convenience."
With intense concentration, Rava drew a deep breath and raised his staff. Golden chains of light erupted from his core, yet instead of enveloping him, he directed them outward. One chain harmlessly struck and penetrated Roy's chest, the other constricted around Lynder. Serving as the conduit rather than the recipient, Rava exerted himself, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead, to sustain the crucial link between the two.
"Link established," Rava strained. "You should feel it now."
Instead of the anticipated mild infusion, a sudden surge, a cold splash, a mere top-up, Lynder was drowned by the whole ocean. Roy's mana hit Lynder's core like a breached dam, an overwhelming, endless, suffocating deluge of raw power. It felt less like energy and more like a physical force violently displacing his very being. The sensation was both intoxicating and terrifying, providing him with a weight of mana that surpassed the total he had accumulated across his multi-millennial existence. Combined.
Lynder's back arched. His eyes glowed with a blinding violet light that spilled out like smoke.
"OH!" Lynder shouted, the sound vibrating with a manic, vibrating frequency. "OH, YES. YES!"
He turned toward the horde of armored beetles charging down the gantry. "Castration: Sparks of the Shadow," he whispered.
He cast it once, then ten times, then a thousand. The air around him fractured, ten thousand individual runes carving themselves into existence within the span of a heartbeat.
A wall of black spikes erupted from his outstretched hand, so dense they appeared as a fluid wave rather than individual bolts. It was a physical displacement of air through overwhelming volume. The torrent slammed into the beetle horde, the impact sound lost beneath the roaring scrape of a belt sander against meat. Thousands of shadow bolts shredded the monsters into oblivion in milliseconds.
Lynder began to laugh—a raw, unhinged cackle belonging to a villain in the final act of a play.
"MORE!" he roared.
He floated off the ground, buoyed by the sheer pressure of escaping magic. He flew down the gantry, hands moving so fast that Eryndra would have respected. "Castration: Kindler's Curse!"
He snapped his fingers. Fifty thousand sparks manifested instantly over a square mile of the floor. The entire sector vanished in a column of white-hot fire, the sheer quantity of heat turning the iron walkways into dripping slag instantly.
Roy immediately cast light barrier and noticed the pressure in his head he usually gets is now gone courtesy of the newly upgraded magic he got by splitting with Lynder. Now, protected inside his light barrier, he was dragged along behind Lynder by the golden chain like a balloon on a string. He checked his wrist. Mana levels: 99.99%."
"Come back here!" Lynder yelled at the fleeing boss monster, a massive construct of gears and flesh. "Castration: Faerwind!"
He thrust his hand forward, air compressing into a solid, dense wall as layers of kinetic energy multiplied the spell's intensity. The force struck like a meteor, instantly pulverizing the boss monster and smearing it across the far wall in a liquefied ruin of metal and viscera.
Lynder spun in the air, his robes billowing in the updraft of his own destruction. He looked down at Roy, his face flushed with power, eyes wild.
"We could do it, you know!" Lynder shouted over the roar of collapsing architecture.
"Do…what?" Roy said hesitantly.
"With this… with you… we could take the capital! We could subjugate the kingdoms! I could rewrite the laws of the continent!"
"No thanks!" Roy yelled back, shielding his eyes from the glare of burning metal.
"Think of the perks!" Lynder argued, firing a barrage of ice shards that froze a lava lake solid in seconds. "They would build statues! We would never pay taxes!"
"I already don't pay taxes!" Roy countered.
"Free food! Anywhere! Forever!"
"I have infinite food! Better food! That's a downgrade!"
Lynder let out a frustrated growl, turning back to the devastation. "You youth! No ambition! No vision! Fine, then I shall simply settle for… ERADICATION! Castration: Downpour of the Iron Hive!"
Millions of tiny glowing darts formed a cloud so thick it blotted out the ceiling mana lights, turning the air purple. With a conductor's flourish, Lynder lowered his hands. The darts then descended like an angry torrent, scouring the final square mile of the floor until the only things remaining were pebbles.
From the safety of the Fireside Ascent, hanging back near the entrance, the rest of the crew watched the distant flashes of apocalyptic violence.
"He's having fun," FDR noted.
"He's going to have a heart attack," Takara murmured.
Down in the wreckage, the dust began to settle. Lynder hovered back down to the ground, his chest heaving, smoke rising from the tips of his fingers. He looked around at the absolute void where an ecosystem used to be.
He turned to Roy, panting, a look of desperate hope on his face. "Well? How much? Did I drain half? Twenty percent?"
Roy looked at his wrist. He tapped the screen."Um, you dropped me zero point four percent," Roy read. "And… oh, wait. Just regenerated back to full."
Lynder stared at him. The golden light faded from his eyes, replaced by the crushing weight of financial reality.
"My alimony…" he whispered, sinking to his knees in the ash.
Floor 239 opened into the throat of a volcano, each of its many sectors clearly taken over by whatever boss commanded this level. Black rock islands floated in a churning lake of magma that painted the high vaulted ceiling in strobes of violent orange. At the center, submerged to its waist in molten stone, stood a burning Cyclops scaled to the size of a cathedral, its skin a crust of cooling basalt that cracked and glowed with every slow breath.
"Oh, look, the Titan of the Kiln. Killed by the Chosen hero over four hundred years ago," Lynder said, his voice trembling with manic delight. "At least it is something sturdy… Castration: Glacial Epitaph…and…Concraze."
A torrent of ten thousand distinct ice spikes materialized within the superheated atmosphere, their regeneration outpacing the heat's capacity to melt them. They layered continuously, coalescing into a tumultuous, cohesive flow of diamond-hard frost. With a precise motion of Lynder's wrist, this river was directed to impact the Titan.
A blinding white explosion of steam erupted, and the Titan roared like tectonic plates grinding beneath the earth as ice crashed into its dark hide. Stone fractured away, magma flash-cooling into a gray, lifeless crust.
Heat rushed inward as the Titan inhaled, pulling warmth rather than air into its lungs. The magma lake dimmed to a lifeless, ashen gray. Above, the molten orange glow on the ceiling flickered and vanished. Boiling air froze instantly into crystal. With one breath, the volcanic chamber dropped from blazing inferno to absolute zero.
Frost raced across Takara's armor, sealing joints. She gasped, her breath hanging before her as a solid cloud. "Cold... so cold..."
JFK immediately moved to interpose himself between Takara and the Titan. "Let me help." From his chassis, and extending through his suit, a sphere of warm, swirling wind enveloped Takara, creating a small haven of spring-like air.
The Titan opened its single, immense ocular sensor, its pupil a concentrated nexus of captured thermal radiation. A focused discharge of thermal energy erupted, instantaneously turning the air along its trajectory into plasma and boring a passage directly toward Lynder.
Lynder merely chuckled. He joined his hands, fingers spread. "Castration: The White of No Light."
Panels of pure void manifested as a swarm of thousands of individual, paper-thin rectangles of absolute nothingness. They layered over each other, a deck of cards shuffling at the speed of thought, interposing themselves between the elf and the beam.
A sharp, brittle, and utterly wrong sound signaled the impact of heat on the void. Lynder's silver conduit ring was instantly pulverized, its gemstone exploding with enough force to atomize bone. His index finger simply vanished in a puff of pink mist.
Roy shrieked. "YOUR FINGER! YOUR FINGER IS GONE!"
Lynder looked at the stump. Blood welled, bright red against his pale skin but he still looked bored.
"A minor calculation error," he murmured. "The conduit was flawed."
He raised his maimed hand. Threads of black void mana spooled out of the air, needle-thin and sharp. He drove them into the stump, stitching the wound shut with shadow-stuff that froze the flesh instantly. He didn't even blink.
"No conduit," Lynder mused, shaking the hand as if he'd just burned it on a kettle. "Fine. We resort to basics."
The Titan's beam intensified, pushing against the fading panels. Lynder dropped into a lower stance. He began to draw in the air with his remaining fingers, leaving trails of burning violet light.
"Arcane Runic Magic: Null Interdiction."
A monolith of shadow erupted from the ground, blocking the beam's progress. The Titan roared, pouring more power into the assault. The shadow monolith cracked.
"Concraze," Lynder whispered.
He didn't cast the barrier again. He cast it five hundred times. Monolith after monolith erupted from the floor, pushing violently upward, slamming into the heat beam, shattering, and being instantly replaced by the next. It was a machine-gun rapid-fire of heavy defense, creating a staggering, stuttering wall that slowly marched back toward the Titan.
While the spell auto-cycled, Lynder hummed a tuneless song. He crouched, scratching complex, chaotic geometry into the stone floor with his good hand. Mana poured into the etchings, so thick it looked like liquid mercury.
Purified plumes of void rose from the carvings, winding in tight spirals up Lynder's arm, slipping through flesh toward the source of power. Converging around the stump of his index finger and the remaining digits of his injured hand, the currents condensed into a solid form. A sharp clink echoed as a new ring crystallized into existence, raw void magic cut from the darkness between stars.
Lynder pushed himself upright, tilting his hand to examine the newly formed ring. He gave a faint smile, clearly pleased, and extended his hand forward. "Castration: The White of No Light."
The panels abandoned their usual shuffle, erupting instead into a fractal burst. Millions of void-plates unfolded into an expanding lattice, surging outward at mach speed to intercept the Titan's heat beam. They swallowed the beam whole, driving its blazing energy back into the Titan's eye.
The Titan shuddered, locked in place as the panels sealed tight, encasing it completely in a hardened void.
Lynder closed his fist and spoke calmly. "Arcane Shadow Magic: Umbral Subsidence."
In an instant, the void-plates contracted violently, forcing the Titan's enormous mass into a single crushing point of pressure. A heartbeat later, the force snapped outward, ripping the Cyclops apart. Fragments of diamond dust and black vitrified glass sprayed outward, catching the dim light as they drifted through the silent dark.
Lynder turned to Roy, shaking his new ring of crystallized void. "That had to be five percent, boy. Pay up."