“You have got to stop breaking your shields,” Desdemona said, turning the two halves of the splintered item over in her hands. The wood was scorched black, drinking in the already somewhat dim lighting of Cayden’s personal chambers.

“I know.”

“This is what, the third one in less than a week?”

“I know.”

“And it isn’t like we have access to an auction house or anything to get yo-“

“I know!” Cayden groaned, faceplanting into the pages of the leatherbound tome on the table before him. “Do you think they can fix it?”

“Mrhrmph?” Desdemona shot back, his words entirely muffled.

The young man lifted his head, glaring in her direction as he repeated himself. “Do you think they can fix it?”

“Probably not. Durability is pretty far in the negatives. I can’t remember the smithing rules, but I’m almost positive you’d need someone with at least intermediate crafting to do the job right.”

“Great.”

“Of which we have precisely zero on the floor,” Desdemona said in a voice far too chipper for his liking.

“You don’t say.” Cayden sighed. “Are you trying to get a rise out of me? Or are you just feeling actively malicious?”

Her eyes said one thing as her lips said another. “Neither. Silver said you were pouting, so I thought I’d distract you.”

“By making fun of me?”

“Is it working?” Des grinned and dropped into the chair across from him, billowy leggings hanging down across its front as she crossed her legs. “Come on, it isn’t that bad. So he blew himself up and nearly killed you both, big whup. What was it you told me, nearly only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades?”

“That isn’t…” He leaned back, drumming fingertips on his thighs as he struggled for the right way to express his thoughts. “It isn’t just that I nearly got us both killed, though I don’t expect I’ll feel good about that one for quite a while. It is that we spent all that effort and time for nothing.”

“It wasn’t that much time.”

Cayden frowned. “We don’t have much time left, either.”

It was a hard point to argue with, and an uneasy silence settled between the two of them, punctuated by the occasional nervous tap of his fingers.

“You did learn some things, at least?”

“Confirm is more like it.” He replied. “We were already quite sure that whoever stole the shackles of the Liar King hadn’t gotten off the floor. Given what he said about being able to see a link through both Silver and I, that we touched whoever has them, it seems almost certain that they’re still here with us.”

“And with that first meet and greet with the Duke, pretty much everyone has had some contact with everyone else. Doesn’t exactly help us narrow it down, does it?”

“Were it so easy,” Cayden said, echoing Temujin from hours before. “Even if we did narrow it down, I’m not sure that’d be a good thing either. Whoever did it has had plenty of time to come clean, which means they’re either afraid we’re going to hand them over or the item is worth risking all of our lives.”

Desdemona watched him steadily as Cayden leaned back in his chair, arms stretched up over his head with a groan. She knew all too well the spiral that shame or greed could lead a person down, but neither felt right to her. “Could also be a very elaborate mass murder/suicide.”

He frowned. “You aren’t helping.”

“Probably not. You want to try and sherlock it up? See if we can figure out whodunit? You’d make a damn good Watson.”

“Yeah, no. You go right ahead and start the deductions without me. I need more work do to like I need another hole in the head.” Cayden muttered. “Strategy meeting in an hour, heading out in the afternoon. And then I still have to figure out if we can take advantage of this somehow.”

His attention turned to the book still open across the desk in front of him. The writing was illegible, even to him, its illuminated pages filled with icons that seemed reminiscent of the runic language he was familiar with, but different enough that his Runic Knowledge skill could do nothing to decipher them.

It was more than just illegible, however. The majority of the text itself felt, wrong, somehow. He’d gotten a headache the first time he’d flipped through and had ended up in Celia’s care to deal with severe nausea after little more than an hour of study. The sensation was hard to describe, but his best explanation had been to compare it to trying to focus on an optical illusion you could never quite bring into focus. Definitely a little too Lovecraftian for his taste.

Mixed in among the cognitohazard text, however, was the real prize. Ritual magic.

He’d picked up the Ritual Casting skill some weeks earlier upon hitting level 10 in his Unique Runemagi class, but had little opportunity to explore its benefits since. His minor dabbling had shown that it could reproduce the effects of similarly named skills gained by other magic-using classes, yet owing to the somewhat free-flowing nature of his own magic he had struggled to find much use for it.

This book might change that.

Perhaps a quarter of the book was composed entirely of instructions for various ritual magics. In plain English, no less. If a bit eye-rolling in their presentation.

How to dimensional lock a 20’ area in five easy steps. How to create Elsmere’s Benevolent Bungalow in seven easy steps. How to summon a minor demon lord in six hundred and sixty-six easy steps.

And far more important than any of them. How to conjure the Throne of Tabbris (Dungeon) in six easy steps. What was hopefully the solution to two longstanding problems.

Special Quest

Learning to Run

Requirements: Locate the Entrance to the Throne of Tabbris.

Reward: 35,000 XP.

Grand Quest

Find her.

Requirements: Locate and free The White Knight

Reward: ???

The book wasn’t even kidding. Yeah, the spell called for a positively obscene amount of Zeni, a large space, a high number of runes known, and some frankly bizarre material components, but none of those were really at issue. He met the knowledge requirements, had a fortress to work with, and could probably beg Silver for the cash for both the spell and components if he had to. There was just one small problem.

Throne of Tabbris (Dungeon) in six easy steps. (Req: Master Ritual Casting [Runemagi]– Novice Level Max.)

Or rather, four small problems.

Name: Cayden Gender: Male Bloodline: Agares-Tabbris Class: Guardian 16, Runemagi 10 Experience: 351,981 Next Level: 378,000 Strength:26 Dexterity: 38 Vitality: 44 Energy: 61 Stat Points Remaining: 0 Mastery Points Remaining: 0 Max HP: 3260 HP Recoverty: 11.4/Second Max MP: 3910 MP Recovery: 13.9/Second Max TP: 2160 TP Recovery: 10.2/Second

Between the fight in Islo and a few of the small raids he’d taken part in since, Cayden had passed level 25 a few days earlier and in perhaps the only real good news of the day, his ‘combat’ with the exploding officer had still counted for XP, just barely pushing him over the edge of level 26 that morning. He’d actually leveled fairly well since the start of this whole mess. One small blessing with already diminishing returns.

He’d earn his next mastery point at level 30, but baring some windfall of XP he wasn’t likely to make it there before the Warden troops closed in on Bastion. Even if he did, he had no way of knowing how difficult the dungeon would prove to be, how long it would take, or if the rewards for completing it would be of any meaningful help in the overall scope of the floor event. Grand Quests tended to have grand rewards, but it would take something truly special to swing the war in their direction.

So close, yet so far. The whole idea of it irked him, as though it were staged for maximum annoyance.

“…and you haven’t been paying attention to a word I said.”

“Huh?” Cayden asked his mind refocusing on the present and a very annoyed-looking Des.

“No wonder you’re single.” The girl rolled her eyes, grumbling. “Going to get Celia to cure blindness/deafness just to make sure you’re out of excuses. I asked if you had come up with any of your brainy solutions to your level gap problem.”

“None that don’t involve stabbing you for the XP.” Cayden cringed as he remembered who he was talking to. Not the best joke for a former Player Killer, but it was hard to tell whether her brief flash of shame had more to do with the joke or his overreaction. “No good ones, anyway.”

She flashed a wan smile, idly toying with the end of one of her deep blue braids. “You’ll come up with something.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I try. Besides, you seem to have a knack for that sort of game-breaking loophole.” She shrugged. “And if you don’t, we kick the Warden’s ass the old-fashioned way.”

“You are… surprisingly positive in the face of all this.”

This time she laughed, covering her mouth with one hand as though the humor might break some serious façade she most certainly never possessed. “One of us has to be.”

“I don’t think that-“ Cayden began to reply when a soft ping from his glasses drew his attention away. A waiting message. “Please be good news, please be good news…”

“It’ll be good news.”

“Don’t jinx me.” He grumbled as he collected his glasses and slid them on, then snapped his fingers twice and gestured at the interface only he could see. There was a pause before finally, he smiled. “Huh, would you look at that. Good news. They took the bait.”