The chase lasted for about an hour as I led Shadow to a certain part of the forest.

He was still in his shadowy gas form but way more condensed, chasing us like an amalgamation of darkness. It seemed the reason he kept that form was because he was faster that way. Even now, Blizzard was barely able to maintain some distance with him despite her higher agility stat — that just worked perfectly to my favor without the need for an impromptu to lure him.

Before long, there was a huge cliff wall sticking out in the distance. Just below the protruding part, there was a gap the size of about enough for the both of us to squeeze in.

“Just a little more… Whoa!” My hands gripped Blizzard’s thick fur to stabilize myself.

I was almost thrown down when Blizzard abruptly dodged Shadow’s incessant flying dagger attack; he kept throwing this kind of attack in a very sudden and clandestine manner from the most unexpected angles.

His speed was only getting faster and faster by the minute, so in response, I took out my bow and loaded an arrow that had been imbued with [Programming] to explode three seconds after being released and shot it at him. The arrow exploded once three seconds had passed and hindered him from getting closer, though not enough to give him any injury. I guess his real body isn’t at the center of that gas… No matter.

“C’mon, Blizzard! Only one last push! When this is all over, I’ll give you a treat.” I patted her head. We were only about one hundred meters away; this would be the critical juncture.

“Woof!” Blizzard sped up and, as if becoming one with the wind, glided into the gap.

“Want to escape? Keep dreaming! Die under my blade — {Shrouded Step}!”

Shadow’s shade formed up right in front of the gap like some sort of shadowy humanoid monster with a pair of chilly eyes and swung his chisel-like weapon at us.

Normally, this would be time for us to panic, but…

“Now! Lorelei!” I shouted — the range was just about enough.

When the blade was only a millimeter away from touching Blizzard’s face, we teleported into the mansion’s garden inside the Artificial Realm. The warm sun hitting my face told me we were no longer in the dark, cold forest.

My heart was still racing hard, my back sweating profusely; I slid down from Blizzard’s body down to the ground with my backpack under me, spreading my arms wide. Truly, what one hell of an experience it was… Ugh. I didn’t want to taste it the second time.

***

Shadow’s Perspective

Where is he? Where are that ostentatious jester and his wolf?!

Shadow had almost never seen such an abrupt yet real disappearance of people; it just didn’t make any sense. The guy in the white mask himself wasn’t a problem, but the strange wolf mount under him that could emit blinding light was another thing altogether. He had to kill that thing before all else!

He checked the most likely place for them to escape and found a gap wide enough for two of them to fit right behind him. The reason he used his Shadow Magic at the last moment was to block them from getting this into the hole at the corner. Then, they would be most likely to escape inside.

Of course, he wasn’t a brainless idiot. Who would stupidly chase them into a place that obviously looked like a trap? His assassin instinct was telling him there was danger inside.

Out of the blue, however, numerous golems surfaced from the ground all around him, not leaving him any space to escape behind him and with the cliff wall on the other side.

“Just a bunch of golems. What can they do to me? Though this amount is quite troubling…” Shadow chanted, “{Shadow Turbulence}!” and his body transformed into the dark shadowy gas form that encompassed all the golems.

This spell could not only be used to entrap his enemies inside his body and beguile them in endless torments of nothingness, but also made his body impervious to any sort of physical attacks. The only catch being it exhausted his magical power and consumed a lot of his mana reserve, making him unable to maintain such magic for too long; he got to finish this quickly and neatly.

But to his horror, ten of the golems within him released flames from their hands, burning his insides. Even though his magic made him resistant to small-scale fire, getting burned all over still hurt him — the pain made him almost cry.

“Fuck!”

He released his shadow form and turned back to his physical body, but as if waiting for that moment, the other golems shot small projectiles at him. He had no fear of such physical attacks, especially at this time—

Countless blinding flashes embodied the night sky, turning it into day. Before he was able to conceive what was going on, the projectiles shot by the golems hit him, injuring his body, some even exploded in flames and burned him. Even with his constitution that had been trained for decades, small holes were left by the projectiles.

“What’s wrong with this bunch of golems!”

Every time he transformed back into his shadow form, the ten golems would release flames on him, and when he released his form, the other golems would rain him with sphere projectiles. He didn’t have enough time to escape, much less deliver an attack on them.

Dammit!

Left with no other choice, Shadow decided to bite the bullet and get into the gap. At least he could momentarily escape from the golems that way and plan his next move. There was nothing to lose by doing this.

Bearing that in mind, he vanished into thin air amidst the hail of gunfire and flames and appeared inside the tunnel located under the gap. He didn’t mind the lack of illumination and the faint feeling of very subtle extraction coming from all over, solely focusing on escaping.

Moments later, he saw a barely lit small room at the end of the tunnel. Being an elite assassin as he was, Shadow stopped in his tracks, faded himself with the surroundings, and slowly crept toward the room, leaving no sound to escape. His countless experience made him a cold killing machine that could efficiently camouflage his environments.

Though it might seem strange, inside the room were three people he recognized… since they were members of the Axiom Order. Although, only one among them with the biggest stature was the one he knew the most — Rowan.

He shot stealthily behind the bearded man and aimed the dagger at his neck. “Speak. Who are you?”

“Eek! S-Sir Shadow… It’s me, Rowan. How’s your injury? It’s been a ‘long time’…”

“Hm?” Shadow raised his eyebrows, moving the dagger closer to Rowan’s throat. “Why are you here?”

“Er, we three have been trapped here for weeks…” Rowan began retelling their story of stumbling across a dungeon, and they escaped after almost every member they brought was wiped out. And now, they were forced to seek asylum in this small room, being cornered by the golems outside.

“So you said that those golems also cornered you here with their strange weapons?”

Rowan and the other two were frantically nodding their heads in response to his question.

Something was odd.

He didn’t know why, but they felt out of place as if somebody had intricately put them here. Was it that jester in white? Or was it another party altogether? Either way, it didn’t matter right now.

Should he kill them to eliminate any unstable variables? No, they might prove to be useful as a decoy to lure the golems from the exit point. He didn’t care whether they were real or fake since he would bite the bait and escape from here alive with the information he had in hand. Then, he would no longer be a failure to “them”!

His dagger still on Rowan’s neck, he suggested, “Okay. We’re in the same boat. I just happen to think of a single plan to have the four of us escape from this place: You three will distract the golems for a minute while I finish them one by one.”

“Sounds interesting,” answered the thin man among them.

“Then—”

“But Sir Shadow… No, Shadow. I believe that such an opportunity will never come.”

As soon as that sentence finished being uttered, another person in a robe dropped countless ball-like objects onto the ground, sparking dazzling lights that blinded Shadow’s eyes.

“Argh! Bastard!” They must have planned this!

In the confusion, Rowan elbowed him and took out a dagger to stab him. Of course, he had anticipated such a thing, so he somersaulted to dodge. His feet touched the ground, making a thick splashing sound. He’d only regained some of his vision from one of his eyes, but he caught a glimpse of a pool of water up to his ankles appearing out of nowhere. A puddle of water? Since when?

More importantly…

Shadow didn’t bother wasting words with them and proceeded to unleash his magic to kill them in one fell swoop. Even though he couldn’t see their location clearly, he still had his ears and his assassin instinct.

But right then, a mechanism opened from the ceiling, spilling countless blob-like objects onto him. While simultaneously, the water below him actually converged together, forming into squishy, sticky, and itchy moving things, and wrapping themselves around him like some kind of leech.

As an elite assassin, he easily made evasive maneuvers to dodge these strange creatures, but the room had nothing but flatness — no high places from which he could escape, no gaps where he could hide. Worst of all, because the blinding flash had yet to recede, Shadow couldn’t transform into his shadow form. His usually calm breathing had long since gone into chaos. Horrifying!

Rowan’s large hands suddenly locked him in place from behind and caught him off guard. No matter how many times and hard he struggled, he couldn’t extricate himself from him, much less perform a difficult move in this kind of environment. Just what made him so strong all of a sudden?

“Let go, you fucker!” He used his Vocation, which he would only use when he was truly in a pinch, and summoned a chisel-like weapon out of thin air and stabbed Rowan with it. “Hahaha! Die!”

Not once in his life had anyone survived after being stabbed with this weapon, so he had complete confidence that he would die.

“Wh-What?!” The strength of the arms that bound him didn’t weaken. In fact, it was just getting stronger like being chained by hard metal.

Glancing back with his limited vision, he didn’t find the sight of a bearded man with a powerful, muscular frame, but a humanoid mud monster — a bit over two meters in height — with a continuously melting face and metal plates covering its body. His weapon, which had been stabbed at it, was stuck in the narrow hole in its face that appeared to be its left eye.

Soon, more and more parts of the room were flooded with those squishy creatures… What used to be just ankle-deep started to rise to the waist, and now his chest. When the blinding flash finally receded, at long last, he quickly regained his sharp vision.

“These things?! Slimes!” His heart immediately sank.

Countless transparent green slimes were the things that had flooded the room and himself.

Whatever. He just had to get out of this room. Now or never! Even so, the room had no other way out, making the only way he came to the only exit. But to his dismay, despite his best efforts, he was unable to find the path; it felt like it had disappeared like it never existed in the first place. What the fuck is going on?!

Before he was able to think straight, the slimes coming out from the small hole in the ceiling began to change in color; they became purple. And as soon as they touched the pool of slimes, a numbing sensation began to run its course in his body, paralyzing him, who was still bound by the mud monster — making the difficulty to get away rose exponentially.

“Ngh… Aargh!” He let out a muffled cry as slimes had clogged his head from the remaining empty space, restricting his desperate trashing from achieving any result. Every time he tried to gasp for air, the slimes forced their way into his mouth, and even into the rest of his orifices.

How could someone like him die here?

He was among the “Named Children” and a former member of the “Moonshade Scripture,” an elite among elite, a chosen among chosen; he wouldn’t mind dying for them to accomplish his task, but to perish in an obscure place like this without achieving any noteworthy result, there was no way he was going to accept that. No way!

Shadow, fearing death, could only desperately cast magic to keep the acid coming from the slimes from dissolving him while keeping him awake. Surviving was key. As long as he kept himself alive, then he would be able to think of something. But was there a way out of this place? He didn’t have an endless supply of mana, after all, and his magical power would be exhausted sooner or later.

If only he had mastered the Top-tier spell that his master refused to impart… just because he was a “failure.” Escaping from this place would be a cinch. As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t have escalated to this as he believed that killing the white-masked bastard, who had caused all this, would not be unsuccessful.

Shadow’s vision became dimmer and dimmer as time went on, falling into the abyss of no salvation.