'Two patrols at the eastern gate, appear to be weapon users, magic proficiency uncertain,' Liz said, peering through a pair of giant binoculars with night vision capabilities. The stalagmites in the area were no longer glowing brightly, and the aurora above had dimmed substantially, now only wisps of color floating through the skies. The three of us were hiding behind a variant of Yaksha that grew in shrubs.

'We know. They're less than a hundred meters in front of us,' Coffee sighed. Liz had a tendency for theatrics, and it got to Coffee's nerves. We clearly detected the mana signatures of two unknowns on either side of the metal gate ahead. Both were fairly weak, if we were just comparing raw quantities of mana, but the chance that they might be using Absorption to hide their true strength was a very real possibility.

'Give me those,' I snatched the binoculars out of Liz's hands and studied the glass windows that covered almost 75% of the entire mansion's surface area. 'Dark, dark, dark... oh, I see them. Around twenty nobles talking and eating a crapton of food. Aren't mimics supposed to be starving?'

'Only as starving as they are poor,' Liz frowned. 'Those nobles are friends or distant relatives of the Kings, and are very far from starving.'

'All's going to plan, then. Let's give the operation a green light,' Coffee said. Liz nodded and led us away from the eastern gate towards the north wall of the mansion, which was more like a small castle than a simple villa. Luckily, Liz was stationed here as a hired guard not too long ago, and had a pretty good idea of the building layout.

Coffee used the Void Ring, which was placed in her care for insurance, to excavate a small hole in the wall, which we passed through and resealed by summoning the wall material from the ring. Doing this anywhere else might have been dangerous, but this location was perfect, due to guards rarely, if ever, approaching this area of the mansion. That's because this area was the servant quarters, which resembled a cross between Cairo's stinky sewers (in Egypt) and a medieval prison.

But it wasn't the smell that dissuaded them. Rather, it was the servants themselves. As we snuck through the backdoor into the quarters, we ran into four mimics chained in cells, each with terrible looking wounds that were festering with pus and bacteria. Their eyes didn't even greet us, and remained fixated on the stone floor. All it took was one look to understand why Liz told us that it was hopeless to try and help them. It felt like every one of them had visited hell and had their souls ripped out and kept there, while their body remained alive.

Steeling my core, Coffee, Liz and I bolted past the servants and headed deeper into the mansion. If Liz's information was correct, the subdungeon entrance was less than 300 meters away.

Pit pat pit pat.

The floor started to become wetter as we traversed the corridors of the mansion basement, which twisted and turned with multiple branching paths. For example, the four way intersection we were currently at. Without Liz's prior knowledge, we'd have gotten lost already.

'I think... we're lost,' Liz said hesitantly.

Or not.

''What the fuck?!'' Both Coffee and I exclaimed.

'I don't recognize these halls at all.'

'Wait...' Coffee frowned, turning her attention to the walls. She rapped them with her knuckles, and the wall seemed to wobble. 'Shit, we've been had. This is a mobile labyrinth. They must've changed the layout.'

'Can we just bust our way through the walls?' I suggested.

'Any breakage in the walls usually triggers an alarm system,' Liz sighed.

'Well, fuck.'

'Do we head back?' Liz asked.

'No, we'll split up to search, and regroup in fifteen minutes. Don't engage any enemies and try to find whatever you can that'll lead us to the gate,' Coffee said.

'Sounds good,' I said, turning to the left.

'Don't take longer than fifteen minutes,' Coffee repeated, dashing forward.

'Aye aye, commander,' Liz said, running off to the right.

Smack!

"You dare tarnish our master with your vile semen? Learn your place!"

A dark skinned man flexed his arms and cracked his joints in preparation for a long session this time. As the Slave Master of the mansion, he was given free reign to educate the new recruit, an orphan named Kallimore pir Deadwood.

The Deadwoods were once the second most powerful family in the Mimic Kingdom, and were responsible for managing international relations following the First Dungeon War. Being likeable, polite, and powerful, the Deadwood family quickly gained a positive reputation among the other Kingdoms. Their connections unfortunately made them too influential for the current ruling family. The entire family was slaughtered overnight, leaving behind the sole heir of the family to live the rest of his life as a slave to the Kings' niece.

Kalli was only six at the time.

Smack!

"Say something, you little cunt. You think you're better than me because you're a Deadwood?" The Slave Master spat, holding a thick, metal rod in his hand. He unbuckled his pants with a crooked smile. "Maybe the only way you'll learn is through some old fashioned discipline. Let this be a reminder for what'll happen if you cross Lady Chantelle again."

Kalli stared at the massive, black appendage hanging from the Slave Master's groin. He internally screamed at his legs to move, or to fight back at least. But it was as if he didn't have a body at all. It was like watching himself from a third person view. He could do nothing as he was pushed down onto the ground, stepped on, and cuffed against the cold, stone floor. He could feel hot breathing right behind him, and yet, at the same time, couldn't feel anything at all.

Ssssuk. Thud.

A heavy weight fell on top of Kalli. He continued to scream internally, but realized that it wasn't as it seemed, by the red liquid dripping onto the floor next to him. He pushed off the weight with great strain, and turned around to see what was going on.

"Hey Kalli, long time no see," a young woman smiled. She had golden hair tied to the side, and was wearing a slick, black track suit that stuck to her body. Splotches of blood were splattered all across her face.

Beside Kalli was the carcass of the Slave Master, whose head was hanging from his neck by a thin strand of flesh, barely holding the two together. A wide, wooden stake was planted through his mana core so forcefully that the core itself was ripped out, and exposed for the whole world to see. Something told Kalli that he should be sickened by such a sight, but the feeling never came. Instead, he staggered to his feet slowly, lifting the rod above his head.

Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.

Blood splurt forth from the Slave Master's head and sprayed Kalli with a mist of red. That didn't stop him as he kept whacking, as if he was possessed by a demon.

Whack. Whack. Whac--

"That's enough, my Lord," Liz stopped the rod by putting her hand in the way without even so much as a flinch. "We must hurry and escape."

Kalli stared at the woman blankly, blood dripping from his face and metal rod in hand. It would've been a ghastly sight to behold if there was a bystander nearby. He wondered who this woman was.

Pang.

A jolt of pain shot through his head as memories flooded back. This was the big sister who used to play with him back when his father and mother were still alive... When his family was...

A tear rolled down his cheeks as his eyes regained a little bit of life.

Finally, he nodded.

"Great. I have a couple acquaintances who are waiting for us. They're going to help us get you to your mother," Liz explained, leading him to the cell door by the hand.

"M-mother is alive?" Kalli croaked. This was the first time he had spoken in half a year, and speaking at long last felt like regurgitating a dry sandwich up his throat. He ignored that though; what Liz had just said was impossibly incredible.

"Yes, my lord. We have been preparing for your rescue for quite some time now, and the opportunity arose recently." Liz was worried, because her fifteen minutes were almost up. "Your deceased father was a great friend of my father's, and it's my duty to bring you to safety."

"T-thank y-you, miss..."

"Liz," she beamed. "It's been a long time. Of course you've forgotten about me."

"T-that's not true! Just the... name..." he blushed.

Liz laughed and rubbed his head. Her primary objective was complete. Now the problem was getting Coffee and Bell to understand...

A subdungeon, huh. I remembered Ellie's stories about her SDF adventures with Andrea, dungeon diving to gather magical tools after clearing extremely difficult rooms or completing missions that took weeks to complete. Apparently each subdungeon was governed by a rule called an 'instance', which would transport any given party to an isolated copy of the subdungeon's pocket world. Some subdungeons gave you optional missions to complete, while others were home to entire civilizations that could only survive within the subdungeon.

For us, this subdungeon was not only a way to get food for our journey, but also to escape the MImic Kingdom. Each subdungeon was connected to various locations within the dungeon, and Liz apparently knew of a hidden exit that would bring us closer to the Vampire Kingdom. All that we needed to do now, was to find the damn entrance.

Weirdly, I felt like I knew what Liz was talking about when she described the entrance that was used to gain access to the subdungeon, the Great Manamoo Caverns. She explained it as a golden arch, complete with a golden bull's head at the keystone. The same gate that I saw when I was dead; or more specifically, a dead spirit floating along some sort of scarlet river.

I passed through a gate and awoke in the Slime Kingdom, which meant that the gates were related to the dungeon somehow. And now, another gate shows up and it apparently sends you to a subdungeon. Coincidence? I think not.

Regardless, I didn't make any progress so far, and time was almost up. Every path I took ended up being a dead end, except for one which I hadn't checked out yet. I made my way down, careful not to splash any of the water as I moved.

Fump.

?!

For some reason, I couldn't move forward anymore, as if there was a pressurized wall of air in front of me. I squished my face against the wall to see if I could make out what was beyond, and saw something golden and shiny. The gate!

After making sure that there was no one around me using mana perception, I tried to diagnose what sort of mana was being used to keep me out, and to my surprise, it was something that I was very familiar with. Collision mana.

Whoever or whatever had made this barrier must've been quite powerful, to maintain such a strong barrier made of Collision mana I remembered how frustrating and exhausting it was to manipulate even a little cluster of it outside the body. I tried to use Absorption to siphon some of the mana away, but found that it was impossible with my abilities. It was just too overwhelmingly dense to absorb completely.

Hmmm..... Aha!

I channeled a ball of crimson mana into my pseudopod without converting it at all, and began to rotate it from multiple directions faster and faster. After these past two weeks, my control had become much better, and I was able to compress it far denser than when I practiced my first air bullet. Surprised how easy it was, I tried to increase the supply of mana I used, and compacted it even further. More. More. More! Eventually, it grew to such a size that it felt like it was going to explode if I even lost the slightest bit of focus. Moving the rotating cluster to the tip of my pseudopod, I pointed it at the invisible wall with one word in mind.

'EJACULATION!'

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.

My bullet had penetrated through the barrier in an instant, generating long, deep cracks within its structure. It shattered like glass, and the shards dissipated like sand in the wind. The golden shine beyond the wall was revealed, but it wasn't the gate. It was something beyond my wildest imagination.

'Is this real?' I asked out loud to no one in particular. I pinched myself in the cheek to make sure, just in case.

It was a giant dildo.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

[ATTENTION, HOSTILE FORCES DETECTED IN THE BASEMENT. ALL GUARDS TO THE CENTRAL WING, IMMEDIATELY.]

I felt the blood drain from my face.

Ah, fuck. I fucked up, didn't I.

For a fucking dildo.