Resentment for that incomplete draconic form washed over him; resentment towards the Gu for failing to give proper form to his perfect designs. Nevertheless, he could not deny the Gu’s efforts in their pragmatic simplicity.

He had to admit that the tail was a design of genius, willing it to manifest as it was, albeit scaled down. The armor’s metal creaked and he felt the ocean of tar inside his mind churning, and a few moments later, a silver rendition of the wide, segmented tail had taken shape from his lower back. As for the other two entomodragon-related techniques, he could not see himself biting like some beast and he found the hollow stingers all too vulnerable if they were just out and exposed. The sickly feeling of her breaking them was still fresh and painful in his mind.

As he did ferocious battle with the four-armed crowman and maimed the hallway nearly as badly as he maimed the horrid creature, a thought sparked in his mind; a solution to the fragility issue, his unwillingness to bite with his own head, and his very immediate need to defeat the crowman’s armor. Even with his monstrous strength, it was a struggle to get a good enough grip on the creature’s plates to pull them off. For once, his thoughts went not to brute force, but to innovation.

Von Wickten willed the Armor of Pure Purpose to manifest a maw around his right forearm such that it could easily snap forward around his fist, with a flamestinger hidden within his forearm such that it could freely extend or retract when the maw was even slightly open from right beneath the wrist. Mounting the crowman’s back, he used his tail to bind its arms and his left hand to hold on while he grabbed at one of its necks with his right. With a loud snap, his gauntlet’s gaping maw shot forward and clamped down on the thing’s neck, allowing the flamestinger to slam forward into its flesh.

Not a single thought of technique dwelt on his mind when he pumped accursed purple flames into the beast until it spilled from every possible seam and cooked it from the inside. Simple intent was enough to bring forth a Curseflame Deluge, where even in his Entomodragon form he had to strain and struggle to summon his flame.

It was almost disappointing to feel the great mass of meat and blackstone falter beneath him, crumpling to the ground in a puddle of its own boiling bodily fluids… Almost. He left it there, following up on directions to a supposed shortcut which he’d wrung out of that moleman, expecting another ambush. Instead, he was faced by that macabre temple to mutilation and sacrifice, the pearlescent tunnel still yawning open for him to pass through.

He was close. He could feel it in his bones; that burning ache no longer faded whenever he stopped focusing on it.

There, above the field of white flowers he stepped into the sunlight, paying no heed to any aspect of the view other than the cathedral. She was in there. He could feel it.

“NEWMAN…”

It had been a few hours, with the party having set up the burner and eaten. Vic had been absorbing bones and forming a large, quadrupedal construct for a while now. He answered any questions as to what it was supposed to be with: “You’ll see when it’s done.”

Meanwhile, they could see a gradual shift in the Blackwall Gate’s great glyph; its yellow-orange sunlight was slowly becoming iridescent.

Jorfr confirmed that it vaguely denoted how far along the whole process was.

“Must be a pain to deal with this shit every time…” Zel remarked as she lifted one of the pews above her head, using it as a makeshift weight. With each rep, one could see bursts of light inside the muscles that were being engaged. By her estimate, it had to be a couple hundred kilos; not much, but enough that lifting it wasn’t just glorified cardio.

“The surface gates don’t do this, they only take a couple minutes…” Zef said. “But then, those are maybe one fifth this size, and not immediately below the burial place of a Dead God. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been designed specifically to discourage people using this gate as if it were any other.”

“It’s because it crosses over a thousand kilometers,” the northman piped up offhandedly, raising a bottle of Liquid Vigor to his lips. Only once he received three questioning stares did he elaborate: “Right. This big bastard-”

He gestured to the gate with his bottle.

“-does the same thing as the sacrificial doors in the Labyrinth. Yes, doors, there are many of them and they are the only way to get from there to here. Our shortcut was a convenient way to one of the exits, nothing more. The Avatar of Sacrifice refused to talk in detail, but it at least told me that the First King personally traversed the many barriers sealing this place, entered the Blackwall somehow, and then used what he learned from this gate’s inner workings to construct the Labyrinth. It said that the whole complex was built in an effort to bypass the barrier, the first of whose layers tries to slough your skin off when you walk through it. What the barriers did… That the avatar spoke on at length. It made me listen in exchange for passage, one time.”

Jorfr shuddered, then took a swig of his drink.

“So it… Makes a thousand-kilometer long tunnel?” Vic questioned.

“What? No. This tunnel is a couple minutes’ walk at most. The one in the labyrinth goes at least twenty or thirty kilometers through solid rock. This one… I cannot say for sure, but the Long Road North takes around two weeks on a bear-pulled sled and those things are a little faster than Grekurian trail horses, so if you do the counting it comes out to a bit over one thousand kilometers.”

Like a man possessed, Victor scrambled to retrieve his notebook and began scribbling, drawing a representation of the sacrificial chamber’s spiral-patterned door, the relic, and the blood pool. He murmured under his breath all the while: “Rainbow Corridor… Allows traversal of huge distances, like a Fog Gate… Vastly more efficient and without the power requirement being proportional to how much matter goes through…”