A heavy hand on my shoulder reminded me where I was, and more importantly, why I was here. Every minute we spent in this place, more people were dying outside.

  Seeing that... that... I didn't even know what it was! Seeing that random glowing crystal had instantly driven me to an incandescent rage. Why? Even if it had been stolen from me, wasn't that far less important than the pair of dead kids on the ground? Was a theft more deserving of my anger than the murders and atrocities of the count? It wasn't even a theft from this life!

  "Have you calmed down?" asked the Enshrouded.

  "Yes. Sorry. I... don't know what came over me."

  He said nothing else as I once more looked into the room. Despite my visceral reaction to one of its components, I still had no idea of the function of either that component nor the overall construction, yet I knew it was important. There was a small pane of glass in front of it, surrounded by a silver frame, and attached to the complex magical machinery by wires. Another one of the panels from the entrance room, perhaps? But that one would be even tougher to activate, if I couldn't even get close to it without something burning the flesh from my bones.

  Should I continue trying to activate it, or explore the rest of the facility?

  On the basis that there might be something else in the ruins that might offer a hint at how to activate the mysterious panels, I looked into room after room. Most were empty, which was strange in itself. The dwarfs wouldn't have dug out rooms for no reason, so they must have been in use at some point, yet they were completely empty. Where was the furniture? Had Count Harvent taken it?

  But other rooms did have furniture. There were rooms that had probably been in use as barracks, two alcoves set into each wall, one above the other, sized in such a way that I suspected they were beds, for a total of six to a room. There were cupboards in the walls, too, but the doors were bent or torn, obviously opened with force, and no contents remained. Presumably they'd previously held the belongings of whoever slept there.

  That was something else that had vanished. Despite the beds making it obvious dwarfs lived here at some point in history, there were no remains. There were more remains of human children—burnt or frozen, sliced or crushed, no two traps seemed the same—but none of the original occupants. Had they evacuated somewhere? Were they alive now, elsewhere? Were the empty rooms because they had shifted stuff?

  I hoped not. Given what they'd left behind, what the hell had they felt the need to remove?

  Another option was that they'd been removed by Count Harvent, but why would he? Besides, Sir Christopher had mentioned that no-one knew where the dwarfs went, which wouldn't be the case if they'd left behind corpses.

  Whether he'd taken the bodies or not, the place had obviously been looted by Count Harvent or his cronies. Every door was propped open, everything that might possibly have been a container smashed. There was nothing left that wasn't built into the structure.

  We didn't come across a single one of the puzzles the kids were supposed to have been thrown at. Some rooms held constructions of crystal and metal that I didn't require my blocked [Mana Sensitivity] to tell were magical, but all such rooms had corpses just beyond the door. If the king was hoping I'd have been able to figure out how to get into them safely, he was going to be disappointed. Thus far, the only new information I'd provided was a translation of the name of the facility.

  A boundary? A boundary of what? What was on the other side? What was this side?

  Combining the way the place was familiar to me with the description of [Ancient Soul], one possibility was that this place was some sort of interdimensional portal facility. A link between universes. None of the rooms looked like they contained a path to another universe, but what would a path to another universe even look like?

  "I believe you've now explored the entire facility," came the voice of the Enshrouded. "It appears you're yet to learn anything?"

  "No. I'm not sure what you were hoping for. Yes, I can apparently read their writing, but there isn't any writing here to read!"

  "That's not completely true. Please return to the room that first evoked your anger. I was hoping we could avoid it, or at least disable the traps, but it seems we'll need to risk entering."

  "Uh..." I said, remembering the charred skeletons. "That sounds... fatal."

  I didn't know what Constitution would be required to survive something that burnt all the flesh off someone's bones, but I knew I didn't have it.

  "A risk, certainly, but did I not already say that sometimes risks are a necessity?"

  "Since you say 'risk' rather than 'certain death', I assume you have some sort of plan?"

  "Yes," was the only answer I got.

  In the absence of any better options, I complied, returning to the corridor outside the room of crystals. The pair of burnt skeletons remained untouched, a reminder of just how unwelcoming this place was.

  "Hold your breath and do not move," ordered my companion, before sweeping me off my feet and back into a princess carry. "My Skills are geared more towards personal stealth than hiding another, but if you use your own [Expert Stealth] in conjunction, it will hopefully suffice. If not, I am almost certain I will be able to flee to safety in time."

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  "I don't like the idea of 'hopefully', or even 'almost certain', but fine," I complained, falling as still as I was able.

  The Enshrouded stepped forward, pacing confidently through the door.

  We both remained blissfully uncooked, and he let me back down.

  "You didn't express any concerns about yourself, so you've been in here before," I pointed out. "You also suspect this room contains what we need."

  "Place your palm upon that panel to activate it," he replied, which did nothing to confirm or deny my accusation.

  I held my hand against the glass panel I'd noted earlier, causing angular yellow shapes to dance across its surface.

  Angular shapes that represented a script of some sort. I'd never seen them before, yet I could read them. Alas, being able to read them didn't mean that I could understand them. Something in the hidden depths of my Memory twisted the alien shapes into words, but I had no idea what half of the words meant.

  "Well, what does it say?" asked the invisible voice.

  "Uh... Something about something being transferred? Something about an interface? Or an interface to an interface? I don't know!"

  "Hmm... Disappointing. Those runes in boxes can be tapped, and the panel will change in response, but without knowing what they're doing, few scholars have risked much experimentation."

  I stared a while longer, then tapped a button that I believed simply read 'status'. That should be safe.

  The panel flickered, the light within rearranging itself to form new rows of the dwarven script.

  Mostly dwarven script.

  "Hmm..." repeated the disembodied voice.

  I was hmm-ing myself. Among the dwarven runes was quite clearly written in the regular alphabet 'Aberscale Harvent' and 'Grysk Khris'. Presumably Count Harvent and, extrapolating slightly, Sir Khris? But the words next to them... Something about adjustments? Alterations? And how stable the adjustments were? While I didn't know what they meant, the fact that the characters next to Count Harvent's name were in red instead of yellow was presumably a sign something wasn't working correctly.

  "Well?" asked the Enshrouded after letting me stare in silence for a couple of minutes.

  "I'm fairly sure you're right, and that this thing is what Count Harvent used to do whatever he did. Should you be worried Sir Khris is... ah. The 'reinforcement' you mentioned."

  "Indeed. After the count lost his rationality, Sir Khris had something of a change of heart. You needn't worry about him. Only undo whatever it is that the former Count Harvent did to himself."

  "I don't think it's undoable, any more than you could undo a cake back into an egg," I said, continuing to stare at the alien characters. They flickered occasionally, as something about the count changed.

  Something about his soul, perhaps? It was still changing? And given the constant feedback here, I was getting the impression that this thing was putting a constant effort into keeping him alive.

  I let out a big, melodramatic sigh. It was apparently time to call out the Enshrouded on why I was actually here.

  "What's more important to you?" I asked. "Stopping Count Harvent, or getting this power for yourselves?"

  At that question, the Enshrouded actually chuckled. "You've grown rather astute during your short travels thus far," he observed. "However, as much as I desire the ability to increase a subject's Stats and Skills at will, we must prioritise the divine threat that looms over us. Stopping the Unbound is our primary concern."

  "Good, because I haven't got any idea how to undo what he did, but I give it better than fifty-fifty odds that smashing this device will kill him, because as far as I can see, it's taking a constant input from this thing to keep him going."

  "Unfortunate, but if that's what's required, so be it."

  I nodded and drew one of my daggers. The surviving one I'd looted from Leo, rather than my better, newer one, on account of the way I had no clue what was about to happen.

  "Stab!"

  There were sparks. Very colourful sparks, accompanied by an acrid stench. Hairline fractures ran through every crystal as the specific crystal I'd targeted shattered, fragments raining with far more noise than might be expected. For that matter, there were far more fragments than I'd expected, too, as if there was rather more crystal on the inside than the outside dimensions might suggest.

  The Enshrouded was suddenly standing next to me. He looked, if anything, even more shocked at that fact than I did. A tall, gruff man, his face criss-crossed with scars, wearing a black cloak similar to the one worn by whoever had saved me from the Fatal Breeze.

  Something clicked in a direction that wasn't the broken machinery, causing the suddenly visible Enshrouded to swear and leap to the side. Or try to leap to the side, anyway—what actually happened was that his legs got tangled up and he fell over.

  I'd have laughed, but I knew that if I tried moving, I'd have the same issue. That was bad when a small patch of wall had lit up in a bright orange. With the Skill of the Enshrouded broken, presumably this place's defences had identified him as a threat.

  The glow grew, my suddenly sluggish body refusing to react as I wanted it to. Even my thoughts seemed to be moving slowly.

  ... I was about to get cooked, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  The glow cut out. So did the lights, the room now only lit by the sparking machine behind us. A second crystal shattered, then a third, and then the entire thing crumbled all at once.

  The Enshrouded was instantly gone, and I felt his grip around my waist a moment later. The walls of the facility blurred as he ran, tearing through the dark corridor and back out into the mineshaft. He didn't stop even then, despite the lack of anything interesting happening behind us, rushing through passageways at ludicrous speed. What he didn't do was pass through the rock, a decision for which I couldn't fault him. What if our Skills cut out again halfway up?

  He didn't stop moving until we breached the surface, the last sunlight of the day long since gone, but the moon shining overhead.

  "Fuck," he declared.

  "... In my defence, I wasn't expecting the results of that [Stab] to be quite so dramatic."

  "No. Nor I, else I would have stopped you. Now, the question is, what effect did that have on the battle?"

  I winced. If the Skills and Stats of everyone there fighting had cut out like ours had, but Count Harvent's hadn't, the results would be devastating. Even if what I hoped for came true, I doubted the Unbound would have died instantly, but if it also lost its Stats, that may not have mattered.

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