The library spread out before him. This was his fourth time coming back here, even if the last time had just been a facsimile created by the dryad dungeon. Several hundred books still rested on the shelves, though there were far fewer now than there had been. He picked one of them from the shelf and inspected it.

  [Item]

  Dragontooth Bat Tome

  Description: The power of the Undying Library has locked away this Dragontooth Bat in book form.

  Only the Dragontooth King can unlock it and free this creature.

  He tried prodding it with his ‘Reality Warp’ skill, but the book remained a book. He set it back down on the shelf. The library was just as eerily quiet as the version the dryads had made was. No bats chirped or chittered; there wasn’t even the ominous presence he’d always felt at the center whenever he’d come here.

  “Oi, Boss? Shadow be doing wibbly thing.” Elijah’s eyes snapped down at his shadow, and it was indeed doing a ‘wibbly thing’ as Bitter Root had said.

  His shadow was reacting like a pool of bubbling tar, rolling bubbles coming to the surface before popping silently. He could sense the bats within his shadow, desperate to get out. There was a link there too, but it was completely unlike the link he held with either of his familiars or even his scout bats. Those links were two-way channels. They drew their power from Elijah, but in return he could see through the senses of his bats, or gain the fighting power of his familiars. A symbiotic relationship.

  The link to the bats in his shadow was different. More parasitic. They drew their power from Elijah and assisted him through his teleport and swarm skills. But they were hungry. Some unseen force prevented them from consuming Elijah’s energy like the gates of a dam.

  But the gates felt damaged, and now that he was paying closer attention to them, Elijah could sense a steady trickle of mana passing through them. It was small, just a few percent of his regeneration rate, but he could tell it wasn’t supposed to be doing that.

  He tried to focus on the feeling of his mana being drained. Now that he noticed it; the feeling was clearer. He grabbed onto it with his will and activated ‘Reality Warp’ intending on checking out what was happening with it.

  Pain lanced through his brain, searing the back of his eyes with white-hot intensity. At the same time, garbled text shimmered into his vision, nonsensical code that looked like someone had just slammed their face into their keyboard repeatedly with a text editor open. He fell back onto his butt as the pain continued to trace paths around his skull.

  “Boss? What wrong, Boss?” Bitter Root’s worried voice broke through the haze. Elijah was thrashing about on the floor, trying to expel the pain from his head. Bitter Root’s hands gripped him, keeping him from smashing his skull against the concrete floor or nearby bookshelf.

  Several eternities passed until he could focus enough to release his hold on the thread of siphoning mana. The moment he did, the pain eased. He could hear Bitter Root talking to him, his voice breaking and stuttering as he tried to figure out what was wrong with Elijah. Deep down, away from the torment of the pain, a conscious thought bubbled up; he was so thankful that he had his familiar with him. The little menace was becoming a close friend to him despite being a game construct.

  He slowly sat up, patting the goblin on the head. He looked up at the ceiling. “Alright, I get it. You don’t want me messing with that.” He wasn’t sure that the pain actually had anything to do with the AI, and was fairly certain he didn’t have to actually yell his complaint to the heavens, but it just felt right.

  “Who Boss yell at?” Bitter Root asked, following Elijah’s gaze up to the ceiling.

  “No one. Just forget it,” Elijah grunted as he stood up slowly. The swarm was still roiling beneath his feet, and as he stood, they once again started making his shadow writhe. He tried to focus on them closer, to focus on the link without touching it. He wanted to understand what had them so riled up, what they wanted from him if not to inform him of the mana they were constantly draining.

  The draining of mana was their payment for something. Now that he was aware of it, that link sat front and center in his consciousness. But what was it he was paying them for, and why had it suddenly become so apparent that they were doing it?

  He realized like a bolt of electricity through his brain, thankfully without pain this time. Their intentions crystallized like a voice in his mind. Several dozen voices all screaming. Not sentences or even words, just raw emotion and intent. A force of will all their own, separate from his own inside of his head.

  They wanted out.

  The only thing stopping them at this moment was Elijah’s dam. The one he had unconsciously placed when he’d absorbed the Dragontooth King class into himself. In his mind’s eye he could see them, countless bats battering against the dam, and on the other side of it was Elijah’s mana pool.

  He took a deep breath, mentally pulling back the gates of the dam and letting more of his mana seep through. It wasn’t enough to drain him yet. The cost was still being covered by his regeneration rate. His shadow reacted immediately; the gentle bubbles became a roiling boil. Still, the bats wanted more.

  He pulled back the gates further, and his mana began to drain. A single point every second. That did the trick. Bats sprang forth from his shadow, flying into the air above his head. Bitter Root let out a squeal of fear, but Elijah ignored him for a moment.

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  This wasn’t his swarm or teleport ability; it felt different. As for the group of bats—‘what is a group of bats called?’ Elijah thought unhelpfully.

  As the group of bats reached a critical mass, they began diving for one bookshelf. Elijah expected they’d either topple it over or transform into more books, but instead, they slammed into the wooden shelves, transforming into a swirling shadow. As the last of the bats joined the swirl, Elijah cautiously stepped forward.

  His hand reached forward and touched the mass. He could sense it was a portal, though completely unlike the ones Benjamin created with his normal ‘Teleport’ spell. This felt more akin to the portals that dungeons used at their entrances. He took the chance, bracing himself against the potential pain he was about to endure, and activated ‘Reality Warp’ once more.

  [DEBUG VIEW: Portal to the Dragontooth King’s Forbidden Armory]

  Gate {

  NAME: GATE_DRAGONTOOTH_DUNG_2

  OPENTO: DRAGONTOOTH_ARCHIVE

  OPEN_COND: DT_KING_BATPORTAL

  }

  He grimaced, hoping that if his skill had actually worked this time that he’d be able to use it to skip straight to the end of whatever challenge this was. He couldn’t remember the location that the entry portal had listed, and this current portal didn’t give any hints on the banking scheme.

  He could start randomly entering possible locations, but he wasn’t keen to experience that pain again so soon, and there was no telling if any location he got to work would actually be the final area.

  “What do you think, Bitter Root?” he asked his goblin, who was currently drawing lewd images in the dust on the floor.

  Bitter Root’s eyes snapped up to meet Elijah’s, and he grinned. “Me think Boss look like tasty meal. Be shame if Boss gets eaten by bat before Bitter Root get taste.”

  Elijah rolled his eyes and stepped through the portal, knowing that Bitter Root would follow.

  This portal was different from any he’d felt leading up to this point. Like a constant pressure pushing against him from every direction. He continued walking forward. With every step, it felt like the air was getting thicker, the pressure more intense. Then, with the feeling of elastic snapping, he was through the portal.

  He arrived in a dusty room full of various weapons resting on stands and armor hanging from mannequins. Elijah approached a curved blade, similar to the one that his dryad counterpart had wielded against him during the trial of ascension. As he reached out to touch it, the weapon crumbled to dust. There wasn’t even enough time to pull open the debug menu for it.

  Bitter Root’s scream was the first indication of danger. Elijah turned to face him just as a creature fell from the ceiling. He lunged, wrapping Bitter Root in his arms and rolling out of the way. He sprang to his feet, turning towards the creature and pulling out his dagger while his familiar produced his trusty cudgel. The sight of the beast was disquieting, to say the least. It stood up to its full height, just a few inches shorter than Elijah, on legs with too many joints. An extra set of knees that pointed in the wrong direction.

  ‘What’s with this game and creatures with the wrong number of leg joints lately?’ he thought to himself, taking the creature’s lack of attack as a moment to inspect it.

  It was just under six feet tall, with black fur covering most of its lower body and torso. The fur gave way to a dark brown leathery hide that covered its chest, neck and head. Two extra-large bat ears protruded from each side of its skull, and he could see razor-sharp needle teeth behind its lips.

  Elijah became very aware suddenly that not only was this creature mammalian in nature, but that it was also a female of its species. Scraps of moth-eaten fabric covered its breasts and groin, barely decent enough for the game to maintain its PG-13 rating. Only then did he notice the thick arms that ended in thick talons, thin scraps of wings, which Elijah assumed were vestigial, connected them to the creature’s torso. This was a creature adapted to climbing rather than flying.

  [TARGET INFO]

  Dragontooth Armorer (Level 20)

  HP: 170 / 170

  “You smell of him, but do not look as he does.” The creature hissed out, cocking its—her—head in the same way he’d seen his scouts do. “What are you, little morsel?”

  The creature’s tag filled him with both dread and hope. His subclass was the Dragontooth King. The tome that had unlocked that class had stated that this old abandoned fort would become a base for him. Presumably, that would apply even though he had merged it with Reality Warper.

  “I am the Dragontooth King. I have come to lay my claim to—” her roaring cut Elijah off as she swiped her talons through the air. She wasn’t anywhere near him, but the dangerous finger-blades made him hesitate.

  “No!” she screamed at him, baring her teeth in outrage. “No! You do not look like our king. You are an imposter wearing his scent. Or perhaps you are a ghost of our memory, failing and flawed.” Her large clawed hands gripped her head, flattening her ears against her skull. He could see her muscles tensing, squeezing her head tightly. The tips of her talons dug into her skin, drawing blood.

  “Why do you torment us so, Ghost? Can you not allow us to crumble in peace as our weapons do?”

  The creature was obviously sick in the mind. Age, Elijah guessed, had given her something akin to dementia. He worried she would crush her own skull if he didn’t intervene. “Enough!” he shouted, squaring his shoulders and stepping forward. He was within range of her talons now if she attacked, but he had to appear confident and authoritative.

  “I am not the old Dragontooth King, but still that is my title. Now enough of this foolishness, prepare to serve your liege!” The words felt absurd on his lips, as if he were playing a part in a play that he hadn’t even auditioned for.

  Her hands slowly moved away from her head, and she fixed him with an intense look. Her eyes moved over his body, from his feet up to his head, taking in every inch of him.

  “He is not our lord, but claims the title. No, this is not the way it was told to us. Our King shall surely return.” She blinked a few times and shook her head. Her talons flexed a few times, and Elijah braced himself to be cut down in one fell slash. Instead, her head twitched, and she began speaking again. More to herself than to Elijah.

  “The King has been gone far too long, and it is the truth that you smell of his power.”

  Her whole body twitched this time, and she shook her head in a jolting, viscous manner. “No, the library tricks us. You are not he!”

  She suddenly stilled and assumed a crouching position; the way her double knees collapsed was almost grotesque. “We have made our decision.” Her claws flexed as she stared wide-eyed into Elijah’s face.