Orum and Melina raised their torches and stepped into the corridor beyond the left door.
The torchlight swayed in the darkness, illuminating only a few meters ahead.
The stone walls on either side were built from rough granite, with thin white filaments of fungus growing in the cracks.
The floor was paved with smooth flagstones that seemed untrodden for centuries, blanketed under a thick coat of grime.
Orum held his Flame-steel buckler tight in his left hand and his Flame-steel longsword in his right, moving with measured, cautious steps, each footfall a quiet test of the ground ahead.
He could feel the air growing steadily more humid, the temperature dropping with each step.
In sharp contrast to Orum's tension, Melina seemed entirely at ease.
She walked through the dungeon with calm, unhurried steps, narrowing her eyes slightly to see the path ahead with perfect clarity.
This was the composure of a seasoned Wanderer. Returning to a dungeon was no different from coming home.
And Melina was a werewolf. As a creature of darkness, she was born with an innate affinity for the dark.
She noticed Orum watching her and turned to give him a reassuring smile, lowering her voice. "Relax. With me here, no trap is getting past my eyes."
She drew a long, slender probe from her hip and crouched at intervals to tap lightly on the flagstones or prod at cracks in the walls, her movements practiced and precise.
Ahead stood a square stone chamber, empty of everything, its four walls rough and unadorned, without door or window.
Melina's gaze settled immediately on what mattered. "Three pressure plates. One on the front wall, one on the left, one on the right."
The plates were carved from the same stone as the walls, rising just barely above the surface, nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding rock. Without Melina's sharp eyes, they would have been impossible to spot.
She gestured for Orum to stay back. "Stand by the entrance and keep watch. I'll test them."
Moving with deliberate lightness, she approached the left plate, crouched, and pressed it gently. It didn't budge. She increased the pressure, and it sank slightly, but no mechanism was triggered.
She tested the right plate and the front plate in turn. The result was the same.
She straightened, her brow creasing. "They need significant weight or force. And they probably all have to be pressed at the same time."
Orum moved to her side, frowning. "There are only two of us. How do we manage that?"
The corner of Melina's mouth curved into a confident smile. "I have a way."
She jammed her torch into a small recess in the wall, and the flame steadied at once, casting clear light across the entire room.
She pointed. "You take the left plate. I'll take the right. On my count, we push together."
Orum nodded, spread his feet, and drew a slow breath.
Melina dropped into a low stance, both palms flat against her plate.
"One, two, three!"
They pushed simultaneously.
Orum pressed both hands against the left plate. The strength housed in his body was vast; he barely needed to exert himself. A single, steady press unleashed a torrent of force, and the plate sank smoothly under his weight.
Melina bore down on the right plate as well. Both stones descended almost in unison.
A deep rumble reverberated through the chamber.
The whole room shuddered. Dust rained from the ceiling in thin streams. The runes carved into the walls began to flicker with a faint glow, as though some ancient mechanism were stirring from a long sleep.
But the center plate remained perfectly still.
Melina's expression shifted. "We're still one short!"
In that instant, she reached into her pack and pulled out a heavy sandbag.
It was a counterweight tool she had purchased at the Port Zobek black market, designed specifically for triggering trap mechanisms.
She leaned back, her arm snapping forward like a spring. The sandbag arced through the air and landed squarely on the center plate with a sharp crack.
A soft click followed. All three plates triggered at once.
All three sank to the floor simultaneously, and the runes blazed to life in a blinding blue light.
A hairline crack split the center of the far stone wall.
A grinding roar rolled through the chamber as the crack widened rapidly. Stone blocks ground apart on either side, revealing a dark tunnel mouth beyond.
The ancient mechanism churned inside the walls, its sound like a great beast rousing from a thousand years of slumber.
"We did it!" Melina moved forward eagerly, ready to step into the passage.
In that same instant, Orum's pupils snapped shut.
A surge of acute danger poured down his spine like ice water. Every hair on his body stood on end, and alarm bells rang out in his mind.
"Melina!"
He lunged, seized her wrist, and hauled her bodily into his chest.
At the same moment, his left arm shot out, the Flame-steel buckler swinging up across his body.
The instant Melina's feet left the ground where she had been standing, a dazzling ice-blue cone of light erupted from the darkness of the tunnel.
It moved like lightning, striking the face of Orum's buckler dead on.
The impact detonated in a burst of frozen mist that swallowed the entire doorway. Ice crystals sprayed in every direction, glittering in the torchlight.
The wave of freezing air swept over them. Melina, sheltered in Orum's arms, still felt a bone-deep cold seep through her skin and into her marrow.
Her teeth chattered beyond her control. Her eyes were wide with naked shock.
Orum felt the floor underfoot begin to ice over at once, a thin frost crystallizing across the flagstones with terrifying speed.
Without a moment's hesitation, he pulled Melina with him and leapt backward several meters, barely clearing the patch of stone that was already turning treacherously slick.
Melina stared at the fading trail of the ice-blue cone, her nerves still jangling.
Her voice shook from the cold. "That was the captain's signature spell. Icicle Shard! But how is this possible? Felix went through the right door. How is he attacking us from the left passage?!"
Before the words were fully out, a massive figure crashed out of the tunnel.
It was a towering warrior clad head to toe in jet-black plate armor, standing well over two and a half meters tall. The black full-body armor left not a single gap, its surface catching the torchlight with an unsettling sheen. The helmet covered the face entirely, its two eye-slits glowing with a sickly, luminous green light.
The giant warrior swung a colossal battle axe in both hands, its blade as wide as a door, gleaming with cold light.
He planted his feet and launched forward, hurtling toward Orum and Melina like a runaway war machine.
Heavy footfalls boomed through the stone chamber, each step sending a tremor through the floor.
Orum recognized it in an instant. That signature technique, that charging form. Combat Skill: Charge. It was unmistakably Raygore's.
"Raygore, the vice-captain?!" Melina went ashen. Her voice was laced with bewilderment. "How is this possible?!"
She could not begin to fathom why Raygore and Felix would suddenly turn on them here. But that height, that charge, that heavy plate armor. Every detail was identical to Raygore himself.
The black-armored warrior was already upon them.
The axe swept through the air with a sound like tearing cloth.
A hard light settled in Orum's eyes. There was only one option: full force.
Rather than fall back against the surging charge, Orum drove forward. His eyes blazed with battle-hunger.
His right foot slammed into the stone, and he launched himself like a cannonball.
Inside his chest, his twin-heart system hammered furiously, surging power through every vein. The powerful oxygen supply from his Forest Monitor Lizard Lung-Lobe flooded each muscle with explosive force.
He gripped his longsword in both hands, channeled every ounce of strength into the Flame-steel blade, and hewed forward in a single devastating slash to meet the charge.
The blade carved through the air in a dark arc, the force rending the air itself with a sharp, keening shriek.
The tremendous strength of his Bugbear Tendon +2 erupted in full, compounded by the damage bonus of his "Goblin Slayer" title. The blow reached a fearsome magnitude.
His muscles bulged. Veins stood out across his arms like cables of iron.
A piercing clash of steel rang through the stone chamber.
The instant the Flame-steel blade met the metal axe, the air seemed to split. A shockwave of force radiated outward in all directions. Sparks showered like a cascade of embers, lighting up two faces set with murderous intensity.
The result, in the next heartbeat, was staggering.
The seemingly solid steel axe was sheared clean through at the base of the blade by the Flame-steel longsword.
The severed axe-head spun away with tremendous momentum and punched deep into the stone wall behind them with a heavy thud, trailing a shower of sparks.
The black-armored warrior was clearly battle-hardened. Faced with the sudden loss of his weapon, he showed no panic whatsoever. He wrenched his head aside at the last possible moment, barely clearing the follow-through of Orum's slash.
Using the momentum of his own charge, he swept past Orum's flank and put several meters of distance between them.
Then he spun to face Orum, eyes alert.
In the black eye-slits, the sickly green light burned more fiercely than before.
Orum did not pursue. His gaze locked on the passage behind the black warrior.
His instincts told him that the greater danger had not yet arrived.
He was right. Two more figures stepped out from the darkness of the tunnel.
When he saw who they were, Orum's pupils contracted sharply.
Emerging from the passage were unmistakable likenesses of Felix and Ronald.
Like the black-armored figure that had attacked first, all three wore equipment resembling their companions'. But everything about them was pitch black, as though they had been fashioned from pure shadow.
Their expressions were utterly blank. Their eyes were empty, stripped of any trace of human feeling.
The black Felix gripped a jet-black staff, its head set with a deep obsidian shadow-gem.
The black Ronald wore dark robes, and the holy sigil on his chest had turned a strange, unnatural black.
The black Raygore carried the same massive, imposing frame, radiating crushing menace. He reached behind his back and drew another steel warhammer, and his presence surged even higher.
The same thought struck Orum and Melina at once: these were not their companions.
Yet aside from the black skin and the altered equipment, the resemblance was absolute.
At the feet of all three figures, shadows rippled and coiled like living things, writhing and thrashing like dark serpents coiling around their ankles.
The shadows twisted in the torchlight, seething with an ominous energy.
Melina drew a sharp breath. Her voice trembled. "This is shadow magic. Shadow magic created copies of all three of them. These duplicates have exactly the same abilities."
Her beast-ears were pressed flat against her head, a sign of genuine fright.
Before she finished speaking, the black duplicate of Ronald raised his holy sigil. A purple arcane circle blazed to life in the stone beneath Orum's feet, pulsing with a strange and sickly light, the air crackling with magical energy.
First-circle spell: Command.
A cold, imperious voice rang out inside Orum's skull.
"Drop your weapon!"
A powerful compulsion seized him in an instant. His arm began to tremble against his will, his grip on the sword hilt faltering as though his fingers were about to open on their own.
But his will was iron. A single, frigid refusal rose from somewhere deep inside him: No.
That will surged like a dragon breaking free of its chains and threw off the mental shackle. Orum's body locked up for only a fraction of a second before control snapped back into place.
He had resisted.
A thin film of cold sweat beaded across Orum's brow. One moment more and he would have flung his weapon away with his own hands.
For the first time, he felt with his whole body just how dangerous it was to fight a spellcaster.
Then another Icicle Shard came screaming in from the side.
Under the black Felix's casting, another ice-blue cone blazed toward him.
Orum reacted instantly. His left arm rose, and the Flame-steel buckler caught it flush.
The spell burst on the shield face in another explosion of frozen mist.
This time, both Orum and Melina were ready. The blast barely touched them.
Through the dissipating cloud of ice, the black duplicate Raygore let out a low roar, swung his steel warhammer like a falling mountain, and charged again.
Each stride made the floor tremble beneath him, as though the stone itself groaned under his weight.
Orum's gaze hardened. He drove forward again, flooding every ounce of strength into the Flame-steel blade as it hummed with violent resonance.
Combat Skill: Blade Dance.
The Blade Dance unfolded at mastery level. The Flame-steel longsword became a whirlwind of death in his hands, weaving a web of countless dark arcs through the air, covering every angle of approach.
Steel rang against steel in a furious, rapid-fire chorus. Sparks cascaded in sheets.
The black plate armor covering the duplicate Raygore came apart under the relentless assault like papier-mâché, shredding and peeling open.
Sparks flew, shards of metal scattered across the floor.
The black armor tore open in wound after wound, the damage beneath deep to the bone.
Watching the Blade Dance carve its way through, Orum understood something clearly: the duplicates' physical capability, combat techniques, and spells were identical to their originals.
But the materials of their equipment were far inferior to the real thing. Against his Flame-steel weapons, that gap was absolute.
Compared to the Flame-steel longsword in Orum's hand, the steel weapons these duplicates carried were as yielding as clay.
The duplicate Raygore bellowed in fury and ignored the wounds riddling his body. He raised the warhammer and brought it crashing down toward Orum's skull with mountain-splitting force, intent on reducing him to pulp.
Orum met it with the Flame-steel buckler head-on.
The blow that could have split stone landed against the buckler with a dull, massive impact. The shield didn't deform by a hair.
The moment between his opponent's spent force and his recovery was all Orum needed. He snapped his wrist. The Flame-steel blade struck like a viper uncoiling from its den.
Combat Skill: Thrust.
The tip slipped through a gap in the cracked armor without a sound and drove cleanly through to the heart.
A soft, wet impact.
The duplicate Raygore's body seized. The shadow energy within it writhed and spasmed like a dying snake, furious and erratic.
Then the churning shadow exploded outward with a hollow crack, scattering into countless black fragments that dissolved into the air.
A smell of scorched matter hung in the chamber.
The first phase of the fight was over. Orum caught his breath, but his eyes didn't ease.
He had already seen it: the two remaining duplicates had made a fatal mistake.
Both the black Felix and the black Ronald had fixed their entire attention on Orum, who was meeting them head-on. Their combat logic was simple and direct: attack the strongest enemy.
Neither of them had noticed something that mattered enormously.
The small figure in the black cloak had vanished from the battlefield entirely.
Melina held her breath, and her silhouette dissolved into the shadows in the corner of the room like a wisp of smoke.
Her steps made no sound at all. Even her heartbeat seemed to merge into the surrounding stillness.
Her beast-ears quivered, tracking the subtle shifts of air inside the chamber. Like a patient black leopard, she circled silently around to the rear flank of the two duplicates and slowly drew the two daggers at her hips.
The blades caught the firelight in a cold, brilliant flash. Killing intent descended like a blade.
Melina's gaze was glacial, without a trace of hesitation. This was a Wanderer's moment. The instant of the kill.
The time had come.
Melina burst from the shadows like a bolt of lightning.
Both daggers struck like vipers, driving with precision toward the throats of the duplicate Felix and the duplicate Ronald.
Double Assassination.
Two soft impacts, nearly simultaneous.
The daggers sank to the hilts and drew twin jets of black liquid that twisted and writhed in the air like living things, letting out faint hissing sounds.
Both duplicates clutched their throats at once. Their bodies convulsed violently, clearly dealt a lethal blow.
Melina gave them no time to respond. Her eyes remained cold as she moved her hands in a blur, driving both daggers again and again into vital points across the two figures with savage, relentless speed.
Combat Skill: Visceral Strike.
Within seconds, both duplicates detonated.
The shadows writhing across their bodies erupted outward in a spray of black fragments that scattered and vanished into nothing.
The chamber fell quiet again. Only the torches still burned on the walls, and the two of them stood breathing hard in the stillness. A faint, acrid smell of burning drifted through the air.
Melina let out a long, slow breath. The tension left her body all at once, and she stumbled, nearly going down, her face drained of color. The effort had cost her dearly.
Orum caught her in an instant, steadying her. "Are you all right? Do you need to rest?"
Melina shook her head. Her face was pale, but her eyes held firm. "There's no time. We have to find the key and get it out of here as fast as possible, or the Hero's Trial will fail."
Her black beast-ears drooped, lying flat against her head, showing the exhaustion she wouldn't put into words.
Orum looked at her pallid face, reached into his pack, and held out a small iron tin. "Here. Have some dried fish. Get your strength back a little."
Melina blinked, took the tin, and looked at it with mild curiosity. "You actually carry this around?"
Orum shrugged, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "It's field rations. Light to carry, and it's got salt."
Melina opened the tin. Inside were small strips of dried fish glistening with red oil, rich with a pungent, savory aroma.
"All right, just a little." She couldn't resist. She pinched one between her fingers and slipped it into her mouth.
The salty, spicy, savory flavor spread through her mouth and snapped her back to alertness.
With a little energy restored, neither of them wasted another second. They turned and stepped into the hidden stone passage.
Beyond was a corridor narrower than the one before, with a few dim glow-stones set into the walls on either side, providing just enough light to see by.
The air inside was wetter still, carrying a faint smell of damp earth.
Orum gripped the Flame-steel blade and moved carefully in front. Melina stayed close behind him, eyes moving constantly across the space around them.
The corridor was not long. At its end sat a small stone dais.
What rested on top of it made both of them feel a surge of relief.
A radiant key lay there, still and gleaming. It was carved entirely from jade, its surface lustrous with a warm, deep polish, its interior alive with slowly shifting light, like a river of brightness flowing beneath the stone.
The grip was etched with ancient runes, and a glance at it carried a sense of dense, layered mystery.
Orum stepped forward and picked it up.
It was cool in his hand at first, but beneath the coolness was a trace of warmth, subtle and steady, as though something inside it lived.
"This is the first half of the Hero's Trial key."
He raised it. In the light of the glow-stones, the jade key was extraordinary.
The moment it settled in his hand, Orum's body went rigid. His color changed. The hand holding the key tightened around it reflexively.
Melina caught the shift immediately. "What's wrong?"
Her beast-ears trembled with unease.
Orum raised his head slowly. The gravity in his expression had deepened to something close to dread. He spoke each word with care. "I just realized something terrifying."
His voice was quiet and flat, with an undercurrent that made the skin cold.
He paused. "If the duplicates we encountered were copies of Felix, Ronald, and Raygore..."
His eyes met Melina's. In that silence, they read the same thought in each other's face, and the realization arrived in both of them at once.
Melina's voice shook. "Then the captain and the others... they must have run into duplicates of us."
The possibility hit her like a blow. Her breathing quickened, her chest heaving.
Orum's expression darkened completely. If Felix and the others had come face to face with copies of himself, the situation would be catastrophic.
He knew his own capabilities better than anyone.
Then, from behind the right wall, a heavy, violent sound of collapse shook through the stone.
Something enormous was being destroyed. The entire dungeon trembled with the impact.
Stone dust rained from the ceiling. The air filled with grit.
The sound came from exactly the direction of the right-hand door, the one Felix and the others had entered.
Orum and Melina stared at each other. The same alarm, the same urgency, moved across both their faces.
There was no time left to hesitate.
Orum let out a low, fierce sound and spun without another thought, breaking into a run.
Melina was right behind him. Their footsteps hammered through the narrow corridor in rapid, urgent rhythm, like the beat of a war drum counting down.
Behind them, the torchlight swayed and stretched their shadows long.
Only one thought filled Orum's mind: "We're finished. If the captain and the others meet a duplicate of me, the whole party is going to get wiped."