The Stepstones. Cutthroat Isle. The Dock Market.
"Lemon, take Hank and check the warehouse up ahead. It's been derelict for years, but it's the perfect place for a rat to go to ground."
The Dock Market was a sea of torches and drawn steel. The attempt on Jon's life had ignited a cold, collective fury in the Chainbreakers, and the men were scouring every corner of the island.
Lemon and Hank, both teenagers from Seagull Town who had fled to the sea to escape the poverty of a dozen siblings, moved through the shadows. The sea breeze flickered their fish-oil torches, casting long, dancing shadows against the stone.
"Hey, Hank," Lemon whispered, his voice vibrating with a nervous energy. "You think that 'Shadowbinder' thing Lord Jon talked about is real? Or is it just... stories?"
Hank, the sturdier and more silent of the two, scratched his head. "I don't know about stories, Lemon. But something made the Lord bleed. If it can hurt a man who commands dragons, we'd best keep our eyes peeled and our mouths shut."
"Lord Jon is a sorcerer!" Lemon chirped, ignoring the caution. "I bet he let that shadow hit him just to see what it tasted like."
"Maybe," Hank muttered. "But the septons in Seagull Town used to say the Targaryens lost their dragons because the Seven grew angry at their pride. They said common men killed the beasts with nothing but pitchforks."
"Pah! Those septons were liars," Lemon spat. He remembered his sister, deceived by a man of the cloth and forced into the Silent Sisters to live among the dead. "Jon isn't like the old kings. He's... something else."
They reached the derelict warehouse on the edge of the harbor expansion. Once, it had been a storage for whale oil—a precious resource brought south by Ibbenese whalers once every few years—until a sleepy guard let a spark fly. The resulting fire had gutted the building and charred the walls with a greasy, black residue that still shimmered in the torchlight.
The wooden doors, half-eaten by termites, groaned on rusted hinges as the wind pushed them. The windows, melted into grotesque, jagged shapes by the heat of the old fire, looked like the teeth of a starving beast. Inside, the air was a stagnant mix of mildew, rot, and the metallic tang of oxidized iron.
"Wait," Lemon hissed, stopping at the threshold.
He pointed his torch at the floor. In the thick layer of dust and soot, a trail of strange, wet indentations led into the darkness. They weren't quite footprints; they looked more like the drag marks of something heavy and multi-limbed.
Hank signaled in the silent code they had learned under Garo. Danger?
Lemon signaled back. Withdraw and Destroy.
The warehouse's support beams were already sagging, held together only by dry rot and luck. The two boys didn't need to be heroes; they needed to be smart.
"One, two, three—DROP IT!"
They slammed their heavy wooden torches and several loose timbers against the primary support pillars.
CRACK. RUMBLE.
The beams gave way with a deafening roar. Lemon and Hank dove through the doors just as the roof collapsed in a mountain of stone and splintered wood. A massive cloud of dust billowed into the night air.
Lemon scrambled to his feet, glancing back at the ruins. His heart stopped.
Through the settling dust, a pair of blood-red eyes stared back at him. It was a nightmare given flesh—a female upper body covered in iridescent, scale-like plates, but where her legs should have been, eight thick, obsidian tentacles writhed. Wooden splinters from the collapse were embedded in her hide like thorns, yet she seemed unbothered by the pain.
"MONSTER!" Lemon shrieked.
HISSS—!
The creature let out a high-pitched, aquatic shriek. It moved with a terrifying, hitching gait—four tentacles pulling, four pushing—as it lunged toward the boys.
In the heart of the Dock Market, Jon felt a sudden, electric jolt in his mind. He looked toward the harbor's edge just as the System's interface flared to life.
[Descent Entity: Twisted Devotee. Level 10. Alignment: Ancient Elder Gods.][Items: Death (Dark Magic), Summoner's Badge.]
(Level 10?) Jon's pulse quickened, not with fear, but with a predatory, gamer's greed. (She's a boss. And she's carrying 'Death' and a 'Summoner's Badge'.)
He didn't know how the System would adapt a Summoner class to this world, but the prospect of commanding more than just men and wolves was intoxicating. He had the "Moonlight" of the Staff and the "Blizzard" of the Grimoire. He had his elite knights.
"Narsas! Kapo! To the harbor!" Jon roared, drawing Dark Sister. "We have a god to kill!"