Soul of the Warrior

Reivyn looked around the room in confusion. He recognized the faces surrounding him, but not the circumstances of his arrival. There was also a disconnect in his perception, screaming for his attention, but his thinking was coming a bit sluggish.

Lin, a familiar face he hadn’t seen for years, bounded toward him with a happy expression on her face. She hadn’t changed at all, but Reivyn now looked down on her due to his increased height. She seemed like a much younger woman to him, now, though he knew she was several years older than him.

She grabbed his hand and turned to drag him out into the ballroom. He looked around, searching for his companions he knew should be around. He spotted Teilon and Kimberly chatting a short distance away, and he relaxed for a moment.

Relaxing, though, immediately caused his mind to scream at him that there was something wrong. Now was not the time to be relaxing and taking everything for granted. The spike in alarm caused him to focus on his Divine Sense, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of what his Skill was telling him.

Right in front of his eyes was an elaborate ballroom filled with people enjoying a banquet and dancing, but his Divine Sense told a different story. It was shrouded and hazy, like there was some sort of mental interference. The main takeaway for Reivyn, though, was that he could tell there was absolutely no ballroom filled with people.

Reivyn dug his heels into the ground. Lin turned to look at him with a questioning look on her face, but she never spoke. In fact, the murmur of conversation, upon closer inspection by Reivyn, came back as mostly gibberish. There was one underlying message among the voices, though.

“Relax,” they whispered. “Come with us. Join us.”

Reivyn pulled on his hand held by Lin. Lin’s questioning look turned into a frown, and her grip turned into a vice on his wrist. It wasn’t enough to cause any pain, but if Reivyn’s Stats were the same as when he had first met Lin, he would likely have been crippled by the amount of force contained in her grip.

That’s not right, Reivyn momentarily thought. Lin was from a Tier 1 Region. She wasn’t strong enough to cause crippling damage from a simple grip.

Reivyn shook his head violently. There was so much wrong with the situation, but his thoughts weren’t coming to him coherently, and anytime he started to get a grip on the situation, the whispers would interfere and start lulling him into relaxation once more, starting the cycle anew.

There was one thought that kept trying to make its way to the forefront, but it kept getting washed away by the interference. Reivyn buckled down on forcing the thought to the front of his mind, and he felt a pulse from his Mental Fortitude Skill as it breached.

Where is Kefira?!

The thought brought him up completely short. He looked around and immediately spotted her floating next to him. She had her eyes closed, hair gently floating in the water as one of their new friends wrapped its arms and legs around her.

Wait… what?

Reivyn’s own wrist was being held by one of their beautiful new friends. She smiled at him with the face of Lin as she tried to drag him away from his Party, but Reivyn instinctively resisted the pull.

The face of the creature morphed into fury. A terrifying visage covered the vaguely human features and a powerful pulse of mental energy assaulted Reivyn.

“AAAaaaahhhhhh!” Reivyn screamed.

He pulled his Stamina, Mana, and Qi all together, using them all to fuel his Mental Resistance, and a powerful pulse of his own repelled the intruding energy. The whispers muted and Reivyn fully came back to himself floating on the fourth floor of the Dungeon.

Reivyn’s Divine Sense Skill came back fully to his perception. They were surrounded by the Sirens that made the fourth floor their home. Each one of his Party Members had an individual siren wrapping their body around them, sucking their Health away slowly, one tick at a time.

Reivyn’s mental resistance had been stronger than theirs because of his mental resistance Skills, so he hadn’t fully fallen to the enemy yet. Even Refix was caught and had a siren starting to feed on his life force.

The situation they were in flashed through Reivyn’s mind in an instant. Rage, fury, and terror filled him as he flooded his body instinctively with his Qi. The world slowed down around him.

His sword was in its sheath one moment, the next it was drawing an arc away from the furious siren’s neck, quickly followed by the severed head shooting away with black blood billowing out of the siren’s neck.

“Wake up!” Reivyn screamed, once more pulsing his Mental Fortitude Skill.

He empowered it with his Qi and used it in a way he never had before. Instead of just passively resisting and letting him push through tough situations, the Skill actively left his body and covered his companions.

Reivyn’s shout, plus the added Mental Fortitude Skill covering them, shook his companions out of their stupor. They didn’t immediately wake up, though, and the sirens surrounding them plus the ones wrapped around their bodies tried to put them back into an illusion.

Reivyn, though, was having none of it. He immediately launched a torrent of Magic at the sirens surrounding them in a sphere. Lightning protected from discharging in the water with a protective Mana cover ripped into their ranks. They were all inherently weak to the element, and it paralyzed their bodies and minds.

Reivyn’s sword flashed once more. A hole appeared in the forehead of the siren holding onto Kefira. Reivyn’s sword flashed again and again. Each time he stabbed, another siren within the Party was slain with a hole in their head.

In less than a second of real time, Reivyn had immobilized and stunned the entire small army of sirens putting pressure on them with their illusions and killed all the ones actively draining the life of his Party members. With the world slowed down all around him, it felt like almost a full minute to Reivyn, but his System clock showed it was incredibly brief.

The sirens that had wrapped themselves around his companions slowly loosened their arms as they began to float away. The Party members’, despite the active illusion casting being broken, were still struggling to break free and wake up, but they would come around in a few seconds.

Reivyn didn’t wait for them, though. He was still empowered by his Qi, a state he hadn’t intentionally entered for since the first time fighting against the robed archer. He wanted to get as much insight into the state as he could while it lasted. He launched himself at the paralyzed sirens.

There were still sparks of electricity coursing through the bodies of the sirens. Reivyn didn’t continue using his Mana to attack them. He simply tore into them with his sword. Not only were they paralyzed and unable to react, Reivyn was moving at such incredible speeds that even if they had been able to, it wouldn’t have mattered.

The sirens looked like a cross between humans and fish. Their top half was that of a human, but they had tails instead of feet. Their upper bodies were bare, and they had no clothing or gear of any kind. They didn’t even have any weapons.

Reivyn paid no attention to the female sirens. He was simply butchering monsters. The resemblance to human females didn’t elicit any kind of attraction in him at all. Blood quickly filled the waters, obscuring the bodies from sight, but Reivyn could still perfectly perceive with his Divine Sense.

It was over in a matter of what seemed like minutes, but it only took Reivyn twenty seconds to kill all of the enemies. His Divine Sense told him there were forty-two sirens including the ones that had approached his Party members.

That doesn’t match with what the dossier says, Reivyn frowned. There should have only been the boss and its entourage. A total of four sirens. This wasn’t even the group of sirens attached to the boss and there were ten times as many as expected.

Reivyn let the Qi recede to his core. He paid attention to the way it felt as it was flooding his body and as it retreated into his core to get a better understanding of it. He felt like he learned quite a bit from the process, but he would have to experiment with it later before he fully figured out how to actively use it at will.

Reivyn used his Mana to wrap up his Party members and drag them back up to the tunnel leading to the third floor. He led them all into the air pocket room. They moved mechanically under his direction, so he wasn’t hindered by them being stuck in an illusion.

“What happened?” Refix was the first to come out of the illusion he had been trapped in.

He looked around and noticed they were in the break room to the fourth floor.. He looked at the other Party members and noticed them similarly beginning to come out of their stupors. Kefira was the next to recover.

Most likely due to her increased Mental Stats because of her Class, Reivyn guessed. He walked over to her to inspect her to see if she was alright. There were no visible injuries on her person, but he would have to ask her about the energy he clearly felt being drained away.

“What’s going on?” She asked Reivyn.

“Let’s wait for everyone else to fully come to,” Reivyn said. “It’ll only take a moment.”

Just like Reivyn said, the others quickly recovered. Vyria and Xudrid were the next to recover. Teilon, Kimberly, and Serilla all snapped out of it at about the same time, though nobody really took too long to escape the illusions after Reivyn broke the sirens’ active attacks.

“We were too complacent,” Reivyn said once everyone was looking at him. “We thought we didn’t have anything to worry about, so we were too lax on our entrance to the fourth floor.

“I don’t know why, but the boss floor was completely different than what was in the dossier. Instead of just the boss encounter with a few extra monsters, there was an entire army of sirens waiting in ambush for us.

“I can’t remember how we got trapped, though. Anyone else?” Reivyn looked at each of his friends in turn. They all shook their heads.

“The last thing I remember is heading toward the exit of the third floor,” Kefira said after a second. The others nodded their heads in agreement.

“Me, too,” Reivyn said. “And we wouldn’t have bypassed the waiting room between the third and fourth floors, so we’re missing at least fifteen minutes of memories prior to getting caught. What about you, dad?”

“I’m the same,” Refix answered. “Nothing between the third boss and waking up. I barely even remember the illusion I was under. In retrospect, it was a strange choice the sirens used to trap us with. The only thing I really remember is that it wasn’t really anything I was all that interested in.”

“Yeah, I had an illusion of a past event,” Reivyn said. “It was the feast after defeating the demon and revenants that crawled out of the hole by the Revenant Dungeon.”

“I was attending a luncheon with some nobles,” Kefira admitted.

Each of the Party members recounted an event pulled from their memories, but it wasn’t anything particularly captivating for them.

“It seems strange,” Reivyn said. “I believe it’s probably Dungeon shenanigans. It was giving us an illusion of something adjacent to something we’re interested in, but not the actual thing. Probably giving us a way to fight it off.

“If I didn’t have a Skill that enabled me to interrupt their hold on me, I imagine we all would have eventually been able to figure out something was wrong and fight free. The other anomaly is the number of sirens.”

“I think I know the reason for that,” Refix held up his hand. “It’s my presence.” Everyone looked at him with a bit of surprise. “Think about it. The dossier mentions this room is the boss plus a few extras. The main encounter is fighting off illusions, but I’m well into Tier 5. The System probably messed with the makeup of the floor in order to be able to trap me in an illusion.”

“That makes sense,” Reivyn said, nodding his head. “Though I haven’t heard of a Dungeon being dynamic like that before.”

“It’s not unheard of,” Refix shrugged. “It’s not really the Dungeon itself being dynamic. It’s the encounter. This encounter is one of fighting off illusions. They needed the power to capture our Party, so the whole floor was altered according to the System to make it happen.”

“Everyone should check their Health and Stamina,” Reivyn said. “They were draining energy from everyone while we were trapped in the illusion. This will give us a gauge of how much danger we were actually in.”

Everyone’s eyes focused on an invisible screen in front of them for a second. Reivyn waited for them all to focus their attention back on each other.

“I only lost about a percent of Health and Stamina,” Kefira answered first.

“Same,” Teilon nodded his head. He looked at Kimberly and she nodded her head in agreement.

“What about the two of you?” Reivyn asked the two Cultivators.

“Same. About one percent,” Xudrid answered.

“I only lost a couple points,” Refix said. “Not anywhere even close to even one percent.”

“Yeah, it looked like they had just started on you when I broke free from the illusion,” Reivyn said. “I don’t know how long it had been for everyone else, but based on what everyone’s said, it sounds like a couple points per second for both Health and Stamina.”

“That would give us practically forever to break free,” Teilon said. “Doesn’t sound very dangerous at all, especially for a fourth floor.”

“I imagine that’s only supposed to be the opening of the fight,” Refix said wryly. “I would bet the encounter is supposed to be us getting trapped and fighting it off, then followed by being disoriented as we get free which will allow them to engage us in combat where we’re at a disadvantage, and then once we’re fully in control again, we’ll have to fight to regain the initiative.

“Wonder Boy over here broke the paradigm. He moved so fast, phase two and three were never an option for the monsters.”

Everyone chuckled at that. Reivyn simply smiled and scratched the back of his head.

“Yeah, I managed to enter the state where I was infused with Qi again, so I took advantage of it. I was able to fight off one of the robed assailants by myself under that condition. These guys were nothing compared to them.

“Anyway, let’s take a short break before heading back down, again. We still have the boss to kill and then we’re done.”

“Sounds good,” Teilon said.

They didn’t take too long to recover. Aside from losing a bit of their Health and Stamina, they hadn’t really suffered anything. There were no lasting effects from being caught in the sirens’ ambush.

“Let’s be a bit more careful, this time,” Reivyn said as they once more descended to the fourth floor.

They moved a bit more cautiously. Reivyn wrapped his mind in a cocoon with his Mental Fortitude Skill. He felt like he had made a breakthrough with his utilization of the Skill. He would have to check his Notifications after they got out of the Dungeon. He wanted to wait and see everything all at once instead of piecemeal, so he didn’t check whenever they had time while still in the Dungeon.

Reivyn’s Divine Sense radiated out. It had grown by a couple of yards in radius since even the start of the Dungeon delve. It’s growth wasn’t sudden per each uptick in Skill Level, and that aspect of the Skill was more pronounced the higher his Skill Level grew. Each new Skill Level covered more ground than the one before it. It was an exponential growth rate, too.

I can’t imagine how far the Skill will reach by the time I reach Level 100 with it, Reivyn thought. It’s going to be insane, though. That being said, I have no idea how the sirens managed to sneak up on me like that. There had to have been something projected toward us that my Skill couldn’t detect.

There were no other surprises on the fourth floor. Reivyn led them around in a ring to scout the area, but there were no other groups of sirens waiting for them. He looked at the other Party Members and nodded to signal they were moving to the final boss encounter.

The boss came into his Skill’s perception. Reivyn halted and combed through the waters with his Divine Sense, attempting to figure out if there was anything that could help him figure out how the other group had gotten the drop on them.

There were no Mana signatures in the water that he could detect. There also wasn’t any kind of energy resembling what he understood to represent Stamina, either.

He strained and felt like there was something on the periphery, but it was hazy and indistinct. If he wasn’t looking for it, he would have never noticed it.

What is that?

He couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t Mana. It wasn’t Stamina. It wasn’t Qi. He had no idea what it was, but it was definitely subtle and well hidden.

Reivyn projected his Mental Fortitude outward once more as he began to descend again. His Skill met with the strange energy hiding in the water, and an intense reaction suddenly exploded out in a fierce battle of opposing energy.

At first the energies seemed to be equal in strength. Reivyn bore down with his will and applied his Iron Will Skill to his Mental Fortitude. The opposing energy could only retreat in the face of the empowered Skill.

The boss immediately noticed something was wrong. It looked up and made direct eye contact with Reivyn. Reivyn felt like there was a spark of awareness in the monster’s eyes for a brief second, but it quickly disappeared. It happened so fast that he didn’t know if he had actually seen it or not.

The boss wasn’t larger than the three accompanying sirens like the sahuagin boss had been. Instead, the boss was distinguishable by its pearl and shell necklace. Fierce Mana signatures emanated off of the accessory.

Kailey and Riley would be interested in checking that thing out, Reivyn idly thought. Hopefully its a drop, otherwise I’ll just have to remember as much about it as I can and tell them about it.

Reivyn dashed ahead. The Party followed in his wake. They were unhindered by illusions this time as Reivyn had suppressed the sirens’ ability to affect them. The Party quickly engaged the sirens in melee combat with Kefira and Vyria hanging back to launch ranged attacks at them.

The sirens, even the boss, weren’t very impressive when they had no access to their opening gambit. They had no weapons, and their bodies weren’t designed for combat. It was their mental powers that made them so dangerous.

Wait! Mental powers! Reivyn had an epiphany. That’s what was in the waters! Wait, so does that mean there’s an entire other form of energy I need to learn to manipulate?

Reivyn felt the urge to roll his eyes. He had too many things to train already. A whole new subsection wouldn’t have any place on his plate at the moment.

Maybe there’s something else. The System did mention I already had the perfect foundation, so it doesn’t make sense that I completely missed out on something. This requires further investigation.

Now wasn’t the time to worry about it. Even if he did figure it out, he didn’t plan on devoting any time to training a new method any time soon.

The fight was over very quickly. The sirens, robbed of their main form of combat, weren’t able to put up much of a fight. They tried to initiate illusions a couple more times in desperation, but Reivyn kept a bubble around himself and the others with his Mental Fortitude Skill. They were unable to land a foothold in their psyches. The Party members destroyed the fourth floor boss encounter in short order.

Reivyn felt a swirl of power a short distance away as the siren boss succumbed to its injuries and perished. He looked up and saw a chest sitting on the sand of the seabed where before there had been nothing.

They all shared a look and smiled at each other as Reivyn swam down to inspect the spoils of their victory.