Rockheart clapped his hands together, instantly drawing in the gazes of the milling students like a magnet. Everyone knew that when Rockheart spoke, you listened. “Yes, yes, I know, you are captivated by the beauty. But focus. We are going to Eritreus to see a real dungeon core in action. We have no time to tarry.”
The students gathered around the gargoyle-griffin and the other chaperone, Arketa the Hellgazer. She was decked out in the Vermillion Phoenix’s clan colors. Her headscarf matched her dress, both a rich red, while her gloves matched her shoes, the deepest of blacks. Rockheart, wore a matching outfit, though in the colors of his clan—the two of them looked like a terrifying, monstrous version of doddering old couples who pick matching outfits every day of the week. Was it possible Rockheart and the Hellgazer were an item? That was a strange pairing, though with her love of interior design and Rockheart’s odd obsession with fashion, Logan could kind of ship it.
Honestly, the whole thing would’ve been sort of endearing if it was anyone other than Rockheart.
Arketa’s headscarf bulged for a second—an unruly serpent, no doubt—but she smoothed out the disturbance with a practiced hand. She smiled from behind her dark sunglasses.
“Well, this is exciting.” She caught Logan looking. “Good morning, Mr. Murray. I do like your new form.” She motioned to the thick chitin plates covering random parts of him. “I will say, your asymmetry is daring.”
Marko laughed because he’d said something similar.
Rockheart cleared his throat loudly and touched the bark of the tree branch. “Thanks to Arketa, you’ve all taken trips from the DIE Pavilion. This will be a similar experience, though perhaps a bit more... turbulent. We’ll be going to the Slaughter Pits of Kyvandry Spencer. It’s one of several S-Class dungeons on Eritreus.”
“Kyvandry Spencer?” Inga glowed. “He’s a blade ghoul. He was one of Inkboon’s primary sources for the various tortured undead guardian forms. I’m very excited to see him in action.” She was nearly bouncing on the balls of her feet in anticipation.
And maybe it was well-deserved anticipation since even Chadrigoth and his cronies seemed impressed.
They shuffled forward one by one and touched the tree. Logan was near the end of the line, so he watched in fascination as each guardian glimmered briefly in a wave of energy before vanishing, whisked away to another world. He also checked his gear while he waited.
Not that he had much gear to check, unlike some of the other guardians. Chadrigoth had a veritable arsenal already, and his rune-etched ebony armor looked like it was made for an underworld god. Logan had a pair of rough linen pants held up by a cracked leather belt. That was pretty much it, although he had managed to craft a simple leather sheath for his pitted dagger in Professor Crucible’s class, and it hung on his side. Unfortunately, his pitted dagger looked more like one of Haven’s Home’s famed butter knives in his newly evolved hands. Better than nothing, though. Logan double-checked his silver shield, secured to his back, one last time. The shield was more of a buckler in his larger hands, but with its magical force field, it was still the single best piece of gear he owned.
Finally, it was Logan’s turn to transport. He took a deep breath and stepped forward, but Arketa’s hand flashed out and caught his wrist before he could touch the activation rune. “Try to focus on a single spot,” the gorgon professor said. “The trip can be very disorienting, especially at your current level.”
Logan nodded and offered her a quick smile and a thanks. He slapped his hand down on the rune deeply embedded into the wood.
How bad can it be? he thought.
A spike of energy shot through his arm and into his body like a jolt of lightning, and the ground dropped out from beneath his feet while his stomach leapt up into his throat. One moment he was falling, only to be flying the next, while every color known to man—and several known only to mushrooms—washed over him in a wave of tie-dye and stained glass. His eyes bulged in his head as his arms and legs stretched and contorted in impossible ways. He flipped, spun, and suddenly was surrounded by funhouse mirror versions of himself. Some short and squat, others tall and willowy.
Others were far more horrifying. Visions of himself with three heads or a hundred arms. Versions with antlers, wings, plated scorpion stingers.
Eventually those vanished, swallowed up by the void of creation, and Logan managed to glimpse the vastness of the universe. An endless blanket of crushed velvet, studded with stars, planets, and the swirl of whole galaxies, all interspersed by tubes of chaotic light snaking across the cosmos. And there, like a shadow, was the Tree of Souls, connecting those living worlds, bright with Apothos, to each other. Planets like Mercury and Venus weren’t connected, but those worlds heavy with life, like Earth, hung from the shadowy tree like ripe fruit.
The wild ride of sensation and color ended as quickly as it started, and Logan abruptly found himself standing at the entrance of the famed Slaughter Pits. It took him a full thirty seconds to realize he was shrieking at the top of his lungs.
“That will be quite enough, Mr. Murray,” Rockheart growled. He leaned over and whispered into Logan’s ear, “Please comport yourself with a little dignity. If not for your own sake, then for the sake of our House.”
Logan snapped his jaws shut and said a silent thank you to Professor Arketa. At least she’d tried to warn him. As the world stopped spinning like a top hat, Logan took a minute to get his bearings. It always paid to have some measure of situational awareness. They stood on the rocky crags of a wasteland mountain range. Hateful black clouds ruled the lightning-strewn sky. Thunder boomed like the world was about to break. A vicious wind blew in the foul stink of a Death Valley blood bank without air-conditioning.
They stood on a ledge next to a blank, rocky wall. Half-hidden stairs, treacherous at best, descended to a foul-looking river below. Next to the river was what looked like a long-dead tree growing up the side of the cliff. It looked dead, but it wasn’t—it was part of the Tree of Souls, and it could take them back to Arborea.
However blighted the landscape, Logan was thrilled to be on another world, and one so rich with Apothos. He felt the thirteen Apothine energies thrumming in the air, and when he cycled Apothos from his core to his eyes, he couldn’t help but gasp at the swirls of primal energy blowing in the wind. Painting the air itself. Inga’s mnemonic came back to him: I make coffee and tea for Grandfather Tiberius and make lemonade under the Velveeta moon. Ignis. Magma. Corrosivus. Toxicus. Fulgur. Glacies. Terra. Aqua. Mallus. Luminosus. Umbra. Vita. Morta.
It did work wonders.
Arketa had brought an umbrella, which she raised high above her head. “Welcome to Eritreus, though this isn’t one of the more scenic areas, I assure you. However, this is one of the most famous dungeons in the entire realm. And the Serpent Shields of Infinity—one of the five most powerful dungeoneer guilds across all the multiverse—has sent hundreds, if not thousands, of raiders to their deaths trying to take the Slaughter Pits.”
Logan had learned about the dungeoneer guilds in his History of the Tree of Souls class. Serpent Shields of Infinity. The Sun Fist. The Sages of the Golden Thread. The Hermetic Order of Davos. The Scarlet Paradox. The Glorious Sunrise of the Golden Dawn, also known as the GSGD—two different groups of raiders, both who liked sunrises, apparently, had decided to join together. Neither wanted to abandon their name, and so they had embraced the redundancy.