🏆 THE AMBY AWARDS 2023 TOP PICK - DIVERSE LIT 🏆
It's Rin and Hye-jin against the world. Or so it should have been.
Nagara Rin and Joon Hye-jin, college sweethearts and passionate gamers, have lived a fairytale marriage. Not even a decade after did...
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The walls of the palace's corridors closed in on me the deeper I went. My breath joined the thickening darkness with every iteration, my chest feeling like an elephant was sitting on it. I craned my neck to the ceiling, where a thousand chandeliers had already passed me by. A thousand more seemed to be on their way as my feet pattered against the moth-eaten carpets and bouts of uncovered marble tiles.
Even then, no flame flickered from the heavens, plunging the space into a void I couldn't dream of chasing away. In palaces like this, I was sure the high ceilings would have sported fancy murals depicting solemn things and such, but none of them were visible apart from the faint silhouette of what could only have been pale splotches which had faded into white.
I left Rin in the front hall and took the stairs to the second floor. Since then, I rounded that floor and climbed up on the third story. Nothing there too. I found a door leading to the higher floors ajar. When I decided to take it, one look through the shattered glass windows told me I was somewhere in the middle floors of the palace, the ones flanked by the crumbling spires.
Arzo was somewhere in here, I kept telling myself. It's been ages ago, and I haven't glimpsed a sliver of teal anywhere. I summoned my sword and fastened it to my belt. Should my skills get locked again, at least, I'd be able to fight. I wouldn't let him surprise me like that, by making me feel helpless. Because I wasn't.
Not anymore.
If anything in what Rin told me about a valdyrsi's weakness was true, the skill I developed using the Key of Goran should be good enough. Rin even tried to fight against it last night. So long as I have the talisman in my person at all times, Arzo wouldn't be able to control me. And this way, he wouldn't have any ability to steal and would just be reduced to his starting spells, all of which were moderately strong. I also had Rin share his ability list last night using the Book of Darkness. I knew how to counter most of them by the next morning.
Arzo would be going down. If it wasn't from my hand, then Cavya's or Karmi's. Or the rest of Solarlume's. As I reach the final floor of the central wing, dread began bouncing on the walls of my gut. What if we were wrong and Arzo wasn't here? What if he's just controlling the Monarch while being safely tucked away in some place else? What then? Would we have led the whole adventuring sector of Solarlume here for nothing?
I clenched my fists. He had to be here. Otherwise, what's the point?
My feet tackled the last set of stairs leading somewhere. The light from the outside beamed down the steps, chasing the darkness away with a silent hiss. Wherever this was going, it led into an open space. Kind of.
I cleared the steps and a courtyard flanked with pillars and capped by a triangular roof came up. It was narrower than the expanse by the entrance but wider than simply being a bridge in between spires. I looked to my left. Surging from the spaces between the pillars was the real war. The beasts of the mammoth size looked like ants from where I stood, the adventurers flitting between them more like dust flying in the wind. The smaller beasts would either be as large as people or smaller.
