Level: Ascension

Book 2: Level: Unknown

by David Dalglish

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure

Synopsis

To save his people, Nick must slay the God-King of Yensere in this exhilarating sequel to the hit LitRPG, Level: Unknown!

The plan to kill God-King Vaan and free Yensere from the effects of the frozen black sun is finally underway. Nick has accrued an impressive array of friends: the guarded spellblade, Frost; the world-generated fire scholar, Violette; and their bodiless AI guide, Cataloger. But they will need more help if they are to build an army capable of slaying a god. Hearing of a potential usurper king—one who can defy death—leads them to rescue a broken champion, Batal the Beast.

Free from his bondage, Batal rampages against his enemies, claiming multiple victories against the God-King. But Batal’s true motivation is a guarded secret and he won’t hesitate to use Nick and his friends to get exactly what he wants.
 
As Batal schemes, and Nick struggles to grow in power, Frost breaks from the group in search of her missing sister. As they get closer to the truth and Nick learns more about the incredible girl who willfully placed herself in the Artifact’s grasp, they’ll find that sometimes the questions you want answered most are the ones you’ll wish you’d never asked…
 

About the series: Join Nick as he adventures through the incredible world of Yensere in this progression fantasy isekai. Featuring multiple POVs, traditional LitRPG elements, magic and fantasy combat, friendships, light romance, and sarcastic robot guides, this is the perfect series for anyone wishing they could explore the galaxy and fight terrifying liches at the same time.
 

Release date: May 13, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

Lesya Koval walked through white halls in her bare feet. The tile was cold, as always. She wore a heavy sweater over a second shirt and a thick pair of cotton sweats. Such was her daily attire, regardless of the weather. The facility’s automated heating and cooling routines had been designed with hundreds of people in mind, and Lesya had long given up trying to adjust them to a society of one. Better to just don a sweater.

“Are we hungry?” she asked as she entered the cafeteria, trailed by her only friends, three cats and a little mutt that had somehow sneaked through the chain-link fence surrounding the facility. The four knew she only came to the cafeteria for food. Otherwise, she avoided the sprawling room entirely. It was too… open. Too empty. Lesya hated the echo of her footfalls, hence her bare feet despite the chill of the flooring, but even here the soft padding of her heels and toes sounded too loud.

There was no moving the refrigeration units, nor the deep-freeze storage, and so she endured. Her little gang of animals escorting her, she passed dozens of empty benches and tables, then went through a door into the kitchen area and to the nearest freezer. Lesya yanked it open to reveal over two hundred cans of food neatly stacked atop one another. Little labels described what was within. Each can was an inch tall and as round as her hand when spread wide. They were mini-meals: green chile chicken, garlic-spiced rice, steak filets in mushroom sauce, and another thirty varieties. That they resembled fancy cat food packaging was not lost on Lesya, but at least it tasted better than that.

In the earliest days following the first ascension, Lesya and Irina had tallied up the amount of food stored in the various freezers. All told, there had been enough food to feed the pair for approximately 237 years. The wealthy founders of the facility had been a selfish lot, and despite benefiting from their selfishness, Lesya felt nothing but disdain toward them. They’d dreamed of achieving a perfect, digital existence but also believed deeply that the rest of the world would suffer in a coming apocalypse. “Utopia for me, not for thee,” was how Irina had summed their mindset up once.

Given the absurd supply, Lesya felt no qualms about giving each of her pets their own meal. Thin beef strips for Poppy, the mutt; Lesya was pretty sure the pup was a miniature terrier, though he was all black save for a long white streak that ran from forehead to tail, like an odd skunk. Meatloaf in mixed vegetables for Noob, a gray shorthair. Chicken in white sauce for Sammy, the bobtailed calico, who was easily the pickiest of the bunch. A random can for Gabe, a black cat who never showed any consistency in what he liked or disliked and more often than not would steal bites from the other three. As for herself, nothing sounded appetizing, so she settled for a can proudly declaring it contained “authentic Dethry lasagna.” She piled all five cans into her arms and then snagged a fork from a permanently open drawer containing over a hundred of them.

Lesya tossed the five cans atop electric burners, hit the preset buttons underneath, and waited for the various frozen contents to heat up. When they were ready, she scooped all of them onto a large plate and then passed through the door of the kitchen, smirking at the FOOD PERSONNEL MUST WASH THEIR HANDS sign before rejoining her little group of animal companions. They rushed to the round table nearest the door of the cafeteria, the three cats leaping atop it and meowing eagerly while Poppy hopped around in a circle and barked at Lesya’s feet.

One by one, Lesya used the pull tab on the top of each can to peel off the thin aluminum covering. She spaced three out on the table, then opened Poppy’s to set on the floor. Poppy tore into the beef strips immediately, slurping and snarfing as only a miniature terrier could.

Lesya peeled open her can and stared at the noodles buried in vibrant red sauce and shredded Parmesan and mozzarella. Clearly better than cat food, but after three years of this, she saw only a slop of vaguely food-adjacent pasta swimming in a cheese-tomato mixture that would give the lasagna its only flavor. She picked at it with her fork, knowing she should eat. Knowing did not, however, loosen the knot in her stomach.

Nick’s plan is suicide, she thought as she nibbled on a bit of noodle. He’s going to get you killed again and again and again, and no matter how good the facility’s meds are, it will take its toll on you.

Nick, that idiot visitor to Yensere’s Artifact. He had plans to kill, not just a king, but a god-king. The audacity alone would have been commendable if the consequences weren’t so potentially dire. Granted, if what Nick said was true, and his home was in danger, the consequences were already dire…

A massive, booming signal shook Lesya from her thoughts.

“Shit, today?” she asked as the deep, thrumming noise shook the very walls. She glanced at her watch, an old-fashioned timepiece without circuits or panels, just reliable gears, ticking hands, and a panel showing the month and day. Had it already been three months since the last ascension? Her unpreparedness just proved that the time she’d been spending in Yensere was indeed messing with her sense of reality.

A second call, identical to the first. She felt it in her teeth. Leaving her can half-eaten, she sprinted out of the cafeteria, a mental clock counting down in her head. Two minutes. She had two minutes. Her cats remained behind, Gabe quick to eat from Lesya’s can, while Poppy chased Lesya, excited and confused. He yipped as he ran, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. As if this were just a game, and not life or death.

Her bare feet pounded across the tiles as she passed closed door after closed door, the rooms beyond dark and untouched for several years now. Once, they had been filled with scientists, researchers, administrators, and personnel to keep the fifty-thousand-square-foot facility running. Now the offices and rooms were empty and unlit. A corpseless tomb.

“You’ve a full minute,” she told herself after glancing at her watch. “Stay calm.”

Poppy barked in clueless agreement.

There was no door to her room. Lesya had removed it at the hinges because the locks were automated, and she didn’t trust the facility’s protocols. If something went wrong, and a lock refused to acknowledge her authority, or her passcode became corrupted, there would be no one to call for help. Better to remove the risk with a screwdriver.

Thirty seconds.

Automated lights flicked on at her arrival, bathing the room in clinical white. Books on a shelf were stacked and piled to overflow the shelf’s limits. Posters covered the walls, movies she’d watched hundreds of times. A guitar sat in the corner, abandoned after an ambitious plan to teach herself how to play never progressed past basic chords. Her dressers were full of similarly gray sweats, shirts, and sweaters she’d pilfered from other rooms. Atop the dresser was a picture of her sister, Irina, smiling in a blue dress, white flowers of a dogwood decorating her hair.

Lesya pulled the closet door open. The interior was barren, stripped away for a plan she and Irina had devised in the weeks leading up to humanity’s willful surrender in the first ascension. Each and every wall was covered with lead panels. They were nailed atop one another in uneven layers, the crude work done in secret. Two big sheets covered the center of the closet door. Even the floor was lead, cold and unpadded. Unnecessary, Lesya suspected, but they hadn’t known that then.

A third call, deeper and more foreboding than the last.

Ten seconds.

Poppy darted inside just before Lesya shut the closet door. She shoved her back to the corner and sat with her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her ankles. Poppy pressed against her leg, and Lesya scratched the white streak of fur on the top of his head and forced a smile for his sake. Her other hand picked at the permanent IV port on her wrist, a bad habit she couldn’t seem to break.

“Thanks, Poppy,” she said. “I needed someone with me to—”

The final call, booming and with depth to rival the deepest oceans. It felt like it came from everywhere, and in a way, it did. All across the entire world of Beogat, that call would be heard from the tens of thousands of scanning pods. It was the culmination of the Artifact’s grand design, and to many, the pinnacle of human achievement.

To Lesya, it was a death sentence.

A strange whistling followed, like air blowing through a tunnel. Poppy tilted his head, his happy panting halting as he lifted one ear. Lesya wondered what the mutt heard that she could not. Supposedly the ascension scans were silent and painless, but Lesya trusted nothing of the Artifact, nor the people who had given up their lives to enter its false world.

“Come here, you,” she said, lifting Poppy into her lap and burying her face in his fur, cradling him like a stuffed animal. Eyes closed, she waited out the long five minutes, glad for Poppy’s comfort as she trembled amid a torrent of memories. Of the first scan she had spent alone after Irina’s departure. Of the one before, when she was betrayed.

The completion of this most recent scan tolled with one final thrumming call. It was a message for all survivors that their current chance had passed, but another would come in three months, as would another and another, perhaps into eternity. Across every mountain, every desert, every forest and river, the farmlands, empty towns, sprawling highways, and concrete cities, that alert would sound, but it needn’t have bothered.

In all the world, there was only her.

Lesya’s meager appetite did not survive the ascension, and so with Poppy in tow, she decided it was time to return to Yensere.

“Hate to keep Nick waiting,” she said as she walked the long hall. She’d memorized every inch of the facility’s layout. This path, in particular, was burned into her mind. From her room, it was but a two-minute walk to reach what a plaque on the outside door called THE LONG-DURATION LINKING CHAMBER.

As for Lesya, she merely called it bed. There were three such chambers, each containing a gently curving, thickly padded mattress set into a sort of half-open plastic cocoon. Medical equipment surrounded each, some she’d disabled, most not. Lesya climbed inside her favorite and hooked back up her IV. A machine hidden in the back of the chamber whirred to life. Next came two sensor pads, one she stuck to her neck; the other, her right arm.

The system would track her dehydration and give her fluids as necessary. If she stayed inside the Artifact for too long, it would add additional nutrients to the mix. The aqua-blue fabric of the mattress shifted at her presence, vibrating ever so slightly. It would adjust periodically to loosen her muscles and prevent bedsores. With a sigh, she removed her sweats, tossed them to the floor to join an existing pile, and then slid on what her sister had dubbed “the world’s most expensive diaper.” It was a pair of plastic-lined underwear connected to a waste tube. It was better than a real diaper, but not by much. At least it saved her from inserting a catheter, or worse, waking up to find herself covered in her own filth.

These three chambers had been constructed in the early months of discovering the Artifact, back when the scientific community thought prolonged exploration of the world within would become commonplace. Less than a year after the chambers were complete, new discoveries rendered the entire facility obsolete. Physical bodies meant nothing to the Artifact—they were an inconvenience to be tossed aside. So in came the thousands of scanning pods, and with them, the glaring ascension calls…

Noob hopped up onto Lesya’s lap, purring as he padded his paws on her stomach.

“Baking biscuits?” she asked, smiling even at the hurt those two words caused. Irina had always called it that. She stroked Noob, her fingernails scratching along his spine as he liked, and then gently lifted him off to deposit him atop the old clothes pile. “But sorry, I don’t want to imagine the alarms you’d set off if I kept you inside the pod.”

Once he was off, she reached up and hit a green button built into the upper lip of the half cocoon enveloping her. A clear plastic covering slid down, sealing her within the chamber. A brief whirring marked an increase in pressurization, followed by a faint feeling of air blowing across her face. Like so many other automated aspects of the pod, oxygen saturation would be adjusted if her breathing slowed or she began to hyperventilate. The billionaires who’d ordered the facility built had possessed grand dreams of an elite society living out their lives in rows upon rows of such chambers. They’d even named their movement: Freedom from Flesh, or FFF.

The damned fools had burned through their hoards of wealth in pursuit of their dream. Lesya’s current facility was meant to be the first of many… and then came the announcement. The debates. The construction of the first scanning pod, then thousands more. And then the end, blissfully celebrated by Beogat’s doomed populace.

Lesya closed her eyes as bitterness threatened the peaceful state required to drift asleep. Tranquilizers were built into the chamber and could be administered via the IV, but doing so was impossible for her, for it required an input command on a console outside the chamber. As always, she had to fall asleep on her own.

But still, that bitterness…

Why did you leave me, Irina? she thought as her mind darkened. Why break your promise? We were all we had, all we would ever have…

Familiar curses did not dull the pain. She exhaled, focusing on the black, focusing on once again becoming the unknown ice mage of Yensere. Of seeing Nick’s soft eyes. Feeling herself falling.

Seeing, before her in the abyss, a ring of stones.

Location: Croghan

Description: A farming town, population four hundred and fifty-one, whose people are largely scattered for dozens of miles, living in family clusters dedicated to raising swine and cattle and growing potatoes, red cabbage, and multiple types of beans

“You sure this is a good idea?” Nick asked as they entered the town that seemed to emerge like a wart among endless fields. “We don’t have the greatest record when it comes to entering populated areas.”

“Just don’t go showing Sorrow off to any clever smiths and we should be fine,” Lesya said, her head high and her expression carefully neutral. “And it’s not like there’s wanted posters with our faces on them or anything.” She turned and muttered under her breath. “Not yet, anyway.”

“I heard that,” Nick said.

“You two bickering is going to attract more attention than Nick’s sword,” Violette said behind the pair. “Well, that, and Frost’s fancy armor.”

The flowing blue cloak and sparkling silver armor certainly made her stand out, but so far as Nick knew, Lesya was right. Though word had spread of Lord Frey’s death at the hands of demons, descriptions of the perpetrators had not been shared throughout Inner Emden. If the three kept a low profile, they should be able to travel eastward unbothered. They passed by rows of well-kept buildings, their walls of cut pine and their rooftops sharply slanted and shingled with deep red wood.

“Everything here feels better kept than in most of Vestor,” he said.

“The blight hasn’t spread this deep in,” Violette said. “For their sake, I hope it never does.”

“There’s what we’re looking for,” Lesya said, pointing. It was a leatherworker’s shop. After filling up on general traveling supplies, Lesya had wanted to get Nick a proper sheath for Sorrow so he wasn’t tucking the sword into his waistband or carrying it around on his shoulder.

“Think they’ll have anything that fits Sorrow’s particular shape?” Nick asked, referencing the way the weapon opened up into a twisting orb just after the hilt before fusing back together into an impossibly sharp blade.

“Not perfectly, but if we get a sheath meant for a shorter blade, it should cover up to that whole weird part there,” she said, gesturing toward the open portion adjacent to the hilt.

She insults my design. The space is needed to manifest the magic inherent to the power and rage of—

Yeah, yeah, Nick thought, mentally interrupting him. Special and magical, got it. You still need a sheath and your design makes that difficult, so quit grumbling.

“Well, after the disaster that was last time, I’m going to wait out here while you search inside,” Nick told Lesya.

“If you insist. Violette?”

The scholar grinned. “You know we can’t leave Nick unattended. He’ll get into trouble.”

The pair waited on the other side of the street as Lesya left with a shrug. Nick barely had time to lean against the wall of the carpenter’s shop before Cataloger’s voice addressed him.

Is all well?

Yeah, just waiting on Lesya to do some shopping.

Is there any way that I can aid you? Remember, I am meant to guide you during your visits

Nick wasn’t used to her being so pushy about offered aid, and it struck him as odd.

How about you, Cataloger? Everything all right with you?

I am—confused by recent aspects of Yensere

Nick couldn’t even guess what they might be. The weird monsters? The impossible geography? Time overlapping on itself?

Before he could ask for clarification, a soldier came hurrying down the street, shouting at the top of his lungs. Nick quickly turned his back to him, pretending to be in deep conversation with Violette as he passed.

“All to the Jekel mansion!” the soldier shouted. “Gather now, all to the Jekel mansion! Come rejoice in the rejection of heresy!”

The people scattered about all started west, some slow, some eager.

Rejection of heresy? he wondered.

Whatever it is, it cannot be good, said Sorrow.

Nick started to follow, only to have Violette grab him by the sleeve.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Come on,” Nick said. “Don’t you want to see?”

“I know what we will find,” Violette said, her voice lowering. “I saw it plenty during my travels west.”

Worrying as that might sound, it only added to Nick’s curiosity.

“Well, I haven’t yet,” he said. “So let’s go.”

The crowd gathered before a mansion twice the height of all nearby homes. Across its front was a tremendous balcony, and upon it stood a man in the now-familiar garb of an Alder priest dedicated to the god-king: ankle-length white robes tied firmly at the sleeves and waist with gold sashes. Across the chest, a gold fist held prisoner the dark half circle that was the black sun. A faint red garnet labret was below his lower lip, the daylight flickering off it when he spoke.

Jekel: Level 9 Human

Archetype: Priest

Special Classification: Deity Blessed (Vaan)

With him were four soldiers, each of them level 5. Their armor was finely polished, the sunlight reflecting off the steel of their pauldrons and breastplates. Before them were three prisoners, stripped naked and forced to lean over the balcony’s banister. Their hands and feet were bound to the banister’s poles, preventing them from moving.

“What are they doing?” Nick asked as they joined the rear of the crowd. Violette stared with her hands clenched into fists.

“Something loathsome,” she said. “Perhaps you should see it, Nick, to understand why I will never trust the god-king and his followers.”

Nick shifted his weight from foot to foot, nervousness thickening in his belly.

Whatever the priest in charge had been waiting for, it seemed prepared, and so he stepped closer to the railing and began to address the crowd.

“Oliver Brimley, son of Gethard Brimley, a farmer from the fields south of Croghan,” Jekel said. He took a step to the side, to a woman whose face was bruised and whose hair had been crudely cut short at the neck. “Wilma, his wife.” Another step, to a boy several years younger than Nick. “And Olison, their son. All three have been proven guilty of clinging to the forbidden faith of the Sinifel.”

The crowd booed and stomped their disapproval.

“Do you think they’re guilty?” Nick asked.

“Do you think it matters?” Violette asked. “Imagine Ranu up there, or any of the other hidden Majere we met. Are they worthy of death, just because they don’t worship the monster in Castle Goltara?”

The priest returned to the father. His left hand slipped into his pocket and withdrew a small leather bag.

“To accept heathen gods is to reject the blessed gift of life our god-king has granted you,” Jekel continued. “And so we shall ensure what life you yet possess is spent in proper penance.”

“What does that mean?” Nick whispered, but Violette did not answer.

It means death, Sorrow spoke in the scholar’s absence. Are you truly so dense?

The priest opened the leather bag and dipped his hand inside. It came out clutching a handful of sand, the grains sliding like water from his grasp to blow across the wind.

“Do you repent of your transgression and give your heart to Goltara?” the priest asked the father, who had begun to weep. No answer. Jekel shook his head and then closed his eyes. A whispered prayer, unheard, slipped from his lips. Nick sensed magic growing, and he saw evidence of it in golden lights swirling around Jekel’s hand. Smoke, similarly golden, floated up from his clenched fist as if the priest clutched trapped stars.

“Behold the life awaiting all those who cling to the forbidden past,” Jekel shouted. He opened his fist and cast the sands upon Oliver. “Behold the waste.”

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, the older man began to shake against the banister’s railing, tears falling to the dirt as he wept. Golden light shimmered across his naked body. Faint swirls of sand encircled him, guided by an unnatural wind.

Slowly, the man’s hair grew longer, gray overtaking the brown in streaks. His skin tightened against his body, as if he had stayed out too long in the sun. Then the changes quickened as wrinkles deepened and his body shed weight. Still his hair grew, as did his fingernails and toenails. The gray tone became all-encompassing. The man wailed, unable to form words as his teeth fell out one by one. His eyes turned cloudy. His skin clung tightly to the visible shapes of his bones.

And then the skin itself withered away into a leathery covering that split and tore. A black sludge of what had once been organs spilled out from his belly, teeming with maggots. His face shriveled. His bones pierced through flesh, the blood on them blackening into dust. A bare skeleton collapsed upon the balcony, pieces rolling underneath the banister to fall to the crowd below.

Somehow, he still wailed.

Spell: Approaching Grave

Attributes—

“No,” Nick hissed, turning away. “Get rid of it, Cataloger. I saw what it does.”

The spell’s information vanished from sight. If only the same could be done for the memory.

The crowd, however, cheered and clapped, growing rowdier by the second. Nick tried to understand it, realized he didn’t want to. That they could desire this? Be entertained by this? This went beyond vile. This was joyful evil, and it shook him to his core.

His hand dropped to Sorrow’s hilt.

“What are you doing?” Violette asked, her voice a sharp whisper.

“What does it look like? I’m stopping this.”

“But it’s just us two!”

Priest Jekel moved to the woman, his hand dipping into the bag. Though her husband’s scream had finally abated, hers began anew, a panicked, mind-empty howl as she struggled against her bindings while staring wide-eyed at the pile of bones.

“I don’t care,” he whispered.

Neither do I, Sorrow agreed. Slay the servants of the great heretic. My might is yours.

Nick lifted his hand, electricity crackling around his fingers, and then released a . It struck Jekel square in the chest, crackling away a satisfying 20 percent of his health. The priest staggered, his arms flailing… and his hand opening, releasing the dust.

“No!” Nick screamed as people in the crowd panicked and fled the premises. The woman’s struggle heightened as she pulled against the ropes binding her… and then the magic spell enacted. Once again, Nick witnessed the dreadful curse, rapidly aging flesh and bone, while, cruelly, the victim remained conscious throughout.

“Execute him,” the priest screamed as he staggered to his feet atop the balcony. The soldiers with him drew their weapons, but they looked confused about how to react. Nick doubted they wished to leave the priest, whom they were likely charged with protecting.

Violette greeted his order with a spray of , missing the priest and instead striking two of the soldiers who rushed to his defense. The darts thudded against their shields, though two made it through, burning into their flesh. Nick readied another spell but hesitated before releasing a bolt. He needed to get up onto the balcony, and he needed to get up there now, for he saw the priest reaching for his bag of sand. The boy was still bound and awaiting execution.

Time itself seemed to slow as he looked upon the kid’s face. The young man’s eyes were wide. His shoulders heaved as he struggled against the tightly knotted ropes. Nick imagined himself in such a position, sentenced to death while a crowd watched. Imagined listening to others cheer at the deaths of his parents, gleeful in the face of horrific screams.

Lightning crackled around him, and he heard an echo of Lesya’s voice in his mind.

Embrace what is impossible.

Nick drew Sorrow and ran through the scattering crowd, his eyes never leaving the balcony. His heart hammered in his chest. Electricity crackled beneath his feet with every step. This magic was his to command, its shape and form created through his mastery. The only logic that mattered was what Yensere accepted, and damn it, it would accept what he demanded of it.

Two more steps, and then he leaped into the air while feeling a strain on his mana.

Spell Unlocked: Lightning Leap

Cost: 9 mana

Attributes: Safe Fall

Catapults caster into the air, with mana cost increasing exponentially when distance goes beyond one hundred feet

Lightning sparked in all directions as he catapulted into the air. Trails of electricity flowed behind him, wild and aimless. Despite the tremendous speed, Nick felt fully in control, guiding himself with a mere thought. The space between him and the balcony vanished in a blink. Once above the soldiers, Nick unleashed his fury. Lightning blasted from his hand, arcing through all four soldiers. As they cried out in pain, he landed amid their number and let Sorrow do its work. A slash in one direction, cutting off a man’s arm. Another, chopping right through ring mail to open up his innards.

Nick spent the mana Sorrow stole from the blood Nick spilled to launch another blast of . It arced through the two remaining soldiers, enough to bring them low. As they collapsed, Nick caught a flash of light just behind them, and he flung himself sideways.

The shot through the air, scraping across his arm. He grimaced against the pain. He’d encountered that spell before when battling Priestess Aranni in Greenborough. She’d died by his hands, and so would Jekel. Nick rolled back up to his feet, clutching Sorrow in both hands as he faced off against the priest.

“Vaan be with me!” the man shouted, slamming his palms to the ground. A circular shadow darkened underneath Nick’s feet, and recognizing , he dove aside. A golden spear shot up from the shadowed circle to spike into the air, and it easily would have impaled him had he not reacted in time. Nick’s roll came to a halt just before the bound boy, and he lifted Sorrow up in defense.

“Nice try,” he said, and grinned like a madman. “But it’s my turn now.”

Violette’s scream pierced Nick’s spine, interrupting his planned attack. From the corner of his eye, he saw her retreating from an armored man wielding a sword and shield. Her sleeve was cut, and her arm, bleeding. She forced him back with a , but the damage was barely a quarter of his health.

Nick swore. How had he not seen the knight of Alder? The burly man was only level 8, a far cry from Sir Gareth’s might, but still a formidable foe. Worse, Violette faced him alone, and she was already wounded. Nick wanted to help, but he dared not remove his attention from the dangerous priest.

“You’re the demon of the west, aren’t you?” Jekel said, dipping his hand into his bag of sand. “They say you cannot die, but can you recover from age itself?”

Nick dove aside as the priest flung another cloud of sand, fighting off a sudden spike of terror at experiencing the horror that had taken the lives of the married couple. He came up to his feet with his sword slashing. It sliced through Jekel’s legs, tearing cloth and splashing blood across his white robes as Sorrow cut him for over half his health. The priest dropped to his knees, gasping as Nick blasted him with a straight to the chest.

Jekel coughed blood as he gasped for air. To Nick’s stunned surprise, the priest was laughing.

“You are truly as terrible as they say.”

A piercing wail turned Nick around. That wasn’t Violette, it was…

The boy. He’d been behind Nick, still bound to the balcony railing. The pries