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‘‘Shit, shit, shit,’ Leon repeatedly cursed, wondering just what in the hells he’d been thinking.

The tusked beast above him, the equivalent of tenth-tier, twisted about in the air and brought its massive head down closer to the offering of meat that Leon had left upon its altar.  Leon heard it sniff a few times, and then the monster pulsed with magic in a manner reminiscent of a human using their magic senses.

Leon, still invisible, froze as the magic washed over him.  To his immense relief, the monster didn’t seem to notice him.

The monster opened its strangely small mouth and began to dig into the meat.  It still hung in the air like an eel floating in water, seemingly completely at ease with itself in the cavern, showing such a degree of confidence in itself that Leon almost forgot to breathe.

It was only a matter of minutes before the monster had devoured Leon’s entire offering, and then it finally ascended back into the air.  In these few minutes, Leon managed to get his body back under control and dull his panic.  As his anxiety fell, the reason why he’d done this returned to his mind, and he steeled himself for what he now had to do.

The monster had been depicted on the wall blocking his way to the Iron Needle.  That, along with the monoliths and altar, made it clear enough to him that this monster was probably not only the lord and master of at least some of the cave network, but that there were other things—or there had been—down here capable of revering, if not outright worshipping this creature.

Leon supposed he couldn’t blame them, tenth-tier was only a step away from Apotheosis and achieving divine status.

The monster began to fly away, its small arms and legs paddling in the air like a swimming dog.  Its body movements were languid and relaxed, but it moved with great speed over the underground forest, and Leon moved quickly to follow.  He’d summoned the beast with an offering and hoped that following it would lead him to the Iron Needle.

Not the best of plans, but it was a plan, and he considered it better than wandering around the cave system for weeks trying to find his way through.

The monster cut a relatively small silhouette head-on, and so was able to fly down into one of the larger tunnels attached to the underground forest with ease.

‘Not the one it came from,’ Leon noted.  The beast had originally come from the opposite direction, if he wasn’t wrong—though the creature was surprisingly subtle for its power.  Its aura, while powerful and overwhelming when Leon stared at it, did not flood the caves and put pressure on him.  That made the monster surprisingly stealthy for its size and power.

But as soon as that thought crossed Leon’s mind, it was almost immediately destroyed as the monster led him past yet another illusory veil and into another massive cavern.  Like the last one, this one held an underground forest.  In contrast, however, this forest had been completely frozen over, with the dirt hardened by cold and ice covering the dead, leafless trees.  Spread throughout the cavern were more than thirty ice pillars of the sort that had housed the ice wraiths back at the rift’s entrance.  These pillars dwarfed those in size, however.

The monster’s aura, as it flew into the cavern, practically exploded outwards, staggering Leon with its power.  He’d been flying himself to keep up with the monster, and damn near fell to the ground.

The pillars, on the other hand, suffered worse.  All were damaged by this expression of power, cracks racing across their surfaces.  The half-dozen pillars closest to the monster splintered and almost fell apart, only held together by a wave of ice that instantly grew from their bases to cover their surfaces.

Leon grimaced slightly at the sight of eighth-tier ice wraiths at the base of the pillars, using their demonic magic to keep the pillars intact.  At the same time, a horde of banshees made their presence known with terrible shrieks as they flew out of a pit of darkness covering one of the massive cavern’s walls.  Several ice wraiths began launching huge ice spikes at the monster Leon was following, but the tusked thing hardly seemed to care as these attacks from seventh-tier equivalent lesser demons broke or bounced right off the tusked creature’s scaled hide.  It swiped one of its relatively short and stubby claws at the nearest ice pillar, and a wind blade shattered the thing in its entirety, sending a veritable mountain of ice shards falling to the ground.  In the same motion, a cyclone began turning around the monster and swept out to envelope the entire horde of banshees.  In but a moment, their terrible shrieks were silenced.

Leon stared in awe at the almost careless expression of power.  The largest concentration of ice wraiths and banshees he’d ever seen, and the creature was completely unfazed.

With another swipe of its claws, a second and third pillar were annihilated, and when the tusked beast roared, a shockwave was projected in front of its open, toothy maw.  Just about all the ice wraiths on the ground were shattered as completely as their ice pillars.  Leon himself was thrown from the sky and hit the frozen ground, his veil of darkness partially dissolving away before his armor’s enchantments managed to get it back up.  Still, all the air was driven from his lungs and his body was wracked with pain.  No significant damage was done to him thanks to the strength of his armor, but it was clear enough to him that taking on the tusked beast was not something to take lightly.

The tusked beast didn’t seem to notice him, thankfully, or if it did, it didn’t consider him a threat.

‘Perhaps due to the offering?’ Leon wondered, though he wasn’t keen on testing that particular theory.

In any case, with just a few more roars, the cavern was cleared of ice wraiths.  The air had been filled with ice and snow, but not so much that Leon lost sight of the tusked beast.  So, he took back to the skies and did his best to continue following it.  He didn’t know where it was going, but at the very least, it was hostile to banshees and ice wraiths, and he fully supported it in its expression of that enmity.

However, as the tusked beast continued flying through the caves, gracefully sliding through the air like it was swimming on the surface of a placid lake, they encountered no more wraiths or banshees.  They did find a few more powerful creatures, but all hid as soon as the tusked beast made its presence known.  For its part, the tusked beast hardly seemed to take note of them, leading Leon to wonder just why it bothered to clear out that cavern of ice wraiths, assuming it wasn’t simply because they were stupid enough to get in its way.

 Perhaps more significantly, they passed through three more enormous caverns with underground forests, each one separated by more and more intricate cave systems that Leon did his best to memorize.  Thankfully, it was mostly the illusory veils he had to keep track of to know where he was.

Along the way, the tusked beast stopped at one more location with a monolithic circle just as decorated as the one Leon had found, and it, too, had been filled with offerings: three large bears were piled up like lumber on the altar, while a huge stag, its hide the color of and glowing like moonlight stood off to the side, its head held high and sharp antlers covered in blood.  It radiated the aura of a seventh-tier mage, and if Leon had to guess, had killed and stacked those bears, indicating a not-small degree of intelligence.

The tusked beast descended upon the bears with the same gusto as it had devoured Leon’s offering, the stag watching all the while.  Only when the tusked beast was finished did the stag finally move, and when it did, any doubts that Leon had of its intelligence faded away: it lowered itself in an obvious bow as the tusked creature’s eyes fell upon it.

The stag remained lowered as the tusked beast continued to coldly regard it, but after almost five excruciatingly-long minutes, the tusked beast finally growled, and a bead of light appeared in the exact center of its massive forehead plate.  The bead couldn’t have been larger than one of Leon’s finger bones, yet it radiated an incredible amount of power, and when it gracefully fell upon the stag, all the power it contained was absorbed.  The stag didn’t grow such power as to seem to ascend a tier, but it did grow greatly in power, and slightly in stature.  Its coat even seemed to shine more brilliantly, and Leon briefly wondered if it still would if he were to hunt it.

However, with the creature so clearly having won the tusked beast’s benevolence, Leon’s wondering was brief and not particularly serious.

In fact, he was more upset that he could’ve possibly gotten a bead of light like that himself if he hadn’t hidden from the tusked beast, though he wondered if it would see his power as a threat.  Bestowing power upon a seventh-tier stag was one thing, but a ninth-tier human was another—at least, it would be for Leon.

Soon enough, the tusked beast continued its journey through the caverns, and Leon followed it.  Unfortunately for him, the tusked beast soon came to another wall marked by its carved image, but the tusked beast passed cleanly through the wall like a dolphin into the ocean.  Leon’s eyes about leaped out of their sockets, the wall having seemed without magic of any kind before then, and bearing no sign that the tusked beast had just passed through it after.  Leon was unable to replicate the feat, the wall seeming completely solid and unchanging for him.

He momentarily considered trying to blast it down, but once again, his eyes traveled upward to examine the ceiling.  His earth magic was still dismal even compared to his water magic, let alone fire or lightning, and the wall had already proven itself to be more than it seemed.  While he filed away the brute force attempt for later, for now, he decided to let it be.  At the very least, he knew that a good way to get the tusked beast—or a tusked beast, if there were more—to appear was to offer something at one of the monolithic shrines.

So, Leon landed at the base of the new walls and started his examination.  However, he’d barely been in contact with the ground for five seconds before a wave of ice appeared at the last fork in this tunnel and came rushing down toward him.

With a roar of surprise and anger, Leon leaped into the air, dropped his invisibility—it wouldn’t stand against his retaliation, anyway—and called upon his fire.  He extended one of his hands, but instead of bright orange flame, the black fire of the Great Black Dragon sprang forth.  In but a moment, this fire had grown larger than Leon’s body, and in another, large enough to cover a quarter of the tunnel.  Leon pushed outward, and his black fire met the oncoming wave of ice, and Leon wasn’t surprised to see the ice prove itself lesser.  His fire, practically unparalleled in its destructive capabilities, vaporized the ice on contact.  He briefly thought he’d made a mistake as the resulting water vapor exploded outward, but it was contained to the other side of his fiery wave and didn’t do any notable damage to the tunnel itself, thankfully.

As his fire reached the fork where the ice had come from, Leon let it die, revealing a dozen ice wraiths standing there, all looking about as surprised as their nearly-featureless faces could express.  Eight of them were seventh-tier, three were eighth-tier, and the last Leon was shocked to see was ninth-tier.  This last one was larger than any wraith Leon had seen until then, standing a full head-and-shoulders above the eighth-tier wraiths at its side, and its cold blue eyes stared back at Leon with clear killing intent.

But instead of making another move as Leon expected, the ice wraiths vanished back into the tunnel they’d come from, leaving Leon otherwise in peace.  Whether that was due to his power over fire or for some other reason, Leon couldn’t say, but he was left wondering if they’d been trying to attack the tusked creature, its wall, or him.  He had been invisible, after all, though, with ice wraiths, he had no way to know.

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For two more weeks, Leon ran around the tunnel system, creating a mental map of the place and getting an idea of just where everything was and what inhabited each location.  In that time, he came to the hesitant conclusion that whatever had made the stone walls had also made the illusory veils and the monolithic shrines.  In the case of the latter, it was clear enough that they’d been made by the same person or people, but after taking some time to examine it all closely, it became much clearer.

As far as he could tell, the carved walls, monolithic shrines, and illusory veils were all created with ancient runes, allowing him to salvage a little bit of his pride.  His studies into ancient runes with Nestor hadn’t gone into such great detail that he could easily understand what was going on with these enchantments, but he knew enough to identify—and possibly even control—ancient runes when he found them.

When it came to controlling them, however, it was much easier said than done.  It was easy enough to drop illusory veils, but they never stayed dropped for long.  Leon couldn’t get rid of them all and rely upon his magic senses fully again.  Every time he tried to get rid of one, no matter how quickly he moved, it would always be back in place before he reached a second.

His other big problem was the carved walls.  He’d discovered two more, and based on his internal map of the tunnel system, all four of the walls he’d discovered so far led deeper underground than any other tunnel could take him.  In these two weeks, he’d finally started finding the limits of the tunnel system, with the walls the only obstacles left to his exploration.

Or at least, the only passive obstacles.  After the encounter with the ninth-tier ice wraith, Leon followed the tunnel it and its fellows retreated down, eventually finding the largest grouping of ice wraiths he’d ever seen.

He’d discovered the largest cavern in the entire tunnel system, the thing practically as large as the entire Forest of Black and White far above.  And the entire thing was infested with ice wraiths, almost a hundred of their pillars holding up the ceiling far above.  The air between the ground and the ceiling was choked with thousands of banshees—thankfully passive and quiet with Leon making stealth a high priority.  In those numbers, he guessed that even the low-level banshees could cripple his use of magic power for at least a little while, leaving him at the whims of the ice wraiths if he were to attack mindlessly.

Fortunately, he didn’t think he’d need to attack them—at least, such were his thoughts when he first found them.  There were a few more ‘cities’ of ice wraiths, but none were so large, and all were easily bypassed by other tunnels.

So, once his explorations were largely done, Leon focused his attention on the four carved walls.  He’d made a few low-power magical probes into them, confirming some of his fears that to get past them with force would take enough power to probably collapse the tunnel around him.  At the same time, the way through them wasn’t immediately clear.

In the end, though, Leon managed to detect exceptionally faint traces of magic that only revealed themselves when he took in the entirety of the walls in as great of detail as he could, and even then, the currents of magic weren’t so much directly sensed as they were detected by how they affected the ambient magic around him.

Leon hazarded a guess that these were the ‘strings’ that controlled the ancient rune or runes within the carved walls.  It would certainly explain the strange magical phenomenon that occurred when he saw the tusked beast pass through it like water.  The problem he faced was that each wall had more than twenty magical currents flowing through it, and he hadn’t the faintest idea how exactly to pluck these strings to get them to allow him past the walls.

In the end, Leon had decided that the best way to figure out how to operate these walls would be to observe from those who already knew.  Fortunately, he knew how to summon the tusked beasts, though he wasn’t quite as eager to do so now as he was before.

In the two weeks he’d spent exploring the underground, he’d encountered a—or the—tusked beast twice more without trying to, and both times, they’d been collecting an offering at a shrine.  The first one rewarded the dark panther-like creature with another bead of light, raising it from a fourth-tier creature to a fifth-tier creature.  The second time, however, a sixth-tier griffin had brought a meager offering of only two relatively small wolves.  The griffin had stood proudly as if boasting of its offering, but the tusked beast, if Leon had to guess, had taken offense.

The griffin was destroyed on the spot, obliterated by a single roar of the tusked beast before being subsequently devoured.

Suffice it to say that Leon was a little more apprehensive about laying out offerings after witnessing that.  However, he realized that it was going to be necessary the more he studied the walls.  Everything else he did, from probing the walls with destructive magic, to trying to use his own ‘open’ rune spells, to trying to randomly pluck a few of the strings of magic led to absolutely nothing else happening.

So, with no other choices readily apparent and not wanting to spend years and years down in the tunnel systems, Leon made up his mind and went hunting for a suitable offering that would summon a tusked beast that he could again follow.  Invisibly.  Carefully.  Using every hunting trick he knew to not be seen by the creature and destroyed for trespassing on its turf.

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