His legs burned with exertion, his breath fogging in the broken air, but he didn’t slow. The streets no longer obeyed normal geometry—buildings leaned at impossible angles, roads folding back on themselves like torn parchment stitched by madness. Glimmers of unstable mana whirled in the air, shedding sparks that hissed against his armor.
Ahead, the first anchor loomed: the remnants of an old harbor statue — a marble guardian of the waves — now wrapped in a cyclone of leyline fractures, glowing veins pulsing across its crumbling form.
A notification flared across his vision:
Prolix didn’t even have time to finish reading before the ground around the statue shivered.
From the cracks in the cobblestones, something clawed its way into the world.
At first, he thought it was mist — but then the mist thickened, coalescing into grotesque shapes: hunched, spindly things stitched from broken fragments of ship wood, rusted nails, and shuddering scraps of torn sailcloth. Their bodies dripped viscous mana like black ichor, their hollow faces stretched into leering masks of salt-encrusted bone.
Anomaly Entities.
Corrupted reflections of the city itself.
The nearest one snapped its splintered limbs together in a mockery of applause, emitting a hideous, wet chuckle.
More figures rose behind it — seven, no, ten — shifting and twitching with puppetlike spasms, surrounding the anchor point.
ProlixalParagon ground his heel into the cracked stone, planting himself firmly.
No running.
No more delays.
If he didn’t stabilize this anchor, the dungeon’s collapse would accelerate — and the Troupe’s chance of survival would vanish.
Mana thrummed through him — raw, unstable, fierce.
He triggered his Scrap-Drift Shade, commanding it forward.
The Shade shimmered, pulling pieces of fallen debris to itself as it darted toward the creatures, baiting their attention. Two of the monstrosities lunged, brittle claws raking at the Shade’s distorted image.
While they struck at the decoy, Prolix moved.
Fast.
He sketched a quick, crude array on the ground with a shard of mana-charged stone — a Static Field Coil, barely stable, but enough to hold.
The nearest creature jerked its head toward him, sensing the surge of intent.
Prolix hurled his battered adaptive shield forward — it expanded mid-flight, unfurling into a shimmering bubble of refracted mana that absorbed the creature’s wild lunge.
The impact rattled his bones but held.
Snarling, he triggered a hastily jury-rigged entropy shunt from his belt, tossing it at the beast’s feet. The device exploded with a muffled whump, dragging the creature into a local gravity sinkhole — its twisted limbs flailing helplessly as it sank halfway into the cracked earth.
He didn’t wait for it to recover.
With a snarl, Prolix surged forward, slamming a scavenged filament spike into the marble at the base of the anchor. Mana rushed through the array he’d scrawled—
the Static Field Coil flared to life—
and the ley fractures around the statue began to stitch together.
Another anomaly beast screeched, barrelling toward him.
Without hesitation, Prolix drew his dagger and sidestepped, slashing across the creature’s taut mana-filament “veins.” The blade, simple but true, disrupted the unstable magic binding the creature, and the thing burst into a cloud of dissipating shards.
Stolen novel; please report.
Two more surged from opposite sides.
The Scrap-Drift Shade dove into one, its structure destabilizing on impact, causing the entity to stagger. Prolix spun under the second, kicking its spindly legs out from beneath it, then lunging back toward the core.
He jammed the last of his mana reserves into the anchor’s stabilizer node.
The fractured leylines around the marble statue flared brilliant white—
—then snapped back into alignment.
>Area Instability: Slightly Reduced.<
The anomaly creatures hissed like dying embers, flickering and dissolving into motes of harmless mana as the area’s reality reasserted itself.
ProlixalParagon sagged forward on one knee, panting hard.
One anchor down.
Four more to go.
And the heart of the anomaly — the true core — still pulsed somewhere deep in the fractured city, waiting for him.
He wiped blood from his brow and pushed himself upright.
Then, in the broken hush that followed the anchor's stabilization, he felt it.
A pulse.
Not from the anchor.
Not from the creatures.
Something else.
Something vast.
Something aware.
The world seemed to shiver under its gaze, the broken streets whispering secrets in a language he wasn’t meant to hear.
In the distance, beyond the second anchor, a figure moved across a shattered rooftop — tall, draped in shifting, smoke-colored robes, crowned with the faint glimmer of fractal, silver antlers.
Not a creature.
Not a player.
Something older.
Something watching.
The system whispered across his vision like the brush of a cold hand:
>>Dedisco's Eye has Opened.<<
And the fracture in the world… widened.
The anchor pulsed once more, flaring a steady, muted silver — a stabilizing heartbeat against the chaos of the city’s fractured soul.
But that light was a beacon.
A flare against the dark.
And the creatures of the anomaly had seen it.
From the warped alleys and twisted canals, from the hollowed shells of shattered taverns and overturned market stalls, they came — a crawling tide of instability given form.
ProlixalParagon barely had time to rise fully to his feet before the air thickened with the keening wails of the horde.
At first it was just a sound — high-pitched, ragged, rising and falling in grotesque, layered harmony — but soon shapes resolved themselves against the bleeding dusk:
Slithering masses of ironwood planks lashed together by writhing rope sinews.
Misshapen constructs of shattered cargo crates and broken pottery, loping like mockeries of wolves.
A vast, centipede-like thing stitched from the twisted hulls of broken fishing skiffs, its mandibles gnashing with the sound of splintering bone.
Their eyes — where they had eyes — were coals of hollow, inverted light.
And they were hungry.
The anchor’s stabilization had hurt them.
Prolix had hurt them.
Now they came to tear him down.
ProlixalParagon’s heart hammered once — sharp, sure — and he moved.
There was no time for fear.
Only motion.
Only survival.
He snapped a filament coil loose from his belt and hurled it wide, casting a net of flickering mana strands across the debris-choked square. The first slithering beast hit the strands — and the unstable energy detonated, wrapping it in sizzling arcs that burned through the rotted rope binding it together.
One down.
The Scrap-Drift Shade, darting through the ruins like a living wisp of distortion, peeled off toward the flank, trailing a confusion field that made the creatures' charges stutter and fail, some snapping at shadows instead of at him.
Prolix pivoted, fluid and desperate.
He drew his dagger in a reverse grip, the old blade flashing in the warped light, and rushed forward into the first knot of enemies.
A creature lunged — a mass of broken cart wheels and torn sail canvas.
Prolix ducked low under its sweeping strike and drove the dagger upward into its core — a dense knot of condensed mana flickering weakly at its center. The blade punched through with a wet, shuddering crack, and the thing exploded into motes of dispersing light.
But for every one he felled, three more took its place.
A wolf-thing made of shattered barrels leapt for his throat.
Without thinking, Prolix triggered the second Static Field Coil he'd hastily sketched near the anchor’s base earlier. The coil flared to life, sending a localized shockwave outward — the creature was thrown aside mid-leap, its wooden form shattering against a twisted lamppost.
Another abomination — a twisted, snake-like thing formed of fishnet and bone — slithered low, aiming to coil around his legs.
Prolix backstepped hard, nearly slipping on the uneven stone, and hurled a jury-rigged mana filament spike into its open "mouth." The spike detonated with a rippling crack, blowing the creature’s head apart in a shower of shredded netting and bone fragments.
But the centipede construct was different.
Bigger.
Smarter.
It coiled back, sensing the Static Field Coil’s range, and then launched itself in a twisting arc over the trap, aiming directly at the anchor point behind Prolix.
If it destroyed the anchor, all his work would be undone.
Mana surged through Prolix’s veins — battered, strained, but still burning hot.
He triggered the adaptive shield at his wrist, flaring it to maximum output.
The air between him and the anchor warped into a rippling, curved barrier just as the centipede smashed down with the force of a falling siege engine.
The shield buckled —
Mana shrieked —
The marble beneath his boots cracked wide —
But it held.
Prolix dropped to one knee, gritting his teeth against the backlash as the construct rebounded, flailing.
He seized the moment.
From the depths of his satchel, he yanked free one of his crudest devices made at haidriens shop: a Leyline Entanglement Grenade — barely stable, tuned for chaos.
With a sharp flick, he primed it.
The grenade pulsed a sickly purple.
Then he threw.
The device struck the centipede's upper thorax.
For a breath, nothing happened.
Then the leyline shrapnel inside detonated, sending jagged arcs of inverted mana slicing through the creature's bound soul filaments. The centipede shrieked — a sound that rattled the teeth in Prolix’s skull — and convulsed violently.
Cracks split its carapace.
It twisted once, twice, then collapsed into a heap of shattered planks and leaking mana.
Silence fell over the square.
ProlixalParagon staggered, breathless, chest heaving.
He wiped a smear of blood from his brow and turned, scanning the ruined plaza.
No more immediate threats.
The anchor remained intact — battered, cracked, but still pulsing with steady light.
He had survived the first wave.
But across the fractured skyline, in the looming, bleeding heart of the dungeon, the figure still watched.
Waiting.
Measuring.
And the dungeon’s system pulsed another notification across his vision, chilling him to his core:
>Dungeon Threat Level Increased.<
>Additional Anomaly Manifestations Incoming.<
>>Unknown Entity: “Dedisco’s Hand” has manifested.<<
>Warning: Reality Instability Reaching Critical Threshold.<
ProlixalParagon tightened his grip on his battered dagger, feeling the thrum of his shield pulsing at his wrist, the weight of his satchel heavy with unfinished devices.
This wasn’t over.
This had only just begun.