One moment Wade was in the first circle of hell. The next, he was somewhere else entirely.

  He hadn't even blinked.

  The assassin had simply pointed, the scroll glowing in his palm, and everything shifted.

  Smell hit him first, before his eyes could make sense of the darkness. Wet dirt. Decay. Blood and iron. A hint of rot. And beneath it all, something else - a strange, clear purity to the air, like fresh water from a deep spring. Which made no sense, because water had no smell. Yet his addled mind latched onto it anyway.

  The sight was harder to process.

  A cave. A really weird one, dim and dark with lightish blue glows from small trickles off the sides.

  The terrain made no sense. Smooth, curving ground rose and fell like waves, pocked with rough thin craters that gave it an almost organic texture. Massive pillars rose from the landscape at odd angles, up toward a ceiling he couldn't yet see. When he looked straight up, the same undulating surface mirrored back at him, as if the world had folded in on itself.

  He was in a nook of some kind, and beyond them was the wider world.

  Streams of faintly glowing water traced paths down the walls, feeding into thin rivers that pooled in a vast lake ahead of their nook. The light the mini-rivers glowed was blue and weak, but the lake ahead was far more well lit, like there was sunlight deeper down under it all. More pillars jutted from the lake's center, vanishing into the dark above.

  The dim glow only reached so far, and beyond it, shadow swallowed everything.

  But even in this half-light, Wade could tell the walls weren't stone. The texture was wrong. Too smooth in some places, too porous in others. Almost like...

  Bone.

  Everything here was made of bone.

  Looked almost like the sides of a pool given the reflection of water on the white.

  All the sides were bleach-white, broken only by patches of dried flesh - grey and shriveled, clinging to the skeletal walls like dead moss on a tree. But where the glowing water touched, that grey meat swelled and seemed to be coming back to life.

  The parts outside the streams remained dead and desiccated. The parts within became something closer to alive. Like a really gross sponge soaking up blood.

  Small creatures scattered around those pockets. He wouldn't have noticed them at all if they hadn't been swimming through the luminescent streams, their bodies catching the glow. They looked like shrimp, or maybe krill. Darting fast, hiding within sections of porous bone or burrowing into the waterlogged flesh.

  His eyes slowly adjusted.

  Where the fuck are we?

  Then he remembered he didn't need to ask. He had a System.

  The words appeared at the edge of his vision:

  Ur-Primordial Corpse - Trabeculae Region.

  Impossible Difficulty.

  First part was gibberish to him, but the second part was clear enough. The Nathir shelter city had been rated extreme difficulty. Impossible was something else entirely.

  He didn't like it.

  "What's going on? Medy? Bael! Eri!" He turned, scanning the darkness.

  Identify.

  Their name tags materialized in his vision - the System cutting through the gloom where his eyes couldn't. Eri and Medy were right there with him. The skeleton was still crouched where he'd been knocked backward. Medy sat on the ground, looking panicked.

  "We're here, mortal." Bael's voice came from behind him.

  Wade turned. The old demon stood in the dim light, looking morose.

  That's when Wade noticed they hadn't just been transported - they'd been cut out of where they'd stood. The ground beneath their feet had come with them, a neat circle of mud and plants ripped from somewhere else and dropped here. It was already forming a small dam against the trickling streams, redirecting the thin rivers of glowing water around its edges. Pieces of grass and dirt broke off, carried by the current toward the lake.

  "Do you know what this place is?"

  Eri clicked his jaws a few times, looking wildly around, slowly getting back up, skull looking down at his destroyed blade. Wade could tell at least he wasn't the only one who had no idea where they were.

  Bael straightened, surveying their surroundings. Then he closed his eyes and sighed.

  "Where we are is death. That's what's. You just don't know it yet." He opened his eyes again, but didn't look at Wade. "You will start to feel it in under an hour. And in three, the pain will begin. Doesn't matter if you find shelter or not anymore. It's over."

  Medy remained collapsed on the ground, panic in her voice. "No, nononono, not here, anywhere but here! We were so close, why now?! Who was that mortal?! This isn't possible. No wait, Bael, there's no pathway to here from Hell, how are we even here?"

  The other demon gave a loose shrug. "Stranger things have happened already."

  Medy didn't seem to hear him, too panicked about everything. "Why was he able to cast a full realm-shift ritual in under a second like that? It takes an hour! At minimum!"

  "Realm shift ritual?" Wade started feeling some real ill in his gut.

  And then he realized it was an actual physical feeling in his gut. Nausea. Something was going on in his body. And on the side of his eye, he could see the System was showing notification after notification. More were appearing even now.

  And Wade paled as he saw the first one he'd already missed.

  A new debuff was applied: Mana Necrosis I. (Time until Death: 2 weeks, 4 hours.)

  That... shouldn't be possible. He didn't have any mana in his body.

  Except… that he did. Because he could feel it. That same sensation of power from his home. After consuming Zin's cut-up mana piece. Only this time, the feeling wasn't confined to his stomach. It was everywhere. In his hands, fingers, eyes, feet - he could even feel it in his head.

  And more of it was rushing inside him from everywhere around.

  A new debuff was applied: Mana Necrosis II. (Time until Death: 1 week, 12 hours.)

  "Identify!" He called out, panicked, staring at the debuff.

  Mana Necrosis II - Mana exposure beyond body tolerance threshold. Causes cellular death and escalating systemic failure. (Time until Death: 1 week, 12 hours.)

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  "Stats!"

  The stats text appeared and his eyes raced over the fluff, looking for the one number that mattered.

  Mana: 689/125

  Oh shit.

  A new debuff was applied: Mana Necrosis III. (Time until Death: 4 days, 7 hours.)

  Wade watched as the number spun upwards.

  Mana: 921/125

  A new debuff was applied: Mana Necrosis IV. (Time until Death: 2 days, 7 hours.)

  "Jesus christ, no! No-no! Stop-stop-stop!"

  The number continued to climb sky high, zipping so fast the first position looked like it was flashing random numbers at him, while the second position was climbing up one digit at a time constantly.

  A new debuff was applied: Mana Necrosis V. (Time until Death: 17 hours.)

  "Seventeen hours!? What the fuck?!"

  A new debuff was applied: Mana Necrosis VII. (Time until Death: 10 hours.)

  The number started to slow down, until it finally stopped at one absurd number.

  Mana: 1272/125

  A new debuff was applied: Mana Necrosis VIII. (Time until Death: 6 hours.)

  And then he spotted them in the gloom - his eyes had already been drifting in that direction, glazing over the translucent system text.

  Bodies.

  Everywhere.

  All of them were encased in strange suits of thick leather reinforced with tarnished metal plating, their heads sealed within silver dome helmets.

  They looked like some strange fusion of deep-sea divers and astronauts, explorers of a frontier that had swallowed them whole. Some lay sprawled across the uneven ground, limbs bent at angles that suggested they'd fallen mid-stride. Others had propped themselves against the curve of the bone walls, like they'd simply sat down to rest and never got up again.

  Weapons remained clutched in gauntleted hands - swords mostly, and a few spears. Some of those same blades had found their way through chest plates, whether by enemy hands or their own in the end, Wade couldn't say.

  Every helmet was damaged. Cracked. Pieces of the silver domes sheared away to reveal what lay beneath.

  Wade's mind made the connection in a single, sharp leap of clarity. He understood now why the mana here pressed against him like the weight of an ocean, flooding into his body to equalize the pressure.

  He understood why these bodies surrounded him.

  And he understood why they were moving.

  The twitching started slow - a finger curling, a shoulder rolling, a helmet lolling to one side. Then came the rising. That same horrible, jerking motion he remembered from the Nathir shelter city, like feral animals slowly waking up from hibernation.

  One of them turned its head toward him.

  Through the jagged gap in its visor, a skull leered back.

  "Identify," Wade said. His voice came out calm. Detached. His mind had already arrived at the answer; now he simply needed confirmation.

  The nametag flickered into existence above the creature as it lurched fully upright.

  Level 21 Undead Arcanonaught - 100%

  Wade started laughing.

  He swept his gaze across the cavern, watching more nametags blink into view. A dozen. Two dozen.

  A few said miners, those ones didn't even have clothing beside utility items. The rest looked like guards. But that didn't matter to Wade.

  There was only one place in this deathworld where mana was mined.

  "We're in the Arcane Realm, aren't we?" Wade asked.

  "We are." Bael said, raising the store-bought longsword. "Unlucky to appear right in the middle of a dead excursion, not that it makes much of a difference. We have hours to live now. At least I'll die with a sword in hand. Small mercies."

  The Satyr ran his hand across the blade, and it began to glow bright blue. "Free magic spell." He said, before Wade could ask how he managed to enchant a sword made on Earth. "Extremely inefficient way to power a blade. No need to hold back anymore here."

  His hand then slapped the demon armor plate he'd had at his chest, and it began to glow with power as Bael recharged the armor to full.

  Ready for the fight, he rushed forward at the first undead miner.

  It didn't stand a chance. The demon's blade caught it mid-lunge, shearing through reinforced leather and rusted plate, separating torso from hips in a single sweep.

  Bael roared. Some kind of primal howl that had both excitement and age old weariness, like he was too old to deal with any of this. And excited to find that he could still fight just as well as he remembered from older days.

  Wade considered shooting with his Glock. Should he assist?

  When he ran his eyes around to see the levels, he noticed something had changed:

  Medy was now level 36. And Bael was level 51.

  Given the sheer number of spells Bael was casting, swinging himself forward with powerful kicks, swiping his hand to toss skeletons aside like bowling pins, Wade could guess this was how powerful Bael would be with a mana crystal.

  Or infinite mana to use. Maybe mostly that.

  Two more undead started racing forward, glaring at Wade with empty eye sockets through that broken helmet they wore. Bael pivoted, then raced right at the pair, the longsword swinging. It bit deep into the first skeleton's helmet, dented it inwards, further shattered the thin silver visor they all had, then caused the entire skeleton to get rocketed into the ground from the blow. A hoof stomped onto the back, and pinned it in place. The second undead raised a terribly rusted pickaxe. Bael caught the swing on his blade and shoved, sending the creature sprawling backward into the glowing stream.

  It stumbled into the water, splashing down. And then slowly got back up.

  The broken part of a Nathir greatsword dug into the helmet, through what was left of the visor, and into the skull under it. Then Eri flung the entire skeleton as if he were playing golf, launching the victim up and out into the distant lake.

  Eri had joined the fight, his broken greatsword still wickedly strong despite the missing third of its length. The skeleton moved with practiced efficiency, parrying an incoming strike before driving the jagged point through a miner's eye socket. When another lunged from the side, Eri simply reached out and grabbed its skull directly, yanking it out clean from the helmet. Then he seized the rest of the headless corpse and hurled it against a bone wall.

  "Make sure they are crushed into pieces." Bael grunted out. "In this Realm, they'll never run out of mana to power the bones. Cut their arms and legs, then grind those parts into dust."

  Eri clicked his jaw affirmative. He had a giant fuck-off sword, it was heavy enough to be used like a hammer for this work. Which he did with the unfortunate skull in his hand. Into the ground it went, and then the greatsword slapped into pieces.

  Then Eri reached down, cut off one of those broken astronaut helmets, and put it on his head. He had priorities to handle here, and this looked like a particularly nice looking hat.

  The rest of the undead mining crew and guards were wide awake now, all staring at the four targets here, leering. A few were grabbing weapons nearby, or yanking them out of their chest.

  "Come on then!" Bael's voice carried across the little nook here. "Got an hour of limitless mana and centuries of spite. See which runs out first."

  Wade decided he was going to save his ammunition in this case. Bullets were not effective against undead. He'd seen the Nathir golems fail that check, firing a torrent of bullets into them and only dealing damage if they happened to hit bone. There was too much empty space otherwise.

  Most of the skeletons here were only levels 14 to 19, so Wade figured Eri and Bael could handle them.

  The problem he was more worried about was the lure trap that was right at the center of their teleportation cut. Still embedded inside the mossy grass. It looked like a bronze sphere, although with the dim blue light he couldn't quite tell the actual color. It certainly looked dead and non-functional at least.

  Wade knelt down, getting a closer look, and tried to figure out how it worked.

  "Identify."

  Lure Trap (System Quality) (Used)

  He ran a second Identify right on the nametag itself.

  Lure Trap - When activated, targets nearby are branded with a debuff attracting dangerous enemies at their position.

  He looked over his debuffs list, finding mana necrosis was still there as expected, but just above was something else.

  Branded - Attracting dangerous enemies. (7 hours remaining)

  The assassin's plan was coming into clear focus now. Toss them into this realm where he'd absolutely die eventually without any effort.

  And if what he understood about mana poisoning was accurate, within an hour he'd be puking his guts out, losing hair, and generally degrading real fast. Making him easy pickings for anything looking to eat him, or assassinate him.

  The undead came at them in a shuffling wave - not coordinated, but persistent. Their movements held training, muscle memory still well and alive in their animated bones, same as the Nathir city. They blocked, feinted, thrust with purpose. It didn't matter against Bael and Eri. The demon carved through them like a mad berserker, looking actually happy for once, each swing empowered by enough raw magic to make the blade cut through their broken down suits and the bones within.

  Medy hadn't moved from where she'd fallen. She sat in the mud they'd brought with them, knees pulled to her chest, staring at nothing. Her lips moved, forming words Wade couldn't hear.

  Another miner fell. Then three more in quick succession.

  Bael very deliberately cut off arms, legs and then used his hoof to stomp them down. A few stopped moving before then, health bars hitting 0%.

  He hadn't noticed, or believed they were stunned or pretending. The dead were pests to deal with in every realm, and so long as there was mana in the air, they'd remain. He was busy grinding up the bones of targets that were clearly dead-dead.

  The cavern was starting to clear. Body parts scattered across the bone floor. A few stragglers remained near the lake's edge, but Eri was already moving to intercept.

  Wade checked his debuff timer.

  Mana Necrosis VIII. (Time until Death: 5 hours, 53 minutes.)

  What a miserable way to die. The early escape was an option using his last lootbox's reward. He had his backpack ready to convert into a bed, and probably they could find a pocket that satisfied the System's idea of shelter.

  But the problem was the next round: If he died here, he'd come back here.

  Which meant instant mana-necrosis again, and death within a few hours.

  This was going to be a problem. A very big problem.

  They could fight off undead hordes. And whatever this lure trap was set to drag to them, they at least had a chance of fighting against that.

  But how does one fight the environment itself?