The village of Halis was disturbingly empty.

Sev's heart sank as they wandered cobblestone streets, looking into every building to see if they could find any survivors — and more and more it was looking like there weren't any, despite both Derivan and Vex claiming that they could sense life here. Misa's own attempts with her skills had turned out nothing. She'd tried searching all the realities generated by her alternate selves, sending them down different streets and into different houses.

The worst part was the fact that everything else about the village was perfectly intact.

There was no sign that there had been a struggle anywhere in Halis. No furniture tipped over, no scratches in the wood or damage on the stone from skills being slung around. The meals that sat on dining tables were still warm, with a gentle haze of steam and the mild aroma of spice and meat drifting over the room.

In any other setting, it would have seemed warm and inviting — but with the dungeon's oppressive domain pushing down on them, it just felt wrong.

"You're sure there are still survivors here?" Sev asked, for the umpteenth time.

Vex looked troubled. He traced a glyph in the air, the pattern looking something like a leaf encased in a lens, and peered through it. "I still see signs of life," he said quietly. "I just can't pinpoint any of it. It's like they're... scattered."

"Or Shifted," Derivan agreed. "But if they are, it is beyond my ability to sense them, and that is unusual in itself. I do not know what would allow them to hide from me like this."

"So what the fuck is going on?" Misa muttered. She scanned the air, holding her mace out as if she thought she could ward off whatever was happening here with it, which Sev supposed she technically could. Sort of. Misa's eyes narrowed slightly as she seemed to trace something across the room, and then she suddenly straightened. "I'm going to try something," she announced, and then before Sev could say anything about it, she vanished.

"Wha— Misa?!" Sev hurriedly called up the system to see if anything had happened to her, but her health readout hadn't changed; she was physically healthy, but apparently missing.

Her mana, on the other hand, was dropping in chunks. Sev realized what had happened in the same moment Misa reappeared, panting and nearly doubling over; she steadied herself on the nearby table, trying to catch her breath.

"Misa?" Vex asked. "Are you okay?"

Rather than replying, Misa gave the lizardkin a thumbs up, gulping down a few more breaths of air as she did so. Her skin glistened with a sudden sheen of sweat, and she retched once or twice; it took her a moment to steady herself and her stomach.

"I'm fine," Misa said. She didn't look like she was fine. Sev eyed her critically, and she rolled her eyes. "I will be fine. The dungeon or something in it is actively distorting the people here — that's why we can't track any of them. I tried to block it, but it's a constant attack and there's so many of them that they'd just disappear again as soon as I cancel the block."

"I cannot sense what the dungeon is doing." Derivan seemed perturbed by this fact. "This is a spectacular use of Shift, if that is indeed what is happening. I cannot imagine..."

"It's not Shift," Vex said. His eyes glowed as he pushed his mana sense to its maximum, scanning the environment around them — and then the color of it changed as he tuned it further. "Or not entirely Shift. It's spatial magic. I didn't sense it before because it's slightly Shifted and attuned to be harder to detect."

"Do I want to know what kind of spatial magic it is?" Sev asked, already dreading the answer.

Vex closed his eyes before responding; when he opened them again, the glow had faded, and he seemed marginally paler. "The kind that splits you apart into a thousand pieces but keeps them all connected," Vex said grimly. "Misa disappeared because, I imagine, she had to protect every piece at the same time. Or however many she could without instantly dying."

"Yeah, that sounds about right for how shit it felt," Misa said. She cracked her neck and let out an irritated grumble when it refused to cooperate. "Like I was being yanked a million different ways at once."

"If it's spatial magic, can you counter it?" Sev asked Vex. The lizardkin didn't answer for a moment — he hesitated, staring at the air as if he could discern an answer from the ceiling tiles — before he eventually nodded.

"I think I can," he said, and then his eyes hardened. "I can. I'll need time to set up a ritual."

Sev nodded. He trusted the lizardkin.

"We'll set up watch in the meantime," Sev said. "Since we're technically in a dungeon. Can't forget about the monsters."Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

It didn't take long for the first monster to spawn.

Dungeons challenged adventurers; it was what they did. It wasn't surprising that monsters began to spawn soon after the dungeon detected new delvers within it. What was surprising was that the dungeon hadn't sent these monsters after the villagers themselves, and had instead held them hostage in an intricate web of spatial magic.

Sev didn't understand it, exactly, but he figured they would find out, soon enough.

It was a dark, spindly thing that emerged from the shadows. Misa was the first one to spot it — Sev saw her narrow her eyes and then jerk her mace toward what seemed like a completely normal albeit unusually dark alleyway. A second later, the darkness began to pool into spidery legs and...

...Nope, it was just legs. The whole thing was legs.

<Level 72 Legs>

The system apparently wasn't feeling very creative either.

Sev yelped when it scrambled towards them, abnormally fast, mostly because the way it moved was jerky and unnatural; Derivan stepped forward calmly and grabbed it in one of his gauntlets, and then Misa smashed her mace into it.

Several times.

[ Your party has killed a level 72 Legs! ]

It was kind of anticlimactic, really. After all the dangers they'd encountered on the way here — the people they'd had to fight — a monster like this was trivial to beat.

"Watch the shadows," Sev instructed. Mostly unnecessarily. Derivan and Misa were already eyeing every stray alleyway cautiously, their backs to one another.

Which meant Sev was the only one in a position to see it when their own shadows melted together, and something else started to emerge.

"Behind!" he called out, and he took several quick steps forward, just in case a new monster had begun to emerge from his own shadow. It was lucky that he did, too; a dark claw slashed through the space he'd been in a moment later, rippling the air as space was torn apart around it. Sev's heart seized as he looked at it — that wasn't a normal attack.

Misa and Derivan seemed to realize the same thing. Both of them had leapt back from the monster that appeared between them, and Sev glanced at the system-tags.

<Level 86 Shadowskitter>

<Level 92 Shadesplitter>

The Shadesplitter was the one that had attacked him. The Shadowskitter was living up to its name — it was small, a tiny, buglike thing that stood between Derivan and Sev with an aura of menace. It would have been amusing if not for the fact that its entire body was rippling with spatial magic and Void.

The Shadesplitter, on the other hand, was a mantis-like thing with bladed arms that sung with spatial magic.

The increase in level wasn't lost on Sev. The dungeon had evaluated how dangerous they were, and evidently decided they were more of a threat than it first assumed. A quick glance within the house they were protecting showed that nothing had spawned within, yet, but it was very possible that it was only a matter of time.

Dungeons didn't normally spawn monsters within their designated safe spaces, but this was very far from a normal dungeon.

"Think these are the things that took out the villagers?" Sev asked grimly.

"Almost certainly," Derivan responded, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

"No shit," Misa snorted. "Let's take them out."

As one, they moved.

Misa split into several copies of herself. Derivan summoned a Remembrance into his hand, a pale, glasslike orb that shone with strange colors. Sev called on his bond with the God of Light.

These were shadow creatures, after all.

The Shadowskitter was fast. True to its name, it skittered along the floor, dodging Misa's attempts to crush it with her mace; it didn't help that it was small, and none of them were quite used to fighting opponents that were that much smaller than they were. Derivan frowned with his eyes, then made a twisting motion with a hand — a Shift.

The Shadowskitter disappeared and warped into the air, where it scrambled desperately for purchase. Misa didn't give it a chance — before it could land, she slammed her mace into it like a bat, sending it flying and crashing into a nearby wall.

It wasn't dead, Sev knew. There had been no notification for it. But at these levels, nothing was really going to die from one hit.

He shifted his focus to the Shadesplitter. Unlike its smaller counterpart, it was waiting and watching, almost like it was intelligent. It had eyes that glowed a soft green, and Sev tensed, waiting for it to make the first move—

Misa threw her mace at it.

The Shadesplitter blocked, of course, but that was only one of her copies; she charged up almost immediately after, following up with a kick below the blades and between its legs, then attempting to crush her mace into its skull. It raised a bladed hand to block that too, and at the last second Misa shoved herself away before her mace could come into contact with it.

Sev saw why. The first mace she'd thrown — the copy — was cut clean in half, a ripple of spatial magic keeping the two pieces only technically intact. The Shadesplitter glared at them, letting out a skittering roar, then charged toward Derivan, who threw the glass Remembrance he held at the ground.

It exploded into a sharp burst of light that glimmered with color. Sev thought he recognized it for a sharp, painful second, as a brief memory of fireworks and festival touched on his mind; he pushed it aside to stay focused on the fight, and seized upon his Divine Domain to take control of the light before the Remembrance's power faded.

Light swirled like a physical thing, a brief flash and glittering color turning into a torrent and a river. Sev felt the God of Light open the connection between them a little more, lending more power to him than he strictly should have; he felt the light he held in his grasp shine even brighter as everything around them darkened.

The shadows grew as he gathered up the light. The Shadesplitter shrank back, almost fearfully.

And then it spoke in a hissing, broken voice. "S...Stop. Stop. Stop."

The Shadowskitter wove in from where it had impacted the wall. With all the light he had gathered, Sev almost didn't see it. It ducked underneath the light he carried, then leapt, tiny claws gathering enormous amounts of spatial-void magic that screamed like sharp razors even to Sev's unattuned senses—

Straight towards the Shadesplitter.