The shaking came again.
A low, ugly tremor rolled through the underground passage, followed by a distant impact that made loose grains of dirt trickle from the ceiling. A second later, another one echoed through the stone like some giant hammer was smashing apart the foundations of the capital itself.
Viola’s eyes narrowed.
Ludger had started.
Honestly, the fact that the castle was still standing was starting to feel more impressive than reassuring.
She reached down without wasting another second and pulled on the earthen gloves Ludger had handed her before leaving. The material looked simple at a glance, but the moment she tightened them around her hands, she felt the difference. Mana moved through them more smoothly than it should have, as if the gloves were guiding the flow for her and correcting small mistakes before they could fully form.
Of course he had handed over absurdly useful equipment like it was nothing. Viola flexed her fingers once, then looked at Luna and Elira.
“We move now.”
Neither of them argued.
Luna just gave a short nod, calm as always, though her eyes had sharpened. Elira nodded too, her expression far more serious than usual. The constant tremors had stripped away the last bits of excitement from the mission. What remained was focus.
Another boom thundered through the underground.
Viola took a slow breath and activated her bracer.
Mana spread over her body in a practiced surge. Her special armor unfolded from that flow with a smooth metallic whisper, plating her frame piece by piece until it covered her completely. The weight settled over her like a promise. Familiar. Solid. Reliable.
She exhaled once through her nose and stepped toward the wall ahead.
Ludger had given her pointers before they split up. Short instructions, dry and annoyingly simple on the surface, which somehow made them worse.
Don’t force it. Listen first.
Stone tells you what it is supporting.
If you move the wrong section, you bury yourself. If you move the right one, it opens like a door.
Easy for him to say. This was still the first time she had to use earth magic on this scale. Viola placed both armored hands against the wall and closed her eyes for a fraction of a second. She pushed mana through the gloves and into the earth.
At first, all she felt was noise.
Layers of compacted dirt. Stone veins. Old pressure lines. Broken patches where Ludger had already passed before. The underground around the castle was dense, tangled, and uneven, full of natural weight and artificial reinforcement. It was nothing like the cleaner practice conditions she’d worked with before.
Her jaw tightened. Then she forced herself to calm down. Not strength first. Sense first. The mana spread farther.
The wall in front of her ceased to be just a wall. In her perception, it turned into depth, pressure, texture, fractures, resistance. She felt the shape of the tunnel ahead without seeing it, tracing the sleeping mass of earth and stone like fingers brushing over something buried in darkness.
Seismic Sense.
Crude compared to Ludger’s version, probably laughable by his standards, but it worked.
Viola extended the sense forward carefully, probing for anything unnatural. A barrier anchor. A ward node. Reinforced metal grids. Hidden chambers with magic locks. Anything that might scream the moment they opened the wrong path.
Nothing. At least nothing in the section directly ahead.
“There’s no magical blockade,” she said, opening her eyes. “Not here.”
Luna immediately stepped closer. “How far?”
“Far enough.”
Which was not a precise answer, but it was the best she had while the castle overhead sounded like it was being torn apart by a monster pretending to be a ten-year-old guild vice-master.
Another impact shook the tunnel.
Elira glanced upward. “He is being extremely loud.”
Viola snorted once. “That was the plan.”
Then she focused again and pressed harder.
Mana pulsed from her gloves into the wall. Instead of trying to smash through it, she followed the weak lines she had sensed a moment earlier and pulled at the structure with controlled force. The packed earth shuddered, loosened, and then gave way.
Stone cracked. Compacted dirt softened. The wall in front of them lost cohesion and collapsed into a heavy stream of sand, pouring downward in a controlled wave rather than an uncontrolled cave-in. A narrow opening formed ahead, raw and uneven, but usable.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Viola stared at it for half a second. She had done it. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t Ludger-level. But it was open. A tiny, vicious spark of satisfaction flared in her chest.
“Move,” she said immediately, not letting it show too much.
She stepped forward first, boots crunching over fresh sand as she entered the new path. Luna followed right behind her, silent and alert. Elira came last, crossbows ready, eyes scanning every angle even in the cramped underground darkness.
Behind them, the capital trembled again. Ahead of them, the earth parted bit by bit under Viola’s hands. And for the first time since this insane plan had started, she felt like she wasn’t just chasing after Ludger’s shadow.
She was helping carry the mission forward with her own hands.
The closer they got, the worse it became.
At first, the tremors had come like distant thunder, muted by layers of earth and stone. Now each impact carried real force behind it. The tunnel shivered around them every few seconds, dust spilling from the ceiling, pebbles skittering across the ground, the walls groaning with strain as if the entire underground network was being shaken by a giant’s hands.
Ludger was truly going all out.
Viola clicked her tongue and kept moving, one hand against the wall, the other slightly raised as mana flowed through the earthen gloves. Part of her really wanted to see it. She wanted to see what he looked like up there when he stopped pretending to be reasonable. She wanted to see the faces of the people trying to block him when they realized just how monstrously strong he actually was.
A small, savage part of her wanted to grin at the thought. But the mission mattered more. That was the whole point.
If she got distracted now, if she messed this up, then all it would do was prove Ludger right. It would confirm every dry, irritating, infuriating thought he’d probably had about keeping her away from this kind of work. That she wasn’t ready. That she would get emotional. That she would become dead weight at the worst possible time.
No. Absolutely not. She pushed more mana into the earth and kept opening the path.
The tunnel ahead gave way in rough segments, packed dirt turning loose, stone splitting where she forced the pressure lines apart. It was not clean work. Ludger would have made it look effortless, almost insultingly so. Viola had to keep adjusting every few steps, correcting the angle, reading the stress, making sure the passage did not collapse on top of them before they reached their target.
Even then, it was getting worse.
By the time they neared the castle’s underground area, chunks of stone had already started falling around them. A slab cracked loose from above and smashed against the ground behind Luna, exploding into fragments and dust. Another section of ceiling sagged dangerously to the left, supported only by a thin rib of compacted earth Viola had not had time to reinforce properly.
The whole tunnel felt unstable now, half-forced into existence while a battle above them hammered the foundations without mercy.
Elira glanced around once, her voice low but steady. “Your tunnel is not exactly comforting.”
Viola kept moving. “Then walk faster.”
Luna, naturally, said nothing. She just adjusted her footing and continued forward with the same maddening calm as always.
Another impact boomed above them. This one was so strong the ground jumped under their feet.
Viola stopped. Her eyes sharpened.
She pressed one armored hand flat against the wall and sent her mana outward again, deeper this time, pushing Seismic Sense through the layered stone ahead. The structure of the underground unfolded in her perception in rough, shifting shapes. Walls. Cavities. Pressure lines. Empty rooms. Reinforced sections. Moving bodies.
Then she found it. Her breath hitched for half a second.
“I found them.”
Luna and Elira stopped immediately.
Elira looked at her. “Good job.”
The praise was simple, almost casual, but Viola did not react the way she normally would. Her expression tightened instead, turning complicated.
Because yes, she had found the dungeon. That was the good part. The bad part came right after.
“There aren’t many guards actually inside,” Viola said slowly, still reading what she could through the earth. “Not compared to what I expected.”
Luna frowned faintly. “That should be good.”
“It would be,” Viola replied, “if that was the whole problem.”
She swallowed once and focused harder, trying to make sense of the presences below and above. The dungeon itself felt wrong. Not empty. Not exactly crowded either. But wrong.
“There are more above,” she said, her voice lowering. “A bunch of them. More than inside the cells area.”
That alone was bad enough. It meant the route into the dungeon might be lighter than expected, but the space above it was loaded with soldiers ready to crash downward or seal the exits the moment something went wrong.
Still, that wasn’t what bothered her most. Her brows drew together.
“And…” Viola hesitated for the first time since they started moving. “There are some weird presences inside the dungeon.”
Luna’s eyes narrowed. “Weird how?”
Viola did not answer immediately. Because she wasn’t fully sure.
The guards were obvious enough. Dense, moving sources of life and mana. Their patterns made sense. Human. Armed. Alert.
These others didn’t. Some felt too still. Some felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with size. One or two seemed almost blurred at the edges of her perception, like they were there and not there at the same time. Not invisible. Not hidden in the normal sense. Just… wrong. Hard to pin down cleanly through the earth. She didn’t like that at all.
“Not normal guards,” Viola said at last. “That’s the best I can give you.”
Elira’s usual curiosity vanished completely, replaced by cold focus. Her hand tightened around one of the runic crossbows. “Prisoners?”
Viola shook her head. “Maybe some of them. Maybe not all.”
Luna was silent for a moment, processing.
Then another violent tremor ran through the tunnel, and a spray of grit rained down over all three of them. Somewhere above, something massive cracked apart.
Ludger.
Viola exhaled through her nose and forced her focus back into place.
“Whatever those things are,” she said, “we’re here now.”
She looked at the wall separating them from the dungeon zone.
The stone between them and the target suddenly felt much thinner than before.
“Get ready,” Viola said. “Once I open this, we don’t get to hesitate.”
Luna listened without interrupting, her eyes half-lidded in that way she had when her mind was moving faster than her face ever showed. Then she looked at Viola and made the decision immediately.
“Open two exits,” she said. “One outside the dungeon, one inside.”
Viola blinked once. “You’re splitting us.”
Luna nodded. “I’ll take care of the guards outside before they can react properly. That should buy you time before anyone inside understands what’s happening.”
Then she turned to Elira.
“Protect Viola no matter what.”
There was no hesitation in her tone. No wasted softness. Just a clear assignment. For a moment, Elira looked surprised at being addressed that directly. Then the cryomancer’s expression settled, and she gave a firm nod.
“I understand.”