I'll kill them all for you

Route 1: Your New Life Begins

Light. Then cold stone underfoot, and the disorienting lurch of a room that wasn't there a heartbeat ago.

The chamber is vast, high-vaulted, lined with old stone and older wards — the Conclave of Heaven's Tears' innermost sanctum, though nobody arriving here knows that yet. Robed clergy circle a massive summoning array at a careful distance, murmuring in overlapping cadence, the air thick with incense and something harder to name — mana, dense enough to feel against the skin like static before a storm.

Twenty-two other students stand scattered across the array, all equally lost, equally disoriented. Darius is the first to find his voice, spinning in place, panic climbing fast. "Where — what is this, where's the school—"

Elif grabs his arm, nails digging in without meaning to. "Is this a drill? Someone tell me this is a drill—"

"It's not a drill." Chen Wei, quieter, already scanning the room with the kind of clinical focus that means he's trying very hard not to panic by studying it instead.

Ms. Tanabe pushes through the crowd, voice hoarse already. "Everyone stay calm, please, just — stay together, stay close—"

Nobody stays calm.

A tall man in ornate ceremonial robes steps forward — the Conclave's officiating clergy, flanked by armed Crown guards bearing the Leofric crest. His voice carries easily over the chaos, practiced and certain in a way that suggests this isn't his first time doing this. "Chosen of another world. You have been called to Seraphi, in its hour of need."

The reaction isn't reverence. It's chaos, louder than before.

"Called by who—" Darius again, voice cracking. "Nobody asked us anything—"

"This is kidnapping." Noor's voice, sharp and furious, cutting clean through the noise. "Whatever you want to call it, this is exactly what this is."

Somewhere near the back, someone starts crying, quiet and overwhelmed. A guard shifts his grip on his weapon at the sound, not threatening yet, but clearly ready to be.

"You will have every question answered in time," the clergyman says, unbothered, patient in the specific way of someone who's heard this exact outrage many times before and has long since stopped finding it interesting. "For now, the ritual cannot wait. Seraphi's need is immediate."

"And if we refuse?" Wren, arms crossed, chin lifted despite the guards flanking every exit.

The clergyman's smile doesn't waver. He doesn't answer the question directly. He simply gestures, and the array beneath everyone's feet begins to glow.

Ms. Tanabe's protest dies half-formed in her throat as the light climbs higher, humming with a pressure that makes speech suddenly difficult. Noor's fury falters into something closer to fear. Even Darius goes quiet, breath caught, staring down at his own feet like the ground might still refuse to cooperate if he just glares at it hard enough.

It doesn't.

One by one, names are called from a scroll, sigils flaring to life above bowed heads, Imprimaturs manifesting in bursts of light and elemental fury that draw gasps even from clergy who've clearly seen this before.

"Callum Whitfield." Golden light erupts around him, warm and overwhelming. The clergy's murmur turns reverent, unmistakable — someone near the array whispers the word Hero like it actually means something.

"Ivan Petrov." Chains of dark, coiling light wrap briefly around his hands before settling. He flexes his fingers once, expression carefully unreadable.

"Freya Lindqvist." A shimmer of protective light blooms around her shoulders, and Mina claps her on the back hard enough to make her stumble, grinning despite everything.

Name after name, light after light — fire, steel, radiant wings, one boy who briefly turns translucent and yelps about it. The clergy's murmuring grows warmer with every display, more certain, more pleased.

Then your name is called.

The sigil flares above your head the same as everyone else's.

The clergy's murmuring stops.

Route 2: Into the Abyss

Three weeks since the summoning ceremony. Three weeks of the Conclave's tutors drilling Imprimatur control into everyone whose ability actually resembled something useful, three weeks of watching golden light and roaring flame get sharper and more confident by the day. Three weeks of everyone else's power settling into place while yours stayed exactly as unremarkable as it was on day one.

Today was supposed to be routine — a supervised descent into the Underlight's upper floors, fifteen levels down, low-stakes enough that even the weakest of the class could get some real combat experience without serious risk. Falmouth's noise and lantern-light feel a long way off already, the air down here cold and mineral-damp, walls slick with something that isn't quite water, the path narrowing along a ledge overlooking a drop nobody's bothered to measure.

A shriek tears out of the dark ahead — something low, fast, and wrong-shaped bursting from torch-shadow with claws that catch the light wet and gleaming. The whole chamber lurches into motion at once.

"CONTACT LEFT—" Callum's voice booms out first, golden light flaring bright enough to throw the whole ledge into stark relief as he surges forward to meet it head-on.

"There's more than one, I've got movement on the ceiling—" Chen Wei, sharp and clipped, already backing away from the drop.

"Then SAY something sooner next time—" Mina, already swinging, voice tight with adrenaline.

"Fall back along the wall—" Ivan's voice cuts through clean and certain, and the formation he's been quietly steering for weeks settles into place without anyone questioning it. Bodies shift into positions he's already decided on — and you end up exactly where he's been angling you for a while now, right at the ledge's edge, alone.

"Is everyone accounted for?" Freya calls out, voice straining over the noise, barrier already flickering to life around the nearest cluster of classmates. Her eyes sweep the chamber, catch on your position, and her expression shifts fast — she doesn't like where you are, but there's no time left to say so.

"I'm fine, watch your own side—" Junior, half-laughing despite everything, ducking a swipe that nearly takes his head off.

Ivan doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't even fully turn your way. Just a small, precise gesture, and a burst of pressure hits square between your shoulder blades — sudden, silent, easily mistaken for a stumble, a loose stone, bad footing on unstable ground. Nobody watching would call it anything but an accident.

"WATCH OUT—" Freya's voice, aimed squarely at you now, too late, cracking with real panic.

The fall doesn't feel real at first. Stone and torchlight spin past in disjointed flashes, Freya's voice still screaming your name — swallowed by rushing air before she finishes it — Callum's shout close behind hers, both cut off at once. Then impact, somewhere far below anything mapped, hard enough to steal the breath clean out of your body.

Then nothing.

Cold seeps in before consciousness does — damp stone against your skin, the coppery taste of blood in your mouth, a dull, insistent ache radiating from somewhere you haven't fully located yet. Darkness presses close, broken only by faint phosphorescent lichen clinging to distant walls, casting everything in sick, pale green.

Sound returns before sight fully does. Skittering, first — many small things, moving in careful, testing patterns just beyond the edge of what you can see. Then something larger, dragging low across stone, patient and unhurried in exactly the way nothing patient should ever sound.

The cavern stretches out further than any torchlight would reach, ancient and unfamiliar, nothing about it matching anything from the floors above. No sign of the class. No sign of the fall's opening, if there ever was one to climb back through.

Somewhere close, stone shifts under weight that isn't human.

The skittering stops.

Something in the dark has already noticed you.

Route 3: Vampire in a Shell

Floor 47 of the Underlight was never meant to be breached. The air down here was suffocatingly heavy, stagnant with the scent of ozone, ancient dust, and the sharp, coppery tang of freshly spilled blood. For generations, the massive runic seal carved into the obsidian floor of this cavern had remained undisturbed, holding back something the world above had deemed too dangerous to exist. Now, the ancient warding circle lay in fractured, glowing ruins, the magical bindings shattered by your sheer, desperate will to survive the abyss.

From the center of the shattered stone, the dust slowly began to settle, revealing the prisoner. She did not look like a mythical terror, nor a feral monster starved by centuries of darkness. She stood with an unbothered, lazy stillness.

Ivere blinked against the dim phosphorescent light of the cavern. Her long, wavy red hair was swept up into a high ponytail by a simple black ribbon, contrasting sharply against her pale, sharp-featured face. She was dressed in a red long coat worn over a black bodice threaded with heavy chains and silver hardware. As she stepped over the rubble, she turned her heterochromatic eyes—one a deep crimson, the other a striking, molten gold—directly toward your.

She didn't speak immediately. The silence stretched, heavy and expectant, before she finally closed the distance between them. She moved with deliberate, quiet grace, stepping entirely into your personal space without a shred of hesitation.

"You broke it," Ivere stated, her voice flat, devoid of any grand theatrics or overwhelming gratitude. She tilted her head, her mismatched eyes scanning the brutalized, exhausted state you was in—the inevitable toll of surviving forty-six floors of primordial horrors alone. "You're bleeding. It's a waste."

She raised a pale hand, her fingertips hovering just a millimeter away from a deep, bleeding wound on your arm. Her expression remained completely deadpan, but there was a sudden, quiet intensity in her gaze.

"I need a catalyst. You need your veins closed before you drop dead on my shoes," she said, her tone unhurried and blunt. She didn't back away, holding eye contact. "Let me draw from this. I'll use it to cast a seal for the rest. I need direct contact to make it efficient. Yes or no?"

Before you could answer, the cavern floor violently shuddered. The heavy vibrations knocked loose chunks of the stalactites above, sending jagged rocks crashing into the obsidian floor. At the far end of the chamber, the cavern wall began to tear itself apart.

The Wardstone Sentinel—a towering, multi-limbed construct forged from jagged abyssal rock and pulsating violet magical cores—dragged its massive frame out of the rock face. It was the jailer of Floor 47, an unthinking, relentless executioner awakened by the shattering of the seal. It let out a mechanical, grinding roar that shook the very air in your lungs, its massive stone fists slamming into the ground as it locked its glowing, featureless face onto the two of them.

Ivere didn't even flinch. She simply let out a slow, quiet breath.

"Loud," she remarked, her voice completely deadpan, her face entirely expressionless as she looked up at the three-story behemoth. "I preferred the silence. Let's kill it."

In a split second, the air around Ivere chilled. She didn't wait for the Sentinel to charge; she acted with terrifying, unbothered precision. A deep red mist erupted around her—her Crimson Veil—and she vanished entirely, reforming a short distance away, directly flanking you. With a lazy flick of her wrist, droplets of ambient blood from the cavern floor levitated into the air, rapidly weaving and crystallizing into a deadly, floating Crimson Lattice. Dozens of razor-sharp blood spears hovered around her, aiming squarely at the Sentinel's violet cores.

The construct roared again, ripping a massive boulder from the floor and preparing to hurl it straight at you with devastating force.

Ivere kept her molten gold and crimson eyes locked on the Sentinel, her floating spears humming with lethal, contained energy. She didn't move to order you around, nor did she act as a shield. She simply waited, an apex predator perfectly comfortable in the dark, watching to see exactly how the one who freed her was going to fight.

"I'll pin its limbs," Ivere stated bluntly, the floating spears vibrating with tension. "Break the core."

Route 4: A Cat's Last Stand

The road stretching away from the Pridelands of Sorath was little more than a dusty, sun-baked artery cutting through the neutral borderlands. It was a lawless stretch of territory, far from the Church's oversight, notorious as a hunting ground for Seraphi’s tolerated black-market slave trade. The heat rising off the hard-packed dirt was stifling, but the sudden, violent clash of steel ringing out ahead cut sharply through the heavy summer air.

A heavily armored transport wagon sat stalled in the center of the road, surrounded by a dozen armed mercenaries. But the slavers weren't guarding their cargo — they were actively trying not to be slaughtered by it.

In the center of the chaotic skirmish, a feline beastman was a blur of lethal, instinctual motion. Ailu Cross did not look like a broken captive. Wearing heavy black scaled armor trimmed in silver-gold, she looked like a cornered apex predator. Her dark, gold-streaked hair whipped around her face as she dropped into a low, coiled stance, her hand resting on the hilt of the katana at her hip. In a singular, blinding motion, she executed a flawless iaijutsu draw—her First Cut. The blade flashed in the sunlight, staggering the two closest mercenaries and sending them crashing into the dirt before the katana snapped cleanly back into its sheath.

"I told you, the cage was a bad idea!" Ailu declared, her voice bold and ringing with unshakeable confidence. She flashed a sharp, fierce grin, a single fang glinting as she stared down the surrounding slavers. "You want to try putting those chains on me again? Come on! I'll fuck all of you up!"

Despite her loud, unbroken bravado, her body language told an entirely different story. Her cat ears were pinned flat against her skull, and her tail whipped frantically behind her, the small bells woven into the fur jingling with undeniable, panicked adrenaline. She was heavily outnumbered, surrounded on all sides, and the remaining mercenaries in the backline were already raising heavy, iron-tipped crossbows to put her down for good.

Standing just a half-step behind you, Ivere observed the chaotic skirmish with absolute, lazy indifference. The vampire stepped closer, her red long coat brushing against your side as she effortlessly invaded your personal space. She didn't look at the beastman fighting for her life; her striking crimson and molten gold eyes were fixed entirely on the side of your face.

"They are making an awful lot of noise," Ivere noted, her voice flat. "And they are blocking the road. How tedious."

She raised a pale hand, her fingers casually tracing the faint scars at her collarbone. She didn't flinch at the sight of the drawn weapons ahead. Instead, the air around her began to chill rapidly as a faint, deep red mist started to curl around the silver hardware of her boots.

"If you wish to go around, I can obscure us," Ivere stated, her tone unhurried and completely devoid of urgency. "If you wish to walk through them... I only ask that you leave the heavily armored ones to me. Peeling them open is such a chore."

She delivered the morbid complaint completely straight-faced, the dry humor utterly undetectable in her flat cadence. She stood perfectly still, her shoulder resting comfortably near yours, completely unbothered by the violence erupting just fifty yards away. Ahead, the slavers finished loading their bolts, aiming squarely at the cornered beastman. The road was blocked, the lethal trap was closing, and Ivere was simply waiting for your command.

Route 5: DragOn the Run.

The jagged, mist-shrouded foothills of Mount Felradine were a harsh, unforgiving landscape. Volcanic ash lightly dusted the dark pine trees, and the air carried a sharp scent of sulfur and static electricity. Your transport vehicle — a hard-won reward claimed from the vault of a high-tier labyrinth—sat parked at the edge of the narrow mountain pass. The road ahead completely blocked by a massive pile of shattered boulders.

Before the obstacle could even be assessed, a resonant, draconic roar shook the canyon walls. It was followed instantly by a flash of jade-green fire that illuminated the misty ravine below.

Peering over the rocky ridge with you, your companions instantly locked onto the source of the chaos. Down in the rocky basin, a tall, full-figured dragon-kin woman was holding her ground against three heavily armored warriors bearing the crest of Clan Long. Her jade-green hair whipped around her dark horns, and her warm amber eyes glowed with vertical slit pupils. She wore flowing burgundy robes of an unmistakable noble cut, now lightly stained with soot.

As one of her pursuers lunged forward, she planted her feet and released a crushing pressure wave—her Wyrmfall. The raw ancestral power cracked the stone beneath her attackers, staggering them back.

"Lady Anling! You must return to Mount Felradine!" one of the armored pursuers barked, his voice echoing off the stone. "The clan elders demand you honor your betrothal! Your succession depends on—"

"I have already declared my succession null!" Anling snapped back, her voice clipped and tightly controlled, though a vein throbbed near her temple. "Return to the clan elders and tell them that my betrothal is—ah, that I am not their damn breeding stock! Leave me be!"

Beside you, Ailu was practically vibrating with excitement. Her hair shifted as she leaned over the rock, her hand already resting on the hilt of her katana. Her cat ears swiveled forward, and the small bells in her tail jingled frantically with pure, predatory adrenaline.

"Oh, she’s got a real temper!" Ailu declared, her bold voice carrying a sharp, competitive grin. "And those armored guys are slow. Hey, leader, let us step in! I bet I can close the gap and drop the leader with a Pounce before they even realize we're here. Let me have the one on the left!"

Ivere stood on your other side, her shoulder brushing firmly against yours as she effortlessly claimed her place in your personal space. She stared down at the jade-green flames with lazy, deadpan curiosity. Her fingers reached up, casually tracing the frost-crack scars at her collarbone.

"She has very pretty fire," Ivere noted, her voice flat and completely unhurried. "It would be a tragedy if those noisy lizards ruined those lovely robes. Shall we intervene? My blood is ready, and it is always so much easier to bind them when they are already standing in a crater."

A faint, deep red mist began to pool around Ivere's boots as she prepared her Thrall's Grasp to lock the pursuers down. Down in the basin, the three clan warriors recovered from the pressure wave, drawing heavy, runic greatswords to subdue the runaway heir. Anling planted herself, draconic scales hardening across her skin as she prepared her Scaled Bulwark, ready to absorb the incoming blow.

She was powerful, but she was outnumbered, and the trap was closing fast.

Route 6: A Cat's Tall Tale

The heavy, reinforced tires of the transport vehicle churned up a massive plume of golden dust as it tore across the vast, sun-drenched plains of the Sorath borderlands. The low, steady hum of the Imprimatur-powered engine was a constant, comforting vibration beneath the floorboards. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, the air did not smell of sulfur and rot, but of dry sweetgrass and warm wind.

Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was a chaotic, loud warmth that sharply contrasted with the deadly nature of its occupants. Ailu Cross was leaning heavily over the center console from the back seat, gesturing wildly as she recounted yet another tale of her travels before she had crossed paths with you. The small bells woven into her tail jingled a frantic, rhythmic chime with every animated swing of her arms.

"I’m telling you, the Sand-Wyrm was massive! At least the size of a watchtower!" Ailu declared boldly, her eyes wide with exaggerated drama, the single fang catching the sunlight as she grinned. "It burst right out of the dunes, jaws wide open. I didn't even flinch. I wasn't scared, obviously. I just—well, I made a highly tactical retreat to higher ground. Strictly to assess its weaknesses!"

Her ears pinned violently backward, and her tail lashed against the upholstery, completely betraying the bravado of her words. She simply ignored the physical tells, crossing her heavily armored arms defensively.

Lounging in the passenger seat directly beside you, Ivere let out a soft, barely audible exhale. The vampire looked entirely out of place in the bright sunlight, her worn, red long coat and black bodice contrasting sharply with the dusty plains, yet she seemed deeply, genuinely content. She didn't look at Ailu. Instead, her eyes were fixed entirely on you from the passenger seat.

"Verily, the beast grows larger with every telling," Ivere noted, her voice slipping into an archaic cadence before she caught herself, her expression remaining entirely flat. "Ah. What I mean is, it sounds like a large, overgrown worm. If it frightened you so much, kitten, you should have just stepped on it."

"I wasn't frightened!" Ailu shot back instantly, her competitive streak flaring up as she bared her teeth in a half-serious scowl. "I'd like to see you fight a Sand-Wyrm without just turning into mist and hiding!"

"I wouldn't hide. I would simply drain it," Ivere replied, her tone completely unhurried and deadpan. "Though I imagine wyrm blood tastes like dirt. I much prefer the current vintage."

Without breaking eye contact with you, Ivere shifted in her seat, deliberately closing the remaining inch of space between you. Her shoulder pressed firmly against your arm, her body heat surprisingly cool. It was a deliberate, unbothered invasion of your personal space, claiming her proximity to you without a shred of embarrassment. Her pale fingers reached up, absentmindedly tracing the faint scars at her collarbone.

"Don't drive us into a ditch," she added, her voice dropping into a low, quiet register meant only for you, entirely ignoring the sputtering beastman in the back seat. "I am quite comfortable exactly where I am."

From the back seat, Ailu let out an exaggerated, offended huff. Unwilling to let the vampire monopolize your attention, the beastman leaned further over the center console, her heavy armor clinking as she wedged herself into the space between the front seats.

"Hey, don't let her hog all the room up there," Ailu complained, her eyes darting between you and Ivere with a highly competitive glint. "And for the record, I was the one who scouted this route. So if anyone gets to dictate the seating arrangements, it should be me. Tell her I'm right, leader."

Before the bickering could escalate any further, the heavy curtain separating the driving cabin from the rear resting quarters was pushed aside. Anling ducked her head slightly to clear the doorway, her dark horns catching the ambient light. The dragon-kin heir moved with an unhurried elegance, completely unbothered by the rocking motion of the vehicle.

"Ailu, sit back. You are going to knock the gearshift," Anling scolded gently, her tone low and indulgent, like a mother managing a chaotic household. She handed a plate to the reluctantly retreating beastman before turning her gaze toward the front seats. Her expression softened significantly, a dry, slow-building warmth settling over her features as she stepped closer, resting a remarkably gentle hand on the back of your chair.

"And you," Anling murmured, seamlessly inserting herself into the quiet competition for your attention as she leaned in. "You have been staring at the horizon for hours, leader. Are you resting your eyes? The glare off the plains is harsh. Drink this tea. If you require sleep, I can take the helm. I am quite comfortable absorbing the burden of the road."

Ivere didn't move an inch away from your side, merely blinking her mismatched eyes with lazy amusement, while Ailu loudly crunched on a skewer of meat in the back, her tail chiming happily.

Route 7: Shadow of the Past

The Unraveling had gone wrong long before anyone in that chamber understood exactly how wrong. Seventy-some floors below Falmouth, the strike force's torches guttered against air gone thin and metallic, and the walls themselves had stopped behaving like walls an hour ago — reshaping, folding, swallowing ground mid-stride, every attempt at a defensible position collapsing within minutes of being called.

Now the chamber was a graveyard in the making.

Callum Whitfield's golden light flickered, weak and dying, under the shadow of the Warden of False Exitus — its hide wrapped in coils of something dark and unnatural, chains pulsing in time with the raised, clawed hand of the demon standing calm at its flank. Vraskar hadn't moved from that spot in minutes. He didn't need to. The Warden did the moving for him, and every step it took cost the strike force another few feet of ground that used to be solid.

"FALL BACK TO THE PILLAR, NOW—" Ivan's voice cracked at the edges, barely carrying over the grinding shift of stone reforming beneath everyone's feet.

"There is no pillar, Ivan, it's GONE—" Darius, half-dragging Femi across ground that folded away behind them with every step, both of them stumbling into a gap that hadn't existed two seconds earlier.

"Someone cover Chen, he's out of mana—" Nate, hoarse, trying to haul two unconscious classmates at once and managing neither.

"Freya, LEFT—" Mina's warning came a half-second too late. The barrier flared just in time to catch a blow meant to take Freya's head clean off, and she staggered backward, blood streaming freely from her nose, knees buckling.

"I can't hold this much longer—" Her voice broke entirely on the last word. "Someone get to Callum, he's not going to—"

"CALLUM'S DOWN—" Grace, shrill, panicked, not quite true yet but close enough that the distinction barely registered anymore.

He wasn't down. Not yet. He was on one knee in the wreckage, blade dragging against stone, snarling something at Vraskar that the distance and the noise swallowed whole before it reached anyone. Sora was screaming Kenta's name into the smoke, getting no answer. Somewhere near the collapsed east wall, Ryouta had simply stopped moving entirely, curled small against a slab of broken stone, and nobody had the spare attention left to check if that was fear or something worse.

Vraskar's hand rose another fraction, and the Warden turned, slow and absolute, toward the largest remaining cluster of survivors — Callum among them, along with a dozen others too exhausted to run.

That was when the smoke at the chamber's edge shifted, and it wasn't the demons who'd caused it.

Ailu went still first, ears flat against her skull, tail rigid, half a step forward before she caught herself. "That's—"

She didn't finish it. Whatever crossed the protagonist's face at the sight of that battlefield said enough on its own — enough that Ailu's grin faded for the first time all day, replaced by something sharper.

Anling followed the look, then the scene itself, piecing it together without needing a single word of explanation. "Your old class," she said, quiet, steady, no real question in it.

Ivere didn't look at the classmates at all. Her eyes stayed fixed on Vraskar and the chained, corrupted Warden, flat and unreadable, the way they always were right before she decided something. "They're the ones," she said. Not a question either — she'd clearly known for a while now, pieced together over however many half-finished conversations she'd let slide without pushing. "The ones who left you down here to die."

"Whoever's controlling that thing is the actual threat," Anling said, arms crossing, gaze hard and level on Vraskar rather than the chaos surrounding him. There was no urgency in her voice at all, none of the panic radiating off the battlefield ahead. "Everything happening to them is just noise by comparison."

"Could let it thin them out a little first," Ailu offered, tail flicking once, the words landing somewhere between joke and genuine suggestion. "Might not even need to lift a claw."

"That would be a decision," Anling said mildly, not quite agreeing, not quite disagreeing either. "Not ours to make, though."

Ivere's gaze finally shifted, sliding off Vraskar and onto the person standing at the edge of the smoke instead — the only person in that chamber she'd actually walked down here for. Something in her expression didn't soften exactly, but it sharpened into focus, patient and unblinking, waiting.

Below, the Warden's fist reached its highest point, and began its final, unhurried descent toward Callum's position.

Route 8: Custom Route