There was a certain delirious joy to be found in the virtually effortless collection of weft. Veil scouted out building after building filled with the spectral wights, Raith’s dreamforged dart evaporating their foes while the other Myth Seekers herded the monsters with their mirror shields. When the occasional one broke away, it would quickly find itself shredded by Nyhm’s glowing claws.

  The wights went down, and the Myth Seekers’ levels went up. And so it went for hours on end, quickly darting through the increasingly thick patrols outside to the daemon’s indicated targets. The dungeon underwent three evolutions throughout their harvest, each time providing greater rewards from the kills.

  Raith squatted down panting after a particularly vigorous bout of dancing around an enormous hall swinging his weapon.

  “I can’t wait until we can get out of here and start stitching [Skills]. Anyone ready to braid up yet?”

  “Not terribly far,” said Thea. “If this [Quest] is worth as much weft as I suspect, it should get me there.”

  Nyhm nodded in agreement.

  “Same.”

  The team’s rapid progress filled Raith with excitement. This entire ordeal was madness, but if they made it out of here alive they would have braided up in record time. He might see his name on that Wall of Paragons sooner than he ever dreamed.

  Raith activated [Life in Staccato] and took a look at his pattern. He’d been making good use of the new [Skills] he stitched, but he could really use formal practice. Preferably with some professional guidance on how to best use his [Warrior] [Skills] in conjunction with one another. A well-trained veteran could string together some devastating combos, and he wanted to be more deliberate in the [Skills] he stitched from here on out.

  As the team moved further into the central district of Tarn, the buildings became less worn and decay less evident, as though this central stronghold of the gods and the true giants were the only part worth preserving in all of its ancient glory.

  Along with the general sense of newness, the size grew in proportion to the former residents of this once great city. The scale was surprising, and Raith's view from his distant tower top had not prepared him for the feeling of smallness that they felt when walking amongst this home of giants.

  Doorways and ceilings towered above them, and they entered these new buildings to find that even the furniture had been preserved, sized to match the scale of the buildings and their long-gone occupants. Chairs whose seats sat above the top of Raith's head and tables twice again that height. Kitchen knives, larger than a Pridian’s sword, sat atop massive cutting boards of ancient oak.

  The well kept preservation of the objects made Raith’s mind turn to the possibility of loot. He didn’t want to risk taking the time to search every nook and cranny, but he did not miss the opportunity to cast around these houses and buildings for anything of value, especially books or scrolls. He took Veil aside after the daemon returned from a scouting trip.

  "Hey buddy, while you're out there looking around, see if you can find me any books or a library or something like that."

  The little daemon nodded in understanding and darted off on his next important mission.

  There were several more buildings complete with easily vanquished wights before Veil led the team into what looked to be some sort of library. Raith quickly reassessed that initial impression. It much smaller in scale than a library, but the scale of these buildings threw him off. More likely, this had once been a bookshop, much like Vandamir’s.

  There was one shelf behind a pane of enchanted glass of preserved books, while the rest of them lay in dusty ruins. The preserved books were the only clue Raith had that these little mounds and scraps of dust that lined every other shelf in this room had perhaps once been great and wondrous tomes.

  Raith cursed whatever haphazard rule of this place kept chairs and curtains intact but allowed these priceless tomes to disintegrate. He could have cried at the loss of knowledge, ancient stories and wisdom that surrounded him.

  A thought occurred. He checked his [Duplicate Book] skill to duplicate a book and saw that the cooldown had passed. He looked around at the little piles of dust, wondering if this would be sufficient remains to duplicate a tome with his skill. And if it was, which random pile should he choose?

  The more he thought about it, the more he realized it really didn’t matter which pile he chose, as they were all complete unknowns to him and he had no way to find out. Sorting through the dust, he determined to find what seemed to be the closest thing resembling an intact remain he might unearth, thereby giving his skill the greatest opportunity to succeed in duplicating this impossibly ancient book.

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  He found some threads and what might have been a dried piece of leather making up the binding of a book. It was the closest thing he could find to anything recognizable amongst the piles of dust. He focused on the items and activated his skill.

  A gigantic smile split his face as he saw the fruits of his success. An enormous tome, even larger than the one in which he’d found his [Mnemonic Library] skill, sat before him. The cover read The Song of Delirium. Raith had no idea what that meant, but his heart soared just the same. How many thousands, no tens of thousands, of years old was this book?

  He turned to his friends in triumph, gesturing at the book, and they all smiled in return, Thea biggest of all.

  "You’re going to have to let my dad read that, you know."

  Raith grinned broadly. "Oh, absolutely. He’s gonna love it."

  She nodded, and he got his friends to help him wrestle the tome into his satchel of holding. Now approaching the tomes behind the enchanted glass, Raith reached out to open the panel when his ring abrubtly vibrated.

  Startled, he snatched his hand back, cursing himself for forgetting to check for traps. They had seen so few of them due to avoiding the inside of buildings he’d almost made a very costly mistake. After careful inspection, he discovered the one his ring alerted him to was quite insidious and would have released a poisonous gas cloud into the room with them.

  Raith slowly and carefully disarmed it and was glad for the reminder. Even moreso that the reminder hadn’t cost any of his team their lives. It was going to be vital to keep an eye out, especially as they got into areas of the dungeon that contained more valuables and therefore more worth protecting from delvers such as themselves. This small treasure trove of tomes proved to be their only written works that Veil could find for Raith as they continued to move their way further towards their goal.

  Raith periodically checked the enchanted arrow that continued to point unerringly towards the prize of the key that they must reach before the giant-kin. Moving as quickly as they could while continuing to slay the wights with effortless impunity.

  As with all good things, this too soon came to an end.

  It happened abruptly as the team battled a particularly large contingent of wights that Veil had led them to confront inside of some commercial building. An intact picture window graced the front of the building, displaying their battle to the streets beyond, which soon caught the attention of a passing patrol of bone horrors.

  There were multiple interior entrances to the structure in which they fought, making it difficult for Thea and Tolliver to effectively herd the creatures for Raith and Nyhm to pick off. This allowed several of the wights to maneuver around and threaten the mirrored shield bearers as they found themselves surrounded and in a precarious position.

  Just as Raith spun and danced around, disintegrating the creatures with his rope dart, he noticed that the growing horde of bone horrors had moved aside to make room as a sharp-eyed shrike serpent pushed its way to the front. Through the glass, the creature glared at them with beady intelligence that unnerved Raith in spite of his certainty that they were safe from these creatures inside the building.

  Although he could not hear it through the thick pane of glass, he saw the creature bark out what seemed to be orders to its surrounding troops, who by this point had grown larger than an elephant.

  The creatures all snapped to attention as one and thundered towards the doorway that had once passed giants and gods alike. Unlike the outer rings of the city, the doors here remained intact, and the giant wooden construct was closed tight against the oncoming horde.

  Again, Raith was sure they couldn’t get in, but was still glad that massive slab of wood remained between him and the oncoming enemies. As they finished off the last of the wights and paused to catch their breath, Tolliver’s head snapped towards the doorway and he pointed in alarm.

  "Look at the door handle."

  As one, the Myth Seekers turned to see the massive handle slowly rotating. They all held their breath as they heard the click of the mechanism freeing itself from the wall so that the door might swing freely open.

  The moment the bolt cleared the door swung wide, revealing a shrike serpent with what Raith swore was a wicked grin on its face. It stepped backwards to make room in the doorway for its horde of troops, and this time they could hear the hissing chirps as it pointed towards them in a commanding way.

  The bone horrors thudded forward, clearing the doorway in an instant and drawing a shout of alarm from Raith as they poured through.

  "Run!"

  The companions wasted no time in fleeing behind him, deeper into the building and up the stairs. Tolliver followed as a bat, heading in the other direction to give them an opportunity to be forgotten and thus increase their chances of escape from this horde of creatures whom they had no hope of defeating.

  The tactics proved effective, and Tolliver soon rejoined the team on the second floor of the building, hidden in a massive closet filled with brooms and buckets on the scale of giants. Raith looked around at his friends.

  "Well, that changes things, doesn’t it?"

  Nyhm nodded.

  "I think we just need to sneak on through from here out and get to the key and get out."

  "After we get the aethercore," Thea added.

  Raith frowned, realizing that he’d gotten used to the idea of this not being as hard as they feared it would be, and that fear had just been rekindled with this latest development. It was probably foolish to hope it would last.

  "You’re both right. From here on out, it’s stealth all the way. No more battles that we can avoid, and we should go way out of our way to avoid them."

  They all nodded in agreement.

  Raith issued new instructions to Veil.

  "Hey there, buddy. From here on out, we’re still going to go from building to building, because it’s easier to punch our way through a handful of wights than it will be to fight and avoid the bone horrors and serpents. But we’re going to do our best to keep this quick and stealthy and get through this as fast as possible."

  The little daemon nodded and darted off yet again.

  Thea added, "It’s probably a good idea to speed this along, anyway. We can’t be sure how much longer the formor will be tied up trying to get into the bank vaults."

  She was right, and Raith silently admonished himself for getting greedy with the wights and possibly spending too much time harvesting them to the detriment of their main mission, which was far more important than a few levels.

  “Alright, team. Let’s get that key.”