Chapter 366

Low-Fantasy Occultist

The silence in the canyon was deafening as the realization of what they were seeing sank in.

Nick stood in front of the rough stone wall, narrowing his eyes at the flickering drawing. He wanted to sneer in disgust at the scenes depicted, to dismiss them as mere flavor in a dungeon that already seemed dedicated to scaring them, but his gut told him otherwise.

Crude, shifting figures painted in blood-red pigments danced across the rock face. To the untrained eye, they might have looked like the primitive scribbles of a goblin tribe marking territory, simple stick figures being swallowed by the earth or hunted by monsters enchanted to move, wolves with too many eyes, and at the center of it all, the sun oozing black ichor.

But Nick saw the geometry beneath the gore. The lines aligned with the canyon's geological faults, tapping into the lingering ambient mana that the leyline kept spewing into the air.

He narrowed his eyes, shifting his focus from the physical to the metaphysical with [Empyrean Intuition].

The world came into focus, and the dried blood on the wall ignited with a sickly, pulsating glow. The crude drawings came to life, illustrating how each village hunted down, each adventuring party eliminated, and how each contributed to the whole.

Mana was drawn from the depicted deaths, spiraling inward to feed a central motif that dominated the fresco: a massive, indistinct wolf emerging from the black sun, its body stitched together from the limbs of men and the roots of trees.

It was a strange kind of sympathetic magic, Nick thought, his inner voice detached and clinical despite the horror. As is above, so is below. Mimic the event to shape reality so it can happen.

He’d never encountered something so clearly a ritual schematic, yet had nothing to do with the magic he knew, but while there were alien parts of it, things he had no context or frame of reference for, it was clearly part of a single work meant to produce an unnatural result, and therefore, a ritual.

"No," Nick said, his voice flat. "They painted it to make sure it happened."

He tracked the flow of mana with his eyes. The energy moved from scenes of slaughter, eerily similar to what they had found just outside the dungeon, and funneled toward a specific point in the mural. A focal point.

In the painting, the Great Wolf held a sphere in its jaws. A sphere that pulsed with the same violent, static frequency Nick felt whenever he focused on the entire dungeon, but with a distinct quality that he recognized as coming from [Sairoh the Howling Madness], the Outer Guardian they had defeated.

It’s a circuit, Nick realized, the pieces fitting together with a sense of satisfaction. The Guardian was the battery through which the mana was collected.

He couldn’t exactly determine the ritual’s purpose from this alone, but he strongly disliked the image of a crack in the world through which the massive wolf stepped. Even if it wasn’t meant to summon the Feral God to the material realm, it was nothing good.

"It’s sick," Malik spat. He reached out, the tip of his spear wavering as he aimed to scratch the face of a painted figure being torn apart. "We should destroy it."

“Don't touch it!” Nick’s voice cracked sharply enough to make the adventurer flinch. The spear tip froze inches from the stone.

Malik turned, eyes wide and defensive. "What? It’s just paint, Nick. It’s—"

"It is a sympathetic anchor, Malik," Nick said, stepping forward. He didn't shout again, as he didn't have the energy for theatrics, but made sure to let the other know he was deadly serious. “If you scratch that, you will destabilize the entire work, and either complete the circuit with your own life force, or kill all of us as the canyon collapses on our heads. Do you want that to happen?”

Malik slowly lowered the spear and stepped back. "I... no."

"Good," Nick exhaled, rubbing his temples. The headache behind his eyes pulsed, but he had no time for it as he felt the next Step, Hod, come together. It was fitting, in a way, since Hod was the capacity to comprehend and articulate divine truths, the Majesty. “Everyone, get back from the walls. I need to study them without interference.”

Raphael didn't ask questions. He knew this was Nick’s area of expertise, even if his curiosity was burning. "You heard him. Move back, now."

As the apprentices shuffled back, casting worried glances at the wall, Nick refocused on the mural. He needed to dismantle it. If they left it intact, the ritual could eventually leak out, or worse, it might attract something else to fill the void left by the Guardian, creating a new one and eventually fulfilling its purpose.

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Sairoh was the key, he thought. We removed the battery when we killed it, so the machine is off. But the wiring is still live, and for something this complex, it might be enough.

He traced the lines, deciding this had the markings of a Grand Sacrifice. It was a bastardized mix of dungeon mechanics and something older, reminding him of the darker corners of Earth’s occult past—the primitive Goetia, the blood pacts of prehistory, where gods were ravenous beings demanding flesh as payment. The entity behind this wasn't a civilized deity, willing to operate through the constraints of faith. It was a Feral God, a scavenger of divinity.

Still, it was incomplete. I can use that.

Nick’s eyes darted to the edges of the mural. Lines of mana trailed off the rock face, fading into the stone itself, where they connected to something else.

This isn't the only one, he realized, pressing his lips together.

The complexity of the spell work, the enormous amount of mana needed to elevate a Guardian to a Divine Avatar, or whatever this thing aimed to do, told him that this ritual covered the entire dungeon, and they had only discovered one of its cardinal points by luck.

A while passed, and eventually he stepped back and gestured for the other to relax. “It’s not going off anytime soon, of that I’m sure.”

“Are you okay?” Raphael asked politely as he approached, stopping a few feet away, his gaze fixed on the wall with a look of distaste. "You look like you’ve found something worse than just unpleasant drawings."

“That’s the understatement of the century," Nick muttered. “This is part of a greater work."

"Building what?"

“An opening for a god," Nick said, pointing to the central wolf figure. "Or a vessel for one. The Dungeon was trying to create the perfect environment for a divine being to materialize, using the Outer Guardian as a focus point. We killed it before it was finished, but the..." He waved a hand at the bloody scrawls. “The framework is still here. It could resume anytime.”

Raphael stared at the wall for a long moment. “That sounds very complicated. I didn’t know Dungeons could be that precise with their works.”

“It probably took months to set this up,” Nick muttered. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the expansion was a cover to hide this. We need to scrub this. If we leave it, the mana will fester, and it’ll act like a beacon for every spirit and monster within fifty miles."

“How do we destroy it?”

“We can’t use blunt force or spells; they would just keep feeding the ritual,” Nick explained, mostly to himself. "We need to ground it and discharge it back into the leyline, where the flow of natural mana will disperse it safely.”

He turned to the group, regarding them silently. They were in no shape for a banishment ritual, not that he would have expected them to know how to conduct one.

I have to do it myself, Nick decided. Though perhaps I can get a little hand this time. Hod is the sphere of Majesty, so commanding others shouldn’t interfere, for once.

“There is something you could do, though,” he said, gesturing for his senior to come closer. "I need you to make some space so I can work my wind."

Raphael stepped up, frowning. "Sandblasting?"

"Essentially. I need to strip the pigment from the rock, but also to do it slowly enough to get rid of the mana along with it."

“Is there anything we should be worried about?” Willow asked, eyeing the paintings with pursed lips

“There is a lot of negative energy trapped in the paint," Nick nodded. "Just don't breathe in the dust."

Before anyone could ask something else, he took a position in front of the mural, raising the Shard, and manifested his [Territory].

His shadow stretched out, spreading across the canyon floor like spilled ink. It wasn't the fierce power he used in battle, but a containment barrier. A quarantine zone of sorts, to keep the dungeon from reacting.

"Begin," Nick commanded.

Raphael clapped his hands, and space folded upon itself, expanding far beyond what the canyon walls could allow. Nick took advantage of it and flexed his will, causing the wind to pick up. It carried the grit of the canyon floor and swirled against the bloody frescoes as lightly as a feather, but with much more abrasive intent, filled with his emotions in the same way that [Bolt of Wrath] was.

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

The sound was like nails on a chalkboard. As the first layer of dried blood flaked away, a low groan echoed through the canyon.

"Steady," Nick warned, feeling the accumulated power being released press into his mental defenses. To reach Hod, he couldn’t let a single wisp go unaccounted for.

It was furious, lashing out with invisible tendrils of malice, seeking a new host. It aimed to infect him, to distort his body and mind as it had done to the villagers, but it ran directly into his [Territory].

To Nick, the spiritual sludge felt heavy and oily. It coated his mind, whispering promises of power and hunger. Eat, it suggested. Grow. Hunt. Conquer.

Oh, will you shut up, Nick groaned, pushing [Blasphemy] to the forefront.

"Keep it up," Nick gritted out, sweat beading on his forehead. “We can’t stop until it's bare stone."

Raphael pressed onward, spiraling space around him as the wind howled. The images on the wall began to fade away. The wolf's stitching came undone. The villagers turned to dust. The grand pattern was reduced to nothingness.

For several minutes, the only sounds were the wind and the low, resonant thrum of Nick’s mana fighting the ambient pressure. The students watched silently, witnessing a battle entirely invisible to them yet palpably terrifying. They saw Nick standing rigidly, his shadow writhing independently of the light, swallowing the red dust that Raphael stripped from the wall.

Finally, the last streak of crimson vanished, and the oppressive weight in the canyon lifted.

Nick exhaled sharply, dropping to one knee as the physical toll caught up with him. He pushed the last of the ritual’s energy down, grounding it harmlessly into the earth beneath him, and the dirt hissed, turning black and sterile in a perfect circle around his knee.

"It’s done," Nick wheezed.

Raphael leaned against a rock, wiping sweat from his face. "That was harder than it should have been."

"Sympathetic magic usually is quite hard to break," Nick said, forcing himself to stand. He dusted off his robes, trying to look more composed than he felt. “It has the weight of the soul to account for and all that."

But as the ritual's echoes faded, Nick felt something else.

The flow of mana he sensed earlier—the lines connecting this site to the others—hadn't been severed, and a small part of the ritual had flowed into them.

It was like snipping a single strand of a spiderweb. The tension didn't vanish, but shifted to the next. He sensed the mana surge away from the canyon, moving deep underground, rushing toward the East, the South, and the West in three distinct pulls.

Damn it, we’re going to have to deal with those too, aren’t we? We might have slowed the process, but a Greater Ritual like this isn’t as delicate as the minor ones. And with a leyline to power it and a divine mind behind it, it can probably withstand any disruption until it’s completely broken.