The cave hummed with glowing sigils and a sort of vitality—like it was actually alive.
It technically was, but only Reoloy knew that.
The air came against him in a slow, rhythmic exhale that pressed his skin and lifted again, like something vast was sleeping just beyond the plummet in front of them.
The scent of mineral cold hit his nose and something older beneath it: Reoloy wasn't sure what it was, but it smelled almost sweet. Floral, even.
He stood with his back against the cave wall, knees loosely bent, looking down into the pit that marked the cave's end as well as his entrance of choice.
He had felt it many times before, but being here now was kind of disorienting. All this had been covered by a loading screen he stared at.
'Unlike the rest of the game, the south was always much more limited in its content,' Reoloy mused absently. 'Even the journey through the mountains was some stupid, unrelated mini-game...'
The hole wasn't dramatic by any measure that would satisfy someone who hadn't spent the last few weeks bleeding toward it. Almost pitch black, but details came through. Wide enough for five to fall through side by side. Its grey stone edges—a different stone from the rest of the cave's purple surface—were carved with inscriptions similar to the ones on the main door from earlier. They served no purpose, since he'd already been registered.
Pale light came from somewhere inside. Not torchlight—lamps powered by the ruin's core, steady and free. Under different circumstances, the visibility might have seemed like a courtesy, but this was a trial for one of the pinnacle relics of the world. It was never going to be that kind.
The sickly green light was a trap to those unaware of its function. The longer you walked beneath it, the more it quietly hollowed out your thoughts, until there was nothing left and you became easy pickings for the guardians nearby.
'This is it.' His heart was beating out of his chest. 'This is actually, genuinely it.'
It wasn't that he hadn't been aware of it before now, more so that it felt too real now... because it was.
Not far from him, Lohan was crouched over a shallow puddle near another section of cave wall, giving it total, unguarded attention. Not really unusual. She often did that for things she felt warranted her investment. She'd been at it for two minutes. Whatever she was looking at had apparently earned it.
"There's a fish," she announced.
"There's no fish."
"There's something."
"Well, don't touch it."
Laurencia, sitting apart from them both with her arms folded and the stiff posture of someone who had just remembered exactly what happened the last time she'd been around this particular teenager, made a short sound in the back of her throat.
"You said this place is guarding a Supreme Grade Regalia," she said, tone even, expression giving away everything else. "You don't just pick those up like trinkets at a market stall. We should be sharper than this."
Reoloy stared at her.
She stared back at him. The pale light from the threshold somehow found her face at a strange angle and made her look briefly, oddly alien.
He swallowed a laugh, his nerves calming a bit.
"Fair," he agreed. "You remember everything, right?"
"Pretty sure, yeah," Lohan said, standing and rolling out her shoulders.
"I remember you glossing over how you got me here in the first place..."
Reoloy cleared his throat. "Power, glory and riches first."
That seemed to do it—for now, at least.
Maybe longer. She looked especially settled on the riches part.
With everything settled, he nodded at the two and led them in dropping down the pit.
Despite seeming like a short drop from above, they hit a wave of distortion on the way down, stretching the fall out by a good twenty seconds or so.
In the middle of that, Reoloy's senses prickled with the distinct, crawling feeling of being watched.
'Just this once, please be wrong...'
All three—except Lohan—landed with an unstable stumble, correcting their stances and taking in the surroundings. The hole they'd just exited was now absurdly high on the tall ceilings of the halls.
"Fun," Reoloy muttered under his breath. "Just like old times."
In one direction, sound carried clearly—movement, and a lot of it. That was the section they'd just skipped over by using this other entrance. The silence on the other side wasn't the least bit comforting, however.
"Alright. We're about sixty percent of the way through from here." He kept his voice low and even. "If we're lucky with the timing, we can use the side paths I mentioned earlier while skipping most of the encounters entirely."
"Really?!" Laurencia's forced composure cracked instantly, pure relief spilling through. "So we only have to deal with one enemy? Let's go—come on, move!"
Reoloy watched her march off like she knew the way, then followed quietly after her with Lohan right behind him.
The guardians in the ruins were artificial beings created by Luvarne, just like the sea beasts encountered during their voyage. The difference was that these had more variety and less destructive power... usually.
The grand majority were odd facsimiles of sea or airborne creatures, keeping with the sky-and-sea theme the Regalia carried. For one reason or another, they were smaller and more speed-focused.
The reincarnator was least worried about them.
Other variations were either basic armoured soldier golems or hidden assassin types that could prove to be tricky but were manageable.
The real threat was Drumel, the knight golem.
Game lore specified it as an apparent perfect copy of some legendary knight who actually existed in the ancient period.
He had always steamrolled past it, but that was when he was in the mid-game section with all kinds of skills, abilities, and relics under his belt.
'Right now, I'm less than an inexperienced game repeater...'
It kind of stung when he actually thought about it.
"Where to?" Laurencia asked, finally realising she didn't know where to go once they hit a split in the road.
Three paths. Same ancient-futuristic hybrid feel. Different levels of dread.
"That way," Lohan guessed, pointing confidently down the right path. "I can barely hear anything from that direction, so that way."
Reoloy sighed. "If you want a quick end, sure."
They turned to him, already walking down the middle path slowly with his hands in his pockets.
"They're hiding. Plus, it's riddled with traps."
One of the earlier attempts he'd made in RON ended with his character impaled by a bunch of hidden daggers.
He didn't feel confident enough to try it in real life.
Laurencia stared up at the high halls that only seemed to get higher down that specific way, swallowing the lump in her throat.
"Are you sure?" she asked, more to dissuade him than anything. "There's like a hundred different mana presences coming from that direction."
And if a relatively ordinary civilian like her could feel them, they were significantly powerful enough. Reoloy understood her hesitation. He had no reliable measuring stick, but the enemies did seem a lot stronger than he'd thought they'd be.
Regardless, he wasn't intending to fight them, so it was fine.
"There's a secret opening about fifty metres to the right," he explained calmly. "It will take us past them with no issues as long as there's no patrols that far out."
Lohan nodded and followed, but Laurencia paused for a moment.
It didn't escape her notice that Reoloy was much more restrained than usual. It wasn't calmness—in fact, it was an edge she had never seen in him before now.
Whatever it was that had him fearful, the mere attempt to imagine it rattled her to her core.
Silently, she started walking after them.
She decided she just needed to survive this, no matter how crazy his decisions looked in the moment.
At the front, Reoloy extended his senses to the hidden opening, confirming that nothing was close by before breaking into a run.
It would make more noise, but he weighed it as less risky than getting caught before they could hide.
Fortunately, they arrived with no issues. Less fortunate, the sound drew the guards' attention, so they were coming.
"Lohan!" Reoloy called. "Send your ki into this brick in exactly the way I tell you."
The lavender-haired teen was in position immediately, her hand flat against the surface.
"Short pulse, long, short, short, long and then short!"
In three minutes, she was done, and the wall fizzled out of existence. Reoloy shoved both girls through, then stepped in after them as it reappeared behind him—just in time for the monsters to crash land right in front of it, confused and loud and a half-second too late.
In the dark tunnel, Reoloy and Laurencia panted while Lohan looked ahead. Her eyes were much sharper than theirs—a passive benefit of possessing ki.
"That was too close," Laurencia exhaled.
"It was," Reoloy agreed, a frown forming. "They were abnormally fast to notice us and..."
"And what?"
He glanced at her for a moment and then shook his head.
"Nothing."
He moved to where the tunnel became more spacious and sat down.
"It's all empty," Lohan reported.
"Yeah, we should be safe here," Reoloy affirmed.
Looking back at what just happened, the pit in his stomach grew deeper. The monsters had moved much faster than he was used to, and in the brief gap before the wall reappeared, he'd caught a glimpse of the enemies.
Slick grey humanoids with deformed sandworm-like heads lunging around on all fours.
He'd never seen those before.
'What's going on?' he pondered grimly. 'Is Luvarne... awake?'
He'd entertained the idea after the bridge collapse. It was clearly not the work of a monster, and there hadn't been any hints of mana, ki, or casis involved, which led him to believe only the Supreme Grade Regalia could've pulled it off.
According to Gaiskas, true relics siphoned element from the atmosphere and used it to perform their functions.
Relics with strict use cases tied to a specific one of the three powers converted element to whatever power was necessary and used it.
Regalia, in general, were on a different scale.
But Supreme Grades were incomprehensible. Even the ancient laikern had said that it was possible they could control element itself.
Reoloy's glove, for example, formed a claw of element that could alter its shape, size and behaviour.
If Luvarne—which possessed a powerful ego of its own—was currently independently active, it wasn't too far-fetched to say that it used element to destroy the bridge, was the presence he felt watching earlier, and was now creating new creatures to counteract the knowledge he had.
'That changes everything...'
He would need to severely re-evaluate his approach.
"Reoloy."
To start, he'd have no choice but to bring Gaiskas out sooner—as much as he detested the thought.
"Reoloy."
Next, if Lohan could manage it, she'd sweep through as many enemies as possible and draw their attention while he and Laurencia pushed to just outside the central room.
"Reoloy..."
He'd give her directions to a secret passage she could use to escape the pursuit and join back with them, then they would face Drumel.
"Reoloy... Reoloy... Reoloy..."
"What?!" he snapped—and instantly froze.
His companions were in front of him, staring like he'd lost his mind, but...
The voice had come from behind him.
He turned slowly.
A bulk of a creature phased into existence—larger, heavier, a brollic version of the things he'd seen outside—its invisibility peeling away layer by layer, revealing just how much of the space it had been quietly occupying.
"Run!"
Reoloy's claw surged to life, cutting through the beast's arm and leg and giving them room to slip underneath it.
Without so much as a word from him, Lohan had already mustered her ki. It was a lot more controlled than before—a testament to her time training with Meyer.
Beside her, Laurencia pulled a baton out of her storage pocket and clutched it tightly against her chest as she ran for dear life.
The monster seemingly didn't possess regeneration, but wasn't slowed in the slightest from the loss of its limbs. It eerily crawled through the tight path, only a hair's breadth away from reaching them.
'Without a conventional head, we have no way of knowing where its brain is... and for the core...'
They rolled forward, narrowly avoiding its round maw filled with dozens of rows of teeth.
Lohan was on her feet first, launching forward and driving an upward kick that snapped the abomination's "head" back. She clocked the space constraints a beat later as gravity brought it back down, and twisted away, pivoting off the wall and sliding back to the others.
"You can't fight here!" Reoloy yelled, then paused, contemplating his next action. 'I can't burn through my usage of the glove just yet...'
He clicked his tongue.
"Stick close."
The moment they were beside him, he swung his Regalia and cut through the floor, sending all three of them barrelling downward.
They crashed onto hard black marble, fine rubble trickling down over them.
Reoloy's heart dropped before he even rose. He already knew from the feeling alone—his gaze only went up to confirm it.
"Umm..." Lohan said, backing up until she was back-to-back against them. "This is a bit much. Even for me."
For the first time during this whole ordeal, her face strained with tension, though she tried to mask it with a smile.
"What's the plan?" Laurencia's voice was tight, sweat running freely down her face. "You have a plan, right?"
In what appeared to be a ballroom, stood thousands of ruin guardians.
Kinds Reoloy recognised, and kinds he didn't.
It was then that Gordoi's words came back to him.
"Depending on your mindset going in... the ruins can either be a moderate challenge… or hell."
The memories of his multiple confident "one day challenge" declarations flashed across his mind as he let out a hollow laugh.
"...Fuck."