Chapter 19: Crystalscale Tribe
The morning fog still clung to the cobblestones as Azazel and Reginleif made their way through the waking town. Breakfast was a quiet affair of hard bread and strong tea at the inn. No grand plans were discussed; the rhythm of preparation was becoming routine.
Their first stop was the provisioner's. Azazel's purchases were methodical, a mental checklist being ticked off with grim efficiency: fresh bandages, a new coil of rope, another skin of oil, and a small sack of coarse salt. Reginleif vanished into the cluttered back of the shop and emerged with a small, wax-sealed clay jar. "Salve," she said simply, tucking it away. "For the damp."
Next was the blacksmith's quarter. The air rang with the sound of hammers. Reginleif approached the master smith, a woman with arms like knotted oak, and spoke in low tones. Azazel caught the words "balance," "fuller," and "monster bone." A special order. He didn't ask. Their partnership was built on a foundation of unspoken utility; if she needed a better tool, it made them both more likely to survive.
Bags heavier and pouches lighter, they made for the Fresh Tears Dungeon.
The entrance was quiet. No other parties milled about. The upper floors, freshly cleared just days before, were eerily still. The air was stagnant, the familiar growls and skittering absent. Their footsteps echoed in the vacant tunnels. It felt less like conquest and more like trespassing in a tomb they'd partially dug themselves.
"Cleared floors stay quiet," Reginleif murmured, her voice barely disturbing the silence. "For a time. The dungeon's energy is spent here. It will seed new things eventually, but not yet."
They moved with a practiced swiftness, descending through the familiar, now-harmless chambers. The silence was a tool; it let them hear the subtle shift in the air, the drip of distant water, as they reached the threshold of the unexplored twelfth floor.
The architecture changed. The rough-hewn rock gave way to smoother, sculpted tunnels. The walls were damp, covered in a soft, phosphorescent lichen that cast a dim blue-green light. The floor was slick with perpetual moisture. And there were traps.
Not crude pits or falling rocks, but subtle things. Pressure plates disguised as slightly darker stones. Nearly-invisible tripwires of woven, glistening gut strung at ankle and neck height. Reginleif took the lead. She didn't search with her eyes alone. She held a hand out, fingers splayed, and let out a soft, controlled exhale. A whisper-thin current of wind expanded from her palm, flowing down the corridor like an invisible tide. It brushed against the tripwires, making them quiver. It flowed over the pressure plates, sensing the minute difference in air displacement.
"Clear. Step where I step," she instructed, pointing out the safe path with the tip of her dagger.
Azazel followed, watching her work. "Your wind… it's precise. How many people can actually use a Mythic like that?"
Reginleif didn't look back, her focus on the next invisible wire. "Most people have the seed. It's in everyone, like a thumb or a heartbeat. But having the seed and waking it up are different things. For most, it stays asleep their whole life. It takes a certain… pressure, or a specific trigger, to make it sprout. Of those who awaken one, maybe one in ten get something as defined and useful as a proper elemental affinity like Wind. Most get vague whispers—a feeling for when it will rain, a knack for calming a crying baby, minor luck with knots."
"And the ones who get something defined?" Azazel pressed, navigating a tricky step.
"They become adventurers. Or soldiers. Or sometimes just really good carpenters or bakers, if their Mythic leans that way. But a combat-ready Mythic like mine? Or like yours?" She paused, finally glancing back. "That's rare. That marks you. It makes you a tool or a threat. There's no in-between."
Azazel absorbed this. A world where everyone had the potential for power, but fear or fate kept it buried. It made sense. It explained the reverence and the fear. "So your wind… is it common among the ones who do awaken?"
She shook her head, turning back to the path. "No two are exactly alike. I've met a man whose Wind Mythic let him hear conversations a mile away. A woman who could only use hers to never have dusty shelves. Mine is about pressure, perception, and cutting focus. It fits the hand that holds the dagger."
"And mine?" Azazel asked, his tone deliberately casual.
This time, she didn't pause. "I don't know. But a Mythic that makes people try to kill a child in its cradle isn't just rare. It's a kind of power that stories are written about—the kind kingdoms go to war over or burn at the stake. It doesn't fit in. It breaks the world around it."
Azazel said nothing. A threat or a tool, he thought. No in-between. The categorization was brutally simple. He needed to be the sharpest tool in the box, then. The one too useful to break, too dangerous to discard.
I can't tell her I fell out of the sky, he thought, the familiar internal wall slamming down. I can't tell her this is all a sick joke I don't understand. The basic isekai trope from the mangas: is get strong, get powerful items and survive. That's the only plan that makes sense. Everything else is noise.
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They cleared the trapped corridor and entered a wider chamber. The air grew colder, damper. The sound of dripping water was a constant percussion. And then they saw them.
The Crystalscale Tribe.
They were not monsters waiting to ambush. They were inhabiting. Three lizardmen were gathered around a small, perfectly circular pool of glowing blue water in the chamber's center, their forms kneeling in a ritualistic silence. Their scales were not green or brown, but a shimmering, pale blue and silver, catching the water's light like faceted tears. Crests of crystalline spines ran down their backs and heads. They wore simple armor of bleached bone and shell, adorned with tear-shaped gems.
Two more clung to the ceiling high above, their webbed fingers and toes finding purchase in the slick stone, watching with softly glowing eyes.
The scene held a fragile, sacred stillness. It shattered the moment Azazel's boot scuffed a loose stone.
Every reptilian head snapped towards them. The kneeling lizardmen rose in one fluid motion, not with a roar, but with a unified, sibilant hiss that echoed in the chamber. The ones on the ceiling dropped, landing with soft, wet thuds, flanking the pool.
No words were exchanged. The territorial threat was absolute. This was their sacred space, and the intruders had stepped into it.
The fight began not with a charge, but with an environmental shift. One of the larger lizardmen, a crest of particularly large crystals on its head, slammed its webbed hand into the pool. The water didn't splash; it exploded upward as a thick, cloying Mist Veil that filled the chamber in seconds. Vision was reduced to a few feet. Sound became muffled, distorted.
Azazel lost sight of Reginleif. He heard the sharp ting of a dagger deflecting something. A crystalline spike, conjured from the mist itself, shot past his ear and shattered against the wall.
He couldn't see to use You Shadow. He focused on the sound—the soft scrape of scales on wet stone, the almost melodic click of a lizardman communicating. He moved on instinct, ducking as a heavy, bone-club swung through the mist where his head had been. He lashed out with his kukri, felt it bite into scale and flesh. A hiss of pain, close.
Reginleif fought differently. He could hear her—short, controlled bursts of movement, the distinct whump of compressed air. She wasn't trying to see; she was using the mist itself. A sudden, localized gust would part the fog for a split second, revealing a lunging attacker, and in that window, a Piercing Feather would find its mark. He saw one lizardman stagger back, a needle-hole blooming dark fluid on its crystalline chest.
A lizardman lunged at Azazel from the blind side, jaws wide. He got his arm up, the creature's teeth sinking into his vambrace. A cold numbness, Sorrow's Bite, immediately began leaching up his arm. He headbutted the creature, feeling its snout crunch, and drove his kukri up under its ribs. The numbness spiked, making his fingers clumsy.
From above, a rain of Tear Crystal Spikes descended, punching into the stone around them. One grazed Azazel's shoulder, a line of freezing fire.
"Reginleif! The ceiling!" he shouted, his voice swallowed by the mist.
Her answer was a single, powerful exhale. A vertical column of wind shot upward, punching a temporary hole in the mist. He glimpsed a lizardman clinging there, about to throw another spike. Reginleif's dagger, propelled by another gust, flashed upward like a silver dart and embedded itself in the creature's throat. It fell with a crash.
The mist began to thin, the lizardman maintaining it clearly wounded. Azazel saw the leader now, the one with the large crest, chanting over the pool, its hands glowing with the same blue light. One of its wounded kin stumbled towards it, and the leader placed a hand on its wound. The bleeding slowed, the flesh knitting slightly—Healing Waters.
They couldn't let it sustain the fight.
Azazel ignored the lethargy in his bitten arm. He focused on the leader's shadow, cast by the glowing pool. It was deep and clear. "You Shadow. Hold."
Dark tendrils erupted, coiling around the shaman's legs. Its chant broke off in a surprised gurgle. The mist dissipated entirely.
Reginleif was a blur. She closed the distance in a heartbeat, leaping over the pool. The second ceiling-lizardman dropped to intercept her. She didn't change course. In mid-air, she twisted, delivering a devastating kick empowered by a concussive blast of wind to its chest, sending it sprawling, before landing in front of the bound shaman. Her daggers crossed in a flash of silver at its neck.
The remaining lizardmen, seeing their leader fall and their mist gone, let out chorusing cries of loss and fury. But the fight had gone out of them. They retreated, melting back into the dark, wet tunnels, dragging their wounded with them, leaving their dead behind.
The chamber was silent again, save for the drip of water and their ragged breathing. The glowing pool shimmered, undisturbed.
Azazel flexed his numb hand, feeling sensation slowly, painfully return. Reginleif retrieved her dagger, wiping it clean on moss. They didn't speak. They collected a few of the larger, fallen crystalline scales as trophies, avoided the sacred pool, and found the exit on the far side of the chamber.
A set of worn stone stairs, slick with condensation, spiraled down into a deeper, colder dark.
The thirteenth floor awaited.
They shared a look, a silent acknowledgment of the fight, the new terrain, the lingering chill of the venom. Then, without a word, they started down.