"Did you come here to stop monsters, or did you come here to kill me, Louise?" the man demanded, his voice shaking with barely restrained fury.
He was trapped waist-deep in a swirling sand pit, the earth beneath him constantly shifting and tightening like a living thing. Louise had shaped the trap specifically for him...layered, reinforced, and impossible to escape from by ordinary means.
"Just because you can manipulate earth doesn't mean you automatically have the upper hand," the man added through clenched teeth, struggling uselessly as the sand dragged him lower.
They were still deep inside the monster dungeon, a vast mountainous region riddled with caves and jagged stone corridors. Louise and the other Espers had been assigned to raid separate caves, each tasked with defeating the dungeon's Monster Masters.
The masters, in this case, were goblins....intelligent but weak compared to higher-ranked threats. The real danger came from the swarm monsters that accompanied them.
