Chapter 53: Dungeon Break -Part 2

Ignatius was fighting right at the front lines beside three young recruits, his broad frame standing as a stubborn wall of meat and iron against the tide of darkness.

His heavy face was entirely smeared with a thick paste of sweat, soot, and gray dust, his weathered leather armor already heavily stained with the foul, dark blood of slaughtered beasts. With a deep, guttural bellow that echoed above the deafening chaos of the breach, he chopped down hard on the massive skull of an invading Earth Bear.

The heavy iron blade bit deep, shearing through hide and bone, but the beast’s dense skull structure clamped around the metal like a vice, trapping his primary weapon deep inside the dying monster’s head. Ignatius planted his boot against the bear’s snout and yanked, but the weapon refused to budge.

In that critical second of overextension, the shadows directly behind him writhed violently. A massive Shadow Wolf, easily the size of a carriage horse, leaped into the air from the smoke. Its crimson eyes burned with a dark, toxic purple light, and its jaws pulled back to reveal rows of razor-sharp fangs, dripping with caustic saliva as it aimed straight for Ignatius’s fully exposed neck.

"Old fool," I muttered, crouching low on the soot-stained edge of a three-story brick chimney directly above the chaotic street.

I reached down to my leather belt, pulled out a single, plain steel lockpick, and aimed the narrow tip straight at the airborne predator.

Locksmith’s Eye!

In a fraction of a heartbeat, my vision inverted. The violent, messy world of screaming guards and roaring monsters dissolved into a dark blueprint composed entirely of glowing mana pathways. Golden lines stretched across my field of vision, mapping the internal energy networks of everything beneath me.

My golden sight locked squarely onto the Shadow Wolf’s primary physical mana node, a tightly bound, pulsing knot of energy embedded deep within its left shoulder joint. That specific node controlled the kinetic output and muscle contraction of its entire front left limb.

Open!

An invisible, needle-thin beam of golden energy erupted from the tip of my steel lockpick. It sliced through the air instantly, striking the airborne beast mid-flight and forcibly unlocking its physical mana channel. Rather than suppressing the energy, the forced unlock flooded the joint with an unchecked, chaotic surge of raw, unchanneled mana, snapping the internal tumblers of its muscle control.

The Shadow Wolf’s front leg went completely limp in an instant. The sudden loss of structural muscle tension ruined its carefully calculated leap.

Losing all balance midair, the giant beast swerved violently off course, missing Ignatius’s exposed neck by mere inches and crashing headfirst into a towering pile of wooden supply crates right beside his feet. Wood shattered like dry tinder, sending splintered boards and iron hoops flying across the cobbles.

"Ha! Missed me, you ugly overgrown dog!" Ignatius roared, completely oblivious to how close he had just come to decapitation, and entirely unaware that his life had been saved by an eight-year-old child standing silently on the roof above him.

Leveraging his massive upper body strength, he finally yanked his iron axe free from the dead bear’s skull, spun around, and drove the heavy, blunt iron butt of the weapon directly into the fallen wolf’s head, crushing its skull with a sickening crunch.

I did not linger to watch him celebrate his frantic victory.

I shifted my gaze away from Ignatius and toward the center of the breach, where the main defense line was rapidly crumbling.

A terrifying trio of giant Cave Trolls was tearing through the heavy oak and iron guard barricades as if they were made of dry twigs.

These were not standard subterranean trolls. Their hulking, grey-skinned bodies were grotesquely mapped with thick, dark purple veins where parasitic black threads had integrated directly into their circulatory and muscular systems.

They felt no pain, possessed absolutely no self-preservation instinct, and exerted physical strength easily three times greater than that of normal subterranean trolls.

Several high-level mages from the city guard were standing on raised platforms, repeatedly firing large rock spears and blazing fireballs into the advancing trio.

Explosions of fire and shattered stone rocked the monsters, tearing away chunks of hide and charring their flesh, but the corrupted trolls simply ignored the burning meat hanging from their bones.

They kept marching relentlessly forward, stepping over the burning debris and heading straight toward the densely populated residential homes of the Normal District.

"Their cores are infected," I analyzed silently, my golden eyes zooming in to scan the chest cavity of the largest Cave Troll leading the pack.

Deep inside its dense chest, behind ribs as thick as tree trunks, its translucent magic core was completely wrapped in writhing, parasitic black threads.

These foul organisms were biting into the crystal matrix, forcing its body to stay in a state of continuous, unnatural, berserk physical enhancement by pumping raw, corrupted energy directly into its organs.

If I allowed those three trolls to push past the final barricade, hundreds of innocent families in the Normal District would be slaughtered in a matter of minutes, long before the high mages could organize a proper secondary defense counter.

I reached into my inner coat pocket and pulled out my spatial key frame, holding the cool, intricate metal tightly in my small right hand.

I could not afford to cast large-scale spatial spells or flashy high-tier magic without instantly revealing my presence and identity to the keen senses of the high mages. But I didn’t need massive, destructive spells to destroy a corrupted beast.

I was a Locksmith. I didn’t break doors down with brute force; I simply touched the right node to release the latch.

I leaped off the three-story roof, bending my knees to absorb the wind, and let gravity pull my small body smoothly down into the deep shadows of a narrow alleyway right beside the advancing Cave Trolls. The cool night air rushed past my face mask as I hit the dirt quietly, blending into the darkness.

Close!

I focused my golden mana through the key frame, targeting the intricate internal mana circulation valve of the lead Cave Troll’s magic core from twenty feet away.

The massive troll took a heavy step forward, raising a stone club the size of a pillar to smash a cluster of terrified young recruits who had fallen to their knees.

A quiet, crisp click echoed inside the structure of my mind.

The critical internal mana flow inside its core was forcibly locked shut. The valve snapped closed, severing the connection between its power source and its biological body in less than a millisecond.

The dark purple light glowing in the troll’s eyes vanished in a single frame. Its giant, muscular body went completely rigid, its complex biological functions collapsing instantly as its internal energy stopped circulating. The unnatural pressure sustaining its muscles vanished.

The massive stone club slipped from its paralyzed fingers, tumbling through the air and crashing harmlessly onto the dirt path. A second later, the giant beast lost all rigidity and collapsed forward like a felled oak tree, striking the earth with a deafening thud, completely motionless.

"What happened?!" one of the young recruits screamed in total confusion, shielding his face from the dust cloud raised by the falling giant. "Did someone strike its heart?!"

"Don’t stop! Cut its neck while it’s down!" another guard captain roared, surging forward and driving his heavy steel spear into the paralyzed beast’s throat.

I didn’t wait for them to finish it. I moved through the dark alleyways like a silent ghost, threading through shadows and broken brickwork, continually firing precise golden mana signals to lock the cores, valves, and key joints of every corrupted monster that pushed too close to the civilian defense line.

A Shadow Wolf attempting to leap over a defensive stone wall suddenly had its hind leg joints locked mid-jump, causing it to lose its momentum and tumble uselessly into a deep drainage ditch where guards quickly impaled it.

An Earth Bear charging violently toward a group of wounded adventurers had its heart’s mana node locked for just three seconds.

The sudden cardiac interruption halted its unstoppable charge, stumbling its massive frame and giving the surrounding guards just enough time to plunge a heavy boar spear directly through its exposed sternum.

To the guards, recruits, and mercenary adventurers fighting desperately on the ground, it appeared as though a mysterious wave of sudden fatigue, systemic muscle failure, or miraculous strokes of divine fate were striking the monster horde.

They had no idea that a small child wearing a black cloth mask was systematically dismantling the internal mana structures and biological engines of the invading beasts from the safety of the dark corners around them.

For over an hour, the violent, bloody battle raged at the Western Wall.

With their berserk momentum constantly disrupted and shattered by my subtle, invisible interventions, the guards and high mages finally managed to re-establish their footing.

They formed a solid, unyielding defensive circle, gradually slaughtering the remaining subterranean monsters until the violent roars faded and the street went completely quiet.

The battleground was a disaster zone. The street was covered in broken weapons, shattered stone barricades, pooled blood, and the heavy carcasses of hundreds of monster corpses.

I crouched quietly behind a ruined chimney on top of a two-story bakery, leaning back against the warm brick as I caught my breath.

My golden vision slowly faded back to my normal eyes. My small, eight-year-old lungs burned from the heavy physical exertion, and my internal mana reserves were depleted by nearly half.

Below me, the surviving high mages were walking cautiously among the massive monster corpses, conducting an official inspection under the illumination of floating mage-lights.

"This makes no sense," a senior mage clad in heavy purple robes said, using his wooden staff to turn over the heavy snout of a dead Shadow Wolf. "These are clearly low-rank subterranean beasts, yet their physical output and mana density were nearly double their normal natural limits."

"Sir, look at the magic cores," a younger mage called out from a few yards away, carefully holding up a cracked, extracted crystal pulled directly from the lead Cave Troll’s chest cavity. "There are strange, dark veins embedded deep inside the crystal matrix! They look almost organic!"

I narrowed my eyes beneath my black face mask, watching them from the shadows above.

The kingdom’s high mages were finally starting to notice the black threads, but their understanding was still far behind reality. They foolishly thought it was a natural mana mutation or some form of localized regional mana illness. They had absolutely no clue that an ancient, terrible entity was actively harvesting dark power and corrupting the subterranean ecosystem right beneath their feet.

I reached into my coat pocket and felt the reassuring, cold metal of my spatial key.

Before leaving, I glanced over at the far end of the street. Ignatius was sitting heavily on an overturned wooden barrel, greedily drinking water from a dirty leather canteen while a young female cleric wrapped a clean white bandage around his bleeding left forearm.

He was breathing heavily, covered from head to toe in dirt and dried blood, but he was completely alive.

A small, quiet smile formed beneath my cloth mask.

"At least the old man survived," I whispered softly to the wind.

I pulled my black mask higher up over the bridge of my nose, turned away from the battle-worn street, and leaped effortlessly across the rooftops, disappearing into the quiet, starlit shadows of the Normal District before anyone could notice my presence.