"AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"

It was a loud, blood-curdling scream that violently ruptured the throat of the woman echoing endlessly through the damp oppressive stalactites of the subterranean cavern.

The sheer power of the shriek alerted all of the other scattered members of the Death Cult residing within the cavernous underground chamber, prompting every single one of them to snap their heads toward the source of the disturbance.

"Those two are escaping! The prime nourishments for our god are runn—"

The woman’s fanatical warning was abruptly and brutally cut short as a sleek silver longsword shot through the dim lighting like a railgun projectile.

It impaled her directly squarely in the center of her forehead, completely exploding her head apart in a grotesque shower of crimson and bone fragments.

The sheer kinetic force of the blade pinned the gruesome, unrecognizable remnants of her skull directly to the jagged stone wall behind her.

Without skipping a beat, the blood-soaked sword vibrated violently before shooting backwards through the air, rapidly returning to its master.

It flew directly back to Klaus, who was currently leaning aggressively forward, balancing with impeccable core strength on another identical floating sword situated directly beneath his feet as it shot through the humid cavern like a sleek hoverboard.

The Compass of Truth was gripped firmly in his left hand with its needle trembling as it pointed stubbornly forward.

Meanwhile, Cedric, the scrawny fourteen-year-old boy he had just rescued, was currently wrapping his arms tightly around Klaus’s broad shoulders and his legs desperately latched around the older young man’s waist like a terrified koala as the sword rapidly sped forward over the uneven rocky terrain.

The remaining members of the Death Cult, which were surprisingly comprised entirely of women in this particular cavern room, immediately broke out into a frenzy.

Their heavy dark purple hoods fell back, revealing pallid faces twisted into horrific unnatural expressions of sheer fanaticism as their hands suddenly erupted... completely engulfed in ominous swirling black flames.

"Tear their flesh from their bones! The sacrifices must not leave the sanctuary!" one woman screeched with her eyes rolling back into her skull.

"Flay them alive! Offer their screaming souls to the abyss!" another wailed, violently thrashing her head side to side.

"He defiled the altar! Drink his marrow! Boil his blood!"

"Our god starves! Feed him! Feed him!"

"Kill! Kill! Maim and slaughter!"

"Big brother, what do those black flames do?!" Cedric asked, his voice cracking loudly in sheer terror as he squeezed his eyes shut, holding onto Klaus’s clothes so tight his knuckles were completely white.

Below them, the hooded women began sprinting frantically after their flying escape vehicle, completely disregarding human physical limits.

The ominous black flames crackling in the palms of their hands began to rapidly gather, growing larger and denser.

Cedric knew all too well that those flames could be easily manipulated and used for potent sleeping spells, since that was exactly the terrifying method they had used to knock him out and forcefully drag him down into this nightmare of a cave in the first place.

However, despite over a dozen deranged cultists simultaneously manifesting roaring bonfires in their bare hands right beneath them, Cedric realized something utterly horrifying... he still couldn’t feel a single trace of heat radiating from the flames.

The complete lack of heat made a cold dread pool in his stomach.

"Just know that if a single spark of that touches us, then we’re quite literally dead." Klaus said sharply as he took a deep stabilizing breath.

He could theoretically move the flying sword much, much faster to simply outpace them, but he was currently mentally juggling the telekinetic control of several different swords at the exact same time. It was a massive drain on his cognitive functions.

And though he successfully possessed the Trait of ’Light’s Blessing’ which allowed him to forcefully call upon the goddess to instantly refill his depleted mana reserves... he absolutely wanted to keep that trump card suppressed and hidden until it was absolutely undeniably necessary. Who knows? He might need to refill it three times in a single fight.

"Kekekekekekeeekekekeke!"

A horrific guttural cackle echoed from below. Klaus glanced down to see one of the cultist women literally running on all fours, scrambling over massive boulders and jagged stalagmites with the terrifying, jerky movements of a mutated spider as she relentlessly chased after them.

"Fire Sisters! Don’t hold back!" the crawling woman shrieked, her jaw unhinging slightly. "We don’t need their physical bodies to complete the ritual, we just need their souls... Just kill them!"

With that chilling command echoing through the cavern, the entire group of pursuing women immediately shrieked in unison.

They aggressively thrust their palms upward, rapidly blasting massive, compressed balls of the heatless black flames outward, sending them rocketing towards Klaus and Cedric like a barrage of anti-air artillery.

"Hold on tight..." Klaus muttered, his voice dropping an octave.

With a sharp mental command, he aggressively angled the tip of his sword upwards. The blade responded instantly, violently ascending and banking hard to the right.

Klaus practically rode the silver weapon horizontally along the cavern’s curved wall in a rapid spiraling ascent.

The action was blindingly fast. A massive black fireball slammed into the space they had occupied a mere fraction of a second prior, silently obliterating a stone stalactite into fine gray dust without producing a single sound or spark which made Klaus a bit surprised since Death Magic worked on leaving things.

Klaus gritted his teeth, his eyes darting frantically as he mentally calculated the chaotic trajectories of the incoming magical artillery.

He swerved violently, dipping the sword down to weave under a volley of three simultaneous fireballs. The black flames rushed past them, leaving a freezing suffocating vacuum in their wake.

He immediately kicked the back of the blade, forcing the sword to drift sharply against the wall, dodging another explosive sphere that silently chewed a massive crater into the solid rock beside them.

Suddenly, a particularly massive compressed black fireball curved unnaturally through the air, completely bypassing Klaus’s blind spot and locking directly onto his face.

"Look out!" Cedric squealed at the top of his lungs, his grip on Klaus tightening to a painful degree.

Time seemed to slow down to an agonizing crawl but Klaus didn’t panic. His expression remained utterly deadpan. As the terrifying sphere of soul-destroying black flame closed the final few inches, reflecting ominously in his irises, Klaus simply, casually tilted his head a few inches to the left.

The massive fireball whizzed right past his ear, close enough to rustle his hair, before heavily impacting the stone wall directly behind him and violently dispelling into a splash of absolute nothingness. Now this one didn’t harm the wall? Was there something happening that he didn’t understand.

Cedric’s jaw completely dropped.

He practically vibrated with excitement. "Oh my Goddess, you’re so cool!" he squealed, violently shaking Klaus’s shoulders in pure awe. "That was amazing!"

A thick, highly prominent vein immediately popped up on Klaus’s forehead.

"Shut up!" Klaus snapped, violently shrugging his shoulders to stop the kid from throwing off his precarious balance. "You’re going to get us both killed, stop moving!"

Down below, the twisted sisters shrieked in mounting frustration and immediately launched another massive, coordinated barrage of black fire but Klaus was already three steps ahead of them.

He aggressively accelerated, traveling further up the steep incline of the cavern wall, elegantly dodging the rapid-fire cluster of fireballs with completely unnatural physics-defying maneuvers.

With a final, powerful thrust of his will, Klaus pushed the sword past the vertical axis and fully flipped, seamlessly going entirely upside down.

The bottom of his boots magnetically gripped the metal as his sword faced the jagged ceiling of the cavern. Hanging completely upside down, Klaus’s eyes suddenly glowed with an azure light.

’All this stress... I hope I at least get some kind of absurdly good reward for this.’ Klaus thought with a heavy, irritated mental sigh.

While still hurtling upside down across the ceiling, he violently pulled back his right, free hand. In a flash of spatial distortion from his Storage Ring, a massive, chaotic pile of heavy, jagged metal scraps instantly appeared hovering in his palm.

It was a whole lot of them... Without a single microsecond of hesitation, Klaus forcefully surged a massive wave of dense, azure mana into the metallic junk, supercharging them until they violently shook with kinetic energy and violently threw them straight down toward the pursuing cultists using his spell.

’Shrapnel Burst!’

A massive, concussive shockwave abruptly exploded outward from the exact point of release with the sheer recoil almost forcing his body to crash entirely into the rocky ceiling but the devastating payload was already delivered.

The hundreds of jagged pieces of mana-infused shrapnel rained down upon the cavern floor like a localized shower of flashing, hyper-lethal meteors.

"Kill! Kill! We just have to kil—"

The deranged woman who had been running on all fours didn’t even have time to finish her fanatical sentence. She looked up just in time to see the blinding azure lights right before the supersonic scraps completely decimated her.

The metal ripped through her fragile human body with the brutal, unstoppable force of a high-powered shredder, instantly tearing her flesh to ribbons and painting the cavern floor in a gruesome splash of dark crimson.

The others were absolutely not exempted from the carnage.

One woman had her entire left shoulder and torso completely pulverized, her body spinning violently like a broken ragdoll before collapsing.

Another cultist took a volley of iron ball bearings directly to the chest, the high-speed projectiles effortlessly punching massive, gaping holes straight through her ribcage and out her back.

The cavern echoed with the sickening, wet sounds of high-velocity metal obliterating bone and organs followed by the heavy, lifeless thuds of corpses hitting the dirt.

However, some others, purely by blind luck or latent magical shielding, miraculously managed to survive the devastating carpet-bombing.

Seeing an opening, Klaus deliberately fell off his flying sword, hurtling downwards toward the remaining survivors like a predatory hawk.

"Big brother, what are you doing?!" Cedric squeaked out in absolute horror, experiencing the terrifying stomach-churning sensation of complete freefall.

Before the boy could even process the panic, three of Klaus’s telekinetically controlled swords suddenly whizzed violently past his face.

The blades streaked through the air like guided missiles, effortlessly and cleanly piercing the chests and throats of three of the four cultists that had miraculously managed to live through the shrapnel storm, pinning their twitching bodies firmly to the ground as they died,

Only one remained...

As Klaus rapidly plummeted toward the ground, he focused a dense, swirling concentration of magical energy solely into his right leg.

With a sharp, metallic clink, he fully activated Iron Skin, instantly transmuting the entirety of his right foot and lower calf into dense metal.

The fourth and final surviving cultist violently aimed her bloodied hand up at the speeding man coming down at her like a meteor.

She desperately tried to summon her magic, but her terrifying Death flames violently refused to sputter to life as her mana reserves were completely shattered by fear.

"My go—" she muttered, her eyes wide with sheer terror. Before she could finish, she got herself completely stomped through the air.

Klaus slammed down onto her with the sheer weight and momentum of a falling anvil, his iron-clad foot driving directly into the top of her skull.

He completely destroyed her head upon impact, driving her body straight into the solid stone floor. The brutal, devastating impact instantly generated a massive, visible shockwave that violently rippled outward, kicking up a massive cloud of dust and blowing his own hair, as well as Cedric’s messy hair completely back.

The cavern finally fell dead silent, save for the settling dust and the dripping of water and Klaus slowly drew back his heavy foot before letting out a long exhausted sigh.

’Serves you right...’ He thought coldly as his eyes swept over the carnage.

With a mental pull, he recalled the other three bloodied swords, turning his foot back to its normal fleshy state.

With a swift leap, he hopped casually back onto his primary hovering sword, the blade effortlessly taking his weight as he flew off directly in the exact direction to which the golden Compass of Truth was still stubbornly pointing.

He noticeably increased his flight speed now. It was much better and far easier to maneuver now that nobody was actively giving chase and throwing soul-destroying fireballs at them, though Klaus heavily doubted it would actually remain completely like that until they successfully escaped this hellhole.

"Big brother, what does this compass actually do?" Cedric asked, finally opening his eyes and peering over Klaus’s shoulder at the glowing artifact.

Klaus’s left eye immediately twitched in deep annoyance.

He slowed the sword slightly and looked back at the kid. "I’m sure you’re aware... I am absolutely not your big brother so why do you relentlessly keep calling me that?"

Cedric blinked with his expression turning completely innocent. "Because you were the cool guy who saved me! And you fight super cool too, so you totally deserve to be called Big Brother! Anyway, what does the Compass do?"

Klaus forcefully pinched the bridge of his nose, letting out a heavy, defeated sigh.

There was no winning against a stubborn kid’s logic.

"The Compass," Klaus explained monotonously, "will supposedly show us the safest, most direct exit out of this insane asylum."

"Oh." Cedric paused, squinting ahead into the darkness. "Well, Big Brother... then I should probably point out that the Compass is currently pointing straight North... but there is a massive, solid wall of stone right in front of us."

Klaus frowned, looking up from the compass. Cedric was completely right. The cavern abruptly ended in a massive, impassable blockade of solid bedrock but the golden needle was vibrating violently, pointing stubbornly at the wall.

Klaus’s eyes narrowed as he noticed a structural anomaly. He responded without a word, violently pulling up on the sword’s trajectory and shooting straight upward into a massive heavily concealed vertical tunnel of jagged rock that was hidden just above the dead end.

They shot upward like a bullet in a barrel, ascending higher and higher through the claustrophobic stone chute.

The air grew significantly colder and eventually, there was a solid, low-hanging ceiling of rock at the top of the chute, forcing Klaus to forcefully hit the brakes.

He completely stopped the sword’s momentum, hovering silently in the darkness.

He was now situated at the absolute top cavern of the underground network... The Compass of Truth in his hand was now pointing perfectly straight ahead with its entire metallic casing violently taking on a blinding radiant golden glow indicating that the true exit was just beyond this threshold.

The primary issue with that?

The moment they breached the lip of the tunnel and hovered into the massive, cathedral-like upper cavern, Klaus froze.

There were dozens upon dozens of elite Death Cult members standing in perfectly organized, completely silent rows directly in front of him.

They weren’t shrieking or acting deranged like the ones below; they emanated a terrifying suffocating aura and not only that, but standing ominously at the very forefront of the army was a single woman.

She had a stark, terrifying bone-white mask securely fastened onto her face and she was wearing a much darker intricate cloak than the rest. Her long, stark white hair was blowing around her shoulders in an ethereal nonexistent wind.

The sheer pressure radiating off her was so dense it actually made it hard for Klaus to breathe. Immediately, Klaus just slowly closed his eyes and completely gave up.

’Take me out of the game rep...’ Klaus thought as his shoulders slumped in absolute defeat.

Not only was he unlucky enough to get violently kidnapped on his day off, but he had to simultaneously meet the literal Heir of Death on the exact same day?

Was he perhaps cursed?