Magic glyphs flickered on crumbling marble pillars, half-erased by time and impact. Torches flared blue-green against walls scraped by claws and scorched by spells. Amid the chaos stood Nolan and Vaelreth, back-to-back, surrounded by goblin lich-kin and undead brutes.
Nolan blocked an axe with a burst of strength, his Chainmail Armor groaning in protest.
“Counter Vault into... into what again?” he murmured, breath ragged.
He stared at his drawn card—Cross Slash—and hesitated.
Was this the one that used a Martial Token? Did it combo with Parry or Quick Step?
Before the thought could finish, his body reacted. He leapt over the goblin brute, instinct kicking in. Counter Vault, then a wide swing. Not quite the full Cross Slash, but enough to cleave bone.
Across the field, Vaelreth raised a card. “Dragon... something—burst?”
The rune cracked as she activated it. A cyclone of heat erupted, turning goblins into cinders.
She didn’t look at the flame. Her eyes were distant. “That spell had a name. I think.”
Their enemies fell one by one, not by strategy—but by muscle memory. By remnants of learned behavior.
Vaelreth’s final burst of flame slammed the last brute into the wall. The marble trembled, and a golden mural fragment above them shattered, turning to dust mid-air.
Neither of them looked up.
No one remembered what the mural had shown.
The stairwell down to the 14th floor was unusually cold. Light seeped from Nolan’s Focus Amulet, casting narrow halos on the spiraling stone steps. Vaelreth walked ahead, one hand dragging along the wall like she was afraid it would vanish.
Nolan trailed behind, flipping through his cards. His deck, once so familiar, felt like a stranger's diary.
Hero’s Journey.
He stared at the card longer than he should have.
“This lets me... search. Right?”
He whispered the line on the card aloud: “The story begins when you choose to walk.”
The words sparked recognition, but the mechanics... escaped him.
He reached for another—Martial Arts Book. “Meditation... Martial Tokens. Something about graveyard recursion?”
He wasn’t sure if he was saying it to himself or trying to convince the card to remind him.
Ahead, Vaelreth stopped at a corner alcove and summoned a flickering card from her pouch. The parchment was scorched at the edges. “I had a combo here,” she said, tapping it lightly. “Fire rune... thunder ink... or was it a terrain shift?”
She looked at him, eyes faintly glowing. “I feel like I’m missing something important.”
Nolan sighed, tucking his deck away. “I’ve been missing something important since we got here. I just don’t remember what.”
There was a silence between them, not heavy, but hollow.
“We should be panicking,” Vaelreth said softly.
“We probably were,” Nolan replied, “but we forgot how.”
The chamber they found was quiet and strangely smooth—walls of black stone glinting like obsidian, humming with divine residue. In the center sat a flat pedestal of white quartz, like a judge’s dais.
Nolan entered alone, his hand already reaching into his cloak’s inner pocket. He pulled out a ragged, half-burned piece of parchment—a fragment of the Chaos Pages.
It pulsed.
Not visually. Not audibly. But in his bones.
The system interface shimmered in his peripheral vision, glitchy and faint, offering one clear option: Call the Akashic Record.
He stared at the Chaos Page. It trembled in his fingers. The temptation was sharp.
“One request,” he murmured. “One divine order. She’ll patch the cards. Reset the floor. Maybe even give me an exit.”
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He pictured her. Not as a deity or overlord, but as a tired bureaucrat sipping divine espresso with a bored scowl.
“Didn’t I give you tools to solve this yourself?” she’d probably say.
He shook his head. “You did. You always do.”
The floor rumbled under him. Not danger—just the pressure of choice.
He whispered, “I’m not calling the boss. Not unless I’m dead.”
With shaking fingers, Nolan pulled out two more cards from his pouch.
Hero’s Journey. Glory Road.
He placed all three—those two, and the Chaos Page fragment—onto the pedestal.
“I’ll make something better.”
He set down his Spellbound Journal, flipped it open to a blank spellcraft page. He dipped his pen in Dragonforge Ink, drew a circle with fragmented runes from both Hero and Glory templates. The chaos fragment burned, fusing script with sacred resonance.
Then the words formed.
Hero Returns Activation Condition: Hero’s Journey and Glory Road must be activated. Effect:
-
When this card is thrown into the banishment pile: ?– Once per turn, send one card from your hand to the graveyard to add any one card from your deck to your hand. ?– Once per turn, return one card from your graveyard back into your deck.
The card glowed gold, flickering like candlelight against the black stone.
Nolan exhaled.
“No more topdecking luck. If I’m forgetting everything, then I’ll build something that remembers for me.”
The quartz pedestal dimmed.
Behind him, the wind shifted. Something ancient moved above the dungeon—watching.
But Nolan didn’t flinch. His hand clenched around the new card.
“I’ll survive by drawing forward.”
The dying forge chamber flickered with a lingering breath of divinity—its embers barely lit, its anvil cracked down the middle.
Nolan stood over the altar, hands smudged with soot and arcane ink, the Chaos Page disintegrating into glowing fragments as they seeped into the binding circle.
From the floating system interface, a single line scrolled across his vision:
“New card registered. Approved by System: HERO RETURNS.”
A slow flash. A new card slid from the system interface and landed in Nolan’s palm—paper still warm, gold-trimmed edges sparking with residual static.
He stared at the words. They had weight, purpose. Structure in a world falling apart.
Hero Returns. Not a spell. Not a blessing. A lifeline.
Activation Condition: Hero’s Journey and Glory Road must be activated. Effect: When this card is thrown into the banishment pile: – Once per turn, you may send one card from your hand to the graveyard to add one card from your deck to your hand. – Once per turn, return one card from your graveyard back into your deck.
He slipped the card into his deck. “Forty cards. Forty stories. One keeps coming back.”
His shoulders didn’t drop. There was no surge of relief. Just silence.
No divine message. No snarky commentary from above. No cosmic pushback.
If the Akashic Record was still able to communicate, he thought bitterly, there’d be no reason for me to ask the system for anything. I could get direct feedback. Adjustments. Hints. Now I get nothing. Just silence and a blinking interface.
He stared at the fading embers. “She’s watching,” he muttered, “but she’s left me here. No guide. No fail-safe.”
He clenched the deck tighter. “That’s fine.”
He turned and walked out—tired, deck heavier than ever.
Elsewhere—beneath the shattered ribs of an ancient dragon fossil—Vaelreth knelt before a cracked obsidian bowl.
Her arms were scorched. The sleeve-bound scrolls at her side were flaking, half-legible.
“They’ve all gone quiet,” she said aloud. “I don’t even know what this one used to do.”
She held up a card that bore only faint dragon sigils. Her memory didn’t fill in the blanks.
“So I’ll give them names again.”
From a pouch near her side, she retrieved a jagged gem and an inked scroll. Then, slicing across her forearm, she let blood trickle onto the parchment. The bowl pulsed faintly in response.
Her voice low, lips moving in rhythm, she whispered draconic syllables not spoken in generations.
System Prompt: “Blood Letter Recognized. Unique Card Creation Permitted.”
The scroll caught flame—not burning, but transmuting. As the blood-lettered rune sank into the card’s framework, the interface solidified the result.
Draconization
Activation: Requires one Letter of Blood (single use). Effect: Transforms the user into True Dragon Form. All active and passive cards become Dragon-type. Dragon-type cards gain enhanced power, durability, and combo extension.
Her fingers trembled. The card hissed as it cooled.
She tucked it into the middle of her deck, smirking despite herself. “If I’m going to burn out... I’ll do it flying.”
A forgotten melody echoed in her mind. She didn’t remember the lyrics—only that it came from home.
She stood.
Time to meet the human again.
The stairwell at the end of Floor 14 was cracked but still standing. Runes pulsed faintly along the edges—warning signs of high magical pressure. The walls smelled of scorched oil and old incense.
Nolan stood first, arms crossed. His Focus Amulet dimmed. His gear was scuffed, edges dull, Chainmail barely holding together.
Across from him, Vaelreth stepped in with a low crackle of arcane static. Her aura shimmered faintly crimson, her left arm wrapped with dragon-hide bandages.
They locked eyes.
No quips. No taunts. Not even their usual passive-aggressive sarcasm.
Just the quiet tension of people who forgot how they got here but knew they had to keep going.
Nolan nodded once. “You ready?”
Vaelreth tilted her head. “Forget what?”
He almost smiled.
Together, they turned toward the obsidian gate ahead. Its center pulsed like a heartbeat behind a veil.
Floor 15 greeted them with silence.
The walls were smeared with murals, but the figures had been scratched out—faces missing, titles erased, blades cut in half. Glowing lines snaked across the stone, divine etchings now broken into illegibility.
Names had been there once.
Nolan stepped forward, fingers brushing one of the scrawled names. As he touched it, the stone hissed—and the name disappeared.
The curse was stronger here.
“The Lich stood here once,” Nolan muttered. “And now... nothing does.”
Vaelreth traced her claw across another mural, eyes narrowing.
“Some of these dragons were mine. Maybe. I don’t know.”
She turned to Nolan. “What kind of curse makes the world forget you?”
He looked down at his deck. His hand moved almost automatically—shuffling, drawing.
The first card was familiar.
Hero Returns.
He looked at it for a long time.
“Even if I forget,” he said, almost in prayer, “the deck remembers.”
Behind him, Vaelreth unsheathed her newly named cards, fire swirling along her fingers.
They walked side by side into the black gate—toward the floor where the Lich waited.
No past. No memory. Just cards, instinct, and fire.