Renelle found herself in what seemed to be a ritual hall....again, without her butler by her side.

[Adrian?] She called out, only to realize that she couldn’t sense him anymore and she couldn’t help but get a bad feeling.

Still, she didn’t allow herself to overthink; instead, she tried looking for a way out of this place, only to realize that there was none.

The hall was mostly empty, save for a single statue that was quite a distance from her.

She couldn’t properly make out what the statue looked like, but from her mana sense, she noticed that it was shaped just like the one from the illustrations.

The guardian.

Or at least, it once was.

But now, all it was, was a statue filled with corrupted mana, mana that was quickly seeping into hers.

Renelle realized that if she didn’t find a way out soon, she was bound to get corrupted.

The statue, as it had been since she appeared here, remained kneeling with its head resting on the pommel.

But that soon changed as it started moving the moment it sensed uncorrupted mana. It, like the Oroborus needed uncorrupted mana to resume what they were created for.

And the Guardian’s duty was to seal the Oroborus and the corruption again.

She looked at the statue properly and understood in the span of about three seconds why it was kneeling here instead of doing what it was built for.

The corruption hadn’t just spread to the beasts and the people of this dungeon.

It had spread to the guardian first.

Whatever the king had broken from the seal five years ago, the guardian had been the closest thing to it.

Since its task, at least one of them, was to keep the corruption sealed, and it had become corrupted, the guardian was stuck in a state of contradiction.

And in the end, it sealed itself, as it had now become part of the same corruption it was meant to seal.

That is, until right now.

With Renelle’s presence, it finally had something to work with.

It could use that uncorrupted mana within her to break free from the influence of the corrupted mana.

But first, it needed every drop of the mana from the human before it..... before she was also corrupted by the dungeon.

Renelle kept an eye on it as it stood up.

The guardian was a lot larger than the illustrations suggested, but that much was to be expected.

At full height, it easily dwarfed her multiple times over, but she wasn’t one to be intimidated.

After all, this was the only thing between her and her Adrian right now, and she would remove it no matter what.

An ice sword formed in her hand and she pointed it at the statue before saying, "Come at me."

The guardian stone pupils looked towards her and the next second, it lifted its sword, causing a slight tremble in the hall as it moved.

For something its size, it had no business moving that fast, and yet it crossed half the distance between them before Renelle had fully processed that it was making the first attack.

The sword came down in a vertical strike that had nothing elegant about it, it was just pure force,

But it was an attack that didn’t need technique because the weight behind it made technique irrelevant.

BOOM!

The entire hall shook even more as the sword formed a massive crater where it landed, kicking up debris.

Fortunately, Renelle had reacted fast enough to avoid the attack.

She moved so fast that it seemed she disappeared for a second, reappearing behind its feet and slamming her ice sword on its heel.

The point of contact immediately froze.

But the freeze didn’t hold.

The corrupted mana coating the guardian’s surface ate through it within seconds, dissolving the ice like it was never there, and the guardian turned toward her.

She quickly put distance between them and reassessed.

Her ice wasn’t useless, it was landing, it was affecting the surface, it just wasn’t lasting long enough to accumulate into anything meaningful.

The corrupted mana was stripping it away too quickly, and if she kept spending mana on strikes that dissolved in seconds she’d run dry before she made any real progress.

"How annoying," she muttered, looking at the statue.

A second later, she dismissed her ice sword, but it was not because she had given up. Far from it actually.

She lifted a finger and a small shard of ice formed in it, but unlike normal ice, this one seemed to hold a pool of shadows within.

The guardian immediately sensed the danger as Renelle launched it towards the crack in its heel.

The shard passed clean through the stone as if it were only an illusion, but the next second,

The guardian’s foot locked mid-step, the ice spreading through the internal structure of the stone rather than coating the outside of it.

Renelle watched it stumble as the ice coating its heel broke off, bringing the stone with it.

The statue caught itself with its sword just before it could fall, but Renelle had already confirmed what she needed to.

The corrupted mana had no way of stopping her attacks when combined with Adrian’s shadow element.

The only problem was that shadow-ice was expensive. Considerably more expensive than normal ice because it was pulling from two sources simultaneously.

But that won’t matter after all, she was determined to end this soon.

The guardian, with its sword stabbed in the ground, looked as she lifted her finger again.

[Empress’s Frozen Garden]

From Renelle’s fingertip, a single ice rose bloomed and it gently moved through the air, into the guardian’s chest.

With one of its feet missing, the statue couldn’t maneuver in time to avoid the petal, so it passed through the guardian’s chest the same way the shadow-ice shard had passed through its heel and headed directly for its core.

The guardian did not move after that, not that it could because the next second, cracks started riddling its stone skin.

From within said cracks came roses made completely of ice.

A second passed and the statue remained standing, looking directly at its attacker....

But the next, it slowly fell to one knee, just as it previously was, before getting completely encased by ice.

Its sword met the same fate, as they were now in the middle of the ritual hall like a centerpiece.

Renelle let out a sigh of relief, but it seems she did so too soon, because the next second, the walls around her started rumbling.

Cracks started spreading all through them and the ceiling suddenly caved, a large chunk of it falling towards her.

Renelle immediately encased herself in an ice barrier, expecting water to flood the temple, but such a thing did not happen.

Instead, what was beyond the ceiling was the same night sky as the surface world.

Well, almost.

Renelle’s eyes widened as she spotted the stars in the sky.

Actual stars.

She hadn’t seen them since entering this dungeon, none of them had, and yet there they were, scattered across the dungeon’s sky as they had always been there.

One by one they were still appearing, each one settling into place, but that wasn’t all that caused her surprise.

Because just like the stars, something else was floating in the skies.

"Adrian?"