Soulbound

Dungeons were supposed to follow rules.

Floor two must have forgotten.

“We just formed a party,” he said, keeping his shield angled toward the next opening in the corridor. “We don’t need to rush progression-”

“You don’t get stronger by waiting,” Mira snapped, cutting down another monster.

She slipped through a gap between shield and wall that Jax would never have trusted. Frost gathered along her blade, thin at first, then tightening into a pale sheen.

“Frost Cut.”

Cold split the corridor, Ice raced across iron and flesh before bursting outward in jagged shards. The goblin locked in place and toppled, but its body had not fully settled before another stepped over it.

Jax’s pulse kicked up. “They’re stacking too fast,” he said. “They’ll overtake us. We need to leave now.”

Mira planted her feet. Frost crept over her boots and sealed them briefly to the stone.

“Frost Step.” Ice compressed beneath her soles and snapped her forward.

She reappeared inside the goblin’s reach before it could adjust, her blade cutting low and clean. Tendons parted.

The creature collapsed with a guttural noise that echoed too long in the narrow passage.

“We’re fine,” she called, already moving again.

Then the stone beneath them trembled.

Something heavier adjusted its weight deeper in the dark. Jax felt it through his boots first, then in his ribs.

When the creature stepped into the torchlight, the air changed.

Something demonic pierced its spine. Not grown from mana. Not integrated like natural mutation. Driven through flesh with deliberate placement.

Jax had read about them in old field guides, always in the kind of sections people argued over after too much ale and too little proof.

Black veins pulsed outward from each anchor, threading through muscle forced to swell around them. The flesh twitched in uneven spasms, as if rejecting the reinforcement it carried.

“Mira,” Jax said, voice tightening, “that’s a hobgoblin. Floor two doesn’t spawn hobgoblins.”

She measured it in a single glance.

“It’s just bigger. Quit overthinking.” She argued, readying another strike.

“Just being here is already out of the ordinary. “Look at its back, those are void anchors.” He explained, fear creeping in as he thought about what it could mean.

“If it bleeds, it dies.”

She took off before he could stop her, frost cresting along her blade as she rushed the towering creature.

The hobgoblin did not charge.

It stepped once, and that was enough. The corridor erased the distance between them. Its club descended with a force that displaced air before impact.

Jax hesitated for half a heartbeat, long enough to picture the blow landing squarely. “Stone Shield.”

Mana tore through his palm and into the floor. Stone surged upward between them in layered density, rushed but solid enough.

The club shattered it. Fragments burst outward and stung his cheek, but the angle shifted just enough.

The blow smashed through stone instead of bone, clipping Mira’s shoulder and throwing her into the wall. She hit hard, rolled, and pushed herself upright before he could speak.

Blood darkened her sleeve. Frost was already reforming along her blade. “You freeze every time something gets bigger than your expectations,” she snapped.

Another goblin lunged from the side. Jax moved on instinct, intercepting it, but the hobgoblin was already advancing again.

The anchor along its spine pulsed.

Dark mana rolled outward like pressure from a heartbeat. The hobgoblin swung again. This time Mira met it head-on, frost flaring along her blade as she redirected the strike instead of absorbing it.

“It’s breaking your mana,” Jax said, panic sharpening his voice. “The anchors are disrupting it.”

Mira, still recovering from the last impact, did not see the hobgoblin shift behind her.

“Mira, move!”

Both hands snapped forward as mana gathered, panic on his face as he screamed. “Behind you!”

The hobgoblin answered with a roar that shook dust from the ceiling. It drove forward not with speed but with sheer mass, the club lifting again in a straight crushing line meant to break whatever stood in front of it.

Jax stepped between them and forced his mana sideways instead of upward. Stone erupted from the wall rather than the floor. Jagged rock snapped outward, widening the corridor by inches and shoving against the creature’s planted footing.

The hobgoblin broke free almost immediately, but the interruption was enough.

Mira stepped in, she slipped inside its reach while its momentum still carried forward and drove her blade deep into its thigh.

Frost surged through steel and muscle in a violent wave. For one heartbeat, it worked.

Then the anchor pulsed violently.

The sound was more pressure than vibration, as if the corridor itself had exhaled. Cracks spidered across the ice gripping the hobgoblin’s leg while the black veins beneath its skin flared brighter.

The frozen muscle flexed once. Then again.

Ice shattered, the creature able to tear itself free with a wet snap, ripping through the frost where the magic had held too tightly.

Mira stumbled back to avoid the collapsing weight as the hobgoblin ripped itself loose and kept coming.

That was when Jax felt it clearly.

The corridor itself had changed. The space was not merely tight anymore. Something in the air pressed inward against every spell he tried to form.

The anchor pulsed again, and the air thickened with it.

“This can’t be random!” Jax shouted over the rising noise of claws and stone. He slammed another shield forward, buying only a sliver of space. “Mira, that’s not normal!”

The hobgoblin swung before she could answer. The club clipped through his weakening defense and tore into his shoulder.

Jax felt the resistance clearly now. Mana that normally answered his intent instantly felt thick and sluggish, as if the air itself were pushing back.

“It’s destabilizing my mana,” he muttered.

“What?” Mira shot back, finally turning toward him. “I don’t understand how you talk. Dumb it down.”

“It’s not just stronger,” he said, forcing another formation together as goblins clawed through the cracks in his barrier.

“Every time that thing pulses, it compresses the ambient mana. Our spells are fighting the air itself.”

The hobgoblin stepped forward again, crowding the narrow ground they had carved open. More goblins pressed behind it, claws snapping through the gaps in broken stone.

“We’re done,” Jax said.

The thought came with a terrible calm, then his body gave out. The strain, the pain, the pressure in the corridor, all of it folded together at once. His vision dipped.

The hobgoblin loomed in front of him, its club rising again, and some stupid, useless part of his mind reached somewhere safer.

Back to the inn.

To a quieter day when he had tucked himself into a back corner with a book and every intention of staying unnoticed. Then he looked up and saw a crowd gathering around a girl who clearly wanted none of it.

He had crossed the room before thinking it through. Stopping just behind her he said, “Didn’t you hear?” “We just formed a party this morning.”

Mira had looked up at him with obvious confusion, but she caught on quickly enough.

“Oh,” she had said, forcing confidence she did not feel. “Hey, teammate.”

The men around her grumbled and left.

Only then had Jax realized he had no idea what to do next. He pulled out a chair and sat in it himself, because apparently panic made him stupid.

“Thank you,” Mira had said, laughing despite herself. “I’ve only been here a week, and the crowd gets thicker every night. The name’s Mira.”

“I’m Jax,” he had answered, trying not to bite his own tongue. “I hope I didn’t impose. It looked like you needed help.”

“JAX!”

The memory shattered.

A voice ripped him back to the corridor.

When his eyes focused, someone had stepped between him and the incoming strike. Steel met the hobgoblin’s club with a violent crash.

“Hey, kid!” the stranger barked. “Get the fuck out of here. There’s no chance you can win.”

Jax blinked hard and forced himself upright. Mira looked wrecked, blood on her sleeve, breath ragged, but she was still standing.

Obeying the man’s orders he yelled.

“Follow me!”

They ran, past the brutal clash behind them, past the shattered stone and torchlight, back toward the stairs and the upper floor.

Neither of them looked backup until the dungeon door was finally in sight.