As it turned out, Armiger Knight Lania's judgment was no more steadfast or reliable than her willpower. Case in point?
The figure she had flushed out with her sword a few minutes ago—the one sneaking around and watching the two of them from the shadows—really wasn't an enemy, much less an underground creature.
Quite the opposite!
There were three living people there. More precisely, three adventurers?
Of course, they weren't all Terrans.
There was a middle-aged human mage, a Dwarf Warrior, and a sharp-eared fellow with gray skin.
At a glance, that last one wasn't one of the underground races commonly found among Nighon's forces. He was a Drow—a dark elf of the legendary kind, with dark skin, a devotion to the Spider Goddess, mastery of magic and assassination, and a home in the underground depths?
Nighon did have plenty of Drow commanders, but not all Drow belonged to Nighon. They had city-states and nations of their own.
Annie and Lania didn't ask for more details.
After all, the three were just an adventuring party. There was no need to pry.
Just as every continent on the surface had many races, city-states, and nations, the underground world was no less complicated. They couldn't interrogate strangers about their origins the moment they met, especially when they had just fought and neither side fully trusted the other.
"So!"
"You're an adventuring party?"
"You're Mazze, a Drow and a level-seven adventurer ranger? She's Eileen, a level-six mage, and he's Chen Storm, a level-six Dwarf Warrior?"
Lania suspected Mazze wasn't a ranger at all, but some kind of stealth specialist—an assassin, perhaps. Still, if he said he was a ranger, she would take his word for it. She couldn't be bothered to dig deeper.
"And another thing—"
"You came here because you accepted a