Despite the fact that he should have been in his safest place in Als Atbor, Merrick felt like he was standing in the middle of a dungeon. The normally bland interior of the Curious Glades Faction Office had been turned into a smoldering hellscape. The lobby had taken a pretty brutal blow but the further Merrick went in, the worse the damage was.
The hallway from the lobby toward his office was completely shrouded in a smoke-like darkness. Merrick weaved magelight into the air and the darkness splintered. Finally he was able to see what Thom had already warned him about before handing the situation over. Thom was headed to the Faction HQ to involve Mouseion. Merrick was headed into the bowels of their building to assess the damage.
With the darkness somewhat dissipated, the corpses of fallen monsters appeared. The walls were burned and charred. Entire portions of the floor and ceiling were missing. In fact, the only doorway that seemed undisturbed was Merrick's office door toward the end of the hall.
While stepping over a deformed goblin corpse, Merrick made a mental note to rewrite the entire Faction's wardings to match the set that he had just recently put on his own door. It had already been an idea, but now it was near the top of the list.
Across the hall from Merrick's office was the entrance to the Faction's Coffers. At least, that was how Merrick thought about it most of the time. What was actually across the hall was a staircase that dropped five floors into the earth beneath Als Atbor. It was the only used subfloor for the Curious Glades and it housed an Arcane Spellcrafter, an Alchemist's Lab, and the Coffers themselves. Basically, Thom had decided to put anything that could explode, whether looted or crafted, as far from the rest of the Faction Office as possible.
It was a good thought, but now Merrick was looking down five floors of burned out stairs with no easy way down. Fortunately, Crudle had picked up some tricks after fighting Earth Elementals. While he was not able to fix the entire stair, like the Pure Earth Elemental had done so long ago, Crudle was able to secure a few stairs right as Merrick needed them.
The deeper Merrick went, the stronger the darkness. Something was creating it, Merrick was sure of that now. Without devoting more energy to the magelight, Merrick struggled to see, but when he poured more energy in he found that it had diminishing returns.
As he was nearing the bottom of the stairwell, Merrick had Crudle craft a bench alongside the wall so that he could take a seat for a moment and focus. From his new perch, Merrick took a deep breath and let the arcane energy roll off him. The magelight dissipated and instead Merrick tried to cover as much of his surroundings in energy like an arcane radar.
It was hard to tell, because the darkness felt tangible, but Merrick was certain that at the bottom of the stairs there was a creature waiting at the entrance to the Coffers. It felt familiar and foreign at the same time. It was the source of the darkness. After letting out a deep breath, Merrick left his perch and reached the bottom of the stair.
Rather than rushing into the deepening darkness, Merrick stole an idea from Rath and implemented his own preferred element. With Crudle's help, Merrick conjured a metal spike the size of a magical wand and started to infuse it with lightning. The metal crackled and sparked, Crudle wrapped another layer of metal around the energy-potent wand. Merrick followed with more energy, Crudle followed again with more metal, and after a few rounds the wand became a staff.
There was no direction or focus, Merrick had no idea how the actual spell worked. When Merrick struck the staff into the ground, it did not grow into a lightning tree. Instead it shattered outward like a lightning storm stolen from the inside of a thundercloud. It cascaded over the ground, heading toward the Coffer.
Despite the darkness, Merrick could see white-hot lines of lightning jump over the ground and then leap up into the air to strike at something. An angry mechanical growl filled the air, the darkness receded, and Merrick saw the source finally. Hovering at the broken entrance to the Coffers was a Pure Elemental. It looked like the one that he fought in the Instance Dungeon. In fact, the Core that the Pure Elemental was housed in looked exactly like his Dungeon Clear reward.
Merrick swore and stepped closer. The darkness in the air dissipated immediately. Merrick could see past the Pure Elemental, through the broken doors, to the Coffers. It confirmed what Thom had already assumed. The Coffers were empty.
To the other side, the Arcane Spellcrafter was billowing smoke and the Alchemist's lab was slowly leaking something similar to lava or acid. Those were problems for a few moments from now, though, because Merrick realized the fight was not yet over. The lightning had not killed the Pure Elemental, it barely stunned it.
As his Knowledge Archive would tell him later, Merrick was facing down a Pure Darkness Elemental. It was a different variant than the Pure Lightning Elemental but it was no less dangerous.