My fingers roam over the hole in my gut, or rather, the bloody scab where there had been a hole just before. I take a deep breath, my lungs expanding with a twinge of pain. A controlled exhale lets me know I am in relatively decent shape. I wipe the blood on my fingers on the ground before I spring to my feet, fire roiling over my hand.
The earthspeaker man, his skin a mottled tone of harsh onyx with gray rings running throughout, stands, holding his hands up. “I do not want any trouble with you,” he says, taking a step back. My bolt of dragonfire sails past the man’s head, leaving him flinching and confused for a moment before he hears the collision behind him. He turns, looking down at the charred monstrosity halfway out of the hole. The man looks completely out of place, wearing simple traveling clothes that make him appear more like a clerk than a monster killer. His soft features and the kindness in his eyes only reinforce my poor first impression of the man.
Jasper Callaway(Level 32)
Seer Conflux
Near the wall, a square of darkness leads into the floor, snarling and the sounds of heavy moist breath coming from within. Another sickly hand of pale, almost translucent white, reaches up from the black, its webbed fingers wrapping around the corpse and pulling it back inside. Jasper wheels back from the pit, backing toward the wall of mana that separates our slice of the room from the others.
A part of me wants to find out what will happen if someone touches the wall, but I speak up anyway. “Stop!” I yell at the man. He flinches at the harshness in my voice, but does as I tell him to, slowly turning to find himself just a step away from the wall of mana.
“T-thank you, miss,” he says.
I am left looking at this man, unsure of how he and I can possibly be the same level. Is this man really supposed to be as strong as I am? It doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. I throw another ball of fire into the dark hole as I notice movement beginning to crawl upward, eliciting an awful howl from inside the dark.
My eyes fall on the elven woman. She hasn’t moved from her knees, and she watches me with suspicion, one hand hidden behind her back. Svelte leather armor clings to her, looking so form-fitting that I can’t bring myself to imagine she found it inside of the trial. The high quality of the black armor’s scaled pattern reminds me of the Boiling Python leather I had collected long ago, and the intricate golden weave throughout the armor tells of its obvious enchantments–though my eye reveals that easy enough. The woman lacks the telltale pearlescent hair of the true-bloods elves, her hair bouncy curls of raven, her eyes a brown so deep the appear black, and her features so sharp that even the fairer race might find them unflattering. Despite her appearance, my eye tells me of her origin, an asset I am coming to value more and more.
Clarice Morningcall(level 44)
Eclipse Conflux
“Will you stab me if my back is turned?” I ask her.
The woman continues to glare at me, slowly moving to her feet. “No.”
I nod, uncertain why I even asked her in the first place. Galea will tell me if she is tries to do something while I’m not watching, hopefully. “You two deal with the monsters if you can.” I look over, coming to kneel beside Jess and look over the cuts across her shoulder and back. “You saved me, didn’t you?”
“Just returning the favor,” Jess says, grunting through the pain of Samielle pulling another sliver of rock out of her arm. “That woman was going to blow me away. Who is she?”
“Her name isn’t important,” I tell Jess. I look through my inventory, finding scraps of linen from my destroyed clothing and handing it to Samielle. The man doesn’t look like he is in much better shape; one of his wings still lays limp on the ground, and his skin looks like he has walked through a fire. He doesn’t show any pain in his movements though, dutifully taking the cloth from me with a murmured thanks and applying them to Jess’ wounds. “Those two tried to kill me before. I am merely returning the favor.”
“I can understand that. I’m feeling a bit of righteous…ACK!” She turns and smacks Samielle’s arm as he pulls the last piece of rock out of her shoulder. The long jagged piece makes me want to gag just looking at it and the bit of flesh hanging off its barbed tip.
“I’m glad to see you again. I was wondering what happened to you two after the dungeon.” I catch Jess’ hand and give it a squeeze.
“There will be time to catch up later,” she says, nodding back toward the hole in the floor. “I think that we have more pressing issues to think about just now.”
I look over her and Samielle. Jess might actually be able to bounce back and get into a fight–she is a strong woman–but Samielle looks like he is just barely managing. I don’t doubt that once he no longer has someone to take care of, his injuries will start needling him. A glance to my side shows Jor’Mari laying on the ground, blood slowly pooling out around him. I squeeze Jess’ hand once more before standing and walking over to the man.
He looks up at me, his already alabaster skin more pale than normal. There is no fear in his face, just the stubborn anger that I might associate with a child.
“You failed,” I say.
Jor’Mari’s eyes focus on me as he scowls. “Did you finish the job while I wasn’t looking?”
I ignore the question, looking over the wounds that continue to trickle blood. “Can you recover? You look like you are going to die.”
“Who do you think you are talking to, Ms. Devardem? This is not enough to kill me. Would it stop you?” He takes my beat of silence as confirmation, his maddening smirk appearing on his bloodless lips. “Then how could it possibly be enough to stop me?”
“You are mighty full of yourself for a man that charged alone into a group of enemies just to be stabbed and beaten,” I say, unable to keep myself from smirking at him in return.
“But I looked like a true beast doing it. Did you hear that sound when I sent that bastard flying? It sounded like Exeter slapping a fly.” The bulging muscles have faded from his arms and chest, the horns on his head having shrunk to nothing more than nubs. He looks more fragile than I remember ever seeing him, his grin more genuine than ever before.
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“Will you be assisting with this?” I ask, motioning toward the hole in the floor. Three of the monsters have crawled up out of the floor.
The earthspeaker man, Jasper, struggles to contend with one using a wooden staff. The monster, barely level thirty, pressures the man with is grabbing hands. Despite some familiarity with the weapon in his hands, Jasper has no power in his strikes, and as I watch for a few seconds, he fails to utilize any magic to defeat the monster.
The elven woman on the other hand is far stranger. In her left hand she holds what looks to be a four-foot rod wrought from white light. Two of the monsters follow her as she steps backward around the hole in the floor, each struggling to stay in line with her as she constantly moves to use one of the monsters to block the other. She doesn’t attack, merely using footwork to stop the monsters from landing their grasping fingers on her.
“I will leave that to you,” Jor’Mari says. “I will recuperate here.”
“So be it.” Turning away from the man and my two other friends, I approach the hole in the floor. I have come to stop questioning these strange portals that are found inside of the dungeons. Surely, they are some kind of enchantment, and the idea of making these kinds of opaque doorways in the future is interesting, but I have no energy to spare on such idea for now.
“Kill those already,” I tell the elven woman, Clarice, as I approach the hole. I grab onto Jasper’s shoulder as I make it to the hole, moving the man aside so that I can belch dragonfire over the slimy monster still trying to make it past his stick. A torrent of orange and white fire engulfs the monster, setting it ablaze instantly. Blind, it tries to run, to cry out, but I knock it back into the hole with a kick from my steel boot.
I look up in time to see Clarice cut down the second of the two monsters, the rod of pure energy in her hand cutting through their flesh like a hot knife through butter. She jumps away from the blood of the creatures as it splashes onto the ground. The smell, an acidic burn that clings to the back of my throat, hits me a second later as the beige colored blood begins to pool on the floor.
“I hate stickers,” Clarice says, continuing to back away and keep her fine boots out of the spreading monster blood. A glance at a window over one of the corpses of the monsters confirms that as being their name.
“What do you know about these creatures?” I ask.
She looks back at me, seeming to consider whether or not answering my question is in her best interest. “They are a kind of monster that spawn around rivers and lakes, making their homes beneath the water. They aren’t all that powerful by themselves, but they move in large groups and swarm people and animals. Their blood is sticky once it has left their body, thus the name.”
I look at the beige fluid pooling on the ground, not running off in the way like water or blood would. “It looks like we have been put together on a team,” I tell her, including the man with a glance. “That might end after we have made it out of the first floor, but in case it doesn’t, I would appreciate that you be upfront with me. Have either of you killed someone in this competition?”
Jasper looks aghast. “No, of course not.”
Clarice stares back at me for a good while, her fingers playing on the bar of magic she holds in her hand. “No,” she says, eventually. “I couldn’t help but notice that you were trying to.”
My immediate reaction is to deny it, but when I think about it, I had been trying to kill her. Coriander and Kendon tried to kill me; just seeing them brought up so much anger in my heart that I couldn’t hold myself back. Is killing them really what I want? A part of me really wants that, to end those two, while another part balks. Will I become a murderer so easily?
“Good,” I say, looking between the two. For some reason, they seem to be treating me like I have some kind of authority. It is a strange feeling, one that I haven’t had much experience with, but I will use it if I can. “I will handle this, if you want to recuperate from the battle. Me and my friends plan to climb this tower and to beat everyone else in doing so, prepare yourselves.”
We haven’t exactly said so, but I am sure that Jor’Mari will agree with me. If we want to make certain that we get to Kendon and Coriander, we will need to reach the end of the tower before they do. If not, they will be able to escape out onto the north side of the mountains. We might never get another chance at them. Forget whatever that woman from the guild said earlier, I won’t give up on this so easily. I won’t forgive Kendon and Coriander. I’m sure that Jess will help me if I ask her too, and based on how Samielle was just acting, worrying over her, he will likely go wherever she does.
“You will handle all of this?” Jasper asks me, looking down into the darkness. “You can do that?”
I look around at the other slices throughout the room, watching as the bodies begin to pile up, men and women in pitched combat with multitudes of the grabby monsters. Dozens have poured up from the dark, forcing magicians to work together, to put their backs to those that might have just been enemies a moment before in order to protect their own lives. It is a completely different story from our relatively quiet hole. “I am already handling it,” I reply, making sure that he looks around as well. I cannot blame the man for his skepticism, he doesn’t see what I can see.
Deep in the dark of the hole at my feet, a window opens, telling me that a monster has died inside. A few seconds later it is followed by another and another. My fire is blazing down in the dark, growing as it leaps from beast to beast, chewing into the monsters down below. Already, more than ten have died, and Galea has alerted me that I have gained a level.
“Someone has gone through the trouble of gathering a bunch of monsters in a cage for me, it would seem like a waste to not give it my all.” Holding my hands forward, hungry orange fire streams down into the pit in front of me, crossing over the barrier of darkness with ease. While the flames roil outward, I keep an eye on my available mana, but at this point I have an obscene amount of the resource.
I lose myself a bit, pouring twin streams of flames down into the darkness, watching window after window appear to notify me about the deaths of the monsters down below. Watching the windows appear, I begin to sense something faint in the center of my chest. It is as if something is swelling inside me, each window echoing a sensation so distant that I can barely be sure I am not imagining it. The feeling is there, something on the divide between euphoria and satisfaction, a feeling that with each of these terrible beasts I burn from this world I grow a little bit stronger. It is a heady realization. I can’t keep myself from laughing as the fire pours down like a waterfall into an endless hole. If it can be this easy to reinforce the soul, how come no one had offered it to me before?
The hole vanishes, snapping me back to the world as the two others standing around the hole near me scream and leap back to escape the orange flames splashing against the pristine white of the floor. I stop my outpour of fire as soon as the hole disappears, and thankfully manage not to ignite either Jasper or Clarice. Blinking, trying to ground myself back in the now, I look around the room, noting that half of the groups have vanished. My eyes fall on Coriander; she sits in her own slice of the room with a man covered in singed clothing. In front of her, five men heave with exhaustion, the bodies of monsters laying all around them, their weapons stuck into the ground at odd angles, caught up in the blood of the enemy.
I ready myself to conjure more fire for her. My time never comes. From the ceiling far overhead, fourteen sets of spiraling stairs begin to descend down towards all of the groups remaining in the room, the walls between all of us staying in place. Coriander spares me a single glance before turning toward the staircase and making her way up. There is fear in her eyes as she heads away from me, and I cannot help but savor that. It isn’t enough, not nearly as much fear and pain as she put me through, but it is a good start.
The platform of the spiral staircase, a circular base made of the same odd material as the rest of the tower, comes to a halt right over the rune in the ground that would have pulled our group out of the tower. Jess supports Samielle on her shoulder as she leads the big man toward the staircase, while Jor’Mari peels the bloody tatters of his clothes off the ground with a sickening sound. There is color in the man’s face again, not that it had all that much color to start with.
“I presume we are to go up,” he says, being the first to step onto the marble steps leading up into the ceiling. I get a good look at the man’s back, a mess of smeared and dried blood, his robes nothing more than strips of cloth that cling to him. He doesn’t wait for anyone to follow him, trudging up the spiral at the lead.
I spare a look around the empty cut of room that I am left inside of, and the rest of the chamber at large. There is a single other slice of the room that is as barren of monster corpses as our own, though the sticky blood is scattered throughout. An odd woman, her skin a pale greenish-blue leads a group up the stairway, stamping in obvious irritation. Despite my earlier desire to progress upward as quickly as possible, I linger, allowing the others to move ahead first. It would be a shame to leave all this treasure behind down here without even trying to claim it for my own.