Standing on the edge, looking down and through the water at that terrible monster beneath, I find my feet unwilling to move another inch. “This is a terrible idea, isn’t it.”
Galea float in the air ahead of me, bobbing up and down, looking down at the same monster. “You killed the last fish by stabbing it.”
“On land,” I say, looking up at the sharp point of the spear I hold. Is my plan really to dive headfirst into the water and try to fight a monster while holding my breath? Have I lost my senses? “There has to be a better way to go about this.”
“Surely,” Galea agrees.
“Do you have any idea?” I ask her.
“I do not believe that I am capable of ideas, at least in the same way as you think of them.”
Stepping back from the edge, I let the spear fall and clatter to the floor next to me. That small, cold point in the center of my chest returns to the forefront of my mind, the memory of what it feels like to lay dying and knowing that there is nothing I can do about it comes to the front of my mind. If I just dive headfirst into this pool, I probably wouldn’t even have time to regret it if that thing got its teeth on me. It could probably just rip my throat out, lightning fast, and all my anger, pain, and dreams to find a dream would turn into a red cloud in the water.
“I don’t even know how to use a spear,” I say. “Did I really think that I could just kill some monster underwater like it was nothing.” Disgust with myself wells up, but the worst thing is that I don’t know where the sudden confidence to just plunge into my almost certain death came from, and that scares me.
I sit next to the pool, contemplating the Brayfish lurking in the water, not taking my eyes from it for a second. Time passes, and I set my mind to thinking. I think about myself, about all of the monsters I have killed, about all of the monsters that have nearly killed me. Does my ability to recover from injury scrub my mind of the danger somehow? Impossible to know really, but I decide that I need to watch myself more closely, avoid stupid risks.
The monster in the pool is my obstacle, one that I am still determined to overcome. An hour passes as I watch it make lazy circles in the water, there is a pattern to it, a consistency in the way that it swims that no living creature should commit to. I know without needing to try, my fire is not going to be a weapon I can use against this creature, but other than fire what do I have?
“We don’t have a fishing pole,” I say, looking through my inventory. “Not that I have ever seen one that could catch something as large as that thing.”
“Can you make one?” Galea asks, trying to help.
I scan through the boxes in the inventory window. “I doubt it.” I blow out a sigh, looking between the open window floating in the air in front of me and the monster down in the water. It is made of menace, though it seems content to allow me to be up here. The trails of color through the water that chase is swirl and ebb with its passage, almost looking like ghostly appendages, almost.
“You know what that reminds me of?” I ask, looking at Galea.
“Yes,” she says simply.
I frown at the golden lizard. “So, you know whatever I am thinking no matter if it is words to you or not?”
“Correct.”
That is peevish. “Then that also means you know what I wanted to be the answer to my question, and you simply ignored it.”
She looks ready to answer again, her mouth open, eyes shifting around. Eventually, she makes a show of looking down into the water and shaking her head. “No,” she says; she is either a poor actor or being sarcastic. “I don’t know what that reminds you of.”
“It reminds me of a crayfish in a pot,” I say. “I don’t have any seasonings with me, and it would be a shame to only have one crayfish, but do you suppose that I could cook this one?”
Galea looks at me, her eyes narrowing to pinpricks. Then, her face contorts in a dozen expressions so suddenly that I jump back from her a step. Her expression sticks, the left side of her dragony face pulled into a sneer while he tongue lolls out the right side of her mouth. I am just on the verge of reaching out for her, something I know that I can’t do, when life snaps back into her. A window appears in front of her, the normally black and featureless rectangle holding something that looks like a piece of paper. A few seconds of scanning the writing on the page makes me remember where I have seen it before.
“This equations should be able to tell you if you can, one way or another,” she says.
Now that she holds it up in front of me, I recall the equation in particular from one of the books on mathematics, tucked away neatly in the glossary at the back in a section on useful equations. It is a simple expression, equating energy to mass, change in temperature, and something called heat inertia of material.
I look at that simple line of mathematics, attempting to really understand it for the first time, and to my surprise, I begin to. Galea is wrong, not something that I get to say often, but the equation itself cannot tell me if I am able to boil the pool in front of me. Firstly, I don’t know the heat inertia of water, nor do I know the temperature of the water, or–for that matter–the temperature at which water boils. Asking Galea about this confirms that none of the books I have read out of Arabella’s shelf so far have that information inside. As I continue to stare at the equations, I come to realize that I don’t need any of those factors either. There is a lesson hidden inside the equation that I puzzle out, something that seems obvious when stated outright, but it isn’t until I see it written down, properly constructed, that it occurs to me to try and apply it.
To heat something requires energy, and the energy required to heat a material is directly related to how much of the material is at hand. So simple, and, perhaps, very deadly as well.
“Galea, how big is the pool, exactly?” I ask.
Another window appears in front of me, the black void of this one filled with a sketch of the sides of the pool beneath me scrawled with precise cerulean lines. The sides of the pool in the sketch are measured and listed, something Galea must be able to do. I cast my mind back into the book on mathematics, recall the formula for determining the volume of the simple shape, and have its measure in a brief moment. I cannot help but smile, tracing my finger along the darkness of the window, finding new lines scratched in where my nail passes, marking down the volume of water I will need to heat–minus a monster fish of course.
“Are these numbers close?” I ask, looking at the fey spirit.
“I am not some low-level spirit incapable of precise mapping of the environment. How else do you think I can so freely move about, Mistress Charlene?”
It was my understanding that she was actually inside my head, not moving around anywhere. I set aside the multitude of questions that her reply brings up for the moment. Dipping my hand back into my inventory, I pull free a tin cup, one thumb-sized dent in the side and pocked with roughly cleaned dirt.
“Measure this,” I tell her, holding up the cup. Another sketch appears on the window that has the pool on it, the window itself growing larger on its own. This time, I do need to ask Galea to pull up the passage from the book to find the volume of this shape.
“Is there anything else you require?” Galea asks me.
“No, I think that will do it.” I inch closer to the pool once again, looking down into the water. “Do you think that thing will attack if I just take a cup of water?”
“No more than it might if you attempt to boil it alive,” Galea says after a long moment of pondering.
“Good point.” Ever so slowly, ever so carefully, I lower myself to kneel at the edge of the pool. All my focus goes toward the monstrous fish swimming circles near the bottom of the pool, watching its lazy routine for any signal of disturbance, my legs ready to jump away at the barest hint. The water is cold on my naked fingers as I dip the tin cup into the water, almost freezing. The fish gives no hint that it notices me, no hint that it is anything other than a large and obviously magical beast content to make laps in the water. Water dribbles off my knuckles, splashing into the disturbed surface of the water, creating ripples that spread until they fade at the edges where water meet white stone, but still the creature does not move.
I sigh, standing and inching away from the water once more, my prize of a tin cup full of cold water clutched in cold fingers. I set the tin down on the stone, looking down at the small cup, thinking to myself how strange it is that this small bit of water will tell me whether or not I might kill a large and likely powerful monster. How odd, relying on knowledge gained by a cup of water.
“You are hoping that I will ask what you are doing,” Galea says from my side.
“Will you?”
“Mistress Charlene,” Galea asks in a half-bored drawl, “whatever are you attempting to do?”
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“I am going to see if I can kill a rank two monster with mathematics,” I answer, ignoring the spirit’s tone. I might not know the heat inertia of water, what the temperature of the water right now is, what the temperature of boiling water is, or even how much energy is inside my fire, but I don’t need to know any of that. I know how much water is in the pool; I know how much water is in the cup; now all that is left is to see how much mana it takes to boil the water in the cup. At the end of the day, the mathematics involved is frighteningly simple.
Beads of air cling to my finger inside the tin cup less than a minute later, more latching on than floating to the surface, popping into the air. Plums of flame as thin as a sheet of paper creep into the air around my index finger, making a ring of flickering flame where my flesh meets the water. The greatest effort is in the control, to not let the fire run off and climb up over my hand, far harder than it is to let the flame spread. Fire doesn’t like being contained; it wants to run out wild until it burns itself away. When the bubbles truly start, a vortex of torsion spinning like an undersea storm off my bare finger, I pull my hand away and watch the water continue to boil. My eyes flick toward the ever-present line in the top of my vision: the entire experiment required barely any mana.
“Mark that,” I tell Galea, watching as the figure appears on the window. Just a bit of division, a part of mathematics I am well acquainted with from chores around the orchard, later and I have my answer. I cannot, in fact, boil the tank of water. It is impossible to stop a sigh of disappointment escaping my lips as I look over the sums once again, making certain that the figures are correct. Unfortunately for me, they are. It seems somehow unfair that I can blow so many things apart with my magic but boiling a huge pool of water with it is beyond me.
“It was an interesting experiment, Mistress.” Galea floats near my shoulder, inspecting the figures on the window. “A good attempt.”
“It would be nice if everything worked out so easily as that,” I say. My fingers glide once more over my inventory window, my staff topped with its cage of flame falling into my hands. A bit of effort pushes a burning orange flame into the head of the staff. “But I figure that the monster will appreciate dying in nearly boiling water little more than if the water were boiling.”
The Brayfish lurking inside the pool does not flinch when the head of my staff glides smoothly beneath the still surface of the pool, the light inside the cage not quivering in the least as it is submerged. I feel my mana drain, sliding down through my fingers into the smooth wood of the staff, feeding out toward the light beneath the water as it begins to burn brighter, and disappearing into the cool water as if it were an endless well ready to soak up whatever I give it.
Minutes pass as I stand on the edge of the water pushing mana into the pool. It feels like trying to move a great stone, only making the thing slide the barest inch at a time with each great heave, the rock fully refusing to roll over and help at all. The world becomes blurry other than the burning light at the head of my staff, bubbles pooling off of it to swell and pop at the top of the water. I taste salt on my tongue and realize that sweat is dripping down my face, gathering on the tip of my nose and splashing against my lips. I spare a glance away, seeing that more than half of my mana is gone. Mana flows away from me, faster and faster as I flex some great muscle in my head. My teeth ache with how tightly I clench them. I need to remind myself to breathe. Heat flushes me and I feel warm, hot even, for the first time in a long time. Then, at last, the great stone shifts the barest bit, starting to roll away from me as I heave upon it, and somehow, I find the strength to push even harder.
Magic soars away from me in a torrent, flashing through the staff and into the water which has become an angry roil around the head of the staff. An ache begins to build behind my eyes as I stare at the flame in the water. I am barely aware that the line counting my mana is shrinking at an outrageous pace, grinding away into nothing faster than I have ever seen it before. I will need to stop soon before…
There is a snag. My staff rips down into the water like it has a mind of its own, pulling me along with it, my fingers clenched too tight around the wood to let go in time. I plunge into the near-boiling water. As the heat of the liquid splashes over my face, striking into my eyes, I want to scream, want to shriek and wail, but a part of my mind keeps a grip on my body, or perhaps with how hard my teeth were clenched, they do not come apart so easily. The sting melts away a second later as I glide listlessly through the hot depths, waiting for my skin to start to blister and burn, but it never does. It would seem that hot water is as harmless to me now as hot air has proven.
I sink through the water far faster, far easier than I should. Bubbles rise in strings from all around the pool, sparse, but intermittent enough to let me know that I was at least a bit effective in my aim. My staff is gone from my hand, but its burning light pulls my eyes toward it. It is held tight in the viscous teeth of that monstrous fish, its barreled-snout whipping about in the water as if it were trying to tear my staff apart like it might its prey. The once sparkling scales of the fish have dulled, turning gray and flaking away in places. Strips of flesh peel away from the unfeeling eyes of the Brayfish, hanging loose in the water like hangnails rimming its face. One of its eyes has turned white and chalky while another seems to have burst all-together, leaking dark sludge into the once clean water around it, and its once fine fins have withered to crumpled stumps that shrink tight to its sides.
My staff tumbles out of the monster’s mouth, spinning slightly as it sinks through the water, the light at its head flickering once, twice, and going out before it hits the bottom of the pool. Then, I find its attention turned on me, and fear wells up in my guts. My left hand scoops at the water, trying to pull myself up toward the surface, but finding it almost impossible to drag my body through the pool. My right snaps out toward an opening window, fingers darting madly for some spot in my inventory, but the entire thing is unorganized; in my mad scramble, I don’t find anything immediately.
The creature slithers through the water as if it were still whole, crossing the distance between me and it in a flash. It never slows, its long snout almost spearing my through the stomach as it opens its mouth. Three rows of jagged teeth sink into my flesh, ripping and tearing in the bare instant it takes the Brayfish to smash me into the wall of the pool. My back collides with the white stone, my head snapping back, the monster’s momentum pushing its biting mouth deeper into my guts, tearing me up from the inside.
Blood fountains into the water, blanketing me in a red mist that pushes out the world. I fumble, blind, my finger twitching through space that I cannot see. My fingers clip across surfaces, the smooth iron of a chest, the clinging paper of a package of meat, a bit of twine that tangles in my knuckles, drifting away a moment later. Then, leather, a smooth and giving surface. I catch it with the tips of my forefinger and thumb. I am slammed back against the wall again, breath bubbling out, bloody water flowing in, my grip gone. I flail, knee coming up and thudding uselessly into scales, foot kicking hard enough into something metallic that I feel a toe crunch. By some miracle, my flailing hand knocks against the hard leather again, spinning it in the sea of red. I swipe, find the grip, and seize ahold of it.
Torrents of water pour into my mouth, down my throat, leaving a tangy hint of iron on my tongue. I ignore it, ignore the darkness pressing in, and ram the head of whatever weapon I hold into the monster fish over and over again. It gives a final attempt, its mouth ripping sideways, slicing through skin and catching on bone, trying to crush me into the wet stone, but I do not stop. I feel dull impacts, a spurt of something cool washing over my hand in the hot water. It struggles, thrashes, but even here in the water it can’t outlast me.
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I’m cold. The vague colors I stare at begin to register in my vision. A slab of white becomes the floor, a mess of orange changing into my wet hair clinging to my face. Constant, there is the beat of my heart thudding in my ears, pulsing in time with the ache behind my eyes.
My first instinct is to suck in air, to gasp, and it turns out to be a poor choice. A splash of water spits down my throat, leaving me retching and gasping on the stone floor. I make it to my hand and knees before my stomach clenches, hot water and bile tumbling from my lips to mix with the slightly pink puddle I lay in. I cough, rolling back, wiping my mouth with a wet arm. A knife lays on the stone next to me, a familiar blade, the same one that I used to kill that mudfish all those weeks ago. I smile despite the painful hiccup that gurgles out of my throat, trying to stand and finding my legs all too ready to get up off the floor.
I hold the dagger in the light, rubbing a bit of flesh off of the edge with my thumb and tossing the strip of scale and pink meat into the water. “I think this will be my fishing knife.” My head pounds, but I cannot help but laugh, a sound that comes out as more of a wheeze. I notice my blouse hanging off me, the right side a ruined scrap of cloth where the Brayfish tore into it, the left clinging heavy to me. That knocks the humor out of me. Can’t I go through any kind of ordeal without needing to find new clothes?
“How long?” I ask Galea, still turning over the knife in my hand. It might do to keep this on me more often considering how useful it has proven.
“You have lain on the floor for nine and a half minutes,” Galea says. She hovers around in front of me, a window between her claws.
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
“Great,” I manage to say, but there isn’t much enthusiasm in my voice. My head continues to pound away, and my fingers shake as I put the knife back into my inventory. Mana exhaustion, at least I think so. Checking my own mana, I find that it is nearly halfway back to full. It doesn’t seem right that I should hurt this much from nearly depleting it, but then when has the world been right?
Peeling the scraps of cloth away from my side, I find an angry circle of scabs sticking to my skin beneath, angry zig-zags cut into me where it tore at me. I turn away from the healing wound; I don’t know if I will ever get used to the ugliness of it.
To my surprise, the fish monster is not floating at the top of the water. Looking down into the pool, I see it resting still at the bottom of the pool, along with a latched metal trunk, two bundles of sticker meat–one undone and open, and my staff. I roll my eyes to the ceiling, wondering how long I can postpone going back into the water, but finding no real reason to put it off. Dipping a toe in, I find the pool still pleasantly warm.
I fall through the water almost as easily as the air, clutching the knife in my right hand as I fall to the bottom. My feet land on the stone, finding it craggy and pocked, abrasively sticking to my feet as I take a step forward. My belongings fly back into my inventory as a touch, but I make a note to dry them out later. It is as I am bending to stroke a finger over the corpse of the Brayfish, I notice something strange in the pool. In the center, right beneath the spot where the fish had been swimming circles, a smooth square of stone stands raised on four legs, leaving a gap almost two feet long in the floor beneath. The gap is impossible to see from above, but down here it is impossible to miss.
I am conscious of my breath, finding it easy to hold it as I walk along the floor of the pool, almost absentmindedly disenchanting the corpse of the monster as I go. Beneath the raised section of floor, a hole filled with artificial darkness beckons me on, the same impenetrable black that I have seen in these guild constructed buildings before. Above the hole, engraved into the side of the stone, is a 2.
I stop at the edge of the hole, looking through my inventory for the key the fish monster held, finding a golden one falling into my hand. There was such a door upstairs; it would seem that we have a way forward. My mind goes back to the group waiting for me in the hall; I can’t have been gone that long. Likely not enough time for them to have had a proper rest.
The number stands out on the stone, and I brush my fingers over it, finding it cool despite the warmth of the water. It would be more than a bit ambitious to keep going on ahead. I look at Galea as she still hovers near me, the same window grasped between her claws. This is the first level that I have gained in more than a week. I am slowing down. That feeling more than anything makes the choice for me.
Ducking forward, bare feet slipping in as I slide myself down, darkness overcomes me. More than anything, I can’t fall behind if I want to accomplish my goals–they are already so far ahead. I will work harder than anyone, that is what my brother told me to do. Sometimes, it seems, to work harder also means to take risk more.