Bellies full of good food and purged of all that stupidly strong alcohol thanks to Jones’ creepy healing spells, the party broke camp and set out once more to fight the dungeon and its monsters. It felt strange to be inside a dungeon and see the sun, or at least a facsimile of the sun, at the same time, but spatial magic was spatial magic and that was about all I understood from Jones’ lecture on why this place existed.

We’d been walking for at least a good hour without seeing so much as a hint of anything but waist-high grass when we finally came across our first monster. Borgen was leading from the front when he suddenly paused, then drew an arrow and sent it flying in a blur of motion, the air itself rippling with the power of his shot as a crack reverberated through the grassland, immediately deafening all of us with its intensity.

After Carlyn gave him a solid scolding to at least warn everyone before doing that again, a scolding it was apparent he’d had before, the big man led us to the site of his kill. It was nearly a mile and a half before we finally found the poor creature, or at least the splattered remains of it.

“What the fuck,” I couldn’t help but say as I looked from the small blood-stained crater to Borgen. “Where the hell was that shot when we almost got wiped out by that alpha pyugnaek?”

“If he’d done something that stupid we definitely would have died,” Jones said from behind me. “The shockwave alone from breaking the sound barrier would have brought the ceiling down on us.”

“Besides,” Borgen said before the scholar could go on. “We couldn’t exactly go around flashing our full capabilities before since there was a chance you were an association rat before.”

My mouth worked like a fish desperate for water before words began to tumble from my tongue in a furious rush. “You’re saying that you all have crazy strong powers like that? That I didn’t have to risk my life for you with the pyugnaek?”

“Well of course you had to risk your life,” Carlyn said, putting a hand on my shoulder and giving it a squeeze that made me wince slightly. “No association plant would risk themselves like that in a fight, not for us. If you hadn’t done that then you wouldn’t be part of the team now.”

Her words made sense, but I was still angry. “I could have died. I almost did,” I snapped back at her.

“I wouldn’t have let that happen,” Carlyn said, shaking her head and giving me her usual slight grin. “Trust me. If you had been in that much danger, I would have saved you. Besides, you make quite the cute little hero, and anyway, now you get to learn from the best.”

Red rose high in my cheeks and I looked away. “Fine,” I said resigned, tired of being angry. “Let's just drop it.”

“Let's,” Carlyn agreed, patting my cheek as George stepped up to the mess of splattered beast in front of us and nudged it with the toe of his boot. A moment later the system had left us a neat pile of tanned leather squares and a single hollowed tusk.

“What is it?” Carlyn asked, crouching down beside the materials.

“Boarhound,” George said before slipping the items into the big storage gem. “Big one too.”

“First time we’ve seen a full-grown monster outside that alpha fight,” Carlyn said, frowning around the small crater. “Let's get moving. If there’s one of those things then no doubt more will be somewhere nearby.”

“What’s a boarhound?” I asked Jones as we began our march once again.

“Big dog with tusks, not really anything special. I hear those barbarians in Yuk like to make drinking cups from those tusks though,” he replied with his usual sneering tone.

“Sounds badass to me,” I said with a shrug, wondering if I could convince George to give me one.

“Of course, you would think that,” Jones said with a snort. “No one civilized would desecrate a corpse in such a vile way, even if it were a beast’s.”

“Aren’t your boots made of leather?” I asked, pointedly staring down at his rich black boots which were indeed made from some sort of leather, probably lamb or something.

“Are you saying I have dirty feet or something? Because I can assure you that I do not,” he said, his voice taking on a defensive air.

I rolled my eyes at him. “Everyone has dirty feet. Feet are dirty. Period. How the hell are they ever not dirty?”

“Cleaning spells,” Jones said simply.

I paused at his words, falling behind a few steps before then rushing to catch up. “Can you teach me one?” I asked, my eyes and words full with the brilliant light of hope. If all I had to do was cast a spell then maybe-

“No,” he said so simply that I felt as if I’d just suffered blunt-force trauma. “Unless you are blessed by The Cleric, it would prove almost impossible for me to try and teach you any of my spells. My arts are divine, granted to me through my bond with my gods. Sharing the secrets of my magic would violate my oaths and sever my connection to the higher plains, rendering me more pathetic than an earthworm. You wouldn’t even be able to parse even a fraction of the runes' deeper meanings anyway, let alone translate them into something you could use with your oration casting. Such things would take you years of study to accomplish.”

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I let out a heavy sigh. “Well, at least I tried,” I said.

“Next time, don’t,” Jones said, then moved away from me, interposing Carlyn between us.

“You wouldn’t happen to be able to teach me a cleaning spell, would you?” I asked the other woman, doing my best to plead with my eyes.

“Sorry,” Carlyn said with an awkward smile. “Not unless you’ve got a mage blessing or if you get a new casting method that works with spell glyphs.”

“Why not? What's so different about our casting methods? Isn’t it all just magic?” I asked, crossing my arms.

Jones burst into incredulous laughter on Carlyn’s other side. “Truly the epitome of pedestrian spellwork. ‘Isn’t it all just magic?’ What a fucking joke.”

A sharp jab to the ribs from Carlyn’s elbow thankfully put an end to the man’s cackling. “Ignore him,” Carlyn said with a roll of her eyes. “The difference is in the mana composition and arrangement. Spell matrices, drawn glyphs, runes, and other such spell forms are, in general, far more complex and detailed than the spell forms you can create through spoken casting of any form. In short, anything you try and translate to your casting form would at best just fizzle out into nothing, at worst, explode in your face.”

I sighed deeply, keenly aware of my increasing accumulation of filth. “Is it the will of the arcana that I stay so filthy and gross? All I want is to be clean and to stay that way. Is that really so big an ask?” I said to no one in particular in a liltingly sorrowful tone.

Carlyn chuckled beside me at my proclamation. “What?” I asked with false indignation. “Am I not allowed to mourn this loss I have suffered? Is it not terrible that you must all now experience the agony that is the smell of my clothes after weeks' worth of adventuring?”

“Just ask me anytime and I’ll help you out,” Carlyn said, then, without warning, sent a burst of cold sudsy water washing over me, eliciting a yelp of surprise from me.

“First of all,” I began through chattering teeth. “That was very appreciated. Secondly, warn a girl before you try something like that again or else I can’t promise the response will be a positive one.”

“Sure thing, little hero,” Carlyn smirked at me, to which I sighed.

“And stop calling me that. I’m neither little nor a hero.”

“No promises on that one,” Borgen said as he passed us, tousling my hair with one hand despite my protests. “Now shut your mouths for a bit and focus.”

We shut up for a while after that, just roaming the grasslands in silence, wondering where in the hell all the monsters were for the next few hours until a single monolithic shape crept over the horizon. Eventually, it was large enough to make out and I found myself blinking at the imposing form of a black pyramid almost identical to that of the dungeon’s exterior facade some few miles away.

“That must be the alpha’s den,” George said to Carlyn and Borgen as we paused to take a short break. “I didn’t expect us to find it so soon.”

“Likely the path towards it is not as straightforward as it seems,” Carlym said, frowning at the distant structure.

“Let's just continue on as we have been. No way to know what waits expect to go and find out,” Borgen suggested. “Besides, we could all use a breather.”

We all loosely agreed to that reasoning and after a short break to eat and drink, we were ready to start back out, at least we would have been, had a low rumble not begun to shake the grass around our party, an, of course, stereotypical prelude to a monster fight. We all lept to our feet, weapons and spells ready to fight. Carlyn launched a ball of black fire, more intense than any of her previous spells, into the tall, dry grass, creating an instant flash fire that Jones immediately doused with a wide area water spell, glaring at the woman.

“Watch it, you can't just burn down the field while we’re still in it!” He shouted at her, but she just glared back and sent out a spray of shadowy not fire bolts. Several pig-like yelps were followed by half a dozen boarhounds charging from the grass in a fury of fur and fangs, terribly long tusks terrifying to behold! And yes, I did have fun with that line.

New sword in both hands I gave the creatures my one remaining middle finger and flung myself at them in one smooth leap, the monsters’ yellow eyes gaining a faint red glow as my taunt skill activated. Good to know a middle finger was just as insulting to a dog-pig thing as it was to a human. Or was it just that I thought it was an insult? Questions for later, it was slashing time.

In a strong whirling slash, I ran straight into the fray, cleaving off the nose of one of the boarhounds, and sending it to the ground in a furious fit of anguished howling. I’d been aiming for the neck, but that would do. I reveled in my newfound success in combat, look at me, not a scratch this time, I thought, until I realized the downside of my reckless charge. I was now left alone in the center of the pack of borehounds. As the other beasts angled to surround me and close in I used one of the forms taught in the system’s handbook for my new proficiency, swinging my weapon in several wide arcs around me, not hitting any of the beasts, but causing them all to take a wary step or two back from me.

I grinned as Nika and George came from the beasts’ sides and started hacking away with terrifying power. Nika held a new spear, this one twice as long and evidently wicked sharp as the short spear she’d used before as she cleaved three of the hounds into halves. To my surprise the moment she finished the attack the weapon seemed to almost melt, folding in on itself until the short woman held naught but an orb of metal and wood in her hand. George, on the other hand, was in full bear mode. As in, he was just a big ass bear now, ripping into hound after hound until each died wailing beneath the might of his claws. It was both terrifying and kind of awesome at the same time.

Arrows sprouted from the nearest boarhound’s eyes a moment later, followed by a black jet of power from Carlyn’s open hand. The agondlon woman glared at her brother in the way siblings do when competing for something, then let out another volley of the dark projectiles, each effortlessly finding a mark in the two remaining hounds. In the end, the monsters were all destroyed in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. I’d honestly been hoping for a better fight. Still, perhaps it was just a mark of how far I’d come that I wasn’t bleeding out on the ground like I would have been two weeks ago, especially given the apparently overwhelming forces the others seemed to wield.

Once we’d checked to ensure that no more boarhounds were lurking nearby, we set up a rotating watch of Borgen and Jones, since they were the only ones who could effectively look over the tall grass, and began breaking down our kills. This too proved easier to do than with the fregnick corpses since the monsters were half the size and not covered in thick scales.

It only took about an hour to break down and divide the hounds, then we were off once more heading towards that pyramid in the distance. All the while a strange feeling kept raising the hair along the nape of my neck as if something were warning me to stay away from the ominous and clearly not-at-all-threatening building. Great.