While Wren flailed at the ceiling behind me, I hustled down the slope. Debris slammed and clattered, dust billowed, but I didn’t turn. I scanned the gloomy, subterranean street for Tansy and Usim.

I didn’t see them, which made sense. Of course, they’d hide, in case the next people down that slope were Sixers. They knew to stay small and silent and--

“Mom!” Usim called as he appeared in a narrow doorway. “Where’s my mother? Alex, is she, is she ...”

“She’s behind me,” I called back. “Doing some redecorating.”

“Oh, thank gods,” he said, wiping tears from his face.

“Good job staying quiet, little man,” Tansy said, hunching into sight behind him.

As I reached the street at the bottom of the ramp, I noticed that Tansy didn’t stop hunching. And that a bloody bandage was tied around her stomach. Apparently she wasn’t hunching to keep low, she was hunching from a serious wound.

“Shit.” I frowned, trotting closer. “That kobold got you.”

“Not as bad as I got her,” she said. “But yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“No,” Usim said, while Tansy said, “The best.”

“I already ate a gold bead, boss,” she continued. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. All I need is a night’s sleep.”

“That true?” I asked Usim.

He scratched one of his horns. “Um, I think so.”

“What’re you asking him for?” Tansy demanded.

“No reason,” I said, as the noise from above stopped. “Just because I trust him.”

A moment later, oversized Wren leaped down the ramp to join us in three mighty leaps. Her tail narrowed and shortened after the third one, then she shrunk to normal size.

“That’s the last time I can do that for a while,” she said, wiping her forehead.

“You’re on a cooldown?” I asked. “What’re your limitations?”

“Mom!” Usim pushed forward and wrapped her in a hug. “You’re covered in gross! Yuck!”

“Yeah, I--”

He hugged tighter. “Oh, thank the tide you’re okay. Thank the gods and all their little rosy helpers!”

“I ... “ She smiled wide, and tears glinted in her eyes. “I’m glad you’re not hurt.”

“Cause I’m one of the gods’ little rosy helpers,” Tansy told me.

“Let’s get you somewhere to rest,” I said.

“We can’t stay too close,” Wren said, still holding her son. “The kobolds won’t hold Kathina for long, and neither will that collapsed tunnel.”

“Can you walk?” I asked Tansy.

“Sure, boss. Not sure now far, though.”

I clasped her arm, partly from fondness and partly to support her. “How come I’m ‘boss’ now?”

“Just too damn small for ‘major’.”

Usim wiped his face on his mother’s uniform shirt, then nodded along the street. “We should go that way. That’s the direction that the exit’s in. I mean, where that sliced-in-half building is. The tower? The one we saw in the kobold cave.”

“The lighthouse,” I said. “You sure?”

“Yes. I think. I mean, it’s in that direction, but I don’t know if we’ll find another tunnel into the kobold village, but maybe. Maybe we can just run in and climb before anyone sees us.”

We trekked off with Wren in the lead, trying not to leave tracks. Which meant no blood smear, so Usim followed closely behind Tansy to check that she didn’t drip anywhere. When she shook off my support, I trotted in the other direction, dragging my feet, to leave a false trail, then caught up with them where the cobblestone street opened into a wider space, because we were no long surrounded by buildings. Instead, rooftops rose five or ten feet from the floor, like we were looking at a flooded village. We picked through them, and I looted a rag doll into my hand from a tin box hidden inside a chimney.

“How many gems do you have?” Wren asked me.

“Oh, nine or ten,” I said.

She frowned at me. “You turn to smoke. Your hatchets are artifact-level, and return to you. You can teleport rocks and--what is that, a toy lion?”

“Yeah, wearing a tutu,” I said, frowning at the doll.

“That’s three gems.”

“His other six are me,” Tansy said, her voice weak from blood-loss.

“What does that even mean?” I asked, pretending I wasn’t concerned for her.

She showed me a pained, tusky grin. “No idea, but it sounded good.”

“How did that survive all this time?” Usim asked, looking at the doll in my hand.

I tossed it to him. “No idea.”

“I don’t recognize the fabric,” he said.

To my surprise, Tansy didn’t make a joke about Usim playing with dolls. Well, she was hurt pretty badly, so maybe she wasn’t in the mood. Or maybe this culture wasn’t sexist like that. Either way, I eyed her worriedly as we turned onto a dirt pathway, still aiming in the general direction of the lighthouse, at least according to Usim.

Then a crash sounded from the shadows. Or the echo of a crash.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Sounded like falling rocks,” Usim said.

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“They broke through the obstruction,” Wren said. “They’re coming.”

She prowled into a side-street then whistled for us to follow. We headed through a brick-lined tunnel to a wider street. Usim murmured to his mother as she stalked ahead, maybe guiding her path. I didn’t listen, cause I was too busy worrying about Tansy.

Her breath was sounding rougher. Coming in little gasps.

I wasn’t sure if we’d gotten far enough from the Sixers, though, so we kept walking as she kept weakening. Finally, Wren led us into a tangle of alleys that had once between corridors and bedrooms in a mansion or a hotel. The floor had sunk level with the street, and the doors--and some of the walls--were gone, which left eight or nine paths, with odd right-angled connections between them.

Every thirty or forty feet we came across an opening into the higher floors of the sunken buildings, places where we could climb into the half-rooms above, the lower-halves of the rooms that ended at the rough-hewn stone ceiling.

Tansy started swaying, so we found an out-of-the-way opening and hefted her through. The space was low and felt unstable. The floor didn’t have much beneath it to hold us up. Still, we crawled--well, Tansy and I crawled, the infenti mother and son just crouch-walked--until we found a protected little corner. Then Wren grudgingly re-bandaged Tansy’s wound while Usim sweetly fed her water from my domain.

I crawled out of sight, then turned my entire head to smoke, mostly so I’d weigh less and not break through the floor. Though also, I realized I could see 360 degrees around myself with a smoky head. At least for ten seconds or whatever.

Also, I hadn’t realized until the moment I turned into The Smoke-headed Man that I could do that now. It was pretty badass.

I retraced our path, erasing any signs that we’d come this way, and when I returned to the others, Tansy was asleep beneath the blankets I’d given her. I handed out more food and drink and blankets and Wren gazed at me thoughtfully.

“It’s one gem,” I said.

She grunted. “A flexible one.”

“Flexible like smoke,” I told her. “But my gem doesn’t give me a tail.”

“Plenty of infenti have tails.”

I almost scoffed, but ... did they? I suddenly couldn’t remember, which was weird. Like, I must’ve seen hundreds of infenti by now. I knew they were devil-looking, of course, with horns and pointy teeth. Had Oksar had a tail? When he’d jumped to kill the thornspider, had I seen a tail balancing him? I could sort of remember him both with and without. Not in a creepy, magical, distorted-memory type way. Just in a silly brain-fart of a way, like forgetting if a friend you’ve known for years wore glasses.

So I played it safe. “Yeah, but not like that.”

“True.”

“If I had your gem, would I get a tail?”

She snorted faintly. “Of course not. Gemmed powers change depending on the person with whom they bond. Not much, but a little. The soldier who had my gem before me?”

“Lieutenant Garanka,” Usim added.

Wren smiled faintly. “Yeah. He grew taller, stronger, faster, like I do, but instead of getting a tail his hands turned into like ... dragon claws.”

“He was infenti?”

“Yeah.” Usim looked up from the doll he was inspecting. “He was my great-uncle. He was kind of shy, except when he was fighting. He called me ‘champ.’”

Wren put her arm around him and told me, “He died fighting the Plagues.”

I almost said, “If Six Coves wants Wallhill to join them fighting the Plagues, they could’ve just asked instead of invading. How about that?” But Princess murmured in my mind, a wordless sort of nothing, like a woman rolling over in her sleep.

So I kept my mouth shut about that, and just said, “How come kobolds don’t take over the world?”

“Huh?” Usim asked.

“Well, they get stronger if there are more of them. Like the ones we just fought, they were crazy strong compared to the first bunch. And there were only what, sixty of them totday? So they keep breeding, soon there’s a two hundred of them. That makes them so strong that they easily take over the next kobold village, and the one after that. Then there’s two thousand of them, and each one is level forty. Completely unstoppable.”

Usim wrinkled his nose at me. “What does level forty mean?”

“Completely unstoppable,” I repeated, as if he should’ve known. “So they spread, and now there’s ten thousand of them, a hundred thousand, getting stronger every day. Harder to kill. Easier for them to conquer, it’s a vicious cycle.”

Wren swallowed the stuffed grape leaf I’d given her. “Kobolds are like honeybee hives. Once a village reaches a certain size, it splits. Half of them leave. But unlike bees, if they meet again, they fight. They’re violently territorial.”

“Well that’s a boringly plausible answer,” I said, then yawned.

“I’ll take first watch,” she told me. “I’ll wake you when I wake you.”

“Sure.”

“And you ...” She gestured across our cramped little space. “Sleep over there. Away from me. I want to talk to Usim before he goes to sleep.”

So I crawled out of earshot--like a naive idiot--and made a nest for myself with blankets. Then I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, four feet above me. The stone looked solid, but I didn’t understand how. Like, if the entire dungeon was a sunken city that had been built on a sunken city that had been built on a sunken city, how come there were such distinct levels?

“When the priests requested my presence,” Princess told me, “this was not called Ryetown. This was a capital city. Waldin. A provincial capital city, yet still a populous and ancient one. Or, no. No, it wasn’t at that time, but the oldest of the priests remembered when it had been. Or ... well! My memory remains uncertain and, dare I say, wobbly.”

After she fell silent for a few seconds, I said, “And?”

“And?” she inquired.

“You’re telling me the history of Ryetown, and why there are such distinct, um levels.”

“Or strata,” she said.

After she fell silent for a few more seconds, I said, “Or strata. And?”

“Mm?”

“Are you even awake? Sometimes I think you’re talking in your sleep.”

“Training in your sleep,” she murmured. “That is a wise idea, my honey-eyed warrior. You should absolutely indubitably work on that.”

Then she dropped into deeper sleep. The five-eyed knucklehead.

I had questions for Support, so I tried to contact the weird-ass sarcastic automated voicemail system in my head, but nobody answered. Then I realized I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to ask, other than, ‘why am I the only one with a magical support system in my head?’ First off, maybe, if I had any quests active.

So I thought, Quests.

Show quests.

Reveal quests, abracadabra!

Open sesaquests!

Welp. I knew that the Plagues quest still existed. I forgot the specifics, but it was basically: get strong enough to go one-on-one with Godzilla. Which, considering a pack of knee-high, Level 11 kobolds had just made me burn through my healing beads, wasn’t looking all that do-able.

Then there was some stuff about tiers that Support had mentioned but I wasn’t sure I understood. Every ten levels I achieved a new tier. And then I could get my stats higher and ... what else? Get more gemmed powers? Had I imagined that? I didn’t think so.

I was level 8, though I must’ve been closing in on 9 after all those kobolds. I knew enough about role-playing games to know that each level took geometrically-more experience points or expoi. I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘geometrically-more’ meant, but every level would be harder than the previous one. I still thought I was close to 9.

What else?

Well, I really did have the equivalent of three gems, with my hatchets and domain and smoke. And that was before factoring in Princess, giving me webtouched senses and a shared mind. So four gems, even if some of them were pretty minor. Huh. If I really could learn how to train in my sleep, that’d be a game-changer.

Not that I was sure what the game was. Like, what was I supposed to do between now and arm-wrestling Godzilla? Well, I had to save Usim, naturally. Which meant I needed to find an exit to the surface. Also, I needed to put an axe in Tiral-ur and Kathina--and that gemmed infenti who’d killed Oskar with her fireflies.

I considered that as I closed my eyes. At one point in my life--at any point in my life before waking up in the temple of the Marlboro Smokers--the idea of committing homicide, of attempting homicide, would’ve horrified me.

Not anymore.

I was going to find them. I was going to kill them. Those were ugly feelings, but they were true. They were ugly facts. The question wasn’t, if you kill a killer, do you become as bad as them? The question was, if you don’t kill a killer, do you become as bad as them?

In a world with a prison-industrial complex, however flawed, maybe you could afford to believe in incarceration and rehabilitation. Or at least in containment, in separation. But in a world with magic? In a world with magic, however flawed? You could not spare a killer of innocents.

And I wouldn’t.

With that in mind, I let my thoughts drift toward sleep ... and training. I needed to grow stronger. I needed to become the archmage that my sheet claimed. I needed to increase my tier, my stats, my boons. I needed to increase my gemmed powers, and sleep-training would be a tremendously-valuable tool to achieve all of that.

Imagine six or eight extra hours every day, devoted exclusively to training. Single-mindedly, in a dreamscape where my mind stayed focused and no limits applied.

Keeping those aspirations, those intentions, in mind, I let my thoughts drift ...