Sophia was going to have to kill the cat while Dav and Amy occupied it. They weren’t making much progress. Neither was the corpsevine-infested cat, fortunately.
Which of the two targets Taika mentioned should she try first? The skull was the most common location and Taika said there was a concentration there as well as the shoulders. The shoulders could be all the vines that had now risen up to fend off Amy, but Sophia couldn’t think of what else could be in the skull. If she was wrong, that would waste time she wasn’t sure she had and it had already proven to be sturdy. “Taika! Is there still a bunch of, what did you call it, light at the cat’s shoulders?”
“Uh.” Taika froze and stared at the giant cat for a long moment. “It’s a lot weaker. The glow in the head is still there. The vines above the cat glow more than the bones do. That’s so strange.” The colorful chinchilla sounded both intrigued and disgusted.
That was all the confirmation Sophia needed. The spot she wanted was in the head, so she had to get through the skull.
Or did she? Could she manage to go around the skull? She couldn’t go in through the mouth, since that was wrapped around Dav’s upper leg, but that also held the cat’s head in place and Dav’s attempt to stand had twisted it to the side.
Sophia ran a few steps to the side and found that she could see the cat’s lower jaw. It wasn’t a great angle, but it might still work. It had a better chance than trying to go in through the eyes; they were too small for her Animated Spell Blade to fit. She’d have to try to aim spells at the eyes if she wanted that to work, and her aim with Force Bolts was questionable enough that she wasn’t happy about the idea.
Sophia hurriedly pulled the Animated Blade over to just under the jaw, then shoved it forward. It was just like controlling it with her muscles even though it used her mind; she knew what it was supposed to do and her years of practice with spellforms meant that controlling a floating blade seemed as simple as doing it physically.
Not that controlling it physically was all that easy without practice either; it wasn’t. Fortunately, Sophia had enough practice at both.
It took force to push the blade into the decaying skin under the sabertooth cat zombie’s chin. Sophia could tell when the knife hit the open mouth by the improved movement.
The zombie didn’t even seem to notice. It bit down on Dav’s leg again, which knocked Sophia’s knife into the side of Dav’s armor and also let the tip of her blade impact its upper palate. Sophia didn’t wait for a better chance; she just shoved on the Ability animating the blade to push it as deep as it would go, then a little deeper. Blade’s guard dented the damaged skin where it entered the cat’s neck and even forced it to tear a little more before it finally penetrated far enough to hit the important part of the corpsevine.
Sophia kept pushing for several seconds after the cat stilled, until she realized it was dead.
“That didn’t go well.” Sophia tried to pull her blade back out, but it was stuck and she felt surprisingly low on mana. Had she pushed additional mana into the Ability to get it to move farther? It seemed likely. That was one way to enhance maintained spells, after all, so it was almost a reflex for her. She’d have to watch out for whenever she ever ran into a situation where she was mana-limited.
Sophia ended up having to get Dav to pull her knife out from where it was embedded deep in the cat’s skull. It was chipped, which would work fine for a floating spellcasting location but was definitely a sign that she needed another new knife before they took on the Leveled Challenge in the West Conservatory. She shouldn’t try to shove this one into another critter’s skull. It might not work. Even if it did, the knife probably wouldn’t survive.
That was less important than the fact that it might not actually penetrate.
Sophia set the blade in the air next to her then carefully helped Amy remove the pair of long teeth from Dav’s leg. As they came out, they were followed by a rush of Dav’s purple blood. Sophia immediately pulled some roughly bandaged the area over the armor. The fire was still lit, calling other corpsevines. They couldn’t stay here.
Amy tried to break the pair of teeth off the skull, then growled to herself and chopped through the neck. By the time she finished, Sophia had Dav more or less on his feet, supported by his arm around her shoulder. They limped into the darkness away from the fire.
“We should be far enough now,” Amy broke the silence.
Dav leaned heavily on Sophia while she looked around.
Sophia hadn’t given up on finding him a log or something to sit on. She eventually picked out a wide root. It wasn’t perfect, but it would be a better place to sit while his injury healed than the ground. “Can you get down to this root without hurting your leg too much?”
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Dav shook his head with a frown. “No, but maybe…”
Before Sophia could ask what “maybe” Dav was talking about, she saw the green glow she’d come to expect from his healing beacons. This beacon didn’t look like any she’d seen before. If anything, it looked like a sawed-smooth tree stump with mushrooms rising from the bark on the far side, except that the areas where the bark was missing glowed a virulent almost neon green and looked more like glass than wood.
Healing Beacon Seat [https://i.imgur.com/0xR4yCx.jpeg]
It was clear that Dav had decided that he didn’t want to get on the ground and had decided to try to solve it with his healing beacon, since he needed to summon it anyway. It was the best beacon Sophia had ever seen Dav summon. It might or might not be exactly what he envisioned, but it would certainly serve its purpose.
“Very nice. That should work.” Sophia supported Dav as he settled onto the horizontal surface of the beacon. It didn’t shift at all under his weight.
A moment later, Taika hopped into Dav’s lap. He balanced carefully on Dav’s uninjured leg, then softly headbutted Dav’s hand in a gesture that was so familiar that Sophia had to laugh. He was wordlessly asking for scritches.
Dav cautiously rubbed the chinchilla under his chin. Taika shifted forward a little and Dav’s hand ended up buried in the colorful ruff of fur around his shoulders. “We should have left when the cat came in, the same way we did for the bear.”
“I’m not sure we could have gotten away easily,” Amy countered. “Didn’t you notice that the cat didn’t move like any of the other critters we’ve seen? It might have followed us if we tried to run.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sophia interrupted before the disagreement could become a true argument. “We didn’t run, we fought and we won. It’ll slow us down since we have to wait for Dav to heal, but we killed the sabertooth cat and that should be very helpful to others. I guess those teeth are worth something?”
Amy gave a sharp laugh. “Shieldbreakers? Yeah, they’re worth a lot. That cat had to be past its first upgrade for that. Something like that doesn’t belong in this forest. Back home, sure, but here?” Amy shook her head.
“What’s a Sphere upgrade?” It couldn’t be a level. Sophia finally knew what an Ability upgrade was, when you increased the power of an Ability by directly upgrading its slot and the Ability itself, but this sounded like something else. Maybe it was like a Tier increase back home? A single Tier usually wasn’t worth enough to be that important, but she couldn’t think of anything else Amy might mean.
“I keep forgetting how little you know,” Amy said with a grin and a small shake of her head. “The first Sphere upgrade is at level four; we assume it’s the same for monsters. You have a choice then to upgrade, split, merge, or increase your Spheres and you also gain a Primary Sphere Ability. The Primary Sphere Ability is based on the Sphere and all of your Abilities, so there are a lot of options, but a few of them are very common. Shieldbreaking is one of them. If that’s not your Sphere Ability, you can imitate it by getting a Shieldbreaking weapon, which requires materials from an appropriate monster.”
“That makes sense. Is it every four levels?” Shieldbreaking seemed like a good Ability. If she could attack straight through an opponent’s Shield, it seemed like monsters would be a lot easier to kill. At the same time, if they could get through hers, things might be a lot deadlier than she thought at higher levels.
“Primary levels,” Amy corrected. “I’m looking forward to it; that’s when I can really start thinking about going home. With the Leveled Challenge, it might be possible without leaving Casterville. Anyway. Dav, why is your blood purple?”
Sophia had hoped that Amy would miss it, with the terrible light conditions. Apparently, firelight plus nightvision eyedrops was enough to see color well enough to tell the difference between Dav’s purple blood and the deep red of normal human blood.
“Does it matter?” Dav sounded tired. “I know you’ve already guessed that I’m Warped. It’s not something I can hide.”
Amy chuckled. “Yeah, but a bloodwarp? What did you gain? Is it something other people should repeat?”
“You sound excited about it?” Sophia was completely confused now. “Arryn seemed to think we should try to hide the fact that Dav is Warped, and deliberately took us to Casterville instead of Hailport because Dav can’t completely hide it.”
No matter what her Status said, Sophia knew she wasn’t Warped. It didn’t know what she was, so it called her Warped, but she wasn’t changed by the trip through the Origin.
“Hailport? Why would you want to go there? Hailport’s almost as bad as Mazegate. Might even be worse, now; I don’t think anyone in my family’s been there since they had that war.” Amy sounded dismissive.
Dav traded a glance with Sophia. She nodded at him to tell him to go ahead. He smiled at her, then turned to Amy. “We haven’t talked about the past, have we. We’re not from the Broken Lands, but we don’t know how to return home, either of us. After we got here, the first person we met was from Hailport. We didn’t know where else to go. Aymini introduced us to Arryn and he brought us here, instead.”
Sophia hadn’t expected him to lay it all out like that. Maybe it was for the best; Amy was passionate and open and didn’t seem at all concerned about what other people thought about her. She also openly disagreed with the way things were done in Casterville and the Vocational Registry, which meant a different worldview.
“You’re not from the Broken Lands.” Amy’s eyes widened. “Are you from Midgard or Jotunheim? Do you know a way to return other than the Maze?”
“I’m from Terra,” Dav said with a shake of his head. “And I already said we don’t know a way back. What’s the Maze?”