Chapter 18:

Mias' first combat against a wolf was successful, but not without problems. I stayed behind my sister as we left the cave to intercept the zombie canine. I watched as the shadows seemed to crawl away from their resting places as if they were living things to help hide and conceal the girl, until she was little bit a shadow herself. If I hadn't have known where she was already, I think I would have lost her completely. Even then I thought my eyes were tricking me half the time.

Even the shining silver spear seemed to become more muted and Gray in my sister's hands. I was gobsmacked to be honest. To think her Ability made her this good at stealth should have made it nigh impossible for the zombies to follow her.

Boone did slightly better than me at following Mia, and at my request, stayed in her flank, with enough distance not to break her stealth, but close enough to save her if she needed it.

The zombie wolf did a terrible impression of imitating life. It trotted on paws that squelched, and it's tongue lolled like a swollen black slug more than a living appendage. It swung it's head from side to side as though scenting, but it were it's ripped and ruined ears I paid the most attention to.

Mias’ stealth was good, but I could almost see it the moment the wolf found her. It snapped around, jellified flesh flinging free from its many rancid wounds, and growled a wet and horrid sound.

Mia froze. I could tell only because it was no longer difficult to follow her. I could practically feel the magical aura of fear pouring off of the wolf, not affecting me or Boone, but absolutely affecting Mia. It charged, and Mia stood staring at it, not braced, spear to her side, seeming to almost accept her fate.

Then a stone coated in blue Force essence tore through its front leg, and the wolf ploughed a furrow in the wet mud several feet long. Boone had flung the rock with the speed of a ballista and it had taken the leg off at the knee, completely scuppering its charge, but at the end of the day it had barely inconvenienced the monster, let alone stopped it.

“You can do this, Mia! You just have to stab it with the spear now. You don't even have to get close. If it comes too close, I will end it before it can hurt you.” Boone spoke softly and comfortingly to the nine year old, having seen as well as I did that kid gloves were needed with Mia right now. She might hate me for treating her this way later, but if it got us out of here alive, I'd pretty much stoop to any level - including babying my big sister. Boone continued to encourage with a small voice, and propped his muzzle under her trailing hand so she could feel his warmth and comfort. He used to do the same with me, when I was sad, or scared, or mourning my first life. He was a good friend - the best I could have asked for, and now he was being that friend for my sister.

As the wolf tried to climb to its feet, Mia finally got the courage to emerge from stealth, took the time to gather herself, and with a scream of both terror and rage, skewered the wolf through the chest.

The blade of the spear was so sharp it bypassed flesh and bone altogether and buried itself in the ground. The wolf, for its part, wheezed and growled, and went still. There was a moment of silence, before Mia yelled again, her face suddenly visible behind the shadows in her hood, where her expression held the fury of a warrior, not the face of a child, and she ripped the spear back out and buried it again in the corpse. She went to wrench it out a third time, but I was already there, having raced from where I stood to watch to lay one hand on the shaft and wrap the other around my sister, as the wailing became crying, and the stiff posture and taut muscles collapsed, her body going limp in the come down crash of an adrenaline dump.

I don’t know how long we stayed there like that, but it was long enough that Boone had to crush an interloper with a rock.

When Mia finally pulled herself together, though, I could see something else beside the fear in her. There was the burning anger of a woman scorned and torn down. The kind of expression that throws bricks at god for a hobby.

She looked at the corpse, and left my grip to reach into one of the tears in its flesh and pull out a black Ability Stone.

Ability Stone: [Wood 3]

Anywhere else, I would have told her to eat it, but considering the putrescent orifice she had just pulled it from, and the ichor covering it, I was willing to wait until we could clean it properly.

Still, with that act, something rose in my sister that pushed back against the fear, and the day began in earnest. We needed to scout the surroundings, and discover the secrets of this trial, if we had any hope of getting out of here, let alone with constellation stones. And that was the goal, after all. Constellation stones and a class to go with it. Mia had come here hoping to help me, but I would be damned if I was going to leave her behind. We would both get classes out of this or neither of us would.

We began to scout after that. Between Boone and Mias' senses, we could find or avoid the zombies fairly well, and now that Mia was rested, and not making decisions based purely on terror, she began recalling more and more of Fathers lessons about hunting.

She only made three more kills with the spear. It wasn't that it was an unwieldy weapon, but it was a weapon that was ill suited to Mia. She was at her core a small, incredibly deadly, and acrobatic close range fighter. Her Shards of Midnight Ability produced wickedly sharp knives from the shadows inside her cloak, and between her up front, Boone as ranged support, and me reverting to a midrange role of being able to snipe from afar with my catapult, or smash things with my tail, we racked kills as the day went on. But we avoided heavy pockets of creatures, of which there were plenty.

Still, while we had trained and sparred together for years, seeing Mia when she was letting the rage temper the fear was a feat to behold. When she wanted to be, Mia could be almost whisper silent on the muddy and wet ground, and skimmed over the surface of the long grace as though she were skating in ice It was clear that even if her personality had regressed, her skills hadn’t - and with the addition of Ability stones, had actually only improved. Rats and wolves sometimes never even saw her coming. Often, she led with a thrown knife from close range, burying it in vulnerable body parts, like necks, eyes, armpits, or on one particularly sickening occasion, the crotch of a wolf. If the rotted thing could have still felt pain, I imagine after that it would have done nearly anything to stop doing so. Then she would leap in, coming in low and slicing a blade across and through flesh, parting skin and tendon, stabbing deep into bone, or spilling rotten guts to the floor.

The first couple of kills were as faltering as the spear, but as she saw we were always there with her, and as she continued to evade damage or have us there to back her up and heal her when she needed, the fearful aura of the forest seemed to hold less and less of a sway on her psyche.

That is not to say Boone and I did nothing. Frequently, we would snipe snakes or rats from range, or disable and kill second or third targets when they came at us in a pack. While rare, a few of the creatures we killed had Cores which became Ability Crystals inside their bodies. Neither Mia or I fancied trying to take one before we’d had a chance to clean them. When it turned out Mia had only washed the ones she had taken in a river and wiped them dry I was horrified.

My tail, as it turned out, was a particularly deadly weapon against the fetid freaks. When one got too close, I was able to slam the heavy length of it down with a surprising force, crushing skulls and bones, and pulping organs, while it was flexible enough that I discovered I could wrap the smaller opponents in its coils and crush them to death. My strength sat at Body 2, the same as Mia, but the tail seemed to amplify that strength further, and I was sure I'd most likely give Papa a run for his money on strength alone - not Father though. I had more than a feeling that if I tried, he would leave me very sorry for the attempt, while laughing full bodied and making a joke of it.

I missed him, and mum, and Papa. I wanted out of this wet and back to the searing dry heat of the desert. I wanted desperately to see the sun.

The first time I saw light in the forest that wasn't mine, I doused my light and the three of us ducked into the sodden undergrowth to observe what we had found.

Ahead of us was a cliff, or possibly in reality the side of the cave cavern in which this forest sat. Regardless, through the dark and twisted trees, we could see gray stone stretch up into the darkness and the clouds above. We could only see that much because of the strange, purple light spilling from a ragged rent in the rock face, glowing from huge fungi that were growing from the walls and ceiling.

It wasn't an abandoned cave either. The entrance was about eight feet across at its widest part, and it was swarming with perhaps a dozen huge, bloated rats. They twitched and wandered, but never left the entrance, just scanned around with their blinded eyes, ruined ears, and twitching noses. Every few minutes, a new rat would emerge from the cave, stand around for a minute or two, and then trundle off into the forest. No rats went in, but more and more came out and headed away.

I slid back down the carved out ditch I had crawled up to get a view, and met Boones’ and Mias’ eyes. “I think I found one of the Towers that I was told to destroy to pass the trial. I'm guessing there's something in that cave making rats, and that's why there seems to be no end to them. I'd guess that there's one for Snakes and Wolves too - but there's supposed to be four of them. Mia, you've been here longer - have you seen any other creatures here in the forest?”

Mia looked panicked and her eyes widened to a comical degree - or it would have been comical if her eyes weren't now black pits and gold irises. She started to shake and her lip quivered before she looked away from me. “The Spiders…” she whispered. “They don't leave their part of the forest. I don’t go there.” I took in that information with a sigh and a shudder. Spiders in my old world could get big, and they could be deadly. But the ones I had heard of in this world were utter horrors. And if they were in the forest in the numbers that the other creatures were… my heart fell through my stomach and I felt my gorge rise. Even if I was immune to the fear effect of the forest from the [Dawnslight] Ability, a phobia of gigantic spiders was an all natural, perfectly real fear to have, I reckoned. I determined then and there that if there was no trick, and we were really going to have to stay here until the [Terror Aura] was brought down, we would go for the spiders last. I really, really hoped there was a trick. After all, i had apparently passed the Trial merely by becoming immune to the fear.

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“Can we take them as we are?” Boone asked, crawling his way to the top of the embankment to look for himself. He slid down soon after. “I answered my own question. Not as we are now, we can't. We need more supplies, a place to properly prepare, and a plan of attack.”

My friend was right. As much as leaving this place as soon as possible appealed to me right now, and while the enemies in the cave were low level, taking on a possibly unlimited number while they were in a fortified position that favoured them would be a terrible mistake.

“So what do we do?” Mias’ voice was sounding small again as our denials were sounding to her and her fear-addled mind like we were giving up. I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. Gods, she was warm in that cloak. I was distinctly jealous, as I say there shivering in my destroyed shirt and soak trousers.

“We have a few hours still to scout and see what we can come up with before the next storm, if I’ve been reading the weather patterns right. We see what else we can find and see if we can spot a less well guarded place that we can take as a starter.”

Eventually, with one last longing look at the cave and it's implied hope of an end to the trial, Mia agreed and we snuck back the way we came and headed in what I was calling a northerly direction. The rains always came from the same direction and I had decided that was North, in order to not get as easily turned around in the dark.

The rain was just threatening again when we discovered the first of what I would later come to call supply caches. There was a cool wind that rattled the trees and the temperature had dropped several degrees. But after pushing through progressively more dense patrols of creatures, we came across a hollow tree that was guarded by two wolves, two snakes, and three rats. Inside the hollow of the tree, I could see a doorway in a few planks of well sealed wood - like a cupboard, almost - with a glowing mushroom above the door.

I had doused my own light when I saw the light in the distance, in case it was another tower, but when I saw the door, and the mixed guards, I had smiled to myself.

“We need whatever is behind that door - I'm sure of it. This whole trial is set up to take a long time and deal with survival and facing your fears, but the people it is meant for would never come into a trial expecting to be here for days or weeks. They would die of exposure or starvation first.” Mia looked down at my comments, as in two weeks, she had discovered none of this, and had almost done just that, but I pulled her to me and hugged her to my chest. “You did really well to survive as well as you did, Mimi. Kintsuji threw you in at the deep end and didn't even give you a clue how to survive. Yet you did. I’m so proud of you for that.”

When she was reassured, we went through a plan on how to catch the creatures unaware. Seven zombies was more than we had handled at once so far. Mostly anything over three we had avoided and gave a wide berth while we hid in bushes or up trees.

In the end, we decided that Boone, with the most powerful attack of the three of us, would truly and take one or two of the wolves while Mia went to tackle the third. I would shoot the snakes that hung in the branches of the trees, and hopefully remove them completely, before trying to tackle the rats.

I checked the essence storage on the enchantment in my catapult and found that it was below half. As my own essence had had a chance to recover and everything but my Foxfire Imbuement was sitting at full, I took a moment to refill the battery, taking 15% of my essence, and filling my limbs with an even deeper chill than that brought on by the cold and the weather. I would need to make sure we all warmed through thoroughly after this, and I started to wonder how Mia had gotten through two weeks without getting sick. This place should, by all rights, be a breeding ground for disease and illness. I even remembered that I had been worried about my filthy wound not smelling right, but that worry had simply…faded…after we had eaten and rested. Something to think about later.

As it was, Boone lifted four medium sized rocks out of the sucking mud with some visible strain, and his body began to flicker with blue flame again as he filled them with essence. Him launching those stones from behind cover was our signal to begin, and I rolled out of my own cover as Mia started sprinting from where she had hidden in the nearby shadows.

As the first rocks impacted the wolf in the back, I yanked back on the cord of my catapult, eyed down my arm, and loosed a charge Foxfire Imbued stone at one of the two huge snakes wound through the branches of the tree above the door. Unfortunately, for a small target at range, in the dark, I missed, and the stone hit the wooden branch. The good news was that the stone exploded in blue fire and force, cracking it and breaking it away from the trunk under the weight of the snake. It dropped out of sight and I knew I had screwed up. It would be able to sneak up on Mia from where it had landed - but at least it couldn't drop down on top of her like the other was about to do.

I grabbed another stone from my pouch and dumped another charge of Foxfire into the stone, dropping me to only four charges in the Receptacle before I started drawing directly from my Core. As the second snake began to lower itself to where my Sister fought, I aimed and took a shot, and this time cracked it clear in the skull. The resulting explosion sprayed the dry and fetid snakes’ skull over a wide area, and the body went slack where it was still wrapped in the branches.

Unfortunately, I had overestimated my speed. Mia had made it to the lead wolf, and Boone was in the process of smashing his first target to soup, but the rats had basically been left without a target, and concentrating on the snakes, I had left myself open for them to sneak up on me.

The first moment I realised I had really screwed up was when a long set of rotten incisors dug into my lower leg and didn't let go, weighing me down and keeping me in place with two sets of sharp claws dug their way up my legs and into my back as a second rat climbed up into my hair to dig teeth and claws into my back. A third tried to grip on to my tail and started to claw at the softer scales on the underside, but even as I screamed at the sudden pain of the pair on my legs and back, I lashed my tail to one side and smashed the third rotten rodent against a tree truck, crushing it's bones and leaving it to fall in a heap.

My scream of pain as the teeth dug in, though, distracted Mia, who flinched and glanced back just as the snake I had missed reared up and jerked forward. I watched as it clamped it's broken fangs into my sister's neck and shoulder, and then suddenly I wasn't the only one screaming. I just wasn't screaming only for myself.

The adrenaline surged through me with a shock, and I ripped out my bone handled knife from my belt where it always sat sheathed, and jammed it with every bit of force I could muster into the head of the creature biting into my leg. It spasmed as the six inch blade penetrated its skull, and its jaw twitched apart. With a wrench, my leg was bloody but free.

The other rat climbed higher and sank its teeth into my neck even as I started running for Mia, my tail beating at the rat on my back and trying to dislodge it - my panic was so high I didn't even feel the bite as it sank its teeth in. Mia was in trouble and I needed to save her, it was the only thing that mattered to me right now.

I needn’t have worried, though. Mia rose from the undergrowth with the snake skewered on one of her shadow daggers, bleeding, but barely. She was breathing heavily as I raced forward, but she looked more shocked at the rat I was fighting than at her own situation. She threw her other knife directly at me, and I flinched, but the speed was so great I didn't have a chance to dodge. Luckily, I didn't need to; the dagger impaled the rat on my shoulder at the speed of an arrow, and tore it from my throat - though it took a large chunk of flesh with it.

Arcadia! I heard Boones’ mental yell just as I stopped before Mia. The terror in his connection was like a punch in the face. Your health!

My thoughts seemed fuzzy, but I felt the need in his message and brought up the relevant portion of my Soul Card.

Health: 42/200

Health: 41/200

Health: 40/200

“That…that's not good.” I slurred, and put a hand to where the rat had bitten me. It came back soaked in red. With each beat of my heart, a new surge of claret pumped from the wound. My knees went weak and I fell to the floor, my sister diving to catch me so I wouldn't smash my head on the tree roots beneath me. My blood coated her black cloak in a darker stain.

“Mia! Get the door, there's more coming!” Boone yelled, and grabbed my collar with his teeth, dragging me with surprising strength to the wooden door in the tree. For myself, I tried to grope for my Traveller's Bag power, but couldn't seem to get the concentration necessary to activate it. The portal flickered once, twice, and fluttered as though it wasn't there at all.

I forced myself to think, forced every iota of concentration into the task of opening the portal, and with a painful surge of effort, the doorway held. I reached my free hand in, searching for the healing bottle. My other hand was clamped to my wound.

“There's nothing here! There's not even a room!” Mia yelled, furious, rather than scared, the first time I had heard her voice like that in this trial.

My head lolled as I pulled the bottle and the portal snapped shut. I could see through the gap in my sister's legs that she was right. There was nothing there. The door opened onto the bare wood of the tree. It had been a trap all along. The door had been a fake and I was dying for it.

Health: 35/200.

I bit at the cork of the healing bottle with my teeth and tried to twist it out using my free hand, but I either didn't have the strength, or more likely, I was quickly approaching passing out from blood loss and a torn throat.

“Get away from her! Get back!” I heard Boone yell, and saw his blue fire form step over me protectively. It was then I heard the growls, the shrieks and the hisses. I looked down towards my feet and saw the gathering of wolves, snakes, and rats that had gathered in a ring around us.

“Get away from my Sister! You’ll have to go through me to get her!” Mia screamed into the approaching pack, and the other figure, that made its way through the ravenous crowd.

In the centre, now, was a massive, jet black lion, standing before my tiny sister and her shadow daggers, as she furiously slashed at anything that came close. The lion had a pleased grin on its face.

“Are you sure that is what you want, Child? You can leave. Just walk away. Your sister will bleed out in moments and do you really want to watch that? Just walk away.”

“Never! I'll never leave her you giant Creep! She’s my sister! My best friend! Monsters like you don't get that! You don't have people to love you. That's why you're a monster!” Her hood was thrown back and her triangular ears stood erect, her hair puffed out like the fur on an angry cat. Tears streaked her face.

Health: 15/200

I tried one last time to pull the cork, but my fingers didn't have the strength to hold the bottle, and it slipped from my fingers.

“I am so pleased you said that, little morsel. It means you passed.” The Lion growled, and the growling and shrieks of the monsters faded. The oncoming rain never got here. The darkness crowded in, and the world held its breath.

Then I was somewhere else.