More panic than Dylan had ever seen jumped from Mark’s eyes as the Herbalist tried to find something to hold on to.

His body dropped, chest scraping against the newly formed ledge in front of him. Clawing at the ground, he tried to stop himself. He managed to grasp the edge of the cliff, but his injured muscles protested. The fingers of one of his hands were quick to begin losing their grip.

Dylan jumped forward.

In that moment, his mind split, but he was too focused on reaching out to Mark to spare any of his attention for his deck. He scrambled to squat down and grab the man’s wrist, straining against the pull of the Herbalist’s weight as his own wrist was clasped in turn.

Dylan’s feet slid along the rocky floor as he struggled to stabilize Mark.

Because of his preoccupation, he failed to choose whether to draw or generate and was automatically forced to pass on his beginning of the turn action.

Once his feet were secure, Dylan took stock of the Herbalist. His clothes were in tatters, strips of acidic web had melted their way through the fabric, etching burns across Mark’s skin. The arm Dylan held had gotten the worst of it.

Probably the one he landed on after the explosion, Dylan thought.

The boy’s other arm still desperately clung to the ledge at Dylan’s feet, but it was obvious he couldn’t last much longer.

“Mark, I need you to calm down and help me get you up,” Dylan said through labored breaths.

The Herbalist weakly struggled to pull himself out of the abyss before giving up with a gasp. “I can’t do it!”

“You can!” Dylan yelled. “Help me pull you up.”

Mark’s eyes locked on to Dylan’s as he quietly pleaded, “I think I’m going to quit. I just want to go home.”

“Don’t quit! You can go home after we finish the dungeon.” Dylan tugged at Mark, his wrist scrapping against the edge of the precipice. He thought of the weirdness after the Herbalist’s trial and said, “Whatever’s going on with you, you’ll have a better chance of dealing with it if you get a better reward from the System. Now, come on.”

Mark closed his eyes and took a deep breath. For a moment, his muscles relaxed, and he seemed like he was about to give up. But then he nodded. He let out a pained cough and said, “Let’s do it.”

With Mark’s renewed cooperation, Dylan slowly began to haul the man up, but just before the pair managed to get the Herbalist over the ledge, an explosion somewhere near the front of the group shook the ground.

Mark slipped, dragging Dylan closer to the chasm, but he quickly attempted to stabilize himself by clutching at a jagged rock. Skin scraped off his palm, but he succeeded in slowing his momentum. With the addition of Dylan leveraging himself against the floor, the two came to a halt.

After taking a few breaths, Dylan asked, “You okay?”

Mark gave a short nod, and they started again.

While helping pull the Herbalist up, Dylan once again felt the beginning of a new turn. With a calmer mind, he chose to draw a card, but he couldn’t spare the attention to look at it until Mark finally crested the ledge.

As the man gasped against the relative safety of the stone floor, Dylan pulled the cards in his hand in front of him, finding a new Basic Energy.

Then, not waiting for something to yet again divert his attention, Dylan activated his Intermediate Energy and then one of the Phantom Archers.

Mist materialized into a body, and Dylan's eyes swept the room.

Chester had managed to regain control of the armored spiders, but his shoulder was bloody and his movements a little stiffer than before.

He was put under more pressure because Dena had stopped playing. Dylan couldn’t quite make out the details, but she looked to be fixing something about her violin.

Rowan and Jaiden continued to kill the monsters while Alice and Sara worked together to push the corpses away from the group’s back line.

Dylan ordered his new archer to resume the work of whittling down the spiders harassing the party from above.

The disintegrating webs had dropped all the spiders previously lining the edges of the ceiling, but new ones had soon crawled out to take their places.

Dylan jumped to the side to avoid one of their white threads as the phantom began to charge its shot.

From where he was at the back of the group, he had enough room to dodge, but was closer to the ledge than he’d like. Still, he didn’t move. There were no dangerously close spider corpses. The nearest was just over ten feet away, and if the shaman decided to blow it up, the only thing he’d have trouble avoiding would be the gore.

That also meant his archer would be mostly unaffected as well.

Archers, he thought, feeling his mind split at the beginning of a new turn.

He chose to generate, played his Basic Energy, and summoned another phantom.

Dylan felt a little nervous; there were no cards left in his hand. But he calmed himself with the thought that, at least for the next minute, he still had a functional Mana Shield and two summoned creatures to command.

Both archers began to attack the web shooters. When they focused on the same target, a well-placed shot from each was enough to end the creature. Spiders began to fall from the ceiling every five seconds under the steady barrage of misty arrows.

With Jaiden’s cooperation, there was rarely more than one of the web shooters left capable of harassing the party at any particular moment.

The lowered pressure to dodge eased the fight of the rest of the group, and once Dena’s music resumed, Chester and Rowan finally seemed able to catch their breaths.

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But the shaman was still a problem.

With a limitless stream of spider corpses to exploit, explosions of gore and green fire lit the room every five to ten seconds. Members of the party were constantly forced to interrupt their combat rhythms and move out of position to escape the blasts.

With everyone working together, no one appeared overly taxed in the situation, but moving forward was difficult.

Over the next few turns, Dylan kept drawing cards to replenish his hand.

Phantom Rally.

Immobilize.

Phantom Rally.

Shit.

Despite having two copies of the card that could do it, Dylan wasn’t able to extend his archers’ duration. He’d needed to draw an energy card.

Now, he couldn’t activate anything in his hand.

But maybe he could do something else.

Dylan stared at the pair of Phantom Rally cards, thoughts racing through his mind.

The cards’ primary effect was to restore and then double the duration of all active phantom cards. For a summoned creature with a duration of five turns like the Phantom Archer, that meant however many turns that it had left would be restored to five and then doubled to ten. When he’d played the first of the Phantom Rallies earlier in the dungeon, it had done just that. When he’d played the second, however…

Dylan had summoned multiple phantoms to fight against the massive wave of spiders in the dungeon’s second battle, and his first archer had lasted through it all. Where the second Phantom Rally had refreshed and extended his other summoned creatures’ durations to ten turns, that first archer had had its duration extended to twenty. Phantom Rally hadn’t acted on the duration value listed on the archer’s card; it had acted on the already extended duration the first instance of the card had buffed it too.

The cards had stacked.

And if that was how the primary effect worked, Dylan guessed that the salvage effect would be the same.

If one Phantom Rally were discarded, it would double the physical and magical powers of all active phantoms for one turn. A second should double the values again, effectively quadrupling the phantoms’ damage.

And discarding was free.

He had no energy and his only other card was Immobilize. The archer’s duration wouldn’t last much longer. One would dissipate at the beginning of his next turn, and unless he got lucky and drew one of his few remaining Intermediate Energy cards, the other phantom would follow just one turn later.

Using the Phantom Rallies’ salvage effect was the only thing he could do now. He just worried whether it would be enough to change the situation of the battle.

Progress forward had stagnated. Spiders continued to appear in a steady stream. Corpse explosions were more frequent. And the chasm cut off much of the party’s room to maneuver. The difficulty of avoiding both the blasts of green fire and the ever-present harassment of the web shooters was slowly increasing. Without the archers’ support, it would only get worse.

And at the heart of everything was the shaman, unfazed and unsullied, conducting the battle from behind its barrier.

But if something could get through to it…

Dylan had no clue how the lizard’s protection functioned, but he guessed that stronger attacks would find an easier time penetrating it. Jaiden’s Stone Bullet was more powerful than a Phantom Archer’s arrow, and when the two had both tried to target the shaman, the Earth Mage’s attack had traveled further.

If there was a sharp increase in the archers’ power, maybe their shots could get through.

He couldn’t be sure, but it was his only chance.

Dylan ordered the phantoms to attack the shaman.

He discarded the first Phantom Rally, and mist erupted around his archers, dim light leaking through a shifting veil of vapor.

He discarded the second, and the mist drawn to the condensing arrows transformed into a roiling vacuum.

Unconsciously holding his breath, Dylan counted seconds that seemed like minutes.

In front of him, the battle moved in slow motion.

Chester used his shield to guard himself and Dena from an explosion.

Mark was hit by a flying web just as Jaiden killed the spider that had shot it.

Rowan and Alice each dueled one of the armored monsters.

And Sara stood as close to the center of the party as she could, eyes constantly darting around the chaos while maintaining a kind of distant composure that made her seem the least affected of them all.

The phantoms’ bows flashed with light, sucking in the very sound around them, and then they fired.

Twin streaks of mist blasted their way across the room, reaching the circle of green flames almost as soon as they took flight.

Air rippled wildly in front of the pillars, but it was a futile resistance. The flames dimmed, and a loud crack echoed through the room just before the barely slowed arrows detonated against the shaman.

One took it in the shoulder, disintegrating the arm that held its staff.

The other tore a large chunk from the creature’s stomach, sending it crashing back against the altar.

The battle seemed to pause.

Hit it again, Dylan mentally commanded the phantoms.

As the arrows condensed, the mangled lizard let out a howl. It weakly raised the hand that held the green flames and flung it forward. The fire floated on an unseen breeze, and just before the phantoms fired, it reached the ring of flames flickering around the pillars.

A blinding flare of light washed across the room. When it was gone, the circle of flames vanished with it.

The archers loosed, and their arrows rushed unimpeded toward the shaman.

One smashed through the lizard’s skull while the other blew large hole through its chest.

As it died, the torches along the walls flashed, their flames rushing chaotically across the room.

Dylan ducked as one bout of fire raced over his head toward an armored spider. A living armored spider.

The creature screeched as its body took on a greenish tint. Its carapace strained, and smoke rose from its joints. Dylan imagined he could see pain burning its way through the spider’s eyes. Eyes that were locked onto him.

The monster staggered forward a few feet before madness seemed to sweep over it. It charged.

Dylan ordered the archers to shoot it, but he didn’t think they’d have enough time to condense their shots before it reached him.

“Everyone careful!” Chester shouted.

Though his eyes stayed on the spider barreling at him, Dylan could see enough of the rest of the battle to know that his opponent wasn’t unique.

Every living spider had been afflicted with the green flames, and every one of them was charging at someone in the group.

Chester tried to Taunt, but the creatures ignored him. The spiders were out of control. Maybe the skill could prevent some of the damage they were about to do, but it couldn’t affect anything else.

A red wave of light swept the area to Dylan’s right as Rowan used Elemental Cleave. The skill instantly killed one of the armored spiders, and when it died, there was a familiar explosion.

“Shit!” the swordsman cursed.

Another blast came from behind Dylan. A web shooter killed by Jaiden.

Chester activated Retaliation and blew apart the spider in front of him.

Alice gritted her teeth as she tried to protect Mark and Sara as one of the web shooters charged down from the top of the wall, but Dylan couldn’t spare the attention to follow her fight. The spider coming at him had almost arrived.

Dylan got ready to dodge to the side, hoping the spider’s momentum would carry it off the cliff behind him, but just as it was about to reach him, the spider screeched again and came to a halt.

Limbs flailing, the monster twitched back and forth, its body cracking and expanding beyond its limit.

Dylan’s heart dropped. He wanted to run, but he had no time. There was nowhere to go that would let him escape what he knew was coming.

The armored spider crouched down and exploded. Green flames smashed against his shield, shattering it.

The force of the blast lifted Dylan off his feet, sending him careening back toward the abyss. He saw the ledge pass beneath him and panicked.

Lost in his fear, Dylan almost failed to notice the tug at his mind that signaled the beginning of his turn, but once he realized what it was, he grasped for it with all his might.

He chose to generate and then immediately played Immobilize. Targeting himself.

Forced to a stop, Dylan hung frozen in the air above the chasm.

The ledge was in front of him. It was just under five feet away, but it was too far to reach. If he stopped channeling Immobilize and let himself fall, there was no way for him to catch himself.

One second passed and the mana displayed at the corner of his vision began to tick down.

[Mana: 22.2/103]

22 seconds.

Dylan had 22 seconds to figure out how to get back on solid ground. If he couldn’t, his mana would bottom out and he would fall.

With the depth of the chasm beyond sight, that fall would mean death.

The only way to escape would be to quit the Tutorial.