“Please don’t let me interrupt if you’re having a moment,” Nathan said to his two… his thoughts stalled out for a moment. Adventuring partners, he decided. My two adventuring partners. We are an adventuring party. “Unless there’s a reason to rush? I have no idea.”

“Nope.” Tanya shook her head, moving to Honeydew’s side with untroubled speed. “Hope you’re not in a rush, though. It’ll be a couple of hours before we move on.”

He opened his mouth to reply, then shut it as the wizardess drifted down to the ground and sagged bonelessly against her partner’s side. “Lady, um, Brilliant Flower? Are you okay? That was really impressive.”

“Mm. F’n.” Her hand lifted an inch as if to wave at him, then fell again as the effort became too much for her. Her head came fully down to rest on a muscled shoulder and she smiled beatifically, eyes closed. “G’nna, ‘mma, nap.”

Tanya gave him a microscopic shake of the head, lips twisted into a wry smile. Her own expression untroubled and no little bit smug, she swept Honeydew into a princess carry and cocked her head towards the door. “She needs a nap. And, y’know, water and a snack, and a cuddle, that kind of thing.”

Nathan glanced around the arena, which had suffered to be largely seared featureless by the finishing blow. There was no trace of the choir, and the floor in the center was an irregular mosaic of glass, flash-melted in broken and jagged patterns. “And uh…”

“Right, right, so, every transept…” Tanya took a step, then stopped to tilt her head at him. “Do you know what a transept is? You’ve got that language thing going on.”

“Traditionally the—okay, traditionally where I’m from, it’s crosswise bits that stuck out of the main body of a place of worship that had a particular shape? But in your language it’s a little more generic. It’s definitely more like anything that has a main area or pathway and it’s imbued with any sort of ritual significance or metaphysical power, that’s a nave; and anything where stuff branches off of the nave, that’s a transept, unless the branch is longer than the nave was or it loops around.”

“That’s… yeah. C’mere, walk and talk.” Tanya gave him a nod and started walking towards the door they entered the arena through, hugging the shivering woman in her arms closer. She carried her with no apparent effort, muscles barely seeming to be engaged. “So, a level of a Layer in the Darkness—in the Megadungeon that we live in, that everyone lives in nowadays, everyone who isn’t at best screaming bound undead soul wishing they were dead—is a sort of slice of wherever, right, made out of bits of whatever?”

“Instantiated dynamic subreality,” Honeydew mumbled almost inaudibly. “Cohered by expectation and powered by the friction between reality and metareality, given proto-form by the collective subconscious.”

“Shhh,” Tanya murmured. “Rest.” She paused for a moment in her walking and speech alike, looking down at her partner. “Anyway, so, each demesne or floor or whatever is made out of segments, and each segment is a nave with some transepts coming off of them. A segment starts with a non-combat room and ends with a stepped-up challenge, and the center of each nave is an optional wave-hold contest that turns the room into a rest area if you survive it.”

“You do that really well,” Nathan said with genuine appreciation. “The teaching voice,” he clarified. “The cadence is perfect, and you’ve got the vocal confidence to give it the right amount of weight without seeming like you’re lecturing.”

“… thanks, I guess?”

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t interrupt.”

She stopped at the doorway, looking back at him. The crease running across her forehead smoothed after a few moments and she shrugged. “It’s fine. Thanks.”

“So this was the, um, stepped-up challenge? The… Elite? And we’re going to be heading back to the center where you already have the rest area set up. To rest.”

“Yup!” She crossed the threshold and Nathan followed in her wake. “Normally we wouldn’t have bothered with it, but normally we don’t delve alone.”

“And when you do, you need to rest more?”

“And when we do, we take our time and fuck each other’s brains out in comfort,” she corrected him frankly, turning to look at him. “I’m a godsdamned juggernaut, literally, and Honey here just needs a breather, which she could get sitting up against a wall. Or in my lap. But we like beds, and the exit won’t materialize for a little while yet.”

There was a challenging pressure in Tanya’s gaze, and Nathan puzzled over it as he considered what she’d said. It was like she was expecting something, or afraid of something, or demanding something—but he didn’t know what, and he didn’t know what his response was supposed to be. “Beds,” he said slowly, opting for honesty rather than pretense or artifice, “seem more comfortable than a wall? Or the floor? But why not just bring a tent?”

Tanya blinked at him in surprise, which meant he had done a bad job pretending to understand what was expected of him. But she smiled after a moment, still clearly surprised, which suggested that he’d said something adequate for the moment anyway. She shook her head, smiling wider, and started walking through the room Nathan had been summoned in towards a door at the opposite end of the room from the arena.

“We’re not socially appropriate, me and Honeydew,” she explained. “People get unhappy about us. The people who pay us to bring them through are our customers, and we want to keep them happy; and the people who delve with us as equals, well, we have to manage their emotions or whatever. There’s no hiding who we are, but we try to minimize how much people feel like we’re rubbing it in their faces.”

“Is it, um.” Nathan’s voice faltered as he glanced over where he’d been summoned. The faded, translucent runes that were left after the room had been used and then reset were labeled to end stream of malevolent undead, deploy ritual, which answered why they’d summoned him. “Is it because you’re both women? Because that’s a thing where I’m—that was a thing where I was from. People disapproving of that, I mean.”

“Eh.” Tanya huffed, then shook her head. “Nah. I mean, people aren’t thrilled that a noble is letting her House die, but we’re gene-compatible and I’d give her a kid in a heartbeat if she wanted one.” She caught his inquisitive look, and gave him a confused one back. “What? That’d better not be a you don’t look like the nurturing type look, just because you’re a Millionborn and managed to not get in the way or die doesn’t mean I can’t punch you.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that,” he protested. “I’m just surprised that you can? I mean, physically?”

“Physically? What are you—right, Millionborn.” She shrugged, seemingly not noticing the woman in her arms, who mewled piteously at the momentary distance from the broad-shouldered chest she’d been pressed against. “Hush, dear. Anyway, yeah, we have arcane and divine magic ways of managing it. Slut bless her, Honey’s talked me into being demi a few times, and that’s a lot more complicated.”

“Oh.” He thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “She said something about being… huh. Shapestrong is a fun word.”

“Anyway, yeah, no, the disapproval is all about the whole, I dunno, thing I do where I bait people with more money and power than sense into fighting me, and then I kill them.”

“That seems like a them problem?”

“You’d think,” she snorted. “You’d think.”

She picked up the pace, and they lapsed into silence as they strode through dulled, desaturated rooms, thinking.