"He wouldn't say a word to me last night, Ah Lam. Even when I squeezed his shoulder and rubbed his back... he just ignored me!"

"Well, you did yell and snap at him in front of everyone, even when he was puking up all over the place. I know that if I were feeling like death warmed over, I'd want Elof there comforting me, not making me feel worse," said her youngest sister with a certain dry inflection that made it clear Chu Hua had definitely stumbled.

Chu Hua cursed softly. "You don't understand, Su Li. This has nothing to do with my feelings for Jack. If things were otherwise, I'd do all I could to protect him from all of this. But as things stand, for the sake of the group, what else can I do but push him?"

Chu Hua's older sister sighed. "Unfortunately for you, you're in the unenviable position of being our tactical battle leader who knows all too well the perils of a weak link risking the strength of the collective. And in this case, your weak link happens to be your boyfriend."

"Exactly," noted Su Li. "And it doesn't help that you're now being just as hard on him as our former Kung Fu master, determined to make us stronger above all else, no matter how much we hated him at the time."

"Which is a great way to ruin your relationship, assuming yours is anything more than a fling in the dark," said Ah Lam.

"But what else can I do?" despaired Chu Hua. "It doesn't matter how much I think I might be falling for him. If I dare let that softness ease my touch, if I pamper him when he must be pushed, then my weakness, my desperate desire to please him, might be the very thing that destroys him! How twisted an irony would that be, sisters? Dark fates then laughing at my folly! I either lose his heart or he loses his life. Either way, I lose! At least if I push him, at least if he survives... maybe, in time, he can forgive me."

Jack could sense the hug they shared, Chu Hua's soft sobs making him feel like a complete turd for so bitterly pushing her away with his cold silence and stiff back the night before, though to be fair, he really had felt like death warmed over, and much to his chagrin, flinched at the thought of enduring Veti's Tier 4 bane a second time, even just the peripheral backlash from a less than perfectly cast spell.

"Your words make sense, sister, and I don't disagree that we all need to push ourselves to our limits, and it speaks well of your training regimen that the rest of us are learning to endure the backlash of those bane spells. But you're forgetting one very important thing, Chu Hua."

"And what would that be, sister?"

"We're all level 12, learning to endure the backlash from imperfectly cast Tier 4 spells. Jack is still level 0."

A breathless silence followed, as if the girls contemplated just how absurd it was that Jack was even surviving down here, let alone could be thought to have any hope of surviving the backlash of spells 4 entire tiers above his actual nonexistant level.

Chu Hua chuckled ruefully. "And yet so much of the time he shines like the sun, when his plasma blast sends those horrors scrambling back before they can overwhelm us, his ability to seal up the portal slits we use to bait our prey. Hell, his earth affinity that somehow allows him to segment and reinforce this entire endless tunnel or hallway, forming pits or unbreakable stone bars, or just allowing for a superheated kiln being integral to our strategies."

Jack could sense Su Li's nod. "Exactly. We need Jack to shape the environment, just like we depend on you to shape our tactics and take advantage of your battlefield perks. And you two blending your strategies together is probably the only reason why we haven't taken massive casualties, or even any casualties at all."

"And every time he cast's that Windfire spell and the entire segmented chamber becomes as hot as the Ebenrock desert under the midday sun before he seals off the monster filled hallway, turning the tunnel segment he formed just beyond our own into a deathtrap, is a fresh reminder of just how fiersome a Flame Adept's powers can be," said Ah Lam. "In those moments, Jack radiates a killing aura worthy of the battlemages we saw years back, before the emperor's edicts came into full effect. At times like those, it's hard to remember that Jack is, in fact, the most fragile among all of us."

"A fair point," whispered Chu Hua. "So what do I do?"

After a thoughtful silence, it was Su Li who spoke. "Jack already knows what he's doing, springing his stone wall traps and fire spells. Let's continue to work with him as we always have before. Our job isn't to reshape Jack. It's to let Jack be himself, as we learn to move and act in sync with his spells. A practice that's kept us alive for nearly a month down here, and I think it's a miracle we haven't already gone mad. As for boosting our resistances by training through conflict? I'd suggest we stop that. That we accept his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Do you remember when even our master would alter our training when we were children? That what he expected of me at 8 was very different from what you were expected to handle at 10 and Ah Lam at 12. To expect Jack to push past Tier 4 Bane backlashes when he is twelve levels behind us is, let's be honest, absurd."

"Su Li's right, Chu," said Ah Lam. "Pushing him isn't worth it if it's just breaking him, and ruining your relationship."

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Their voices faded to indistinct murmurs at that point, and Jack's last thoughts were relief that he wouldn't have to pretend to be sleeping after all, drifting off in soothing waves of dream once more.

Chapter

Soft hands wrapping about his chest pulled Jack out of sleep, tasting the anxious worry of a girl who's psyche blazed against Jack's own in their party-link. Jack smiled, purposely easing his momentary startled tension, taking comfort in and accepting her touch.

And the relief he sensed through the link reaffirmed how right he was to do just.

"Jack?"

"Yes Chu Hua?"

"I... well..." she swallowed, lowering her gaze when he turned to face her.

"I'm sorry."

Jack gently took her hand and squeezed it, gazing at the strikingly beautiful girl now curled up against him, the farthest thing from the imperious, tyranical drillmaster of the day before. He lowered his lips, gently kissing her forehead. "My apologies as well."

She quirked a smile, for all that Jack could sense the wave of relief she felt with his simple words. "You have nothing to be sorry for. I was the one coming down on you like a tyrant, I was the one pressuring you as if you were the same rank as the rest of us, as opposed to..."

"A classless nobody?"

She suddenly glared. "Don't even say that! Without your fire magic and talent for manipulating the elements, we'd all be dead since the day we first got here."

Jack winced. "Sorry."

She kissed his cheek. "No Jack. I'm the one whose sorry. Wht I did was absurd and unfair. By job is to recognize strengths and weaknesses of my party and protect the weakest links. Not to condemn their flaws reforge them in fire, irrespective of how many break under the strain, like the coldest of masters trying to quickly forge a killing force from thousands of levied troops he cares about individually no more than individual grains of wheat." She sobbed and held him close. "Because you, Jack, are already as precious to me as the crown jewels of the empire I once called home. A treasure to be cherished and protected, not pushed to the breaking point and castigated for not being even stronger, like the monstrous cultivators at home my sisters and I hope never to see again."

Jack laughed at that, giving his girl a fierce hug as the last traces of bitterness melted free of his heart, and grateful he was to be free of that burden, savoring a long deep kiss before parting lips with husky laughter and hungry smiles. "Monstrous cultivators. Wow. That's a term I hadn't ever expected to hear again. I'm glad you'll spare me their training techniques, whatever they are. They sound pretty brutal."

Chu Hua nodded. "Cultivators who thrive in struggle and conflict are actually learning to cycle trace amounts of living Dream to reforge themselves and their own path through life." She frowned thoughtfully. "It's like gaining levels, even if just a small handful of levels, without actually having to dare the deep."

Jack blinked at this. "Seriously? You can actually cultivate to increase your abilities? Not having to level up at all?"

Chu Hua positively beamed. "It's true! Of course it takes years, and you're effectively only gaining a handful of levels, cultivating on the highest peaks, or areas so rich in the spiritual energies of Dream and Nightmare it's almost like their meditating in the Deep themselves, or just embracing every battle, every conflict, absorbing to a small degree the potency a Delver does with his kills. But the most important truth in cycling any ofthat spiritual energy is that those who are able to, are almost certainly able to become Delvers. Which is the only reason my sisters and I even dared the keep in the first place."

Jack blinked at this, feeling a sudden chill. "So, wait... facing those spiders, that was technically your first Delve?"

His lover solemnly nodded as he held her close.

Jack felt hot with sudden anger. "Those spiders were no White Tier monsters... that Queen was around Level 20! And there were only three of you? The captain should have known better than to even allow you three to risk your lives to that madness. Unless, of course, he was subtly guilting you into doing so while your father left, clever enough to trick you into thinking it was your own idea all the while."

Chu Hua hissed and shuddered at those words. "If anyone but you had suggested that, Jack... but how, thinking back to our final conversations, our father's almost taunting contempt..." she shuddered and shook her head with disgust. "Now I can't help but wonder how true that was. Perhaps we were a final sacrifice to the emperor, being as we had refused to marry his sycophantic pawns twice over, and our value in his eyes as anything other than a sacrifice had gone drastically down." She chuckled bitterly. "At the time we had thought, just maybe, he would support our choosing our own paths through life, when he saw how diligently we were working to better ourselves, to make the most of ourselves... Once or twice, when he nodded his head and seemed pleased with my growth, I thought that maybe it meant that he actually cared."

She sighed and it broke Jack heart to sense the disappointment in her gaze.

"But no. Clan elders don't believe in freeing their pawns. Only using them so long as they're useful... and destroying them when they aren't. Even if they're your own children."

Jack swallowed the lump in his throat, holding the girl so precious to him as tightly as he could. "Oh, Chu Hua..."

"Shh, Jack." Soft warm lips caressed his own. "The past is the past, and that's all that it is. It's up to us to make a future as sweet and bright as we can. Her kisses turned fierce, hungry with need. "And with you in my life, Jack, I hope we can forge a future together that is very sweet indeed."

Soft amber eyes gazed into his own and Jack was stunned to realize how much he wanted to do just that with the girl he was now kissing so fiercely, so tenderly.

Both of them knowing that the days to come held nothing but uncertainty and peril, and all they could do was embrace the present in each other's arms, and make their brief moments of solace together as sweet as they possibly could.