If I reach the end of these arrows and don’t find one of them, whatever I do find is getting shot. Dana was frustrated. When she found the first arrow made of dried blood at a crossroads, she was elated, thinking she would be joining up with another member of her party soon. But Dana had been following behind them for days now, with no signs of getting any closer. Not to mention, taking the same path as someone else meant she was no longer getting any treasure chests. With nothing to break up the monotony except the single chime she heard earlier today, it was boring.

Dana had found a trial not too long after entering the second floor, and it was almost laughable how easy it was to complete. A ‘Trial of Strength’ probably was not a fitting trial for an Archer, but a Smith? Total joke, her strength was way higher than any other stat. Big boy Sam would have wiped the floor in that competition too. The whole thing was basically just tug-of-war, against an invisible entity and with Dana glued to the rope.

And the giant pit into nothingness that the loser would fall into.

But those small details did not matter as long as she won, and Dana won the trial handily. After that though, it had been non-stop running with no end in sight. She had found two separate exit doors before coming across the bloody arrow, but was not inclined to take them by herself. Not without knowing what came next, or having a reason to believe the rest of her party had left her there.

‘Teamwork makes the dream work’, a phrase the Archer mentor had used while trying to instill the importance of the party dynamic on her, but also a phrase that Dana had heard back home more than once, mostly from her parents after Dana and her siblings clashed. She was heavily inclined to agree with it in this instance, based on the experience so far. Almost everything seemed made to be overcome as a team, not as an individual unless you had niche class and profession combinations. Plus, leaving without them just felt a bit wrong.

So, she was looking for her team before moving on. It wasn’t so bad when there was treasure to collect, but now Dana wanted to pull her hair out from the apparent lack of progress. Just as she was considering trying to climb the violent hedges again, she turned a corner and saw a section of the hedge maze had been burnt out, leading to a large flat area made of black stones that was coated with dried blood.

***

It had been two days, the trio still had not come across the next trial, nor did they hear the chime that would indicate one of the missing members of their party had completed one. The slow dulling of the autumn flora continued, morphing into more and more barren hedges until all that was left was walls of twisted, thorny branches. A few mottled yellow leaves still clung in places, but for the most part the shift into a more winter appearance was complete. There was no snow, thankfully, but the air had taken on a chill. Cyn should have felt more effects from the change in temperature, but while she was aware the air was cold it was only mildly uncomfortable. She had to chalk it up to another thing the System made more tolerable, like pain or running.

While they could now see into other parts of the labyrinth around them in places, for the most part it was irrelevant as the paths running alongside them looked nearly identical to where they currently were. The large puzzle boxes too had slowed until coming to a stop, Hex detecting no treasure at all nearby, serving to reinforce the barren feeling the changed landscape brought.

At least the two days was more than enough time to recover and for her to get moderately clean. Plus, as soon as Cyn felt moderately recovered, she dedicated every spare moment to attempting to control Soul Slip or improve her syringe method of healing.

Soul Slip wasn’t a total bust, thankfully. It took hundreds of uses of the skill, resulting in a lot of minor injuries, for Cyn to start to understand how it worked in order to manipulate it and not smash into her target. Her initial theory had been correct, that the target of Soul Slip was not the physical body and instead was the soul, but the skill made use of both mana and stamina. The addition of stamina made it exponentially harder for Cyn to understand and manipulate, even with Hubris.

She had understood Mana Ball after a single use of the skill, and more than that had almost instantly gleaned enough knowledge of both her mana pool and how mana moved through her body in order to manipulate it. While Cyn had not spoken with another Mage to confirm, she was pretty sure that was not normal based on gaining Free Form Mana Casting. She was just inherently attuned to the resource.

Restoration and her health pool, and by extension other people’s health pools, had taken a bit longer to understand. Even now she did not fully understand how it worked, but could manipulate it to a point by using mana as a tool.

Stamina had been a completely foreign resource to Cyn until she started trying to take control of Soul Slip. And even after she was familiar enough to be able to use the skill safely, she still would consider stamina a pretty foreign concept. She couldn’t even detect her stamina pool like she could for mana and health. Cyn had ended up simply manipulating the mana in the skill to shorten its course, using a lot of trial and error to make sure her mana manipulation did not interfere with the way the skill consumed stamina. When that happened, it made the rubberbanding backfire debilitating.

The syringes on the other hand ended up undergoing quite a few iterations, with Hex and Sam taking turns being her test dummy. While there was no getting around the need to damage her party to heal them, she was able to modify the shape her mana took to minimize it as much as possible. Both men did comment that the pinprick would still probably be a distraction that could create problems, depending on the situation, but it was better than not getting healed at all. Cyn was also concerned about what would happen if she accidentally struck something she did not want to heal. Would she be able to stop the health points transfer? Would her health points even heal something not human? She couldn’t even test that question properly on Spam, since Cyn wasn’t sure how their bond might affect the test.

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She had already learned one unexpected effect of their familiar bond over the two days, which served to give her quite the scare. The frog had complete access to her storage ring, through its mouth. That was where the potions Spam had spat at the Warrior came from, but more importantly Spam had seemingly decided to store the Sanguine Lily Vine. Cyn wasn’t sure if that was purposeful, or just the only way the familiar could deal with the vine in the moment, but when she found the frog ‘eating’ the vine during the Trial of Vitality so easily it had actually just been shoving it into her Promising Ring of Holding.

Cyn didn’t notice it at first, thinking the difficulty of withdrawing items was just her being tired, but when she went to pull out a mana potion on the second day she instead pulled out a broken bottle and a long withering vine that still had enough life left to try and strangle her. Presumably, however this storage space worked, it was not intended to keep living things. After she pulled it off herself, Cyn chopped it up into smaller pieces until it stopped wiggling. She ended up trading all of the remains to Hex for a few intact potions, joining the rest of the vine fragments that had been wrapped around Cyn still after the trial, before going through every single item in her storage to get rid of anything that was damaged.

Which ended up being most of her potions, and a good deal of the food she had was also unusable now. At least the Sanguine Lily petals, which the Rogue had split between them after dismantling the bloom, were still intact. Cyn did not get anything special out of Inspect, but after eating one of them Hex let her and Sam know that they would restore a lot of health if eaten and were not poisonous. It had come out to five for Cyn and Sam, and six for Hex after he ate one.

Her remaining survival wafers were indestructible, unfortunately, and suffered no damage from the wayward vine.

During the second day Cyn had started experimenting with circulating her mana, like she had while unable to vent it during the Trial of Vitality, after determining she had improved her mana needles as much as possible at her current level of knowledge. It proved a little harder to do when she was not forced to keep the raw mana inside of her, but after getting the hang of it Cyn discovered that doing so provided a sizable increase to her stats. It explained the sudden weakness when she stopped holding it in before, that she was just returning to ‘normal’ after being boosted.

Sam actually had a similar skill, talking about it after asking why she was glowing blue. The circulation made soft lines of blue spread out from Cyn’s core while she was doing it, along the veins she had created, but she did not realize she was actually glowing until the Warrior mentioned it. The red glow she had seen during the fight with the Illuminant Queen had been Sam’s boosting skill, increasing his strength and agility by a large amount for a short time. He could use the skill every half hour or so based on the testing Cyn and Hex had convinced the man to do after hearing about it.

Unfortunately, this method of buffing herself was too dangerous to do unless she was under duress. Not only did the process have the potential to do lasting damage to her, shown by her still blue fingers, it also began to make her mana veins feel raw and painful after each test. It was more of a psychic pain, and she did not have the tolerance for it like she did for physical pain. So once she had a handle on the concept, she decided to stop pushing that limit for now.

The trio’s friendly chatter and personal skill testing ended up being interrupted when Spam straight up refused to indicate a direction at a crossroad. There was no clear reason, as it looked the same as any other intersection in this section of the labyrinth, but when Cyn tried to figure out why the familiar just crawled into her tabard pouch with a grumbling warble.

“Well, guess it's time to just start picking at random.” Hex shrugged while speaking, but before he could actually make any attempt to pick the frog made a brief, angry cacophony of sound from within the pouch. “Or not…”

“I think it wants to wait here. I don’t know why though.” It was hard to describe what Cyn felt from her familiar, but she was pretty sure that’s why it wasn’t picking a direction. It wanted to stop.

Her words made the Rogue sigh, but he did not argue and just helped Sam pry up some of the stones. The Warrior was able to mold them using his profession to smooth over the cobblestones in a small area and create makeshift backrests for them. It wasn’t much, but the small comforts went a long way during the short rests they had taken.

It took a few more hours, but they discovered why Spam wanted to wait. The Warrior was sharing funny stories of mischief he and his siblings had gotten into growing up, when Cyn felt something odd at the back of her mind. She stood up quickly, confused and alarmed a few heartbeats while she tried to figure out what exactly she was detecting, before turning around in time to see Dana run into view from the direction they had traveled from.

Cyn felt her face break into a grin, and she raised her hand to wave at the approaching Archer. Dana didn’t stop her run until she was directly in front of Cyn, sweeping the shorter woman into a tight hug. Spam surprisingly did not make any complaints about being crushed, but perhaps the Archer had squeezed the air out of it.

The men received the same greeting before Dana asked, “No sign of Scott?” The party shook their heads to her question, and Dana’s shoulders slumped. “Damn, I was hoping I was the last. I have been following those arrows for days.”

“Did you do a trial? One was completed without any of us.” Now that the Archer was with them, Cyn hoped that the mystery trial had been done by Scott. It would be an indication he had been alright at some point in the labyrinth at least.

Her hope was quickly dashed as Dana nodded. “Trial of Strength. Kind of a joke.”

Hex snorted, probably thinking about the fact both of the trial’s they had done had been a pain in the ass, before speaking, “Well, if you are feeling rested enough, we should get moving. So long as Spam is feeling cooperative again.”

“Spam?” Dana sounded confused, until she looked at Cyn again and watched as the bubblegum-pink frog crawled out of its pouch and onto Cyn’s shoulder. The Archer's jaw dropped a few moments before she laughed, “Oh god, it's adorable.”

Cyn and Sam joined her in laughing, with Hex just shaking his head. Spam was apparently feeling cooperative again and chose their direction. Dana claimed to feel plenty rested, having kept an easy pace through the labyrinth, so the nearly complete party continued in high spirits.

They didn’t run long, however. Instead of another crossroad, the next feature they came across was yet another obvious trial arena.