“Typically, enma has six forms,” Luci explained while she stuffed her hair back into her cowl. “These are whim, ease, blame, conform, urge, and torment. An easy way to remember them is with the acronym, WEBCUT.”

“Yes!” Wip said forcefully.

He was sitting on his shins opposite Luci. His back was bolt upright and his knuckles were clasped firmly on his knees. The exposed stone of the dungeon floor was uncomfortable and his shins were bare as he was wearing shorts, but he seemed tolerated it. Luci, on the other hand, was sitting cross-legged atop Wip’s flattened backpack. She’d offered the opposite end for him to sit on, but Wip had been adamant about sitting “beneath his teacher,” whatever that meant.

“When enma is first pulled from the soul,” Luci continued, “it’s completely inert. It won’t interact with the world in any way. I don’t want to get into the theory, but the simple explanation for this is that enma exists within all things yet it doesn’t do anything. You breathe it, you eat it, you step on it, but without a physical form it may as well not be there. Therefore, to make it interact with the world, you need to shape your enma into one of the six forms.”

“Yes!”

Luci sighed. “Once given form, enma can then be melded. Melding is, essentially, compressing and solidifying forms to make them do something. For example…”

Luci pulled pure enma from her soul and into her palm. Then she took a trickle of it and clumped it together into hard whim. Using the remaining pure enma like it were her own hand, she pressed down on the whim ball until it solidified into its meld. She then retracted all of her enma except for a thin trickle that kept the ball from dissipating.

“You’ve seen me use this a few times now, right?” Luci said.

“Yes!”

Luci glared at him for a second. “Well, this is an anchor. It has one purpose, as follows.” Following a similar process from earlier, she pushed the anchor to the side with a pulse of blame. Then, gripping it with unformed enma, she rotated it around her and Wip. “It acts as a hard point which I can tie other melds to. Oh, and you can’t do this, Mr. Wip. I’m sure you can figure out why.”

“Yes!”

“You… don’t know. Okay.” She closed her eyes and tried to think of the best way to explain this. “You know how your enma makes lightning? Well, that’s a result of two things: your soul’s unique characteristics, and your path. While you can’t control your unique characteristics, you can control your path. Doing so causes your soul to take on even more non-standard characteristics. The combination of these characteristics is called, deviation. In my case, I can create orbits, so…”

She pointed towards the orbiting anchor and released it. It took only a few seconds to turn to vapour. Wip didn’t look, which caused Luci to groan in frustration.

“Typically,” she said through clenched teeth, “as a meld grows more distant from the soul it also requires more effort to sustain, though moving enma through the body can reduce this effect tremendously. When it becomes completely detached from the soul, however, it will dissipate immediately. However, the Path of the Moon, which is the path I practice, has a property called ‘orbit’. It allows my soul to act as the centre of orbit for a meld, which means I can sustain it indefinitely without connection so long as the meld and I are rotating around each other. Plus, there are some other unique things I can do. If you were to try replicate that, however, the effort would be about as useful as trying to draw on paper with a sharp stone.”

“Yes!”

Luci pinched the bridge of her nose and whispered to herself. “Yes, yes, yes. Why does he say this?” She sighed and turned back to Wip, who seemed not to notice. “Now, that’s all well and good, but the most important question is, how is melding done? Well, there are two ways: flow and spike. At their essence, they’re both ways to shape forms into a meld, but there’s an enormous difference between them.”

“Yes!”

“The best—” Luci took a deep breath to calm herself. “The best analogy that my instructor ever gave was to think of painting a picture. The forms are your colours, the soul is your brush, and the world is your canvas. There are two ways to go about this. You can use a single colour, or form, which is called a spike. On the other hand, you can use many colours, or forms, which is called a flow. And just like with paintings, there are limitations to both. Using one colour, or spiking, is easier and quicker, but it’s limited in its scope. Think of how a painting done in one colour can never truly capture the beauty of a landscape or the subtleties in a person’s expression. It’s like that: less detailed. On the other hand, using more colours, flowing, will produce a more impressive result, but it’s more difficult and time consuming.”

“Yes!”

“And FINALLY!” she shouted over Wip. Not wanting to be spoken over again, she sped up her explanation so that her words started tripping over each other. “There’s passive enma. This is what we refer to as the soul, or the basis upon which all your melding and afto binding occurs. The greater your passive enma, the stronger your spikes and flows will become, though practice and your path play an enormous role in determining those also.

“Using the Columb constant, we can calculate your level by testing your passive enma. It works on a logarithmic scale, so every ten levels require approximately ten times the effort to obtain as the previous ten. These calculations are highly accurate, so you can take them as a perfect summation of your ability as an enma practitioner.”

She took a quick breath the continued just as Wip was opening his mouth. “We also measure the output of individual forms when spiking and flowing. Just like with passive enma, the output multiplies by ten for every ten levels. However, these measures don’t tell us much other than one’s raw output capacity. Remember, unless you’re using an afto, then your path, your soul’s unique deviations, and a proper meld determine everything. For example, a level ten blame spike may be able to push something that weighs five kilograms with a decent meld, but someone using a poor meld might struggle to do the same with a level thirty blame spike.”

“Yes!”

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“Now, flows and spikes can further be divided”—Luci buried her head in her hands. “Mr. Wip, can you please take this seriously? I’m trying to help you!”

“Yes!”

“No, I mean, you don’t have to be so serious. That makes it less—never mind. Listen, this isn’t a classroom. You don’t have to be so formal.”

Wip stared vacantly at Luci. “But you’re teaching me. That means I’m your student. I must show you the highest respect.”

Luci reeled back at his admission. A number of theories cropped up in her mind as to why Wip would say something like that, and none of them were good. She wondered if all of his scars and burns weren’t from dungeoneering, but from a strict training regimen, perhaps one even crueller than hers.

“Okay, let’s try this,” Luci said, attempting patience. “Does Ms. Stella teach you things as well, such as rules and regulations concerning dungeoneering.”

“Yes!”

“No, stop that!”

Wip’s eyes darted to the side uncertainly. Luci could only sigh at him. Who was she to be angry with Wip, especially after what she did? She took a deep breath. This day had been incredibly stressful and, with one more push, Luci felt like she would cry.

“Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so rude. Let’s take it slow. How does Ms. Stella teach you about the dungeon?”

Wip yanked on one of the links on his collar. “She chokes me,” he said in a strangled voice.

Luci shuffled back from Wip. “Th—that’s so… inappropriate! I’m not doing that!”

“Sometimes she even shoves my face down and calls me names.”

“Okay, stop!” Luci waved her hands feebly to try ward off the image that had assaulted her mind. “I really don’t want to know what you and Stella get up to in your private rooms.”

“But that happens in the counting room. Although, Stella makes sure nobody’s around when she starts.”

Luci’s face paled. “You—I never took you for such a deviant!”

Wip released his collar. “But I don’t do anything. It’s Stella. Whenever I make a mistake, she tells me off and shows me how to do it properly.”

“Stop, please! I beg you.”

“Last week she got mad because I didn’t get enough money, so she made me count to thirty.”

Luci scrunched up her face and glared at him. “Wait, what?”

“She teaches me how to count.”

“And… when you make a mistake, she…”

Wip tugged at his collar once more.

“Oh. Oooh, I see. That makes much more sense, although it’s not much less disturbing.” Luci crawled back onto the squished backpack and crossed her legs. “Mr. Wip, why do you put up with such poor treatment?”

Wip’s face twisted into a contemptuous sneer. “Lessons must be forcefully beaten into the subjects,” he growled. His face shifted back to a grin. “That’s what the teachers used to say.”

Luci buried her head in her hands and groaned. “Why do you sound like my enma instructor? No, that’s not right. You don’t even know basic enma theory!”

Wip shrugged and reverted to his usual, quirky cadence. “I don’t think too hard about this enma stuff. If I want to punch something, I just do it.”

“So, you only use spikes and direct enma manipulation, like the heroes who fought against the first waves of monsters at the Emergence. You don’t perform any complex meld?”

“Nope. I just make it do what I want. Just like what you did when you tried to…” His eyes darted around, seeking escape. When he saw the hurt in Luci’s eyes, he leapt up and flashed his gapped teeth. “Hey, let’s go fight some more monsters!”

Luci had been denying it for a while, but Wip’s slip up had made it impossible for her to ignore. Wip was humouring her. He was trying to cheer her up. The mental calculation she performed was simple and absolute: he was going out of his way for her, which meant she was slowing him down. Dragging her along was obviously against his and Stella’s best interests. Furthermore, he didn’t seem to care about the money from this crawl. Conclusion: Wip was going to turn Luci in to her family.

As Wip practiced throwing punches at the air, Luci pushed aside the wrapping on her staff and brushed her thumb along its smooth, silvery surface. She would have liked to think the staff was the cause of all her problems, but she knew she was truly the one to blame. She had failed to control it. She was the one who hurt Vesina and, now, Wip.

Her mother had never had these problems. When the Queen of Sylexa was in Luci’s place, holding the mantle of the Daughter of the Waxing Moon, she’d successfully fought off a rebellion at the age of twelve. This had helped secure her place as the strongest enma practitioner in the country. Her meteoric increase in levels came afterwards, and by that point, nobody dared challenge her.

Luci, on the other hand, only had one defining trait, and that was her ability to bind with Lunacogita. If wielding either enma or aftos could make someone powerful—wielding aftos being the easier of the two, by a wide margin—then the synergy between enma and afto could produce something terrifying. That was why Lunacogita was so exalted by the Cult of the Moon: when combined with the right deviation, it could shape mountains.

The last person who’d managed to draw on its full power was Soria Animana, the forger of Lunacogita itself. She’d been the one to suppress the dungeon on Mount Praesummus, but that was nearly two thousand years ago, during the Age of Enma. Since then, the highest anyone had ever bound with the staff was its fifth core.

Worse, nobody in the last hundred years had been able to bind with it past the first core. Her mother only managed to make it to the second core once she crossed over level fifty—a feat achieved by brute force rather than synergy or talent.

Luci was the exception due to her ease in absorbing the moonlight, in following the Path of the Moon. Her hair was the proof of that. It proved she had the potential to be the monstrous talent that her mother seemed to think she should be. Yet, in her seventeen years, she’d never come close to achieving anything resembling talent. She was an utter failure.

She bowed her head and spoke softly. “When am I being turned in?”

Wip froze mid-punch and blinked at her. “Turned in?”

“Don’t play coy, please. I know that you’re only keeping me down here while Ms. Stella contacts the Sylexa consulate.”

“Oh, that. Nah.”

“What do you mean? I’m worth ten million kin. Who would be foolish enough to say no to that?”

Wip jabbed his chest with his thumb. “I don’t care about money. I want to explore the dungeon.”

“But Ms. Stella—”

“I trust her.” Wip’s expression had become more serious than Luci had ever seen. All the boyish joviality was gone, replaced by a gaze so intense that it sent a shiver down Luci’s spine.

She turned away from him. “S-sorry.”

“Stella is a good person,” Wip went on. “She doesn’t show it very well, but she cares about me. That takes a lot of work, you know? But she helped me when nobody else would. That’s why I came to the fourth floor. I wanted to get something nice for her.”

“But most of the monsters are…” she began.

The overwhelming horde she’d seen charging into the clearing before was almost completely gone, turned to less than smoke in the sky. However, that still left hundreds of small green blobs in the clearing and beyond, all of which would soon join their kin. Once the decay spread too far, a monster’s core would be rendered unusable.

“Not here,” Wip said. He pointed towards the jungle. “Over there. It’s something big. We’re going to smack it.”

“I—”

Luci didn’t know what else to say. She wanted to protest, she wanted to curl up in her tattered blanket. She wanted to forget this day had ever happened. She pulled her legs in close and placed her chin on her knees.

“Ten million kin,” she muttered. “I don’t get it. How am I worth so much when I can’t even earn a cet for myself?”

Wip eyed her sideways. “Nobody should put a value on life.”

Luci looked up at him, completely shocked by the statement. She’d hardly expected something so meaningful from Wip. His words had cut right to the heart of her and they made her feel so much better.

Wip’s face split into a smile. “Chian taught me that.” He spun his shoulder to loosen up the joint. Red electricity crackled along his skin. His curses from the fight with the monkilyxes had miraculously vanished. The prickles on his skin were gone and his face had returned to a normal shape. He was ready to fight again. “Alright. How about I show you how I use enma.”

“Okay,” she said. A smile creeped onto her face. “I’ll help you as best I can.”