Some floors took a while to walk from staircase to staircase, others took less. All of them were equally boring. That was why Ortho had run off to kill a mezpinsor on floor one.

“Mr. Ortho,” Luci whined. “We have a big day ahead of us and can’t go wasting our energy on small fry.”

Ortho glanced down at the mangled corpse at his feet. Its scythe-like arms had been broken off by a strike from the edge of Ortho’s shield. The corpse was already turning to smoke.

He didn’t bother raising his dog-head helmet. He could see Luci just fine despite there being no holes for his eyes. By flowing a trickle of enma into it, he could see through the helmet’s golden aftocore eyes, fastened into the eye-sockets on the helmet’s top.

Through the helmet’s eyes, his field of view was wider. It had taken him a little while to get used to in his youth but the extra peripheral vision worked wonders in a fight. Besides, he used so little enma to maintain this odd sight that he didn’t mind keeping the helmet on. It also made him look more intimidating. Unfortunately, the downside was that colours were heavily muted in this state.

“Listen, sister,” Ortho said, shaking his head. “I’m here to kill monsters. I found a monster and I killed it.”

Luci looked behind her down the long, winding tunnel. The path to the second floor was out of sight. “But we’re supposed to be killing monsters on the seventh floor.”

“Stella said to bring back thirty thousand kin. I’m starting early.” Then he walked off down the tunnel, further away from the path.

“But you didn’t collect the core!” Luci shouted.

“Oh yeah, can you get that for me? I’m the striker, after all. It’s not really my job.”

“But… but that’s…” Dancing on the spot out of anxiety, Luci turned to Wip for support. “Can you tell him that—no, Mr. Wip!”

A red streak blurred past Ortho before he could react. He spun on the spot and raised his shield, but the blur, Wip, had already turned a corner and was out of sight. In the distance he heard the distinct thwack thwack thwack of several things being hit by a blunt force.

“There’s plenty more here!” Wip shouted, his voice carrying through the tunnel. “Don’t worry. I’ll leave some for you.”

Luci smacked a hand to her face. “Why does he always do this?” she muttered.

Clicking his tongue, Ortho turned and headed back to the path to floor two. He wasn’t going to be some clean-up crew for Wip. If that guy wanted to go showing off like that, then he could do it on his own.

“Wait!” Luci cried as he passed her. “We can’t go without Mr. Wip.”

Ortho shrugged. “I’m just following orders. Like a good little dungeoneer.”

Things were a lot quieter since then. Luci had kept a tight leash on Wip by tripping him up with threads of enma before he ran off on his own. Ortho kept ahead of the pack. He didn’t want anything to do with them.

The walk through floor one was always the longest until reaching floor eight. It spanned almost two kilometres due mostly to the path dungeoneers had to take through the winding tunnels.

Ortho and the rest were stopped at the lomaw, when a bunch of Aspar “outpost guards” checked their paperwork. Ortho was about the knock away the leader, a man wearing a visored helmet whose arm was cast up and resting in a sling, when the man laid eyes on Wip. His whole body trembled at the sight of Wip and he let them all through with an apology.

They took far too long to get through floors two and three. Ortho walked quickly and Wip didn’t seem to have trouble keeping up, but Luci seemed puffed out by the pace they were setting. It felt to Ortho like he was just dragging the kid around.

There were no hiccups throughout those floors. Luci and Wip remained in idle conversation for most of it, though there was one bit of drama when Luci told Wip off for trying to eat all of his packed food right then instead of saving some for the walk back. Ortho shook his head at that and picked up the pace.

Once they reached the fourth floor, Wip took the lead and created a fog. He didn’t use an afto for it, instead depending on his enma. Ortho couldn’t help but feel it was a waste of effort.

Ortho stayed as far back from Wip as he could without leaving the fog’s range, which was excessive, but then Luci approached him. She kept making small talk by asking a lot of questions, mostly concerning his aftos.

“I think it’s really impressive that you can use any afto,” she said.

“It’s just training,” Ortho replied half-heatedly.

“Really? But I’ve trained most of my life and I struggle using anything that requires anything besides conform to use.”

“Eh, then use those ones.”

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Ortho was preoccupied by the creepy faces on the trees of the fourth floor, watching them for any sign of movement. His smell did him no good here; the whole place stunk of rot. The problem with the Dungeon of Anypaxia was that there were monsters everywhere, so he never knew if he should be on edge all the time or to just relax into it.

Despite his attention darting between every tree he passed, he had no trouble listening to Luci. He could tell that the sleight girl was trying to win him over by being extra nice. She was getting on his nerves.

“Hey, sister.” He stopped abruptly and rounded on her, letting Wip walk ahead of them. “What’s your travel strategy?”

Luci stopped and glanced nervously at Wip’s back. “Um, sorry, mister, but I really don’t think we should be waiting or else we’ll end up outside of the fog.”

Ortho waved a hand dismissively. “Hey. Do you know how quick the first floor is supposed to be walked?”

Luci’s eyes darted to the side. “I, er, read a blog post saying that fifteen minutes is a good time.”

“Pah! Fifteen minutes?” Ortho almost laughed at how sad that was. “Even for E-ranks, that’s too slow. I’ve got no idea where you read that, but it’s wrong. Even so, we took over forty minutes.”

“Well, we’re still improving, I guess.” She looked like she wanted to be anywhere else. Ortho wasn’t going to let her go without saying his piece.

Ortho fished his arm out of his shield’s grips and stood it upright on the stone path beneath his feet. He crossed one leg behind the other and rested his arms on the shield. “How long do you think an A-rank team takes to run the first?”

“Um, I imagine less than fifteen minutes?”

“Guess.”

Luci bit her bottom lip. “Twel—” Ortho’s eyes bulged and she quickly changed her answer. “Ten!”

“Two.”

Luci’s face dropped. “Oh. I guess I still have a long way to go, then.”

“Yeah, because you’re not doing anything.” He kicked a foot out from behind the shield to show Luci the bangle wrapped around his ankle. “See this? It’s called a wadi, and we of the Nubah Kilebhi all wear them once we complete the Ritual of the Limping Hound. I can use it increase the strength of my body. With that, I run. I can beat one of those skytrains the Anypaxians love to brag about when I’m using them, but I need to unbind my aftos first to reduce the stress on my enma.”

“Wow, really?” Luci’s eyes had lit up in genuine amazement.

A smile etched onto Ortho’s harsh features. “Yeah. And I think I’ve run the first in five minutes once. The only reason it took so long was because I had to wait for my grupp of a party. So.” He drummed his fingers on the top of his shield. “What’s your strategy?”

Luci squirmed under his gaze. “It’s not that great.”

“Hey. While you’re wasting time, Wip is getting away.” They couldn’t see him anymore between the dense trees. Ortho could still smell the man’s fog, though, like a passing rain. Honestly, the more he learned about Wip, the more he wanted to slug him in his mug.

“Well, all I have is some melding,” Luci admitted. “And I’m not that good at it either way. I only know two ways to move faster. The first is to sling myself.”

“Sling,” Ortho repeated dryly. “Like a rock.”

“More or less. The other is, well, less practiced. I can reduce my weight and then hop through the air.”

Ortho raised his eyebrows. “That sounds useful.”

Luci waved a hand defensively. “No, it’s really not. It takes a lot of enma and I’ve only ever used it once before, and if I use it now, I’ll be fatigued before I even get to the seventh floor.”

“And if we take too long to get to our farming spot, we won’t have enough time before we need to turn back and get some sleep.”

“I understand,” Luci said resignedly, “but with the variations that my enma has taken on, I still have no data on how a meld like that ought to work and how it could be optimised.”

“Then get an afto to do the heavy lifting for you.” Ortho picked up his shield and slipped his arm through the silvery grips. There were two of them, one that he fit his forearm through which fit despite the arm guard, and another that he grasped with his palm. “That’s what aftos are for. You use less enma, get less fatigued, and there are plenty of things that aftos can do that enma just can’t. Basically, they’re more efficient. And when it comes to life-or-death situations, you don’t want to be wasting your time or energy.”

Luci’s hands squeezed around the length of her bag, compressing it so that whatever round tool she had within could almost be made out. She stared at her feet, the rabbit ears on her beanie drooping down. “But that’s the problem. I’m no good with aftos. My path is way too strict and doesn’t work well with them, and I don’t want to abandon it either. I… I don’t know what to do. I’m just so weak like this and I’m only holding Mr. Wip back, even if he says otherwise.”

Ortho shook his head. “Kid, go back to your family and keep training.”

“But… this is my family now.”

She didn’t say much, and Ortho couldn’t see her face, but he didn’t need to in order to recognise how she felt. A mixture of scents overwhelmed him: fear, regret, pain, sadness, and so many more.

As much as he tried to convince himself that she was just being a whinge, Ortho still felt guilty about what he’d said. And he hated that part of himself. That weak side of him had left his tribe and honour to rot while he fled, alone.

He glanced around at the trees. He’d seen people get caught by those vines before. Still, it was nothing compared to Huhl Hadem, where indescribable horrors could raid your camp at any time of the day or night.

“Listen, sister,” Ortho said. “My strength isn’t strength; it’s just survival. We, the Nubah Kilebhi, have a lot of rituals we undergo. A lot of training, too. We twist our souls so we can bind more aftos. We change our enma to swallow much of the effects of aposyndortion so we can bind faster. We burn our senses out with the cores we find to help us hunt better. And we train ourselves to use our enma with a certain, singular form that allows us to use any afto we want. We don’t do it because we want to, but because that’s the only way to survive.”

He removed his helmet and, using his own eyes and not the helmet’s, peered into one of its golden eyes. “But when we do that, we lose ourselves a little. We forget what it’s like to smell an afto and just not know what it once was, or to live without sniffing out every monster within a thousand steps around us. The wadis don’t come off the day we put them on. They grow with us. The fight never leaves us. This helmet…”

He flowed a trickle of enma into the helmet and saw his own face staring back at him. He looked old for his age, but everyone in Huhl Hadem was like that. In Anypaxia, people had pinned him as mid-thirties despite being twenty-three. Stress had etched his face in ways that ought not to happen to the young, and the wings of his black hair had already developed some greys.

“This is my pride. It’s all I have of my family before they were taken from me.” He slapped the helmet back on his head, suppressing the dizziness induced by spinning it around. “And if anyone takes it from me, well…”

He turned and headed off down the path at a brisk pace. Luci called after him and started running.

“What happened to your family?” she panted once she caught up.

Ortho’s face shifted into a snarl, hidden partially behind his helmet. “I let them die without me.”

He set off at a sprint, leaving Luci behind.