Luci thrashed to the surface and coughed her lungs up. The river here was steep and narrow so, given her short stature, she couldn’t find the riverbed and had to tread water to stay afloat. Desperate not to drown, she clawed her way back to the riverbed. It was hard work given that her dress was weighing her down.

Once Luci had dragged herself out of the water, coughing and sputtering, a shadow loomed over her. She looked up and caught sight of the strange water monster.

It was a giant of a man. He had a tuft of red hair on the top of his head; everything else was seared flesh that had long since healed up. The sun was shining brightly on him such that his muscles, and the scars they carried, seemed to pop. That was when she realised, in terror, that the man was naked from the waist up.

She yelped and slipped back into the river. By the time Luci swam back to the bank, struggling against the swift current, she was completely out of breath. She kept her eyes fixed on the riverbank.

“Firstly, mister,” she sputtered, “I apologise for staring. However, it’s a little hard not to when you’re—” she broke out in another coughing fit.

The half-naked man leaned forward and shook his whole body like a dog drying off. When he straightened up, he looked genuinely confused. “Staring at what?” he said.

“That—it—your indecency!” Luci cried.

The man simply blinked at her, even more confused.

Luci screeched, “Just put your clothes on, mister! Please,” she added in a moderated tone.

“Okay!” He trudged off to a nearby tree.

Luci took a deep breath and heaved herself out of the water. She slid backwards up the riverbank so that her vision was always facing away from the naked man. Luci’s dress was completely soaked and a gentle wind brought a chill. She couldn’t believe he’d just exposed himself like that. Disgusting! She, on the other hand, was not so indecent. She was going to wait for him to leave before stripping her dress off to warm over a fire.

“You know, mister, er—what’s your name?”

“Wip!” he shouted.

“Mr. Wip,” Luci said. She took a deep breath, preparing to give her lecture. “You know that revealing your body like that is something that should only be done on your wedding day, yes?”

“Huh? Does that mean we’re married?”

“I—what? No! Absolutely not!” Luci wailed. Her cheeks were hotter than the sun. “I mean, indecency aside, I’m sure you’re a wonderful man. But me? I’m nobody. Not worth a conversation. Just forget I exist. Think of me as garbage on the side of the road.”

“People tell me to get out of the garbage all the time. I don’t listen to them.”

“Wait, what does that mean?”

Luci saw from the corner of her eye that Wip had slipped his shirt on. That was when she realised that his clothes were right there, and Wip had been swimming near her home the whole time. Earlier, she’d been so fixated on her phone that she hadn’t noticed him. She could have slapped herself for being so careless!

“Also, don’t married couples have to sleep in the same room?” Wip said, ignoring Luci’s question. “That would be really hard, I think.”

Luci spun around and scowled at him. “Okay, there are so many problems with what you just said that—”

Their eyes met for a moment, then Wip looked away, clearly having seen something he knew he shouldn’t have. Luci couldn’t figure out what would prompt him to be so flustered. Firstly, she was a terrible person by her own measure, so nobody should have behaved like that around her. Secondly, she looked wholly unappealing right now, and that was beside her foray into the river and up the muddy bank. She was rake thin, there were heavy bags under her eyes after months of rough sleep, and her hair was a complete…

That was the moment when Luci realised that Wip had seen everything—her hair and freckles, that was.

Her face paled and thoughts ground to a halt. She gaped at Wip for a few breathless seconds, trying to process what had occurred. Then a thousand fears and anxieties came crashing rushing to the surface of her consciousness and she slammed her head into the earth in a kowtow.

“I’m an idiot, Mr. Wip,” she wailed. “I’m a stupid, idiotic, fool of a girl.”

Wip froze with a shoe half slid up his foot. “Um, okay.”

“Please pretend you never witnessed my pitiful existence. I’m begging you! Don’t let anyone know I exist.”

For a few seconds, Wip didn’t respond, and Luci thought her stomach would turn inside out. Then he shoved his shoe on and said, “But I wanted to tell Stella about you.”

“No!” Luci yelled. Then, realising she’d spoken so rudely, she dug her forehead further into the mud and lowered her voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so rude. But please don’t tell anyone about me and my… um…”

Wip cocked a half-missing eyebrow. “Shiny hair?”

“Don’t even say it!” Luci was on the verge of tears. “I mean, it’s bad enough that I didn’t notice a boy had been swimming near my home—naked, too! But if anyone finds out that I’m here, I’ll… I’ll…”

“Be forced to hurt the people you love?” Wip said.

Luci raised her head and smiled in relief. “Yes, I’m glad that you under—wait, what prompted you say that?”

Wip looked around for an escape. His eyes settled on the bush behind him. He turned back to Luci, then slipped on his shoe and dived headfirst into the bush.

Luci was left gaping at Wip’s afterimage. It took her a few seconds to realise that he’d just run away with her secrets. “Come back!” Luci shouted. “I haven’t finished apologising.”

She scrambled up the embankment and bolted after him. When she checked behind the bush Wip had dived into, she couldn’t find him anyone. Confused, Luci whirled around in search for him, and that was when she found him. Nearly a hundred metres downstream, running.

Luci’s mind filled with nightmares. Wip was going to report her to the Sylexa consulate. She’d have to face her mother again and explain why she spent three months on the run. She needed to catch him and beg with everything she had. But, more importantly, how? He was so fast!

“Idiot, Luci!” she hissed. “This is what you trained for, right? Kind of.”

She didn’t have time for a more elegant enma meld. She just needed something that worked. Starting off at a run, her waterlogged slippers squeaking with every step, Luci wrapped herself tightly in threads of conform, her most familiar of the six enma forms.

She then melded a ball out of hard whim in her hand and wound the end of her conform thread to it. To an outsider, her silvery threads would have seemed to move on their own. In actuality, she was controlling them with unformed, invisible enma straight from her soul. Then she launched the ball ahead of her and above using a pulse of blame, blasted straight from her palm.

When the whim ball’s momentum was spent and it came to a halt, Luci tugged on the thread connected to it with her soul. She kicked off the ground and let the natural pulling force of her conform threads slingshot her into the sky.

As soon as Luci’s feet left the ground, she knew she’d made the stupidest decision of her life. Too late! She had to give chase.

Wip was blurring across the paddocks, hopping fences, but she was catching up. That was great. That wasn’t the problem.

The issue was that Luci was falling straight towards one of those paddocks. And it was filled with grupps. Luci started to scream.

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“This was a mistake. This was the stupidest idea you’ve ever come up with, Luci!”

She prepared another slingshot. It took time to put the meld together, simple or not, and she was getting closer and closer to the grupp paddock. Most of the woolly jerks were chasing down Wip, trying and failing to ram him with their oversized horns. He dodged and weaved through them with a big grin on his face. Some, however, were calmly waiting for Luci to plummet to their mercy.

At the last moment, Luci threw the ball out. She was still hurting from the last slingshot. So, rather than let her conform thread pull her towards the floating ball, she held it firm. The thread went taut and she arced down. Towards the grupps.

“I take it back,” she cried. “This is the stupidest idea you’ve come up with!”

Luci raised her legs. A giant grupp waited for the last moment before leaping up and trying to whack her backside with the round of its curved horn. Thankfully it couldn’t reach, and the grupp slapped its long, scaly tail in frustration. Luci could do nothing but scream. She wasn’t good at maintaining more than one meld at a time, so if she tried to attack them, she’d probably drop her slingshot-turned-swing and fall.

More grupps gathered beneath her as Luci got lower to the ground. She prayed, knowing it would be in vain. The grupps leapt for her, backside by a hair’s breadth. Slowly, she started rising again. Her screaming didn’t end. Once she reached about thirty-degrees, she released the conform thread and was sent soaring through the sky and over the paddock’s steel fence, into open fields.

She looked over and realised she was actually ahead of Wip. All she had to do was get in front of him.

Her thread was still evaporating after she’d stopped maintaining it. She couldn’t form another slingshot because the evaporating thread around her body would interfere with the new one, distorting it. Instead, she turned her hands to the side launched twin spikes of blame from her palms. The force of it sent her spinning through the air.

“Why did you do that, Luci?” she wailed. “You can’t land like this!”

Luci was too low to the ground for a proper fall breaker. Instead, she improvised, and spiked a tidal wave of soft ease enma out of her. It wrapped her whole body like a cocoon. She hit the earth hard. The enma enveloping her cushioned most of the impact but still left her winded. Thinking quick, she flipped over and focused the ease spike to only release underneath her.

She skidded along the ground on all fours. Her enma acted as a surfboard and she tore through the grass. It was the wrong meld for the job, but she made up for the inefficiency with raw output.

Just as she calculated, Luci drew closer and closer to Wip’s trajectory. She ground to a halt just in front of him, screaming the whole way. Wip hit the brakes at the last minute, stopping a metre before her. Luci released the meld, it vanished, and she slammed her head into the mud in a kowtow.

“I’ll do anything you want,” she shouted between her panting. “But please please please don’t tell anyone I’m here. I’ll—I’ll wash your dishes. I’ll scrub your toilet. I can even cut your onions for the next week. A month! I can’t do it for any longer than that because it would interfere with my search for a dungeoneer party, however. I’m sorry if that’s not good enough!”

Wip put a hand to his chin and stroked his non-existent beard. Unlike Luci, he seemed completely fine, not worn out in the slightest. In fact, he looked like he’d been enjoying this, grinning the way he did. Was he just messing with her? Luci couldn’t help but feel cross with him, and a little jealous of his stamina.

“Anything, huh?” Wip hummed.

Behind him, the woolly grupps were ramming their horns against the steel fence and letting out a horrific screeching sound, like nails on a chalkboard.

“You know, Stella has been getting really angry at me lately,” Wip said. Then he snapped his fingers. “I know. How about you join my party?”

At first, Luci didn’t quite process Wip’s words. Then, when they finally sunk in, she raised her head and stared at him with a blank face. “Excuse me, mister, but isn’t this supposed to be a punishment?”

*****

The next morning, the first thing Luci did was inform Mr. Hapswitch that she wouldn’t be able to work on his farm that day. He seemed rather disappointed. Luci got it in her head that he wouldn’t bother asking for help again since she’d let him down. That was okay. She’d finally found a party, even if it had been forced onto her at gunpoint.

For the first time in her life, Luci had made the fateful trek into the Ravelin. Seeing the enormous structure from the outside did not do it justice.

The Ravelin’s design was utilitarian. The dark, nigh-unbreakable, heft-infused walls were as wide as they were tall. And they were tall. They diverged from the dungeon’s entrance at a sharp angle to leave an open space between. Stalls had been set up in the centre of the open space with canopies protecting them from the elements. Along the walls were closed-off rooms used for administrative purposes, or which were owned by some of the city’s major guilds.

There was no roof over the Ravelin’s walls. Thin steel rivulets had been embedded in the stone floor to allow water to be drained. The rear was left completely open; someone could hop the handrail and dive straight into the moat if they wished to. Past the moat was the even taller walls of the Dungeon Fort. Hundreds of guns skulked from within dark gaps in the fort’s walls, maintained and forever ready for a dungeon breach. It may have seemed a strange design choice, but this structure allowed the Dungeon Fort to release its full salvo at the entrance and blast anything that dared come out that wasn’t completely human.

But the most ominous and striking feature of the Ravelin, by far, was the gaping dungeon entrance, the Kimaw. She’d read plenty about it, but seeing it in person made her heart beat a note faster. Between the stone arch, beneath the gate that only closed in an emergency, was the black abyss that led to the dungeon itself. As Luci gazed into it, she imagined herself falling into the darkness and never returning.

Luci shook the thought away. She couldn’t keep Wip waiting. She sought out the General Counting Room. When she found it, Luci knocked, waited for a response, didn’t get one, then entered.

Inside, there was a single person sitting behind a counter, a woman wearing cat ears atop her black hair. To Luci’s complete bafflement, she had a furry tail protruding from her dark skirt that swished and swayed on its own. Luci stared at it, completely mesmerised.

When she saw Luci, the woman’s eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets before she smoothed out her features.

“Luci Black, right?” the woman asked.

It took Luci a second to realise she was being spoken to. She was still unfamiliar with the fake name she’d provided Anypaxia’s authorities upon registering as a dungeoneer. Trying not to appear rude, she quickly lowered herself into a deep bow.

“Pleased to meet you,” Luci said. “Am I to assume you are Ms. Stella?”

Stella waved a hand dismissively. “Drop the formalities. The idiot will be here any minute now. He’s probably got himself in another fight with a forger. Just sit tight.”

Luci bobbed her head and found herself a seat along the wall. She placed her staff across her lap and gripped it for comfort. It was unnervingly quiet in the room, in stark contrast with the hubbub outside. She was a little too nervous to broach any topic of conversation, so she remained silent. Stella wasn’t talking either, instead occupying herself with her phone and occasionally glancing up at Luci. Each time she did, Luci had to snap her gaze away. She knew she shouldn’t let herself be seen too closely, but she couldn’t help but look. She was just so fascinated by that tail.

People came and went from the counting room, each eyeing the two of them oddly. The wait became too long, and her thoughts continuously wandered. What did Stella’s constant glances mean? What was that reaction earlier? Was she weirded out by Luci’s unkempt appearance? She didn’t ask for her DID, her Dungeoneer Identification. Luci had given Wip only her name. Had Stella found it in the system? Had she figured out her identity from there? What if Wip had lied about hiding her identity and told Stella about her hair? What if this was all just a ruse to trap her in the Ravelin while agents from Sylexa came to apprehend her? What if—

The door banged open. Stella squealed and leapt out of her chair. Standing in the doorway, however, was not a guard, but a jittery Wip, who was bouncing from foot to foot. His backpack was so overloaded with warped aftos that he couldn’t fit through the doorway.

“Party party party party,” he chanted. “Stella, I have a party!” He threw his hands up in the air and beamed a gap-toothed smile at Luci.

The nervous girl’s face was fixed in an expression of horror. This had to have been the strangest thing she’d ever seen. Excited? Because of her? And what in Gul was up with those warped aftos?

Stella, on the other hand, pinched the bridge of her nose and sucked air through her teeth. “Wip, get in here before you kill us all with embarrassment.”

“Party!” Wip cried again.

He stepped forward and his backpack got caught in the door. Luci nearly leapt out of her chair again as Stella’s banged her head against the counter out of frustration.

“Um, Ms. Stella,” Luci said cautiously. “Is he always like this?”

“No. Sometimes he’s worse,” Stella sobbed.

After trying and failing to squeeze in sideways, and then diagonally, Wip eventually figured out that he had to take his backpack off before he walked in. Once inside, Stella raised her head off the counter.

Wip dumped his bag on the floor and it made an ominous series of clanks. He gestured in an exaggerated manner towards Luci.

“This is my lambaster,” Wip said. “There are many like her, but this one is mine.”

Luci’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “L-lambaster? Me?” she cried. Luci waved her hands defensively. “Oh, no. I’m just the support. Just a backup. Nobody special or who you should take notice of.”

“Why not?” Wip said. He looked hurt by Luci’s rejection. Her heart sinking in pity, she tempered her words.

“Oh, well, a lambaster is responsible for clearing packs of monsters. They need to exert high spikes of enma to do so, usually with the help of a powerful afto. But me and high enma spikes don’t go well together. I’m more likely to kill my party members than the monsters. Also, me and aftos don’t go well together.”

“But isn’t that an afto?” Wip said, pointing to Luci’s socked and cloth-bound staff.

“Ah, well this—it’s too strong,” Luci stumbled over her words. “I’m still learning to control it. I mean, yes, I’ve had lots of practice already but I need way more. All of this is why I should be left to support. It’s far easier for a pure enma user like me to perform whatever tasks are necessary to help my party. That’s why support is the right role for me.”

“Oh, I can be a support too,” Wip said. “For example, I can beat up the monsters.”

“I don’t think that’s quite correct,” Luci said.

“But if the monsters are dead, then my party won’t need help.”

Stella slammed her hand against the counter, causing Luci to squeak again.

“Luci, do you mind waiting outside for a bit?” Stella said, raising her head off the desk. “I have to talk sense into the idiot.”

“Oh, um, sure.” Luci scrambled out of her chair and walked a little too quickly to the door, her shoulders hunched. She felt like she’d stepped in between a quarrelling couple, one that was close to pulling out knives.