“How many enhancements will it take?” Jace asked. “Until I can launch myself out of the pit?”

“Uh…” Lessa held the cooldown resetting card tight in her grasp and shut her eyes, then stared at Jace with the backs of her eyelids. “Two enhancements, give or take? After you use it, it’ll grant your technique cards a thirty-second buff, which should allow you to jump out of the pit without improving your overall Aes output or increasing your Resistance rating.”

“But you’ll need me to be cycling the whole time and using Aes?”

“I don’t think that will be an issue, Mr. Baldwin,” said Kinfild. “I imagine you will have kobold friends emerging on you every second that you’re down there—especially now that the Cleaner is gone. Maintain a constant pattern, keep yourself alive for a few more hours, and you’ll be out—with a new infusion of Aes to compensate for it.”

“Understood,” Jace replied.

And so he did.

He maintained a stable pattern, the Ten-Claw Inlet Cycle, even though he didn’t plan on triggering any technique cards. He needed to stay within sight of Lessa, first off, and using a hyperspace jump straight up wouldn’t do him any good. Sideways or down? He’d just phase into the ground.

And he didn’t really want to know what would happen if he emerged from hyperspace in the ground.

The first kobolds arrived within ten minutes. They were injured, with broken, swollen limbs and damaged arms, but they were all around level ten—the apparent average for kobolds. But the Split didn’t differentiate between injured and perfectly functional kobolds, as best he could tell.

Maybe an injury that lasted a long while and impacted their Attribute ratings would cause them to dip in rating, but these kobolds probably would’ve died sooner than their injuries would take them down a level rating.

So instead, he waited in the main pit, and when they emerged, their jaws gnashing and their claws unveiled, ready to slice and carve, he jabbed the Whistling Blade through the skulls or necks. It put them out of their misery, if they could even be considered alive to begin with, and it triggered his class bonus.

Lessa knelt at the top of the pit, pressing the technique card against the stone floor and scrawling calligraphic runes in circles on the center of it.

“How do you know which runes to write?” Jace asked in a gap between the kobold waves. “Do you just know them all?”

“I can see your dreamspace tree,” she replied. “But my candlefolk senses are more rudimentary than your perception of that realm, and I can only see it through your subconscious. I see strands of runes draping off branches and lines of golden light, all neon yellow with a blank, empty void of a background. But if I follow the lines to their conclusions, it shows me which runes to pick. I mean, I still have to pick a few and do a little guesswork, and I need to know where to put them on the card, but I’ve read books and helped the village with basic card maintenance before.”

“Holocomics aren’t an ideal source of academic information,” Kinfild complained. “Certainly nothing we should be basing his technique cards on.”

“I read more than just comics!” Lessa exclaimed. “I’ve…I’ve read at least two textbooks! …Passages from them!”

Jace snorted, but a wave of chittering signalled the approach of another wave of kobolds. He hoisted the Whistling Blade back up.

“While you’re down there, heaving that sword around,” Kinfild said, “you may as well learn to use it better.”

“How? Do you know how to use swords?”

“I know the basic principles of martial training,” Kinfild stated. “Why do you think a Wielder would spend time mastering fighting forms and martial arts? We have technique cards available to us, and atop that, distributing Attributes affects our strength vastly more than physical training ever could.” He spoke as if he was a teacher handing out a test, smugly knowing all the answers but still subjecting his students to an hour or so of stress.

“Dunno,” Jace said simply. A kobold charged into the pit, pulling itself through a hole in the wall. It brandished a crude sword of rusted, black steel. Jace stepped to the side, avoiding the flat blade, then slashed across the kobold’s back. It staggered, the glowing gash burning, but not yet defeated.

It spun around and swung its blade up at Jace, and he slashed through it with a swipe of the Whistling Blade. It cleaved through the steel and made a slash across the kobold’s snout. The beast screeched and staggered back, and Jace rammed the sword through its chest. It disintegrated into a puff of black ash.

Another kobold rushed in from behind. It wasn’t injured, and it brandished its claws with determined strength. Jace leapt back, avoiding a swipe and pressing himself against the pit wall.

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“Hey!” Lessa exclaimed. “Stay in my sight, or I’ll lose my grasp on you!”

“Sorry!” Jace called back. “Kinfild? Where were you going with that martial arts speal?”

“I didn’t want to distract you!” the Wielder called back.

Jace ducked to the side, avoiding a slash of dark claws, then raised the sword and slashed the kobold’s nearest wrist off. It bellowed in pain and rage. “I’m plenty distracted!” Between cycling Aes and fighting kobolds, all while trying to stay within Lessa’s field of view, he had plenty of problems to deal with. “What’s one more?”

“You must teach yourself discipline and willpower!” Kinfild said. “That’s the best way to improve your Aes output, and there’s no better way than physical training and martial arts training.”

“Can you teach me to swing a sword properly?”

“Start high and cut low! As with every weapon, you should aim to be perfectly precise and make the cleanest cut you can!”

“Easier said than done!” Jace replied, dropping down to dodge the next swipe of the kobold’s one remaining hand. The beast must have been able to feel pain, but it didn’t let it rule it. It kept attacking, over and over again.

“That is why you must practice!”

So for the next two hours, as best as Jace could tell, he practiced making the best cuts he could, swiping at the incoming kobolds. They often landed return blows. He ended up with a few scrapes on his arms and chest, and he earned a few more dents and scratches on the stolen armour. One kobold got its jaw around his shoulder and bit, and its fangs had left a nasty gash when Jace had pulled away.

But he improved. Slowly and steadily, his cuts became less wild. He always started in the same place—high above his head—and cut down to a point just below his hip. When he faced the last kobold, he killed it in a single swipe.

“It’s done!” Lessa called, then dropped the card down the pit. “At least, I think! It should work!”

The card fluttered down to Jace, and he snatched it out of the air. It had a new spattering of rune-circles soldered onto it, and a larger circle of metal runes marred the center. Lessa had melted some of the wiring and dragged it around with the tip of her engraving needle to form the text.

The tag above it read: [Technique Card: Cleanse Buildups (Common) (Utility) (Compatible Class: Hunter) (Compatible Aspects: Pure, Hyperspace)]

Slightly different, and just like with the Hyperjump, she’d pushed it closer to his class and ability. Perfect.

Next, he viewed the description of the card.

[Technique description: Once every twenty (20) hours, cleanses all Aes channels in a two (2) meter radius. Removes char buildup and spiritual strain, and resets cooldowns of all other technique cards Legendary grade and below. Enhances and opens Aes channels for a period of thirty seconds, and grants the user +10% Resistance and +10% Strength.]

That should do the trick. He swapped it into his core, socketing it, and immediately, it activated. A meter-wide halo flashed into the air behind him with a snap, solely made of blue light, but it was already dissipating. In about thirty seconds, it’d disappear entirely. When he passed his hand through it, he only felt a faint tingle, but nothing else happened.

That was his timer, then.

He swapped back to the Hyperjump card, then set his sights on the upper ridge of the pit and activated it.

In a flash, he arrived, ten feet higher than he’d anticipated and almost in the ceiling. He fell down to the edge of the pit and landed right next to Lessa and Kinfild. “Thanks. Worked like a charm.”

“You’re welcome!” Lessa said, then held his backpack out to him. “It’s heavy!”

He grabbed it and shouldered it, then activated his sheets and checked his progress. Advancement progress sat at a clean seventy-five percent, and he’d reached level eleven. Getting closer.

“Now…the good news!” Lessa said, pointing down the hallway where the Cleaner had been. “Chances are no one has been this way before, and I’d bet there’s a nice chest or two down there.”

“Coffin…” Kinfild reminded her.

“They’re long dead! What does it hurt them?”

Jace sheathed the Whistling Blade, nursing his injured shoulder, then said, “Alright, we can search the hallway for treasure, but after that, we need to make camp, and we need to rest. We need to take care of ourselves.”

They walked to the end of the hallway, ducking under overgrown dark vines, none of which were under the Cleaner’s control anymore.

“What was that thing, anyway?” Jace whispered as they walked. “And why would the kobolds let it stay?”

“The Cleaners sprout up in areas with high concentrations of dark-aspect Aes,” Kinfild said. “Normally, a group of kobolds—or darklings in general—wouldn’t be enough to create one, but when kobolds set up a nest, they bring their queen-core with them, and it has an extensive aura of dark-aspect Aes.”

They rounded a corner and arrived at an intersection. In the center was an undisturbed coffin, much like the first they’d encountered—with the same brassy lettering along the sides and top. The three of them heaved it open, revealing a skeletal corpse holding a rotting leather pouch to his chest.

Jace picked up the pouch with the tip of the whistling Blade and lifted it out with the neutral, non-burning back edge of the sword, then set it on the ground. Inside it was a set of vials with sparkling sapphire liquid that seemed to eat away at the cork stopper, and a syringe with vibrant green liquid inside.

“Stim shot,” Kinfild said, and a tag (reading the exact same thing) confirmed it. “For healing.”

“Why’d they bury someone with that?” Jace tilted his head.

“The Luminians believed their afterlife to be a world of constant violence and combat, providing them eternal glory. The stim shot was meant to aid them in their struggle. The elixirs? I suppose they believed they could achieve arcane advancement even in the afterlife.”

Jace took the stim shot and injected his arm with it. He pumped all the green liquid into his veins. It seeped in, stimulating his skin and muscles and urging them to knit back together.

“We set up camp here,” Kinfild said. “It’s as good of a place as any.”