“Holy–you did that in one night?! That’s crazy!!”

Noem smiled at Mona’s unrestrained enthusiasm as she nearly danced around the table and the serpentine anchor that rested upon it. “You should see the real masters. They’d have finished in two hours, not the seventeen it took me.”

Mona stopped moving for a second and gently bent down to pick up the anchor. Before she touched it, though, she seemed to remember something and looked to Noem for permission.

Noem waved his hand for her to go ahead. “It’s yours.”

“Thank you!” Mona squealed and eagerly grabbed the anchor. She held it up to her face for the stones to reflect shapes and colours in her eyes, smiling wide and giggling giddily. “It’s so cool! There’s no way the apex wouldn’t want to live in here, which means all that’s left is my plan. And before you say anything, I do have a plan.”

Mona set the anchor down even gentler than she’d picked it up, then tapped on her interface and summoned three pages of paper that were pinned together with a bright red tack. She flipped through them one last time, then handed them off to Noem with a confident nod.

“I don’t know anything about the area, but I used my map to get a lay of the tunnels. Unless anything’s different than the system showed me, this should work.” Mona said.

Noem read and flipped through the plan, half of which was a simple drawing of the tunnels and where Mona wanted certain things to be placed. It wasn’t overly complicated by his standards, but from the countless erasings and scratched-out possibilities, it seemed as if it had taken a lot of work to make it so simple.

The first step was to find the tunnel’s exit. Or one of its exits, as Mona had written and marked down three in total with a circle crossed through with a line. Step two was to seal off all of the exits but two, forming one continuous tunnel that the apex would have to follow. And the third step was to lure the apex in, seal off the exit behind it, and seal the final exit to trap it inside so it couldn’t breathe and eventually died out. There was a footnote asking if Noem had something that could make the suffocation process go any faster, but aside from that, the plan was finished.

He flipped over the diagram one more time, reread the simple plan and a list of things she needed him to summon from his inventory, then nodded to himself. “Not a bad plan, but there’s one huge problem with it.”

“Aw.” Mona deflated and leaned against the wall. “I thought it was pretty good.”

“I just said it wasn’t a bad plan; did you ignore that part?” Noem sighed sarcastically and gave the plan back to Mona. “The problem is that you make too many assumptions. The apex has some kind of mastery over air Qi, so there’s a good chance it wouldn’t ever suffocate. We also don’t know how big it actually is, which means we might not be able to seal it in at all. And finally, it’s a spirit. They don’t usually need to breathe.”

Mona frowned, but slowly nodded in acceptance. “Okay, that definitely makes the plan not work. But would it work for a big animal?”

“There’s no such thing as wild animals. Only spirits.” Noem wiped the dust of his work off the table and pushed Qi onto the tip of his finger. He set it to the table and began to draw a diagram of the quarry. “We’re right here,” He pressed his finger to a spot near the edge of the quarry, “and we have to find one of the tunnels that connects to somewhere we can lure the apex into. That part of your plan is fine, and is what I’d start with myself, but we have to be extremely careful. Putting ourselves in an enclosed space with something as powerful as an apex is already dangerous, and you’re not strong enough to take a single hit from it.”

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

“I took one earlier.” Mona argued.

Noem waved his hand. “Yes, yes, you took a hit from the slowest and most obvious warning attack I’ve ever seen. But if we get the apex into an enclosed space, and it finds out we’re trying to destroy its physical body, it won’t throw out any more warnings.”

Mona shivered under the weight of her own imagination. “You’ve got a point. Then what’re we supposed to do? Unless you’re a superhero in disguise, we can’t fight the apex on even ground.”

Even if he was that powerful, Noem wouldn’t have risked it. He’d seen what apexes could do when they were bonded to powerful cultivators, and even though this one wasn’t bonded, he refused to underestimate it. Overestimating something rarely led to spontaneous and undeserved ends.

Noem summoned a dozen small packages of explosives and set them down on the table. He spread them out along the map he’d drawn, then nodded to himself and grabbed one. It stuck to the ceiling with an underhanded chuck, then held fast as the Qi that enrobed it solidified from the impact.

Mona took one without hesitation, turned to her interface, then looked at it with a lot more hesitation. “Explosives? Isn’t that really freaking dangerous?”

“Only if we’re reckless with them.” Noem said. He separated them into two piles and pushed one toward Mona, who reluctantly took her half in her arms. “If you had to guess, where would you say the apex’s achor is?”

She tilted her head to the side in thought. “Probably the head with all those glowing eyes. That or it’s hidden away in the deepest part of the smoke.”

Noem nodded in agreement. “Exactly what I’m thinking. So it’s all a matter of the apex’s personality. If it’s cocky and thinks it's invincible, the anchor’s probably in its head. But if it’s testing us to see if we’re actually dangerous, then it’s probably hiding its anchor away somewhere we can’t get to no matter how hard we try. Either option is equally viable from what I’ve seen, but only one of them gives us a chance.”

“The head.”

“The head.” Noem confirmed. “So we make our plan based on the anchor being there, and we give up if the anchor’s deep inside of it. If we don’t get it today, you can come back here when you’re a lot stronger if you still want the apex five years down the line.”

“But then I’d have to bond something else.” Mona argued.

“Yes. And you can bond three things, remember?” Noem countered and opened his interface. He brought up the map of the quarry and marked the points he’d just shown on the table, then sent the information to Mona. “Your marks are in blue and mine are in green. If it starts to get smoky at all, you run right back here without annoying the apex. The second it gets wind of what we’re doing, it stops working.”

Mona nodded seriously, but her expression and body language were horribly nervous. Anticipation shook her hands, and in turn, the explosives she held. Noem knew how that felt. To stare down something that would make or break the next few years. He walked over and gently set his hands down on Mona’s shoulders and put on the most comforting smile he could.

“I’m terrible at motivational speeches. You can do this.”

Confusion spread over Mona’s face, then blossomed into laughter. She doubled over from the weight of her amusement, tears beading in the corners of her eyes that fell to the ground in tiny puffs of wet dust. Noem kept his smile up, but on the inside, he was confused and a little insulted. He hadn’t intended what he’d said to be funny.

“Haa… a-hem, I needed that. Heh.” Mona shook her head and chuckled through the aftershocks of her laughing fit. She smiled up at Noem–the worry still there but vastly overshined by resolve. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”

Noem watched and waited for Mona to disappear down the tunnel while he waved with a small smile plastered on his face. When she turned a corner and activated Dash, he let the smile fall and turned to the hardened foam barrier that separated him from the apex outside. His fingers brushed ever so lightly against the material, and he felt absolutely nothing from the other side. Not even the Qi-filled smoke that should’ve smothered everything outside.

He closed his eyes and sighed. The apex hadn’t come in through any of the exits Mona had labeled. It hadn’t tried to break through the weaker stone that surrounded the large cubes that made up the Great Quarry. Almost like it was waiting to react to whatever move was made instead of making its own.

“Let’s see what you’re up to, you shifty fucker.” Noem placed his hand on the barrier and activated Heavy Blow centered on his palm. The foam exploded outward with barely a sound, and before it could travel a single meter, it slammed into the apex’s unsuspecting face.