“You have a ring!” Jeremy crowed, taking a couple of steps toward Caleb. “That’s awesome. Do you feel any diff…”
He trailed off when Caleb stumbled back a step, feet tripping over each other because there was nothing but smooth blacktop beneath his shoes. He clutched his chest, fist wrinkling the front of his shirt, and put his other hand out to stop Jeremy’s advance. The whites of his eyes showed because they were so wide, features pulled tight by what Jeremy could only describe as horror.
“Are you okay?” He asked tentatively.
“I can’t…” Caleb gasped. He gulped for air but did not seem to be able to breathe in. “I think I’m having a fucking heart attack.”
He dropped to his knees. Zanie hissed in sympathy when they heard his kneecaps collide with the asphalt, but Caleb seemed to pay the pain no mind. He was more focused on scrabbing at his chest as he bent forward and wheezed. Jeremy took a few cautious steps forward, then crouched a couple of feet away from him so they were at the same level.
“You think you are having a heart attack?” he asked. “Does your chest hurt?”
Caleb glared at him, but it came off as rather desperate because of his wide eyes and thin lips. “Do you…do you think leveling up can kill you?”
His voice was starting to take on a thready quality, as if he had just taken a huge bong rip and was holding the smoke in while he spoke. Jeremy shook his head and said, “I don’t know, but I think the first thing you need to try to do is breathe.”
“What’s going on?” Julie stood beside Zanie and leaned toward her to whisper, but her words could clearly be heard by all the rest of the neighbors who had also begun to gather in the court circle.
“Christ,” Jeremy stood up and waved his arms at them, “Give him some space.”
“Is he okay?” Someone asked.
“Did he get struck by one of the bolts of lightning?” Someone else called out, “Too much electricity can mess with your heart, you know.”
Jeremy crouched back down near Caleb. “Did you get hit by one of the elemental’s attacks?”
If that was the case, maybe there was some type of healing that Jeremy could do to fix him, or maybe Zanie could zap his heart back into the correct rhythm like a defibrillator. But that was venturing into the type of medical healing that they really did not have the experience to mess with. In any case, Caleb shook his head violently and wheezed out, “No.”
“He’s alright.” Jeremy tried waving the neighbors away again, “He’s just leveling up. We don’t know exactly what that does to a person.”
Zanie took over, moving the crowd back and shooing them away so that they were not hovering over Caleb. Henry had joined in and looked down at Caleb and Jeremy with his arms crossed and an unimpressed look on his face.
“See that?” He said to one of the guys standing next to him, “That’s why we shouldn’t be messing around with magic.”
“Oh?” Zanie stepped in front of Jeremy and Caleb and put her hands on her hips. “And what would you have done about that lightning elemental if we had not been here to kill it? Gotten zapped and had a heart attack yourself, probably. So how about you just move along?”
Julie came over to fetch Henry away, making sure to thank Zanie a couple of times for fighting off the elemental while she tried to stop a red-faced Henry from arguing with her. Jeremy turned his attention back to Caleb and chewed on his lip. Caleb was still hunched over, chest still because he was trying really hard to breathe but not actually filling his lungs any. At this rate, he was going to pass out.
“You know what this looks like?” Jeremy told him in a low, even voice. “A panic attack. Maybe leveling up overloaded you somehow, and now you are having a panic attack, so all you need to do is just focus on breathing, and you will be okay.”
Caleb turned his head to look at him, face bright red with a vein popping out in his temple.
“Come on, just inhale with me.” Jeremy started counting out breaths, using his arms to demonstrate when he was inhaling and exhaling. Eventually Caleb began to follow the counts, the wheezes turning into little sips of oxygen, which eventually turned into choppy breaths that made his chest heave. But at least he was getting air into his lungs.
“Jesus,” Caleb said when he finally had enough air to speak. He collapsed off his knees to the side and ran a shaky hand through his hair, which was now damp with sweat and sticking to the sides of his face. “That was awful. You said I got a ring?”
Jeremy tuned into his overlay to confirm that there was indeed a single glowing white ring encircling Caleb now. His overlay had returned to a dark red color.
“Yes, you have a ring now,” Jeremy told him. “Aside from the panic attack, do you feel any different?”
“I mean, I feel like I was just put through a meat grinder, so I don’t really know.” He rubbed a hand over his face.
Stolen story; please report.
“Well, you should probably just chill out for the rest of the day.” Jeremy shuffled forward to help Caleb to his feet. “Let’s get you over to an actual chair.”
He helped him to their little circle of tents, where they had also set up some of the folding chairs to sit in. Once he got Caleb settled into one of the chairs, he ran to grab him a water bottle and a pop tart from the box that Julie had given them yesterday. Zanie came over and spoke to Caleb a little bit, then they both stood back and watched him much on his pop tart.
“That looked terrifying,” Zanie said.
“It certainly felt terrifying,” Caleb told her. “You ready to go practice some more with Jeremy? I bet you’re only a couple of spells away from leveling, too.”
She made a face. “But you were alright in the end. And maybe not everybody reacts that way.” She looked at Jeremy and shrugged. “You want to keep practicing?”
“Sure,” Jeremy glanced back at the scorched portion of the circle where the lightning elemental had died. There was nothing left of its core but what looked like a few shattered pieces of glass glinting in the sun. “Let’s see if maybe all of us can level up by tonight, and then tomorrow, we can talk about trying to go back into the dungeon again.”
So he and Zanie made their way back down the hill to continue their practice. She put up a barrier with two strengthening runes on it and proceeded to attack it with several lightning spells.
“I think that I’m building up an immunity to being shocked by my own spells.” She told Jeremy when one of them zapped her. That happened quite frequently whenever she used the lightning offensively, but she no longer got burns from the zaps. “That just felt like one of those little toys. The ones that you wear on your finger so you can zap someone when they shake hands with you. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Jeremy watched one of the hay bales wobble as his attack hit it. “Yeah. So now it’s just like a shock from static electricity rather than a miniature lightning strike.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
Jeremy hummed and aimed his next spell at her barrier. The mana collided with it in a burst of bright blue, and then the barrier fizzled out completely. He felt a sudden, sharp pain in his head. It originated in his eyes as though someone had shone a very bright pen light directly into his eyeballs after he had been sitting in a dark room. Then it spread out, making his vision white out, and his skull squeezed and thrummed with waves of pain.
“Oh fuck,” Zanie was saying, “Did you just level up? Are you okay?”
He realized he was on the ground, the thick, soft forest floor beneath his back. His hands were clutching his head as if trying to keep his skull from flying apart because that was what it felt like it was trying to do. He took a deep breath, in and out, but unlike Caleb, he was not having trouble breathing. He was having trouble seeing.
“Migraine,” he spat out between bared teeth.
“Ouch,” Zanie said, and the word smacked into his brain like a clap of thunder. He made a shh sound to get her to stop talking. His arm fell across his eyes as he banished all thoughts from his head because even they hurt him.
After an undiscernible amount of time, Jeremy let his arm fall away and tentatively opened his eyes. Light did not immediately jab them, which was a relief. It was nighttime already. Darkness surrounded him, and his vision was too blurry to make out the pinpricks of starlight above him. The top of the hill glowed with light from the back porches of the houses atop it, which did not reach down to the streamside where he and Zanie still sat.
Her back leaned against a tree, her head tilted back, and her eyes closed. But she was not asleep. When he shifted onto his side to get an elbow beneath himself and push into a sitting position, her eyes flew open to watch him. Once he was upright, he let out the breath he was holding as he moved with a groan and held the side of his head.
“Are you okay?” Zanie asked.
His head still throbbed, but it was more of a phantom pain. The migraine had been so bad that it left his brain in shambles and a mark on the inside of his skull, like when someone would remove their hand from his skin and leave it feeling colder than before. He took a deep breath.
“I don’t feel like my head is going to explode anymore,” he answered her.
“I don’t know if I want to level up,” she mused, chin dropping so that she was no longer looking at him through slitted eyes with her head tilted back. “First Caleb almost stopped breathing and then your brain just,” she gestured with her hands, then let them fall into her lap, “stopped working for a little while.”
“Well, it only lasted for a little while for both of us,” Jeremy assured her. “Whatever happens to you won’t kill you.”
“Or won’t it? We don’t really know. Maybe people regularly die from leveling up.” She put a hand on the trunk behind herself and used it as leverage to rise to her feet.
Jeremy tried to follow her up, but the world tilted, and he tumbled right back down onto his ass. Zanie had the good grace not to laugh at him, instead coming over to offer him a hand up. She kept a hand on his shoulder as they picked their way up the hill in the dark, trying to avoid the tripping hazards of sticks and downed logs beneath the canopy of trees and holes in the grass once they broke past the tree line. When they got to the top, Jeremy paused and squinted at the neighborhood and all of its houses and porch lights.
“I doubt leveling up kills you,” he said. “But I imagine if we are having such a physical reaction to it, that means the ring really is an actual leveling up, not just a placeholder. We’ll have to keep an eye out to see what has changed.”
“Well,” Zanie pushed on his shoulder a little, urging him to move. “Maybe it’s getting more efficient at magic.”
Jeremy pursed his lips and minutely shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ve already been getting more efficient as we move through the overlay colors. If it’s physically paining us, I’d say it has more to do with…I don’t know. Something else. I can’t really think right now. My head does still hurt.”
They rounded one of the houses and crossed the court toward their tents. The entire circle of houses was awash in soft blue light from the dungeon entrance. It was not bright enough to compete with the yellow porch lights, which drowned out the blue where they shone, but it did dimly illuminate the dark shadows in between where they did not reach.
“Like you said, we’ll just have to keep an eye out for any changes.” Zanie took her hand off his shoulder when they reached the tents. He rubbed his fingers over his forehead, a wrinkle of confusion forming beneath the pads of them as a thought occurred to him.
“How come you didn’t level up?” He asked her. “You are probably only a few spells behind.”
“You looked like you were literally dying.” Zanie shot him an amused look like now that he was fine, it was funny. “Laying there on the ground, shushing me every time I even moved and snapped a twig. So I just sat down and stayed still.”
“Thanks for keeping watch while I was dying.” Jeremy smiled back at her. “We’ll get you leveled tomorrow, then figure out what’s next.”
“Okay. Night.”
“Good night.”
The sound of their tents zipping up filled the court, along with the occasional snap of electricity coming from the swirling energy of the dungeon entrance.