When Zanie leveled up, it was not nearly as dramatic as when Caleb and Jeremy did. The next morning, she cast a few spells like she had been doing for days beforehand – practicing the lightning barrier with a few strengthening runes and building up her resistance to the occasional backfired shock that came from her offensive spells. Caleb had remained up by the camp, keeping an eye on the dungeon now that it was putting out monsters and resting up since his chest still hurt and he kept getting short of breath.
“It’s like…all of a sudden, I’m overwhelmed,” he had told them. “It’s a physical pain, but it’s more like crippling anxiety or something.”
At least he had not had another actual panic attack since the first one, but the effects of it still lingered.
Jeremy was watching Zanie when she leveled, which was a stroke of luck. He could see the blue, nearly white, color of her overlay spin into the ring around her body in a swirl that hurt his eyes. His head still throbbed with phantom pain, and his skull felt pressurized as if the headache might return at any moment, but he kept his eyes open to watch as her overlay faded back to dark red.
“Nice,” he told her. “Do you feel anything?”
She was just standing there, staring at the network of lightning bolts that made up the barrier still hanging in the air. “I mean, yeah. My whole body hurts, I guess.”
Jeremy’s brows lifted. “You guess?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of like,” she hummed and looked at him while she thought of the right description, “growing pains. Almost. A little worse. But it’s like my bones ache.”
“You seem to be handling it pretty well,” Jeremy told her incredulously. The pain that he had felt literally knocked him flat on his back for several hours, and Caleb had almost passed out. Zanie just shrugged, then grimaced when her shoulders and arms shifted.
“I’m a woman,” she said, then rolled her shoulders and tilted her head from side to side, grimace still in place. “I don’t think lying down would help. I’m going to walk around. Have you looked for Atticus lately?”
“Not since before the lightning elemental came out of the dungeon yesterday,” Jeremy said.
Zanie nodded. “I’m going to just walk around and look for her a bit then.”
Jeremy watched as she literally started walking off the pain. Then he jogged to catch up with her and joined in shouting Atticus’s name as they walked through the woods. She had to be out here somewhere. He wondered if she thought this was a fun game of hide and seek or had just grown tired of sticking close to them and wanted to explore on her own. Those were nicer thoughts than the probability that she had gotten caught up in the storm and wandered much further away or got hurt.
“She’ll show up eventually,” Jeremy said after a while, mostly to himself instead of Zanie.
“Sure,” Zanie agreed easily.
To get his mind off of Atticus as they walked back to the neighborhood, he asked, “You said your pain was like growing pains, right?”
“Kind of.” Zanie stretched her arms over her head. “But also kind of like when you have a fever and your body aches. Or when you work out hard, and your muscles ache after. But it’s bone pain.”
“Huh. I wonder what made getting a ring be a different experience for all of us.”
They had wandered down the length of the woods toward the farm behind the neighborhood as they looked for Atticus. When they emerged from the trees, they were a good way down the court from the circle at the end. They went through a side yard and started walking up the street.
They might have different types of pain because they have different Unique Personality Traits. Jeremy could see things that others could not, so his eyeballs hurt, and he got a headache. He was not so sure about the other two, however. Caleb had a panic attack and lingering anxiety. How that fit with spatial magic, he did not know. There also was not a clear connection between bone pain and heat magic. So, it probably did not have to do with the Unique Personality Trait.
Maybe there were some other types of stats that he was not able to see, which leveled up when they gained a ring. Maybe it was just a place marker in terms of their casting efficiency – or the amount of mana that they each had – but it unlocked something else for them that they had yet to figure out.
“Hey,” Caleb said once they reached the tents. He was holding a steaming mug of coffee. After the storm, it seemed as if the temperatures were dropping more consistently at night, but during the day, it was still hot. And the humidity which had been zapped out of the air was slowly seeping back in. How Caleb could stand to drink hot coffee, Jeremy had no idea. His shirt was sticking to his back from sweat, and all he wanted was something cold to drink.
“Did you level up?” Caleb asked Zanie. She nodded, sat in one of the folding chairs, grimaced, and then stood back up.
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“She’s got bone pain,” Jeremy told Caleb, sitting in his own chair with a sigh. There was a half-full bottle of water in the cupholder of the arm. It was lukewarm, not cold, but he glugged it down anyway. Caleb nodded and muttered ‘ouch’ under his breath.
“I think since we are all still sore from leveling up, we should wait until at least tomorrow to go into the dungeon,” Jeremy said.
“Sounds like a good plan,” Caleb agreed immediately. Anything to put off going into the dungeon. He was still nervous about it and he had not even been in one as it had begun to collapse yet.
“I think our plan from before will still work,” Jeremy continued. “Zanie will focus solely on putting up lightning barriers to keep us from getting zapped by their attacks. I’ll do as much damage as I can with mana attacks to stun them or slow them down or whatever it is that the mana does to them and keep them from attacking as frequently. And Caleb, it’ll mostly be in you to actually kill them by splitting their cores.”
“You don’t think your mana attacks will be strong enough to kill them?” Caleb asked. “You are a whole different level from them now.”
“I don’t really think that leveling up makes the spells we cast stronger, though.” Jeremy pointed out. “I mean, have you cast your spell since yesterday? Were you suddenly able to cast it over a larger amount of space?”
Caleb frowned. A whole patch of grass around his chair was shorter than the rest of the lawn, evidence that he had been practicing splitting the blades in half with his spell all morning. “No, I still need about nine strengthening runes to cover a square foot of area, and I don’t seem to be able to add any more strengthening runes than that.”
“Right.” Jeremy crinkled the plastic bottle in his hands. “I think that getting the ring doesn’t impact the spells at all. They are still the same. Maybe we can cast them quicker or cast more of them if leveling up did increase the amount of mana we have, but the spells are the same. It’s just us that are different, although I’m not sure exactly how.”
“That makes sense,” Caleb agreed. Zanie had wandered off somewhere, maybe going to poke around in the back garden with Julie or see if she could find some food. Or maybe she was just walking off the pain still.
Jeremy frowned down at the crumpled water bottle. “You said you can only add nine strengthening runes, but no more?”
“Yeah,” Caleb let his head fall back with a sigh that ended in a little frustrated groan. “It does not make sense because I can cast two of them without draining myself completely. So, theoretically, I should have enough mana to throw, like, eighteen strengthening runes on the manipulate space spell. But I can’t do more than nine.”
“Maybe there is just a limitation to the spell itself.”
Caleb's face scrunched up in unhappiness. “So I can only ever add space in a thin little one-foot square box? Or, if I add the modifier, a couple-foot lone line?”
“Well, I mean, if you stretch out that box, you’d end up with more than just a couple of feet.” Jeremy pointed out.
“But it would only be like an inch deep.” He pursed his lips at the sky, then his head whipped up, eyes wide with an epiphany. “I wonder If I could time it just right for something to run through it, and then their momentum would make it slice through more of them rather than just separating one little portion of them.”
Jeremy frowned, trying to envision it.
“I could make it into a trap of some kind!” Caleb sat forward excitedly. It only goes off when they step into a certain spot, and then all of a sudden, molecules are added to a thin line of the space in front of them just as they pass through it, which would split apart everything that passed through those added molecules since the timing was just perfect.”
“You’d have to time it exactly perfect. Otherwise, you would just be adding more air for them to run through.” Jeremy mused, “If you are trying to split one of the lightning elemental’s cores, for example, you’d have to make sure that the added space split the edge of the core. It couldn’t even be an atom in front of it or else it would be ineffective.”
“Yeah,” Caleb rubbed a hand across his mouth and stared at the dungeon entrance in thought. “Now that I’m thinking about it more, I don’t even know if that would work.”
“We can test it out sometime,” Jeremy told him. “But for now, I think it’s better if you just focus on casting little inch-square spells aimed in the center of the cores.”
“Stick to the plan.” Caleb rested back into the flexible fabric of the chair again. “Don’t worry. I know that in the middle of a fight against a whole horde of lightning elementals is not the time for experimentation.”
“Maybe once we’ve gotten better at killing them, but for now, I think it’s best if we just focus on getting better at killing them.”
Caleb hummed, still staring at the dungeon entrance. “What do you think their purpose is?”
“The dungeons?” Jeremy asked.
“Yeah, they just seem so strange. Like they pop up because of a thunderstorm, create a bunch of monsters, and then have a reward at the end,” Caleb said. “Do you think they are meant to help people with leveling up?”
Jeremy shoved the crumpled water bottle into the arm of his chair and folded his hands in his lap, joining Caleb in frowning contemplatively at the swirling dungeon entrance. “I don’t know. I doubt they exist for the sole purpose of leveling people. I mean, this isn’t actually a video game. I think they just…exist. I mean, this one popped up because of the storm, right? That was pretty random. I think they are just a natural phenomenon.”
“Unlike the gates, which appear to have been built by someone at some point,” Caleb said.
“Yeah, and the gates have a pretty clear purpose,” Jeremy pointed out. “They connect to other places. Other worlds probably, if things like elves are coming through them.”
“But the dungeons are confined units of space.” Caleb nodded along. “It’s just weird that you get a reward at the end of clearing one. I’d say they were just a home for these monsters, but why would the dungeon reward you for killing them, then?”
Jeremy rubbed his forehead. “I have no idea, man. Maybe it’s a combination of all the above. They are a natural phenomenon. Because they are a place with a really high concentration of mana, they create monsters. Remember that there are monsters that don’t come from dungeons, and we aren’t really sure yet where they come from, right?”
Caleb nodded.
“So maybe they are this natural phenomenon, but also maybe the dungeons themselves have some type of intelligence. I mean, they do have an overlay. So maybe there’s something about them that makes me see and overlay, and that makes them give out the rewards when they are cleared.”
“Like they are some type of monster themselves.” Caleb frowned deeply. “Now I really don’t want to go into them.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes.