The first thing Eik saw as he crashed through the forest underbrush was Heath, on all fours, heaving up what remained of the dirt duck hot pocket. The second was Michael doing the same. Sonja had made it a few meters further to support herself against the trunk of a mossy tree but her condition was no better. All three of them had copious amounts of tears and snot running down their faces.

Eik checked on the boy, but he seemed much better off than the team. He gave a healing sphere to each of them, patting their backs.

“What’s up with you guys anyway?” he asked.

Sonja shot him a venomous look as she wiped her mouth but said nothing, while Heath glared up at him with a face full of various bodily fluids.

“What the f—, What? Why are you fine?” he downed man demanded with a voice permeated by disbelief. Another violent heave forced him to break eye contact.

Eik fished out the wooden plaque and showed Heath his ability sheet.

[Acquired Resistance: Toxin — Lv. 25]

“You got your toxin resistance to level 25?”

Eik looked at the plaque himself, feigning surprise. “Damn, that’s pretty sweet,” he sang. “It did stink a little, so I’m glad I got something out of it at least.” His shit-eating grin earned him a half-hearted punch in the shoulder.

“When we get back from this damned humid jungle, I’m going to piss in Rock Fist Bart’s breakfast cereal and blame it on you,” the round-cheeked tank said with a crooked smile. “You will wish you had my Fortitude ability then.”

Eik laughed while he checked up on the three of them again, just to make sure that their symptoms weren’t developing into something really bad.

“But really,” Sonja began as she sat on a soft patch of moss. “Well done back there, Eik. I think you saved us there. Thank you.” Michael and Heath nodded somberly. It had been a close call back there, and who knows what might have happened if they had inhaled even more of those pink spores.

After a double dose of healing spheres, thirty minutes of rest, and a bit of treatment from an exhausted Michael, they were more or less ready to get back on their feet.

While the others waited for the nausea to subside, Eik kept an eye out for monsters. Michael had been offered a new skill, and he was having trouble deciding which to choose.

“I’m not sure about this one, Mike,” Heath said, pointing to the first skill listed on the healer’s plaque called [Soothing Regeneration]. “You already have a good healing skill. I think the utility of [Bind] would serve us better.”

“I don’t intend to live this kind of life forever. I want to settle down and help people.”

Heath gave the young man a look but Sonja was the one to answer. “You will need to be able to survive if you want to do that. If you truly want to make a difference in this new world we now live in, then you need to be stronger. F-rank just isn’t good enough for what humanity will face.”

“But I—”

“Our survival,” she said, gesturing to them all. “as well as your own, is more certain if you take Bind instead. What if Forest is invaded by monsters again? Will you not thank yourself when you can protect your mother from harm, rather than only trying to fix her wounds if you escape?”

Michael’s face didn’t show much appreciation for his mother being dragged into the discussion, but judging by the way his jaw was working vigorously in frustration, he could think of no good counter argument. With a sigh through clenched teeth, he drew his finger across the two other options.

[Acquired Bind — Lv. 1]

At once, he whipped his hand toward Heath as the man was getting to his feet with a groan, studded armor clanging noisily. Michael twisted his fingers as if turning an invisible valve, summoning thin, glowing strings that snaked out of the ground to seize the large tank of a man by the feet and ankles, sending him back to the mossy forest floor with a grunt of surprise.

“Hey! Hey! What the hell are you doing?” Heath shouted. With a single, forceful movement of his musclebound legs, he ripped through the strings, but as soon as he did, Michael repeated the finger gesture with a slight alteration, this time calling for the glowing strings to crawl out from Heath’s long sleeves as if alive and wrap themselves around his wrist, forcing his hands together behind his back. He ripped these as well, but they had stopped his movements momentarily.

“Stop that, you little shit!” the big man complained.

Michael shot him a look of angelic innocence at which Eik failed to hold back a snort. “But I was just testing my new ability. It’s very important to know what it does before using it in action for the first time, after all,” the healer said.

“Why didn’t you test it out on Sonja then? She was way more annoying about it than me!”

Michael blanched slightly, side eyeing the composed archer. “I, uuh,” he began and cleared his throat. “I was just a little scared is all…” Sonja couldn’t keep the corners of her lips from rising at that.

“If you’re done, then maybe one of you can take over the watch from me?” Eik suggested. He was sitting cross-legged on a large boulder, which allowed for a complete view of their surroundings as far as the tree cover permitted. “My plaque was making a bit of noise earlier as well.”

“Is it the evolution of your resistance skill?” Sonja asked as she took Eik’s place on top of the boulder.

“Yep!” He pulled the wooden tablet out from his shirt.

[Skill evolution available. Skill available for evolution: Resistance: Toxin]

[Choose one]

[Resistance: Toxin — Noxious Invigoration]

[Resistance: Toxin — Stronger Resistance]

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[Resistance: Toxin — Physical Resistance]

Heath and Michael followed along over his shoulder.

“The only one whose name doesn’t obviously clarify the effect is Noxious Invigoration evolution,” Heath said. “I feel like it could mean a couple of things.”

“I wish smartphones still worked,” Eik sighed, kicking a stupid pebble. “Every new skill and stuff like that always comes right when I can’t go to the library to consult the records.”

Heath chuckled. “You have had a pretty unique experience in that sense. When Sonja and I started out a little while ago, there really weren’t that many assignments we could take, and they were seldom very challenging, even as new F-rankers, so any new skills usually came after the action on the way home.”

Eik reread each of the offered evolutions carefully. “How strong would the physical resistance be if I chose that?”

“Not insubstantial, I think, but nowhere near what I have, for example,” Heath answered.

“I thought so.”

“You should go for the Noxious Invigoration evolution,” Michael chimed in.

“What makes you say that?”

The young man shrugged. “Because it sounds cool?”

“Come on, son.”

“I agree, though,” Heath added. “Resistances are fine and all, but you shouldn’t be getting hit to begin with, being as squishy as you are. It’s better to reinforce your ability to avoid the hit in the first place. And judging by the name alone, I doubt it’s anything useless.”

Eik had to admit that he was curious about it as well. The resistances didn’t sound nearly as exciting as something called Noxious Invigoration, although it most certainly was a pretty stupid idea to choose the evolution of his skill based on how cool the name sounded.

But…

[Evolved skill Resistance: Toxin. Skill acquired trait Noxious Invigoration]

“So, how is it?” Heath asked. “Do you feel any different?”

Eik tried to feel his body for a moment, closing his eyes as his mind investigated every nook and cranny for an unfamiliar sensation or a sudden power-up.

“Nothing,” he said with a sigh, getting up to give the boy some more medicine. He had become a bit more active in his sleep, which they hoped was a sign that he might be ready to come back to consciousness on his own soon.

It would have been nice to get a new card to play in case they had to fight again, which was likely, but he would just have to figure out exactly what Noxious Invigoration did later. “Shall we get going then? I think it would be safer to wait at the fracture coordinates rather than this random spot. Plus, It’s finally beginning to get dark, so making it there before everything becomes pitch black would be ideal.”

“Good point,” Michael said. “I’d like to work on him a bit more too, now that I’ve had some time to regain my strength.”

Heath picked up the boy and let Eik take lead once more as they marched cautiously back to the clearing. The rest of the trek was pleasantly uneventful, They reckoned they had about half a day left before Atla would order the fracture open, since she had based their schedule on Earth time to give them the best possible sense of it.

Apparently, most worlds had day night cycles pretty similar to Earth’s, but it could really throw off one’s sense of time over the course of multiple cycles. After hours of waiting in the clearing, the light was still sufficient to see quite well.

“Is it the moon?” Michael asked.

“Seems like it. Not that I’m complaining. It makes the wait safer,” Eik said.

They’d had to fight off a few weaker fauna but they knew it was only a matter of time before something worse showed up, so when the fracture finally hummed into existence, the team and the boy who had now woken up breathed sighs of relief.

The wonderful, cool air of the Nidafjeld Alliance headquarters felt paradisial, the crisp ice water waiting for them on trays almost drawing tears.

The F-rank boy they had rescued, whose name was Pollarak, cried as he recounted the events of the past two weeks, an Alliance healer tending to his injuries while he spoke. This expedition had been their first unsupervised mission, so they had proceeded slowly and cautiously—excessively so, he admitted. They had spent the entire first day and a half in the clearing discussing and deciding their best course of action.

Once they had actually set off, they had twice convinced themselves that they had picked a bad direction and backtracked to restart. Atla and the other Alliance members didn’t look too satisfied with that.

“So, where’s my daughter?” an agitated man demanded, interrupting the boy’s story. The man had skin the color of fresh blood, four fingers on each hand, and a thick, black mane of hair running from the top of his head to the pelvis, where a slender, hairless tail swept back and forth through the air. He was bare-chested, dressed in a pair of trousers that didn’t match his looks whatsoever. The aura flowing out of him was bone crushingly heavy, as if his presence alone could strangle Eik and press him flat against the cold flagstones of the fracture chamber.

“We got separated. Kans’Gu was alive when I last saw her. I got knocked out suddenly and when I woke up, I just started running. I don’t remember much from around the time I fell unconscious.” The boy named Pollarak couldn’t look the father in the eye.

“When?”

“I-I’m not sure,” Pollarak managed hoarsely, his body trembling like a leaf as new blood began to pour out of his wound.

Atla placed a placating hand on the red man’s shoulder and lead him off to the side where they spoke quietly for a minute. When they came back she directed her next words at Eik’s team.

“Are you willing to continue the rescue operation to find the rest?”

“We are,” Sonja answered for them, drawing a decidedly unwilling look from Michael.

With what little information the boy had been able to provide, they went back through the fracture and into the eleventh plane of hell: the Hell of Humidity.