Beth waved her hand at the darkness, casting long shadows through the tunnel. “I can see it moving ahead of us.”

Bel peered ahead, seeing absolutely nothing but more smooth tunnel wall. “See what?”

“Some bug. Nothing dangerous. James and I will stand to the sides to keep some light on it,” Beth continued firmly.

She looked Bel up and down and frowned. “You know, it’s pretty small. Maybe you should put that borrowed short sword away and use one of my daggers instead, just so you don’t hurt yourself. Honestly, it’s barely a threat.”

Bel couldn’t help but wonder what part of lifting the weapon from a corpse made it “borrowed,” but she was genuinely touched that Beth was worried about her safety. “Don’t worry Beth, I won’t accidentally slice off my fingers.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe in you, it’s just that we’ve mostly practiced with much shorter blades.”

Bel brandished her short sword with confidence. “I’ll be fine. After that ritual my body feels fantast–aah!”

A dark blob had detached from the wall and launched directly at her face. Bel screamed and frantically swung the sword around like a stick, desperate to keep the leaping thing away. She shrieked again when the insect slipped under her wild attacks. She instinctively lashed out with a foot when she felt an antenna brush against her leg.

Bel shivered at the twitching pile, but realized that she’d missed her chance to quickly kill it when the insect – some kind of overgrown cave cricket – regained its feet and leaped towards her again.

She screamed and smashed her short sword into it, connecting with a hollow thunk. The insect struck the ground like a rock, bouncing across the hard floor. As it lay there twitching she seized the opportunity and plunged her weapon into the gross collection of twitching antenna and legs. Like a determined sewing machine, she stabbed her weapon repeatedly into the twitching mass at high speed. Her frenzy continued for several seconds before she regained control of her faculties.

She was breathing heavily, and her snakes were darting around like they were on fire, but the insect was dead, right?

Bel poked it with the tip of her sword. It twitched, but she was fairly certain that was just death contractions setting in. She stuck the sword into it on last time, just to be sure.

Beth snorted. “Okay, to be honest, that was a bit messy. It was essence corrupted, but it’s still just a large cricket.”

James chimed in. “The screaming was a bit much.”

Bel spun around, her face flushed. “I wasn’t screaming,” she insisted. “Those were shouts of war.”

Beth grasped Bel’s hand and lowered her weapon. “No yelling at allies while holding a weapon. Now, wipe this off and then we can talk about how to advance your core.”

Bel stuck her tongue out at her brother.

James rolled his eyes at her, but he stayed quiet.

Beth watched as Bel wiped the sword on a corner of a rag, which she then discarded. Beth waited to speak until after Bel had resheathed her weapon.

“Bel, why didn’t you use your angry face ability?” James asked.

“My what?”

“You’ve only got one ability.”

“Let’s call it glare. Not angry face. Glare.”

“Sure,” he laughed. “Why didn’t you glare at it?”

Bel tilted her head. “Uh, it didn’t feel ready?”

“It hasn’t been long enough for her to recover,” Beth explained. “Remember, it takes an hour to refill after emptying her core, and her inscribed ability will only refill after that. Unless it’s an emergency, most people wouldn’t pull energy from their inscribed abilities, just from their unbound mana, but since that was her first time we can forgive the mistake.”

Bel examined the smashed insect. “So what do I do with this?”

Beth grinned. “There are two things that you can do with an essence corrupted creature–”

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“What makes them corrupted anyway?” James interrupted.

Beth gave him a powerful side eye. She answered his question though – James would just keep asking otherwise. “Not all deities make pacts with humans. Some get their compensation from insects or other things. Personally, I’m happy that the divine treaty enforces some distance between us and the gods.”

Beth paused to see if James would interrupt again before turning back to Bel. “So, there are two things that you can do with the creature’s core. First, you can break it apart and absorb some of its essence. This is the quickest way to build up the size of your own core, far faster than letting it accumulate naturally.”

“And then I can make a second core and choose a patron, right?”

Beth nodded, sending the light from her helmet dancing around the tunnel. “But first we’ll do something else. Some creatures just get abilities naturally as their cores grow, but you won’t get anything… well, anything other than your glare, until you make a pact with a god to gain access to their Path. That isn’t the only way to get abilities though, because you can also take abilities from someone else.”

Beth turned to James quickly. “And no, before you ask, you need a core to do it.”

James slumped dramatically and Bel couldn’t help a quick snicker at his antics.

“Put your hand on the dead thing,” Beth told her, to Bel’s dismay. She reached out and held a finger against a part of the carapace that wasn’t covered with its sticky innards.

“Now, flex your own core until you can just feel what’s left in the insect. But don’t absorb it – you’ll know what I mean.”

To Bel’s surprise, she did understand. She could feel the essence of the dead thing. It was tempting, like a scent of something sweet teasing her through the air. Except it was coming from the disgusting smashed remains of an overgrown cave cricket. “Okay,” she said aloud, “what now?”

“Just feel at its contours. You should pick up a pattern: that’s the ability engraved upon the core.”

Bel reached…and she felt something. There was just the hint of a–

The core broke. A heartbeat later and all of the essence had fled. She turned to Beth, her eyes watering with the stress of her failure.

“I broke it.”

Beth laughed gave her a quick hug. “Of course you did, hon. It’ll take you a few tries, which is why we’re doing this with these tiny pests.”

“Oh.” Bel looked at the mess. “Yay.”

----------------------------------------

“You should be noticing that there’s a similar pattern in all the cores that you’ve touched so far,” Beth explained.

Bel probed at the most recent one with a – relatively – soft touch. She’d already broken eight of them, and she was getting tired of failure.

“I think I recognize it.”

“Great,” Beth replied, “now pick one end of it and trace it. Put some oomph into it so you get all the details. At the same time, trace the same pattern on your own core. It sounds complicated, but it should come naturally.”

Bel didn’t feel very confident, but she tried it anyway. She shoved her senses through the creature’s core and felt it crumbling behind her heavy touch. Simultaneously, she pushed against the petals of her own core and felt a pattern start to form. When she reached the end of the pattern she felt the creature’s core crack and dissipate, but she also felt a pull on her own core, followed by a strange pressure. Then the pattern that she’d traced solidified and a strange new feeling spread through her body.

“I did it!” she exclaimed.

Beth gave her a congratulatory thump on the back. “Great! So what do you think it does?”

“Uh… something in my lungs?” Bel could feel energy flowing from her core and all throughout her body, but most of it moved into her lungs.

Beth nodded. “Delvers call it improved lung capacity. It’s useful in places with bad air. For some reason, all insects have it, even though they don’t have lungs.”

“Oh, I bet I know why,” James said. He scratched at his chin for a moment. “Uh, it’s another language failure, but basically insects can’t get very large because they don’t have lungs. They absorb the, uh, good parts of the air through their skin.”

He made a noise of irritation, clearly bothered by difficulties translating his English words into the Satrap tongue. “That means that they’re limited by their surface area, which gets smaller in relation to their volume as they get bigger.” He gestured at Bel’s latest kill, some kind of overgrown grub as long as her arm. “So if that ability enhances the way they use good air, then they must all need it to get this large.”

Bel gave him a double thumbs up. “Nifty. Thanks teacher!”

Beth rolled her eyes at the gesture, but she nodded at James. “That was actually useful to know. Makes me wonder if there are smaller essence insects that we just don’t notice because they don’t have that ability and stay small.” Beth fiddled with her braids for a moment. “That’s a bit scary actually – but I think that really small things can’t absorb essence quickly, so maybe they aren’t dangerous.”

Bel shivered at the thought of a horde of essence empowered ants tearing into her body. “That’s terrifying, Beth.”

The woman shrugged. “Lot’s of terrifying stuff down here. Once we get into the Labyrinthos we’ll start encountering the real monsters. You’ll grow quickly then.”

“The real monsters?”

“Oh yeah, the real stuff.” Beth prodded the dead grub with her foot. “These are just natural critters that some minor god blessed – or cursed if you want to talk like a priest – to get a trickle of essence. They can get to the surface sometimes, so delvers need to keep their populations culled to prevent them crawling into our beds at night. They aren’t really dangerous.”

Beth grinned as she spread her arms wide.

“The real monsters though, they’d just squish these guys underfoot and never notice. They usually can’t get out of the Labyrinthos because of their size, but they’re the number one killer of delvers. Despite that, Technis’ priests have been pushing the Delvers to reduce their numbers for generations; it’s dangerous work.”

James raised his hand. “Question. If these things are so dangerous then why are we going into the Labyrinth?”

“Labyrinthos,” Beth corrected.

“Sure, whatever.”

Beth laughed. “These old mining tunnels obviously won’t take us where we need to go. The Labyrinthos goes everywhere though. Since we’re trying to avoid, you know, that war up above, this is the fastest, best way to travel.”

“What about safest?” Bel asked.

Beth spread her hands. “Eh. Fast. Safe. Easy. You can’t pick all three.”