Isaac squeezed past the rift entrance and peered beyond where the light-moss turned dim, then gloomy.
“It’s the same corridor again. We overlooked it.”
Zach popped out from behind him. Isaac thought that maybe he would push him forward, calling him a coward with a laugh and a grin. But he was quiet, and in his eyes was a calculating focus.
“Should we go?” Zach asked.
“I’m not sure. It gets hard to see after a few steps.”
“... it’s not too dark. We could just leave, of course.”
“Of course.” Isaac didn’t quite believe that was an honest suggestion.
There was a time when he dreamed he could go see the stars with their entire island in tow. See the hollow planet for himself, meet a real elf, try as many exotic foods he could (or couldn’t) stomach. It was the kind of dream he lulled himself to sleep to, or daydreamed before going back to learning math and history. He dreamed that he could be a pro surfer as well, even though there weren’t any good waves to practice with. And before that, he had dreamed of having a family again, of a home that was safe and sound, a place that he could return to no matter how many times he left and no matter who he became.
“You can be anything you want,” Claire had said, the memory of her comforting him fresh in memory. “Just do not try to be too hard.”
Zach looked eager to plunge forward. Isaac couldn’t deny him that. They were both orphans, and though Claire loved them, it was at times difficult to discern what exactly made her pick them up on that tideful day.
I’m pretty sure she just wants us to be happy.
“I’d kick myself if we didn’t at least check what’s there,” Isaac commented.
Zach nodded. “I’ll take point. Let’s assume whatever is there knows we’re coming.”
+++
Hard stone, dripping ceiling, puckering sealife, a batch of cracked, oozing clams. The jagged barnacles looked like evil maws in the dim moss-light. The smell of ocean wetness grew penetrating. Isaac was trying not to tear up. He could hear every beat of his heart between his ears.
There was a room up ahead. Time between here and there passed like wading through quicksand as Isaac fought with himself every step of the way.
Think about the money. You could buy Claire a birthday present that isn’t made from scraps for once. Hammond needs new flashy bobbers. Sophia… she’d like some shoes, maybe? Or an aquarium. Definitely an aquarium.
A drop of cold something dripped on his neck. Isaac swatted at it frantically until he realized that it was just a drop of water.
Get it together Isaac. You’re jumping at barnacles and brain coral. They’re not even moving.
They reached a room, dimly lit and round.
Oh look, same room as before, except the mound in the middle is missing. Haha. Not at all unnerving.
He looked around. Zach had his dagger half unsheathed as he stared behind them. They entered the room carefully and quietly, making not a sound, and seeing neither stalk nor claw of any lethal enemy.
“Nothing’s here, he finally said.”
“Well, let's say there is. Where have we not checked yet?”
“...above?”
It came from the left, and slightly behind, where patches of glowing bits were bulging out of the ceiling. It dropped with a squelch and a crack before standing up in an unnaturally smooth way, thick claws clacking, uncountable mandibles chittering. Isaac wasn’t sure what it was that was already staggering towards him, just that it was covered in spiky coral growths, twice as large as the critters before, and was trying to stand on its three hind leg pairs.
The man-shrimp slapped its tail against the ground and was on him in the blink of an eye. It was stronger than it looked, and much heavier. The barnacles tore into his back as Isaac tumbled over the ground, slamming against the wall. His stomach hurt, his head hurt, and he was too dazed to think a coherent thought for a couple critical moments.
I…
Yelling and sounds of a fight brought him back for a moment. Zach was fighting it, fighting and not dying. yet.
I think we should leave.
He got up, staggered forwards, and didn’t run towards the exit, but straight for the prawn. With a running start, he put his entire weight behind the swing and bashed it straight in the side of the head.
You idiot. You absolute buffoon.
It staggered, and if a prawn could look annoyed at having an eyestalk snapped, this was what it would have looked like. It jumped in place too quickly to react and pounced on Isaac again, forcing him to bring his bat up, claws snapping at his face.
“Run!” he yelled. He didn’t mean it. He wanted Zach to stay.
A big claw closed around his bat and hand. With a crunch, the hardwood was crushed, barely audible over Isaac’s screaming as his fingers were crushed. Kicking madly did nothing. Tearing side to side did nothing. Praying did nothing.
And then Zach was on the prawn, two legs and one arm scrabbling for a hold, the other one thrusting a dagger into the creature’s face.
Thank the gods — why are you still here!?
It was the stupidest, bravest, and greatest thing he had ever seen. The critter bucked, mouth-tendrils and shears jerking about wildly as the dagger went across its remaining eye, into a joint, a mouth, cut off one of two antennae, and through it all Zach just kept stabbing and stabbing.
At one point, his hand disappeared into its mouth up to the wrist, dagger and all. With a final shudder and a twitch, it fell forwards, dead, and right next to Isaac.
It was over.
Isaac closed his eyes, and shivered. Pain wracked his body, and yet all he could focus on was how glad he was to still be alive. The shrimp-man was dissolving into white smoke, and the more Isaac breathed it in, the more a full, warm pressure grew in his chest. It reached a height Isaac thought was the limit of what someone could feel, then kept on growing until finally, with a pop in his ears, it settled like a lung full of oxygen.
He could still breathe in more. It felt like his chest swelled to twice its size, like he could get up and do anything. He did, immediately regretting it as a lance of pain shot up his arm.
Tiering up doesn’t remove pain, noted.
His body felt fresh to the core, but on the surface, it was like he’d gone a week without showering. Wiping his arm revealed flakes of skin as large as his palm that were falling off, cracks running up and down. It smelled of rancid potatoes, gone-off milk, and hot metal, and that was the final reason why he wanted to get out as soon as possible.
“Zach,” he groaned, and found his brother kneeling on the ground, clutching his hand with a face contorted and sweating buckets.
“Yeah. I’m here,” he gasped out. “Fucker got me. But I showed him, sure showed him, yep. Zach one, Rift Guardian zero.”
They were both trickling blood from wounds all over, but mainly their hands.
That definitely needs to be disinfected. And stitched.
His brick said less than fifteen seconds had passed between entering and killing the beast. Fifteen seconds, and they had both almost died.
“We need to go.”
Zach only answered with a nod.
They stumbled on towards the exit and whether it was pain or the adrenaline, Isaac’s memory was completely blank for the entire journey. In one second he was leaning on Zach, in the next their roles were reversed, and the warbling portal beckoned within a few meters.
Zach stumbled, swearing as he fell on one knee.
“We forgot… the reward…”
Isaac couldn’t believe he was still thinking about that. Zach was shivering, and with the amount of blood he was losing, they wouldn’t be able to hide this from anyone.
Nevermind that Isaac probably lost a finger.
“We’ve got a medkit in the boat, just wait until…”
Suddenly, Zach cried out. He writhed, almost pulling Isaac down with him. He saw Zach’s right hand, clutching the dagger in a deathgrip. The arm was sunburn red, and a thick band of purple bruise color was wrapped halfway up his forearm. Beneath, where the shrimp-man had bitten him, everything was splotchy, more black than purple. It looked like it was rotting, and as Isaac stared in horror, the band of purple visibly inched forwards.
It was overwhelming, the sound, the smell. The ground beneath his feet felt like it was shaking, and through it he felt more than heard the distant rumble, like that of a dying predator laughing its last laugh.
“Out. Out!”
The rift entrance shlorped, the membrane practically shooting them out. Zach hit the boat and Isaac also didn’t miss it, as he immediately began tearing through bandages and alcohols to find something that could cure full-on necrosis.
It shouldn’t be this fast.
He took the alcohol. It was the only thing he could think of. “Zach, can you hear me?”
Zach groaned weakly.
“Stay with me, I-I’m going to help you. This is gonna hurt.”
Even his nod was clipped.
The boat was rocking, making even taking the cap off a bottle an ordeal. The cry he gave when the first slosh of alcohol hit his hand hit tones Isaac didn’t think humans could make.
Shit, was this the wrong bottle? No, stop foaming, please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
For a moment, every fear and regret he could have raced through Isaac’s mind. They shouldn’t have come here, he shouldn’t have told Zach, shouldn’t have listened to Ortho’Wuur. He should’ve come himself, or not at all, he shouldn’t have made friends with Zach. He shouldn’t have been saved by Claire.
He should’ve died on that bed, in the room flooding with ice-cold water.
He should’ve been bit by the monster.
The boat rocked. A figure was standing on it that Isaac only caught after a second. Claire shouldn’t have been able to look angry, it didn’t suit her, and the worst she’d ever done was look at Zach with a disappointed face after one his escapades broke Isaac’s forearm. But her eyes were a blaze of murderous intent strong enough to kill ten people, and her head was on fire too.
“What.”
It was less a question and more a command. Isaac would have wanted nothing more. “The rift, a monster bit him, his arm is growing black, I tried the alcohol, it didn’t work, is it bad, is he going to die?”
She was listening as she brusquely grabbed Zach by the hand and inspected it for three long seconds. He was mewling weakly at this point and didn’t react much when she raised her hand, and with a single chop lopped his arm clean off.
He twitched once, bent his back like a cat, then fell limp. Bandages were taken, twine was wrapped tight around the stump. Claire checked him for any threatening injuries, went into the rift and after some time came out again, but Isaac was too exhausted and frightened to really care.
“Whose idea was this?”
“I…” I did it. It was me. Can’t you see it? Zach is… unconscious, Sophia is absent, who else is there? “It was me. I told Zach.”
There was a moment of silence, before Claire seemed to accept that explanation.
“This was the height of your stupidities,” she said, swallowing a sob. “You will come with me. And you will tell me everything.”
+++
There was perhaps one thing more reckless than going in a rift without armor, with no experience, and one real weapon between the two of them, and that was not even knowing what type of rift it was.
There was a talk, or more of an interrogation. A pair of surgeons came from the mainland in a helicopter to stabilize Zach, while Hammond was keeping the only stiff upper lip for miles. Isaac told Claire everything and eventually, after processing it with that distant emotionless face, she left to watch Zach, and let Isaac stew in his own misery.
Choconut crabs are poisonous. It was the first thing Isaac checked on the honest tablet-transponder-reader-caller, which had a frankly ludicrous number of saved snippets on news articles, encyclopedia entries, and digital forums on sea life. Choconut crabs were herbivorous crabs that feasted on the nuts of the name-giving trees. They grew to nearly thirty kilos, and nobody really knew which parts were poisonous, or under what circumstances. There were reports of people eating the entire thing and being fine. He also found reports of lethal poisonings after eating only a few spoonfuls.
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However, when they tiered up the poison inside them concentrated itself around the mandibles, turning them into venomous hunters capable of killing and eating entire goats. The rift had taken inspiration from these critters, with a Tier 1 guardian as a last sendoff, it really had tried to kill them.
It almost succeeded. Human kids didn’t weigh much more than a goat.
Sophia would’ve known. But without Sophia, Zach wouldn’t be here.
He’d overheard a conversation from the other room.
“You’re lucky the girl found you in time, any later and —————. Zach? The patient will live, and your other boy was damn lucky too. Nothing that won’t heal and scar over, except for the pinky tip. Zach however —————”
Laying in bed, exhausted to the bone, covered in bandages and with only three different drugs and a some sort of potion in his system while his brother was fully sedated in the other room, Isaac didn’t feel that lucky. He rolled around for an hour, then didn’t sleep for six. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, his heart switching between scaring him with how fast it was pumping, and how slow.
He rolled over. Maerdon, I’m such an idiot.
And sleep still did not take him. He knew that nightmares were waiting just around the corner, but Isaac felt rested, like after a long healthy seven or eight hours of sleep. His body still ached all over and burned in places whenever he irritated them, but mentally he was fully there.
I hope the potion wasn’t too expensive. He rolled around again, staring at the empty bunk. This is the price for tiering up? No sleeping in anymore?
It felt unfair that he was worrying about having more time in the day, while one room over Zach was in whatever state they had gotten him in, that Isaac had gotten him in.
There was a knock on the door, two gentle raps. Claire let herself in, looking tiredly across the room before plonking herself down on Zach’s messy bed. She looked like she hadn’t slept a wink.
Does she ever need to sleep? Can she if she wants to?
“You’re Tier 2, I see.” She didn’t say anything afterward for a long while. “Are you feeling any… discomfort?”
Isaac stared at her before deciding to shrug. “My bed is full of dead skin. I can’t sleep. I can… I think I can control how fast my heart beats. Maybe. Is that bad?”
“We never had the talk, I see. I did not think it would come this quickly.” She sighed. “You will be fine. You know for a long time, I did not understand what this ‘mother’ thing was. Deep beneath the sea, only one per generation ever has to learn, and I lived knowing that among the thousand faces of my gam, it could never be me. Until I found you, my own little mudskips.”
Everything was new, everything different. There was no path I could swim that did not lead to mistakes. I feared I was inadequate as a substitute.” She was quiet for a time, before finally adding. “This tragedy is all my fault.”
“No!” Isaac shot up, regretting it immediately as the muscles around his stomach spasmed. “I told Zach about Ortho’Wuur’s rift, I didn’t stop him.”
“The leader of a party takes responsibility for a collective failure, a fact that boy should know more than anyone else. Zach was acting as the party leader. You were following him. You are both my wards; the line of responsibility is clear.”
“He did it for me,” Isaac said quietly. “Because of my bane.”
She pondered that assessment for a moment. “Perhaps we share the blame, you and I, Zach when he eventually wakes up...” Claire frowned. “And that ————— irritating man.”
She was swearing, using some words she’d never used even when she thought Isaac and company were asleep and not listening from the top of the stairs. “Is Ortho’Wuur… alive?”
“He will be delivering a personal impression of my willingness to cooperate with his gam on his right eye. He left some teeth too. Would you like them? I can make a charm out of them; I hear shark’s teeth ward off bad luck to us land dwellers.”
Claire looked at him with a completely unreadable straight face. She was joking, hopefully. Isaac for sure wasn’t going to carry a necklace made with a person’s teeth.
“What about Zach?” he asked, because a change of subject sounded right.
“He will get a necklace too, as a reminder that he is not the only one paying for his stupidities anymore.” Claire sniffed and frowned. “Though I won’t be cross if he decides that it is unneeded. He will recover… most of his parts will. A healer is coming by tomorrow, but they will not be able to regenerate his missing hand. Not enough mana or control unless they are Tier 9, maybe 8.”
Isaac’s heart sank past his feet. It wasn’t that it couldn’t be done, they just didn’t have the money. They were on a Tier 4 world, how the heck were they supposed to drum up enough to pay for a healer almost three times that? Good healers were rare, and they’d have to come from offworld too, which was just another addition to the money-we-do-not-have pile.
“What about the rift?” he asked tentatively.
“It is gone. Nobody talks much about Tier 0 rifts, because their state is temporary, and like babies, are still growing. Take any reward and they are likely to pop.”
He closed his eyes and bonked his head against the headboard. A rift would have been just what Claire and Hammond needed for a stable cash flow.
And we cocked it up.
That she didn’t sound angrier at it made Isaac shrink together with even more guilt. He’d have to have played in the international pok-ball leagues for years if he wanted the millions needed to pay for Zach’s treatment. And that bubble was already bursted, he likely wouldn’t cut it for any craft or trade, and he didn’t have connections worth mentioning, besides maybe Victor. But even his trainees had a cheap skill for woodworking, tiling, or drying cement, which all was to say even if Isaac managed to get a traineeship, it would likely be decades before he could contribute any significant amount to the make-Zach-well-again-fund.
He couldn’t let Zach wait that long.
“Claire,” he said, finding his mouth moving easier than usual, “I want to take the adventurer exam.”
Isaac braced himself for a barrage of retorts. But unlike when he or Zach had broached the topic before, where Claire would deflect and dissuade, she just hummed to herself, a deep vibrating timber.
“Was I that poor a mother?”
He shook his head.
“And yet, you want to leave? If you succeed, you will be gone for many years, never quite sure when you can return.”
“It seems the best way to get Zach fixed,” Isaac said, before adding in a small voice. “But I know it’s not right to want to be an adventurer just for the money.”
Claire smiled. “Indeed. If that is why you are doing it, I won’t allow it. Zach is my responsibility. I will handle it.”
“Then I’ll take the exam anyways.” And if I make it, I’ll just donate all my money to the orphanage fund.
He was determined, or tried to look as much, and Claire didn’t look happy about it. He felt her hand ruffling his hair. “Many people try, and few succeed. Some die. Being an adventurer is difficult, but so is the becoming of.”
“How difficult?”
“More than anything you’ve ever done, less than anything you might do after. You need to be skilled, desperate, and just a bit insane to compete. And they don’t look kindly on quitters.”
Isaac swallowed. “I’ll still do it. I’m ready.”
“No one is ever ready for adventure. Perhaps, if I train you until you are weeping salt, then you will do better on your next delve. And that I will do. That is my condition: you do not take the exam until I see you fit and ready. Until then, rest, and make up with your siblings. Sophia is livid, and Zach… that boy cannot be reminded often enough of the consequences of his mistakes.”
+++
Isaac stood in front of the door leading into the guest room, his hand frozen around the doorknob. Zach had been awake since two days after the incident, and Isaac didn’t quite know which concerns among a million bouncing off the inside of his skull to believe. Was Zach in pain, was he mad, did he blame Isaac or himself, was Isaac going to recognize him, was their friendship ruined, was he going to renounce their brotherhood and force him to wander the galaxy in a thousand years of penance and shame?
That’s definitely the worst case. He rubbed his face. Nothing can surprise me now.
He opened the door and was immediately tackled, followed by someone putting him in a headlock. Sophia wasn’t usually tall enough for a move like that, but she’d climbed a drawer, which bought her enough momentum to slam him to the ground.
“You bastard!” she yelled as she put him in a leglock. “You cockshell-sucking son of a whore!”
Violence was Sophia’s love language. And her hate language. Her general reaction to most things was to start talking with her hands. Something about insecurities, feeling insignificant, Hammond had once told in confidence. It led to her having a lot of practice in not hurting people seriously.
She was tearing up as she pummeled him.
Can’t breathe — I deserve this. No air for me.
The ceiling was starting to spin and wobble. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss her. Maybe this was serious.
“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. The grip around his neck slackened. “We should’ve taken you with us.”
From where he was lying on the floorboards, he couldn’t see her face. If she was considering forgiving him, she’d be doing that thing where her nose twitched while she considered pros and cons. In the case that she wasn’t, Isaac braced for some knees and elbows to join in on the beat-idiots-black-and-blue game.
“I’m also not quite healed yet,” he added meekly, waving a bandaged hand. Three cracked finger bones and half a missing pinky. He’d gotten off light.
She got off him without saying a word. The last of her tears disappeared on her shirt, which featured an inflated pufferfish and the blurb ‘Chill your balls’ written in P’cleek. He wasn’t sure if it even was a pun, or if it had the same implication for underwater dwellers as for him.
“I’m not mad you didn’t take me with you, I’m mad you went and did something so suicidal in the first place,” Sophia took in a shaky breath. “I’m not mad this time, I’m mad about every little time you two do something stupid. I always narc on you two because I hope learning that shit has consequences might make you less stupid.”
“We had a plan, the plan just got… disorganized a little.”
She gave him a flat look. “Claire has clearly been too nice to you both. From today on, whenever you don’t pick up the slack, you’ll have to reckon with me first.”
“You know, you get to be at least a little mad.” Isaac would have even preferred it.
“You’re alive, and that’s what counts, asshole.” After another friendly punch to the shoulder, it looked like she’d gotten it all out of her system. She rubbed her fist. “Also, ow, punching you friggin’ hurts. What are you made of, concrete?”
“Tier 2 bullshit.”
She snorted and shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
“Hey,” a voice croaked. “I’m here… too… y’know.”
They walked up to the guest bed, where the slightly pale head of Zach was poking out from under covers and IV feeders. His left hand was plucking slowly yet restlessly at a seam. His right hand was noticeably shorter and completely covered in bandages.
The sight made Isaac freeze, and stare for far too long.
“Right, I almost forgot your share.” Sophia pulled her fist comically far back, then after a tense moment, stopped herself. “I’ll save it for when you look more punchable.”
“What about… Isaac?” Zach croaked, lolling his head to the side.
“He has a sort of face. Makes him very approachable in terms of violence.”
“That’s my true bane,” Isaac said, noticing how Zach’s head was lolling side to side. “Are you…?”
“Still… anesthetized? Yehehes… weee!” Zach chuckled, before breaking out into a coughing fit. “Only vomited… twice… a good sign…”
“Means there isn’t enough choco-venom left to poison your brain,” Sophia said.
There was an awkward silence. Isaac handed his brother a glass of water with a loopy straw, since he sounded like he was coughing up half a lung.
Since nobody said anything after that, Isaac felt it was on him to pull them out of it. “I… ever since Claire pronounced us siblings, I always thought that we would be together forever, just the three of us. I wanted that to be true. But we were always going to drift apart at some point.”
There, I’ve said it.
The second silence was a bit less awkward than the first.
“I always felt like you two were way ahead of me, and no matter what I did I couldn’t catch up.” Sophia sniffed, looking at the floor. “And maybe I was such a narc because it made me feel better about myself.”
They both turned to stare at Zach.
“Well?”
“I make… mistakes…” Zach said. “Good at hiding them... Karma, caught up. Venom took my hand. They amputated… half a lung wing… Won’t be winning any races, but…Tier 2 compensates.”
For every bit that Zach sounded unbothered, Isaac felt his guilt choking his throat that much more.
“It’s my—”
“Don’t you dare beat yourself up over this,” Zach croaked “You got money, we both got Tier 2 for practically free—”
“You lost your dominant hand. And half a lung.”
“Worth it. If you knew what my boon was—” Zach was about to continue when Sophia squished his cheeks together until his face looked like a goldfish.
“Will you stop downplaying your near death experience?”
“Yesh ma’am…” She let him go, looming over him with crossed arms like a five foot general as he massaged his throat and took another sip. “As I was saying, totally not worth it, never doing that again.”
“It’s a shame we lost the real reward,” Isaac muttered, before the grin on Zach’s face had him doubting his memory. “Wait. Did we get it?”
“Claire got it for us. Keeping your first catch as something special is an old merfolk tradition barely practiced anymore.”
Zach produced a small lockbox Isaac immediately recognized. It was the one the rift gave out, made of simple driftwood, and with a rusted lock and rusted hinges that squeaked when opened.
“Zach, that box is worth a hundred gups, maybe.”
Zach was grinning again. “Open it up.”
There was no surprise Isaac was expecting, besides maybe that they had miscounted and actually found two mana crystals fused into one. Instead, when he flipped it open, a small, shimmering pearl the length of an entire knuckle glittered innocently back at him.
The shine was unmistakable, as were the strangely fractal reflections playing off its insides. He’d seen it in shows, in magazines and comics, sunday-morning cartoons and movies left and right.
A skill pearl.
“This is a — how did you… what?”
“Dropped as a reward from the guardian. Claire saved it, and now it’s yours.” Zach’s grin reached maximum smugness.
Isaac stared at the pearl for a long time.
“I’m one-hundred percent sure I don’t deserve this.”
“Oh please, maybe you don’t want it, but you need it. You’re gunning —” a serious of coughs wracked his body, forcing Zach to calm down and take another big sip. “— gunning for adventurer. That’s a world of prestige equal to if not greater than nobility; it’s geniuses and trust-fund-kiddies all the way to the top. You need to be at least as prepared as them, if not better.”
Isaac opened and closed his mouth. That made sense, a whole lot in fact. He’d checked the statistics for people who took the adventurer exams offered every two to three years, and the chances were grim. If the average of seven million people of Wett’s seven hundred chose to be tested, the end result would see under a hundred contestants leave for their journey among the stars.
One in 70,000.
“I mean, you are correct,” Isaac said, looking between the pearl and Zach.
“I’m rarely not.” Sophia raised a hand. “...except on matters involving rifts, my personal safety, et cetera. Please don’t hit me again.”
“I don’t think… I feel like I got off too lightly.”
“Oh please, you’re signing up to one of the most dangerous jobs there is,” Sophia said. “Even the entrance exam is brutal. In front of every testing location they’ve got a wall written full with the names of every person that ever died on the premises.”
“They do?” How many names does it take to fill a wall? “And you know that because…”
“Because I’m going too. To keep an eye on my idiot brother.”
He opened his mouth. Sophia was still Tier 1. She could run the ten kilometers easily, but never as fast as Isaac. But one look at her and he decided to shut his trap.
Maybe it’s for the best. She’ll tell me if I’m doing something stupid again.
“Do we even know what the skill pearl does?” Isaac asked.
“Your brick should. Give it a nudge.”
Isaac did, finding a skill pearl-shaped recession in the back. His brick hummed and buzzed before eventually spitting out a few lines of information. They read it. Sophia frowned, Zach laughed, and Isaac couldn’t do much more than groan.
“That is such carpshit.”
“It’s hilarious! Come on, eat it, then use it on yourself!”
“This feels criminal.”
[Water bolt: Shoot a concussive bolt of pressurized water at a target.]
“You can still trade it, right?” Sophia asked.
“You’ll have to,” Zach said between giggles. “But the cripple wants a picture of you blasting yourself in the face.”