Glad I was a part of that decision. Even if I agree with it, I’ve got a bad feeling I’m the one that’s going to struggle with taking whatever’s spewing magical salt crystal cannonballs at us. Ursula’s a tank, so she’s going to be fine, and I’m a pile of mush being piloted by some extremely complex shellraiser shit in comparison. Really hope my awareness can handle the slack my reaction time is leaving it.

In the moments between Ursula slinging her rifle over her shoulder and March pinpointing the closest spawner, I pull out my Class Card and quickly type out a question. Apparently March can’t see everything around us, so this should be safe as long as Pearl doesn’t say anything in response.

“How much further can I push my awareness? Is it going to be okay?”

Pearl reads the message seriously, then puts on a thoughtful look. After a moment she waggles her hand in a ‘kind of’ motion. Not exactly what I was looking for, but at least it doesn’t look like I’m in any immediate danger.

“If it looks like I’m going to get seriously hurt, can you do something to get my attention that won’t get March’s attention?”

A smile and a confident nod accompany two thumbs-up.

“Thanks for having my back. Gotta go.”

I send my Class Card away before Ursula can turn around to see what’s keeping me. She’s still busy arguing with March about which spawner is technically closest, but it looks like the argument’s winding down.

“I told you, it doesn’t matter which one’s higher up. Point us to the one that’s closest if it fell completely to the floor.” Ursula says with much more detail than before. “That’s the kind of close I’m looking for.”

“Oh. You could’ve said that to start.” March sighs, then clacks away on her keyboard. “The closest one just along the ground is fifty degrees to your left and straight ahead. But if you want the closest one including how close it is to the ground, then you’d need to go twelve degrees to your right. Now you can choose for yourself.”

Ursula rolls her eyes and turns to the left. “Cool. I choose this one since I have functioning legs and a bunch of spells. Keep an eye out, Gambler.”

“Will do.” I reply and fall in behind Ursula. Or I could call it ‘using her as a human shield’, but that gives off the wrong vibe. Even if it’s what I’m doing. “How far are you willing to go while we’re here?”

“That’s a weird question. What’re you referring to?”

I shrug as a particularly small salt cluster crunches under my feet. Looking down reveals a field of tiny salt flowers–each built like a single clover with the smallest bit of magical light in the middle. And as I trail the flowers up and away, everything fits into place. These aren’t flats at all–we’re trampling a field of clover with every step.

“How much magic are you going to put into this?” I clarify. “Like, if something shows up that you’d have to make way too much noise to kill, are we going to run? Or are we going to push through and hope it doesn’t draw too much attention?”

“Oh, that? Haven’t really decided yet.” Ursula scratches her neck with a wince as the magic around her does… something. “I guess if it really comes down to it, if we find something that needs that much firepower, we’re probably not gonna be able to run. So… yeah. Sure.”

She looks over her shoulder to gauge my reaction. I don’t feel like there’s anything too obvious on my face, but she nods and turns back like she’s found what she wants. Maybe a completely flat reaction was the right thing there? Hell if I know.

“There’s always the relocation option if you get too worried.” I offer halfheartedly.

Now that–that must’ve come through loud and clear. Because Ursula bursts out laughing. And she doesn’t stop as a new barrage of salt cannonballs appears on the edge of my reduced awareness.

“It wasn’t that funny.” I sigh and gesture off in the direction of the cannonballs. “Eight so far. Looks like more are coming, though.”

Ursula wipes away a thin layer of tears with one hand as she swings her rifle around. “Wasn’t what you said, sister–it’s how you said it. Almost like I told you we were about to walk into the chambers of major inconveniences. Eight still?”

“Eleven now. All from the direction of the other spawner Architect pointed out.” I tap my earpiece three times to warn March. “Do your thing.”

Gunfire and crunching salt clover accompany the first half of our deceptively long journey to the first spawner. More and more flowers pop out of the darkness at random intervals–thick things like pitcher plants, strange things like bleeding hearts, and even one that kind of looks like a cactus tree jutting into the air with massive salt crystal spines. But not a single one of them glows with the inner magic as that first flower. Only the carpet of clover beneath our feet does.

“What do you think differentiates the glowy ones from the ones that don’t?” Ursula asks as she goes in for her third reload since we hit the ground. “Let me rephrase that. What about the krarig makes some of the flowers turn magical while it leaves others dead and dark?”

I raise an eyebrow and wipe the cool residue from my magic facemask. “You’re asking me? Seriously?”

“Yeah. I like speculating.”

“Well, too bad for you, I’ve got nothing. Maybe once we learn a little more about how this place works I’ll have something for you, but right now, I know as much as you do. Hell, probably a whole lot less.” I chuckle and flex all my muscles in a rolling stretch. “Damn, my body feels fine now, but my brain’s got one hell of a fog rolling in. Can you count on yourself for a few minutes?”

“Not without using way too much magic. Tell you what–once we take out this spawner-thing, I’ll get Architect to make us a temporary shelter. You can take a load off and I’ll take some time to analyze how the hell we’re supposed to get to those underground exits.”

“It’s probably a tunnel system.” March loudly cuts in, startling the both of us. “Oops. Sorry. I’ve been looking for anything weird, but our instruments can’t punch through the layer of magic salt.”

Ursula clicks her tongue and takes aim towards where I’m pointing. “So there’s a good chance we can’t even get at those exits from this room. That what you’re saying?”

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“I dunno. Maybe.” March says with the best audio-only interpretation of a shrug I’ve ever heard. “Do science on the spawner. I’ll keep looking.”

“Do that, yeah. Thanks.” Ursula says as I tap my earpiece three times. Gunfire rings out, and I lower my hand as a headache really starts to come on strong. “Man, what purpose does this shit serve?”

“Magic bullshit purposes.” I reply flatly. “Didn’t you just tell me not to overthink magic things?”

“Yeah, but that only applies when you’re seriously trying to make sense of things. You know–eh, screw it. Not worth arguing semantics over.” She lowers her gun and scratches her neck. “Can you feel the spawner thing yet?”

“Nope. Hope it’s not out of range.”

“Of course it’s out of range. Or else you’d…” Ursula groans and smacks her forehead. “Shit, you mean it might be too far up. Architect. We pass the spawner yet?”

“Nope. You might want to look out for falling rocks.”

Ursula and I share a look, then slowly crane our necks skyward. There’s absolutely nothing visible in the darkness, but a quiet gasp and a laugh from Pearl tells me that there’s definitely something there. Something that stopped firing cannonballs at us a while ago so we couldn’t find it.

“That’s annoying as shit.” I mutter to myself as I cross my arms. “Don’t know why I thought the spawners would have a little more magic to ‘em. So we could actually see them. Mercenary, how high can you jump?”

She narrows her eyes to try and focus on whatever’s up there in the darkness. From how she grumbles to herself about how March might’ve had a point, it looks like the answer is ‘not that high’. Her briefcase pops out of nowhere and she reaches into it to rummage around for a few seconds, then grabs onto something with an ‘a-ha!’.

Out comes a thick, circular metallic frame with interlaced magical fibers creating a lattice inside. She flicks it once to get five legs to fold down, sets it on the ground, and confidently nods down at the magical trampoline. Then she looks over to me.

“You want to, or should I?”

I stare at her for a few seconds until she gets the message. “I’ll die.”

“Not necessarily. But yeah, unless you use some Worth, you’d probably die. Just wanted to give you the chance in case you wanted the thrill.” She grins and steps onto the trampoline, giving the fibers a few test bounces that send her a few feet into the air with no effort at all. “Just as bouncy as I remember it. Here–just in case something happens before I get back on the ground.”

She reaches into her briefcase one more time, pulls out the revolver from before, and reloads it before tossing it to me. I catch it, test the sight, and nod at her.

“I have no idea how to use this.”

“Aim, steady, pull.” She points a finger-gun at me and pretends to fire. “Not complicated. There’s a reason any idiot can kill someone with a gun. Just don’t try to reload it–you’ll do some serious damage due to your lack of mana or cost yourself a good chunk of Worth. Got a feeling you don’t want either of those.”

“No, I do not.” I wave Ursula off and lower the gun so the barrel’s facing the ground. “Yell if something’s going to fall on me.”

Ursula nods, then taps her earpiece once. “You hear that, Architect?”

“Loud and clear.” March confirms, her voice getting further and further away as she speaks.

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck.”

Ursula’s smile widens at that, and she bends her knees the next time she comes down on the trampoline. It stretches down, down, down, and down some more until only her head is visible outside of the frame. Not sure sure how that works, since the legs were only like two feet tall, but it’s more of that magic bullshit I guess. She raises her eyebrows in excitement and waves one hand at me.

Magic swells. The air around me spirals and condenses towards the trampoline. In a burst of shimmering red-orange that shreds all the fibers to ribbons, Ursula explodes upwards and soars into the sky. Everything happens so fast that it takes me a second to register that I’m staring at a now broken trampoline, which disintegrates into magic particulate as I crane my neck ceiling-ward to see where the hell it sent her.

She’s… perfectly visible. Dangling from something that’s not perfectly visible at all. For the briefest of moments I think she’s going to fall due to how much she’s swaying back and forth, but then she lets go with one hand and shoots me the world’s smallest thumbs-up. I roll my eyes and focus back on the potential dangers as she scurries up whatever she’s on, scanning the darkened horizon for cannonballs or–

Something plummets into my awareness. Then crashes to the ground right next to me with enough force to send me staggering away with a heart beating a mile a minute and adrenaline coursing through my veins. I snap to the mass of salt and… holes… as Ursula stands triumphantly atop it with a shattered crystalline stem still white-knuckled in her right hand.

“Thought you were going to warn me.” I say as calmly as possible while my heart insists I scream bloody murder at her. “That wasn’t much of a warning.”

Ursula shrugs apologetically. “Sorry. Didn’t think it would snap so easily.” She pauses, then looks up as a dribble of molten salt lands on her shoulder. “Ouch. Uh, maybe don’t stand so close. Gimme a hand moving this sunflower bastard.”

Sunflower? I lean in a little to get my hands around a petal, and sure enough, the damn thing looks like a massive sunflower. But like… a combination between the drying one with all the exposed seeds and a perfectly thriving huge bastard. All made of salt crystal of course, and without a single droplet of magic to explain how the hell it was firing shit at us. No pollen like the first flower, either.

“What do you make of this?” Ursula grunts as she hefts it up and onto her shoulders, completely bypassing my need to even be here. “Almost looks like dead scenery, not something that should be shooting shit at us.”

“That’s… kind of exacly what I made of it.” I say as Ursula carries the thing all of ten feet, then snaps off the stem and flips it so the thing’s cannonball-seeds up. “If I didn’t know what it could do, I’d think it just dropped the cannonballs on us. How the hell did it control those things?”

“This time, I don’t think ‘magic bullshit’ can explain it.” Ursula reaches down and pulls out a cannonball. It comes free without any resistance. “...Huh. That’s light as shit. Pretty sure all those impacts we saw don’t equate to these things being light as shit. Architect, can you send over that shelter I commissioned you for a few minutes ago?”

A five-foot tall pillar blinks into being, followed by a shimmering magical barrier that emanates from complex runes written into it. Ursula frowns at it and crosses her arms, then clears her throat when nothing happens. More runes join the others, and the barrier expands to create a thirty-foot wide safe space.

“Perfect, thank you.” She says and pulls the rest of the sunflower into the barrier. “It’ll keep away the cannonballs?”

“For two hours.” March confirms. “After that, you’ll have until the magic in the runes runs out. Maybe another five minutes if you’re lucky.”

“Two hours. Gotcha.” Ursula repeats. “Definitely not enough to sleep in. Gambler, you want to take a nap? Or do you want to get hands-on with this salty sunflower with little old me?”

I sit down with a grunt and lean back against the pillar. “Nap first. Wake me up in an hour.”

“Will do. I’ll try to save some interesting discoveries for when you’re awake, but no promises.”

I roll my eyes, then slowly close them as I force my awareness to ignore the cannonballs that are inevitably going to slam into the barrier. It curls up into a near little compartment in my head, spreads out through my entire brain, and finally unleashes the fatigue it’s built up. Waves of discomfort and mental exhaustion wash over me like a fetid tide, but before I can struggle to fall asleep, Pearl knocks on something to get my attention.

She mouths something. It takes a few tries, since I’m not exactly a master at reading lips, but I’m pretty sure she says ‘goodnight’?