James descended the stairs toward the second level, whistling to himself as he walked.

The sun will come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun…

Despite the darkness all around him, only partially lightened by Hand of Glory, he had never been more relaxed walking into a fight.

As he moved, he secreted strong and thick spider silk from his wrists and applied it as a patch over the section of his armor that had covered his stomach. That area was still broken, but with his newest Skill, James’s silk was potentially much stronger than the armor that had originally protected that space. He infused significant energy to realize that potential.

And this time, he did not slow down when he reached the end of the tunnel.

James was back at full power now. There was no need to hesitate.

Two ogres with green complexions fell upon James as he entered the massive cavern of the second level, but his hands whipped out and intercepted them. With one uppercut, he smashed the right hand ogre’s chin up into its brain case. His other hand grabbed the left ogre by the throat and squeezed. James ignored the ogre’s brief but violent flailing until the quiet sounds of cracking bone and crunching cartilage gave way to a wet, fleshy noise as his fingers popped all the way through the protective structures and into the esophagus.

Then he released the ogre’s throat, and the monster instantly slumped to the ground, its life’s blood gushing out all around the body.

James didn’t watch it die. Three more green-skinned ogres were rushing toward him from out of the distant darkness now, and unlike the first two and the first floor’s gray ogres, these were armed with short stone clubs.

Progressively more dangerous enemies, he thought, smiling faintly. Sometimes his world was really game-like.

His hand whipped out and threw a long Air Strike. Thin lines gouged themselves across the three ogres’ chests, and the gray blood flowed freely out of them, but none of them slowed. As more Mana gathered around James’s body, they accelerated as if hoping to reach him before he could launch another attack.

All right, then.

James pushed Mana out of his body, focusing on his new Skill. His power pulsed, radiated outward, adhered to solid surfaces—and finally took physical form.

The ogres got to within a few feet of James, and then they each struck the solid but invisible object James had conjured in front of them at full running speed. There was a slight elasticity to the threads he had burned through a tenth of his Mana to quickly construct.

But the ogres were fleshy creatures striking a hard, thin web of fibers anchored to solid rock and made with material denser than their bones.

The bodies hit with the combined momentum from their five or six hundred pounds of weight and the velocity of their charge.

Pieces of ogre flew everywhere as the creatures instantly tore themselves apart on the threads. Two of the ogres lost limbs and sagged forward, dropping their whole weight onto the web as their lives gushed out of severed arms, legs, and torn arteries. The other ogre had been running with its head outstretched, so the lower body was only lightly injured, but the forehead was shredded down to the gray matter. The wounds to all three were instantly fatal.

James managed to turn his face slightly away from the splatter as they collided with the silk barrier, to avoid any gore landing directly in his eyes, but he couldn’t avoid looking for long.

Already, more of the green-skinned ogres approached behind the ones that had shredded themselves on the silk wire.

It looked to be a half-dozen or more—James could not see all of them clearly with the ogre cadavers blocking his view.

The nearest one reached out to the area that was not covered by dead bodies and tentatively touched tried to push forward. James could sense its wariness—it knew something was wrong with the space, but it did not know what.

He began quietly chanting, charging gravity magic. Multiple ideas ran through his mind for how he could use it to immobilize or destroy the ogres in front of him.

The ogre that had reached out into what must have seemed like empty space felt its hand collide with the web, and it began trying to push through, then trying to pull away—but it wasn’t strong enough to push through, and the silk was sticky. To the ogre’s alarm, and to James’s amusement, it found that it could not pull its hand away—and as it continued trying to free itself, its other hand became entangled too.

We’ve got ourselves a tar baby situation, he thought, still quietly chanting, trying not to laugh.

Less humorously, James could tell some of the other monsters had begun trying to pull the dead ogres out of the way of their advance. The thread held up under their combined weight thus far, but he wasn’t confident in how long that would continue. He had created it in only a moment or two, and the work wasn’t meant to last.

Already he could see they were forcing the silk to stretch slightly by concentrating all their weight in one spot, using the partially decapitated middle ogre’s body like a sort of battering ram.

That’s the weakness, he thought. Once something is stuck in the web, you can use it as a device to push against the whole structure.

James backed up slowly, still chanting, the dark, dense gravity Mana gathering around his body like a storm cloud.

Around thirty seconds passed like this—one ogre growing increasingly more entangled with the web, while the other five or so pushed against the corpse of another ogre stuck in the web, trying to push through the silken surface with brute force.

Though the silk had been stretched to what James had imagined might be its breaking point, it was the rock wall to which James had anchored it that gave first. The points that secured the web began ripping from the stone one by one. As the web finally collapsed to the floor, the ogres that had been pushing in unison from behind their dead fellow stumbled forward too.

James darted in as soon as the web began to fall.

As he got into close range, he used his power on every ogre within reach. Their bodies suddenly doubled or tripled in weight—those closest to James getting the worst of it—and he had to throw himself back to avoid being trapped under falling bodies as they collapsed.

James stumbled as he jumped backward, the toe of one armor-clad foot caught in his own web, but he still moved in the correct direction, and he struck a wall, giving him something to grab onto so he did not fall into the web. The ogres were less fortunate.

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They slammed into the ground as if a giant fist had appeared and ground them down, and three of them landed sprawled in the web—not counting the one who was already tangled up in it.

The monsters began elbowing each other and trying to shift position, making what moves they could to break free.

But the ogres behind them—there had been more than the half dozen James had thought he detected, he now saw—stepped forward and used the entrapped ogres’ bodies like cloth draped over a puddle. Treading on the stuck ogres was clearly very painful for the ogres, especially after James had increased the weight of everything near him. He heard the sounds of bones snapping as the last five ogres standing slowly, carefully advanced.

James yanked his foot free and stepped back, taking up a fighting stance.

The lead ogre stepped onto the head of the ogre corpse that had become a battering ram earlier, and James darted forward, left hand extended, fingernails pointing directly at the enemy throat.

Predator’s Strike!

The nails sharpened into claws in an instant—but just as James was about to rip into the ogre’s neck, its club came down and slammed into his arm. The creature had been at the periphery of James’s increased gravity and had adjusted to the change in its weight more quickly than he had counted on.

The club struck James’s arm just below the elbow, sending the deadly claws ripping into the ogre’s chest instead of its neck. He felt his nails gouge out skin and fat and flesh, digging deep trenches in the ogre’s skin—but not deep enough. It bled, but the wound was far from fatal.

And James’s arm felt funny. The bone the ogre had struck was not broken—he’d had that before—but badly bruised. It was possible there was a hairline fracture somewhere.

I don’t think that was even a full-force hit. These guys are pretty strong.

Of course they were. The ogres on the previous level had been strong, too.

The creature looked down at its chest and winced, then took another step forward—and its feet became entangled in a bit more of the invisible web.

James lunged up, throwing a right handed uppercut this time. The ogre reacted, raised its arms, but far too slowly. As its hands grabbed for James, it caught only his waist. His fist landed, and the ogre’s chin disintegrated under his punch.

“Grahhhh!” The creature let out a wild, pained yowl, and James twisted free of its suddenly weakened grip.

With his slightly injured arm, he aimed a chop using Predator’s Strike.

His hand swept through the ogre’s neck, and the head flopped backward, held on only by the spine.

The monsters behind the ogre stepped back, fear in their yellow eyes, and James leaped in closer.

He launched his full body into a punch at the right hand ogre’s midsection, just as the creature was hesitantly beginning to step back. The fist embedded itself in the ogre’s middle, and the creature doubled over, blood beginning to trickle from its lips.

The left hand ogre’s eyes went wide, and it turned to run. The other two ogres that remained uninjured took that as their cue and fled as well, running toward the back of the large cavern.

The scenario struck James as similar to a game of tag for just a moment, and he smiled savagely, displaying all his teeth.

Well, I guess I’m it!

—

In the hard mode Dungeon, Mina entered the second level ready for action.

The Alder Wood Wand practically crackled with the intensity of the lightning Mana she had poured into it.

She was prepared for everything Carol had warned her about.

The second level was shaped like a stone tunnel itself, full of irregular rock formations on the walls and ceiling. The main difference between it and the shaft Mina descended to reach it was that the one inside the level was horizontal instead of diagonally descending—and of course that Mina had to be ready to fight as soon as she entered the level.

She took a few deep breaths and, before she could have second thoughts, she stepped into the room.

As she passed through the portal into the second floor, one of the giant black bug-like creatures leaped out from the corner of the room just above her head and to the left. Mina shot it with a bolt of lightning, then turned aside. She knew it was dead without needing to check.

Another one of the monsters charged at her from further away, ground level, and she blasted it straight through the forehead. The creatures’ acidic yellow blood spurted out of the wound and onto the shoulder of the Perfect Skinsuit as the monster slumped forward, but Mina deliberately ignored it and waited a moment, confirming what Carol had told her. As promised, the armor did not take any damage from the acid’s touch.

She breathed a sigh of relief.

Then the rest of the enemies, another twenty black bug monsters—all gathered at the very end of the long tunnel—took notice of her.

They all rushed toward her at once, stepping over each other, running on the floor, the walls, and the ceiling as they charged across the distance. It felt like Mina had thrown herself into some terribly stressful video game.

The one bright side of being attacked by so many at once was that for the next ten seconds, she did not need to aim. Every shot, no matter where she launched it, landed on target.

Her Mana slowly dwindled with every blast from the wand, but every bolt counted.

It was only when the enemies were down to a handful, hiding behind stone outcroppings, that Mina had to be careful, conserve energy—and aim.

A large head poked out from behind a rock, and Mina resisted the urge to fire. She saw one of the other creatures that had managed to sneak closer was moving, and she wanted to save her next shot for that one. It was only seven feet away from her, while the other one was camped out closer to twelve feet away.

It’s almost like they get smarter and more careful when there are fewer of them, she thought.

The monster closest to her gave up waiting patiently, broke cover—and she hurled a lightning bolt at it. The creature leaped to the side and dodged the lighting, and Mina immediately pushed more lightning Mana into the wand.

The other four monsters all rushed toward her as the closest black bug monster lunged in her direction. A bolt of lightning tore through the center of its mass, but it still landed on her, its weight pinning her down as it bled on the chest of her armor. Mina felt very grateful for the suit.

She started to push herself up, reaching a sitting position just as the next creature poked its head into her field of vision. She fired another lightning bolt almost by pure instinct, striking the monster through its oversized head.

The next monster threw itself at her, and she managed to shoot another bolt of lightning at it, penetrating the left side of the chest. Like the last one, it collapsed on top of her, gushing a torrent of yellow blood and spasming as it died. The cumulative weight of the two creatures, one on her upper half and one on her lower half, pinned her back down.

Mina swallowed, trying to control her rising panic as she sensed the remaining two creatures had entered the area around her. Her field of vision was limited by being underneath the two monster corpses, but that was also her advantage, right? The monsters could not directly attack her until they removed their dead comrades from on top of her.

A sharp spear-like object suddenly stabbed through one of the monster bodies and deep into Mina’s stomach. She could only see it slightly, but she felt it.

Adrenaline suppressed most of the pain so that it was more like a hard punch to the gut than the agony she knew would come later, but her heart raced out of control. She felt like she might die.

Then she felt the spear-like object push further in and exit by stabbing out through the back of her ribs.

She let out a choking gasp. That hurt so much. There was a part of her mind that wanted to quantify if this was more or less painful than giving birth with no painkillers, but she recognized that might be her going into shock.

Focus. Focus in this goddamn moment, she told herself angrily. It might be the last thing you ever do.

The bladed thing that had impaled her through the stomach had continued to move, somehow, and the shaft of the weapon seemed to be flexible and jagged.

Right, of course, it’s one of their tails.

The tails were jagged whip-like appendages with a sharp blade at their tip.

It curled around Mina’s back and began to lift her from beneath the bodies.

The monsters wanted to kill her face to face.