Eightfold Awareness (Gold)

Marked Target

Your Mark Capacity is set to eight if it was lower! Your Mark Duration is set to eight days if it was lower! You may have up to eight Marks placed on a single creature! You may Mark creatures you can see!

You always know the location of Marked Targets! Against Marked Targets, you have an increased ability to target weak points and vulnerabilities! This ability scales with how many Marks are on a single target!

Marked Target skills were usually niche: depending on the target parameters and the abilities of the Mark, they could be handy for duelists, bodyguards, or diviners, but none of the standard Mark skills were favored for use in a delving environment. But with a Mark Capacity of eight, and the ability to stack marks? Out of curiosity he Marked Annria and did a quick spin in place. He could tell her precise location even facing away from her. Even just the tracking component, without the combat applications, might be a low-level slot on its own. What a ridiculous skill.

Tav shook himself. Needed to stay focused; Annria wouldn't appreciate him getting lost in build theorycrafting. "I'm pretty sure," he said, "that the System's mixed me up with an Attercope. Probably the big one, the elite, that dragged me down here in the first place. What was it? The Deepspawned Attercope. That explains some of what's been going on with my stats, as well as the special skills I've been getting. The eyes, and, uh, this." He swung his torch in a slow-motion slash at nothing—the wooden length twitched and stretched. Annria looked queasy. "Doesn't the movement look a little bit like an Attercope's? It explains why so much of the System has been acting like I shouldn't be sapient, or like I should have extra eyes and limbs. It explains why I needed to re-enter my name!"

"That's great, I'm glad you're learning," Annria said. "Traveling with a cannibalistic bug-man is so much more comfortable when you're having fun with it."

"It might explain that part, too!" Tav forced himself to remember despite the way his mind recoiled from the events. "I think the Deepspawned Attercope ate some of my classmates before it dragged me off. When I told my System I was human, it updated my achievement from [Predator] to [Cannibal], so maybe [Predator] is for eating other Authorized creatures? Or it's a monster achievement? I don't know exactly. I don't know how I would test something like that."

"Is that what you're going to do?" Annria asked. "Test your ideas, turn into more and more of a monster, and force me to watch?"

"Annria," Tav said, "I'm trying not to panic. I don't like having six extra eyes any more than you like looking at them. I'm not—whatever this dungeon's doing, that it swallowed up both of us? I don't understand it at all! But I know delving, at least a little, so I'm doing what I can. We'll move forward and hope for an exit stair."

Annria slumped to the ground. "I can't believe you want me to go deeper into a dungeon," she said, sitting petulantly on the stone floor.

Tav waved one of the torches. "Both directions look flat," he said, "so you don't know that it's deeper. It could be shallower."

"I can't believe you want me to go further into a dungeon," Annria corrected herself.

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"It's not like anyone's coming to rescue us," Tav said. "The other choice is to stay here until either you starve or a wandering monster eats you." He paused. "By the way, I am going to go deeper—er, I mean further—so whichever it is you'll be doing it alone."

Annria groaned. "See, that's the problem with you delvers. Your violent lives drain you of compassion."

"I'm barely a delver!" Tav said. "This is the first real delve I've been on. It's hardly a violent life if I'm still, as you keep saying, 'a kid.' Make up your mind, am I a horrible monster or a useless child?"

Annria cracked a smile. "You're whichever helps me win the argument we're currently having." She heaved herself dramatically to her feet. "Lead on, stripling delver. Forward into the dark unknown."

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It wasn't that dark. At least, it wasn't to Tav's eyes, excessive in number though they might be. From the way Annria hesitated and stumbled, so unlike her self-assured stride on the surface, Tav suspected that she couldn't see nearly as well as he could. He raised the torches and tried to remember to point out missing flagstones, cracks to trip the unwary, and the occasional shriveled human corpse.

This dungeon was odd. For more reasons than the obvious, and the longer Tav followed the hallway the more convinced he became. What sort of dungeon consisted of a single hallway? There were no branching paths, no secret passages, just a single stretch of torchlit stone, punctuated occasionally by an attercope hatchling or two. No other monsters, no swarms of monsters, no rooms or features beyond the torches. Or treasure—that was bitter. None of the hatchlings yielded any monster cores, and though the first two might have been bad luck the next six also being empty shells seemed like another entry in Tav's growing list of oddities.

After the second fight, Tav had tried to make small talk with Annria, but she'd been too nervous to keep up much of a conversation. After the fourth fight she'd tried to make small talk with him, but they'd immediately been jumped by the fifth and then sixth fights. So they'd walked in silence, made it through two more attercope hatchlings without too much fuss, and then—finally!—they'd come across a stairwell.

The stairwell led down.

"I'm not going any deeper," Annria said. "You might be able to fight off these—these creatures on your own, but if they get past you, or if there's anything stronger, then I'm dead."

"I don't want to go any deeper either," Tav said. "In a stable dungeon like the PND—that's the Perrigen National Dungeon, I don't know if you call it something different in Karmere—the guideline is that a delver's safe when their level is ten times the depth. So for the first floor, a party of tenth-level delvers will be safe, anyone lower will have a fair fight, and anyone higher will start scaring off prey. The second floor is a fair fight from eleven to nineteen and safe at twenty, the third floor goes from twenty-one to thirty, and so on. Class evolutions are a big power spike, and they line up with dungeon difficulties almost perfectly.

"This," Tav continued, "is an unknown and unstable dungeon, so the level ranges might be inaccurate. The attercopes we've fought are weak and clumsy, even for hatchlings. I can handle them on my own. But we don't know how strong the monsters might get on the next floor, so we'd better be careful. If there's an alternative, we should take it."

"Yes, teacher," Annria said. "All your numbers mean nothing to me, but I agree with not going deeper."

"I know it's going to be a long walk," Tav said, "but if this direction has a staircase leading down, the other end of the hallway might lead—"

Tav paused. He'd gestured back the other way with one hand, and the torches lining the wall had flared up in response. The hallway extended back maybe two hundred feet behind them, then dead-ended in a stone wall.

There was a single torch placed in the center of the wall. As Tav watched, the sconce fell off the wall and clattered on the stone floor.

"Hey, Annria?" Tav said.

"It's bad news, isn't it," she said, not turning around. "Let me guess, a horde of slavering beasts waiting to devour us?"

"Oh, not that bad," Tav said. "It's just a wall. I think the dungeon wants us to go deeper."

The staircase seemed to move closer to them, as if the stones were subtly shifting.

"I think it wants us to hurry up," Tav said.

Annria glanced at the wall behind her, made a rude gesture, and walked toward the stairs. She slipped on a loose stone—had the stone been loose before, or had it twitched to the side just when she put her weight on it?—but Tav caught her. "I'll keep leading the way," he said. "You, uh, you keep an eye out behind us. Just in case."