Val sighed for the umpteenth time through her nose, detaching the buckles of her sheathed sword and sliding it off the left shoulder. It clunked onto the hardwood desk, as if it too wanted to get in on the buzz filling the expedition site.

She didn’t think the bout was that impressive, except everyone else seemed to believe otherwise. The Expedition Lead, the adventurers she’d only just met, and her squadmates brimming with excitement behind her could do with a round three.

“Hell to the yes, Val!” Caro hollered, showcasing Val’s exact thoughts. “That was so satisfying to watch. Like you have no idea.”

Sighing once again, Val turned to face her team and could only shake her head wryly. No one set up their sleeping bags, too busy smiling at her unpacking for the day. The CAU offered them a thirty-by-thirty tent, paired with a carpet soft enough that none of them wore their boots for a second longer than necessary.

Deflated beds marked the left side of the room—save for Ekon's, who mumbled things better left unsaid as he tussled with his own—leaving the other end free for them to huddle in open space and grin. She raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“What?” Jesal echoed, scoffing at her question. “Do we need to explain? I mean you just took down your rival.”

It was Val’s turn to scoff. “We’re not rivals.”

“Ex-best friends. Adventurer buddies. Dueling partners. Doesn’t matter, Val.” Jesal thumbed the zipped-up line that counted as a door. “If you checked the odds, almost no one had their cards on you winning, and less attempted to bet money. And you won.”

Caro nodded with scary vigour. “Effortlessly, might I add.”

“Now I don’t know about effortlessly,” Val mumbled.

Ekon groaned, dropping into his newly made bed. “Just take the compliment, Efron. A good fight’s a good fight.”

A small smile finally made its way up Val’s face. “Yeah?”

“Without a doubt,” Otis pitched in, further reinforced by Kylee’s minute bob of the head. The support looked like she had a comment to add, but Val would have to hear it later as the door unzipped itself.

In popped a head full of auburn hair, and calm, hazel eyes to match. “Val! Didn’t know you had it in ya!”

“Aeron, hey,” Val waved at the water Anchor, gesturing both him and Sil inside. “What brings you two here?”

“That was a wicked showing out there. Had to give my congrats in person,” he said, his lips curling upwards. “You stopped our hearts with that little sword thing you did at the end, there.”

Val clicked her tongue. “Yeah, well I was pissed off.”

“Valory Efron—pissed off. Never thought I’d see the day,” Aeron quipped, quickly greeting Caro with a side hug. “It’s as likely as getting Sil to admit she likes me.”

“Oh, shut it.”

The water Anchor winced at the quiet tone and steel-laced voice, causing Val to snigger behind a hand. The wind-lightning mage strode in, and Val stood still, at a loss as to why Sil blazed a path towards her. That was until she opened her arms and pulled Val close for an embrace. “Good job. If you hadn’t punched her teeth in—” she stepped back, her eyes ablaze “—I would’ve.”

“I mean technically you still can…” Caro said with a shrug. “I, for one, will be glad to see that tonight, if need be.”

“Stop instigating things,” Sil replied, not bothering to look back.

Caro shot the woman a salute. “Yes ma’am.”

That got a good laugh from everyone, and seamless banter like that passed for some time. The Anchor-Support pair took to the desk, while the rest of Hammer Squad got to setting up their beds. As nice as Val found it nice to cool down after the eventful night, her friends gathered in one tent chatting away, they were here on serious business.

It was Sil to remind them. “The real reason I’m here is to make sure your captains, Jes and Val, give you a proper explanation of what to expect going in.”

Silence fell at once, and she rewarded their attention with a brief nod. “You guys are going into your first expedition. This will be planned. There will be backup. However, you must always keep in mind that you are here because the government deemed it too dangerous for your peers. That doesn't make it any less dangerous for you, understand?”

A chorus of “yeah” and “understood” answered her. “Good,” she said. Her gaze cut to Val, then to her cousin. “Captains?”

“We treat this like every other dungeon,” Jesal began, standing up from the floor-level sleeping bag to take a spot in front of everyone. “We’re heads-up and we stay focused.”

Val joined him, her expression hard. “Some things we’ll be different though. For one, we kill every aether creature in sight. Every single one. And two, we don’t harvest their cores, their pelts—nothing.”

“We want to clear this dungeon as fast as possible, and we’re on a timer. So, some steps have been removed, including looting. Don’t worry,” Jesal added just as mouths started opening to object. “Our routes have been marked. Associates will gather what’s left behind for us.”

“In areas where we’re in our pods with Rick’s crew and Versetti’s squad—”

“Wait, we’re in Leah’s pod?” Caro hissed.

“—it’ll be split into three,” Val continued, turning a blind ear to the interjection. “If there are multiple pods, then it’ll be split by the present teams. A second force team of associates is always behind us, dealing with Bloom's Essence. We won’t have them with us to detoxify the air, so these masks will do it for us.”

Jesal hoisted the very same mask Whitten showed around in the Command Center. It harboured these clunky boxes on either side, a clear section where the eyes were supposed to go and a white cloth to cover the nose. “These remain on at all times except in cleared, stationed camps set up. There’s been an earth mage assigned to every pod to help ensure we can build a safe spot to rest, recoup, and regather. That also means we’re expected to carry our weight in terms of watch rotations.”

Groans rang out at the mere mention of surveillance shifts. “It’s a necessary evil,” Val said.

“It’s not even evil,” Jesal murmured under his breath. “Just plain necessary.”

“Wouldn’t the area already be cleared?” Caro asked. “We would’ve killed everything in the vicinity and we still have to stay up. For what, ghosts?”

Sil chuckled as she got up to her feet, patting both captains on her way to the exit. “I leave this for you to deal with. Aeron, you coming?”

“Yeah, right behind you.” He pushed off the desk he was leaning on, and ambled over to his teammate. The pair zipped the tent downwards and instead of stepping out, the pair took two steps backwards. Val turned their way, hoping to catch what made them do so.

“Umm…” Versetti stepped in, her gaze flitting about until it landed on her target. “Valory, could I talk to you outside?”

Caro outright laughed. “If I’d known a good slap was what you needed for a civilized conversation, I woulda done it myself.”

Versetti cut her a mean glare. “Bitch.”

“Asshole.”

“Loser.”

“Okay, okay,” Val spoke up, afraid the curse-off might snowball into something else altogether. “We can speak.”

“Great, let’s—” Versetti began.

“Here,” Val said. “We can speak here. Out with it.”

She blinked, looking around at the company present. “You sure?”

“We can leave if needed,” Sil offered, and Aeron underpinned the suggestion with a sad smile.

“No. I trust those here, so anything she needs to say can be said. Here.”

“Alright,” she said on an exhale, wringing her fingers. “I just want to say that I get that it’s a shitty situation for the both of us—I get that. You have to admit, though, that it was a win-win situation for your dad. You could afford a top-notch school! Your mom could get her treatment! Vexal prep couldn’t kick you out after Deduction Day because—”

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“Stop,” Val said, although to anybody else it sounded more like a whisper. She had her build-up. There was a spark, and it set it afire, leaving nothing except the hollow reminder that it wouldn’t bring him back.

Wouldn’t bring back either of them. She accepted it—dealt with it. Only she really could do without the constant reminders.

“Every one of his constant worries, gone in one expedition,” Versetti plowed on.

“Just stop. Please,” Val sighed. “He left a wife behind with three kids. He left his kids behind with no parents. He left his legacy behind, marred. He will never get to see any of his children graduate. He will never get to see his partner healed, never get to grow old, never get to do anything he could’ve done if he were here.

“My mom continues to get treatment—fine, I'll admit that’s something positive. In four years the funding runs out, and I was aware of that six years ago. So yeah, my school was paid off, but I’ve been working despite that, raising two brothers in spite of that because she’s bedridden. Has been since before the tragedy, and still is now.

“So don’t stand there and call my dad’s death a win-win. It wasn’t, and it won’t ever be,” Val said, her breathing even, her arms crossed.

“I… I didn’t know. I thought she—”

“Doesn’t matter what you thought. Didn’t give you the right to spread false rumours, and it didn’t give you the right to use me as your punching bag,” Val cut in. A weight she hadn’t realized existed lifted off her chest. It was… freeing. “Anything else?”

Versetti swallowed, rubbing at the back of her neck. “While I won’t apologize—”

“Fine by me,” Val huffed.

“—I do understand a bit better, though. I do.”

“I’m glad,” Val said, and she meant it. Feelings aside, the root of this was the rift, not Dad. The more people grasped the concept, the more people rendered the true story. And that was everything she could ask for. “Anything else?” she asked once more.

Versetti looked to be fighting the urge to respond, her mouth opening and closing shut on repeat. A gut feeling, however, told her it was worth saying. “What element was that back there? In the fight?”

Val canted her head to the side. “Uh… metal?”

“No no, not that,” she replied. “The thing you did at the end. Your eyes went white and it felt like… I don’t know, it felt like a command straight to the soul.”

“Leah, c’mon,” Caro shook her head. “You’re drinking on the job?”

“No.”

“Then what’s got you spouting all this nonsense?”

“Can’t you be quiet for once in your life?” Versetti hissed, her attention returning to Val. “I’m serious.”

“And I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Val answered.

“You don’t?” she asked, combing a hand through her light-brown hair. Free from its tight ponytail, it fell a little past her shoulders, halfway to being disheveled. Her eyes roamed the muscles on Val’s blank face and a calculating spark twinkled in her eyes before the brightest of smiles lit the room. “By the saints… You really don’t know.”

A command. Soul. Words. It slammed back to Val like a punch straight to the stomach. The Speartailed Scorpion’s sudden death after strung together a semi-coherent sentence. The drained Aetherial Vessel. The blackout. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Oh no. No no,” she chuckled, backing out of the tent. “I don’t get to be angry. At least let me have my fun.”

“Fun?” Sil asked.

“Valory knows just what I’m talking about. Or does she?” Versetti gave a playful shrug. “I guess she has to figure that out, and that is so not my problem. Toodles!”

Val watched as one chapter of her life closed, and another old one reopened. Her lingering inkling was right. Something was off about her awakening. Something did happen during that disaster in the Darkshaft. And the key to solving the mind-numbing headache lay in the last set of hands Val would ever choose. Just great.

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

“Chained Lances!”

Fifty of Val’s aether strands departed her as two rods, a meter in length, popped into existence. Without delay, they rushed across the underground cavern to impale two earth elementals. One rod struck through and through, fixing it to the ground. The other embedded into what appeared as the torso of the earthen being—it was hard to tell when it was a humanoid conglomerate of rocks—and Val took advantage, reeling it in.

It left haphazard lines in the dirt as it tried to jerk away. Val met it halfway, spearing her saber right past its core, highlighted in incandescent blue thanks to Vague View. At once, the rocks fell apart, no longer part of a higher being. Pushing the remainder of her aether pool into energy enhancement, she took off after the leftover elemental.

It had just begun to realize that separating and reforming itself proved a suitable solution to its predicament when Val’s weapon came down on its aether-based heart. It never got the chance to reassemble. Taking the liberty to look around, she chanced upon her frontline teammates finishing up on their end.

Ekon went head to head with a plant-aligned snake that Val wanted no business with. Even sans magic, it rivaled—and bested—Val’s speed. Add in the Sling Viper’s ability to conjure two-inch-tall stalks to catapult itself around its victim and its fatal venom, and you have a match of the ages. The CAU regarded it as a Tier 2 two-starred creature solely because it could drop any Novice within a mile.

The dark Hunter was a blur of movements, the snake a whirlwind of attacks. Ekon ducked, sidestepped, and leapt over attacks from the, at times, airborne viper. It’d made a field of short stalks in no time—utilizing the aether pool indicative of its Tier—and caged Ekon in. His priority couldn’t be on escaping, as the creature would pounce on the opening unapologetically.

The end, as always, came abruptly. Ekon must’ve memorized the snake’s pattern in the two minutes the speedsters have been going at it. After all, he snatched it out of the air, the Sling Viper two centimeters away from sinking its fangs into his neck. Without hesitation, he smashed it into the ground and slashed his dagger beneath its head.

“Hot damn!” Caro spun, her greataxe lopping her final earth elemental in half. In the same second, she came around and punctured its core with the end of her weapon. The elemental crumbled, awarding her the perfect perspective of Ekon’s maneuver. “Smooth moves there, Gale!”

“Ekon or Nightingale.” The Hunter swiped his dagger on the ground to rid it of the bluish blood and rose to his feet. “Choose one and stick with it.”

“What was that?” The striker cupped a hand over her ear. “Couldn’t quite hear your grumbles all the way over here.”

She couldn’t be more than fifty meters away, Val thought. “We still have unresolved business guys. Focus.”

Caro grinned unabashedly. “My bad, cap!”

“Co-captain,” Ekon muttered.

“Shut up,” Caro fired back. “Same difference.”

“So you heard that, did you?”

Val rubbed at her forehead. “Guys!”

“Sorry,” the pair answered.

Jogging past her teammates, she doled out one of her signature, sisterly stares for them each. “Let’s go.”

An echo of “Understood” and “Gotcha” told her the rest of the vanguard followed her deeper into the underground pathway. Half a minute later, the cavern welcomed them into an area infested with a variety of amphibians out of a horror movie. The force of aether creatures seemed to focus their energy on something in the middle, and if their plan worked… The rest of Hammer Squad was there.

“Um, they’re okay, right?” Caro asked, her knuckles white as she clenched the long shaft of her weapon.

“They have Otis and his familiar,” Ekon said.

“Harken,” Caro filled in.

“Sure. In any case,” he said, rolling his blue eyes, “they should be fine.” But he raked a hand through his tight curls, and Val had learned that this particular tick conveyed some type of stress.

“Only one way to find out.” Val detached a cylindrical flare off her belt, tilted it to the high ceiling of the underground cavern, and set it alight. She had to careen her head an extra degree backwards to see it fly through her mask. Accompanied by a loud blast, a red light shot out, a string of smoke following it.

Fifty weird-shaped heads turned to them, and an odd amount of eyes honed in on the trio.

Caro gave an awkward chuckle. “Are we gonna be okay?”

Ekon grunted for an answer, re-equipping his weapons and crouching low. Val raised a hand, a sign to stand down. “Just wait.”

“Wait?” Caro hissed. “I don’t do waiting.”

“I know that—very well, in fact.” Val raised three fingers, putting one down every second. In three, two, one...

“Pulse.”

A whisper passed them by, typical of the tri-bound Support. When the ring of air reached them, it was no more than a soft breeze to wave off any lingering smells from the previous fight. For the fifty aether creatures hounding Kylee, Otis and Jesal, however… It appeared as if a sharp knife sliced through the mob simultaneously.

They fell to the ground in halves, unmoving and certifiably deceased, leaving a clear view of the white jade shields Otis had up. They, too, disintegrated as the Bulwark recalled the spell, and the backline came into view, unscathed and unharmed.

“Holy shit,” Caro breathed. “That girl is a cheat code.”

“She’s a Support. It’s what she’s supposed to do,” Ekon said into the brief quiet. “Plus, we lured away the aether creatures that wouldn’t be susceptible to the attack, just as planned.”

“Can you just, I don’t know, be quiet? Maybe melt into the background?” Caro shoved a hand into the Hunter’s face as she moved towards the remainder of the squad. “Sometimes I miss having Bo around. You never even know the guy’s there.”

The sound of shuffling pulled everyone to a stop. In an instant, holstered weapons were drawn and readied for an unidentified threat. Val’s eyes flickered to an anomaly in the air, a spot where the proportions of everything seemed a tad off. The outline of a form grew clearer before the illusion spell fell away and revealed Bo?

“Well, what do you know!” Caro laughed. “I guess he missed us too.”

No… Val shook her head. Caro was right—you didn’t know when and where Bo could be. His expertise ensured that. Detecting him well before he wanted them to was very, very worrying. She glanced at his clothing, bloodied and stained with dried sweat. He felt off.

Usually nothing so much as scratched him, and that fact included Sil, Aeron and Rick. Speaking of which—where were they? Bo gave an answer the next second, though it wasn’t one she ever wanted to hear.

“We need help.”