Kyle sighed as he lifted his fire axe. Another notch bit into its edge where there had not been one before. A thicket of chips and scratches gleamed on its surface. He rarely used either of its enchantments, but two months of regular use had worn the weapon down.

He had bought other magic items. Sensible ones. None of those one-pump-chump items his classmates fawned over. Growing boots. Durable gloves. A belt that boosted constitution. A magical rope that could do all kinds of stuff. Night vision goggles. Yet, for all the coin they had cost him, a simple shield and whistle would have served him better now.

He drenched himself in water, slipped his goggles on, pulled his hood up, and jogged on the spot.

Sarah’s amused voice called past the buzzing lasers. “What are you doing?”

Her appearance surprised him, but he continued on with dogged determination. “Charging up an item. Unless you have some way of turning these off?” Sparks danced in the air as his Broach of the Ember Beetle ate its fill. It would only offer him meager protection against heat, but every little bit helped.

“The marble slots are closer to your end.”

“I see them.” They were about a third of the way in, nestled in a circular indentation. The grooves along which the lasers rotated extended out from there like a city map.

They had filled the slots earlier and, when nothing had happened, pried the marbles back out. Of course. Why waste money?

Kyle rolled four new marbles in the palm of his glove and took position.

Distantly, Sarah frowned. “Wait, I bet one of the alchemists has some glue or—”

And how long would that take? Kyle didn’t listen. He held his fire-resistant axe flat against the side of his head and sprinted. Straight ahead. He was a rogue, not an [Acrobat].

With all his protections, it felt like walking from a patch of shade into the midsummer sun. At first. Then, the smell of burning wool snaked up his nose. His armor desiccated. Part of the fabric near his neck burst into flame.

He hit the wall flat, slapped the fire with enough force to sting his skin, and huddled behind his axe as he shoved the marbles in. The first stopped the rotation, allowing that ray cutting a line across his back to really dig in. The second made the lasers flicker. The third dropped them in a cascade, and the fourth all at once.

“You’re on fire!” Sarah called, but with humor. Kyle sagged and tore his goggles off. He felt like a sunburnt zebra. He doubted he’d even know if he were on fire.

He did feel a trickle of life flowing from his hand to heal minor blisters and cursed. His skin would shed again because of this stunt, wouldn’t it? That was annoying, but it was the sight of the blackened spot on his belt, when he checked his back, that made his heart ache.

Climbing shirts were naturally fire-resistant—black lines crossed his like cigar burns now—but that final ray had drilled straight through and nicked the hem of his pants. He could regenerate. Most of his equipment couldn’t. It had been so long since Kyle had owned anything of value, he had to remind himself of that.

“Where are the others?” Sarah asked. Her eyes flickered left and right as she walked down the hallway. She held a light buckler at the ready near her throat.

“A wall sealed the fissle room off,” Kyle explained without worry as he strode on. “They’re working on it. Where’s Cathy?”

“She’s, uh, with the others. She’s acting weird— Hey, do you know a Delilah?”

“Who?” Kyle frowned. What did he care about names? “Hey, can I borrow your whistle for a moment?”

“You didn’t bring one …?” She hesitated but handed hers over with a shrug. “Your funeral.”

Kyle smiled. He liked that. She didn’t argue; she was willing to watch him get into trouble. And yet, he hesitated as he considered the brass piece. Some part of him balked at the idea of begging strangers for help, but what option did he have? What was more important to him? He put the mouthpiece to his lips and blew.

“Why are you whistling?” Andrew asked. Kyle only remembered his name because Micah liked to complain sometimes. He was supposed to be ‘reasonable’—Micah’s words, not his—which made it all the more frustrating when he stuck by his asshole friend, Forester.

Again, allegedly. Micah wasn’t the best judge of character. He had put up with Ryan and Kyle himself for the longest time after all. Kyle was curious to see what he considered a true asshole to be like.

A curved axe swung from the ceiling. Kyle ducked left, Sarah right, and Andrew and the guy standing next to him simply watched from where they stood at the end of its arc. “Why are you standing around with your dicks in your hand?” Kyle snapped back.

“Good metal.” Andrew nodded at the blade as it disappeared back inside the ceiling. “We have to wait until we find that familiar anyway, right? Might as well earn some money on the way out so this wasn’t a total bust.”

“If I use a Skill, I can probably break the shaft,” the second guy said, lifting a bow. Ajay, Kyle thought his name was. “Can you slow its fall?”

Behind them, two more workshoppers held out jars to collect acid that dripped from a hatch in the ceiling. They seemed unconcerned that the hatch might open up and flood them in the stuff.

Another workshopper sat crouched next to the gap between cubes. She shone a magic light down with one hand and lowered a fishing line with a hook into the dark. Stone spears thrust into the air centimeters from her hand.

So much for reason.

These weren’t the people he needed to speak to. Kyle inched past the acid, avoided the spears, and killed a green lizard that jumped out a hole in the ground. It burst into red smoke despite its color, and he scooped the crystal up with his foot. Also red. Huh. Fire-breathing lizard?

He followed the glimpse of Cathy he’d seen as she hounded after a boy, arguing at him.

“ROWAN!” he bellowed, interrupting the chatterbox. A ripple of, “Rowans?” went up as people remembered to ‘search’ for the familiar. Some barely raised their voices. Kyle couldn’t really fault them. Looking for a familiar when money was dripping from the ceiling?

He turned the corner and froze at the edge of a massive pit trap. Half of the branching tunnel fell away into a bed of spikes. A few crystals gleamed near a bundle of fabric and a lizard skeleton lay impaled at the bottom.

Cathy held one of the freshmen back from climbing into the pit. “You can’t climb down there!”

Hell, Kyle itched to climb down there and ruffle through that fabric himself, but he had already made his decision. And the boy wasn’t out for loot.

“I am not leaving a defenseless animal behind!”

“It’s a familiar! It’s not defenseless! And I told you, we’re supposed to be looking for Delilah!”

“I’m telling you, I don’t know who that is!” The boy stretched his head over the pit and bellowed, “ROWAN!”

Kyle got an odd brother-and-sister vibe from the two. They had similar shades of light brown hair, too, but he wasn’t sure. Mostly because he didn’t know if Cathy understood the concept of personal space.

“Cathy,” he said and grabbed the boy by his upper arm to pull him back. “We have to leave.”

“I know,” she said and swept an anxious glance around the crossroads. “I know, but we can’t just leave Delilah behind, and the others won’t listen to me, and—”

“Who?”

She waved her arms at him like a wordless exclamation mark, then cupped her hands to her mouth and countered the boy’s cry down one of the tunnels, “Delilah!”

“If someone went missing during the search, that’s all the more reason to regroup. Search parties have to be organized or they’ll only endanger themselves. This”—Kyle gestured—”is a mess.”

“No. No, that’s the issue. We were searching for Delilah in the first place and then— Do you seriously not remember her?”

Sarah was right. Cathy was acting strange. He remembered a small black bat with glossy feathers that had been with them. Rowan. He had sat perched on the loot cart, collected crystals, and scouted ahead. A Waxwing. An odd monster to see around these parts since they were more common in Anevos, but that had only made it stand out more.

Who was Delilah? He wanted to snap at Cathy to get it together but if someone was missing … He groaned. “What does she look like?”

She chewed on her lip and eyed him with an uncertain glimmer of hope. “Black hair down to her shoulders? Dark gambeson. Pale— Well, olive skin but she doesn’t get a lot of sun. Brown eyes. Shorter than me. Maybe under one seventy?” She mimed measuring her height with a flat hand. “You must know her. She wears black all the time and likes to sit on tables!”

Kyle thought he remembered a figure like that sitting near Micah once or twice but … “Is Rowan her familiar?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“Well, where is— Rowan then?”

“What?”

“We have to find him, right?”

“No! I’m telling you, we have to find Delilah!”

Delilah. Kyle tried to picture her face, to remember her being in their school, but the more he tried, the more his thoughts slipped off her name like wet soap and landed on the Waxwing instead.

Finally, his eyebrows snapped into a scowl and Kyle searched the halls with a deep confusion. “What the fuck is going on?”

Cathy didn’t know, but it was only one more reason to leave. Thankfully, she joined him in signaling an emergency retreat. Kyle recognized the signals she used from school, but he could only replicate the most basic ones himself. Of course, a goodie-two-shoes like her would know the standardized Guild whistle system by heart.

Curiously, whenever she whistled, whether she had finished a sequence or not, the meaning of the sound seemed to distill itself like a thought in his mind.

SOS.

Retreat.

Kyle liked that about as much as everything else going on around here. The corpse, the singing, the traps, the missing guh— gir— Familiar, dammit. It felt like he wasn’t even in control of his mind and …

And the singing.

Anxious, bubbly Cathy went still. Her hand was on her wand and she searched the crossroads with a vigilant gaze. Kyle had gripped one of his knives without realizing it.

The singing had stopped.

“Aww,” a crackling, hollow voice whispered in their ears. “Leave you already? That does empty fun. Stay. For the adventure.”

The clatter of metal hitting stone echoed in the silence. It was followed by a curse and a squeaking hinge. Something splattered on the ground, and they rushed back toward the commotion. His stomach twisted at the thought of what he might see, but it wasn’t a bath of acid that had fallen on the alchemists. It was slimes.

They squelched and hissed where they bounced, leaving circular burns on the stone.

The alchemist with the fishing line lay on the ground between the upward-thrusting spears, clutching a bleeding leg with one hand and her bleeding face with the other. Sarah stood over her, fighting off slimes with a buckler and a sizzling glove.

One of the two alchemists fumbled to put a lid on a jar. The other was with Ajay and Andrew on the other side of the attack.

Cathy whistled again, a sharp trill—Fight!—and whipped her wand forward as Kyle charged. White arrows of energy curved around him like heralds of his charge and tore thorned tunnels through the gelatinous blobs.

He had sprinted halfway through the spears when a low mechanical shuffle warned him of an incoming thrust, dropped, and skidded past the wounded girl into the fray.

The air around him ignited like the faint outline of a shell. Kyle tore through slimes, punching and kicking to fight his way into the center where he could do the most harm and draw their attention. He took hits, but he knew from experience that he could heal from deep burns. As much as he despised it, he trusted in his [Lifeline] to bring him back from the brink.

But this? This was simple. Seven fighters against a small waterfall of slimes. Even in this limited space, with the spear trap at his back, the swinging blade ahead, and a curtain of acid to dance around, they’d win in moments.

Then an arrow planted itself in his shoulder. Kyle stumbled. His eyes fixed on the brown line that jutted out just below his jaw. The moment seemed to stretch on for seconds until someone cried out, “Ajay!”

He found the archer’s wide eyes staring at him as the pain began to register. He’d shot him? By accident? Fucking what!?

Kyle wanted to hurl every insult he knew at him, and wanted to hurl knives at him besides, but all that came out was a groan as he gripped the wooden shaft.

This one was going to hurt. He’d hit bone.

“That wasn’t—” Ajay started, but the continued assault forced him to dodge to the side of the swinging axe.

The slimes didn’t let up against Kyle either. One latched onto his leg, another onto his limp hand with a soft spray of acid. He flinched away from it like oil from a pan and hurried. His gambeson had only shielded him enough to keep the shaft out, but the arrowhead was in there. He grit his teeth and pulled through the pain to wrench it out.

The moment the arrowhead was free, he slammed his freed arm against the wall with a splatter of goop and blood. A noxious smell wafted up from below as the other slime ate through his leg guard. Even as the pain fled and his bleeding shoulder healed, a torn hot rage began to replace the scream he kept in his throat, and with a roar, he cleaved the slime off him.

“Kyle!” Sarah fought her way toward him and said, “Don’t strain yourself!”

A hollow voice whispered in his ear, “Kwa. That must hurt have.”

Kyle hurled a throwing knife at the gap between cubes. He thought he’d seen a shadow flit through the darkness. He didn’t have a Skill but he fought with knives. He was good.

The knife tinked off the stone, spun with some force, and nearly hit the wounded girl on the ground. She ducked at the last second and searched the battle with one eye as if she was unsure where the attack had come from.

Sarah suddenly slowed, shooting him a nasty look in her stead, and Cathy admonished them with an exasperated tone, “Avoid—friendly—fire!”

Kyle wiped the sweat from his brow. His shoulder? Had the muscles and tendons and shit not healed quickly enough? The bone definitely smarted … He’d missed.

Andrew handed Ajay a bottle filled with noxious fluid that shifted colors like smoke. “Hit this time,” he impressed on him. Ajay nodded, opened the bottle, and tossed it. At them.

Kyle threw another knife, a sudden suspicion blooming in his chest, and the blade flew true. It hit the glass, sending the bottle careening into the wall where it shattered, and a dense green raincloud poured free.

“No!” Andrew cried. “Cathy, shape it! It’s a—”

“I know!” the girl on the ground, not Cathy, said and whipped her hand around. The cloud flowed to them and where it met their wounds, they began to glow. She lowered the hand from her face. Transparent flesh had replaced a bloody hole in her cheek. A glimpse of her gritted teeth showed through it, and real blood flowed through ghostly vessels.

Conjured flesh? Some kind of stopgap healing potion? It had looked like poison, but now it seemed more like necromancy.

“Kyle, for your shoulder!” Ajay called. The note of guilt that underlay his urgency made Kyle’s head spin … They weren’t trying to kill them?

He stopped fantasizing about kicking his teeth in and flipped him off with his left hand to show he could move it just fine, lying, “I have an item!”

Sarah’s expression only darkened at his words. She wasn’t trying to fight her way to him anymore. Kyle ignored the feelings that swirled up when she looked away, took a step back, and pulled his goggles down.

Distant metal contraptions moved in the gap. Pulleys and pumps. Faint sparks of magic. Rattling pipes.

Someone was messing with them. Listening in. Mocking him. Where were they watching from?

Straight ahead, past the three girls, Mason and his search party returned. They ran through pistons and guillotines and yelled something about a horde of monsters headed their way. That felt familiar.

Cathy wanted to retreat, but Sarah told her about the wall. They didn’t know if Micah had succeeded in lowering it yet, so the two alchemists who had collected the acid volunteered to go check.

As they finished off the last remaining slimes, Andrew argued the logic of fighting with a wall to their backs. The wounded girl popped a pill in her mouth, and Ajay checked on her wounds in passing but tried to get Kyle’s attention, too.

Kyle wandered off.

The spears thrust periodically in front of him and behind him. He picked his throwing knife off the floor. Had there been the slightest quiver to its blade before he’d reached for it?

He wasn’t a musician, but he tried to listen to the mechanical shuffle of the spears. Was there any delay to their thrusts? Any variance in their angle of attack?

Necromancy. Like the gears in the darkness, his brain churned, and that potion had given him an idea. He thought of the figure that hadn’t been a corpse. Micah had drunk a detect life potion and hadn’t been able to sense a thing. Mason had drunk another.

Green lizards, metallic insects, and moldy spiders crawled out of the stonework to nip at the returning group’s heels as they fled. Kyle loosened and tightened his grip on his axe as if itching for a fight.

They were sweating and panting for air, but they dodged pistons and hopped over fallen blades to keep going. Would they sweep the others up in their momentum? Would they all flee to the cart, herded by some unseen force?

Kyle needed the battle to happen here and now, and he needed to talk to Mason. He couldn’t do both on his own. So, he had to ask for help.

“What the fuck are you running away for?” he snarled. “You have bombs and a choke point. Is Micah seriously the only one of you who isn’t a coward!?”

The group … barely reacted. Only a handful showed any sign that they had heard his words, and they looked more likely to turn on him than the monsters. But that wasn’t all of them.

Mason stopped at the intersection. He took in the spears behind Kyle, the pit trap that was resetting itself to his left, and ducked right, toward the veranda. He slipped off his pack and retrieved a small clay apple holstered in twine and—

He had a bomb. Kyle had been exaggerating. He’d meant the flasks and paintballs they liked to use. “Put that away,” he snapped, “do you want to blow us all up? I want a fight, too.”

Besides, they might need it if there was a Trapper about—though he doubted it. In all of the rumors he had heard, the Brood Guardians had been described as intelligent but not sentient, and they had not once sought to communicate with climbers. Let alone mock them. This was something else.

Mason frowned as he caught his breath. The monsters were surfacing. Not all of his group had made it out yet, but he cast a wistful glance at the ball in his hands like he wanted to use it. Reluctantly, he stashed it away and conjured an orb of acid instead.

Cathy must have seen them because she whistled a command that distilled itself into the word, “Hold,” in his mind, echoing with hidden layers of meaning—prepare. Wait. Ready yourself. Get out of the fucking way!

That last one made Kyle blink. Cathy didn’t cuss. Was it his mind that translated the spell?

What a relief.

Surprisingly, their classmates obeyed. A handful had rushed through the spear trap and nearly gotten themselves impaled. For the rest, there wasn’t enough time and they ducked into the tunnel next to Mason and Kyle. That cleared the field. And the group he had left behind opened fire.

Mason threw his orb. Kyle watched arrows, spells, paintballs, and vials fly by and felt the quakes as they erupted into elemental chaos.

The monster horde spilled into the intersection, seeking shelter and finding his axe. Kyle didn’t charge into the fray, though, even as the volleys let up. He nearly forgot his goal when one of the lizards lit up from the inside like someone had shoved a [Light] spell down its throat. Twin cones spilled from its eyes and when it blinked at him, Kyle felt a sudden heat in his stomach and smelled smoke. He glanced at a scorch mark on his gambeson. Not fire breath—

They could shoot lasers!?

Another orb of acid hit the lizard and melted into a gelatinous blob that burst into smoke.

Kyle shoved down his brief surge of childish excitement and remembered his goal: blood. He kept an eye out for it through the fighting and colored clouds. A streak on a wall led him to the mangled corpse of a lizard. He ducked into the fray and dragged it out in a running crouch.

The second one came to him, a wounded metallic beetle that trailed a clear fluid, and Kyle slew it with his gratitude.

Last but not least, he grabbed Mason. “What—” the boy startled as he was pulled out of the fray.

Kyle shoved the lizard in his face. “Your life potion; you can sense blood, right?”

He looked disgruntled by the sudden question but answered, “Yeah, uh, it’s fading—”

Then they had to hurry. “C’mere,” Kyle insisted and dragged him over the gap where the cube of the intersection ended and the cube leading toward the veranda met. “Tell me if you feel any—”

He started to explain but cut himself off. That voice had eavesdropped on their conversation earlier. Were they listening in now, even over the fighting?

Kyle held a finger up to convey patience and gutted the lizard. Steaming blood and viscera unspooled from its thick skin. He gripped it by one leg and its tail and swung it around. Slowly at first. Then in a violent spin like a wet towel over the gap so it shot sprays off into the dark.

“What are you doing!?” Mason asked.

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Kyle finished what he had been about to say, “Do you feel any gaps? Any bodies? Silhou— shit!” The lizard’s tail tore off. The bloody corpse slipped out of his glove and windmilled into the gap. Kyle scrambled for the beetle corpse and urged Mason on, “And!?”

If this even worked—and that was a huge ‘if’—they would only have a brief window of opportunity to retaliate. Kyle wasn’t even certain he could fight back at all.

After all, slimes existed in Hadica’s Tower now. Those came from Lighthouse. Well, Trest existed, too, so why not Ghosts?

Mason gave him a repulsed, judgmental stare and glanced back at the fighting like he wanted to brush him off to go help the others. Kyle could see the tilt to his feet and shoulders. Then he stopped and frowned at the ceiling. At something only he could see.

“Uh, there are. I feel two …?” He pointed. “One is over there and one—” He frowned and spun ninety degrees to point at the veranda instead.

There, a small black bat with feathers scurried along the wall toward them.

“Rowan!” Mason called.

And beneath his voice, there was a whisper so quiet, Kyle didn’t know if he had imagined it, “Found you.”

A deafening metal crash echoed above them. Something rattled and groaned, and a rapid series of strikes sang like swordplay.

A knife in hand, Kyle peered up through the darkness to search the area Mason had pointed at. Something moved up there. It rapidly approached and he aimed—

A gust of wind slammed into him like a waterfall. It drove him back until he met the wall and vanished as it cleaved around a piece of blockage. To his left and right, the cloven streams of wind picked up strength as their source drew nearer. They kicked up dust and the colored vapors of the fallen unmade.

Then, like shaking a raccoon out of a bin, the wind blasted a body out from the ceiling.

It was covered in green and silver feathers and wore dark clothes. It sprawled toward him. Kyle saw a tan beak. An almost humanoid face. Some sort of bird woman?

Behind her, with one arm on the wall, a figure of shadows squeezed itself out of the dark like a nightmare stepping into the sun. It pointed a wand and shouted over its own wind spell in a voice like a drowned child at the bottom of a well, “Kyle, catch her!”

Huh?

The bird woman tumbled to her feet, gnarled things of thick skin and talons. With clawed fingers, she plucked one of her silver feathers—

No, it was a knife. One of dozens. They were small and shaped like leaves, and they hung from straps all over her like a second plume. She leaped at him.

Kyle jerked. He threw the beetle at her, dropped, and rolled toward the fray. A patter of impacts trailed up from his armpit over his chest. A sharp pain blossomed, and the side of his neck felt warm and slick as his blood spilled free.

She’d cast a hand toward him and five of the knives hanging from her arm—not even the one she held—had shot off to impale him as if directed by an unseen force.

The green woman fled, and the nightmare chased her across the hallway. With avian limbs, she skittered along the wall. The nightmare tried to cast her down, but her wind lost too much of its power across the distance and it dropped the spell.

Kyle brandished a knife in either hand. And hesitated. Two enemies. He could hit them both at the same time but for some reason …

The nightmare was just under a meter seventy tall. “De— Deli— Rowan’s witch!?”

It glanced back at him and said, “[Veil of the Eclipse].”

Mason had nearly reached Rowan. And who the fuck was Rowan? Since when did Delilah have a familiar at all? Kyle felt his thoughts snap into a straight line again, where before they had felt bent, and hurled both knives at their enemy.

She waved a hand behind her back. Like scooping salt off a table, the knives curved in the air and tumbled off the wall.

Delilah called out a warning and hurled a yellow orb. The woman leaped with a delighted cackle, and the orb splashed off the wall and froze into a wave of material like a beehive. She cast a hand out toward Mason and knives shot from her armor.

The first struck him in the chest and he scrambled back in alarm. The second, third, and fourth pattered off giant black wings that swept down in front of him.

Rowan alighted on Mason’s helmet as its wings shrunk again and gave a defiant cry.

Still, the bird woman ran. Only when she had made it past all four of them and put enough distance between herself and the alchemist now holding an orb of acid did she stop.

The light and breeze swept in from the veranda behind her. The distant vista was a blinding blur. She chuckled and bowed. She wasn’t even out of breath.

“Magic. How have you do that? We could have so much fun had. A real adventure. A mystery game of hunter and animal, you and me. Yet you have it all light before it was done.”

It was her voice that had sung to them. That hollow cracking quality was gone. She didn’t speak with an accent, and her grammar was atrocious, but … she still sounded off. It was obvious she wasn’t enunciating her words with lips or teeth, but they sounded perfect. A flexible mimicry of individual words.

“And you,” she addressed Kyle behind her, “do you have a teeny-tiny glass of healing I cannot see? Why do you not bleed out on the floor? Where is your dramatic timing?” She sounded like she was trying to be funny, though there was a hint of honest frustration in her tone.

Rivulets of blood ran down his shoulder and glove. Sticky patches of it coagulated and dried on his skin. Kyle had a bit of healing left in him, but he supposed any of his classmates would have distracted Delilah and Mason if they were dying right now.

“I’m fine,” he assured the two when they shot him a concerned look. His voice sounded flat to him.

Delilah gave him a wry smile. “Thanks for the assist. With the blood?” Her face wrinkled into something like concern as she turned, but when she ran a gloved thumb across her temple, Kyle recognized it to be disgust. He spotted the line of lizard blood that ran up the side of her face and hair. Her helmet and her pack were gone. Had she taken them off to squeeze between the cubes?

“Who are you? Are you a— a spirit? A new type of enemy in the Tower?” Delilah stepped forward and a spark of desperate curiosity filled her words. “Why are you attacking us?”

“What odd questions. Who am I? Who are you? Why are you doing here? Why else but to search for adventure—!”

“Money,” Kyle corrected her before she could even finish.

“Ingredients,” Mason added, sounding unsure. He glanced back at the remainder of the battle raging on behind them. The orb of acid hovering over his hand faded away.

Kyle would have checked on the battle himself, but he didn’t want to take his eyes off the enemy. Surely, some of their classmates had to be watching them right now, too.

The woman wagged a clawed finger. “Money is something which you work for. Ingredients are— I know not. At home, we had no alchemy as you do. Medicine is something which you nurture on farms and inside factories, and laboratories, and hospitals.”

“Home?” Delilah took another step forward with an interested smile. Kyle didn’t know how he had ever seen her as a nightmare creature. She looked like the same, dark and quirky girl he would see around school all the time. “You’re new to the Tower, right? Can you tell us where you came from? Or— No. Rather, can you tell us your name first?”

The bird woman waved a hand. Kyle tensed, ready to dodge any knives cast their way, but it appeared to be a dismissive gesture. “Tuhrie, but that is not where over I speak wanted. What you said before. This Tower is what this is about. It is about adventure, is it not? About … experience. You should it seek. I wanted it to you give, but you broke it.”

Kyle was beginning to catch onto her twisted grammar and took a moment to parse her insane ramblings.

“You found me. Now what?” Tuhrie said. She cocked her head in the way birds did. It pushed her cheeks up. Her shadowed eyes, facing away from the light of the veranda, shrunk to almond shapes behind her delicate plume and glimmered with amusement.

He was aware of the open air behind her. He was aware of the curtain of feathers that swept out below her arms whenever she moved. She had wings. He didn’t care.

“That depends on you,” Kyle said. “If you are a monster or a person, on how much trouble you insist on giving us. If you are a person, I am going to break your shoulder. If you are a monster or you attack us … you die.”

Delilah glanced back at him, but she didn’t contradict him. There was sadness in her posture as she shifted her wand. “Or you could agree to speak with us? I would love to have a conversation. You could lay down your arms and let my classmates go. I would stay.”

Idiots, the lot of them, about anything that caught their interest. Delilah, Micah, and all of the other workshoppers behind him.

Mason showed a little wisdom. “She’s the one who has been resetting the traps?” he said as if to confirm. “I don’t know if we should trust her …”

Delilah had also been the first to notice, and then to drive out, Tuhrie from her hiding place. She showed promise. Kyle was still glad he could be here to be the sensible one. He began to march forward to cover them.

The bird woman’s head tilted this way and that. She sounded as sad as Delilah when she parted her beak to reply, “That sounds itself not very exciting. Should you kill me, I would not stay dead for long. And a conversation …?”

“You wouldn’t stay dead?” Delilah asked.

“‘Tuhrie, where did you go?’” Her voice suddenly changed, becoming a mimicry of a woman who did not sound as deranged as she, and Tuhrie began to pace left and right as her expression twisted. “‘You need to stay where I can find you.’ ‘Tuhrie, you need to go to your lessons.’ ‘Tuhrie, you should eat your meal— go to the doctor— stay inside— come to bed.’ Like I am a cracked child! Yes, I believe I have had enough of conversations for this year.”

As she ranted, her voice shifted back to her own, but the impish amusement had fled and been replaced by frustration.

“‘A whole new world. Is that not exciting? We can rebuild. Start a new life. Earn these levels She told us about.’ Ah, but we cannot leave yet.” Her beak twitched up left and right. “We have to wait for the outpost to be ready. Well, I don’t want to wait anymore!”

The pistons and spears shuffled behind them. The last monsters cried as they died. But there was a silence after her outburst. Kyle realized the battle had finished, and the only sounds that came from his classmates were the scuffles of their boots and heaving breaths.

They watched. They had heard.

Even Delilah had opened her mouth to try to calm her down, then faltered.

Tuhrie … did she have levels? Had the Dwarf saved a new people and brought them here?

Kyle shook himself, puffing out his chest, and filling his voice with boisterous heat to drive the shivers from his bones. “Tough luck,” he said, “you dumb cow.” He didn’t know if this was a trick or not. All he knew was that this crazy woman was the reason why his shoulder was throbbing enough to make him sway where he stood. His lesser wounds had healed, but the memory of the pain, of tearing an arrow out of his shoulder, having his neck cut open, would remain for nights to come. “You shot me with an arrow.”

Delilah startled. “You what?”

Tuhrie cackled and this time, when she looked at them, Kyle noticed the deep green color of her irises. Had they been green before?

Her voice flowed smoothly, “I did, didn’t I? You asked me why I’m doing this. Because I wanted to see if it would be as much fun as I had imagined. And it was! Almost. But, I don’t think I got enough of a taste of this adventure to be sure.”

“Don’t do this,” Delilah warned her. “Please. Do you honestly believe you can survive twenty angry alchemists fumigating an entire floor? We have you outnumbered.”

“I wouldn’t say— Well, no. Yes. Yes, you do have me outnumbered. There is one detail you are forgetting, however. I do not blame you. I used to forget things, too. It’s simply this: I am not alone. And neither are you.” She pointed.

The three of them twitched but didn’t fall for the trick. She didn’t attack them, though. The first gasps and sudden shuffle from the group behind them made Kyle turn sideways to cast a glance back.

The corpse stood there in the middle of the intersection, behind the group of eleven students that had gathered to watch. It was clothed from head to toe like a climber. Helmet and coif, gloves and boots. They hadn’t been able to see what lay below the hood before. It faced them now.

There was nothing underneath that hood. A void like the outline of a person cut from the night sky. Its eyes were outlined by an absence of stardust, except for two pinpricks of faint green light in their centers like distant, emerald stars.

“Pretender,” Tuhrie called in a light tone and it felt similar to Cathy’s spell, layers of meaning hidden behind a word. Except this time, Kyle was sure it was not his brain unraveling the information. The meanings pressed themselves into his mind. “Grant me love and play the part of a Garden Great Ape, please?”

The spirit—and Kyle knew it was a spirit—did not move from its spot, but it exploded into motion all the same. Its form twisted and bulged like a series of bombs had gone off within it. With each, it grew in size. Its clothes transmuted from leathers and fabric to thin grey fur and dense muscle. Blue tentacles pushed out every opening in its clothes and expanded until they were broader than the fleeing students. Its arms were thicker than those tentacles still, and skin and muscles rolled down from its scalp to cover its head.

The alchemists, for their part, defended themselves. Vials of acid shattered against its unfinished skin and ate through its bare muscles. Paintballs struck its mouth and bloomed into ice flowers down its throat. Burning fluids showered it, and a ball of twine rolled between its feet.

“[Fume Hood],” someone called at the same time as the girl with the hole in her face swung an arm out and a thin distortion spread across the hallway.

The wards muffled the sound of the explosion, and the smoke pooled against them like glass. The bomb rocked the corpse off its feet, but its elongating legs dug into the stone and it slammed a white fist down. The impact shook the tunnel more than the explosion had.

None of them slowed down in their rush toward the veranda. They would have recognized what that thing was becoming even if Tuhrie had not said its name.

Just as Teacup Salamanders became True Salamanders, became worse things, so did the shaggy grey monkey wolves they fought in caves and forests become greater beasts in the heights of the Tower.

Climb twenty floors up and step off the beaten path, and most climbers would recognize the common foe they found there by description alone. Garden Great Ape.

It was large enough to block the intersection. Tall enough to brush against the ceiling even as it leaned on one fist and a mop of tentacles. Its acid wounds and burning fur didn’t even seem to register in its awareness as it leaned in. The ice covering its mouth shattered and when it opened its saber-toothed maw to roar, chains of spit flew at them in a sudden wind.

The cracked wards held for a second, muffling the noise, before they shattered and the crowd winced.

Tuhrie had not moved from her spot. She sounded untroubled as she spoke. Kyle could barely make out the words over the pandemonium, but she did not raise her voice and she sounded as delighted as before. “Thank you. Now kill their friends.” She pointed and—

The Garden Great Ape trundled through the spear trap. The sound of shattered stone echoed around the corner. But it left.

Kyle swayed with primal relief, only to plant his feet against the press of bodies as her words sunk in. It wasn’t going to kill them. The Ape was headed toward the fissle room. Toward the six alchemists they had left behind.

He hurled a knife. It joined a volley of spells, bolts, arrows, and paintballs aimed at the bird woman standing in their way, but Tuhrie reacted as if she could sense each attack coming and turned her back on them, deflecting the ammunition and dodging the spells in a mad sprint.

A single paintball struck her shoulder and bloomed into another ice flower, but it did little more than make her stumble.

Kyle watched their window of opportunity slip by. If they had caught her, they could have threatened her into calling that thing off but now—

She was out in the open. The wind rustled her feathers. He cursed and turned his back on her to push through the crowd.

Warnings filled his mind as Cathy whistled madly, and he wasn’t the only one who had turned. Delilah drank a glowing blue liquid from a bottle as she pushed and shoved her way over to the wounded girl. “Golsa, I need your pills—”

So that was her name.

Mason also knocked a bottle back and its contents disappeared in an eyeblink.

“I’m coming with,” Golsa insisted.

“No, you are not. Get to the Guild before that potion wears off or you’ll be stuck with a scar for—”

“The rest of my cowardly life?”

“We can’t kill that thing!” someone complained when he heard her words. The boy who had summoned the first ward. “I rolled a bomb under it and—”

“You think the others can?” Golsa shot back. “One of them is a freshman—”

“Where is Lukas? Brent? A whole group is missing,” Sarah’s voice joined the jumble of voices.

Kyle wanted to rant at them. What were they expecting? Time to have a rational discussion about this? By the time they finished, Micah and the others would be wet smears on the end of that thing’s fists.

He copied Delilah and shoved his way to pass by Andrew, saying, “Ghost potion?”

Andrew handed him two bottles without question. One was filled with that shifting green smoke. The other— “Barkskin,” Andrew said.

Kyle nodded and picked up speed as he knocked the bottle back. Everyone here probably had emergency potions or items on them but there was no time to ask.

Mason, Ajay, Delilah and he broke through the crowd, with Golsa and the guy she’d been arguing with hurrying to catch up. Six of them.

They reached the intersection and faltered. Thick grooves had torn through the wall where the spears had thrust up from, and the blade that had swung down the center of the hallway lay rent and broken. Rocks tumbled out of a hole in the ceiling.

The tip of a blue tentacle slipped around the corner as the Ape trundled into the laser hallway.

They glanced at each other and … Kyle didn’t know what to do. He had already used too much of his healing in these last few minutes. He didn’t have any emergency items. He wasn’t even a real climber; he’d only been fighting for a year. He was just an angry kid with an axe.

“Maybe if we distract it …?” the new guy said.

“What’s your name?” Kyle snapped and dropped the empty bottle. If he had to order him to do something during the fight—

“Quin?”

Delilah sounded confident, “If we get everyone on the same side, I can raise a wall. We only need to buy them time.” She popped a second pill in her mouth.

Golsa offered more to the rest of them. “Vigour pills. Boost mana circulation and casting speed.”

“Not a mage.”

“You have that axe, don’t you? We’re short on time—”

Kyle didn’t know if it was sensible to stack up on alchemicals, but he downed a pill with his spit and, realizing they were waiting on him, led the way. He was the only [Fighter] here after all …

A shout came from ahead. The Great Ape had already reached the end of the tunnel. Its longest tentacle trailed behind it as it turned the corner and Kyle felt the earth tremble beneath his boots as he followed, but not because of its heavy footfalls. Stone rumbled as a wall was lowered into the ground.

They had just now managed to lower the wall? Fuck, Kyle cursed in his mind as he began to jog, then run. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—

He ran alongside the tentacle and kept going, feeling the pill churning inside of him like a whirlpool of mud. The pill, adrenaline, and his throbbing shoulder made him feel like the hallway was rotating around his head. He tried to shove as much of his pitiful mana into the axe as he could, fire overlapping the material like a second skin.

Shouts came from around the corner. One of them was Micah’s voice. Something exploded with a tiny pop and fog and smoke mixed on the floor.

Then the Ape grunted and there came the sound of a wall being obliterated by a single punch, and Kyle was out of time.

He sprinted the last five meters to where the tentacle curved around the corner and shoved his sickness into his muscles like fuel to the flames as he planted his feet, brought his axe up, and shouted, “[Power Strike]!”

It was a basic Skill; it was just a tool, the axe, but he knew they could end a life in a moment. The flames swept out in a roar. Its edge bit halfway into the tentacle and stopped, stuck in place.

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

“—spiritual layers are a Thing,” Micah grunted as he dug. “Look it up. The theory has existed long before me.”

“[Geomancers] exist. If you have an affinity for earth magic, just say so. Don’t spin nonsense tales about attuning the, what, body layer of your spirit to rocks …?”

Micah sighed. Why did he have to be stuck in a room with Forester of all people? He was intelligent. He knew that from the last ten minutes alone. Once he had convinced the others of the threat a Trapper posed, they’d taken over preparing their defenses so he could dig.

Micah had explained to them what he wanted to craft and how he was going about it, and they had continued his work with barely a hitch.

So why did he have to be so obstinate? Paths were tricky. So was magic. They enhanced the individual point of view but sometimes came at the cost of communication.

Micah understood the need for the scientific process, but he doubted Forester even believed in it. He only believed what came out of the right people’s mouths, some of their teachers, his private tutors, and the mentors he bragged about finding at the Guild.

It annoyed him who had a hundred questions for anyone who would give him the time of day.

“Do you ever ask yourself how stuff works?” Micah complained. “You’re an alchemist. Do you think potions use mana, too?” He pointed at the pot of bubbling silver goop Forester was stirring right now. A ward shielded him from the incredibly toxic fumes.

“I don’t think they use eensy weensy mandalas? ‘Patterns,’” he scoffed.

He was right. He didn’t think. Micah tried to focus on his task at hand, unearthing the metal contraptions that held the stone wall aloft.

At least, one of the other two people in the room, the freshman with the shaved head and the glasses, sounded curious as he finished his preparations, slowest of them all, “And these golem hands you used came from the ninth floor, so around this area …?”

Micah glanced back with an odd sense of unease. He was glad someone was interested in his work—the annoyance that was Forester did little to bring down his mood. He was digging through stone!

Slowly, yeah, but he’d already found one of the two contraptions propping up the wall. Once he found the other, they could break them and the wall would drop back into the slot where it had been stored before. And yet …

“They’re dangerous, the golems,” he told Laas. He was a freshman and probably the same age as Micah, but he didn’t want to carelessly spread information that might get others hurt.

It was weird because, a year and a half ago, he had been stomping his feet and demanding Linda let him into the Tower without heeding any of her warnings. Why should anyone listen to him now?

“But yes. The, uhm— The earth spirits use crystals veins to help puppet their golems. I mapped those to my hand with a few adjustments and used earth crystals to nurture a copy in my spirit. That’s probably the more dangerous part. You can buy golem hands, but if you grow the veins wrong, I think you can end up paralyzing yourself—”

Forester shook his head and interrupted, “If you want to learn earth magic, start with [Shape Stone] like every other geomancer in history. It’s probably what he is using, some variation on the spell, even if he is too high on his own fumes to realize it.”

Micah almost wanted to lie and say he was using [Shape Stone]. Because who cared if he was using mana or not? The Good Prince and his royal geomancers had reshaped the Great River. Hundreds of kilometers of riverbed. Thousands of cubic meters of water. He could dig through stone like a kid in the sand. At the end of the day, it was results that mattered.

Laas made an impartial noise. “Shouldn’t that be easy to verify if you took notes …?”

“Micah. And yes, I took notes.”

“Uh,” a muffled voice on the other side of the wall spoke up, “maybe we can share research projects after we get out of the renovated death trap?”

“And stop arguing in front of the freshman!” a second voice hissed. “They’ll think they can question us …”

“I’m working on it,” Micah raised his voice to let the people at the cart know he was speaking to their classmates on the other side of the wall.

He dug and something gave. The rock crumbled away from him into a pocket of space between the fissle cube and the next. It was filled with metal and stone machinery like a foldable lawn chair attached to some kind of engine deep below. An elevator …?

Micah had forgotten much of his Overseas Studies over summer break, but he thought those used cables and worked from above. This looked like a platform that pushed the wall up from below.

He cleared the hole and informed the others. Together, they shone a light cantrip down the hole and inspected the metal bars for weaknesses.

“Can you shape metal?”

“A little,” Micah admitted, “I can dent it, but—”

“Don’t. You’ll crush your hands,” Forester said.

“That.” There was a lot of weight resting on those bars. He didn’t want his fingers under there when the wall dropped.

They tried to prod the Giant Toad hitched to their cart into doing something—maybe it could bend the metal with its tongue?—but it didn’t respond other than to hop forward a few meters. Cathy didn’t seem to be linked to it like Lisa was to most of her summons.

They riffled through the loot and some of the bags their classmates had stored on the cart, and it took them three tries to improvise fuel that could burn hot and long enough to weaken the metal. They didn’t have to break it. When the weight became too much, the weakened metal gave. With a trembling groan and a snap, the right corner of the wall lurched down a few inches.

Their cheers were interrupted by the sharp trill of a whistle, and Micah heard a faint whisper that almost sounded like the word, Run.

“What was—”

And then, again, Run.

Run.

SOS.

Schedule—!

Run now!

The others must have heard it, too, because they stumbled back from the wall and looked around in confusion. Laas muttered, “Anne-Katherine …?”

A series of sharp whistles followed the first and Micah recognized the pattern. It was the guild’s emergency retreat signal. Was this Cathy’s doing?

A loud crash came from the distance, followed by a sound like metal being folded like paper.

The Trapper. Did the others need help? Were they fighting it!? Why weren’t they listening to Cathy and disengaging? The Trappers tried to use traps to kill people. They only retaliated against direct attacks and wanton destruction.

“The second lever,” Micah urged the others. “Quick!” He moved and stopped when he felt something in the corner of his perception. The faintest outline of a flower bobbing up and down in the middle of the air as if— as if it were levitating?

His life sense couldn’t feel anything in the tunnel. At first. Then he picked up on wisps of something. An alchemical gas? He felt a whole splash of fire potion in the middle of the air and it was shaped like the outline of … something large …

He thought of the Collector, that massive unliving automaton, and realized it was headed straight toward the two alchemists outside. Cathy was signaling them.

Micah shoved Forester aside hard enough to make him fall and threw himself down in front of the hole, hissing, “Enemy! Throw them a rope through the hole!”

He vented the stone essence he’d stored in his left hand and stretched his arm as far as he could until he touched metal. Someone shouted in sudden terror. Two voices badgered the wall from the other side, and his three classmates asked panicked questions.

Micah concentrated.

Deep breaths in … and out. In … and out …

It was hard, doing this when his heart was racing, when there was no time, but he had practiced this with pebbles, with cinder blocks, glass marbles, crystals—if the essences he drew in matched the material he was trying to shape, it would work.

The only difficulties arose with the availability of essences … and with the durability of the material itself.

So, Micah breathed out and thought, [Exert Dominion]. And when he breathed in, he pulled. Not just with his hand, but with the very field of authority that spread out around him, drawing from every piece of metal inside it. Until the veins in his hands felt like rebar and—

[Essence Path explored!]

[Skill — Earthshaper’s Gloves obtained!]

Huh. Neat. The timing was a little off, but Micah smiled. Hopefully, he wasn’t about to lose his hand.

He gripped the metal bars, had a thought, and asked, “Haul me back?” Laas and the other guy were too busy threading a rope through the top corner of the doorway, so he had to ask Forester to do it, who was picking himself up after being shoved to the ground. The guy grumbled something, grabbed his shoulders, and on ‘one,’ they wrenched.

The bars snapped, they stumbled back, and the wall came down with the screeching rumble of stone against stone. Slowly. The alchemists on the other side scrambled through the widening gap as soon as they could fit.

“Is it the Trapper?” Laas asked with far too little fear in his voice for Micah’s liking.

“Monkey,” the first one over huffed.

Micah made a face. “Monkey?”

“Garden Great Ape!”

Oh.

“Are you sure …?” Micah asked. Not that he wanted to doubt him, but if it was ‘just’ a monster from the Gardens, then why wasn’t it registering in his life sense?

“Yes, I’m fucking sure. Now run!” the guy snapped and began to sprint toward the cart.

Micah grabbed his arm in a vice. “Not that way.” The corpse man had disappeared in those fields. He was still unaccounted for.

Micah didn’t want to let any unseen enemies herd him through the Tower. Their best bet at escaping was still reaching one of the two exits whose locations they knew. He had made the mistake of running deeper into enemy territory in the hopes of finding an exit twice before, and nearly gotten himself, and then Ryan, killed both times. He would not lead his classmates to the same fate.

And what about the rest of their group? That Ape had come from the direction Kyle had gone in earlier. He had to make sure the others were safe. To do that, Micah would go through whatever stood in his way.

“We prepared for a Trapper,” he decided. “There will be no change of plans.”