Whichever Prowlers weren’t impaled by the emerald spikes were caught by Ryan’s flames, and while Micah would have loved to follow up on that, he could only move one arm.
“Back up!” he called out and coughed. He pushed himself up and reached across his hip to fumble at his pouch. “Fight near the clogged dart traps!” It felt like he was moving with something heavy strapped to his chest, dragging him forward while his backpack dragged him back. It strained.
Ryan nodded so quickly he didn’t know if he had imagined it. The guy took a step back and stuck the first of the Prowlers down, deflected a second, impaled then tossed aside the third, but was tackled by the fourth.
He managed to stab it often enough that he could smack it off him, but two new ones threw themselves at his legs by then.
Micah saw it and could do nothing to help but run up and kick them maybe, but that would do more harm than good once he was up there.
Luckily, Jason rushed in with a quick fencer’s thrust to one of them and a simple heel to the face of another. Ryan managed to shake the second on his own then.
Lisa took one look at the partially broken wall and her pickaxe, pushed herself up with a scowl, and snatched her Shepherd’s Staff. Her expression twisted in concentration as she ran a hand along the side and pulled back an invisible bowstring.
Threads of heat essence drew in from all over the tunnel, Ryan, and the remains of his spell with the motion—everywhere except a circle around Micah—and spun together like yarn. They dimmed as they converted to fire essence he couldn’t see and flashed into a burning arrow.
“[Kobold’s Flameseekers],” she cast. The single arrow broke into six darts of burning light that shot off from her and struck six of the smoking Prowlers that had come through the flames.
They were knocked back, set on fire, or impaled, and gave the others a moment’s respite.
Micah stuffed two shots in his mouth just as Kyle ran past, then threw his lighter left arm out to stop him with a garbled, “Njo.”
The guy frowned at him like he wanted to wrench free anyway, but Micah let go and got his bottle. He took a swig and limped forward to where Jason and Ryan fought.
Back off, he thought, because I wanted to do this.
He leaned past them, ignored a Prowler headed for his head, and breathed a giant cloud of noxious fog at the horde and Spike in the distance.
Jason recoiled and held his elbow in front of his mouth before he remembered to pull his bandana up to cover his nose and mouth.
Kyle swung his axe over Micah’s head and stumbled into him to cut the Prowler down that jumped at him, then dragged him away from where it twisted in the mud. “The fuck is up with your arm?”
He couldn’t explain. He spat the empty shells of his poison out before they began to numb his mouth and rinsed.
Lisa gave him another scowl when he stumbled past her. “Are you breathing that in, too?”
He shook his head. Poison was obviously unhealthy enough that he hadn’t. He still had it in his mouth, though …
“Go help the other one,” she said and shot two more curving bolts into the fight. Only two?
Micah nodded and left her to it. He reached down with his one arm to scoop up some mud and searched the walls for dart traps.
Lea pointed to one, busy herself, but he hesitated and wondered if he should accept the tip from her. If one of the others got hit and itched for hours on end because he hadn’t though …
Whatever. He slapped the mud on the wall and avoided looking at her so he wouldn’t see her reaction or get another ‘tip’.
He had to rush when he reached down so he wouldn’t get hit in the neck by another trap, but it was hard with his arm and leg dragging him off-balance. Each time he slathered the wall, he pushed some mana out just to get rid of his stone affinity.
All the while, he focused on his breathing in every free moment to get rid of the rest, but his concentration had been broken and without meditating, it felt like sweeping that last lint onto a dustpan: frustrating.
It didn’t help that his neck of all places was itching like crazy and he couldn’t scratch it because his one glove was covered in mud.
Just a few meters away came the sounds of panicked battle from the rest of his teammates, too.
Micah leaned against the wall, grit his teeth, and suppressed a groan of frustration. He took a deep breath and drew his blade, mumbling, “Screw it.” He would fight with one hand if he had to.
He waited behind Lisa until a Prowler slipped past the others and darted forward to stab its eye out, then jumped back.
She had been about to bludgeon it herself, hesitated in surprise—luckily, it wailed and hesitated as well—then finished the attack and said, “Micah!”
“I can help,” he insisted through grit teeth and stumbled to the side to slap another on the wall with his sword. He ducked behind the others before it could retaliate.
This wasn’t much worse than shooting them with his slingshot, even if it looked bad.
Lisa cursed.
Still, he focused on his breathing in every free moment. When he glanced down, his fingers moved. He could feel them move a moment later. Scary as that was, he let out a sigh of relief.
Good enough.
The next time he nicked one of the Prowlers, he took in a sharp breath. Like wool from a torn teddy bear, he ripped out part of its essences.
He didn’t breath long enough to pull them anywhere near himself, but Lisa still shot him another look. “If you can do that—” She grunted and smacked another Prowler. “Then clean your lungs first.”
“After,” he said.
After didn’t really come. Even when they had killed all the Cavern Prowlers, shuffled sounds and plicks came from beyond the walls as Kobolds moved around to find new holes to shoot from or tried to clear the drying mud off the ones they had sealed. They didn’t try to hide their presence anymore.
Their group turned to Ryan for a warning on whether or not another wave of monsters would attack, but he was propped up against his knees to catch his breath and shook his head.
“Can’t focus,” he gasped, “blood pounding in my ears. No idea if something is coming or not.”
His legs were bleeding and his right one had been slashed more than once. It was his least protected spot. Of course, the Prowlers had targeted that. The wounds were bad enough to warrant a healing potion.
They needed to find armor for his legs so could be fully protected. For now, Micah got out his healing supplies and crouched in front of him to treat the wounds.
Jason yanked his bandana down and took in a gasp of air. “Do we have time for a break?”
“If we have to run,” Micah snapped, “it’s better that his legs were healed, don’t you think?”
“No, no, I’m not saying—” He broke off with a wince and pressed a hand to his chest. Was he wounded, too? “I’m not saying not to give first aid, I’m asking in general. What do we do?”
“We need to fight on equal ground,” Ryan said. “Or else they’ll just wear us down and win a war of attrition.”
On cue, a Kobold cried out, its voice muffled beyond the wall. They were surrounded by enemies they couldn’t even see and it sounded like those enemies were coordinating.
“Jason,” Lisa said and pulled the pickaxe out of the mud, “or someone who isn’t hurt, can you take over for a moment, please?”
Jason looked eager but grimaced when he reached out. He reluctantly let Kyle take it instead.
“Next time,” the guy told him and struck the wall with a loud ring. That agitated them even more, by the sound of things.
After the first stone fell, the rest of them shuffled a few steps back, except Micah who took a deep breath and blew the poison cloud further down the other way.
“Yeah, that’s why I wanted someone else to take over,” Lisa said as she watched him do it, “what the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Yeah, what’s up with your arm?” Kyle asked between strikes. “Are they using worse poison?”
“No, I screwed up,” Micah admitted. He could move it by now, but slowly. Ryan was doing as much of his own first aid as he was. “I didn’t think the consequences through and it blew up in my face.”
Not that that was anything new.
“And how long have you been doing this? Because you seemed to be able to do that pretty easily.”
“No. No,” he mumbled. “I’ve only practiced with stone and earth a little bit. It’s mostly been …”
“What?”
He let out a low grumble. He didn’t want to say because he knew whatever he said, it would be wrong.
“Don’t trail off on me,” Lisa said. “What else have you been putting into your lungs?”
“Nothing.” He glared over his shoulder to get her to back off.
“Micah—”
“Nothing. I just … I don’t know. I didn’t know I could not inhale something at first, then I started trying to twist enemies’ strengths to my own and … and how to infuse essences into myself. Sort of. It’s only temporary.”
The books he had read said Northerners would eventually gain an affinity of sorts, except they didn’t have mana so it was an affinity of their spirit. He wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work. What he had been doing was closer to their own enhancement spells or Northern techniques.
Closer, but not quite because he had tools they didn’t have, like mana, his Skills, and alchemy, and he didn’t know for sure what their magic was like.
“Which ones?” Lisa asked, voice hard.
“Wind,” he grumbled, “or air. Whatever you want to call it. Mostly.”
“Wind’s good.” She nodded. “Air is different. What else?”
‘Different’. He wanted to roll his eyes because it sounded like she was just insisting on semantics again but … he couldn’t. They were different and those types of nuances could matter.
“Ice, uhm, water, a bit of electricity, some earth, uhh … I tried with flesh but it felt weird, I try it with potions sometimes, especially Tower potions, some other stuff … monsters …”
“Monsters.” If anything, her voice turned even harder. “How?”
“How?”
“How do you do that? How do you ‘infuse essences into yourself’? If it’s only sort of and temporary?”
“I, uhm …” And this was going to be wrong, too, wasn’t it? Really, why couldn’t she let up a little? He was busy here and Ryan was in pain. “I use my spirit veins or whatever to push the essences into my mana, or any alchemicals I might have imbued, or my body itself."
She stared for a second in which the only sounds were the others trudging through the mud to pick up the crystals and the rings of pick against stone.
Then she threw her arms up. “Well, no wonder you got [Lesser Constitution] over something else! What the hell were you thinking!?”
“Why don’t you tell me?!” he snapped back. “You seem to know everything.” What did his Skill have to do with anything?
“Micah, this is serious. I knew you were practicing Northern Magic on your own, but mistakes like this literally get people killed.”
That gave him pause. And in the brief silence, Lea asked, “You’re practicing Northern Magic?”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
Everyone turned to glare at her. Slowly, Micah said, “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Uhh. Uh, no. No problem.”
They kept on staring until she looked away.
The moment she did, Ryan spoke up with worry in his voice, “Killed? What do you mean?”
Micah could already think of the answer himself. If he had aimlessly infused his lungs with that much stone essence instead of his hand …
He sighed. She was right. She was but … Just this once, he’d hoped he would figure out how to do something on his own. He had imagined shoveling through the wall at record speed and instead, he had forced Lisa to stop and join the fight because he couldn’t protect her.
And now Ryan was wounded, and he was still wounded because Micah was moving slow as fuck, and Jason had to treat his own wounds, and …
Micah just wanted to hug his head and curl into a ball in the mud. He had let them, and himself, down.
It sucked.
“Micah,” Lisa said. Her voice was somewhere between accusation and worry instead of that perpetual teacher tone she used when she was dangling an answer just outside of his reach. “You’re in advanced Biology and Dangers of Healing. You’re an [Alchemist]. Think about it: what do lungs do?”
It was only her shift in tone that made him answer. “They … they take in air,” he said, “and they deliver tiny bits of it to our blood to make our bodies work, then expel the used parts.”
She nodded. “Right. Tiny bits of air. Not—freaking—stone! Or anything else. It’s like you’re … like you’re…”
She reached for the right explanation and Jason spoke up, “Smoking?”
“Huh?”
“I don’t mean to butt in, but it sounds a bit like he’s smoking? Like cigars or shisha?”
Lisa frowned. “Is that unhealthy?” She stuffed a bit of wet hair back under her helmet. “I can never remember.”
Jason nodded slowly, Ryan more confidently. “They make your lungs sick if do it too often, especially if you buy the cheap stuff.”
“Then why do people smoke at all?”
“Because it’s fun,” Jason said, “it tastes good, and it only makes you a little sick over decades. It’s like eating candy or drinking alcohol.”
Thankfully, Lisa shook her head and said, “This isn’t like that then.”
Yeah, because that’s stupid, Micah thought and pulled the bandages on Ryan’s left leg taut. The comparison only rang true on a surface-level.
“I’m not smoking,” he said. “I’m just … I’m enhancing potions in me and I’m attuning to affinities similar to elemental or material casting. That’s all.” Spellcasting Classes did the same thing all the time, just by using their mana. “The only problem is if I screw up like I just did.”
Lisa stopped shaking her head. “No.”
“No?”
“No, this is much worse. You’re not making your lungs sick, you’re making your spirit sick, and the spirit shapes magic, and the spirit shapes flesh. You’re sickening both your spellcasting abilities and your lungs in one go. This doesn’t take decades. If you screw up, it can happen like that.”
She snapped.
“What? No,” he said and shook his head. He didn’t want to believe that. “No, that’s stupid. How is that supposed to work?”
“Just like it did right now,” she said. “Really, Micah. Just think for a moment and you should know. What do you think happens when you mess with the balance of essences in your body too often, huh? How do you think your spirit reacts? And how do you think that influences the rest of your body?”
It acclimates, he realized and immediately shoved the thought aside.
The problem was that he didn’t want to think about that right now. Part of what she said rang true and part didn't. He wanted to cling to the latter. He didn’t want to have trained these last few months for nothing.
So he shook his head in denial.
“Micah, if you want to strengthen your body with essences, you have to do it right. There are different forms of intake for different essence types, body parts, and abilities. And you have to match the right essences to the right body parts. Mistakes can kill you. Do you understand?”
No. Yes. But—
“Do you?”
It took him a moment, but he eventually nodded instead. He had screwed up and she hadn’t after all.
Thankfully, Lisa stepped away after that. For a moment, he let himself believe she was done chewing him out and that he could consider this on his own in peace. Then she said, “Can I have the scarf, please?”
He looked up.
“Uhm, sure?” Jason handed it to her.
She came back and held it out to him. “Wear this for the rest of the exam. From now on, you’re only allowed to breathe in what can pass through this.”
“What?”
“It’s for your own good. You clearly don’t know what you’re doing and I don’t have the time to explain it to you right now.”
“What? No. That’s unfair. I’m not an idiot, Lisa,” he complained. “I don’t have to wear that to be careful.”
“It’s not about being careful, it’s about bad habits. I haven’t even touched on essence management. You can’t just take in every single essence you find. You know how you complain about essence sludge?”
“I didn’t make any of that inside of me,” he insisted. “If I had, I would have known.”
That wasn’t something you missed.
“And I’m saying you wouldn’t have. I can’t check without hurting you, because to check I would literally have to shove my spirit inside yours and grope around. So I’m asking you to wear this for two days.”
He stared at the shimmering green fabric for a moment and said, “You’re crippling me.”
Finally, he was useful, he could stand by their side, and she wanted him to take a step back again. What about the [Surging Strength] potions he had put time and effort into adjusting for this, or ripping affinities way from his opponents to use them himself, or just making himself stronger ...
“I’m handicapping you,” she said. “You’ll learn to work around it. It’s better than you crippling yourself.”
What if I already have? What did it matter, then? He gripped his leg, met her stare for a moment, and thought of slapping her hand aside until Ryan spoke up.
“Micah.” His voice was tired, “I don’t understand this. But from the sound of things, if we hadn’t found the bandana, I would be offering you the rain jacket right now.”
That … hurt. He thought he had screwed up so bad he would break his promise with his parents to fix it.
Micah stopped himself from flinching, looked down, and snatched the stupid thing out of her hand. The others sighed in relief while he wrapped it around his face and muffled his breath.
Lisa crouched next to him when he finished and pulled it back down off his nose. “Not yet. First, meditate to clean out as much as you can. We’ll wake you forcibly if we have to.”
When they had finished digging? He glanced at Kyle. If it would only be another minute or two …
“Fine,” he mumbled.
She smiled. And the worst thing was that she seemed genuinely relieved, because she had been genuinely worried. “Thank you.”
“It’s not so bad, right?” Jason said. “I mean, it’s like a [Mage] trying to cast [Fireball] or [Lightning Bolt] too early, or if they or an [Alchemist] screws up on [Stone Skin]. Everyone goes through that phase sooner or later, where they reach too far over their heads.”
Micah got that Jason was trying to cheer him up, but he really wasn’t doing a good job of it.
I didn’t think it was too early for me.
“Like, I know one guy who screwed up [Fireball] once and now he has burn marks all along his arm from the fire.” He gestured along it.
And that was his cue to tune out of the conversation.
The ringing of pickaxe against stone, muffled Kobolds yelling at each, itching poison, and his teammates’ voices tried their best to distract him.
Micah took in deep breaths through partially clogged lungs and veins and only felt reinforced in his doubts. Part of what Lisa had said did ring true to him, and part of it didn’t because, well …
As he tried to breathe the stone essence out, they didn’t just resist because that was their nature, but because they seemed to want to stay in him. Like a puzzle piece fitting just right, they felt so familiar but … that didn’t make sense. They shouldn’t want to stay. Blood or flesh, or air, maybe. Not stone. He wasn’t … he wasn’t a freaking Golem. He was human. He was …
I’m whole, he told himself. I’m whole.
Ryan shook him awake when he was almost done and pointed at the hole in the wall. He didn’t look happy and neither did any of his other teammates. Kyle was pacing in circles with his arms resting on his helmet.
Micah winced as he forced himself up and limped over to take a peek and see what the problem was.
Piles of rubble and stone had been moved aside, the left wall had partially collapsed, but it was wide enough you could walk a meter or two in to another tunnel that ran parallel to theirs. It was mostly rock with patches of dirt, but the rock had grooves running through it like someone had scraped it away piece by piece. The edges of those grooves were curved like wet clay.
He didn’t think tan Kobolds were supposed to be able to shape stone this low in the new Tower, but at this point, who knew what he was supposed to believe?
Most importantly, why nobody looked happy: the tunnels were only a half or so meter wide and a little over one high. Just big enough for Kobolds to sneak around in, but definitely not them.
Of course. Why had they assumed they would dig their tunnels big enough for them to fight in?
He leaned back out and looked at the others. “Now what?”
“I don’t get what the problem is,” Kyle said and scratched his waist, “sure, it’s fucking annoying, but the darts only make you itch.”
Micah nodded to himself and started rummaging around in his backpack while he listened to the other conversation.
“Could you flood the tunnels with fire or something? Or lots of Teacup Salamanders?” Jason was asking Lisa. “Maybe it would be enough to distract them?”
She shook her head. “I don’t have that kind of mana left. I’ve been using a lot. I need to regenerate.”
“Oh. Uh, do you want some of mine?”
“Please.” She handed him a mana ring and he began to fill it.
Micah would have offered to do the same but he actually needed his mana for once, especially if they were tying his hands with that stupid scarf around his neck. He pulled a jar out.
“Their tunnels are only hip-high,” Kyle said and gestured forward. “We should just run on through.”
“Yeah,” Micah spoke up, “but that only works as long as the tunnels stay hip-high and as long as they keep on only using itching poison. What if they switch to something a little more dangerous, huh?” He tapped the jar where the scorpion lay inside and shook it at him.
“So we run faster than they can shoot their stupid darts?”
Micah shook his jar even harder and scratched his neck in frustration, trying to think of a solution himself.
“That might work,” Ryan said, “but not if they’re coordinated enough to warn the ones further back that we’re coming. Then they can get ready in advance and fire at us at the end of the tunnel.”
“It’d still make it harder for them to hit us.”
“Probably,” Ryan admitted.
“So?”
He just shrugged.
Kyle groaned.
Micah thought of flooding their tunnels with poison himself, somehow, but he might have to do that for miles. Ignoring his mana, he just didn’t have that kind of ammunition, even if they stopped so he could make more. And who knew if Lisa would allow it?
“Why are we assuming this is going to get any more dangerous again?” Kyle said. “We’re on the fifth freaking floor.”
“Exactly,” Micah said, and had to admit to himself, part of him only argued because he wanted to vent, “we’re on the fifth floor. None of this has been normal, none of it should have happened, and it’s all been erratic. So assuming it’s going to stay that way is just naive.”
He made a face at him in contempt. “I’m surprised you even know what that word means.”
Micah stuck his tongue out at him.
“If this is anything like the upper floors,” Lisa interrupted them, “the traps mean there is a Kobold camp somewhere nearby, possibly with a Guardian.”
They all perked up at that. An actual, not-abandoned Kobold camp could be all they needed to make some sense of these things on their evaluation. Not all of it would have been for nothing then, not all of it a mistake.
“But those types of Kobolds build these tunnels on the very edges of their camps and the tunnels leading in only become more and more trapped.”
So they might use something worse than itching poison after all? Micah didn’t have any antidotes with him … could he make any? He went over his materials for a moment.
“I don’t care,” Kyle said, “we’re definitely not retreating from this. We’re on the fifth floor. This exactly the type of thing we want to prove to the school, and the Guild, and the city or whatever that we can do.”
Micah nodded in agreement as he put his jar away and shifted some things around. “No, nobody’s saying retreat,” he said. At least, he hoped he spoke for everyone when he said that.
If it was a fifth-floor Guardian, he didn’t care about the traps or annoying they might be. They would learn to adapt. And if not fight by their side, then adapting and helping them adapt could be something Micah could do instead, to contribute.
“Then—” Kyle started, but Ryan spoke up. And somehow, they stopped to listen. It was rare enough that he did after all.
“Knowing when to retreat is also valuable to learn,” he said, and though his tone was neutral, of course he was the one to say it. Micah didn’t know if he should feel betrayed or relieved. “And it’s valuable to prove to them that we have as well, so they don’t worry about us getting ourselves killed.”
Kyle looked at him in disgust.
“But we don’t know that yet,” Jason said, “that we have to retreat, right? All we’ve seen are these traps.” He glanced around and then slipped his own backpack around with a hint of a frown.
“Right.” Micah nodded. “We would only retreat if and when we know that we have to, but not before.”
Kyle looked around the group with a frown. “So what the hell are we standing around here for? What are we waiting to do?”
Jason glanced up at the same time as Micah did, and they both saw what the other was doing, and they both lit up.
“Now,” Micah said as he pulled out the bandages he’d just used along with his breeze potion, while Jason pulled out his empty loot sacks, and they finished in near-perfect unison, “we adapt.”
“—improvise.”
He stared at him. Jason stared back. Micah felt his cheeks heat up as a blush came on.
“I thought we were going to go with ‘improvise’—”
“Yeah, yeah, no—”
“—because of that thing earlier with Kyle?”
“—no, I totally should have gone with improvise. I just thought of how annoying the traps would be, and then I had ‘adapt’ in my head, and uhm …”
“Uh.”
“Do you want to try again?”
“Uh, Micah?” Ryan spoke up. Lisa had averted her eyes and took a deep breath, while Kyle just shook his head in disappointment. “I don’t think that’s how it— I don’t think you can do that?”
“What? Why couldn’t we?”
How else were they supposed to have it down?
“Uh …”
“We can totally try again,” Jason jumped in and stuffed the sacks back inside. “On three?”
“Sure.”
“One, two—”
“Wait, wait, wait! Just to be clear. We’re doing ‘improvise’ this time?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay. On three.” He took a deep breath and copied him by putting the bandages back away.
Jason silently counted, One—
“Now,” he echoed his earlier words and looked at Kyle while keeping Jason in the corner of his eye to see how far he was.
Kyle noticed him looking, shook his head more fiercely just once, and turned the other away.
—two—
He pulled the bandages out.
—three—
“We improvise,” they said in unison and grinned.