“Dickhead!” Micah said and cut a spider. Once again, its chitin cracked and bled clear fluid rather than smoke. He was ruining perfectly good ingredients and it irked every part of him.
A burning axe hacked into a rising centipede and it flailed back with far too many legs like it was playing a phantom piano.
“Asshole!”
Another firebolt flew past him and all of the body parts Micah could afford to let tense up did while he forced the rest of himself to ignore it.
The others couldn’t and dodged, blocked, or hid from the spells the Kobolds flung at them.
He cut another Teacup down, stumbled back, and propped his sword against the wall to get his slingshot. The sword immediately fell into the mud.
He wanted to curse and coughed instead, short of breath. His throat felt rugged and hot like he might get sick, but he didn’t know why. They’d slept in this humid heat during the last exam and been fine, and he had [Lesser Constitution] this time. Had he screwed up, somehow?
He thought of the reheated soup, breeze potion, and muddy tunnels—and of Lisa. If she was right, he had done everything wrong … maybe that was being unfair to her.
He groaned and aimed his slingshot through the mayhem of crashing bodies, flying mud, and fire. His hands shook.
“Damnit.”
Kyle probably thought the curse was directed at him again and snapped, “What’s your damage, dipshit?”
“You are!” He put a metal shot in a Kobold’s nose, having aimed for its eye. Its head jerked back and the swarm of flames on its staff winked out.
The Kobolds next to it jerked in surprise and Micah followed up twice more now that he knew he had the distance right.
“Ha!”
“Nice sho—” the other guy started to say.
“Shut it!”
“Screw you.”
“Screw you. You were going to abandon us.”
His scowl slipped and he shot him an odd look before swinging into the next monster, then grunted, “I’m here, aren’t I?”
Micah turned and started snapping shots at the hoard of Cavern Prowlers tearing into their other allies. Kyle had rushed to back them up instead of the others for whatever reason and it gave him the breathing room he needed to divide his attention. For now.
Lea and Silas were retreating toward them, step by step. They couldn’t hold off one wave of Cavern Prowlers on their own when they had all struggled to fight one yesterday, together.
She shot him a look of relief when the first Prowler jerked, smoke breaking from its skin, though she probably didn’t need the help with her stupid axe and wasted the opportunity with that look.
The moment she turned, she cleaved the Prowler’s head clean off and moved on to the next.
“You were going to leave—”
“I wasn’t—”
“Yeah, you were! I saw it in your stupid face.” He focused on helping Silas where he could since he needed it more, though with how nimble the guy was, it took him longer to aim.
“I came back, didn’t I?”
“Screw you! What kind of an asshole runs off in the middle of a— a fight,” he groaned and his voice cracked, “just to get shot at glory or whatever else?!”
Kyle hacked into another beast and surged toward him abruptly, axe down but with a glare on his face. “I’m here, okay?! I stayed. That’s all that matters and you better remember that.”
He was up in his face despite the battle raging around them, to drive the point home, and Micah let his frustration slip to show he got the message.
Kyle had made a choice and chosen them.
Really, he was glad he had come back. Half of the insults had just been an act and the other half him needing to vent because if he didn’t, he would get lost in his mind and his performance would suffer for it.
Or there was the other type of getting lost, but this wasn’t the time or place to forgo his own safety. It was dangerous, his grade depended on him not getting hurt, and he had to cooperate.
Maybe he had been giving himself to [Savagery] already, come to think of it. Scary that he might not have noticed.
“I know,” he said and flashed him a warm smile. “Thank you.”
Kyle grumbled, his version of a frown, and stumbled over a corpse back into the fray, but the Prowlers’ screams reached a peak as they got close and Micah reached out to grab his shoulder.
“No,” he said and twisted him in the other way, pointing with the motion, “help them! I got this.”
Kyle glanced at him and hung his head back at an angle as if to say how much of a hassle that was or, more likely, to make fun of his confidence. ‘I got this.’
Micah rolled his eyes to cover up his embarrassment, collected his things, and parted ways.
Jean had been holding off the Kobolds and their pet monsters almost on his own, fighting in a way that was surprisingly similar to his own, if cruder. Not just because the guy seemed less agile than Micah—he was taller and had his teams’ luggage, and Micah did a lot of agility training to keep up—but Jean was also more careful, avoiding contact if he could and using a form of mounting blunt pressure to weaken his foes.
He cut a spider’s leg and knocked it onto a Teacup Salamander. The two scrambled to get up in the mud, hurting and getting in each others’ way, while he repositioned and did something similar to the next ones.
It was smart, he had to admit. If less … effective? Micah didn’t like to think of ‘vicious’ as an expression of quality, even though the word felt apt here.
Were he in his shoes, he would have faced the monsters head-on and used sharp pressure with the same tactics—deep cuts instead of glancing blows and building up a sort of momentum; cripple rather than delay; find permanent solutions. It was better in the long run.
In a general sense, at least. For other people or to achieve the goal. Not him if he got hurt.
He was definitely using [Savagery] right now, though it felt different than usual. Less combat-oriented.
He punted a Teacup aside and dragged Jean back by his elbow. The guy almost cut him with a bewildered look on his face. First Silas and now him. The [Scouts] seemed jumpy in a way none of the other people he had climbed with had before and Micah couldn’t figure out why.
Even he wasn’t that jumpy anymore, and he slept with a knife under his pillow these days. A reaction Skill? Something about their training?
He also seemed a little slow, because the arm he’d jerked stayed for a moment before he dropped it.
“Back!” Micah said, leaning away. “We’re retreating. Call your familiar; we’ll need all the back-up we can get.”
“Already did.” He stumbled away.
Micah picked up the slack with his shield raised against the [Firebolts] and centipede bites.
“Help— Help me with the poison,” he called before Jean could run off to the others, but he hadn’t left anyway. Fighting back here, he’d probably breathed in hints of the poison pooling on the mud, come to think of it. That was Micah’s fault.
Maybe that was the reason why he’d been so jumpy and he was just imagining a pattern where there was none?
A part of him immediately went to thinking on how to make an antidote, because he didn’t have one for his own poison, but truthfully, lots of water, clean air, and time would be best against fumes.
Fighting alchemy with alchemy was like fighting fire with fire—a last resort for larger threats that needed to be carefully controlled.
Micah blew the fog up and Jean gave him that control, shaping it into a temporary wall monsters would have to run through to get to them, wider and thicker near the top than the middle.
[Firebolts] punched holes in it and the base flapped where monsters ran through, but while the crude magic held for the next few minutes, it would slowly reform and expand as it sunk to the ground.
The benefit of being a spellcaster. Micah wouldn’t be able to force essence to stay in that shape without mana … right?
No.
Huh. He felt a tingling feeling in his chest at the prospect.
“Now help,” Micah said and raised his voice into a command, “thin them out and push through!”
“In that case, we go right,” Lea called back. “I’m not leaving without Spike’s crystal!”
“Of course,” he said, almost offended. They weren’t leaving anyone behind. Besides, Spike was cute and could kill most things in the blink of an eye.
The sounds picked up as Jean joined the fray. Four against the wave was closer to the fight where he had screwed up with the stone essence. Micah held his ground against the other monsters while they forged a path until they called out, then used a push of strength to run after them, cutting or bashing wounded Prowlers aside and dodging their tentacles.
The Kobolds must have stepped through the curtain of poison behind them, because they barked something and the shapes in the walls answered, chasing them.
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They had to run. If they stayed here for a few minutes longer than they already had, they would slowly be overrun. The Kobolds wanted to box them in and they had committed far more resources than they had anticipated yesterday—good for the other team, bad for them.
But why?
Micah couldn’t lead the assault or throw himself into a fight, stuck with the luggage in the back, so he had time to turn the thoughts over in his head.
Lea snatched up Spike’s crystal as she ran past and the thought came together: Just as they had made a plan to make sure the Kobolds couldn’t evacuate with their hoard, so had the Summoner made a plan to make sure they couldn’t run off with their equipment.
It didn’t just want to ward off climbers with its traps, it was out for items and blood.
Greedy.
Lisa had been right about monsters. It was all the more reason to take out the camp. But with things going as they were, he worried they might just succeed.
He tasted blood despite his mouth being uninjured, that weird phenomenon where smell or exercise could translate to the tongue. But he could smell it so … Silas, Kyle? Jean had been closest to him.
He doubted Lea was injured, with her father having outfitted her. Micah remembered what Anne had told him of her own equipment.
They would have to stop to treat their wounds soon, with potions if need be, to ward off a worst-case scenario. For now, he tried not to get hit by the mud Jean’s boots flung up as he ran.
Another benefit to running, the ‘mud’ they threw up behind them: the Prowlers would attack Kobolds and climbers alike. It could force them to take another route or else fight each other, in both cases buying them time.
Although guessing by the screams behind him, there was a third option where parts of both groups clashed and the rest chased after them.
Hurry. He sped up and slowed down in fits and burst, as [Surging Strength] pushed him forward and his luggage dragged him down. Something else to fix.
Ahead of the line, Silas stopped and called back a warning. Another trap, though he didn’t know what.
“So how do you know it’s trapped?”
“Gut feeling.”
Micah got closer and the tunnel looked just like any other, at first glance. Experience, pattern recognition, his Path, or maybe another Skill at work—the scouts hadn’t shared their full details with them, in part because they’d boasted so much about their own levels, he bet.
He remembered what Silas had told him about how his sight could make him a good [Scout]. He had thought something similar once, back when he had made his first steps along his Path and they’d gotten stuck in the Tower. Then Ryan had saved them with that plan of his and Micah had branched out into other things.
Ryan was awesome at what he did. He was the [Scout] of their group. But he couldn’t sense magical effects yet and wasn’t likely to get as good at it as Micah was anytime soon, so maybe he could go back to learning this one Skill, cover his weakness for him, and they could … rely on each other a little more?
It was stupid. He was stupid. He still walked forward while they paused for a second and said, “Let’s change up the marching order.”
Lea glanced at him, caught her breath, and shook her head. “I need to be able to fight—”
“‘Not trying to hoist luggage duty onto you,” he interrupted, “but they want our stuff, we might fall behind if we’re in the back with monsters behind us, and— yeah.”
That was a recipe for disaster. And I want to help find traps.
Silas gave him an almost knowing look and said, “Fine by me.”
Lea reluctantly let them pass and Micah searched the tunnel, but the other guy had figured it out already. He pointed and led the way.
It was hard to see from a distance, but there were wobbly holes that blended into the ceiling much like the dart traps. Silas’ finger moved and pointed at dart traps that were suspiciously low on the sides of the walls, near them.
“All-around dart section, so they have the best chance at hitting us with the worse poison?”
Micah saw a few hints of fumes and motes drift from the holes and shook his head. “Fire potion. The holes at the bottom are to drain it.”
“Got it.” Silas stepped back to them and glanced over their shoulders where the screams of Prowlers still sounded behind them. “Luggage in the front. Sprint through before we trigger it. Others … shield?” He sounded urgent.
Micah nodded and began to unstrap his own shield, both to make him lighter and to give Kyle something to cover himself with. He held it out to him.
The guy gave him a derisive look in turn. “What? No. It’s just a crappy fire potion, right? And we all have [Lesser Fire Resistance].”
“But our stuff doesn’t,” Jean said.
The sounds got louder. The longer they dallied here, the more likely the others would catch up.
He reluctantly snatched the shield away and the two of them took a few steps back to get a running start, then sprinted through the few meters of holes. A second after, the sound of something else splashed on the mud behind them and a few drops hit his legs.
They kept on running out of its range and turned back. Oily, yellow fluid flowed in steady strings from the holes, instead of the drowning wash Micah had expected.
Did they have some kind of funnel system?
The others were a few meters behind them to avoid splashing them with their shields above their heads and his mostly empty backpacks turned around to the front.
Micah smiled when he saw Kyle had done it, too.
“Backpacks are expensive,” he snapped and turned it back around, then shoved his shield back at him.
“Mhm.” Micah didn’t drop the smile ... until the first dart struck him, that was, and two dozen more followed.
The wall-crawling Kobolds had caught up with them, it seemed. And so would the others in a moment, he bet.
They moved to the crossroads to limit their line of sight and Silas hesitated again. Just before he turned to look at them, Jean pulled past saying, “This way!” and kept to the walls to let him take the lead.
The darts followed and so did the sounds. Prowlers didn’t have as much stamina, but they were faster when they had caught their breaths and could sprint in short bursts.
The metallic taste got worse, the sounds grew louder, and they had to rely on Jean to lead them because they had no idea where they were. The scouts’ maps had never gotten this far. They were probably only a few minutes away from the camp, just where the worst of the traps began, and Micah worried about every dart that came out of the walls and struck them.
“Which way?” Silas shouted back ahead of them.
“Left— No, wait a second!”
“What?”
“Max is almost here. We have to hold them off for another moment.”
Micah groaned but turned back around to face what was left of the charging Prowlers. Some were wounded and leaked light, and those wounds had festered as they ran—many monsters on the lower floors couldn’t heal from wounds, he knew. A single cut would inevitably kill them.
But they’d also followed behind through the shower trap and there was barely any fire potion on their fur. Drops, here and there.
Micah pulled out one of his very few fire shots and snapped it at one of their faces, but the beast just ran on through the fire and it washed over it like a flame instead of a burning fluid. It didn’t stick thanks to the subtle light blue glow around them.
“Their stupid octopuses make them fire-resistant!” he complained and switched back to metal shots.
“Octopuses?” Silas asked.
Micah hesitated. “ ... Octopi?”
“What?”
The wall Kobolds caught up with them again and started firing darts, so they slowly retreated— Right into a dozen spears that shot out of the wall and cut past their legs, drawing slashes of blood.
Micah groaned and twisted down to one knee. He tried to grab the spear, but the Kobold dragged it back before he could. Damnit, he had almost forgotten about those.
By the groans around him, the others had been hit as well. The beasts reached them just then and they stumbled away, cutting them down one by one or shooting curving bolts of light at them from behind their lines.
If they slowed down here again, because of these monsters, the traps or their wounds, it would be worse than last time as the strain of it all built up and the Kobolds had an even easier time repositioning this close to their camp.
They needed—
“Where’s Max?” Silas grunted.
Jean frowned, then smiled. “Behind us.”
Micah glanced back and saw a tiny, black bat crawl around the corner of the ceiling behind them, then push off and fly toward them.
He knew [Witches] could use their familiars as weapons, and he had hoped Jean might be able to do more with it by his side, but how was it supposed to help? It was an actual animal, as far as he knew. Or it had been, before magic had changed it.
Witches could do what Lisa wanted to achieve with Sam, except the summon would be dependant on them for life—and they could also do that in reverse, turning an animal into a monster through complicated Class Skills, similar to his [Infusion].
Bits of smoke trailed off the bat as it flew, as if the edges of its body were incorporeal. It seemed familiar.
Another Prowler jumped him and Micah focused on the fight. He bashed it aside while it raked his forearms and dropped the slingshot to put a knife in its throat. He shoved it off and slashed the next, his slingshot annoying him as it dangled around his knee.
A chirping, clicking sound came from behind and he risked another glance. The bat had grown larger. Pitch black wings expanding out in half-circles at its side. They and a long, thin tail trailed off from it like a butterfly or … or like that one sea creature whose name eluded him right now. They looked like flapping doormats in the water. He’d seen drawings in his textbooks.
Shadowy flickers of mana hovered around Jean as he glanced back himself, awaiting his companion with a hint of a smile. “Hold your breath!” he called out when it got closer. “Cover your eyes and fall back in— now.”
Max flew over their heads. Two giant winged shadows appeared on the walls next to them and passed over their heads like an arch. When it reached the Prowlers just beyond the crossroads, the shadows seemed to lift from the stone as giant wings, which it flapped together to drown them all in hot ash.
Micah pulled his bandana up against the pluming smoke and flinched away from a burning mote that flickered by his ear.
It stunk, but that could be a good thing. It might mask their scent and especially the scent of their blood.
Jean seemed to have the same idea because he called out to the chirping sound and commanded, “Go left, trail smoke, and swoop around to come back to me, okay?”
The bat said something else and its chirps grew distant as it flew down one way, leaving a trail of smoke behind it, and they stumbled out of the cloud down the other.
But the spears shot out of the holes in both ways again, striking blind, and Micah heard more grunts from his allies through the confused screams of the Prowlers.
A panicked one stumbled into him. The octopus spirit in its mouth had scrunched up a little like an aging vegetable. Did it not like the smoke? Once it touched his leg, it started screaming louder and thrashed. It cut through the cut on his leg. Micah grimaced, stumbling back, and almost slipped in the mud.
Where were the others?
He shoved it off of him to leave the smoke, but another threw itself at his shoulder, following the sounds of its kin.
He considered calling for help, but something stopped him. It was ridiculous, that he wouldn’t be able to handle two of these on his own just because of a bit of hot smoke and a few shallow wounds.
He started pushing and stabbing, but then a third joined the fray, and they piled on him and he was about to rip the bandana off his face to tear their stupid heads off with his bare lungs and hands, Lisa’s advice be damned, when he caught a glimmer of yellow light instead of the red flickers of ash and something stabbed the Prowler on him in the back.
It arched in pain and the figure planted a boot down to wrench it off him, then cut the next one down. Micah could handle the third on his own.
A glimpse of a yellow arm. His chest surged. Micah broke into a wide smile beneath the cloth as he clasped it to drag himself up and said, “Ryan—”
But the voice was different. When they stumbled out of the ash together, the tall figure of Jason stood next to him and said, “You alright?” He heaved as he caught his breath.
Micah frowned. Where had he come from? How had he found them? He must have run here, but more importantly, he was wearing the rain jacket over his clothes and—
He searched. They were all out of the smoke. Most of the Prowlers chased in the wrong direction after Max. There were no sounds of fighting still inside. And Ryan wasn’t here.
“Micah?” Jason repeated.
“Huh?”
“You alright? Your eyes look a little wide around the edges.”
No, I’m not alright.
“Where’s Ryan?”
And why the hell are you wearing his jacket?
He nodded as if he had expected the question and said, “He had to lead another wave of Cavern Prowlers away, or else we would have led them back to you.”
“A third wave?” Silas groaned, sounding out-of-breath himself. And in more than a little pain by the hiss in his voice.
“Yeah, he’s distracting them, then he’ll loop back around to come help us.”
What? No, that was stupid. Why would he run off on his own again, especially without the rain jacket? If he missed a trap and got stuck on his own—
“Where?”
“Uhm.” Jason swallowed with a flash of pain on his face and pointed back the way they had come. “Back that way a few tunnels, then northeast from there to loop around south and—”
He’d barely started explaining it when Micah got the idea and stepped back into the ash. He had to go find him, protect him. He had made a promise to his dad and … and Ryan had broken his?
Something felt wrong.
A hand grabbed his arm and pulled him back.