Allana sneered and batted a dire spider out of the air with one hand. She held her brass dagger, the long and slender one, backwards, so her brusque motion easily stabbed through the vermin’s carapace. But even as she cut it down, she felt the sting of another’s sharp fangs sinking into the meat right arm.

[Poison Immunity] - Triggered, Healing - Quintessence is consumed automatically to negate poisons affecting you. Cost is relative to potency and volume of the poison.

Most magical poison targeted a specific attribute with their effects, and dire spider venom was no exception. By lowering the victim’s stamina, those with the Warrior gift would find their primary resource for their special attacks dropping away. Given long enough, the venom would eventually exhaust them, making them easy prey for the pests, each of which was the size of both of her fists put together.

Unfortunately for them, they were still minor monsters, and their venom lacked the potency needed to threaten most battle-gifted. Even without her defensive ability, which could easily nullify the effects, Allana had more than enough resilience to resist the venom.

Of course, neither her enhanced resilience nor her defensive ability allowed her to ignore the pain of the dire spider’s bite, and she swore, the curse echoing in the dark alley. She dropped her daggers, both disappearing the moment they escaped her grasp, and the dead spider that had still been stuck to the end of her brass dagger fell to the cobblestones. She raised her left hand up, and when she brought it back down, it now held her thick, heavy-bladed iron dagger, which easily cut the pest off of her.

[Ensouled Item Conjuration] - Active, Conjuration - Conjure the ensouled item bound to this gift. No cost. Current conjurations: iron dagger, brass dagger.

Allana’s instincts twinged, and she took a quick step back and lifted her right hand, conjuring her brass dagger just in time for the dire rat that was diving down to land on the outstretched blade. It hadn’t been any gift ability that warned her that time–just the instincts of a lifetime in Lowrun’s alleyways. Once again, her dagger vanished, letting the rat corpse fall to the ground, and she looked back towards where the alley had split.

“Seo?” she called out, her voice slightly muffled by the layered linen mask she wore in a (mostly futile) attempt to ignore the smell of Rainbow Square. “How you doing?”

There was a second of silence, followed by a series of the odd, hollow humming noises Tenebres’s magical attacks made. Another second of silence was followed by a yelp, another humming noise, and a wet squelch sound that made Allana wince.

Finally, Tenebres responded, “Yeah!”

“You’re doing ‘yeah’?”

“Yep! Everything is fine over here. No worries.”

Allana couldn’t help a grin. The boy was as skilled as any Novice she’d ever met–in more ways than one, she thought, her grin gradually growing wicked at the memory of the night before–but he was still inexperienced. He had fought alongside her on half a dozen jobs like this, but then they had always had Geoffrey looking over their shoulder.

“Rats or spiders?” she called out to him. While they spoke, her eyes surveyed the alley for any further indicator of movement. The minor monsters were, ultimately, little more than distractions. It would be the lessers leading them that were the real threat.

“I got rats,” he called back. Before Allana could reply, she suddenly heard another yelp from the boy, followed by the scuffs of him scrambling about and another pair of humming projectiles.

Allana took a cautious step in his direction, her iron dagger suddenly resting in her hand, but she only made it a couple feet before he called back, “Okay, rats and a spider.”

Allana furrowed her brow, and quickly rounded the corner to the alley Tenebres had been clearing out. The boy was slouched against a wall, one hand crossed over his chest to clutch his other arm. Despite the pressure he applied, a trickle of blood leaked down to the cobbles of the alley, though Allana couldn’t guess if it was from an actual attack or a byproduct of his weird augment, which allowed him to harm himself to enhance his magic.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her tone softening in a way only Tenebres managed to pull out of her.

“Yeah,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Just dandy.”

“The venom…”

He shook his head. “The spider didn’t bite me. One of the rats just got some scratches in before I could get it off me.” By some chance of the light, this alley was better lit than the one Allana had turned down, which was why she had left it to him. Tenebres wrinkled his nose as he looked at the splattered remains of one of the dire rats.

Far and away the most common dire vermin in Emeston, the bloated rats were the size of an alley cat, and while one lay battered and broken farther down the alley, the other lay dead at Tenebres’s feet, its corpulent body smashed. Allana arched an eyebrow at it, and Tenebres admitted, “That one weaved about a bit.” The look of disgust on his face intensified as he noted, in a tight voice, “I’m gonna need new boots.”

“We’ll find you cute ones,” Allana promised. She turned her attention back to the dead vermin. “Is something about this weird to you?”

“What do you mean? Rats and spiders, just like Geoffrey said.”

“Right, just… I don’t know, I expected they’d be fighting each other as much as us. Or that they’d at least be in two separate nests. I didn’t think they’d attack together like that.”

Tenebres frowned at the observation, and his crimson eyes swept up and down the alley. “No sign of the big ones, either,” he pointed out.

“Should there be?” Allana asked. Geoffrey had provided them a brief primer on the two lesser monsters they were looking for, but she had left them to Tenebres. The boy was an enthusiastic reader, a habit Allana found odious. She could muddle through well enough if she needed to, but why bother? Tenebres could explain it to her much faster.

“Maybe not the orbweft. It’s essentially just a dire spider that survived long enough to soak in more life magic and grow bigger and smarter. But darkmaws are hunger-aspected–they normally spawn from a dire rat that lucked out and ate a magically-rich corpse. I’d expect it to come hunting for us, rather than risk its minions getting the first taste.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Allana pursed her lips. “Is it smart enough to be sending the little ones at us to soften us up?”

“I don’t think so?”

“You don’t sound very sure about that.”

“I’m not.”

#

“You’re right,” Tenebres announced, “something is definitely wrong.”

“I’m so happy you agree.”

Around them were the remains of the third wave of minor monsters since they entered the tangled web of alleyways surrounding Rainbow Square, and it had been the most fierce yet, numbering well over a dozen dire rats and half that in spiders. The vermin were weak enough that the pair could kill any one of them with a single clean attack, but in those numbers, their own flaws were showing through more clearly.

Both Allana’s daggers and Tenebres’s force missiles were, by their nature, precision attacks. They were exceptionally effective against other battle-gifted, and more than sufficed when they were able to keep up with the number of vermin, but this attack had been a desperate action for them. By the end, they had been forced to back away, Tenebres holding up a disk of force to slow down the miniature horde while Allana methodically killed the ones that slipped through. Blood covered both of them, as much from Tenebres’s blood magic as from the attacks the vermin managed to land.

And still there was no sign of the actual lesser monsters they had been sent to hunt down.

“You should take a potion,” Allana told Tenebres. They had each bought a couple health potions weeks before–unlikely to be worth much mid-battle, considering the dubious nature of the alchemist they had purchased them from, but enough to heal them up from minor injuries after a fight.

“No,” Tenebres said. His voice was tight with pain, and blood was running liberally from under his matted down sleeves.

“Stop trying to impress me, Seo,” she told him sharply. “Here, at least let me bandage them up…”

She reached for one of his arms, but he jerked away from her. “No!” he repeated more forcefully.

Allana blinked, trying to ignore the feeling of hurt she felt at his reaction. “Seo… c’mon, you can’t keep moving like that.”

“It looks worse than it is,” he insisted. Still, his voice was rough, and tight in a way she wasn’t used to from him. Allana narrowed her eyes, inspecting him more closely in the darkness. His shoulders were hunched, as if his entire body was being pulled taut, and he kept his eyes on the ground, half closed. He was breathing hard, much harder than even the fight had demanded, practically panting.

“Tenebres…” she called his name softly, and he sharply raised a hand, as if motioning for silence. She watched with an odd, almost alien, sense of concern for her first friend, but she stayed quiet. Still, she slipped closer to him, her feet quiet more by habit than by any gift ability, and wrapped her arms around him from behind.

She felt the slender boy tense at her touch, but then, like a dam breaking, he relaxed, suddenly gasping for air. This close, she could feel as much sweat covering him in a light sheen as blood.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him. She kept her voice to a whisper, speaking softly right into his tapered ear.

He shivered a little, and she couldn’t tell if it was a reaction to her closeness, or another piece of his internal struggle. “It’s my gift. The other one, the one I don’t like using.” Allana nodded gently, recalling the story of the ritual chamber and his gift of the void.

“It’s hurting you?”

“No,” he told her. His voice was tight again, with a different kind of pain. “The opposite… it knows when I’m in danger, and it wants to be used. It desperately wants to be used.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” Allan asked, keeping her question gentle. Even after her stories, her understanding of what the gift could do was vague at best.

“Very. You… you don’t know what it’s like. I can’t control it. I-I have to keep it locked down, or…” his voice cracked, and he paused to take a shaky breath.

“It’s okay,” Allana told him. “It’s okay now. We did it. Everything is okay.”

Tenebres responded with a jerky nod and another sharp breath. But slowly, the boy put himself together, and Allana just continued to hold him while he did. She felt useless. She didn’t know what else to do, how to reassure him with anything more than an awkward hug…

Finally, he said, in a more even tone, “Okay. I’m okay.”

Allana nodded, and carefully stepped away from him, as if he was made of glass and might break if she moved too quickly. He turned, and gave her a small nod, and a smile even Allana could see was forced.

“Okay… you need to take a potion now, okay? You’ve lost too much blood.”

Again, Tenebres shook his head. “No. I was serious about that. I promise, I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not, Seo.”

He sighed, and admitted, “Well, I’m okay enough. I think I figured out how to catch at least one of our targets.” He gave Allana a shy smile that set her heart pounding, and added, “You’re not going to like it, though.”

#

He was right, Allana reflected silently, I don’t like this.

Ahead of her, Tenebres slowly crept down the alley, occasionally stumbling in what Allana hoped was a feigned fashion. He had convinced her that while the darkmaw might be too cautious to attack two obvious battle-gifted, it might be more enticed by a single wounded target. The boy hoped that the smell of his blood would be too tempting for the monster’s dim intelligence to resist.

Meanwhile, Allana paced along behind him, both of her daggers conjured and slathered in a moderate poison. She had wrapped herself in her best veil, hopefully hiding herself from even the overgrown rat’s senses, and was ready to spring forward as soon as anything attacked the vulnerable boy.

[Obscuring Veil] - Active, Illusion - Manifest an illusion that partially masks you from conventional senses. Veil is most effective in darkness or other obscuring conditions. Minor focus cost recurs as long as the veil is active.

So far, they had at least avoided any further attacks by the minor dire vermin, which had been Allana’s first concern. Hidden as she was, it would be hard to help Tenebres without revealing herself, but she could only assume their fighting had made some dent in the pests’ numbers.

Ahead, Tenebres paused. He looked back at her briefly, and Allana had to admit he was managing a good act. He looked more like he was sweeping the alley for danger than signaling her. She crept closer, and saw what made him pause–a stairway set into the side of the alley, crookedly making its way down into the depths of Undercrawl. Allana wavered a little in place.

She had been to Undercrawl, the maze of intersecting drainage channels, sewers, and natural tunnels that honeycombed through Emeston’s underground, a few times since she had started working with Geoffrey, but she was pretty sure Tenebres had never entered the lightless complex before. It was dangerous, even more so than Lowrun itself, and home to no small number of monsters–as many of them human as not.

An unfortunate side effect of her veil was that it suppressed her to all conventional senses. Just as it hid her from view, it masked her scent and any small noise she made, ensuring that the jangling of her bracelets or the scuff of her boots wouldn’t give her away. But it also meant she couldn’t whisper to Tenebres to advise him–she’d have to all but shout for her voice to carry through the veil, and that would spoil the entire endeavor. That meant there was no way to discuss the wisdom of entering Undercrawl without revealing Allana to any monsters that may have been observing them.

Tenebres pursed his lips, but finally, he held up a hand and started down the stairway. As he did, a light seemed to flicker into being around his fingers, a sourceless globe of crimson light that cast about as much dim illumination as a torch. Then he began his descent into Undercrawl.