Sera was trudging through the undergrowth with the rest of the guides, mind elsewhere – running numbers, cataloguing vessels, half-listening to the sounds of the formation moving through dense foliage – when Mira fell back to meet her. Mira cleared her throat.
Sera looked up.
"Hey," Mira said. She scratched the tip of her nose, wrinkling it. "Thanks for covering me. During the golem fight."
Sera eyed her. Mira looked fully recovered – even though yesterday she had been coughing up a lung, body weight entirely dependent on Sera's support, half dead and stubbornly trying to aim for the golem's eye. Now, she was keeping pace, body back to maximum vitality.
Three of her needles were resting in their quiver. Two of them, the length of rapiers, floated at her shoulders. The dark-silver sheen caught the light filtering through the canopy.
The one nearest to Sera drifted uncomfortably close. Almost like an excited puppy.
"You did the work," Sera said, watching the needle. "We took the golem down because of that shot."
Mira looked at her for a moment. An odd quality to it – like she was checking something. The needle hummed faintly.
"My needle actualized," she said. "Theor. Well – was Theor."
Sera took that in. Mira had been an armament priestess for seven years. She had seen Mira, relentlessly communing to get him under control. Had heard she'd been at it for two years. Had seen her diligently focused every second she could get in every training session, every break, in literally every moment she had ever known the esper. The needle that Mira had said had been picky and particular and proud, the one she loved specifically for those qualities.
"That's a big deal," Sera said. "Congratulations."
"Yeah." Mira's eyes dropped briefly to the bandage that started on Sera's palm and traveled up the entire length of her arm. She raised an eyebrow, said nothing and looked forward. "He renamed himself. Goes by Absalom now."
"After actualization?"
"Yep." Mira stepped over a rock. "Said he chose it after a friend. Another weapon."
Sera glanced at the floating needle. It buzzed pleasantly at her attention. "Weapons have weapon friends?" Sera said, half-teasing. Funny lil guy, she thought.
Mira chuckled in agreement, her mouth curved slightly. "Apparently."
They walked. A root crossed the path and they both stepped over it without breaking stride. The formation moved ahead through a patch of thicker undergrowth, the sound of boots on wet earth steady around them.
"That polearm you mentioned," Mira said. Casual. "At lunch on the mountain. What was her name again?"
Sera glanced at her, surprised. Mira wasn't looking at her – eyes forward, expression neutral, navigating a patch of soft ground with careful steps. Sera had mentioned Salome on a whim, and hadn't expected anyone to remember it. Hadn't expected anyone in the squad to believe her – except for Yoru. Mira had seemed thoroughly occupied with her stew and her uncooperative needle.
"Salome," Sera said.
"Mm."
Mira made the sound like she was confirming something. She gave Sera one long sideways look, green eyes flashing with something Sera couldn't identify. Then gave her a grin – small, private – and patted her heavily once on the shoulder before moving back ahead toward her formation position.
Sera watched her go, puzzled by Mira's action.
She turned their conversation over as she walked.
"Mira…" she muttered, under her breath, "Actualization…weapons…friends."
She climbed over a large boulder, slid down some moss, landed back on the soft, wet earth.
"Absalom," she mused, looking at Mira's back in the distance ahead, her brown hair tied in a ponytail.
"Absalom…sa–lom," she paused, red eyes widening. Her breath hitched.
"...Salome?"
✦ ♡ ✦
Sera kept walking. The formation moved around her – boots on wet earth, the occasional call of a formation adjustment, the jungle pressing close on all sides.
She had pressed her awareness outward first. Through the formation around her – the espers moving in their lines, weapons drawn or holstered, the particular mana signatures she had been cataloguing since the raid had been announced. She knew all of them by now. Holt's stable steady output. Kael's warm scattered fire. Simon's yellow arcing current.
She checked the weapons too. Beatrice's golden warmth. Yoru's unnamed dagger, cool and precise. Absalom – she found him immediately, the needle floating at Mira's shoulder ahead. The puppy. It hummed with a pleasant recognition when her mana tendril touched it.
None of them felt like Salome.
She pushed inward then. Through her own mana and vessel, through the beast and its hidden chambers, through the guiding channels she used for work.
Salome had been a polearm. Red lacquer. A weapon given to her by her Instructor. The weight of something that had learned to balance itself against her specifically. She had carried her for three years on Ratiora. She had watched her disintegrate – the portal closing, the physical form dissolving, the mana scattering into nothing in the space between worlds. She had watched the entire thing, from start to finish, her weapon dying and disintegrating into nothing in her hands. Refused to look away.
She didn't feel her now either.
She was about to pull back when she felt it.
At the very edge of her vessel, some corner she hadn't noticed. Faint. So faint she might have dismissed it as background noise.
Something there that was foreign and cold and smelled like lilies.
"Formation – halt!"
Rena's voice cut through the jungle. The line slowed and stopped.
Sera's attention snapped back to the present.
Through the trees – white marble. Too clean, too deliberate, the stone catching the dungeon light in a way that organic things didn't. Steps. Columns half-consumed by roots and vines. A structure that had been here longer than the gate had been open, something the System stole and dropped into the dungeon like a diorama piece.
The raid force fanned out at the tree line. Nobody spoke.
The temple sat in a clearing at the jungle's heart, wide marble stairs leading to a platform, the entrance dark between carved pillars. Tentacled things moved at the foliage's edge – slower than the other jungle creatures, deliberate, watching.
The front rank shifted. Someone's boot found the first step.
The howl came from everywhere at once.
A wretched, wrangling screech – something that occupied more than just the hearing frequencies, moving through the mana in the air and the ground and arriving as wrongness before it arrived as noise. The temple's ambient mana spiked and thickened, the air warping the way heat warps above summer asphalt – the treeline behind it liquid, shimmering, wrong.
The dungeon quest interface reappeared – blazed across everyone's vision simultaneously.
< Dungeon Quest >
Defeat the golems. 5/5
Defeat the High Priest of the Catalogue. 0/1
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
The tentacled things in the foliage lunged.
The raid force erupted.
✦ ♡ ✦
Rian saw the tentacles before the screech arrived.
He had been reading the formation – sight lines, angles, the way the jungle compressed their options – when his eyes found the foliage's edge and something in him went very still.
Dark. Green. Moving with the unhurried deliberation of something that didn't need to hurry.
He knew them. His violet eyes burned.
Not the way you knew a creature from a briefing or a field report. The way you knew something that had ended you. The particular shape of it arriving somewhere below cognition.
The last time he had seen them he had miscalculated.
He always miscalculated. That was the honest truth of it – forty-four lives and he still couldn't reliably gauge the threshold. His blessing unlocked near death. Evolve or die. Not at death – near it. He had discovered it in his twelfth life and confirmed it as fact in his sixteenth – the cruelty and exact mechanism of his fate bestowed by a god.
The closer he got to dying, the closer his body was pushed to the brink – approximation to the reaper – was what unlocked the next increase in his mana output – in his power and ability. He leveled up every time his suffering danced on the threshold of elimination. Cruel.
The margin between those two things was one he had never been able to accurately measure. Too far from the edge and nothing happened and his friends would die. Too close and there wasn't enough left to recover and then he would die.
Last time had been too close.
The tentacle had moved faster than he'd processed. He remembered that specific fraction of a second – time stuttering, the horizon tilting – pain and then nothing. And then the familiar lurch of regression, weeks back, the same morning, the same bed, the same crushing certainty that he would have to do it again.
On his forty-third life, he had lost at the first gate.
The dungeons always changed. That was the nature of them – the System shifting the variables, the layouts, the creatures, the sequence of bosses. He had learned to adapt. Had built his strategies around the assumption that what killed him once wouldn't be waiting in the same configuration twice.
The farthest he had ever gotten was his thirty-sixth life. He had evolved three times, before being obliterated once more in the third gate.
This temple appeared last time.
Now it was here again – on the first gate. Twice in a row. Was his god toying with him?
Rian clenched his fists – pushing down the unsettling panic that simmered in the pit of his stomach, breaking through his apathy. A cloying sense of despair that this life would be exactly like the previous one.
He swallowed.
Rena's voice cut across the formation – halt – and the line stopped. Rian was already moving, already reading, already calculating angles and sight lines and the positioning of people who were about to encounter something he had died to once before.
The formation looked to him.
"Weapons out," he said. Even. Precise. The voice he used when the thing underneath it couldn't show. "Front rank holds the line. Don't let them reach support."
He pulled out his scythe, let his mana burn through it, purple waves drifted thickly off the blade.
Arlen's boot found the first step.
The screech came from everywhere at once.
✦ ♡ ✦
The first tentacle moved before the screech finished. Guardian of the temple, something monstrous, prowling around, and blocking their advance into the crypt.
It came from the left – thick as a tree trunk, dark green, faster than something that size had any right to be. Rian was already moving. The scythe came up and through in one arc, the dark violet mana along the blade cutting clean.
The tentacle fell.
Another replaced it immediately.
They were everywhere – emerging from the foliage, from between the temple's columns, from the undergrowth the formation had just marched through. Not charging. Probing. Testing the line's edges for weaknesses, for gaps, for anyone standing slightly out of position.
The formation held.
Barely.
"Close the gap on the left!" Rian shouted, already moving to demonstrate. "Don't let them isolate anyone."
He had fought versions of this before. Not this configuration – this specific temple was new, the positioning and architecture and coloring different – but the creatures themselves he knew. Their patience. The way they didn't rush because they didn't need to. The way they snapped like lightning when they found an opening. They were looking for the moment someone's attention split.
Last time his attention had split.
He didn't let himself think about last time.
Behind the front rank, Sera moved through the espers, those who were injured and those who fell back for recharge – the first wave of tentacle strikes had caught two espers before the formation fully closed. The raid team in formation, pushing against the mounting chaos. She was already there, hands on necks, pulling pollution, returning clean mana. The guide work running automatically while the rest of her was somewhere else entirely.
Something cold. Smelling like lilies. Something pulled at her attention.
But this wasn't the time, she thought.
She wiped her mouth and moved to the next one. Didn't watch her flank.
That was her mistake.
The tentacle came for her from the right.
Sera saw it late – attention split between the injured esper at her feet and the formation's shifting edge. No time. She was lucky she already had her daggers in her hands, there as a precaution. She pulled them up instinctively, crossing them in front of her face.
A guide's daggers against something that thick.
Across the clearing Rian saw it. Knowing what he knew about those tentacles, knowing the speed – she wasn't going to make it. The tentacle would rip through the blades and crush into her skull in half a second. Something lurched in him that he didn't have a name for. His body turned toward her. But even as he moved, he knew it would be futile.
Sera knew it too.
Had estimated in that fractional second, the strength of the tentacle, the damage that the monster had inflicted on espers in the chaos. This could kill her. This would kill her. Potentially decapitation, if her arms didn't keep the right position. She saw it in slow motion and calculated that the best she could do was mitigate the damage.
She stiffened like lightning, mana flared through her body, armoring her bones, muscle, and skin. It was going to hurt like hell, but if she wasn't dead, that would be a success. Kept her eyes wide open.
And then something cold flowed from that corner in her vessel, moved through her hands, poured into her daggers – slithering so fast, warp speed, like it had known every vein and artery in her body.
With a flash, dark red mana danced along the blades and her forearms – reinforcing the steel and her defensive position. The tentacle hit her crossed daggers, and Sera felt a familiar sensation wrap around her critical organs in a flash. Her daggers cracked, elbows bent, tentacle crushing into her body with a crack and Sera was thrown careening into the jungle foliage. Heard Rian's voice shout in the distance.
She was flying – wind whistling, head throbbing, body cataloguing damage, waiting for the pain to erupt.
She couldn't do anything but bear through the moment.
Something warm, soft, and firm caught her body, a separate sideways momentum intercepting her trajectory, and then she was pressed close against a heated body, and they crashed through the jungle flora. Breaking through trees and brush, rolling and tumbling and hitting rocks and painful terrain before coming to a sliding stop some far distance from the chaos of the fight.
Sera coughed and winced, breathing as small as possible. The pain had erupted with a flare so strong her vision turned white with her eyes closed tight. Definitely some fractured ribs. Amongst other things. She noted a throbbing in her ankle and a burning in her abdomen – something torn in her gut. A dizziness in her skull. Her mana reinforcement had helped – would have died without it. She directed some of her mana immediately into staunching her wounds before carefully bringing her attention to the outside world.
Waited for her vision to settle, breaths short. And then opened her eyes.
An arm was wrapped around her waist.
Yoru's voice was warm against her ear.
"You okay?" He heaved, spitting out a red cough and grunting in pain. Sera was lying on top of him. He was laying on the ground. His long black hair messy, now untied, littered with jungle foliage. Covered in scratches, his head bleeding from a hidden wound. Blood dripping into his left eye. Yoru tenderly pushed himself into a sitting position, clenched his teeth from the pain. Sera shifted and settled into his lap from his action, also wincing from her own injuries.
Yoru had grabbed her when she was whipped backwards, altering the trajectory in which she was thrown back. He had grabbed her mid-flight and covered her, his own body hitting the floor and taking the brunt of the fall damage that would have inevitably made her life much worse, if not, extinguished.
She frowned, he didn't need to do that.
Sera assessed him quickly. His mana was cycling wrong – the impact and roll through the jungle had disrupted his system, the pollution spiking from the sudden physical trauma. Cracked ribs, a major concussion, and definitely some punctured organs. Bleeding internally. Not at death's door yet but still critical if she didn't do anything.
She grabbed his face.
"Hold still."
She pressed her mouth to his – efficient, practiced, the guide work running the same way it ran for everyone else. Pulled the pollution in and pushed her own mana in its place. His system took in the mana eagerly, instinctively stabilizing and patching his body. She pushed more in gratitude – more would make him heal faster and stronger for combat. Yoru closed his eyes, clearly enjoying the moment.
She pulled back. Wiped her mouth.
Yoru blinked, licked his lip, then grinned.
"Can I have more?" he teased, raising his eyebrows, his breathing fatigued and in pain.
"Shut up," she said. "Not the time. Can you stand?"
He climbed to his feet, albeit at a gingerly pace. His tired face set into resolution – he was triaged, he was ready to fight, he could succumb to the pain later. He twirled his unnamed dagger, his long hair cascading down his shoulders, scanning the chaos ahead.
"Obviously."
She stood too. Her ribs protested. Her head throbbed. Sera pushed mana through her bone fractures and padded her organs – not enough to fix, enough to function. She'd deal with it later. Like everyone did.
The fight was still running.
She picked up her daggers.
"You don't need to protect me," she said.
"I know," he said.
They ran back into position.