Breaking Step, Draft 1, CH 61 (Patreon)

Jackal pushed the boss-room’s door open with enough strength they slammed against the wall with an echoing ‘boom’ through the large room. Dusting off his hands, the fighter stepped in and waited.

“Same as last time?” He looked at the others. “Get rid of these, then you and Don figure out how to not trigger the next attack?”

“And if we can’t, we blast those too,” Tibs replied. “We know what to expect, and I don’t have to hold back.”

“Actually,” Don said, “why are you holding back? You said that you can drain the life out of the creatures. Wouldn’t that make all this fighting simpler?”

“More boring, you mean,” Jackal said.

“Me and Sto have an arrangement. I don’t use my element to win the fights, and he doesn’t make things so hard no other team can survive.”

“They can do that?”

“He’s the dungeon. He can do anything.”

“Don’t the rules prevent them from it, though? The way you explained that part to me, dungeons don’t exist to just kill everyone, but to force us to grow stronger.”

“But he can use me as the level of power he needs to match, so if I have it too easy, he’ll make it harder.”

“Then how do they account for your multiple elements? That makes you the equivalent of multiple members on a team. If not multiple teams.”

Tibs looked up.

“We’re figuring that out,” Ganny said. “This is the first time you’ve made constant use of multiple element while fighting.”

“But,” Sto said. “It isn’t like you’re good with most of them. Other than Water, you’re basically Upsilon—”

“I say Rho,” Ganny interrupted, “because of the raw volume of essence he can use.”

“But you’re going to be heading to the fourth floor soon, so I figure that’s going to balance things.”

“But if you overdue it on this floor, I will have to make adjustments to the creatures.”

“They’re working on it,” He told Don after he’d pieced together what they meant. “But I’m not good enough with the other element for it to make much of a difference on the next floor.”

“Which means this floor’s fighting could be more difficult if we stay here while you master them.”

“Two things,” Jackal said. “I say bring on the hard fights so long as the loot matches it. And we’re not staying here once we’ve cleared this room. I want fourth floor loot. And how about we get to clearing this room already?”

“That’s three things,” Mez pointed out.

Jackal counted on his fingers. “Two. Clearing this room isn’t a thing. It’s what’s happening now.” He stepped forward over the activation threshold, and the mass of creatures rushed them.

* * * * *

Tibs skewered golem person, a fighter also wielding water, and looked around. The last of the bodies crumbled to rubble and any not close to his friends melted into the floor, leaving silver behind.

“I want another one like this!” Jackal yelled at the ceiling. He was the only one on the team without serious injuries. Don was pale, leaning against the wall, and Khumdar hung close to him, limping. Mez’s bow arm hung limp, and Tibs didn’t know how he’d stayed in the fight if he’d been unable to fire it.

“No one moves any closer,” he instructed. “If you do, Jackal, you’re fighting them alone.”

“I wasn’t—” he raised his hands. “I promise, I wasn’t thinking about it. I’m the new, smarter, Jackal, remember?”

“That was a rather low bar to clear,” Don said, “and clearing it doesn’t mean you’re now that much smarter.”

“He’s smart enough to stay on Kroseph’s good side,” Mez said as Tibs went to him.

“Isn’t that a given, seeing how they’re special to one another?”

“You’d think so,” the archer said, “but it took him a surprisingly long time to learn to stop trying to explain himself and make things so much worse in the process.”

“Now I just nod and accept my punishment.” The fighter grinned.

“We don’t want to know,” Tibs warned.

“Maybe you don’t, but—”

“No,” Khumdar said. “Tibs is correct. However your man goes about keeping you in line is for you and him to experience and then keep to yourself. I do not believe any of us had done anything to warrant the torture of you explaining it.”

“You’re just jealous of the love my man shows me,” Jackal said dismissively.

“Isn’t it fun how our leader’s always talking about the love of his man like we don’t have our own?” Mez said.

“I…” Don trailed off.

“Really?” Mez asked. Then Tibs had to hold him up as the relief of his healing arm weakened his knees.

“I’m actually surprised you feel you have love,” the sorcerer replied. “The way you talked about that arrangement isn’t… favorable to that.”

With Mez steady again, Tibs moved to Don. He hadn’t seen the sorcerer take the damage, but the way the essence was broken in his chest showed he’d been struck multiple times by a first or some other blunt weapon.

“I have accepted that my position is at her side, and I am trying to see the light through that stormy cloud.”

“That is quite… honorable of you,” Khumdar said.

Tibs formed the weave out of purity and applied it to Don’s chest.

“I wish to be a man,” the archer said, then sighed. “But there are times she makes me wish I could keep being a child.”

“She’s not the kind of noble you’re looking to be?” Jackal asked as Tibs moved on to the cleric.

“She is… she tries.”

Tibs saw the light on the words out of the corner of his eyes, but remained silent.

“I had Tibs’s problem. But in the opposite direction. Where all he saw was the bad nobles did, and couldn’t imagine they were able to do good. I was raised with the ideal of how good a noble is. Dealing with those I encountered here dampened my illusion, but I could still believe my kingdom wasn’t like theirs. Only, it also is, if to a lesser degree.”

“That sucks,” Jackal said.

Khumdar nodded to Tibs once he’d healed him, and he moved on to the next problem.

The pattern on floor by the left column was the trigger that controlled the appearance of the next group of creatures. Interacting with it last time had triggered the attack. He couldn’t know what had caused it in the interaction without interacting with it again, but once detail he’d remembered was how this floor was filled with interconnected triggers.

The problem was how to figure out if there were other triggers in the room that were linked.

“Khumdar, do you sense other secrets in the room?”

“Many.”

“Are any of them connected?” He looked at the cleric when he didn’t answer.

“I am uncertain what you mean.”

“You sensed the trigger by the column. Are there other triggers like it?”

“I believe you misunderstand what I sense. I know there are secrets throughout this dungeon. There are some it is actively hiding, others that are hidden through circumstances. Some feel like they wish to be discovered, while other desire to remain hidden. I can point to more than a dozen in this room with ease, but I do not have a sense of them being triggers. Only of being secret.”

Tibs nodded. “It’s about mindset. You’re not a rogue, so even if you are about secrets, you’re not going to think about them the way I do.” He looked at the room again. He could sense how the trigger by the column was a secret now that he knew it was there, but he wasn’t adept at using Darkness. Or it might be Khumdar’s status as a cleric of the element that granted him a greater awareness.

What Tibs had, were options.

He let go of Water and channeled Darkness.

The trigger was more noticeable, the surrounding shadows deeper. Looking at the room, he saw more pools of darkness on the floor, the ceiling and walls. Even the unmoving dragon at the end of the room was clothed in a shadowed shroud.

But he didn’t see enough.

He suffused himself with Darkness.

“Tibs?” Jackal called. The fighter was looking at him, but his gaze was searching.

“That’s… is that how you vanish, Khumdar?” Don asked.

“I suppose there is no point in keeping this hidden anymore. Yes. Tibs had filled himself with Darkness. He has made himself a secret you cannot easily perceive.”

“But you can?”

“I have more experience. And he is not seeking to hide. It is only a normal reaction of being engulfed by the element.”

Tibs crouched and studied the patches of shadows. There were connections there, he was certain of it. It felt right for the way Ganny did things. He just had to figure out how to see that.

“What are you seeking?” Khumdar whispered next to him, but when Tibs looked, he couldn’t see the cleric. He focussed and thought he felt a sense of a secret there, but he wasn’t sure it was more than his imagination.

“I’m trying to see how the secrets connect to each other. I thought that by suffusing myself with Darkness I’d sense more, and I do, but it’s either not enough, or just not something that Darkness does.”

“Darkness does what we will it to do. Some is about thinking in the proper way, other about weaving it or etching it, and yet more is about how much of the essence we can pour into what we want. Can you suffuse yourself with more Darkness than you are doing now?”

“No, there isn’t an amount of essence I’m using. It just fills me. Isn’t it like that for you?”

“It is, but you are different, so I do not desire to assume you can only do what I do.”

“What happens if I filled my channels with Darkness?”

“I do not—”

“I can sense your channels.”

“Now?”

“Before. You, Don and Jackal have them. Yours are… denser isn’t the right word. But I can tell you’ve been practicing with them longer than them.”

“And you have them too?”

“When I absorbed all that fire, there was so much of it I couldn’t put it all in my reserve, so I tried to push the extra in my body, the way I sort of discovered about suffusing. It didn’t add more to what I was suffused with. Instead, it pooled along the channels, filling it ever denser, and when I released it, the channels were still there. Don said they’re used to create specific effect, but he didn’t tell me why and I didn’t think to ask since he was already giving me the Oneness training to work on.”

“Can you tell where the channels go?”

“Everywhere?”

Khumdar chuckled. “If that is how it is for you, I suspect I will not be able to help.”

Tibs focused on them and separated the sense of the channels from the rest of his body. “They go from my head down to my chest, they split to my arms and legs. There’s sort of like a knot in my chest, my crotch, my arms, and my feet.”

“Your head?”

“No, it’s…” he frowned. “They’re smaller. Four of them, sort of floating in the middle of my head.”

“One is near your forehead?”

Tibs nodded.

“That is… I call it the node of sight. Don will have the correct term for it. When I guide Darkness to it, I see more of the secrets hidden around me. It is how I can see you now.”

“So all I need to do is—”

“Stop.”

“Why?”

“This is not something simple, or without risk. My initial attempt did not result in anything of use. It… did something to me. I do not understand what, but I advise against attempting it without the guild’s training.”

“So I need to take it slow.”

“Tibs,” Khumdar warned.

“I need to find out how the triggers are connected. It’s the only way we’re going to make it through without having to fight all the creatures Ganny has ready for us.”

“Alright, but you must use only the smaller amount of Darkness possible. It is too easy to fill it too much and…”

He nodded and pulled a filament of darkness from his reserve and guided it to the channel. It made contact, and Tibs nearly lost control as more of it than he’d guided was pulled within the channel. He fought to keep it from spreading in bought direction along the channel, then wrenched it out.

“Are you well?” Khumdar asked.

“It was like the channel wanted to suck all of it.”

“That is why you require training. We can return when—”

“No, I know what to expect now. It just took me by surprise.” He took hold of a filament again and tightened his grip as he inserted it into the channel. The pull was strong, and in both directions, as if the channel didn’t want to remain empty now that it had a little essence in it. “What happens if I let the channel fill completely?”

“At this time, I do not believe it would be pleasant, or that you would survive it. If you do not believe you can maintain control of the essence and guide it, you must stop and accept that this will have to wait.”

“I have control.” He forced the essence up the channel to his head, then to the node behind his forehead. Again, there was a pull to fill it, and Tibs held the essence back.

He sensed the difference before he opened his eyes. The secrets were more defined, almost had a shape to them. Looking at them, he could almost make out forms within the shadows.

“I need to use more Darkness, I can just barely tell.”

“Be cautious, Tibs. It is easy to go too far, and this is not the place where you wish to do so.”

Tibs nodded and fed the node more essence. The forms became defined, but didn’t resolve into something he understood until he glanced at Mez. One shadow in his chest had the form of two people holding hands. He considered adding more essence until he could make out who they were, until the woman started to look familiar and he looked away.

He almost lost the grip on the essence as lines of darkness shot from one shadow in the room to the other, marking which ones were connected.