We approached the forest of stone cautiously at first, but my paranoia proved unfounded. The place was silent. Unusually silent. There were no warning cries, no birds among the rocks. Instead, the corpses of lizards, harvested and hollow, sat as warnings in the open. We stepped over and around dessicated corpses through the quiet, before we came upon the first of the birds.

We were on it before it knew we were there. Kim was on it instantly, practicing the forms I showed her— her spear passed through its body, and it thrashed.

She turned and slammed it into a pillar.

“That’s not one of the forms.” I said, speaking up to talk over the din the bird monster made as it bounced off the stone.

Kim smiled, grunting as she slammed it again. Something shifted inside of it where the spear was, and the monster still.

“I’m making a new form up. I think I’ll call it Piercing the Beating Heart at the Ends of the Earth!” Her voice changed to a serious tone at the end, even as she pushed the bird off her spear and worked the point into its chest.

“Piercing the Beating Heart…” I whispered aloud, feeling the sound out, then translating it in my head. “No, that doesn’t sound elegant in either language.” I replied.

“You don’t think it would be fun to shout mid combat?” Kim asked, turning. “Its intimidating! Doesn’t really have magical girl energy though…”

I sighed. “You really shouldn’t call out your attack names.”

“Don’t worry.” She smiled. “I already have all the forms down.” To prove her point, she performed Slaying the Dragon Swallowing the Moon, then rotated through the full set of forms in succession. “Not even a problem. Easy.”

I nodded. “Then all we need is the Qi, and I can guide you through aligning with your aspect tonight.”

I started walking forward, looking over what the bird was doing— it was looking away from us when we arrived, and on the ground before it was a lump of raw meat, covered in scale. It was bringing food back from somewhere, probably from one of the lizards we had seen.

Two more of the bird creatures interrupted my thoughts by slinking out from behind mushroom pillars and into the small clearing we were in. They eyed us wearily, looking between the corpse, the meat, and us. One of them started to stalk forward, making a questioning squawking sound with its mouth. They moved erratically on the ground, with twitchy, fast movements, their head moving from left to right then staying perfectly still for seconds at a time.

Kim lunged, stabbing her spear through its head, then flicking her spear. The head caught somewhere inside of the birds skull, and the second bird lunged towards her. I kicked it to the side, causing it to stumble over. The bird’s bodies were inordinately light, probably as an adaption for flight. Hollow bones and thin, gaunt forms made them fragile.

My knife cut through its skull with hardly any resistance.

Kim pulled her spear out of the bird, flicking it to free the viscera from it before stabbing down again to pull the beastcore free from its chest. I obliged her and ripped a second out of the other bird.

Our hunt became routine as we carved a twisted route through the forest of pillars.

After a dozen kills, we found ourselves in another opening. One singular pillar sat in the center. The rest of the ground was sunken around it. Kim scanned the area carefully, pacing around the opening and scanning between the pillars. After she was satisfied, she sighed in relief, leaning against the pillar and sliding down.

I looked at her appraisingly. Perhaps I was driving her too far by rushing into the gate like this.

It was cathartic to me, at least.

“How’s the balancing act?” I asked, crossing my arms and leaning near her on the pillar.

“Its intense.” Kim said, her mood lowering the farther we paced into the dungeon. She let out a sour laugh. “Its supposed to tingle? Right? Its like theres lightning in my veins. But I barely have to think about cycling it. It almost moves on its own.”

“After this I’ll have to show you how to attune it through the forms. We’ll need somewhere to practice under starlight.”

“The church will work fine. The clergy doesn’t come by often outside of the sermons.”

“Whats up with the church anyway? You hang out there a lot. Is the priest your father or something?”

“Ah, no, I got involved with the church after the Awakening and the gates opened. My father died during the event. We weren’t talking much at the time.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to bring it up.” I replied. What else is there to really say to that? There is no one to target to revenge, really.

“S’fine.” Kim replied. “Everyone lost something during the Awakening. Places, people. Homes. Really, it can be good to talk about it. Acknowledge change.”

I swallowed at that. Was it good to acknowledge change like that? I had spent my entire life keeping my emotions bottled or risking my own death, to the point that I didn’t even notice how badly I had neglected raising my son. I was blind to the culture of my sect, pursuing power to survive.

“What was he like?” I asked.

Kim stared into the haft of her spear.

“When I was young, he chaperoned one of our schools field trips. It was to an aquarium.” Kim paused, swallowing. “He lifted me up on his shoulders to look at the fish tank. He was loving. Bad at showing it. The field trip was one of the last good memories I had of him.

He was a veteran. He would wake up in the middle of the night, screaming. I remember waking up to him waking up, panicked, prowling down the hallways. It was like he was in another world. He left when I was young.” Kim paused. “I had assumed he just didn’t love my mom, that he left her and found a new family.”

“He was on the street?” I asked, staring at her, considering.

She nodded.

“I couldn’t be there for him. I couldn’t understand as a kid, but he was struggling. I didn’t know. Couldn’t have known until I got a letter in the mail as his next of kin. So I spend almost all my free time running this little food bank and mutual aid program. Can’t bring back my dad, but maybe I can save someone else.”

“That’s… admirable.” I replied.

We sat in comfortable silence, resting for a few minutes to recover. The wind made strange sounds over the alien landscape, whistling as it blew over the forest of stone. The lack of flora meant that it whipped the landscape, kicking up drifts of dust.

I heard something like a twig snapping in the forest. My head snapped that direction.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

Kim pulled herself up, readying her spear and staring upwards.

“No?” She ventured.

There again, a second footfall. And a third. All around the clearing.

“On the ground. All around us.” I stretched, limbering up, feeling a smile creep up my face and my heart pound with excitement. “How much more Qi do you think you can handle?”

One of the birds stumbled into the clearing as if he had been pushed, nearly falling to the ground but catching itself last moment. It cawed a noise of betrayal.

“Honestly?” Kim said, pushing off of the pillar with the spear extended. “None.”

“Good. If you’re at your limit, that means you’re ready to get started.”

I dove forward and drove my knife into the side of the birds head, pulling it free to leave its twitching corpse on the ground. The wind whistling alerted me that another had chosen that moment to dive at me from the row of pillars, sailing through the air.

Kim impaled it in a single upward swing, and then there were half a dozen of the monsters on us. I dove through the fight, dodging claws and spinning, lashing out with my knife at the ones on the ground while working to avoid the ones bombing us in the air. they would brush low along the ground, swinging as they dove only to slam back into the pillars of stone, climbing them and repeating the sequence. By the time all of them entered the clearing, there must have been 20 of them, counting the 2 we killed.

Kim grunted as she swung the spear, pushing the enemies back and away from her, and I used their displacement to wind between them, placing dagger blows on open marks. Within a few seconds, we dropped the number of living enemies to 16, but the enemies closed in around me.

One swung at me from the left, which I dodged, ducking backwards, and then there was another swinging and another diving. I moved out of the way of the one diving, only to take a slash up my side in exchange, renting through my clothing. I grunted, killing the 2 that had swung at me on the ground, lowering their number to 14.

The next few moments were an absolute blur of manic hacking and slashing. Kim’s weapon had longer reach, so she correctly prioritized killing the monsters diving. The others just acted as distractions for them, and I worked to keep them off Kim, but the diving monsters slowed down, spending more time between each jump.

They sat on the rocks, looking back at each other in silent communication, but by the time they had agreed on a decision, we had whittled the ones alive on the ground to 6.

All 5 of the remaining dive bombing birds dove at once, swinging towards Kim.

She couldn’t dodge them all.

3 came at her from the front, where she readied her weapon, and 2 came at her from behind. I threw the knife without hesitation, running forward and kicking off one of the bird’s bodies. My knife landed in one of the birds, k4nocking it to the ground with a sickening death throe.

Kim would have to figure out the three in the front herself. I landed on the second bird behind her, plunging it from the air. Its beak cut my hands as I pounded its face, and we tumbled together in the dirt.

There was a sound like an engine roaring, and I turned to see a flashing row of light echoing from Kim’s spear. Two ghostly copies of it, ethereal and transparent, formed in midair, impaling two of the descending birds. As she spun the spear into the birds approaching on the ground, the ghostly emanations followed it, and she thrust, perforating the crowd all at once.

I struggled to my feet, finishing off the corpse of the bird before fishing a potion from my pocket. One of the ones I had remaining had broken, but I drank one, before hesitating while looking at the second.

Kim’s breathing was ragged.

“You good?” I asked. “Didn’t know you had a move like that.”

“Yeah…” Kim panted. “Takes a lot… out of me. Felt like… a little easier that time.” She smiled, showing teeth.

“You want the beast cores?” I said, looking over the pile of bird corpses.

“Nah.” Kim replied. “Let’s get out of here.”