Rhen rose the next morning to the smell of something divine. It was fish for certain, but there was a sweet acidity to the smell, too. He could hear Jakira’s humming something gently and the grinding of stone on stone.

He put on his clothes in a flurry, and emerged to see Jakira working a rudimentary mortar and pestle. That must’ve been what weighed her pack down so much… In it, she was grinding a thick purple-red paste.

“Good morning,” she said cheerily and jumped to her feet. “Mr. Aki is getting some more fish—I already ate mine, sorry! I was so hungry. But here, try this berry jam I made!”

She pulled Rhen up to the fire and served him a slice of a roll with a smear of sweet cream and a drizzle of her jam. Rhen’s mouth salivated at the smell. He didn’t hesitate to take an enormous bite.

First, he tasted the dense, salted honey bread, slightly charred from being held over the fire. As he chewed, the cream and the jam mixed, bringing a rich, sweet and tart moisture to the crisp bread.

“Well?” she asked, nervous.

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” He shoved another bite in, chewing vigorously.

She smiled, cheeks glimmering. “Really?”

He swallowed the huge bite. “Well, you’re talking to the guy who eats monster meat soup on the regular, so it’s not a hard bar to exceed.”

She rolled her eyes with a smirk. “At least I’m beating monster meat, I guess.”

Aki surfed down through the brush and sloshed to a stop at the fire. Rhen could feel his smile in the way his skin pulsed from yellow to pink.

“Just learn how to do that, did you?” Rhen asked.

“I have moved quickly through water before when hunting prey, but never have I allowed water to move me quickly.”

Rhen smiled. “Seems like you’ve finally had some fun.”

“It was exhilarating. I will do it again later.”

They finished breakfast and packed up a bit of the jammed bread for a snack in the dungeon. Rhen’s stomach tightened at the sight of the dungeon entrance. He paused and watched Jakira descend the ladder while Aki poured himself over the edge, as usual. Why was he feeling nervous to go in?

Jakira would be fighting her first monsters, but he was confident that he and Aki could protect her if she were in any danger—though Aki might wait to the absolute last second to put himself in harm’s way…

No, it wasn’t that.

What if there were no monsters? What if that was it? There was nothing left in the dungeon. All his dreams, now theirs, dashed, and Rhen to blame for dragging them out there.

“Come on slow poke.” Jakira waved.

Rhen nodded and got onto the ladder. No point in worrying about an uncertain future.

They passed through the empty hall to the fork, and this time, went right. Rhen took the lead by a good margin, activating caress of night as he did. The spell caused a constant drawing sensation from the syntial on his back that spread over his skin like a cool blanket in waves. The continuous drain on his anima from the spell was noticeable, but with his upgraded boots, he could feel that he was balanced. He could maintain stealth permanently without running out of anima.

He would show Aki just how sneaky he could be.

The dungeon tunnel sloped downward and the air chilled on Rhen’s face. Aki pulsed brighter, creating a soft yellow ambient light by which to walk. The gray walls darkened, reflecting sheens of blue the deeper they descended. Excitement built in Rhen’s chest as he rounded a tight hairpin curve in the tunnel to—

A dead end.

His breathing stopped and he stared at the walls. His fear wasn’t unwarranted then. Rhen deactivated caress of night and stood from his crouch.

“No monsters?” Jakira pouted.

“It appears that way,” Aki said, the disappointment clear in his tone.

No.

This couldn’t be it.

Rhen put his hand against the far wall. “Step back a bit.”

When the others were out of the way, Rhen focused on channeling tremor blast at the lowest possible frequency through the butt of his palm. He breathed slowly, feeling the vibration travel through the rock. It died out abruptly, and Rhen grinned. It was hollow on the other side.

“Time to mine.”

Rhen chipped a good hole in the wall to start, then Aki wore it down with his water until a burst of air blasted through from the other side. Rhen moved up to the hole, sucking down a deep breath.

Fire.

He exhaled hard and blew flames into the next chamber, illuminating it brilliantly for a flash. The walls were green and seemed to… slither. When the flames died out, Rhen could hear rushing water somewhere farther into the next chamber.

Nothing tried to bite his face off through the hole, so Rhen focused his tremor blast and broke off bits of the wall until there was a hole wide enough to step through. He cast a light breath into the room and saw it well for the first time.

Throughout the room were long, green vines about as thick as Rhen’s forearm coming out of the walls. They wiggled, stretching upwards from holds on the walls made by two, three, and sometimes four lumpy gemstones. Right below the stones were tufts of blue-green moss that looked sort of like fur.

Rhen stepped through onto the slick stone on the other side. He pulled a crescent blade from his hip, holding it out toward the green vines that seemed to pay him no heed. They opened large blossoms at their ends that captured trickles of water that came from somewhere above in the darkness. Maybe they were under the river right now.

“Smells like licorice.” Jakira wandered toward the bulbous lumps hanging off the wall and ran her fingers through the moss that covered them. “So soft. I bet I could season the fish with it!”

“That must be the Father’s Fennel,” Aki said.

Rhen sniggered as he understood why. It bared a close resemblance to… well, the tools of fatherhood.

“Jakira, want to collect some? We have a request for some of that from the baker in Yu, Fennica Wheatle.”

“On it.” Jakira pulled her dagger from its sheath.

Aki moved to the center of the cavern, stepping through little stalactites on the floor. He paused under the drizzle of water and held up his hands. Little ripples cascaded across his body, and he closed his eyes.

“It is mildly acidic.”

Jakira cried out and Rhen spun around. One of the thick vines of the father’s fennel had wrapped around her wrist. Jakira slashed the dagger across the vine, making little white cuts across the surface but doing very little damage. Rhen waited, despite his need to lurch into action and protect her.

The vine monster pointed its flowery top at her face, and opened its petals to reveal sharp needles lining the inside. The flower snapped at Jakira and Rhen lunged forward with swift twitch. He severed the head off the plant, and the vine went limp, gushing milky blood down the padreote lumps below it.

The severed blossom head opened and snapped several times at Jakira’s feet and Rhen kicked it away. “Are you alright?”

She stared at the wall, mouth agape. “That plant tried to eat me.”

“Everything will try to eat you down here.”

She turned to Rhen, wide-eyed. “I think I need some training. Using a kitchen knife on a potato is not the same as a dagger on a monster.”

Rhen looked around the room at all the accessible monsters which were, in his opinion, easy pickings. The dangling vine of the monster he’d attacked ceased its bloody gushing and the blossom regenerated, much smaller than before. The vine lifted back up toward the dripping water, replenishing itself.

“Okay, let’s practice.”

“On these crazy things?”

“They are manageable opponents for us,” Aki assured her.

“I don’t want to slow you down. Maybe I should go practice stabbing the tree next to my tent,” she offered nervously.

Rhen put his hand on her shoulder. “You can do this.”

The fear melted from her face, and she nodded. “Okay.”

“How did you get it to attack you in the first place?”

She stepped up the father’s fennel tentatively, then pointed her dagger where she’d been cutting. “There’s like a root or something that runs over the gemstone, and I nicked it while trying to cut the moss.”

Rhen looked at the spot more closely to see the padreote glowing softly below the root of the father’s fennel plant. It was drawing anima from it. That’s how it must survive! Pure anima and acid rain. What a strange plant.

He pulled on some of the furry fennel gently, then ran his blade across it. The top of the plant didn’t seem to notice anything had happened. Then, he poked the tip of his crescent blade into the root nestled around a facet of the padreote. Immediately, the little blossom pointed down as if to look at who had offended it so. It lunged for his hand and Rhen snatched it, holding it still.

“I don’t know if you’d be able to behead it like I did, but give it a shot.”

Jakira moved forward uncertainly, then slashed at the monster. She made a narrow cut across the newly formed neck of the monster, and it leaked more blood. It wriggled free from Rhen’s grasp and pulled away.

Aki moved closer. “Perhaps try stabbing it.”

Rhen helped Jakira adjust her grip on the blade. With even more apprehension than before, she stabbed at the monster. Her blade pierced through the base of the plant where it connected to the wall and the monster hissed, then went limp.

“You must’ve hit its core.” Rhen reached into the hole made by her dagger and removed the eyeball sized core from the milky mess.

“So that’s why you’re always covered in guts…” Jakira said, finally understanding.

“What, you thought once they died they just spit the cores out of their bodies?”

“I never thought about it.”

He handed her the slimy core with a smile. “You earned this.”

Her face puckered and she accepted it. “Great.”

They killed a few more of the father’s fennel plants and realized that once the core crystal was removed, they didn’t regenerate. Rhen could see the plants being a decent source of farmable income, especially if the blossoms and furry moss could both be used, so they decided to leave the rest be and move on.

Rhen resumed his place at the front of the pack, donning caress of night. They stepped around stalactites and reaching father’s fennel until the room opened to a larger cavern lit by glowing green gemstones in the walls. Thousands of father’s fennel plants wiggled joyously, tapping the power of the padreote and creating the green ambient glow.

“Mind your step,” Aki said, pointing out a circular pit like-drain just in front of them.

The water flowed in from the large cavern as well as the smaller one behind them in little streams that had carved a path over years. The streams flowed over the edge and down, down, down into the darkness before them, creating the waterfall sound Rhen had heard before.

“We’ll have to explore that later,” Rhen said as he walked through the stream to get around the hole. They didn’t have enough rope, or the right equipment for spelunking like that.

A soft whooshing of air Rhen had barely noticed before made itself much more apparent the farther he moved into the cavern. It sounded almost like… breathing. Then, he spotted the large, stalactite covered boulder at the center of the room as it moved up and down with the rhythmic whoosh.

Rhen stopped in his tracks. “Shh.”

Aki dropped low to the ground and pulled up beside Rhen. “I am sorry I did not detect it. The ambient noise and movement is creating confusing signals.”

“Quiet, or it will detect us before we can murder it in its sleep.” Rhen moved forward, walking heel-toe and dodging rocks and streams. He was stealth incarnate, and this monster would have no idea what hit it.

As he edged closer, Rhen could see finer, more terrifying details, like the fact that the monster—while laying prone—was six feet tall. Its wide, muscular back was lined with sharp spikes of varying length that looked like stalactites. Those spikes created a hard shell down the monster’s spine up to its short, stubby face. It was one of the hounds he’d fought before, and its clawed paws were coated in milky-white blood.

The hound cracked one massive eyelid to reveal a bright green glowing eye. Rhen held incredibly still, but his confidence waned when the monster’s breathing pattern changed. It’s dark-green pupil shimmered purple as it pinned on Rhen.

Perhaps he was not stealth incarnate, after all.