Micah’s return group shuffled past a Giant Toad hitched to their cart. They set down their loot sacks, unhooked the buckets from their torso straps, and slipped off their harvest baskets with a groan.

Cathy was there one second too early with a smile like harsh sunlight, somehow out of place on the mountain veranda.

She was one of the alchemists in their year who rarely made an appearance in the workshop. Like Saga. Except, Saga and Stephanie sometimes showed up to hang out with Delilah or work on their own projects. And they didn’t suddenly act like friends in front of the first years while trying to hijack their project.

It might have been an uncharitable view of her. Cathy did a lot of volunteer work in and out of school.

Still, they had to push back every now and then or she would overrun them. After she debriefed them and rotated the next group out, they did so with a grumble and a line of stinkeyes walking past.

His team sorted out their loot. The leaves, branches, and bark from the colorful palette trees they had dismantled were separated. He used [Shape Fluid] to scoop his buckets of sap clean. The dead Attack Bird went into the icebox, the crystals into containers. To finish, he threw a few [Chill] spells over the cart and his team and they drank in the cool air.

Ahh, much better.

“Stand back!” Cathy interrupted their coldbath. “Cart moving.” At her instruction, the Giant Toad got its feet under itself and hauled the cart forward with lurching steps. Into the shade of a chasm.

The walls of Morgana’s Roots swayed around them.

Gaps ran through the stone in regular intervals. Large enough for the smallest automatons, insects, and some of the monsters of the floor to crawl through, but not large enough to squeeze into—though rumor had it some people had tried and gotten stuck.

Mason told him spelunkers who got stuck in the wrong position could die from their own circulation. Micah thought they would have gotten crushed long before that happened.

If he peered into the shade long enough, he could make out the barest glints of distant mechanisms and hollow spaces. If he watched long enough, the gaps shrunk and widened like inflating lungs. The ground swayed like he was on a boat.

Morgana’s lowest floor was a mountain of cubes, stacked and swaying like lanterns on a string, each filled with tunnels, traps, and rooms much like the chamber of the guardian golem he had fought.

The outermost layer was missing, creating an even walkway along the edge of the tenth floor—’the veranda.’ It was wide enough for three carts and had stretches of grass and tiny hills with trees that extended over the side.

Far below, they looked out on the chasms and cramped mesas where they’d fought the Collector.

Above them loomed the cloudy Root, where they’d seen the blurred speck that had been Morgana, and the twinkle before its lightning storm had struck down.

He thought of Anne and Sion. How Sion had stuck with her. How she had trusted him but not Micah.

He wished he could have shared this view with her; could have climbed up the side of the veranda along the vines of its rocky exterior with Ryan; could have written a letter to his sister—she was an [Explorer]. Look at all the wonders, the free levels, she was missing!

The good news was, Morgana was dead! And after its death, a wave of treasure hunters had dismantled her halls and looted her vaults. Mostly.

All that remained was a ghost town of roving monster bands and unchecked vegetation waiting to be harvested. And on the last Friday before the new school year, while every other student was getting hammered in bars or basements—or attics, rather, after the storm last night—they had that ghost town all to themselves.

He turned away and stepped into the shadowed tunnel. The roots and moss and insects inside the walls charted the corners and lines of the world around him.

[Detect Life]. He could feel his classmates as well, and himself, all thanks to a potion he had brewed on a whim … All because he had killed some Tower essence.

Not killed, he corrected himself. Destroyed? Ex … expended?

Objectively, he knew every time he, or someone else, cast a spell, a bit of Tower essence was expended. It was a component of mana after all. He’d realized as much a few weeks back … at night when the silver fog had been his only companion during practice.

But it wasn’t like he was an archmage. None of his spells even had a mana cost that breached the double digits.

And the Tower essence hadn’t seemed perturbed. The opposite, really. A part of it survived the spells and potions. It came out of the experience … refined. More aware. Sated by answers. So what was its deal? Some sort of blood sacrifice?

‘Some of us may die, but that is a sacrifice we’re willing to make’?

‘All of us are equal, but some of us are more equal’?

Or was it like a fungus? A singular, massive organism stretched over a forest, and expending itself was part of its life cycle?

Or did he finally have to accept the fact that it wasn’t alive? Not really? And he had been alone during cantrip practice that night. As he had so many days and nights before then.

He wanted to be okay with that.

Micah walked over to a gap in the wall and cast, “[Freeze].” The flying serpent with kite-like wings that shot out of the wall—a bundle of lines in his mind’s eye—tensed up and hit the ground. He whacked it on the head, cast the spell again, and added it to the cart.

“On three,” Mason said. Kyle gave a noncommittal grunt and waited before he lifted the pressure plate with a pry bar. Mason did the same opposite him.

A seam split down the middle. The plate snapped shut, metal teeth penetrating the thin layer of stone. An ant-like automaton as large as his forearm clung to one of the walls of the dark shaft below, mandibles like a bear trap.

Kyle snatched it by its neck and held it with a thick glove. Mason tossed him one end of a rope and they hurriedly tied it around it while its metal limbs thrashed and it tried to bite their arms.

“Plier.” Kyle held a hand out.

Mason ignored him and took the plier past its metal frame himself. It reached into its exposed innards of glass tubes, crystals, and a grafted Honey Ant stomach and said, “Wave incoming, quick fliers from behind you above, swarm below.”

He tapped the plier against the edge of the shaft with a metal ting. Mason was one of the few who had drunk a life-detection potion, because he was the only one who knew how long their potions would last. [Bill of Health] apparently. Kyle’s old Skill.

Kyle snatched his axe off the floor and swiveled, cutting down a flying serpent that descended from a gap in the ceiling behind him.

Using lures in this place meant there was no scouting around corners to find idle monsters waiting in place. Whenever they moved, the monsters that entered their radius came rushing toward them, including those in the cubes above and below.

Mason dragged the automaton to safety, still hunched over and working on detaching its parts.

Dark caterpillars the size of pythons crawled out of the shaft, plated with sharp hairs that fanned left and right with each contraction. Metronomes that could slice up legs and knees—or arms and throats when they crawled along the walls. They did so now.

If it weren’t for their crystals, he would have just dropped a rock down the shaft. He had to wait until they moved from the gaps before he killed them, or those might tumble into the unknown.

The trick was to use a spear— Kyle didn’t own a spear. The trick was to squat down as if he was taking a shit and use the low sweeping motions of a scythe.

The caterpillars crowded him quicker than he could kill, and more of those flying snakes showed up, as well as spiders like moldy clawed hands.

He was about to back up when Mason hurled a globe of acid. It bit into the monsters like oil in a frying pan. They hit the ground, hissing and bubbling, before they burst.

“Good metal,” Mason commented with a tap on the dead automaton.

Kyle shrugged and collected the crystals like bundles of silver yarn. The alchemists were taking their share of the loot in ingredients. Metal sold well in Hadica. They didn’t mine, they had to melt loot down. This would mean better pay for him.

He hadn’t even touched his prize money from the tournament yet—not that quarterfinalists earned much. He would have been better off doing this all summer. He was good at this. Fighting monsters. Helping ‘defenseless’ alchemists.

Disarming traps, he thought bitterly. That shouldn’t have mattered either, the tournament planners had had it out for him anyway, but his pride still stung.

They cleared the way to a cube filled with rolling hills and headed back. The student council girl rotated the next team out to harvest the area. They dropped their loot in the cart and basked in its chill like a fish market.

“I don’t get what the big deal is about. Alchemists can fight just fine.”

Mason eyed him in passing. He stepped away from the smoking vials attached to the side of the cart. Kyle could have done without the smell, too.

But the multi-colored fog parted around Micah, forming a bubble of cold and fresh air large enough for two, and Kyle wasn’t about to give up his seat for someone else. He let Mason wander off.

Sitting on the edge of the cart, Micah didn’t turn to look at him when he replied. That was new but no more odd than his usual behavior. “We’re going all out. We can’t do this every time we go into the Tower. We’d never make a profit—at least, not without scaling up the risk.”

You mean they can’t, Kyle thought. Though Micah wasn’t the only one with useful Skills to save costs. Exhibit A: he eyed the Giant Toad croaking gently in front of the cart.

Not that he expected Micah to acknowledge that. When they had smoked together, he’d been as excitable, uninhibited, and emotional as always, just physically more relaxed. Almost like he had been tipsy rather than high.

Sure, it might have been because of his increased tolerance as an alchemist, but he hadn’t stared off into the world through a warped lens—he already always did that.

Kyle had realized: Micah had been halfway high for the last four years.

How he envied him.

“Most of what I’ve seen you guys do is no different from mages. Or archers.”

Mason could hurl acid and blowtorch holes into monsters. It was honestly disconcerting. Alchemy was already a dubious practice—temporarily grafting monster blood onto people with long-term detriments. Did they need spells like that?

By extension, any alchemist who didn’t go into medicine or science was a shady character in his eyes. All of the ones here and Micah especially.

“Anyone can learn basic spells.”

“Not me.”

Now, Micah looked at him. “Oh. Because of your …”

“Mana’s in the single digits,” he said, but Micah inclined his head toward the glove on his hand like he thought that had something to do with it.

He raised it with a frown. “I’ve been wanting to ask, do you know anything about this? Didn’t you want to study it?” Not that he wasn’t relieved he had never followed up on that.

Micah glanced at the student council chick, Mason, and two others who were nearby, eating vitality cubes and sipping stamina tea on their break.

His voice was uncharacteristically low, which, for Micah, was still a stage whisper, “I mean, sure but uhm … You should ask Lisa if you have questions about that.”

Lisa. Why would she know? Kyle curled a lip and grunted. “Lisa isn’t here. I asked you.”

“I mean … I guess … I could be the Lisa for once!?” Micah sat up with a light in his eyes as he finished the thought. “The student becomes the master.”

“Sure.” Kyle grabbed a bottle of stamina tea for himself—dirt cheap courtesy of three of the shady characters here, including Micah.

“Mana capacity. Right. Soo like, you know how some people can eat tons of food and struggle to build up muscles or fat?”

Kyle broke off his swig of the drink. “Wait, no—”

But Micah was already launched into it, ”That’s because our bodies are predisposed for certain stuff. I think our spirits can be similar. Without a full diet or good exercise, they need to prioritize where to invest resources.

“For us, that’s mana. Because of Tower essence and the auras all around us. I think. For you, you already had a … Skill”—he whispered—”since birth. One that can protect you. So it prioritized that instead. I think.”

Kyle let his objection fade. That was close to what the doctors had explained to him, once. The same idea in different words.

Micah rambled on, “But people can still overcome those predispositions, right? Like, it takes effort but most people can build up muscles and fat if they try. I think some take pills to help? That’s kind of similar to …” He trailed off and snapped back to attention. “But like, some stuff can drastically change how our bodies work. Disease, injuries, starvation, intense exercise. And our spirits are even more malleable. If you got a few levels in a mage Class, you could probably shift your spirit’s— Or maybe with a good enough diet, it wouldn’t need to prioritize. Then you could have just as much mana as—”

“Micah, shut up.”

He looked upset. “Huh?”

“I don’t want to be a mage.”

“Oh, but … why did you ask then?”

“I thought you could tell me how this thing works. Or … I don’t know. Something.” He needed something. Anything to point him in a direction.

“It’s a Skill.”

He bit back an insult. “I told you, it wasn’t a Skill until I turned—”

“No, I’m saying it’s a Skill,” Micah interrupted him for once. “It’s functionally identical. Your uhm, thingie didn’t become [Lesser Regeneration]. It always was … Probably.”

The guild doctors hadn’t told him that. They often mused about how they wished they had blood samples of him before he’d gotten the Skill. Hadn’t Lisa said the same? That it’d changed?

His trust only went so far. He respected the doctors who’d spent a decade studying sorcery over the kid living on a green cloud.

… But he couldn’t help but prod. Micah was shit at talking. Maybe he was just using different words again and meant the same thing?

“I don’t see anyone else getting glowing tattoos when they level up.”

Micah made a face. “That’s just cosmetic. A window, remember? It’s like … Look—I mean look. There.” He pointed at the end of the tunnel they had come from.

Kyle was about to ask what the hell was he was looking for when he noticed the line of shade where the ceiling cut off the sunlight. It dipped and formed a circle like the arm of a puzzle piece. Then the circle began to glow.

“Law of magic,” Micah said, “perception is power. By giving my undivided attention to the light essence, I give it power. Many types of visual magic tend to glow.” He jerked his chin at his hand. “Same thing.”

“ … Wait.”

Kyle didn’t believe anyone had ever uttered the phrase, ‘I need to sit down,’ in real life before, but he suddenly wanted a chair.

“Wait.”

“I’m not—”

“Are you telling me because some dumbfuck looked at my great-great-great— whatever grandparents for too long, now I’m stuck with—” He couldn’t even finish his thought because the council girl was rousing from her notebook. Another group returning with loot.

“An archmage maybe …?” Micah looked dubious. He dismissed the thought. “No, it was probably a large group. Something cultural that developed over generations. Maybe your ancestors meditated a lot, or it was a rite of passage, or divination tattoos that became inherent.”

“Great,” Kyle cut him off. Who cared about the culture of those savages? “How do I get rid of it?”

“Uhm.” Micah glanced at the entrance where the circle of light had disappeared. He shrugged. “Iunno.”

Well then what good was he? If it was attention that had made it this way … He had [Silent Steps]? What was the opposite of divination?

Did it matter? He was struggling enough with his grades that he’d had to find a tutor. There was no way he was becoming a mage.

… generations of attention. How was he supposed to undo that?

“Are you okay?” Micah asked.

He scoffed, “No.”

“Oh. Do you— I mean, you heard me out when I had to vent …”

Kyle glared at him. “I leveled in [Rogue].”

Micah nodded along. “And that’s bad because what you wanted all along was friendship.”

“Fuck off.”

“Team B!” Cathy hollered. “Assist processing. Mason, tell team E to standby until the next team rotates out. Search for hidden treasure. Micah— Get off the cart!?”

He shot her a stink eye and jumped. Mason went to do as instructed. Brent’s team had returned with one of the giant beetles that hid in gaps between the cubes—flat and with long front limbs like scythes. It was dead but hadn’t burst into smoke.

That was a good find. Its chitin was metallic like the centipede guardians on the lower floors. Plenty of value for both of them.

Her toad dragged the cart forward to meet them halfway. Micah shot him a look and, when Kyle turned away, ran off to help.

He wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. Kyle had spent weeks surviving in the Tower at the start of summer. He’d leveled in all of his Classes and in [Rogue] twice.

Then he’d gone to that stupid party, spent one evening smiling and shaking hands, and leveled again in the morning. [Rogue] was not what he had thought it would be.

He caught up with a lazy greeting, “The [Hunters] return.”

“Gimme some of that,” Sarah told him.

Kyle tossed her the bottle of stamina tea. She knocked it back like water. Lukas and Brent began to dismantle the beetle to save room on the cart. Micah hauled their bags of loot over and sorted out their contents.

Kyle stuck with Sarah. He wanted the bottle back and didn’t mind standing next to her while he waited. Or in general.

She was one of Lukas’s friends, which should have been a poor reference. Nine out of ten of her friends were guys, and she was a [Scout] but may as well have been a hunter. Yet, she had a thing or two to say about [Fighters]—something to do with crime statistics?

Her hair was shorter than the usual female climber cut, too, and she rarely wore make-up, but Kyle didn’t get the sense that he wouldn’t have a shot. Excepting the embarrassment that had been Micah and Ryan, he still thought he was a pretty good judge of that sort of thing.

She wiped her mouth and tossed the bottle back. He struck up a conversation before she got beetle juice all over her arms, “I’m surprised the rest of your little clique didn’t come.”

“Thanks. Yeah, no, Conner had to help his mom at work, and Patrick wouldn’t come to something like this.”

Kneeling in front of one of the open sacks, Micah butted in, “Why not?”

Kyle shot him a glare. His leg twitched but he was outside of booting range. Then Lukas winced on the opposite side of them and it became a group thing. “His dad was a harvester.”

Great. Yeah, no, Kyle definitely didn’t want to be a part of this conversation. He took one of the sacks and headed to the cart. There was work to do.

“Oh, did he— Is he no longer with us?” Micah asked carefully.

“Nah, not that. It’s complicated. Legal issues.”

The next sack he inspected only had a rolled carpet of greenery inside. He lifted it onto the cart but kept glancing at them with a confused expression.

Sarah explained, “You know how when you work for a harvesting company like the Madins, you get your regular pay and anything you take out of the Tower belongs to the company? Normally.

“His dad had a workday that wasn’t normal. Monsters attacked them, and the Madins skimped out on safety measures for their harvesters. They got separated from their group and had to survive off the beaten path as middling [Harvesters] for a day and a half.”

Micah’s eyes went wide. The Gardens were high in the Tower, but large groups of low-level [Harvesters] could still go in every day and collect food for the cities so long as they followed a few odd rules they had discovered over the decades.

Rules like how many Garden monsters would only attack you if you attacked first, or that they wouldn’t attack you at all so long as you stayed on the beaten paths.

Micah could barely survive the eleventh floor with preparations. His dad must have survived the equivalent of the twenty-fifth floor on the fly. “Wow. He made it out?”

“Yup. He was wounded, course, but they found a chest. The thing is, though—”

“The Madins tried to sweep it under the rug,” Lukas cut in. “They barely apologized for not protecting their own and demanded ownership of their loot. His dad went to court over it and it took the dumbass judges two years to find some common sense and give it to him.

“Course, he lost his job and had to pay the legal fees for two years. Even if he won, that kind of shit hollows you out. So Patrick gets grumpy whenever he sees stuff that has to do with the harvest.”

But … they were in Hadica. Everything had to do with the harvest. Unless you moved to a district like Westhill. “That’s horrible.”

Lukas scowled. “Don’t say that like you’re surprised. You’re always hanging out with the rich kids.”

“So? Navid didn’t have anything to do with that?”

“His last name is Madin, isn’t it? Maybe if you stopped licking his boots for two seconds and took a look around, you would see how the world works.”

The others paused then. Micah closed the loot sack and stood up. “I was trapped in the Tower myself once. I know what it’s like, asshole.”

Just because something bad had happened to his friend’s dad ages ago, it didn’t mean he was allowed to be a dick to him now.

Lukas rolled his eyes. “That was your fault, wasn’t it? Don’t try to guilt-trip people. What does that color of your ring say? Gonna’ cry again?”

Sarah perked up. “Is that a mood ring?”

Micah glanced down. He’d fastened his magic rings to his gambeson, close to his collarbone. Next to the scaled ring of fire resistance, the mood ring had shifted colors into a sand corn texture of pale violets with a dusting of earthy green.

Echoes of emotion essences pulsed around it, but he didn’t concentrate on them. He didn’t need them or the ring to tell him that his feelings were complicated.

“Can I try it on?”

The question caught him off-guard. He expected any of Lukas’s friends to be just as much an asshole as he was. Now, Micah did blink and squint at her, but he didn’t catch any traces of malevolent intent in her emotions. He shrugged and unfastened the ring. “Sure.”

Sarah slipped the ring over her middle finger—it only reached her first knuckle over her glove. She flipped Lukas off. The ring became a gradient of orange to a dark blend, a sunset to murder after dusk. Amusement and contempt.

The [Hunter] rolled his eyes.

“Can I see that?” Brent asked next, and Micah watched anxiously as his ring was passed around outside of his control. They weren’t that far from a gap in the ground. If they dropped it …

The mood lightened at least, and it wasn’t long until Cathy hounded them to get back to work and someone handed it back.

“Oh!” Sarah smacked a palm against her forehead. “Just remembered: Cathy, Delilah wanted me to tell you her familiar heard singing?”

“Singing?”

“In the distance? Dunno. She said you would know what that means.”

Cathy clearly did not know what to do with the information. “Does she take me for a gossip?”

… Wait, wasn’t she a gossip? Micah squinted, but he was more interested in the contents of their chatter. He listened—he wasn’t going to sort out Lukas’s loot for him anyway—but didn’t hear anything other than distant fighting, monster cries, and the gentle cracks of cubes swayed into each other in the breeze. Like rocks falling into a canyon.

Aw. If he had heard something, he could have mentioned it to his sponsors. They were investigating the singing after all. Maybe it came from the Root?

With the area cleared, their entire group moved the cart to the edge of their territory, where they had to fend off waves of monsters.

“Why do you wear that?” Kyle asked him and jerked a chin at his ring.

“Lens training,” Micah said honestly. “At first. Now, it’s … I figured if I was learning to spy on other people’s emotions, it would only be fair if they could see mine.”

Kyle grunted. “Lukas is an asshole, but he’s right about that. You should stop wearing it.”

“Why?”

He sounded exasperated, “Because everyone has bad days, Micah. They have their own shit to deal with. Suck it up and tell it to someone who cares. Same thing with good days. Communicate, don’t hold up a sign and expect people to tiptoe around your mood.”

“You constantly make your mood other people’s problems, though?” Micah snapped back.

Kyle didn’t disagree with him, but neither did Micah: he was already taking the ring off again. Its colors were shifting to something murky. Purple and red. He tucked it away.

“Thanks, though,” he mumbled, “for explaining.” He never would have thought it was manipulative. He just wanted to be honest.

Kyle shrugged and chased after one of the monster stragglers.

They rolled through a cube of grassy hills onto a cube that only housed a crossroads. Past it, they found a cube filled with rolling fields of fissle—a purple plant like wheat nearly two meters high. The walls were lined with trees. To the right, the fissle led to a grassy ledge below a drop like a mineshaft opening into a chasm. A few trees on a hill.

Their cart stopped just inside the cube and their teams split up on the crossroads. Or they should have. There were some stragglers.

Kyle stood still, frowning at something. “Is that … a person?” Micah followed his eyes and spotted a bundle of brown cloth leaning against a tree on the hill.

To him, it looked more like a tall laundry sack, but once Kyle pointed it out, the shape made itself out to him—the lump at the top was a helmet, not a knot. The ring of lighter fabric a coif, not a pattern woven into the sack. The leathery texture a thick jacket.

His mood dampened even further, but Cathy and Brent perked up. “Oh!” She held a hand to her mouth and spun. “Everyone stop! We have company!”

A chain of confusion echoed through the halls. The closest members of each team relayed the message, the farthest yelled back questions, but Cathy was already marching up the hill with a sickly pleasant smile.

If she went there alone, she’d somehow manage to convince the stranger she was their leader or something. Micah jabbed Brent in the waist and followed. He sensed the lines of Kyle’s outline trail behind him.

“Excuse me!” Cathy pushed the wheat aside as she walked up along the wall of the cube. “I’m sorry to disturb you. My classmates and I were strip— I mean, harvesting on this floor and we didn’t notice you …?”

The figure didn’t react to her words. To Micah, of course, it seemed off—strangers in the Tower were rarely pleasant—but wasn’t there something … else …

[Lens: Affinity Sight]. He blinked and adjusted to the blurred world and crystal clear auras and lines that appeared around his classmates. His classmates.

“If your team already has a claim to the area—?” Cathy went on.

Micah ran up and grabbed her elbow.

She nearly rammed an elbow in his jaw, but Micah caught it with his other palm. She looked embarrassed. “What?”

Lens: Emotion Sight, he thought and blinked once more. He felt the ears and stems of the fissle like scratchy lines on paper, the life in Cathy’s elbow where he held her, the thick lines of the tree on the hill and the grass beneath the stranger’s boots.

[Lens: Nature Sight].

The figure faced away, helmet resting against the tree trunk, coif hiding its features. From their vantage point below, he saw a glove in the grass. A leather pauldron.

“Oh,” his voice was small. His wariness bled away. The tension remained for another reason as his eyes teared up.

“He’s dead,” Kyle guessed.

The wind essence around the body didn’t even move with the tiny rise and fall of sleeping breaths. It had no auras. It was motionless.

Micah nodded.

Cathy glanced at him, to Kyle, to Brent, and back at the body, then to the cart and the rest of their classmates who were returning. She almost began to nibble on her glove and stopped herself.

Had she never seen a dead body before? Then again, Micah had only seen one.

Kyle stepped forward. The grim line through his shoulders and neck seemed to say, Someone has to carry the body.

The corpse stood up.

It got its feet under it. One and then the other in a hurried scuffle. Grass stuck to the back of its gambeson. It wore thick climbers’ boots and the fingers of its limp hands twitched.

Brent cursed and scrambled back.

Cathy sucked in a breath of relief that became vexation as she rounded on Micah with a glare that said, That was a sick prank.

Micah had a dagger in one hand a paintball in the other, eyes glancing left to check if there were any more—if so, he couldn’t spot them through the tall fissle.

“I’m sorry,” Cathy started again as the corpse took a backward step down the hill. The heel of its boot wavered on the clumpy earth.

Micah cut her off, ordering the corpse, “Stop!”

It didn’t.

Automaton? Golem? He didn’t think so. Its proportions were that of a person. It moved like a person. It weighed as much as a person would, going by how much the grass bounced back after its passing.

It gained confidence and speed, too, descending backward. The line of its shoulderblades stared at them like a loping predator and Micah had the instinctual understanding that it was about to break into a run.

Kyle sunk a dagger into the hill. Whether or not he’d meant to trip it or he’d missed, all at once, the corpse froze. Its boot heel hovered over the hilt as if it had eyes in the back of its skull.

“The next one is going in your spine.”

By now, Cathy had pulled out a wand. “We are not looking for a fight.”

Micah loaded his slingshot. “What are you?”

Its hood tilted fractionally as if to roll their words over in its mouth. Gently, it lowered its boot to feel for the dagger. It brushed the hilt. Then it flung its arms up into a sprint.

“Wait!” Cathy called.

It curved into the fields. Micah felt the lines of the stalks and ears brush against it. He heard the rustling in the distance. Then silence. It was swallowed by the sea of purple.

“Fuck this.” Kyle stepped back. “Fuck that!” Something had come loose inside him. A vein fluttered in his neck. His breaths shook.

Micah nodded in agreement. “I’m leaving.”

“What? You can’t just leave.”

“Watch me. I’m not doing this again.”

“Wait, you’re serious?” Brent asked. His eyes caught on Kyle, noticed his posture, and he gave a taunting smile. Kyle immediately stood up straight and calmed down.

“A word of advice,” Micah said and suddenly sounded five years older, “when you see something like that, you turn and walk the other way.”

“C’mon man,” Brent said, “we fight monsters for a living. A scarecrow golem isn’t that bad.” He tried to goad him into staying, but Micah kept stomping down the hill.

Kyle snatched up his dagger, glanced around, and was one step behind him. He was jumpy, but he wasn’t a coward. A healthy dose of fear could keep you alive. And he had two fear resistance Skills, resolve and tenacity, to leverage the most out of that.

But something about that had given him the creeps anyway. If that wasn’t the instinctual equivalent of gagging at the smell of rotten food, he was an idiot who deserved to die.

Micah’s issues ran deeper than that.

“It was probably just … someone playing a prank on us. Hazing?” Cathy tried to explain it to herself and turned to Brent. “Can you see anyone else?”

Standing on his toes to peek over the sea of fissle, he shook his head. “Do you think there is a group of guild workers hiding in there to prank on a bunch of students or what?”

“They better not be!” Micah turned halfway toward the fissle and shouted. To Kyle, he swore, “If this is a prank, I don’t care about my license anymore. I’m turning whoever did it into an itchy potato for a week. Or something.”

Shady characters.

Their crowded classmates had a bunch of questions, but Micah pushed through them and clambered over the side of the cart to collect his things.

Cathy began to explain what had happened. “There was this man …”

“Nearest sure exit would be Morgana’s,” Kyle said conversationally. “We can go back to the veranda or take the stairs we passed earlier.”

“Veranda,” Micah mumbled. “Better than getting lost.”

“Are you seriously leaving?” Forester asked.

Another person spoke up, “So if this area is already claimed, do we have to turn around …?”

"What? No! That's an entire cube full of fissle! Do you know how much we could sell that for?"

The conversations of their gathered group began to overlap, and Cathy tried unsucessfully to calm them down, until Sarah spoke up, “Hey!” She was turning, searching the twenty-something crowd with a perplexed expression. “Where is Delilah?”

The conversations paused for only a moment, but they searched for the dark [Witch] with their eyes at least and when they couldn’t find her, their voices slowly quieted as a low panic filled the room.

Cathy singled out the team she’d been assigned to, but they swore she had been right there a second ago. "We turned back when we heard the commotion. She was right behind us!"

Kyle would have seen her if she’d joined them on the hill. Had she stepped into a trap or something?

So they spilled out into the crossroads then, calling out hername. Micah helped—they couldn’t leave until they found her. He was one of the three who had drunk a [Detect Life] potion. Mason and the third split up in the other directions to cover more ground. Kyle searched but couldn’t find any holes she could have fallen in.

One of the first years who had drunk a perception potion said, “Do you hear that?”

The nearby shouts quieted. The calls of her name still echoed in the distance. Kyle went still and listened for singing—instead, he heard a ticking sound. A series of rapid clicks. Metal shifting in the distance and chains groaning as they were pulled taut. A sound like something was rotating.

Two of the cubes cracked. Not in a gentle way, it sounded more like the thunder from the night before. A first year jumped.

“What is that?” Sarah asked.

“Traps,” Kyle realized. “Something is resetting the traps.” Now that he knew what the cause was, he could interpret the sounds around them, could feel the mechanisms shifting below their feet. A ghost town coming to life.

“Do you think one of the Trappers survived?”

Cathy caught that and panicked. “One of Morgana’s minions!?”

Kyle broke off from the search party and jogged back to the crossroads, picking up speed.

Micah must have had the same idea. Ahead of him, he reached the cart in the distance and began to grab ingredients and vials while the group assigned to defending it asked what he was doing.

Bomb. Morgana’s chief minions were far weaker than it, but they wouldn’t be able to fight one with swords and axes at their level. No more than they could fight a train. The exit was a good hour away and they couldn’t leave until they found Delilah.

Kyle was almost inside the cube when a stone wall shot up below his feet. He stumbled back and winced. It slammed into the ceiling with a sound like a stone coffin crashing down and cut the fissle cube, the cart group, and Micah off from the rest of them.

Then the singing started.