“Where’s your boyfriend?” Ryan asked.

Anne took the accusation in stride. “Otherwise occupied. Where is Micah?”

“Otherwise occupied.”

Their low voices matched the delicate silence of the guild foyer. Shutters were raised. Heels clacked and a distant pair of steel-capped boots trundled gently on the polished floor.

The air was chilly enough that Ryan had pushed up [Hot Skin] in his armor, and moth-eaten stripes of condensation covered the window walls.

He stared at Anne. She met his gaze unflinchingly. He knew he should hate her for stabbing Micah in the back, but her eyes looked weary. She must have known, but she had come here at Lisa’s invitation anyway, prepared for an argument, for accusations, she might have to endure.

They were in the same boat, weren’t they? Ryan had been enough of a hypocrite for one lifetime. He looked away first.

“Hey, beautiful,” Frederic greeted Lisa with an upward nod, frowned, and awkwardly flashed a pearly smile. He continued to shift his posture for another second as if searching for a comfortable position to stand in.

Lisa stared, turned to Anne, and asked like she was making sure, “I’m not, right?”

“What?”

“Beautiful?”

Anne smiled. “Inner beauty doesn’t count?”

Lisa rolled her eyes. It was obvious which answer she’d wanted to hear, which was odd even for her. Ryan wouldn’t have taken her for one to be concerned about looks. “First Kyle, then Ryan, now him—”

“Wait, what?” With a start, Ryan was awake. “Kyle asked you out? When?”

Frederic must have noticed his name on that list. He stepped back when Ryan spared him a glare and held his hands up defensively. “Wow, I didn’t mean anything by it, honest. I just want to be friendly.”

Anne sighed. “He’s telling the truth. Mostly.”

“During the party.” Lisa shrugged. “I shot him down.”

Oh … Good. Not that it was any of Ryan’s business whom she dated, but she could do better than Kyle … What was Lisa’s type anyway?

“Well, I think you’re beautiful,” Navid greeted her magnanimously, but knowing the way they went at each other, he thought it should have been sarcastic instead.

Frederic looked delighted to see Navid. And even more so delighted to have his name cleared by Anne. He pointed a finger up and then down at her as if he had just remembered something.

“Right! You would know. You’re … Annebeth, right? Frederic. Though my friends call me Freddi.” He held an arm out.

“Guys!” Jason cut through the awkward introductions with a hiss. He leaned past one of the receptions with a receipt in hand. Unlike yesterday, he’d come dressed in armor … which had changed over the course of the summer.

His dark, reinforced cloak was missing. He wore a pale blue gambeson with Micah’s yellow-and-green canary scarf wrapped around his collar like a muffler.

Beneath it, Ryan caught a hint of a thin chain he recognized: the cheap projectile ward the crossbow Kobold had worn against him. His chosen reward from the exam, along with the pitons of stone shaping.

Other than that, he carried a thick wooden cylinder with a metal cap next to his scabbard and a pair of large boots that looked like dust-caked leather and wet mud.

It had been a while since Ryan had earned any new magic items. The sight of him made that feeling well back up inside him. Longing.

Jason jerked his head. “This way.”

Ryan suppressed a yawn and cracked his neck. It took a little more effort with a leather gorget and hood pressing back at him, but he shook his body awake.

Lisa had advised him not to wear the raincoat. The Theatre was supposed to be a challenge after all, and he had [Thick Skin]. He had to get used to fighting like this. But he would have taken any excuse to get rid of it.

As they followed Jason, they walked by a receptionist hanging up a poster. Information Wanted! Vandalism. Unknown suspects bombarded the Tower with black magic during the storm on the night of the 29th …

One day. In and out. If the Kobolds had a hoard, he could make up for his mistakes from last time. And if there was an entrance … he’d be level twelve by tomorrow.

He better be level twelve by tomorrow. Four hours in, Ryan peeked around the corner of a cavern wall and yanked his head back. A hail of gunky, burning shards shot by. Crystals.

Rather than rear monsters and harvest their crystals for their mages, or even just pile them up in neat stacks, the Kobolds here broke their crystals into pieces, dunked them in a foul-smelling substance, and used them as ammunition. All of them.

Sure, that meant their camp was easier to assault. And they didn’t burrow through stone as the other Kobold camp had done.

And yes, their objective wasn’t cheap crystals, but … his heart ached at the sight of what amounted to burning shards of loose change flying through the air. Bludgeoning them in the face.

His parents wanted to buy a house someday. Ryan wanted them to be one of those parents who could brag, ‘Oh, your son was accepted into Hedgewall? Ours bought us a house!’

… Though, the tuition for Hedgewall, or any of the other elite schools, probably cost as much as a house.

He tapped the back of his helmet against the rock, took a deep breath, and turned his gaze to Lisa and Frederic. “Explain it to me again. You’re sure?”

“I’m not,” Lisa stressed, “there is a golden screen and the report was right, something about it is off—none of my summons can see it clearly—but that’s no guarantee.”

“I’m sure,” Frederic said with a beaming smile. “Trust me, I saw it through my Skill.”

“Your ‘Skill,’” Ryan said, “which you haven’t explained. We haven’t exactly built a rapport of trust yet, forgive my skepticism.”

There, he thought with a note of pride, perfectly civil. He had explained himself rather than scowling and lashing out. Well … the important bits. The jealousy didn’t matter.

Summons and familiars he could accept. Scouts used those, too. Lisa broke the rules on so many levels, she may as well be from an elite school. She’s a year older than you, he liked to remind himself.

But Ryan had spent his last two summers at scout camp and put years of time and effort into his endurance and perception training, and Frederic had upstaged him with one Skill.

He lay his head back with a grimace. “Yeah, because it’s hard to explain. [Glimpse the Sublime]. It sort of … expands my awareness, y’know?” He noticed Anne, Navid, and Jason returning with a minecart carried between them and adjusted his posture.

Ryan did not know.

He had nothing against fanciful Skills, but adding onto the upstaging, something about this guy having one was annoying. Like seeing an asshole praising a book he loved, as if he could drag it down through association. Not that he was an asshole, he was just fake.

Ryan whistled a bird song to get his attention again. “So scrying. Divination. Like [Displace Perception] or [Wandering Sight].”

“Huh? Oh, no more like … [Widened Vision]. But targeted. I can look at something and analyze it from a larger perspective. Big target, big concept, works better. Target an enemy and find their blind spot. Target a ‘camp’ and map its roads. Target a— Dude!”

Frederic slapped the back of his hand against Ryan’s chest. Ryan eyed the spot.

“The storm yesterday was awesome! There were people flying around in it.”

Lisa turned to eye him as well.

Noticing their looks, Frederic turned to them. He brushed at Ryan’s chest as if to wipe the slap off and gave a bemused smile. “Do you lift?”

Ryan was one second from crushing his wrist, but he dropped the hand and stepped closer, forming a circle like they were gossiping at school and not one tunnel away from the last line of defense of a horde of angry Kobolds.

It didn’t take much to figure out why he was being so friendly—there was a thump when the other three dropped the minecart onto the broken railway. Then Anne watched them. He wanted it to look like they were friends, or like he had captivated them with a story.

Ryan would have ignored him out of generalized spite, but he did captivate them as he went on.

“So, for context, my Skill detaches my target from the background—like parallax, you know? But it also splits the target into layers. So when I used it on the storm, it separated the individual clouds and people and the lightning cut through them in slow motion. It was aw—”

“Parallax?” Ryan cut in.

“Yeah. ‘Eye of the beholder,’ you know? It’s a term astrologers, painters, diviners, and the like use. I think.”

That sounded familiar. “What’s your Path again?”

“[Adventurer Path], why?”

“No reason, go on.”

“I was just saying: It. Was. Awesome.”

“Huh.”

Years ago, Ryan had been told his Path was unique and resigned himself to that fact, but he now knew all Paths were interconnected. He’d never tried to explore the parts of his Path that others might share in common with him.

And here one was, a random [Adventurer] Skill some guy had whom Ryan didn’t like very much because he was new, and Ryan was wary of new people, and he reminded him of himself. Head in the clouds. A fake smile. Concerned with the opinions of others.

Not only that, he had a name for something Ryan had been unable to explain. Maybe there was value in listening to other people ramble and brag after all … Obviously.

If his Path was about distilling the essence of the lives around himself, he needed to connect to those lives or he would only end up with the fake essences that his distorted lens of the world could distill.

He gave Frederic a genuine smile. “I would love to paint a storm like that someday. How did you even end up with a Skill like that?”

“You paint?” He seemed momentarily surprised, but then Lisa detached from their group and his priorities were obvious. He flashed Ryan a smile and trailed after her, “I guess I got lucky.”

Sam shot him a look and Frederic kept his distance.

“Are we really going with Jason’s plan?” Lisa asked.

Navid was beaming. “I like it. What’s life without a little danger?”

“You say that, but I’ll probably end up having to do all the work again while you do nothing.”

He raised his palms. “Such is my existence.”

A small part of Ryan wished Shala were here; Navid without him seemed like a child that could wander off at any moment.

“Sorry, Lisa,” Jason said, “would it help if I topped off your mana rings again?”

“No,” she sighed. “I only have the one. And it’s fine. This just seems unnecessary.”

“We have to reach the portal together and we have to hurry. The entrances are first come, first serve. I’ve heard stories about people stalking teams and stealing entrances.”

Ryan doubted anyone was stalking them—he was keeping an ear out—though the memory of the Rat Hermit was humbling. “And the loot?” he asked. The hoard was small, but there was a hoard in a separate chamber from the portal.

Jason’s gambeson had shifted from a pale color to a striking, vibrant blue throughout the morning. Like the summer sky. He wanted something like that.

Lisa could outfit him, of course, but any equipment she made him would fall apart the moment it took any damage.

“I would rather someone steal that than the entrance. If not, it’ll still be there when we return.”

It made a degree of sense, and Ryan wasn’t about to vote against this plan. “I’m convinced.” He began some light stretches, welcoming the feeling of the sweat and heat on his skin where the raincoat would have been before.

Crystal veins ran through the earthy walls around them, too. This low into the Tower, the scenery almost reminded him of the old Salamander’s Den.

Lisa gave up, outvoted four to one. Anne climbed into the cart, accepting Navid’s hand to steady herself rather than Frederic’s—he quickly adjusted his hair to hide his offer.

She practically hauled Navid, half again her size, in after her. The cart creaked and swayed on the dilapidated tracks.

Jason joined them, making it a tight squeeze, pulled up his scarf like a mask, and turned to weave wards like translucent scarfs around them.

Lisa knelt to command Sam to shift into a more agile form—and it was definitely a command, Ryan knew—and tied a magical leash around him before joining them. She barely fit and stood in the front.

Ryan took the right flank; Frederic took the left. Sam stayed close to the tracks.

“Ready?” Anne got the go-ahead from them and slotted the first marble into the cart. Its wheels began to slowly turn of their own accord and with each additional marble, it picked up speed.

Ryan and Frederic charged. The moment they turned the corner, the first hail of burning shards drummed off his shield, bursting into noxious clouds all around him.

Frederic dodged his share and then they were among the final line of defense, cutting down monsters and traps alike.

Sam cleared the area around the tracks, swiping crystals and debris aside, tackling piles of rocks the Kobolds used as backup ammunition and scattering the remains like a dog digging a hole.

The cart caught up to them with surprising speed, Ryan felt Anne’s [Bless] hit him, and broke off from his fight to sprint ahead, leaving Jason and Lisa to clean up his mess.

He flicked [Firebolts] at distant enemies, ran through the chains of the broken rings that pulsed off his wrist, whistled a bird turn to call Sam and Frederic, and broke into the main chamber by stabbing a Kobold through the chest. It burst.

All around him, Kobolds rushed about, preparing defenses, herding monsters, commanding each other—like a kicked ant hive. They all froze when they saw him standing there, the essences of one of their fallen allies dissipating around him.

And then chaos erupted again.

Ryan dodged a volley of firebolts, thrown flame caltrops, rocks, and crystal shards, running low to the ground with his shield overhead.

There were larger, true Salamanders. Scaled, red alligators. There were larger Kobolds, too. Brutes like walking alligators with toothed blades. He ignored them and the chamber that branched off to the right.

He caught a glimmer of light, items piled up like trash, and he forced himself to look away and tear through a line of mages.

The screen was one chamber over, straight across from them. The railroad only went a third of the way in. When his teammates sped into the room behind him, backup arrived in the form of a volley of flameseekers and fireballs as Lisa whirled her staff overhead, shocking the defenders into inaction.

For a moment. Then, she leaned over the front of the cart and frantically conjured more tracks for them to run on.

Navid held her by the hem of her pants and one shoulder. Jason shot down Kobolds with his slingshot and repaired the wards.

A true Salamander ran for the cart. Ryan almost punted it aside— It snapped at him with surprising speed, he pulled his leg up, couldn’t arrest his momentum, and hopped over it with one leg.

It radiated heat like a grill and Ryan couldn’t stop smiling. He almost lost himself in the fighting as a group of Kobolds came to its aid, but Anne cried out his name.

Lisa had turned in the cart and hauled Sam in by his leash, a translucent line that flickered and caught the light in the air. It sailed through the air, mouth open in a squawk of surprise.

Frederic hadn’t needed any reminders. He was almost ahead of the cart. And Ryan channeled his mana into a burst of motion to launch himself the other way and caught up with them.

So much for getting more experience fighting true Salamanders. Sorry, he thought as the one behind him roared and breathed a cone of flames after him.

They ducked through the entrance to the next chamber and saw it—a tall gateway of pure light, like one of the Tower’s exits. Except, it was gold. Nearly pure gold. A fine silver line outlined it like filigree.

Anne wrapped one arm around Jason and Navid on either side of her. Navid grabbed their luggage. Ryan threw his arms into a sprint.

Lisa saw him, judged the distance, and blasted the back of the cart. It flipped, they jumped, and one by one vanished. The trio, Lisa and Sam, Frederic— The first became the last of them.

As the rest of the Kobold camp fell on them, Ryan thought he saw the portal flicker. He thought a wordless prayer and ran through—to elsewhere.

They went down in a tangle of limbs on paved stone. Voices cried out. Ryan’s boot caught on something and he fell. A backpack strap?

Navid complained and tried to stand, but the strap was looped around his leg and he stumbled. The bag dropped. Anne complained, “Hey!”

Then someone else complained, which stood out to him because he didn’t recognize the voice, “Kids these days.”

Hooves clacked over cobblestone, but the rhythm seemed off. Ryan instinctually worried they were in the middle of a road, but why would they be? They were in the Tower.

But the sound of hooves continued. And the ground was paved beneath them. A man in a suit and a top hat scoffed at them as he walked by, tail whipping left and right. Fur peeked out from the hem of his pants and the top of his collar. No boots. His feet were hooves.

The head of the person next to him was a hovering blob of ink with two white outlines in the shape of eyes. The collar of his— her— uh, their suit resembled tall scissors.

There were more: A frog man’s neck expanded when he glanced at him.

A woman made of fire stood near a notice board and handed out fliers with a bright smile.

A black cutout in reality rode on a broom through the air, wearing a blue uniform and a bulging backpack. He stopped in front of a second-story window of a house and rapped his knuckles gently on the glass, pulling out a bundle of letters.

Behind them, a fountain gurgled as it sprayed an umbrella of water into the air. Far overhead, golden crystalline roots threaded through the ceiling of the underground chamber they were, like massive serpents, and illuminated the space with soft sunlight.

They stood in a town square of an underground city. Ryan glanced back. There was, of course, no exit portal behind them.

His first thought was, Where are we?

Lisa said, “Is that a radio?”

A trio of … teens, maybe? … sat around a little metal box at the edge of the square and played cards. The box played an upbeat, somehow muffled song with a lot of trumpets.

“My gambeson is supposed to match itself to the color of the sky …” Jason said. “I somehow doubt it is night here, though.”

Ryan pulled himself away from the music to look. Sure enough, his gambeson was pitch black was tiny dots of colors woven into it like stars. They almost seemed to move.

“It reminds me of an illuminated void,” Navid said, surprising him. He said it like he had seen one before and Ryan wouldn’t have taken him for the meditative type. “Maybe a pocket dimension? Or maybe this is all a dream …” He trailed off mysteriously.

“Not a dream …” Lisa said, searching the tops of buildings with a frown. She turned to Anne. “Do you think we might be in the Sea of Dreams?”

Anne looked lost. She stared with wide eyes. “I don’t know.”

“What do we do?” Ryan adjusted the grip on his spear but felt foolish when he eyed the peaceful town square around them.

She repeated, “I don’t know.”

“Well, I want that radio.” Lisa walked off, Sam one step behind her.

“Wait, what do you mean?” Anne hurried after her. “Lisa, remember, no violence!”

Her words and the movement of their group were like an impetus that struck Ryan back into motion. Right, he remembered. Rules.

The Theatre challenged people by tailoring a scenario against them. You didn’t always have to fight. Sometimes, you had to face a riddle, escape a room, or solve a crime, or another type of social challenge.

This was beginning to look a lot like one of those scenarios … and Ryan wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. They had wondered, beforehand. While trekking toward the Kobold camp for hours on end.

Two [Adventurers] and one [Paladin]. That was simple enough. A quest of the more traditional kind, maybe? Defeating a villain?

But they also had a [Grand Summoner] … and a [Biomancer] and [Carer], Lisa had confessed to them while Frederic and Jason went scouting.

Navid wouldn’t share his Classes other than [Squire], but he assured them he had at least two others.

Ryan himself was a [Fighter], [Scout], and [Mage]. They hadn’t known how the Theatre was supposed to tailor a challenge to all of them, what they would have to face.

He had not been expecting this. A city.

… Maybe the others counted as hybrids, and Navid and Lisa had tipped the scale?

“I know, I know! I just want to talk to them,” Lisa was saying when he caught up with them. “I just want to ask them some questions— One question. I just want to— Hiiii.”

Lisa stood over the trio playing cards with a sickly sweet smile. They craned their necks back to look up, confused. The radio began to sputter like crumpled paper. A little bit at first, then more and more as the rest of them came closer, until one of the teens turned it off.

He looked an awful lot like the Kobold brute Ryan had been about to kill a minute ago, but green and smaller … younger … He honestly looked like a teenager. Maybe a year or two younger than Ryan. A little pudgy. His pants had a slit for his tail.

Ryan awkwardly fumbled for his spear hood. That was one downside to choosing the spear over swords, he guessed as he ‘sheathed’ the weapon on his back. He tried not to feel too guilty about the resemblance but reminded himself, None of this is real.

The second member of the trio was a humanoid grey cat. The third looked like a paper golem with an enchanted oil painting for a face—it moved on the page. Her lips were tiny and dark red, her face elfin, and she ‘wore’ heavy make-up.

“Cool radio,” Lisa said.

“Uh, thanks?” the cat said. She—Ryan guessed it was a she by her voice—didn’t even have an accent.

“Do you guys have a radio tower or something?”

She pointed. Their group turned. Far off in the distance, hidden behind two buildings, a bit of metal scaffolding protruded over the city, narrowing to a tip with shields attached to it.

In her regular voice, Lisa said to the group, “I definitely want to check that out,” and turned to address the trio again. “So uh, any chance this is for sale?”

“My radio …?” the cat asked.

“Is that a mage staff?” the paper golem said. Her voice sounded quiet and high, like a child’s, but also somehow far off, like a whisper on the wind. Or like there was a marked distance between here and wherever she was, the girl in the painting.

Her eyes went wide, though, and she sounded excited. “Are you a mage!?”

“I am. It is. Why, wanna trade?” Lisa held her staff out and pointed at the radio.

“Lisa.” Anne wrenched her arm back. “Sorry, the staff is meant for mana so you might not be able to use it. Do you … have mana? Or any kind of magical resource?”

Sneaky, Ryan thought, though he doubted Anne had meant to gather information when she had started to speak.

“What, the staff doesn’t give you power?”

“It channels it and aids the caster—”

“Lame. Do you have any other magical stuff?” The paper girl began to look them up and down.

“We do, but … don’t you have magic items here in …?”

“Hadica?” the Kobold boy said. “You don’t even know the name of the city you’re in?”

Creepy, Ryan thought. From their expressions, the others seemed to think much the same.

“I don’t know if we should be trading goods,” Frederic said, “not everything you take out of the Theatre is real. It will vanish the moment you step outside.”

“Oh,” Lisa said with a tiny frown like she’d known that but only just now remembered. “Right. Give me a second.”

She said the second part to the trio as much as them and wandered off. The teens followed them with their eyes when they followed her like a herd of sheep.

Lisa approached a fenced-off strip of flowers and shrubbery, picked up a pebble, and popped it in her mouth. They watched, waiting for her verdict. Rather than eat the pebble, she sucked on it like a piece of candy.

“Uh …” Frederic was the only one who seemed confused.

“I think I know what you will find,” Anne said.

“Dream magic?” Navid mused. “This could be a shared delusion. Maybe we are physically in a pocket dimension but there is a [Half-dream Conjuration] enchantment on everything around us to trick us into believing it is real.”

That sounded nefarious. And like a villain’s trap out of a storybook … or a specialized service an illusionist might offer in the city.

It also sounded absolutely terrifying. How would somebody even know, or know how to escape something like that?

“Something like that,” Anne said. She, at least, seemed more confident than she had a moment before, and Ryan found some comfort in that.

Lisa spat the pebble back out, catching it in one palm and showing it to them: crude, golden eyes had been painted onto its surface with a drab color. “It’s fake,” she proclaimed, “almost … all of it is. Fake. And it’s watching us. Judging us, maybe?”

“How would that even work?” Navid asked, curious.

“It’s like a spell on its last leg. Everything here has just enough energy to fulfill a few specific purposes. The moment you try to subvert them from that purpose …”

She looked at the pebble. It popped in her hand. There was no burst of smoke, no light. It simply bloated, warped, and then—like a soap bubble; one moment it was there, the next it was gone.

Somehow, the sight seemed familiar to him, but Ryan couldn’t put his finger on why.

“And the water?” Anne asked.

“It won’t nourish you. Uh, how many provisions did we pack?”

“Standard practice,” Navid said, “enough for two days.”

Ryan had enough for a day, maybe. He tended to scout and run ahead, so he kept his pack light.

Frederic slung his backpack around to check and while he was distracted, Anne and Lisa shared a look. A question in her eye; Lisa gave a slight shake of her head in response.

Ryan wanted to ask about that, but maybe not in front of the group if they were doing it in secret. Instead, he turned to Jason and asked, “What about y—ou?”

Jason was gone. He spun, began to panic, and spotted him across the town square—the only other human among monstrous civilians—talking to the fire lady who was handing out fliers near the notice board.

Oh. Duh. Notice board.

“Jason!” Anne called.

Jason perked up, spotted them, and began to wave without a care in the world.

“What are you doing!?” Ryan shouted over, drawing a few glances from the people going about their day.

Jason looked torn between responding and his conversation with the fire lady. He turned to her and must have said his goodbyes. He walked toward a large building on the far end of the square a moment later.

It had a large, open entrance and many windows like a public building, though not necessarily a bureaucratic one. A community hall, maybe?

He waved a flier. “I found a lead!”

“We’re supposed to stick together!” Anne said.

“I know, but—” His smile wavered, torn between proprietary and quest, and he seemed to choose the latter. “C’mon! We have to hurry, too, right? Time is wasting, people!”

“He does have a point.” Navid looked from Anne to Ryan. “How about it, coup? Coup? I say we replace Lisa with Jason as our leader?”

Lisa scoffed and pushed past him. Ryan checked to make sure they were all following her this time and noticed Frederic lagging. He was still searching through his backpack, distracted.

“Did you lose something?”

“Huh? Oh, no.” He seemed frazzled. “Just checking on stuff.”

“Mhm.” Ryan ignored him. Had he forgotten to pack food, maybe? Embarrassing, but maybe they could find a place to buy real food. If not, they could always share. He doubted they were staying for more than two days.

He caught up to get the door and noticed a sign on the wall next to it: Help Wanted!

That was as clear as it got. One by one, they stepped into the shaded interior to catch up with Jason.

Frederic hesitated at the door, frantically searching his backpack. He even went through his hidden compartments and unused loot sacks, double and triple-checking everything.

Don’t panic, don’t panic, he thought and looked out over the town square, searching the place they had landed, the trio, the fountain … Maybe he had dropped him. Maybe someone had stolen him. Maybe …?

It was pretty hard not to panic when his [Danger Detection] was ringing like crazy.

Today had been his turn to watch over him. He had been there before they’d charged the Kobold camp. They’d spoken to him when Jason and he had gone scouting, but now …

Jason was going to kill him.

Lemon was gone.