The next Flesh Flower suffered the same fate as the first. Green blood rained in the twilight forest. That one had gotten close enough to splatter some of it on Alex’s face. Reflexively, he wiped the viscous liquid off before the monster and every part of it turned to dust.

That was easy. Too easy, even. But his mana couldn’t sustain it for long.

HP: 69.3/80

MP: 64/130

It cost almost thirty mana to use the scythe trace. If he used it against the other two—and didn’t level up, he’d be down for the count, or near as much. Too vulnerable a situation for his liking. Alex grimaced. He’d have to improvise with the other two.

Around him, the thicket rang with the sound of combat. Metal scraped wood as Cedric danced with his spear. He’d taken out two of the Deadwoods already, but another had emerged from the tree line to bother him. Still, it was easy to see he was playing with the monsters.

Further back, Diana cursed worse than her brother as she juggled the two Deadwoods that had targeted her. Her footwork left much to be desired as she dodged about, slipping and sliding occasionally over the muck. She would have been in trouble were it not for her earth magic always slowing or trapping the big tree monsters. In fact, Alex was surprised she didn’t use it to firm the ground beneath her.

Her blades of air left deep rents in the face and limb of the Deadwoods, but it wasn’t just fire their bark was resistant to. They seemed to have some limited immunity to all types of magic, at least in their outer shell.

He thought it was strange at first how Cedric kept dividing them to fight against specific monsters, but he could see it now. Cedric wanted to see how the rest of the crew would fare without him. No, not how they would fare. He’d done that already. This was to see what they would do when following the leader’s orders wasn’t optimal anymore and he wasn’t there to update them.

In all honesty, Alex was growing tired of these tests. And if he had the mana for it, he’d stick to the orders and clean out the Flesh Flowers by himself just to be petty. But he didn’t have it, in the end, and so he would have to prove Cedric’s point—something about breaking rules when necessary, probably.

Nearer to him, Valerian was playing his part well. He grunted when he knocked another flying Spring Rabbit to the ground; but when there was a lull in the ramming attacks, he would just stand around instead of helping the rest of the crew. It was too obvious.

Daven certainly hadn’t noticed. He had downed another Killer Sloth in the meantime—and the last one had stopped its painful screeching—but he didn’t turn and shot at the Deadwoods all around him. He just kept his eyes on the high branches, looking for the remaining Killer Sloth. Exactly as Cedric commanded.

Sighing, Alex turned to help Diana. The fireball formed and shot off a moment later, bursting against one of the Deadwood swinging at his fellow mage. The explosion threw the monster off balance for a moment. Smoke covered its bulk, and Diana gained a few second’s breathing room.

Still, she shot him an annoyed glance. “What are you doing?” she asked. Sweat plastered her unbound hair to her face. She was tired, clearly, but stubborn.

“Aim for their eyes or mouth,” Alex said.

“What?”

Before he could answer, she knelt to the ground and put both hands into the earth. Hard-packed dirt rose from the ground a few yards away to cover the trunk-legs of the other Deadwood. It held—but only for a few seconds before the beast broke right through the dirt.

Diana growled and was forced to retreat again. She was going around in circles now, kiting the monsters.

“What you’re doing is not working, is it?” Alex asked.

By her reaction she wanted to take the question as a snub. After all, not a few hours ago, they had been competing to see who got to dust each monster. But there was still some logic in that big brain of hers, and she said, “Yes.”

If he heard some gritting of teeth in the way the words came out, Alex ignored it. “I’ve already found that out before when I fought one of these,” he said. “So learn from my mistake and aim for their damn eyes or mouth.”

After a moment, Diana nodded.

It didn’t take long after that. They dusted the two Deadwoods first—Diana and Alex sharing the kills between them, then moved on to help Cedric together after convincing Daven that spending his time looking for a single Killer Sloth while the crew leader dealt with six monsters by himself wasn’t exactly the ideal solution.

xx

He had been right.

Alex suffered through Cedric’s whole spiel about the secret fifth rule of dungeon diving as they rested soon after all the monsters had been dusted. Sometimes, improvise. Not exactly as impertinent as break the rules when necessary, but the spirit was the same.

So again, he had been right. Kind of.

“So what I’m getting is… don’t follow your orders?” Daven asked, eyebrows knitting together.

God bless the boy, at least he could be funny. Sometimes.

Diana palmed her face.

Leaning against a tree, Cedric sighed. “No, Daven. Just…” he trailed off, then sighed again. “Just try to find a compromise between following my orders and following your gut too, alright? This was all to teach you to act independently when the crew leader isn’t there to spoon feed you orders. Things can always go tits up, even with the best laid plans.”

“Well you coulda’ just said that.” Then when Cedric wasn’t looking, Daven turned to Alex and winked.

Shaking his head, Alex couldn’t help chuckling. He raised the waterskin in his hand toward the archer in a toast. It went to show people could always surprise you. Taking another gulp of the water, he passed the skin back to Valerian who sat next to him.

“My brother’s limitations aside,” Diana started. That earned a middle finger from Daven, which she pretended not to see. “Are we just to ignore the fact that those monsters just… just ambushed us?”

Alex straightened. He kept quiet about that, thinking it was just another one of those things everyone else knew and took for granted which he couldn’t comment on.

“Good question,” Cedric said. He turned to Daven with an expectant look. “You ought to know this.”

A sly smile crept up Daven’s lips. “No, no,” he said, putting his arms up. “I couldn’t possibly know the answer here, Cedric. I’m too limited, you understand. Ole' Miss Brains here can figure it out by herself, I’m sure.”

The middle finger was swiftly repaid. “Dickwit.”

“Pipe,” Daven spat back.

Diana growled. That seemed to have struck a nerve. “Hayhead!”

“We come from the same shitty village, you uppity idiot.”

“Alright, alright.” Cedric stepped in before Diana could pop a vein in her forehead. Shame. Alex had been enjoying the show. “Settle down you two. Daven, just answer the question man. The examiners love to put stuff like this on the written part. Oh and Alex, it’s only funny for a little bit before it becomes annoying. They can go for a while, trust me.”

Alex shrugged. “I could do with some long-form entertainment. Maybe some spoken word performances. Daven's a poet at heart, I'm sure.”

Cedric chuckled.

Diana sat back down with a huff, but Alex noted how her cheeks were rosy with embarrassment. The way Diana behaved around her brother sometimes reminded him of one of the boys back in the orphanage.

He was two years younger than Alex, but you’d think he was born well into his mid-forties by the way he talked and dressed and acted. His name helped, too. Wilfred. Not Will. Wilfred. The boy didn’t allow anyone to shorten his name.

He played his part well too, but Wilfred’s cot was right next to Alex’s, and every time something upsetting happened with the boy he would run to his bed and cuddle a ragged stuffed elephant as he cried. Whenever he had that little elephant in his hands, Wilfred turned into a child again.

Daven was Diana’s toy elephant, Alex realized. He brought out the child that was still inside of her no matter how hard she tried to hide it. Everyone had theirs, that part of you that was never allowed to grow up for one reason or another.

It was years later when Alex found out about Wilfred's. His parents died when he was five, and the family who adopted him moved away and left him back in the orphanage when he turned eight. Apparently, he had been too much trouble to be worth it for the family.

So, in that odd way that only childhood trauma can spin things in your mind, Wilfred tried to act as adult as possible to be less of a burden to the grown ups in his life. Even if inside he was still just a lost boy in an orphanage, hugging his toy elephant when the world reminded him of his lot in life.

Daven starting again broke through his strange thoughts. “We’re not that bad, she just—”

“Just answer, Daven,” Cedric cut him off sharply. It was the glare more than the words.

“Fine,” the archer said glumly. “It’s probably the reason this dungeon has an Environment rating other than zero. Environment most of the time means harsher weather, but things that affect the way monsters behave count as well. Dunno why it doesn’t count for the Monster rating, but that’s how it is.”

“So what?” Alex asked. “The Environment of this dungeon is conducive to… monsters knowing how to ambush? How does that make any sense?”

Daven only shrugged beneath his cloak.

“A lot of things don’t make sense, they only are,” Cedric said. “There’s sense in this, however. The Environment rating is not only about the weather. My crew and I were hired to look into this one dungeon once, just before I came here to Riverbend for the first time. We thought it was a nice and easy place at first, but this toxic fog would roil out of the ground every other hour and cover the dungeon whole. We were only able to make it past the first stage by hiding inside a network of caves. I wouldn’t consider that a weather event, but it’s part of the dungeon’s environment.”

“That adds up,” Diana said suddenly. Her tone carried none of the sullenness of before, but she conspicuously avoided looking at her brother. “But it doesn’t explain monsters ganging up like they did here. Especially different monsters coordinating to the point of keeping silent and following a sequence of attacks.”

Cedric smiled patiently. “I wasn’t quite finished,” he said.

Diana flushed. And, of course, Alex saw that Daven was grinning at his sister being rebuked.

“In the case of this dungeon here, it’s about the level of organization,” Cedric continued. “There’s no hive mind to the monsters, nor something directly controlling them. But they tend to ambush. The Monster rating only pertains to the individual strength of monsters in a dungeon, so this falls outside of that. In the Environment rating. There’s no explanation as to why some dungeons have these effects on monsters, only that they do. Hells, I’ve heard there’s dungeons out there that have whole villages and towns of monsters living inside as if they’re people themselves.”

Daven cracked a laugh. “I’d pay to see that.”

“Better to get paid for it,” Cedric said smartly.

Daven’s eyes shined. The boy had a hero-worship complex the size of his daddy issues—which Alex would bet was already overly prominent.

They left their little redoubt some minutes later, and it took nearly another hour and a half of dogged chasing for the third stage dome to appear in the center of the dungeon. It was smaller than the previous, just a few storeys high, shining sea-green against the purple sky of the forest.

The crew had kept their winning formation from before, dusting monster after monster as they went, though Cedric dispatched any of the larger ambushes they walked into. And this time he didn’t play around. It was always over before it began, really.

Despite being the one who’d fought the most out of the whole crew, Cedric didn’t seem any more tired. He walked in front of them toward the center of the dungeon with his head high, spear ready. Lithe as a panther, and likely just as dangerous.

In fairness, Valerian looked fresh as well, marching behind them in that methodical way of his. But there was a larger than life quality to the paladin, in size and in presence, that made it hard to tell what was going on with him no matter what. If Valerian ever tired, Alex doubted he would be able to notice.

The same couldn’t be said about the rest of the crew.

Daven’s steps no longer were as careful and silent as before, crunching detritus loudly as they climbed up the side of another hill. He still held his bow at attention, but it sagged at his side.

Behind him, Diana panted like a war horse, her hair plastered with sweat on her neck and brow. She’d stopped competing for monsters for a while now.

And though it rankled to be included in the weaker group, Alex too could feel the weariness seeping into his bones. The muscles were already gone, at this point. He stuck one foot after the other as if on auto pilot. If he stopped, he was afraid he would need another hour’s rest to get back up again.

It wasn’t his health or mana—those were still at manageable levels. And it couldn’t be the physical part either. Sure, they’d walked a ton in the last hours, but he was more than used to that in his life. If he had to guess, it was the overuse of power that brought this exhaustion, the constant cycling of it through the pathways inside of him. He only hoped this was something that could be trained out of.

Cedric stopped them as they crested the small wooded hill. Ahead, the dome sat in the middle of a large clearing surrounded by forest on all sides.

“Finally,” Daven breathed.

“Not as easy as you thought, huh?” Cedric asked, a winning smile on his lips. The bastard didn’t even have the decency to sweat.

Daven grinned through a cough. “Won’t stop me.”

“We’re going into the third stage?” Alex asked, wiping his forehead.

Cedric barked a laugh. “That’s above your pay grade my friend. No, we won’t go into the third stage, but we’ll go through the dome.” He looked at the three hopefuls and gave them a pitying smile. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy the surprise.”