Chapter 2: Chapter 2 – I Was Used to Being Alone

The first thing I realize is that I’m going to have to completely change my fighting style.

It isn’t a big deal, except that it is a big deal. The varied stones of the corridors of the Temple have been my home for a couple of weeks now, ever since I took that ride through the unproofed, unanchored wormhole in lieu of, well, that’s a long story. Let’s just say I had good reason to do the dive, but it’s not a dive with a controlled exit, and I wound up in a wild spiral through spacetime that ended with pieces of my navblister all over the entry hall of the Temple’s fifth level.

Any landing you can walk away from, I guess, and I walked away from that one. The broken bones came later.

“I need to reconfigure my stuff.” I’m frowning at nothing in particular when I say it, frustration showing through. “Also, to resummon and whatnot. If we can find a dead end, think you can hold off what comes?”

She stops to look at me skeptically. “Neither hide nor tail of any monster so far.”

“Yeah.” I reach out to touch the walls. They’re still the abstract stone, so at a guess they’re going to be everywhere on this whole level. Dark corridors barely lit by phosphorescent algae growing in splotches along the ceiling, a maze seemingly without end and without anything to contest us. “There’s ambient magic, but I’m only getting a trickle of mana. If I start up the vacuum, it’ll draw everything on the floor.”

She hums, thinking. “That how you broke your, ah.” She waves a hand at me. “Various bones?”

“Nah. Swarms are chumpy.” I start counting on my fingers. “The ribs were a jackal-kinda thing at the start of the level, got me with a kick before its tendons went. That sucked, but it didn’t actually stop me from being effective. The arm was a trap, the wrist was me being too slow and having to block a centaur, and the concussion was on purpose.” She gives me a look that has entire dictionaries of meaning, and I shrug. “I had a Share the Pain scroll, a charge of Amplify, and a charge of Empower. Took a glancer of a hit from the miniboss to the head.”

Amplify had been pretty close to a doubling at whatever level I’d been at, and Empower was a flat three. Share the Pain reflected twice on baseline, so the tentacled fucker had eaten twelve times my dizzying, nauseating, debilitating concussion, and I’d waited to pop my last scroll of Stabilize until after I was sure the rot had eaten enough of it from the inside, just in case it transferred across too. I don’t bother explaining any of that to her; the narrowing of her eyes and slow nod means she got it, and I can save my time and energy.

“Right hand rule?” We’re at a T-intersection in the corridor, something I hadn’t even noticed with my … thinking. Definitely not brooding.

“Gimme a sec.” I let my eyes unfocus, staring at the edges of the not-exactly-a-doorway. I hum to myself as I do, narrowing my eyes and focusing tightly on one particular point that seemed fuzzier than the rest of the stone where a doorframe should have been.

“Do you see something?” Her sentence cuts off weird, like she was about to add something.

“Summoning glyph. I think.” I flip a hand upwards and a ball of light starts bouncing on my palm. “Not one that I recognize, but that doesn’t say a whole lot. What do you think? I have, um.” I scratch the back of my head with my other hand. “The basic elements plus the trinity: plague, ill fortune, and weakness. Always works. Range is pretty shit but I picked up a few area increasers and they’re recurse-affect, haven’t run into a room I don’t cover and they bounce real nice.”

“You. What.”

“I could do ice and the trio.” There are four balls of light bouncing on my palm as I attune myself to the right Skills, and they start to pick up some color. Sickly green, black, grey… “The ice is a little more controlled, so we don’t eat the debuffs from the cold—”

“Adam.”

“—so combined with some buffs, our resistances can just tank the trio and we wait it out, especially if you have debuff resistance—”

“Magelord James!”

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“What?” I spin to face her, annoyed, and she steps back, away from the orbs. “I’m trying to—”

“I don’t have resistances to those.” Amber glares at me. “Not to mention, you’re wielding a propagating combination death curse. Don’t even suggest doing that outside. By all Gods, many would say I should put a sword through you for having done so even in an isolated situation like this!”

“Well excuse me, princess.” I try to keep the hurt out of my voice and fail miserably. “I didn’t come prepared for this bullshit, you know! My people fight our battles with, well, we don’t have battles!” War, on the other hand, I think to myself but don’t say, we’ve had. “Way I figured it, if this place isn’t going to give me any real weapons other than my magic, I’ll use my magic!”

She opens her mouth to argue with me and then closes it with a snap, then takes a couple of deep breaths. “Adam. My lord, my captain, my liege, my creator.” Her voice is strained. “I need you to do something for me, for us.”

I look at her flatly. “What.” It’s not in question-intonation. I regret that immediately.

“Use different magic.” She holds up a hand to stop me from saying anything, and there’s a serious light in her eyes that has me respecting that. “Forget the sacrilege, forget the risk of getting into the habit, forget the certainty that you will wind up with a set of Skills that will get you killed on sight if someone with a high enough level in Analysis takes a single look at you.” Okay, that one I didn’t think of. “I have [Elemental Resistance], [Endurance], and [Dampen Damage], and I have [Adaptive Resistance], but none of those provides me with any protection against your trio, and only Adaptive would have an effect against plague.”

My anger quenches like I’d dumped a bucket of ice water on it. With resistances like that, she’d die well before the stronger monsters I’d run into, much less things like the jackal that needed a rotating range of shit. “What…” I clear my throat. “What are your multipliers for elemental? My Resistance line skills were in the teens, percent, when I got hit with the curse. Dunno the others.” Obviously my subconscious had a plan, and there aren’t all that many options right now.

She smiles and it’s like the sun comes out, it’s like I’m forgiven for being an inconsiderate idiot. “My own understanding of the precise values is not as precise as yours, but one in five for Resistance, one in ten for Dampen Damage, and one in three for Adaptive once it rises to its occasion.” She doesn’t have the undercurrents in her voice this time for some reason.

“So around half, all in all, before you get rolling.” I hold a ball of light out to her. It buzzes and bounces, sparking; she winces as she takes it from me, breathing steadily. “Not too bad?”

“Not bad at all.” She grins, and stretches, still holding the sparkball. It’s guttering out, but I know my magic at least a little bit; it’s actually doing a little bit more damage now than it was when I handed it to her, she’s just ignoring it with Adaptive. She’s probably taken two points of damage, but she’s also probably healed it up.

Not that I’m paying any attention to how much damage she’s taking or not as she reaches up to the sky and bends deeply first left and then right, hips swinging wide. She reaches out to tip my head upwards, and I meet her grin with an embarrassed, sheepish half-grin of my own.

“You are good for a woman’s ego, you know.” She pulls her gauntlets on, smiling.

“I shouldn’t—”

She can probably tell what I’m about to say, something along the lines of I shouldn’t stare like that, it’s inappropriate. She shuts me up with a kiss, lips literally shocking against mine as the last bits of the sparkball ground out against me and my health ticks down by one. She whispers something I can’t follow and kisses me again, and the whisper turns out to be [Healing Touch], the echoes of the skill filling the corridor as she pulls her helmet on with a massive smirk.

I ignore the two condition messages I get - really, System? Really? though Shocked was a reasonable pun - and start pulling magic out of the air, condensing it into eye-searingly bright balls of charge. I add a flame orb into the mix just in case we run into something immune to the electricity, and almost miss the sword and shield manifesting from Amber’s gauntlets.

“Keep them off my sides. I’ve got anything in front of me.” I nod, and then everything is chaos.

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