Chapter 6: Chapter 6 – Taking Out The Chaff

We clear six rooms in half an hour, once we get started again.

Amber is cagey about her levels, so I’m not sure how much she got out of the fight, but she obviously got something. I ask why, that is, why she’s cagey, and she tells me that the Temple itself is alive enough that it can hear anything said within its walls. Telling me means telling it; not telling me means she gets to pull out whatever she got at least once before it’s no longer a surprise. That makes a lot of sense to me, given how much of a pain in the ass the Temple has been so far about the bullshit I pull. She gets a weird look on her face when I say so, but we move on.

Some of what she got is obvious, though. There’s a fluidity to her movements that I recognize from fighting Mathilda, something that makes her movements transcend her economical movements born from training - or, at least, her economical movements that match the training she was created as having had, which honestly should be a twistier thought to grapple with than it is - and makes her move less like an arrow and more like a torrent of water. When she went up against Johannes, she beat him down with a brutal application of force, hammering through his defenses; now she’s sliding through the tiniest of openings, applying all of that force in the narrowest chink in an enemy’s armor.

Then again, maybe she’s just more relaxed now, for the same reasons I am.

I’m not sure what, if anything, I got from the fight against the two orcs. The curse I got stuck with that stops me from invoking my Status means I’m not sure, but I’m fairly confident that I’m already at max level for my starter Class, and since I didn’t have Wanderer to Level 10 and a pylon to commune with before getting cursed, I don’t know what the next steps are. I figure with what I went through I’ve probably gotten the second rank of the Survivor Feat, and that might be why my health points - or hit points? hitpoints? It was just HP on the character sheet - had gone to a 13-point maximum from the previous 11.

Also, I’d gotten laid. That was nice. Not everything had to be about Skills and whatever; sometimes it could be just about a bit of a dry spell coming to an end.

It wasn’t changing our dynamic all that much. We’re grinning at each other when we bump hips instead of apologizing, we’re making eyes at each other and doing the blush-but-don’t-stop-ogling thing, and she’s getting sort of in my way when we’re in a tight spot and I’m going in for a quicker look at a rune or something. It’s nice.

I’d say it doesn’t last, but bluntly, we dawdled a little, bunker down for the night in a [Shelter] spell of some variant that translates to Half-Step. I forget to ask her, distracted by how she looks lit by a half dozen of my motes, and then in the middle of the night I’m awake with a panic attack of sorts, so I take the time to figure it out for myself: the spell takes the room and moves it a half step removed from the material plane, still anchored to the planet but inaccessible unless you know exactly the right combination of partial hyperspatial and imaginary dimensions to traverse.

I figure out exactly what happens if you fuck up and traverse it wrong. It’s not hard to figure out, just hard to go back to sleep afterwards. Amber helps me out with that, and I don’t wake up again until she more or less shoves a hunk of food and a mug of what she calls tea into my hands. The worldships don’t have tea, or at least the Sha-la Fleet’s worldships don’t have it; we have, they had, nine or eleven - depends on how you count them - different formulations of Up, most of which comes in powder, pill, or inhalable form. Mix it into water, swallow it, or breathe it in; any way you do it, you’re a razor fit to part the fabric of the universe with for sixteen hours, and the comedown isn’t any worse than realizing you’re done with a project and look at that, your bed is just a meter away.

This wasn’t that. There were notes of a lot of different flavors in it, more flavors than I’d tasted in the last thirty years rolled into one if you didn’t count Festival and feast-days. The primary note was astringency, a sharp and bitter astringency that brings me to tears in a single sip. I spend a few minutes trying to apologize, a few minutes explaining, and then a few minutes comforting a distraught Paladin. I try to explain about hydroponics and carrying capacity, but it turns out a lot of my understanding is just flat-out wrong, at least here.

She spends a moment in prayer and then hands me some food that looks exactly like the food she’d first handed me, but the flavors are a lot more familiar. It helps me re-center, the flavor of protein and fat and salt all mixed in with the familiar paprika and what she tells me is garlic. I keep drinking the tea without letting her change it, or having Kazir change it, though.

There are seventeen monsters waiting when we take down the [Half-Step Shelter] spell. My motes eat the residual mana of the spell and flare elemental lances out the doors, and it only takes three quarters of a second to clear them out because I need to use a couple orbs to pop around the corner and lance the hallways. After that, it’s steady work clearing the floor.

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And I mean clearing the floor. After two rooms and a long corridor, the Temple hands us the exit to the Gatekeeper, the path upwards, and a fifty-fifty chance for another Pylon on a silver platter. We turn back and take a door we’d passed by, because for all that we’re butchering our way through, we’re still improving our teamwork and getting to know each other’s fighting styles better. After that, the Temple just sticks an antechamber in front of us with eleven closed doors in it and a detailed map of the level; an absolutely blatant please finish up here.

We mostly oblige. After three of the antechamber’s rooms - monsters, traps, and more monsters - we sit down to rest for ten minutes, cross-checking our understanding of the other’s style and offering suggestions. Mine are mostly awful, though I’m able to help her get a better conceptualization of the way her gauntlets focus her [Conjure Weapon] skill, and our conversation helps her figure out that if she trains more with her shield as an offensive tool, it’ll pick up some of the slack it’s started to show relative to her sword. That’s not something I’d have thought of because it’s the kind of squishy bullshit I can only stand when I come up with it or exploit it, but I do my best “I am a genius” face and grandly accept responsibility and credit.

She, equally grandly, accepts my claim, and asks what the price will be, and our ten minute break winds up being around twenty five, and we’re both feeding off of each other’s and our own highs when we start up again.

It almost goes horribly wrong because of it. I take point on door number five and miss a trick on a blighthound, and I panic when the rot starts to spread up my leg. I turn the room into a firestorm of condensed mana almost by reflex, and Amber comes out of it screaming in pain as the rings of her chainmail fail to melt and instead cling to her, burning through all the intermediate layers deep into her skin.

She somehow still attends to me before she does a single thing to heal herself. I’m wildly uncomfortable with that level of devotion, even though she’s right that the blightrot was higher priority than any of the sloughing, agonizing horrorscape that my spell had turned her skin into. I make her show me before she heals herself, knowing that it was my fault on two entire levels and needing to etch what that kind of mistake means indelibly into my brain.

I find a corner afterwards, retching until there’s nothing inside me but clear bile. She rubs my shoulders while I do, murmuring something I can’t hear over the roaring in my head, and she doesn’t seem to judge me for any of it, not the mistakes and not the mess I make.

We’ve made necklaces and draping, jangling bandoliers out of the cleansing charms that the goblins had in the room where we fought Mathilda and Johannes. They didn’t do anything against the blightrot, but our clothes are fresh and the vomit puddle shrinks like it’s evaporating at the same time as the smell of it fades into sour memory.

Amber’s response to all of this is to feed us lunch and fuss over the tea she serves me. Its taste is a lot subtler, and I know at least some of what’s in it; the mint has carvone and some other stuff I can’t think of, and there’s some citric acid in the tea, but obviously there’s all the aromatic flavor compounds.

I avoid thinking about a whole lot of things for long enough to feel guilty, but eventually I give up and activate [Insight]. It takes my full mana pool and doesn’t even fully trigger, but it leaves an echoing ringing in my head and a tense look on Amber’s face, like there’s a conversation coming and she doesn’t want it to happen.

I guess I’m familiar with the feeling.

“We need to talk.”

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