Chapter 33: The Deep Room

I got through the archway into the next room, made it two steps, put a hand on my knee, and dry-heaved onto the floor.

Nothing came up, since there was nothing in me to come up. It was all on the outside of me instead. I was soaked from my head to my boots in the blood of more monsters than I’d bothered to count. It was in my hair and down my collar, and my tail was so heavy with it that I could feel the weight pulling. The smell had started the heaving in the first place.

I should explain how I got here, because this was not the plan.

The plan, after the first night, had been simple. Come down, fight things, level up. My level pulls the weasel’s skills up with it, so the stronger I get the harder my little flashlight hits, and the harder it hits the faster I level. It’s a loop, and I’ve written dozens of loops, so I know a good one when I see one.

What I hadn’t accounted for was how many things there were down here.

And, Jesus Christ, there were a lot of things down here.

The ruin went a lot deeper than the chamber Sabine showed me. It kept going, room after room, and the deeper you got, the thicker the mana got. Thick mana is where the monsters breed. I’d spent the last hour walking down through all of it and killing everything that clicked at me, since every kill was a sliver of experience and every sliver put the weasel’s numbers up.

[Cave Lurkers. Then bigger Lurkers. Then those pale things with the arms. Then a whole nest of the pale things. I have personally, in the last sixty minutes, wiped out what I’m fairly sure was the entire breeding population of a subterranean ecosystem.]

The weasel rode on my shoulder, and even it was tired. Its light had gone from clean white down to a low amber that kept sputtering out and coming back. Every few minutes it closed its eyes and put its whole weight against my neck. I let it sleep until the next thing came out of the dark.

[Lv. 11,] I thought, checking. [I started tonight at level four. The weasel’s at seven now. MEND is up to three, and it closes just about anything.]

Another Lurker clicked at me from the dark ahead.

"Weasel," I said, and pointed.

The weasel went off my shoulder without waiting for the rest of the sentence and hit it in the face with a full-strength LIGHT. The Lurker screamed and backed up into a column hard enough to crack the stone. Then it lay down and stopped being a problem. The weasel came back to my shoulder.

I’d told myself one more room and then bed about nine separate times tonight.

And this room was the bottom.

"Weasel. Light. Big one, the good white one. Last one, I promise."

It lifted its head, took a second to gather itself, and threw a proper LIGHT straight up at the ceiling.

The chamber came up all at once. It was domed, and it was big enough to drop the tournament arena into with room left over for the stands. The columns down here leaned inward and the light didn’t find the tops of them.

In the middle of the floor there was a seed the size of a carriage.

Sabine had shown me a picture of a little one. A little one was a chip of soft blue that fit in your palm, and one of those was supposed to be worth more than three weeks of honest training. This thing sat half-sunk into the stone and glowed the same blue, only darker, and I could feel it humming in my back teeth from thirty feet away. I didn’t need the carriage. I needed a corner of it, a splinter, whatever came off when I hit it.

The weasel took one look at it, dove headfirst into my collar, and wouldn’t come out.

[That’s the whole errand, sitting right there, and I’m going to take that shit home. That said, I’m a little bit alarmed. Nothing has gone horribly wrong since that one injury. So, theoretically, I should be about to run out of luck. Meh, whatever.]

I took a step toward it.

The floor moved.

[Yeah, I figured.]

A section near the seed unfolded.

I’d counted it as another leaning column, and it had been wrapped around the crystal the entire time I’d been standing there. It came apart joint by joint, and it kept finding new joints to come apart at, until its head went past the top of the weasel’s light and stayed up there in the dark where I couldn’t check on it. Two points of pale blue opened near the top of it and found me.

[Should’ve seen that coming. You don’t leave something like that lying around with nothing sitting on it. I’m the one who taught this world that rule. I wrote it into a footnote when I was fifteen because I needed a boss in a hole. Anyway, Weasel. APPRAISE!]

The weasel put its head out of my collar, looked up, and gave me no level and no rank.

[DON’T ACT SCARED NOW, YOU USELESS MASCOT!]

The thing took a step and the whole chamber shook with it. Dust came off the columns. Behind me were about four hundred stairs and a door Sabine had left unlocked, and going up them meant walking into a ring in three weeks with the stats I had right now.

And I couldn’t do that. So, instead, I got my sword up in both hands.

[Okay. Assets. Level eleven, five MP, a body that can’t reliably swing a stick, and a spirit the size of a housecat whose kit is a flashlight, a scanner, a heal, and a button that makes the enemy hit the healer. Against a house.]

The weasel still had its head back down inside my collar.

[Buddy. Wake up. I’m taking this fight.]