Ant stood at the lip of the bowl with his boots sinking half an inch into ground that hadn't grown anything in longer than anyone could tell him, and thought, not for the first time this week, that he could sleep standing up if someone gave him thirty seconds and stopped asking him to fight in them. The eighth fissure smelled the same as the other seven — scorched grass gone to ash, and underneath it a mineral sharpness that caught at the back of his nose.
Two wraithkin were left. Low ones, violet light guttering along limbs that flickered from four-legged to six and back before they'd settled on anything worth calling a body — the kind that used to take him and Mahkir the better part of ten minutes back when this had still been new. Mahkir took the first one apart in four seconds, a strike low, one high, the thing folding in on its own light before it had finished turning to meet him.
[XP +40.]
The second one came in fast and low, aiming for Mahkir's foreleg, and connected before he'd fully cleared the first kill. Mahkir took the hit without breaking stride, a thin skim off his HP, hardly worth noticing, and answered with a bite that ended it before it had time to try again.
[XP +60.]
Eight vortexes in, this was what they'd bought themselves: Ant hadn't needed to draw Soul Render once, hadn't needed Overload or the boots or any of the rest of it, just stood at the rim and watched two people who'd spent five straight days learning exactly where the other one would be a half-second before they got there. It hadn't looked like that in the first fissure. It hadn't looked like that in the fourth, either, if he was honest. Somewhere around the sixth it had stopped looking like two separate things fighting at all.
"That's the last of them," Ant said, more to confirm it out loud than because either of them doubted it.
Told you four seconds, Mahkir said, already turning his attention to the bowl's far wall, where the fissure's last dim light was folding back down into the dirt it had come from. You owe me for that one. I called it before we even climbed down.
"You didn't call anything. You just wanted to hit something twice as hard as it needed."
Both things can be true.
Ant crossed to where the second wraithkin had gone down and crouched over the scorch mark it left, more habit than hope at this point. Nothing. No gem, no gleam, nothing but a smear of ash already cooling in the wind coming down off the bowl's rim. He'd stopped expecting one somewhere around the fourth vortex.
"Two gems, ever," he said, standing, wiping his palm on his trousers out of reflex rather than need. "Two, out of every vortex I've ever cleared — what's that now, twelve, thirteen total, counting this week? People act like they turn up if you just clear enough of these."
Because people who say that have never cleared enough of these to know better. Mahkir padded over, ears swiveling once toward the fissure before dismissing it as finished. I've started thinking it isn't luck. I think it's just true. They're rare because they're rare, not because we're doing something wrong.
"That's a very unhelpful thing to be right about."
I'm always right. It isn't my fault it's occasionally unhelpful.
The fissure sealed itself, dirt sliding back over dirt until the bowl was nothing more than a shallow dip in an empty field, and Ant let his shoulders drop for the first time since sunrise. Five days. Eight fissures, one or two a day depending on how far they'd had to walk to find the next one, and every muscle in his body ached from all of it at once.
[Encounter concluded. Experience gained: 2,450.]
[Ant: 3,880/34,000 to Level 18.]
[Mahkir: 60,910/60,000 to Level 10.]
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