Chương 36: Chapter 35 - First Wraithkin

It had taken barely a few hours to find one. Kalsar's Kithren had led the way almost the entire distance, pausing periodically to test the air in a way that looked, to Ant's untrained eye, indistinguishable from an ordinary animal sniffing at something interesting. Kalsar had simply followed, unbothered, offering no commentary beyond the occasional grunt of confirmation whenever his Kithren's pace picked up.

"That was fast," Ant said, mostly to fill the silence of the last stretch of walking.

"I expected this to take days, not hours."

"Depends on the region," Kalsar said.

"This area's had three known vortices logged over the decades I've lived out here. All three have been farmed regularly enough that most people stopped bothering to check on them. But farmed doesn't mean gone. It means smaller. Manageable." He nodded toward the ground ahead, where something had begun to shimmer faintly against the flat grey light of the afternoon.

"There." The vortex looked exactly like the earth had been torn rather than opened — a ragged fissure perhaps ten feet across, the soil around its edges curled upward in jagged plates as though something had punched through from below with considerably more force than the ground had been built to withstand.

Energy poured from the gap in slow, visible currents, a faint violet-grey shimmer that moved the way heat moved above a fire, except cold somehow, and wrong in a way Ant couldn't quite place beyond the simple fact that nothing about it looked like it belonged in the world above ground.

Standing at the edge of it, Ant could feel it before he could properly see it — a pressure against his skin, faint but unmistakable, the specific discomfort of standing near something that had been building for three centuries and had finally found a way to breathe. Maren stood at the edge of it, staring down into the swirling dark with an expression caught somewhere between fear and the same hungry fascination she'd shown in the ruined lab.

"We go in together," Kalsar said.

"I'll be behind you. Watching, not fighting, unless something goes wrong enough that watching stops being an option." His eyes moved between them all, ending on Ant.

"Understood?" Ant nodded. Beside him, Mahkir made a small sound that might have been agreement or might have simply been boredom, difficult to tell which. They went down together. The passage narrowed briefly before opening into a wider space below — not a cave exactly, more like a wound in the earth that had settled into something semi-permanent, walls of packed soil and exposed stone streaked through with the same faint violet residue that had been leaking from the surface.

The air here was thick with it, a pressure Ant felt against his skin rather than saw. Mahkir's amber eyes had gone slightly wider than usual, taking in the space with genuine interest rather than his usual dismissive assessment. This place is thick with it, he said, through the bond. Whatever it is. I can feel it against my skin the way you'd feel standing too close to a fire. Ant relayed the sentiment. Kalsar, a step behind them, nodded slowly.

"Good sign. Means whatever's inside had reason to accumulate." They'd gone perhaps thirty feet further into the passage when the growls reached them. More than one. Low, overlapping, bouncing off walls that gave the sound nowhere clean to travel, and Ant's hand found Soul Render's grip before he'd consciously decided to reach for it. Three shapes emerged from the dark ahead of them, roughly the size of large dogs, their forms somewhere between shadow and substance, edges bleeding into the surrounding gloom.

Points of dull red light marked where eyes should have been on each one, shifting position as they spread out to circle.

"Wraithkin," Kalsar said, quiet and flat.

"There are three of them. They appear to be low grade, all three. Either young or weak, hard to say which from here. Should be manageable, if the three of you actually work together instead of just standing near each other." Maren's Kithren dropped into a defensive stance without being told. Maren herself had gone very still, her hand gripping the strap of her pack hard enough that her knuckles had paled.

"Spread out!" she called, her voice steadier than her posture suggested.

"Don't let them box us in — Ant, left flank, I'll take the one circling right, Mahkir can—" The Wraithkin didn't wait for the plan to finish forming. All three lunged at once, and whatever coordination Maren had been attempting collapsed within seconds. Her Kithren surged forward to intercept the nearest shape, four arms swinging in a wide defensive arc that clipped Mahkir's flank as he darted past in the same instant, sending him tumbling sideways with a sharp, irritated snarl.

"Watch him!" Ant shouted, though it was unclear which him he meant, and the confusion cost him a half-second he didn't have — one of the Wraithkin closed the distance and raked something insubstantial across his forearm, cold rather than sharp, the wound arriving without the clean pain a blade would have given him. A number he didn't have time to read ticked down somewhere behind his eyes and was gone again just as fast. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

Mahkir recovered fast, twisting back into the fight with claws already out, meeting the creature that had struck Ant before it could withdraw. Maren's Kithren, still tangled in its own momentum from the earlier collision, swung wide at empty air where its target had already moved, overcommitting in a way that left it exposed.

"Mahkir, don't—" Ant started, watching Mahkir move to cover the opening Maren's Kithren had left, only for Maren's Kithren to recover at the same moment and swing back into the same space, the two of them colliding again, neither quite where the other expected. This is remarkably poor coordination, Mahkir observed, dry disapproval running through every word — the tone of someone forced to share a task with people who hadn't rehearsed it.

"Working on it," Ant said, breathless, ducking under a strike from the third Wraithkin and driving Soul Render through the shifting mass of its shoulder. The fight sprawled across the chamber in overlapping exchanges that refused to settle into anything resembling a pattern — Maren calling directions that arrived too late to matter, her Kithren throwing its full strength at targets that had already moved, Mahkir compensating for both of them by covering gaps that kept opening faster than anyone could close them.

Ant felt himself flagging, Soul Render growing heavier with every parry, his forearm throbbing where the first strike had opened it, sweat stinging in the wound each time he moved.

"Behind you!" Maren shouted, and Ant spun to find nothing there, the warning arriving a full second too late to matter, her Kithren's own confusion apparently bleeding into her calls as much as into its movements. He caught the real strike a half-second later on the flat of his blade, deflecting it wide rather than absorbing it cleanly, the impact still jarring up through his wrist. Something felt different.

His arm moved faster than it should have, Soul Render catching the next strike with a margin that hadn't been there a moment ago. He didn't have time to question it properly, but the sensation stayed with him through the next exchange too — lighter, sharper, the blade responding like it weighed less than it had at the start of the fight. He checked his screen mid-motion, the habit too ingrained to suppress even in the middle of combat. User: Anthony Byrren User Level: 4 Str: 9 (+0. 45) End: 5 (+0. 25) Magic: 5 (+0. 25) Agi: 12 (+0. 6) The numbers sat fractionally above their baseline, small increases layered on top of everything he already had, present without any corresponding screen event explaining where they'd come from. He glanced toward Mahkir mid-fight and pulled up his status too, quick and instinctive. Kithren: Mahkir Level: 3 Str: 12 (+0. 6) End: 10 (+0. 5) Magic: 20 (+1) Agi: 18 (+0. 9) Both of them elevated. Both by the same proportion. The trait.

Two or more enemies, engaged simultaneously — the five percent boost he'd read on Mahkir's screen back in the ruined lab, dismissed at the time as a minor curiosity, now humming quietly beneath everything happening around him, present in a way he only properly registered once the fight was already turning in their favour because of it. It turned the tide more than the coordination ever managed to. Mahkir dropped the first Wraithkin with a precise series of strikes, the shadow guttering out into drifting motes.

He was already moving to the second before it had finished dispersing, meeting Maren's Kithren there by accident again, but this time the collision worked in their favour, the two of them jointly overwhelming the creature between them before either had quite meant to coordinate anything. The third fell to Ant and Mahkir together, cornered against the chamber wall, the last of its cohesion unravelling under a combined assault that finally, briefly, looked like something planned rather than accidental.

Silence settled. Ant stood breathing hard, forearm throbbing, watching the last traces of shadow drift apart and vanish. The screen arrived. Wraithkin (Weak) x3 defeated. Experience gained: 890. You have reached Level 5. Mahkir has reached Level 4. Ant stared at the notification, considerably larger than anything a single weak Wraithkin had produced. He pulled up his full status without quite deciding to. User: Anthony Byrren User Level: 5 Str: 10 End: 6 Magic: 5 Agi: 13 HP: 40/40 Mana: 20/20 Level five.

He read through the changes carefully — strength up by one, endurance by one, agility by one, HP and mana both climbing by ten with the level itself. Five stat points total, nothing dramatic, but real, earned rather than gifted, and something in his chest settled at the sight of it in a way none of Mahkir's numbers had ever quite managed to produce. He checked Mahkir's screen next, uncertain what to expect after everything the last week had taught him about how unevenly experience seemed to land between them.

Kithren: Mahkir Level: 4 Evolution Stage: 1 Str: 14 End: 12 Magic: 26 Agi: 23 HP: 40/40 Mana: 70/70 Level four. A real level, this time, with real numbers attached to it — fifteen stat points spread across the board, weighted heavily toward magic and agility, HP climbing to match Ant's own and mana surging past anything Ant's pool would likely reach for a long while yet. Ant felt something loosen slightly at the sight of it.

Whatever had happened between level two and three, whatever had left Mahkir's stats frozen while a trait arrived in their place, hadn't repeated itself here. The numbers had moved, and moved considerably, and for the first time Ant let himself set aside the theory of permanently locked stats and simply accept that the growth, however uneven, was still happening — just not on any schedule he'd yet managed to predict.

Maren, catching her breath a few feet away, glanced at her own Kithren and then at the two of them, something rueful crossing her face.

"That was a disaster of teamwork," she said, wiping a smear of dust from her cheek.

"I kept calling positions and none of them landed where I meant them to. I think I was half a second behind everything the entire fight."

"You weren't the only one," Ant said, flexing his forearm and wincing at the movement.

"Mahkir and your Kithren collided twice. I don't think either of them noticed the other was even there half the time." He telegraphs his commitments too early, Mahkir said, blunt in the way he reserved for critiquing anything that wasn't himself. Easy enough to read, if you're paying attention. Difficult to work alongside, if you're not expecting to need to.

Ant relayed a softened version of it, and Maren nodded slowly, unoffended, already turning the failure over with the same analytical focus she brought to everything.

"It was," Kalsar agreed, from where he'd stood the entire fight without moving, arms folded, watching everything with the same unreadable attention he'd carried since the moment he'd first opened his door.

"Which is exactly why we're here."