Chapter Twenty-Two
Kenyon
The way Carter moved always put me on edge. I wondered if he didn’t enjoy throwing himself into danger just for fun. In fact, I wouldn’t even put it past him to do it just to annoy me. I was probably going to die years earlier than I should have, just from the stress of keeping him alive.
Not that he cared. He was probably laughing in that screwed up little head of his. He enjoyed every stress line he put on my face, every hour of sleep I lost, every frantic rush to try to save his useless life.
Well, that probably wasn’t fair. As much as I hated the way he did things, I really wasn’t sure he thought about much of anything when fighting, which was almost more terrifying.
He proved the point when he sailed forward, toward the pillar at the center of the clearing.
That held the heart of the dungeon, the source of power that kept this entire place together.
I’d seen them before, of course, as it was common in our line of work to run across them, but they always startled me.
We usually think about important things being large and flashy and somehow obvious. Even things like gems had a shine to them, a draw that made people want to own them. The dungeon hearts were entirely different.
If anything, they resembled pieces of obsidian, but not quite as glassy. They were dull and flat and chipped and ragged, as if broken pieces of concrete. And yet those tiny little chips of rock were responsible for all the damage a dungeon could do, all the lives they stole.
Ingram preferred going for the heart. His hands still carried the marks of hearts that he’d removed and destroyed over the years. Maybe it was a personal challenge for him to get in close, to get rid of the entire dungeon in one swoop.
Carter, on the other hand, much preferred killing everything inside a dungeon. Maybe he saw it as a personal failure if Ingram got all the credit for actually closing a dungeon. In fact, I had a feeling that if Carter left a dungeon not covered in blood, he would view it as a pointless task.
It meant that even though Carter moved toward the central pillar, where the heart sat, I knew he didn’t plan to go for it. Instead, it was just an attempt to rile up the monsters. The more that outsiders interfered with the heart, the closer that they got to it, the more vicious the monsters grew.
That meant it was far easier for Carter to gain the upper hand if he set the monsters into a frenzy by threatening the heart first.
Sure enough, before he got anywhere near it, the ground shook. A thundering crack echoed through the entire battlefield, and even I struggled to keep upright.
The terror on the others’ faces signaled them as newbies, unused to the violence that bathed a dungeon.
They looked young, but that didn’t always mean much.
Espers often looked far younger than their actual age.
It was one of the benefits of being an esper.
We didn’t live longer. If anything, we rarely made it past fifty or so.
Whether it was a fight with a monster, the corruption, or that we simply decided that we didn’t want to keep going until one or the other got us, espers weren’t known for being long lived. Still, there was a youthfulness to this squad that said they hadn’t had any real taste of battle.
Too often the younger espers would fight a single monster at the entrance to a dungeon and act as though they’d earned their stripes. I had a feeling this was the first exposure to that that this squad had ever gotten.
One of the reasons that they’d been sidelined from the more dangerous situations was probably because they didn’t even have a healer.
The squad was made up of two combat specialists, a debuffer who could control the weather, and a stealth expert.
Without either a mentalist or a healer, there were a lot of dungeons and monsters that they simply couldn’t deal with.
That also meant keeping both squads alive rested squarely on me. It was my job to make sure that nothing got them, or if something did, that I kept them from dying.
And fuck knew that wasn’t an easy job when it came to my own squad. They put far too much trust in me and didn’t value their own lives nearly enough.
The first monster to appear came from the treeline.
It was far from the largest or scariest thing that we’d ever encountered, but we’d learned never to underestimate a monster.
Doing that almost always led to injury or worse.
The thing was large, probably as tall as a horse.
It had six legs, and they worked together like an insect’s to propel it forward.
A short, stocky neck led to its massive wide, flat skull.
The head resembled a lizard, with a short snout full of teeth that didn’t line up quite right, so a few stuck out from over its lip line and showed even when its mouth was closed.
It headed straight for Carter. That didn’t shock me, as Carter knew exactly how to piss anyone off.
Before the thing could reach him, however, Ingram appeared out of nowhere.
It had freaked me out when I’d first met Ingram and learned how quickly he could sneak up on people. In fact, he seemed to revel in jumping out of nowhere and scaring the shit out of me when we were younger.
I think he got off on the control.
I’d gotten used to it, much like Shear’s ability to sneak into my head.
They were just things that we had to accept about one another.
Were they weird? Fuck yes they were. But they were part of us.
It was no different from my ability to heal or Carter’s uncanny ability and desire to kill anything that annoyed him.
Ingram’s shadows engulfed the creature. Some of the time he used a blade, like Carter, but he also had a few skills that Carter lacked. It required significantly higher risk to use shadows, but there was no doubt of their effectiveness.
A frightened, pained screech left the creature, escaping through that cloud of shadows, and when the dark shroud cleared, an emaciated husk remained. Ingram’s eyes glowed from the effort, but he hadn’t allowed the creature to get anywhere near Carter.
“What the fuck?” Carter held out his arms as though he’d just been personally wronged. “That was mine!”
Ingram smirked, the expression pulling one side of his lips up higher than the other. “Well, you should have been a little faster then, huh?”
Carter reached into his jacket and withdrew two blades, gripping the handles tightly. Each one was about the length of his forearm, incredibly sharp and thin. He had any number of blades on him, but those were his favorites. “So what are we betting on who gets the higher number?”
“First guiding when we get back?”
“But I’m not gonna have any kills!” I shouted at both of them, annoyed to be left out again. They always liked to base everything on kill count, as if that was the only thing that mattered. It felt rather unfair.
“Well, that seems like a you problem,” Carter said.
“Maybe we should count every one of your kills for me. I mean, I did save you, so you wouldn’t even have any kills if it wasn’t for me.”
He chuckled, but didn’t seem all that inclined to accept my idea.
Not that it really mattered—most of these bets never actually went through.
No one kept their word at the end of the day.
What did it matter when most of our resources were all pulled together?
It was just a way to pass the time, to have a little fun in the midst of something that was unquestionably not fun.
Of course, I also had never really wanted to win before. What was a hundred bucks to me?
But getting first guiding from Yun—now that was something worth fighting for.
Even if I thought I had a chance, that belief went away rather fast. One look at the way the others moved around the battlefield reminded me of exactly where I sat.
Carter moved like a typhoon, fast and devastating, barreling through the open space.
I’d seen him fight countless times before.
It wasn’t like this time was unique or special in any way, and yet, there was no doubt that it astounded me. Maybe it was some amount of jealousy.
The truth was that I had always fallen short.
Despite my size, despite how I looked, I’d never gotten to be that vision of masculinity.
Everyone always expected me to be the combat specialist. Anyone who looked between Carter and me would assume that I was the fighter.
At my age, by my point in life, I’d think that I would have gotten over questions like that, fears like that, but I guess no one really got over that sort of thing.
We moved past it, we made amends with it, we accepted it, but we didn’t ever really silence the doubts.
It was why it was ridiculous to me, but I still watched in awe, and a bit of jealousy, as he tore through the monsters that appeared.
More and more showed up, causing that slightly acidic scent to fill the space.
It was like rot, but more like rotten fruit.
It had this fake sweetness to it, something that I had grown accustomed to over our years of fighting monsters.
The more and more of them they came out, the more bodies piled up.
Despite that however, we kept the upper hand.
No matter how many appeared, neither Ingram nor Carter struggled beneath the onslaught.
The other espers fought in the way toddlers helped clean up the house. They usually just made more work, but they still got praise for it. They did their best.
I mean, it wasn’t good or anything.
I stayed where I was, monitoring the situation. Since I wasn’t that useful in a fight, I tended to try to stay back. Carter and Ingram had no issues with the monsters, so it wasn’t like there was anything for me to do.
At least not when it came to my squad.