As Warcry and I worked our way through the temple, the skelebuddies got faster, stronger, and more numerous. Soon, instead of fighting six or eight per room, we were fighting ten and twenty. Keeping stray bones and gems from rolling into other rooms and triggering a landslide of new skeletons got more and more complicated.
Luckily, no new Technol squads showed up. Smoky and Unu got a little more on edge about that every day—apparently, they’d never stayed in one place for so long without an attack—but Valthorpe was so engrossed in the carvings and etchings in the temple that he barely noticed time passing. We started a nightly rotating watch to guard the camp, but excluded the hairy academic because it was a toss-up whether he would pay attention to his surroundings or get engrossed in his research and get us all killed in our sleep.
The overnight watch had an unexpected fringe benefit—Kest was usually able to talk at night. Apparently, guarding her senior’s field shop was part of her probationary work, and Rali wasn’t allowed to sit up with her, so he wasn’t reading over her shoulder. I traded shifts with Unu to get on the same schedule as Kest and kept Dead Reckoning active over a huge area surrounding camp during my shift, so I could text with her uninterrupted.
Between the script tattoo, the constant fighting, and the nightly training, my body grew as lean and sharp as a filleting knife. I wasn’t turning into a bodybuilder type like the Komodo Emperor or Smoky, but where I’d been on the skinny side before, now I could see muscles standing out in clear definition. My stamina was through the roof, and facing off against so many deadly weapons really honed my evasive maneuvers. Turned out I wasn’t nearly as willing to stand around and take punishment when it came laced with razor-sharp blades.
My Spirit reserve was jumping up, too. Not only was I spending all day long Swallowing the Universe and Reclaiming the Dead in a temple full of ancient Miasma, but I pocketed all the undamaged gemstones I could find. Then when I had time back at camp, I damaged the protective script and absorbed the life points inside. I went from the almost forty thousand I’d had on Ryu to a whopping seventy-three thousand. Way more than I had ever managed to cultivate in such a short time.
With all the extra Spirit, I made a second spiral, this one denser than the first. Warcry even grudgingly admitted that I was doing a decent job—“for a grav like you, anyway.” Apparently, it wasn’t easy to make such tight, concentrated spirals so soon after learning how to condense. The more efficiently you made them, the more Spirit overall you could fill your Spirit sea with, but most beginners ended up with sloppy, chaotic masses that were hard to store and harder to use.
“There had to be something I was good at,” I told Warcry.
He sucked his teeth. “Didn’t have to be.”
You’d think being up at night and fighting all day would wear you down, but with the life point boosts, I had energy to spare.
Warcry, on the other hand, looked like he was suffering from the loss of sleep. Dark circles painted themselves under his eyes, and he got more short-tempered every day. Most nights when I was on shift, I could see his HUD screen flickering on the inside of his tent. One night, he must’ve forgotten to mute the sound because a tinny announcer yelled over a roaring crowd “Hyla ‘the Hangman’ Nameless versus—” before there was a sudden scramble in his tent and the voice cut off.
Are you going to talk to him about it? Kest asked when I told her.
Yeah, no. I’d rather be curbstomped, and he probably would, too. What I’m going to do is figure out these stupid skelebuddies so we can clear this place already.
If I could do mass damage to all the gemstone scripts in a room, then I could tear out packs of life points at a time. The sooner I found a way to do that, the sooner we could get to the top of the temple, see if the artifact was there, and grab it before the Technols. Then Kest wouldn’t have to spy anymore, and she and I could hopefully get an assignment for the Dragons somewhere together instead of halfway across a planet from each other.
Unfortunately, that plan hit a snag on the fourth floor of the temple.
The huge, low-ceilinged room at the top of the staircase sat at the very center of the temple. No light got in from outside, columns blocked visibility in every direction, and every other tile was booby-trapped with an extra-powerful ancient Fire Spirit construct. Step on the wrong tile, and fire geysered up from the floor in a burning fountain.
It was also jam-packed with skelebuddies, so you couldn’t watch your feet without getting killed. The skeleton warriors surrounded the stairs in staggered rings, each one holding their buddy’s hand and watching for us to poke our heads out and trigger an attack.
Because of his Burning Hatred Spirit, Warcry had a natural immunity to flames. So while I spent most of my time on the stairs writhing in agony as the script tattoo sloughed off severely burned skin and replaced it with new stuff, Warcry kept trying to bull in and take the full fourth-floor army all at once, only backing out when he was definitely going to die.
After several failed attempts and some brainstorming, we tried to lure them into coming after us, figuring we could draw a few away at a time and pick them off, but for some reason, the skelebuddies wouldn’t follow us farther than the top step. They were going to fight us in a group or not at all.
By the end of the week, we hadn’t made any progress into the fourth floor,
