Anton joined in the fighting on the tenth floor. It wasn’t long after that he got his next level. Fighting the mercenaries had gotten him most of the way there, and the second Ice Gorger he fought put him over the line.

  You have reached Level 6.

  Applying Benefits for Level 6

  Strength + 1

  Toughness + 1

  Agility + 1

  Dexterity + 1

  Perception + 1

  Willpower + 1

  Charisma + 1

  Please allocate free Ability points

  Anton put both his free points into Strength and felt his power surge. It still didn’t match the overwhelming force that al-Kadir had wielded, but he would get there.

  Please select a new Trait. Available Traits: Inspiring Speech, Draw Focus, Chainbreaker.

  Anton felt a surge of annoyance that Kelsey had been right. He’d never seen Chainbreaker on any of the lists in the Guild, but he knew it was what he needed right now. Not that the other two were useless. Draw Focus was one that he’d seen before. It would let him protect his party by drawing enemies to him. And Inspiring Speech would relieve one of his main worries about his new role as a noble.

  But a choice between what he needed and what he wanted was no choice at all. He selected Chainbreaker.

  “Did’ja get it?” Kelsey asked eagerly.

  “Yes.” Like most Traits, knowledge of how to use it was seeping into him. Like a well-trained muscle memory, he just knew.

  “How does it work? Is it a spell?”

  “It takes a blow,” he said slowly, feeling out the ramifications. It wasn’t clear to him how he could hit something insubstantial like a spell, but he knew that he could. “Maybe we should test it.”

  “On what?” Kelsey asked. Anton looked at her.

  “There’s a chain between us, isn’t there?”

  Kelsey’s unnaturally pale face went even whiter. “I prefer to think of it as a bond. An unbreakable bond. Of friendship and love!”

  “Do you even know what those words mean?” Anton snorted. “And it’s not so unbreakable, not anymore.”

  “Hey, hey, can you really say you regret the times we’ve had together?” Kelsey. “You and me—and the others—against the world!”

  “If we’re such good buddies, then we hardly need a geas keeping us together, do we?” Anton asked. “You’re still the dungeon in the land that I’m in charge of, we’re not going to go our separate ways. This chain is just getting in the way of our friendship.”

  “Come on, this is just ungrateful. I’ve saved your life so many times—”

  “—Risked it just as many.”

  “I got both your wives Epic Classes—”

  “—You may have pointed them on the way, but they earned those Classes. You set Suliel against her mother and you broke Aris’s bones!”

  “She got better? And there was a lot going on with Suliel already, I just gave her an opportunity.”

  “I’m not ungrateful.” Anton paused, wanting to be sure how he felt. “Just not so grateful that I want to be a slave.”

  He raised his sword. A silver light gathered along its edge.

  “There’s more to it than that!” Kelsey yelled.

  Anton stopped, but he kept his sword in the air. “What more?”

  “I need you,” Kelsey said. “I need you to take me where I need to go.”

  “Where is that?” Anton asked.

  Kelsey shrugged. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t need you.”

  “I don’t know, so how am I supposed to take you there?”

  “You will,” Kelsey said. “It’s part of being a Hero. You’ll go there, and I need you to take me with you.”

  “Can’t you just… follow me?”

  “Nah, man.” Kelsey shook her head. “There are forces. I’ve set myself up against at least one god. They don’t throw lightning bolts, but they work with certain ineluctable forces to get what they want. I need the geas to keep us together. They can’t fight that, it works off their own power.”

  “But why?” Anton asked. “Why do you need to be… wherever it is?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Kelsey insisted. “They’re listening. They’ve already worked out the part I’m telling you, but the rest… I can’t tell them my plans.”

  “What if I don’t like your plans—most of them involve killing at lot of people!”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “You’ll be there,” Kelsey said. “In the fullness of time, at the climax of it all, you’ll be there. You have to be. If you don’t like what I’m doing, you can stop me.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Anton said, lowering his sword. “I’ll think about it some more.”

  “Whew! Don’t scare me like that, okay? Come on, Tier Four isn’t going to reach itself!”

  Floor Ten was a labyrinth of ice corridors. Some of the ice was clear, some was opaque and some was as reflective as any mirror that Anton had seen. Finding their way, even with the guidance of previous expeditions was a wearying chore.

  Zaphar got to test his rapier on the insubstantial Glacial Phantoms. Anton winced to see the lack of skill he displayed with the weapon after the one lesson Anton had given him. Rapiers were said to be the most difficult weapon to learn, and while that wasn’t wrong, it really only applied against human opponents.

  Against an animal, you didn’t need the elaborate parries, disengages and ripostes that duelling required. All you needed to do was keep the point aimed at your target and either lunge or wait for them to impale themselves. Zaphar’s Agility and Dexterity were more than enough to handle that. Complicated techniques could be learned with time.

  That said, Anton was glad to hear that Zaphar’s next level featured attacking traits.

  “What do you have?” he asked, looking the man over.

  Zaphar Alpashan, Level 19, Human, Fae-touched Rogue, Thief/Burglar/Fae-touched Rogue, S: 6 T: 17 A: 30 D: 33 P: 20 W: 13 C: 10

  Thanks to the free Ability point of Zaphar’s class, his Strength was going up slowly.

  “Precision Attack, Acrobatic Attack and Flèche,” Zaphar said.

  “Precision Attack is like the Sneak Attack you already have, but it doesn’t require the target to be unaware,” Anton told him. “It might absorb the older Trait, if it does it will do more damage than another person’s version of the Trait. Flèche is something you normally find in duellist Classes—it lets you move and attack. Acrobatic Attack…”

  Anton racked his memory. “I’ve never seen it before, but it probably lets you do acrobatics before or after an attack? That could be pretty good, like my Leaping Attack.”

  Anton remained happy with Leaping Attack, it was the kind of basic Trait that just kept getting better as his Strength and Tier increased. Was Acrobatic Attack an advanced version, that let you do tumbles and cartwheels as well as jumps?

  Zaphar didn’t seem too pleased with the idea.

  “I need—I need more damage,” he said, and Anton couldn’t disagree. Even with the rapier, he was only just beating out Tyla—before she used magic.

  Zaphar nodded as he made his decision. “Precision Attack.” He stated his choice aloud, which wasn’t something you had to do.

  “Good work,” Anton said. “Let’s keep going.”

  Tyla and Aris both made their next levels before they cleared the floor. They were taking their time now, clearing out every single monster, rather than press deeper.

  Tyla’s level was just Ability points.

  Tyla of the Padascar Tribe, Level 17, Elf, Dungeon Witch, Padascar Hunter (Broken)/ Doxy(Broken)/Apprentice Dungeon Witch/Dungeon Witch,

  S: 12 T: 9 A: 16 D: 22 P: 27 W: 20 C: 14

  But Aris got to pick a Trait.

  Aris Lucina, Level 17, Human, Deadeye Harbinger, Scullion/(broken), Original Gunslinger/Deadeye Harbinger,

  S: 10 T: 15 A: 23 D: 23 P: 28 W: 21 C: 14

  Double progression on three stats was costing her a balanced build, but her Abilities were shooting up.

  “The first Trait for a third-tier class is generally a perception one,” he told her. There were exceptions, like Zaphar’s class. “What did you get offered?”

  “Sense Intent, Identify Target and Longsight,” Aris said.

  “Sense Intent seems fairly obvious, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one,” Anton mused. “Or Identify Target, but that sounds like an identification Trait, like Delver’s Discernment or Nobility’s Privilege.”

  “What about Longsight?” Aris asked.

  “That’s pretty common in archer Classes,” Anton said. You can make faraway things seem close. As a third-tier Trait, it should be… five times closer? Though, you’re an Epic Class, so maybe six or seven.”

  “Sense Intent will probably give you a warning when someone wants to kill you,” Kelsey put in. “Like Danger Sense, but only for people.”

  “It won’t tell me if someone is lying?” Aris asked.

  “It might.” Kelsey shrugged. “The… idiom I think it’s chasing is two gunfighters standing each other off… are they gonna shoot? Though, gunfighters are often supposed to have a keen eye for human nature, so it could work that way.”

  “I don’t think I need an identification Trait, what with both Anton and Suliel having one,” Aris mused. “And Longsight must be for long-range shooting, which I don’t want to focus on.”

  “You don’t?” Anton asked, surprised. “It's safer than fighting at close range.”

  “But it means fighting far away from you, so it doesn’t feel safer,” Aris replied. “So I think I’ll take Sense Intent.”

  They continued on. With Anton fighting, the floor boss was fairly easy to deal with. Another spider, fifteen feet in height, the Frostfang Weaver fought with poison and illusions. But it couldn’t penetrate Anton’s defences and its illusions depended on reflections from panes of ice that were easily destroyed by Aris’s shooting.

  The floor reward was a pair of gauntlets that both protected from the cold and added a considerable freezing effect to any damage they did. No one fought with their fists so they packed it away in Kelsey’s vaults.

  The eleventh floor was an endless howling blizzard. Tyla had spells that could blunt the cold, but she didn’t have the right mana type to do anything about the relentless gale. Kelsey provided some jackets made of some thin, slippery substance that somehow blocked most of the wind. They linked themselves together with Anton’s handy rope and fought their way across the icy plain.

  The monsters here were too much for most second-tier adventurers to fight. Even without the winds and the ice and mist that whipped past, too thick to see through, they would have been too much. Tyla’s fire-arrows were extinguished as soon as they were fired, the arrows caught by the wind and sent flying.

  Zaphar’s unnatural reflexes stood him in good stead, but he was having a hard time keeping on his feet. He would have gone tumbling into the darkness if it wasn’t for the rope keeping him down.

  It was Anton and Aris who did most of the fighting. The first monsters they saw were Blizzard Striders, according to Delver’s Discernment. Wolf-like creatures, three feet high at the shoulder, swept out of the darkness without a sound to give away their approach. A single shot, punching right through the chest of the leading monster, scared them away. They scattered in all directions with high-pitched yips.

  They didn’t stay scared for long. The second attack came from all directions. Rather than charge in, they swept past, never staying in the light for long, looking for a vulnerability. The party formed a ring, back-to-back with Kelsey and Aris in the centre. Aris picked off striders whenever they were unlucky enough to fall under her sights while Zaphar and Tyla did their best to fend off attacks. Setting her sword on fire made the beasts wary enough of her that she didn’t have to test how effective the spell was in combat.

  Anton punished any strider that came close enough to his side of the ring. Quick Attack lashed out again and again, disabusing any strider that thought attacking him from two sides would force a gap in his guard.

  When the attacks finally stopped, they all held in place, wondering if it was over or if this was just a lull. Eventually, Anton was convinced they had seen them off.

  “The pelts of these monsters are pretty rare,” he told Kelsey who was gleefully gathering them up. “This floor doesn’t lend itself to taking the time to skin them, so if you want a pelt, you pretty much have to cart the whole corpse out.”

  “I’ll take good care of them,” Kelsey promised. “Better care than you, mister chop-them-all-up.”

  Anton just shrugged and they moved on. The darkness and the blizzard made it hard for them to tell where they needed to go, but this was another floor that Anton wanted to clear out. He was finally getting decent experience for his kills, and Aris was racing to her next level with all these higher-level monster deaths to her name.

  Zaphar’s progress had slowed, but the appearance of some Frost-wraiths that were vulnerable to the rogue’s special blade helped his progress. Tyla, too, was having trouble making kills. But she was casting spells and contributing to the party, so she was making some progress.

  Then she gained her next level and the game changed.