Dan’s feet gave out under him, and he moaned as he crashed to the ground.

  I crouched to pick him up, but the little clothing he had was soaked in blood.

  Not good. Fuck, really not good.

  “Not gonna make it,” he gurgled, staring up at me. His eyes could barely focus on me. “Broke oath.”

  “You are free from any oath of mine,” said Kabi from somewhere over my shoulder. His voice was strangely loud, even with all the noise.

  The pain on Dan’s face reduced, and his eyes locked on me.

  “You’ll make it,” I said as I yanked the healing crystal out. I’d drained it earlier, but it had to have something.

  “No.” His hand came up and clutched my hand to his chest.

  I stopped.

  “Take it.”

  Time slowed down.

  “Learn.”

  I shook my head. That scent hung about him. Memories of the wounded Para, the first creature I’d devoured, flickered through my mind.

  “Hur..”

  I acted, the knife in my hand, without thinking.

  Thinking would damn me.

  Warm fudge drizzled over ice cream filled my mouth as I chewed and swallowed. Hot tears dripped down my cheeks as I devoured the heart of a person, making everything blurry.

  My notifications pinged, and as much as I wished to ignore them, I couldn’t.

  [You have devoured a level 85, Dan, Runic Apprentice, and gained the skill Runic Scribing and Attunement. Runic Scribing and Attunement: You can scribe simple runes onto various surfaces, infusing them with the rune's power. You can recognize and understand common runes on sight.]

  [Perceptive Awareness - III has evolved into Perceptive Analysis: Your connection to your clan's knowledge deepens with each being you devour. Your six senses work together when analyzing a creature, object, crystal, or rune, tracing the intricate web surrounding it.]

  Pain jolted through my head as my radar flickered and everyone within it pulsed with information. Creatures waited beyond the cavern, the light from the fire keeping them at bay. That didn’t even include the beetles stuck on the other side of the gaping hole in the ground, trying to find a way to cross the chasm.

  “Retreat to the north. We can try to cave-in this area, direct them to the dungeon,” I said, knowing we had to move quickly. I swallowed as the fudge flavor lingered. Dan’s death would not be in vain.

  His body disappeared into my inventory. He’d get buried somewhere better than here.

  I tried to think of the exploding runes from what felt like months ago, working together to make bombs with crystals and runes.

  The image shimmered into view. I yanked out some of my last crystal bits, humming under my breath as I rolled them into balls. The rune hovered inside my mind as I dove into the crystal and placed the first one. Then the second and the third.

  A headache formed right between my eyes.

  Only three. Notifications dinged but I ignored them.

  “Lenna, let’s go,” I practically growled as I finished up.

  Strange sprinted my way, followed by Lenna after she fired a few shots.

  Both ran past me as I carefully leaped up and attached two charged explosives to the ceiling and one to the side.

  Then I followed.

  Creatures hit the edges of my radar, just as the tunnel blew. Rocks, dirt, and dust filled the air as I stumbled north. Everything trembled and shook. Boulders crashed behind me as the tunnel collapsed. Underneath me, the ground rolled and I stumbled away before crashing into more rock.

  Everyone else had made it farther down the tunnel than me, which was a good thing.

  Eventually, the crashing stopped, yet the dust lingered.

  I crawled underneath a slab leaning at an angle, and bit by bit I made it free of the rocks.

  Kabi leaned against a massive stone door, while Lenna stood back and studied it. Dengu chirped at Strange, but both padded closer to me as I appeared.

  Kabi coughed, a deep hacking that filled the air.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, as I slowly approached. That didn’t sound good.

  He held up his hand and waved it back and forth, but I didn’t get the gesture.

  “Healing, slowly.” He wiped a hand across his forehead. “That hit crushed my bones, and they tore into things. I didn’t think his strength would do that.”

  “Too big of a gap in stats,” I said, resisting the urge to step closer to his side. “He put everything in strength.”

  “I don’t see any other way out.” Lenna’s voice stayed soft as the orb of light flickered over her head. It highlighted the area around it, and the view was bleak.

  The stone door cut a round cavern in half. A few boulders dotted the area against the door and the cavern walls.

  The stabbing between my eyes picked up again, and I closed them for a few moments, taking deep breaths. It helped a little.

  Strange nudged my knee, making me crack them open and smile. Concern drifted along the bond.

  “I’m okay, just some new skills that I need to deal with.” I ignored how I’d gained them as best I could. Right now wasn’t the time to dive deep into that thought trail.

  “Anything that could help us out of here?” asked Lenna, still holding her bow.

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  Kabi grunted and straightened off the wall. His breathing deepened as he carefully took breaths. “That might hold them, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Really?” I twisted to study the cave in. Giant boulders blocked the tunnel. While I’d crawled out of that, I figured it was because I wasn’t in the middle of it. I didn’t see how anything could make it through the whole cave-in.

  “They live in tunnels like these. They dig them.” He gave me a nod. “You bought some time for me to heal and for us to prepare. That’s important.”

  I pulled out my healing crystal, which had regained some energy, but not much.

  “Save it,” said Kabi. “My healing rune will recharge, and my natural healing can take care of this. I just need to eat and get some rest.”

  “That’s a good plan.” Lenna tucked her bow away and started making camp in the center of the cleared area. “Give me all the food stuff.”

  Within a short amount of time, Kabi rested on a bedroll and Lenna worked on food. She was using the pot I molded crystal over to start a stew.

  I gave up some wyrm meat to her, not telling her what it was.

  Strange sniffed around the pot repeatedly, while Dengu took up a guard position near the tunnel entrance.

  I sat on a bedroll and tried to let the stress roll off my shoulders. After a few moments, I opened my new skills to reread the descriptions, but first I had two new notifications.

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  That helped.

  The change in my perception skill wasn’t unexpected given the addition of runes, but the last line kept bugging me.

  [Your six senses work together when analyzing a creature, object, crystal or rune, tracing the intricate web surrounding it.]

  The web surrounding it. It reminded me of what appeared when I used my aura sensing, which was now lumped in with my senses, numbering six instead of five. Did webs appear around everything, then?

  I cracked open my eyes and focused on the pot sitting on the rocky ground. I resisted giggling that we sat around a not-campfire.

  Another stab of pain shot between my eyes as lines appeared, flowing from the crystal in each direction. A little yellow and orange.

  When I snapped my eyes shut the pain reduced.

  This wasn’t good.

  I tried again, this time looking at Kabi. Several runic tattoos covered his chest, usually pretty faded unless activated.

  Now, they glowed in a vibrant blue light, except for the one on his shoulder. That one was much dimmer than the others, and tinted a dull purple.

  He used that rune to spot heal, and now it needed to recharge, hence the color change.

  The pain caused me to close my eyes again for several moments. There was one more area I wanted to study.

  This time I stared at the back of my hand. The clarity rune blazed with bright blue, almost white energy.

  I triggered it.

  Now more than ever, I needed clarity.

  The rune flickered and hovered in the air above my skin, tendrils still connecting it to me. Then it sucked inside my body before vanishing.

  I swallowed hard.

  Somehow, Noseen’s voice warning me about forcing a skill to upgrade, and my stats needing to be high enough, drifted through my mind.

  Oh shit.

  That made sense. My perception skill had grown past my current stats, but I didn’t know for sure what stats the skill used.

  Intelligence for sure, but none of the others really made sense. My physical body was tied to toughness. It wasn’t my lowest stat, but it was less than half my Intelligence.

  And I didn’t have any free stats because I’d used them to try to save Dan.

  I snapped my eyes shut and took a deep breath. In and out.

  How about I solve this instead of being annoyed about it?

  I wasn’t ignoring my dumb mistake, but I still had tokens I could use, if I was certain the extra stat points would help. And if I thought about it, maybe I could come up with another way.

  This time, I studied our surroundings, but the cavern didn’t have any runes anywhere. The door, on the other hand, practically glowed in overlapping runes. Most were above whatever threshold was a common rune, since I didn’t have a clue what they could do.

  Snagging the notebook Dan had given me, I frantically sketched several of them into the blank pages at the end. Just because I didn’t know what they did didn’t mean they wouldn’t be useful.

  A single rune sparkled in the mess of them, above and off to the side of the others. It hovered above a boulder and felt familiar.

  Memories rushed through me of each entrance to the hidden barrows. When triggered, we’d walked right through the stone entrance.

  It was the same rune. I knew that rune.

  Information flooded my brain on how the rune worked, from making something solid to intangible when triggered. The lines focused the energy in a particular way.

  A stab of pain shot behind my right eye, and I cut off that thought process. Too much, that was too freaking much.

  “Your nose is bleeding,” whispered Lenna.

  I touched my nose and found it wet with blood.

  That wasn’t good.

  I couldn’t smell it at all, which concerned me even more. I snagged an old sock out of my inventory and held it to my nose to clot the bleeding. I had to admit that while not being able to smell concerned me, the sock wasn’t any too clean, so not smelling was maybe ok right this instant. I had to find some silver lining here, after all.

  I dared to only crack my eyelids a little.

  Everyone stared at me, then I snapped them shut.

  Mentally, I grabbed an experience token and used it.

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  I quickly allocated my free stats to Toughness and then cracked my eyes. Pain still echoed through my brain, but everything screamed inside me that I was on the correct path. So, I did it again.

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  [You have leveled your Profession]

  Frantically, I added point by single point into my toughness. As soon as I crossed the 50% threshold of Intelligence to Toughness. The pain eased.

  I had 18 free points remaining, and I kept them free.

  Again, when I opened my eyes, everyone stared at me.

  “Well, I fixed the problem with my skill,” I said. The energy from the clarity rune faded as soon as I finished my sentence. I frantically twisted about to stare at the stone where I’d seen the entrance rune. It still blazed there for me, and I let out a sigh of relief.

  “And, I might have found a way out of here.”

  A subtle hum made me pause with my lips still parted.

  Dengu stepped closer to the collapsed tunnel.

  Lenna motioned to the almost empty stew pot. “You'd better finish up.”

  “I’m good.” Instead of eating the cooked meat, I scarfed several hunks of raw meat directly out of my inventory. “Kabi, eat that.”

  His cheeks turned a deep blue, but he didn’t argue with me.

  Lenna had already packed up her bedroll.

  Strange nudged my side. “Me find way out to city.”

  “You did?” I asked.

  “No, I can fit.” He nodded to the tunnel. “Warn big people about the dungeon.”

  “Strange, that’s a big quest, and dangerous. The tunnels aren’t safe.” I leaped up and packed my bedroll, wishing I’d gotten some rest.

  “Does Strange want a quest to warn my father?” asked Kabi.

  “He does.” I trusted Strange to make the trek, but I wasn’t sure he’d be able to do it safely.

  “Shadows safe,” he replied.

  A message popped up, showing one of his skills.

  [Shadow Shift - III: You are a blur of evasive movement, and while merged in shadows, extremely difficult to pinpoint. You can hide, travel, and remain connected to your bonded while in any shadow. Within shadow or darkness, you border on intangibility. Within your bond’s shadow you are intangible.]

  That had upgraded, a lot. Then again, he’d been using his sneaking abilities non-stop both for scouting and during fights.

  Honestly, he had a huge chance of getting through the tunnel collapse and making it to Steadfast. Not to mention, I had to wonder what that’d do to his profession. Delivering that message was a hell of an important delivery. I understood the temptation.

  “We cut the bridges over the chasm…” I said, wishing now we maybe hadn’t done that. If we needed to flee south at all, we might be screwed.