Nar held his chin as he read through the semi-transparent gray window before him, then he had a cursory glance through his full status.

  “You alright?” Rel asked. “Bad gains?”

  Nar, Rel and Eum sat together by the cliff edge while the rest of the party milled about, waiting for the harvesters to conclude extracting everything of value from the deflated lump of fungal flesh. An orange, shimmering, oily slime oozed from the dead war machine, and the harvesters deactivated, black aura armors were covered in it, a fact that pleased Mul to no end, as he kept flinging oozy bits at Tuk. This caused the ring tosser to gag and run around the place in panic.

  “Stop that,” Jul chided the brawler, as laughter echoed around the white covered clearing.

  Nar shook his head at their antics, though he had to smother his own laughter.

  “The gains aren’t bad. They’re actually pretty good,” Nar said, closing the window off.

  “Then why the dumb face?” she asked him, bumping into him.

  He sighed. “I don’t know… It’s just, thinking back to when we started the Climb, even just one point gain felt like it was the difference between living and dying. Every point I gained in [Constitution] meant the whole Creation to me, and it was another 10 points of damage that my HP could shield me from against those guardians. Now, I gain hundreds of points in one go, and the numbers have grown so much that it’s hard to even understand their meaning anymore.”

  “Ah, I see what you mean,” Rel said. “It’s like my [Accuracy], it just reached over three hundred points, but it’s hard to understand what it’s even doing at this point.”

  She flipped around and gazed down at the other side of the Great Lake.

  “With my [Sight] though, it’s a lot easier to understand what those 252 points are doing!” she said, grinning to herself. “Look! I can see their faces down there. Even their sweat!”

  “You can?” he asked.

  “There’s a girl looking up at us, actually. Must be another ranged.”

  Nar too, turned around from the deathly whiteness of the Gloom to stare down at the camp on the other side. He pulled on his own [Sight], which thanks to his [Senses of the Champion] stood at a quite respectable two hundred points, and squinted at the makeshift camp.

  It looked as though the delvers weren’t wasting any time, and several of the white tents had already come down. No doubt, soon the parties would make their way up through the cleared Gap and enter the Gloom to continue their journeys. After all, the Gloom was the largest region in the Brightnight by far, encompassing what would have otherwise been considered two entire regions were it not for the fact that both of them were under the control of the Illum, and were both similarly devoid of anything resembling true light.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “I can’t see their faces,” Nar muttered. “But I can see them moving about and packing… Hey, Kur! The other parties are packing up. They’ll be coming our way soon, I think.”

  “Already?” Kur asked, and distracted, he wiped the sweat from his brow, leaving instead a streak of orange goo. “Ugh… Uh, alright, keep an eye on them and let me know when they enter the Gap.”

  “Do we need to leave?” Row asked.

  “Why would we?” Kur replied, with a dark grin. “Let them see that we killed it… And all the XP we’re making from its body!”

  Leon burst out in laughter from where he was watching over Era healing his sister. “Now that’s the spirit, Kur!”

  “That skill of yours is seriously so busted,” Rel muttered, dragging Nar’s attention away from the two party leaders.

  “That’s what hidden skills are like,” Eum rumbled, his glowing green eyes fixed on the dark hollows peaking out from within the maze of deathly white and darkness that awaited them. “There’s a reason they’re considered OP.”

  By mutual understatement, both Nar and Leon had decided to reveal their hidden skills to the others. It wasn’t exactly the wisest thing to do, but Leon had wanted to show his commitment and trust towards the others, just like he had done with Nar, even though he was not allowed by his patron to reveal the name of his skill or its forbidding cost. Nar, feeling awkward about keeping his own secret, as though he was distrusting Row and Leon’s parties, had revealed his own skill too, though he had similarly kept the name to himself.

  “OP?” Rel asked.

  “Overpowered,” the tygaris explained. For some reason, the aethermancer was still in his beastial form, which was a little surprising, as he seemed to enjoy his human face the most. “I’m guessing your faculty hasn’t had time to explain what to expect of your attribute gains, as you continue to level up?”

  “No?” Nar said, frowning. “Is it going to change?”

  “Yes and no,” Eum said, sighing, and at last he pulled his eyes from the dead trees and the giant white mushrooms that absorbed them into their growths. “It’s hard for you to wrap your head around such numbers because the enemies we face are also growing in difficulty, and that causes a balance to exist between us and them. Your [Accuracy] is high, Rel, no doubt about it, but it has to be high for you to be able to actually hit anything. Our enemies have significant [Speed] and [Agility] now, and I bet that not all of your arrows managed to hit that nightmare.”

  “Yeah, I did miss a good few,” Rel said, glancing towards their downed enemy. “I could see exactly where I wanted to hit, but it was tough.”

  The tygaris nodded.

  “Without your [Accuracy] being that high, you wouldn’t have been able to translate what your [Sight] tells you to actual targeting information,” he explained. “That said, if you were to go back to the enemies you’ve previously fought, perhaps not here in the Brightnight, but elsewhere, your targets would probably look as though they were standing still to you now.”

  “Oh, wow,” the archer breathed. “You’re probably right…”

  “Not probably. I am right,” Eum grunted. “This guy’s [Aura Blade] only works because it’s blindingly fast, and a lot easier to hit with than a single, tiny arrow! And I guarantee that the battles you both see are very different from the ones Kur or Row see, for example. Their [NPL] only just about allows them to remain useful during a fight, but I could flick Kur’s nose and he wouldn’t even be able to notice it until the pain came.”

  He cast his eyes about the clearing, through all the separate, small gatherings of delvers, until he spotted Gad.

  “Same thing with Gad’s [Toughness], for the easiest example. At… What is she at now? 188? Well, I doubt anything you fought before could even properly damage her now. There are exceptions of course, like that corrupted illatrian you guys killed, but those would be exceptions,” Eum stressed.

  “That’s wild,” Nar said. “Though it makes sense, I guess.”

  “Because of that, the only way to keep growing is to keep fighting stronger and stronger enemies,” Eum said. “If you stop doing that, you will plateau. You are what you do is the law that governs gains, but there is actually another law.”

  “What?” Rel shouted. “What do you mean there’s another law?”

  Eum scratched the back of his wild mane. “I’m not really sure if we can call it a law. Maybe it’s more like a condition… If you want gains, you need to be challenged.”

  “Huh?” Nar said.

  “It’s simple. You want more [Strength]? Prove that you need it. You want better [Sight], then show that your current [Sight] is just barely enough for your current fights,” Eum said. “You are what you do was pretty simple so far, and will probably remain so until close to level 100, so getting the right gains has been plenty straightforward. But you must’ve noticed that you don’t always make gains in all your attributes, even though you use them. This is why.”

  “So I gained in [Sight] from that fight, because my current [Sight] was not enough, and not just because I was using it?” Rel asked.

  “Exactly. One is the law that governs what gains you get, and the other is the condition for getting those gains,” Eum said, raising two fingers. “Without them, you will eventually stall. Even when challenged, you might end up stalling anyways. How much [Cunning] does a party leader really need? Of course, it depends on the enemies faced, especially if its high level, intelligent monsters, but all the same, one doesn’t need an infinitely growing [Cunning].”

  “So there will be a limit to your growth because you are no longer challenged,” Nar mused, shaking off the white dust of the Gloom from his shoulders and head. “Does that also apply to skills, though?”

  Eum shook his head, ignoring the white flakes that embedded themselves into his hair and fur.

  “Skills will continue to grow as long as you continue to use them. You’ve seen that you can get sudden gains without any accompanying level ups, right? That’s what will happen,” Eum explained. “Your skills will continue to upgrade, and that is, in fact, the way to differentiate between someone who’s been level 100 for 50 years, and someone that just made it there. That said, skills do upgrade faster the higher your level is, and with gains. So there’s that. Plus, higher grade skills really start to show their value then, as their upgrades are much more substantial than lower grade ones.”

  “Hmm,” Rel said, nodding to herself as she eyed the other apprentices dismantling their camp across the other shore. “So attributes like my sense of [Smell], which I don’t really use, will eventually just plateau, and not grow anymore. It makes sense, but at the same time, it’s a little sad to hear.”

  “If you have no use for it, then it won’t matter anyways,” Eum said. “And of course, if you do want to continue seeing gains as dramatic as the ones we’re seeing in the Brightnight, you need to keep going into tougher and tougher delves and fights.”

  So that’s why my [NPC] only increases after our toughest fights. Because that’s when I’m really challenged enough to truly drive it over the edge of what it can currently achieve, Nar thought.

  “On the other hand, the attributes you do gain will start to increase more and more dramatically, and that’s because of your attribute modifiers,” Eum said. “What good is a 0.2 modifier when you gain 1 point? Pfft. Useless! Now when you gain ten? Twenty? Fifty? Just look at Nar’s [Aura***].”

  “And that’s why the modifiers are so important,” Nar said, nodding to himself. “I don’t know where the Scimitar is going to throw us into next, but it will probably be worse than here.”

  “They can’t just throw you into long delves one after the other. They still have to teach you, fast-track or not,” the tygaris said, shaking his head. “It’s safe to say that the gains might not always be as incredible as the ones here, and for that reason, you will likely grow in bursts, from whenever you’re really thrown into the thick of it.”

  “Just like those easy dungeons,” Rel said.

  Hmm, Tys did say that my gains would never be as bad as the ones I got on those easy dungeons, so that must mean they have plenty of other crazy stuff waiting for us, Nar mused.

  “Well, thanks for letting us know. I'll tell the others too,” Nar said. “But, I am curious. How does this all work for the Named Few? Is it the same?”

  “Named Few?” Eum asked. “Uh… Things are a bit nebulous when you start considering those levels of power. After all, they say a Named Few can sense for millions of miles in the Labyrinth."

  “Millions?” Rel mouthed.

  “A Named Few is… an existence you cannot begin to comprehend,” Eum said, staring off into the distance. “The laws, the rules… everything bends before those who are second only to the Gods themselves, and I have no idea how things work at those levels. You might think that one who has been a Named Few for millennia would be stronger than one who comes to challenge them, and for the most part, you are correct, which is why such fights are rare… But they do occur, and younger challengers do win. So, is it stats? Weapons or gear? Skills? Could it be attribute utilization percentage, the state of crystallization for us, and of turning into aurium for you guys? Is it aspects? Are some elements stronger than others? Honestly, I have no idea.”

  “Well, something for us to think about,” Rel said, in the silence that followed his words. Then she reached over and smacked his leg, startling him.

  “Ow! What was that for?” Eum said massaging his leg. Rel had clearly used some of her archer’s [Strength] in that blow.

  “You seem a bit better now. You were all broody and moody before,” the alfin said, smiling innocently.

  “I’m not moody nor broody!” Eum snapped. “I just don’t like the place. That’s all!”

  “Oh, our mighty hunter is finally scared of something?” Rel teased.

  “I’m not scared,” Eum mumbled, a lot more subdued than either Nar or Rel had expected. “I just get a bad feeling from this place.”

  Nar half-turned to stare at the Gloom.

  The massive region was split into two, with the first half composed of the calcified trees and the white fungi that absorbed them and which were the origin of the white particles floating in the air. Those mushrooms may seem soft from afar, but they were anything but. They were called bone mushrooms, and the white particles aptly called bone dust. It was this that calcified the trees, and which would work in a similar way to slowly harden their insides.

  The healers would have to work every night to clear them up of the invisible buildup that seeped into their bodies, though just like the Miasma, Nar hoped his aura would make him immune to the bone dust’s effects.

  However, the bone mushroom was not the worst part of delving through that first part of the Gloom, which would soon turn pitch black as they wandered deeper into it.

  “In this place, there is only one absolute hunter,” Eum muttered, his glowing green eyes blazing with rage. “Everything else scurries about, scared to make a noise… like rats! Here, we’re not the hunters, but the hunted. And the fact that we can’t do anything about it? It irks me.”

  The Quiet, Nar thought, eyeing the dark gaps that looked as though they were eyes staring back out of the dead jungle.

  No one actually knew what the Quiet were, or even what they looked like. Beast or monster? The answer to that question was still up to debate, with even Sej believing it to be a beast and Sarke a monster. But whatever it may be, it came for the noisy ones, and it took them.

  There was no fighting the Quiet. There was no resisting it, neither with power nor numbers. If you were loud, you got taken, and you never returned. That had been one of the immutable laws of the Brightnight’s long, long existence, and no one had ever been able to challenge it.

  For that reason, even though it wasn’t officially recognized, the locals had taken to calling that first half of the Gloom by another name… The Jungle of Silence.

  **********

  Other parties came and went through the Gap, and Kur and Row greeted them all amiably. Nar shook his head every time Kur apologized for not being able to approach them, given his current, gore coated state, and to which Leon only grinned wider and wider with every time Kur repeated his performance. But such was the way of the Circle, and the rest of them did their best to look, if not menacing, at least like the kind of delvers who had just killed something over fifteen levels above theirs.

  Given the shocked expressions on the other domain parties, Nar had to believe that they were succeeding.

  Funnily enough, Juf never showed up, nor any of the party leaders that Nar had met within her tent. That alone spoke volumes, though Nar was unsure of what effect Kur’s triumph might have in the Circle, especially given that he knew that his party leader still had an unresolved issue.

  The enemy that could not be defeated, as Kur had put it. Still, Nar knew that Kur would eventually overcome that obstacle in his path as an ever-growing influential leader. He had to, if he wished to remain their party leader for as long as possible.

  Thus, after extracting everything of value from the nightmare, which included of course its big, orange glowing aether reservoir, several of the unexploded bomb fungi, and other gory organs and meat, as well as several pounds of that unholy mesh of mushroom and flesh, they had at last come together as one domain party once more, and entered the Jungle of Silence at last.