The room stank.

  The boss room for the third floor looked similar to the one on the first floor, except instead of pools of water, there were puddles of acid. Rotten egg-smelling puddles of acid.

  “Probably shouldn’t step in those.” I tried finding a place where I could back up without walking into a puddle.

  “Watch out!” Rix pointed at the boss.

  The Giant Acid Slime looked like the others. Ten feet tall, a gelatinous body, two tentacle arms, and small poison clouds wafting off of it. Okay, the last part was different.

  “Should we stay out of melee range?” I pointed my hand at the tentacles. “FREEZE!”

  “I got this! MAGIC ARROWS!” Aelin started shooting.

  This boss didn’t have an actual elemental weakness. It did absorb acid damage, which none of us used, so we didn’t have to worry about that. Freezing it was working, but not nearly as well as it had on the last one. At the rate I was going, I was only going to freeze about a quarter of this one.

  Fray dashed in and shattered the left tentacle, then began chipping away at where the secondary core should be. A large cloud of gas belched out of one of the holes that Aelin had made and hit Fray in the face.

  The brunette coughed as she backed away, waving her katana and free hand to try to disperse the cloud.

  “Rix?!”

  The redhead teleported behind Fray, grabbed her, and used to get the green swordswoman away from the poison.

  “LOOK AT ME!” Ether rotated away from us to give Justia room to work on Fray while Aelin could still shoot without having to worry about her crossfire.

  “You okay?” I knelt down beside Justia.

  Rix disappeared to work on the tentacle’s core. The blade of her sword lashed out, held to the hilt in her hand by a chain. The golden woman used her weapon like a whip, slicing away at pieces of the boss while staying outside of the range of the poison clouds.

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  “I’ll be…” *cough* “okay…” Fray kept coughing as Justia mumbled her healing spells.

  “You did good.” I touched the poisoned woman’s shoulder. “We’ll finish it.”

  Fray went into a coughing fit when she tried to speak. Once she caught her breath, she gave me a thumbs-up.

  I drew my pistol. ‘Aelin! Try to push the core to the right!”

  I started shooting on the right side from the base of the Giant Acid Slime up. I emptied a magazine and replaced it with and kept firing.

  Rix had destroyed the tentacle core before I swapped magazines and was helping guide the main core to a place where the gelatin wasn’t as thick. Our projectiles weren’t punching all the way through this one, probably because there wasn’t an Elemental weakness, but they were going deep enough to guide the core.

  I emptied the magazine I was on, so I swapped to

  . I still had one more magazine left, but I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use it. Each magazine held sixteen shots. With how much I’d used , I only had about twelve shots left before I ran out of mana, so I wouldn’t even be able to use the whole magazine I had just loaded before I ran out of mana. I did have a sword, so I would have to get into melee range if it came to that.

  Before I had a chance to fire, Rix teleported just above the boss. There were enough holes in the boss that the core was fairly close to the edge on the right side. She sliced through the gelatinous body and cut the core in half, reducing the Giant Acid Slime to a pile of dust.

  The redhead gracefully landed on the ground next to the loot. Her feet had been only six feet off the ground, so it wasn’t very far to fall, but I knew she could have landed from a lot higher and still been fine.

  “Showoff…” Aelin shouldered her bow.

  Rix simply picked up the item and the crystal.

  “Defense ring, plus one.” She looked around. “Who gets this?”

  “Ohhh! Atlas can give another lady a ring!” Aelin ran over and plucked the ring out of Rix’s hand, then half skipped, half danced her way over to me. She batted her eyes. “Who’s it going to be?”

  Honestly, Shelly would be the one who would benefit the most from it, but I doubted that Aelin would allow me to give it to him. Ether could use Defense the best, but she already had a regeneration ring. She could wear a ring on each hand without them interfering with each other, but I had someone else in mind who didn’t have an accessory yet.

  “You’ll have to wait and see.” I put the ring into my CB.

  “A secret!” Aelin laughed as she looked around the room, then back at me. “You’re not trying to steal Justia, are you?” The blonde tried to look serious as she balled her fist. “I’ll fight you…”

  “And you’d win.” I held up my hands in mock surrender. “I promise, you’ll get your show when I hand this out.”

  “You better…” Aelin eyed me. “Can you give me a hint?”

  “Aelin!” I shook my head. “No.”

  “You’re no fun.” She tried pouting, but it really looked like she was about to start laughing.

  “Nicely done.” Miel walked in. “Now what do you want to do?”

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