Chương 138: The Ceiling

Ant stood at the lip of the bowl with his boots sinking half an inch into ground that hadn't grown anything in longer than anyone could tell him, and thought, not for the first time this week, that he could sleep standing up if someone gave him thirty seconds and stopped asking him to fight in them. The eighth fissure smelled the same as the other seven — scorched grass gone to ash, and underneath it a mineral sharpness that caught at the back of his nose. Two wraithkin were left.

Low ones, violet light guttering along limbs that flickered from four-legged to six and back before they'd settled on anything worth calling a body — the kind that used to take him and Mahkir the better part of ten minutes back when this had still been new. Mahkir took the first one apart in four seconds, a strike low, one high, the thing folding in on its own light before it had finished turning to meet him. [XP +40.] The second one came in fast and low, aiming for Mahkir's foreleg, and connected before he'd fully cleared the first kill. Mahkir took the hit without breaking stride, a thin skim off his HP, hardly worth noticing, and answered with a bite that ended it before it had time to try again. [XP +60.] Eight vortexes in, this was what they'd bought themselves: Ant hadn't needed to draw Soul Render once, hadn't needed Overload or the boots or any of the rest of it, just stood at the rim and watched two people who'd spent five straight days learning exactly where the other one would be a half-second before they got there. It hadn't looked like that in the first fissure. It hadn't looked like that in the fourth, either, if he was honest.

Somewhere around the sixth it had stopped looking like two separate things fighting at all.

"That's the last of them," Ant said, more to confirm it out loud than because either of them doubted it. Told you four seconds, Mahkir said, already turning his attention to the bowl's far wall, where the fissure's last dim light was folding back down into the dirt it had come from. You owe me for that one. I called it before we even climbed down.

"You didn't call anything. You just wanted to hit something twice as hard as it needed." Both things can be true. Ant crossed to where the second wraithkin had gone down and crouched over the scorch mark it left, more habit than hope at this point. Nothing. No gem, no gleam, nothing but a smear of ash already cooling in the wind coming down off the bowl's rim. He'd stopped expecting one somewhere around the fourth vortex.

"Two gems, ever," he said, standing, wiping his palm on his trousers out of reflex rather than need.

"Two, out of every vortex I've ever cleared — what's that now, twelve, thirteen total, counting this week? People act like they turn up if you just clear enough of these." Because people who say that have never cleared enough of these to know better. Mahkir padded over, ears swiveling once toward the fissure before dismissing it as finished. I've started thinking it isn't luck. I think it's just true. They're rare because they're rare, not because we're doing something wrong.

"That's a very unhelpful thing to be right about." I'm always right. It isn't my fault it's occasionally unhelpful. The fissure sealed itself, dirt sliding back over dirt until the bowl was nothing more than a shallow dip in an empty field, and Ant let his shoulders drop for the first time since sunrise. Five days. Eight fissures, one or two a day depending on how far they'd had to walk to find the next one, and every muscle in his body ached from all of it at once. [Encounter concluded. Experience gained: 2, 450.] [Ant: 3, 880/34, 000 to Level 18.] [Mahkir: 60, 910/60, 000 to Level 10.] [LEVEL UP] MAHKIR — LEVEL 10 Strength +11, Agility +9, Magic +13, Endurance +8. HP +20, Mana +20. Strength: 50, Agility: 62, Magic: 70, Endurance: 42. HP: 115/115. Mana: 155/155. Ant blinked at the last line twice before it actually registered.

"Mahkir. You just hit Level 10." I heard it the same as you did. Mahkir said nothing else for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone careful in a way Ant hadn't heard from him outside an actual fight. Open my screen properly. I want to see it for myself, not just hear a number flash past. Ant went to do it and realized, with a small, guilty lurch, that he hadn't checked his own progress once in five days — too tired at the end of every fight to do anything but eat and sleep.

He pulled that up first, mostly to put off Mahkir's screen a moment longer. [LEVEL UP] Level 16 Strength +2, Agility +1, Magic +3, Endurance +2. HP +10, Mana +10. [LEVEL UP] Level 17 Strength +1, Agility +3, Magic +2, Endurance +1. HP +10, Mana +10. [LEVEL UP] ANT — LEVEL 17 Strength: 61, Agility: 72, Magic: 68, Endurance: 69. HP: 147/147. Mana: 335/335. XP: 1, 430 /34, 000 to Level 18. Two levels, and he hadn't felt either one land.

It could wait — Mahkir's screen was still sitting there unopened, and it mattered more right now. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Ant opened it, and what came up wasn't the one either of them had spent five days working toward. [KITHREN STATUS] Mahkir Level: MAX Evolution Stage: 1st He read it three times, waiting for a number to show up where the word kept sitting instead.

"It doesn't say ten. It said ten a minute ago and now it doesn't." Read it again.

"I did. It says Max." Ant lowered his hand, not sure what he'd expected the words to do differently a fourth time.

"That can't be right. Every level screen I've ever seen has a number. This is the first one that doesn't." Mahkir didn't say anything for a moment, which from him was its own kind of answer. When he did, he sounded quieter than usual, none of his usual sharpness in it. Try Appraisal on me. Directly. Maybe the level-up screen glitched. Ant did that too, and got the same answer back, clean and unhurried, no glitch in it anywhere — no species field this time either, same as it had ever given him for Mahkir.

[KITHREN STATUS] Mahkir Level: MAX Evolution Stage: 1st"Level Max," Ant said, out loud this time, because saying it in his own head hadn't made it feel any less wrong.

"This is as strong as you get?" Mahkir's ears went back, just slightly, and he didn't answer right away. When Ant had first met him, hatching alone in a cave with nobody left to tell him what he was supposed to become, Mahkir had never once doubted that whatever came next would be more.

It was the one thing about him that had never wavered, not through training, not through a tournament, not through the fight that had dropped him to twenty hit points in the deep vortex, or through the field outside Marigolds' camp not long ago. Ant watched that certainty falter for the first time he could remember, and didn't much like what it looked like on him. I assumed there'd be more room, Mahkir said, quieter than before. I've never once thought about what happens if there isn't.

I don't — I don't have a plan for that. I've never needed one. He sat back onto his haunches, an old habit from before either of them could remember why he did it — not settling in this time, just something for his body to do while his head worked through the rest of it. Every fight I've ever lost, I lost knowing there was more of me somewhere I hadn't reached yet. That's what losing was for. You go away, you get stronger, you come back and it doesn't happen again.

If there's nothing left to reach for— He didn't finish it. Ant didn't make him.

"Hey." Ant crouched down so they were closer to level, one hand settling against the side of Mahkir's jaw the way he did when it actually mattered and not just when he was teasing.

"It doesn't matter if this is your peak. We're plenty strong enough as it is, and every time I grow, Attribute Sharing means you grow with me. That doesn't stop just because your own number stopped moving. We're still a force to be reckoned with. That hasn't changed in the last five minutes just because a screen said a word instead of a number." Mahkir opened his mouth, and before he could speak, the voice cut in.

This is not his peak, it said, unhurried, from somewhere behind Ant's own thoughts, done waiting for the silence to end on its own. This is purely his maximum level prior to evolution. Surely you can feel his potential is well beyond this. Both of you can. Mahkir's tail dropped flat against the dirt and stayed there. I heard that. Good. I'd assumed you could, same as always, but I've learned not to assume anything about the two of you without saying it out loud first.

"Why hasn't he evolved, then?" Ant said it aloud before he'd actually decided to ask it. Kithren rely on more than level to evolve. They have triggers. Some are items. Some are situations — a fight pushed past what should have killed them, that sort of thing. Sometimes it's simply time, nothing more dramatic than that. It's impossible to know which one governs a given Kithren until it's actually found. Level only ever accounts for some of it, and for some Kithren, barely that much.

"So what governs him?" I don't know. A pause, longer than the voice usually allowed itself. There's a cave near the mountains of Grinenfeld, roughly eighty miles west of Coldwoof. If it's still standing, it may hold some of what you're looking for. Ant sat back on his heels.

"Look at you being all helpful all of a sudden." Don't get used to it.

"And you know this for certain? A cave, eighty miles west, just sitting there with the answer in it?" No. I don't know anything for certain about this — it may lead nowhere at all, and I want that understood before either of you commits a week to it. I can't explain why it feels like the right direction. It simply does, and I've learned to trust that feeling more than I trust most of what I actually do know. Ant sat with that a moment.

Most of what the voice gave him came out flat and mechanical, a level-up notification with better grammar than it needed. This wasn't that. Every so often it stopped reporting and started sounding alive — actually working out what it thought instead of reciting it — and every time that had happened before, it had turned out to matter. What do you think? he asked Mahkir, because whatever else was true, this was Mahkir's ceiling and Mahkir's call to make about it.

Mahkir considered it for longer than Ant expected him to. Well. We don't have any better answers. Might as well go find a worse one.

"That's not exactly a ringing endorsement." It's an honest one. Same thing, most days. Maren answered the communicator stone on the second ring and didn't ask why before she started working out how. Eighty miles wasn't a walk either of them had five clear days left in them for, not after the week they'd just had, and the clan's fastest riders could shave that down to hours if she rerouted a supply run already headed the right direction.

She didn't press for details beyond confirming Coldwoof as the starting point, just told him to be at the west gate in twenty minutes, and Ant found he was grateful for that more than he said. The rider they handed him off to at the gate barely slowed the horse long enough for Ant to climb up behind, and Mahkir kept pace alongside without needing to be asked, tireless in a way Ant still wasn't used to seeing this deep into a bad week.

They traded horses twice at relay points Ant hadn't known existed until the first one came into view, low stone posts with a lean-to and a boy no older than fourteen already leading out a fresh mount before they'd fully stopped. Nobody talked much. There wasn't much to say that wouldn't have meant explaining everything twice over, and Ant didn't have it in him to explain it even once.

He watched the ground go by instead, fields turning to scrub turning to the first low hills, and somewhere in the third hour realized he'd stopped bracing against every rise in the road because there was nothing left in him to brace with.

Four and a half hours after leaving Coldwoof, they came over a last rise, long enough in the saddle that the ache in Ant's legs had stopped being worth complaining about and simply become a fact of the day, not long enough that he'd managed to sleep off any of the week that came before it.

Grinenfeld sat below them, low against a spur of southern mountains that climbed hard and fast the moment the last of its rooftops ended, stone going grey-green with lichen up as far as Ant could see before cloud took the rest of it. The buildings were old stone, not old wood — nothing patched, nothing leaning, nothing built cheap, just a place that had been standing exactly like this for longer than anyone still living could account for.

Woodsmoke hung low over the rooftops, and underneath it, sharp enough to catch at the back of his throat, pine resin, burned thick to keep the damp off the walls.

"Any ideas where this could be?" Ant asked, quiet, once they'd dismounted at the edge of the square. No, the voice said. But I may know once we're actually close to it. Ant looked up at the mountains, grey and patient and giving nothing away about how far they'd come to ask them a question neither of them yet knew how to phrase, and started walking.