Chương 38: Chapter 37 - Attribute Sharing

Ant pulled the screen back up properly once the immediate rush of the fight had settled, the habit of checking everything twice too deeply ingrained to leave alone. Kithren: Mahkir Level: 5 Evolution Stage: 1 Str: 14 End: 12 Magic: 26 Agi: 23 HP: 40/40 Mana: 70/70 Nothing had moved. Not a single number, exactly the same as they'd sat since the last level, and Ant felt the familiar frustration rise before he caught himself and remembered the pattern by now — level two to three, no stats, a trait instead.

Level three to four, a full spread. Level four to five, nothing again. Whatever governed Mahkir's growth clearly wasn't running on the same schedule as anything Ant had ever read about, alternating between stat gains and something else entirely with no visible logic tying the two together. Something else, then. He scrolled further, looking for whatever had replaced the numbers this time. New Skill unlocked — Attribute Sharing. Ant stopped scrolling.

Attribute Sharing — For three minutes, User and Kithren may combine their attributes. Warning: User and Kithren are linked while active. What affects one also affects the other. He read it twice, turning the words over slowly. Combine their attributes.

He thought immediately of Mahkir's numbers sitting there beside his own — the strength, the magic, the mana pool that dwarfed anything Ant's own body had ever managed to produce — and understood, in the space of a single breath, exactly what this meant if he ever used it. For three minutes he wouldn't just be fighting alongside something powerful. He'd be fighting with that power running through him directly, borrowed and shared and folded into whatever he already had.

The excitement lasted exactly as long as it took him to reread the warning properly. Linked. Not figuratively. Not in the vague, sentimental way people used the word about bonds and partnerships. Linked, in the specific mechanical sense the system seemed to mean by everything it told him — what affects one also affects the other. If Mahkir took a killing blow while the skill was active, Ant would take it too. And the reverse held exactly as true.

If Ant fell during those three minutes, Mahkir fell with him, regardless of how much health he actually had left, regardless of whether the blow that ended Ant would have meant anything to a creature capable of shrugging off strikes that would have taken Ant's head off cleanly. He sat with that for a long moment, the cold clarity of it settling somewhere he didn't have a comfortable place to put it. Three minutes of borrowed strength, and a single mistake in either direction cost them both everything.

He noticed, further down the screen, that something else had changed too — not new, exactly, but altered, a familiar entry sitting with different text beneath it than the one he remembered. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Emotional Control (Updated) — Depending on the User's emotional state, Kithren may enter a berserk state, increasing all attributes by 20%. Ant frowned at that one, turning it over with less alarm but genuine curiosity.

He remembered the original description clearly enough — something vague about sharing attributes in times of need, low chance of success, a skill he'd never actually seen trigger in any fight he could point to. This read differently. More direct. More specific about what it actually did, and considerably less hedged about when. He thought about the level ten simulation, Mahkir's fury at watching a false version of himself lose.

He thought about the lab, the fire that had spread through half of Maren's equipment because something in Mahkir had simply stopped holding back. He wondered, distantly, whether that had already been this — an early, unrefined version of a berserk state the system hadn't finished naming yet, triggered by something in Ant's own reaction bleeding through the bond without either of them understanding what was actually happening. He didn't say any of it aloud yet.

Kalsar and Maren were still a short distance ahead, discussing something about the passage continuing further, and Ant stood for a moment longer with the weight of both revelations settling into place — one skill that could make them briefly, dangerously stronger than anything he'd yet seen either of them manage, and one condition that had apparently been quietly shaping Mahkir's fights from somewhere Ant hadn't known to look. Both came with the same unspoken cost sitting underneath them.

Whatever strength either one offered, it was never going to be free. They pressed on. The passage widened gradually as they walked, the violet residue thickening against the walls until it was less a streak of colour and more a constant, pressing presence, the air itself carrying weight in a way it hadn't further back. Kalsar had gone quiet, his usual measured pace slowing by degrees, his Kithren pressed close against his leg rather than ranging ahead the way it had for most of the journey down.

"Something's wrong," he said, before they'd even reached the opening ahead of them. Ant felt the shift too, though he couldn't have named it the way Kalsar clearly could.

The pressure that had been building steadily since the entrance had stopped building the way pressure should — it had begun compressing instead, denser, held somewhere it shouldn't have been able to stay contained, the residue that should have been leaking naturally through the stone instead pressing inward on itself like something forcing it to stay put.

"This isn't right," Kalsar muttered, more to himself than to either of them.

"A vortex this size doesn't hold like this. Something's suppressing the leak." They stepped into the final chamber together. The space opened wide, wider than anything they'd passed through so far, and the moment they crossed the threshold the pressure that had been suffocating them for the last stretch of passage simply released — all of it, at once, streaming toward the centre of the room in slow, converging currents of violet light, drawn toward something none of them had noticed until the light gave it shape.

It was humanoid. Roughly, in outline — a torso, limbs, something that might have been a head — but nothing about it resembled a face or any feature Ant could have described beyond the fact that it was there, standing at the centre of the room wrapped entirely in the same shifting energy that had been building through the entire passage behind them. Kalsar's voice cracked across the chamber, sharp with something Ant hadn't heard from him before.

"This is beyond the pair of you! It's stronger than anything I expected out of a vortex this size. Get back — now!" His Kithren didn't wait for anything else. It surged past the group and into the open space, roaring as it went — not confused, not reactive, but immediate and certain, the sound of something responding to an order neither Ant nor Maren had heard given, already closing the distance toward whatever stood waiting at the centre of the room.