Micro had recently thought he was getting used to the sensation of going to sleep and waking up again, but the feeling that coursed through his body as he opened his eyes this time was yet another new experience.

  “It tickles!” he shouted as he began to laugh, scratching his body all over to no avail. It took him a few minutes to overcome the tingling, but it eventually subsided.

  “You senile old witch!” Azar’s voice startled Micro, who immediately tried to jump away.

  “Ouch!” Micro cried out as he realized his feet were attached to the ground beneath him. “What the…”

  “You seriously just pushed me in here?!” Azar’s angry voice continued to ring in Micro’s ears.

  He looked around, and saw an endless green sky, no sun or clouds in sight, though it lit the world with a warm glow. Beneath him was a grassy field that extended off into the horizon in every direction, reminiscent of the beach he’d spent an uncountable number of days on with Tae and Kel. To his left, he saw Trill and Blue, standing next to him in a line with their tiny feet planted firmly on the ground. Trill looked confused and scared, but Blue looked exhausted.

  “What the…” To Micro’s right, he saw the two Imperial Guards who had chased him into the mountains. A curious looking Lena stood between him and a fuming Azar, both of whom also appeared to be stuck to the ground.

  “Oh, be quiet,” Lena chided the younger Azar. “It’s just a jade level dungeon. We’ll complete its trivial challenge and extract the hero. It seems to be a dungeon of infinite space and time, so we need not feel rushed.”

  “I wasn’t prepared to spend an eternity in some unknown dungeon with you today, Lena!” Azar shouted, unable to move his feet despite his best efforts. “Such a nuisance, and all for some strange hero!”

  “Blue, what’s going on?” Micro whispered to the sleepy pixie next to him. “Why are we in a dungeon, and why is everybody stuck?”

  “Hold on,” Blue mumbled as she wobbled back and forth on her immovable feet. She regained her balance after a moment, then turned to Micro with one eye open. “It was the only place I could find. Best I could do, given the circumstances…”

  “Thanks, Blue,” Micro whispered as she began to meditate, gathering as much energy as she could from the air in the dungeon.

  “Watch out!” Azar suddenly shouted as he summoned his sword once again. “He’s casting some sort of spell!”

  “Huh?” Micro grunted as the sword of energy sailed straight by Lena toward his chest. The pressure that preceded it was enough to prompt him to raise his armour, but he had too little energy to summon a meaningful amount. He tried to dodge it at the last moment, leaning back as much as he could in the short time he had, but the blade passed through his shoulder before he could get clear of its path. The pain that burned in his arm stunned him briefly, and in his panic he could only make futile attempts at channelling his energy to the cut in a desperate attempt to ease the pain.

  “Ouch!” Blue suddenly cried out.

  “What?!” Trill also yelped in pain.

  “You undisciplined child…” Lena sighed, bringing her hand slowly to her own bleeding shoulder. “To be scared out of your wits by somebody taking a breath. Act your age, Azar.”

  “You can’t be too careful around those—” Azar fumed, but he turned away in shame as Lena ignored his shouts, grasping his own shoulder in pain.

  Micro looked to his left and right, and noticed immediately that both the two pixies to his left and the two guards to his right had been injured in the exact same way and in the exact same place, even though he was the only one among them to have been attacked.

  “Azar, you know better than to act rashly in a dungeon,” Lena scolded the grumpy young man next to her. “Whether it’s a sapphire dungeon or a jade dungeon, you never act recklessly! Honestly, you’ve become so temperamental since ascending to the sapphire stage. Your ancestors must be rolling in their—”

  “What are you doing?” Azar growled back in confusion, but in the next moment, Lena summoned a small dagger, then pricked the end of her finger.

  “Ouch!” Blue was the first to complain.

  “Enough, I get it!” Azar shouted, finally appearing to calm down a little. “What do we have to do? Jade Dungeon studies always gave me a headache.”

  “They are meant to test your mind, after all,” Lena answered. “It’s a miracle you survived the Jade Water Tiger Art Dungeon as a boy with that head on your shoulders.”

  “You know, they won’t blink twice if I return to headquarters alone and report that you were lost in an accident,” Azar said with a stubborn glare.

  “I fear you may be right!” Lena laughed, turning her attention to Micro once again. “But our fates are very much shared, at least for the time being.”

  “Huh…” Micro shrugged, realizing that any injury to one of the five would equally affect all of them. “Weird.”

  “Listen to me, hero. We need to cooperate to get out of this type of dungeon. Can you follow the orders of another, or would it be faster to remove your feet and drag you out with me? I’d hate to damage you any more, but…”

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  “I can handle a dungeon, thanks,” Micro replied nervously. “I’m still getting used to my feet, but I want to keep them attached, for now…”

  “Oh my—” Lena gasped, then quickly drew a scroll and an odd looking pencil from her pocket. “It can communicate rather well! This is unprecedented. I need to record these findings in detail…”

  Micro tried to see what she was writing, but he and the pixies were suddenly surprised to notice their shoulders healing quickly as Azar used some type of skill to heal his own.

  “Looks like she’s right about us having to work together…” Blue mumbled as she stretched out her shoulder. “This is pretty wild, eh?”

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a guardian?” Micro asked, but his answer came with a deep rumbling from the ground in front of him. Out of the grasslands suddenly grew a giant stone statue that radiated dark elemental energy. At first it looked like a large sphere, but as it continued to grow out of the ground, the five participants who stood in a line before it began to recognize its form.

  “Why is there a big mushroom in front of us, Blue?” Trill asked with an eyebrow raised.

  “The Mycelial Art!” Lena shouted with a clap of her hands, then continued to fill her scroll with notes and pictures. “What a rare find, Azar! A Jade Dark Mycelial Art Dungeon, in this day and age…!”

  “What use could it possibly be…?” He rolled his eyes as the statue grew larger and larger. “Just get us out of here.”

  “We may not be able to escape on our own, but—” Lena continued, but she was distracted by an odd sensation that rose up from her feet.

  “Creatures of the mortal realm!” A voice suddenly filled their minds, but it didn’t enter through their ears. Instead, it seemed to vibrate through the ground and up their legs, flowing into their bodies like a shiver.

  “Hello, mushroom!” Micro waved at the statue, drawing another fascinating look from Lena.

  “The sky above is a source of infinite power,” the mushroom continued. “Each blade of grass on this plain absorbs and transforms this energy, both as individual entities, and as one!”

  “So do we have to mow the lawn?” Micro asked with his hand raised.

  “No—No, you do not…!” the mushroom stuttered. “You must extend your own roots to each and every blade of grass, and each being must become an equal part of the whole.”

  “You’re saying we all need to connect our conscious selves to every entity which exists in this realm, and then circulate equal amounts of energy?” Lena asked with a calm tone.

  “That is correct. You must all achieve unity with this realm, or none of you shall return to your own…” the giant mushroom statue concluded before crumbling to dust in an instant, floating away on the breeze as if it had never been there at all.

  “Well, we have all the time in the world,” Lena said with a surprisingly casual tone, then shrugged. “Azar, you understand the task?”

  “I’ll get started…” Azar sighed with his head in his palm. “What an absolute pain in the—”

  “And you, hero?” She turned to Micro. “You have a strange core, but do you understand the concept of internal energy?”

  “I had a good master!” Micro replied with a thumbs up. “The world is full of all sorts of weird things, but lots of people are quite helpful.”

  “Fascinating,” Lena said as she scribbled more notes on her scroll. “Do you know about dungeons? Have you heard of Core Cards?”

  “Focus, Lena,” Azar snapped, but his words were ignored.

  “I already mastered two of them, and I have some more,” Micro answered with a sincere smile.

  “There’s no need to lie,” Lena said calmly. “Your soul may be confused, but we must be candid with each other if we’re to get out of here in one piece. You’ve heard of them, then? How much do you know?”

  “I know I need to find green ones like this,” Micro stated as he withdrew the four jade level cards he possessed from his storage. “Then you just throw them in the bed. Like this, you see…?”

  Lena stared blankly as he suddenly began to meditate, and the cards in his hand started glowing brighter and brighter. Micro went through the familiar steps of entering his core with the cards in his hand. He shuffled them in his hands as he tried to recall each one’s name.

  “This was the armour one from the turtle…” he thought aloud, feeling a small wave of nostalgia wash over his core. “These were the spirit ones from Trill, I think. The Spirit Wave and the Spirit Taste cards. And this one was the hammer that Vale gave me. I wonder how he’s doing today. I should ask Kel to bring him to the cook’s place for some mountain fried beef soon!”

  “What in the world—” Lena muttered as Micro’s energy began to fluctuate.

  “There we go,” Micro mumbled happily to himself as he placed the four cards neatly in the bed of the truck. He noticed the springs creak slightly, but it didn’t seem to be too heavy a load. He braced himself as four torrents of new information filled his mind at once, a process he could now undergo comfortably for the most part, and he was done. Micro happily announced in the garage where only he, or at least his sense of self, and his truck-shaped soul resided. He straightened up a few of the boxes on the shelves which had shifted during recent events, then departed, closing the squeaky door behind him. “That feels pretty good!”

  “Did—Did you just,” Lena stuttered.

  “And now I can use the skills!” Micro declared as he awoke from his brief meditative state.

  “You…” Azar and Lena both stammered as their eyes opened wide and their faces grew pale.

  “You didn’t explode this time!” Blue shouted sarcastically, clapping her hands as if he’d just performed a simple trick.

  “Were those really Core Cards?” Lena asked as the scroll and writing implement fell from her hands to the ground. “Is it an illusion, or—”

  “They’re real,” Micro replied. “Now I’ve mastered the Jade Fire Turtle Art, the Jade Fire Storage Skill, the Jade Fire Armour Trait, the Jade Dark Spirit Taste Skill, the Jade Dark Spirit Wave Skill, and the Jade Fire Spirit Hammer Skill! It’s a lot easier to remember the names after you absorb them, isn’t it?”

  “But—But the elements,” Lena stammered. “Your own energy—”

  “Oh, the element doesn’t matter,” Micro answered her attempt at a question. “They feel a bit different, but I’m not as picky about the type of fuel as I used to be. Can you imagine putting diesel in a little truck like—”

  “Quit bragging,” Blue scoffed, meeting Micro’s eyes with a competitive glare. “You’re barely in the lead. I’ll catch up soon.”

  “Would you explain…?” Lena asked, her eyes still wide in disbelief. “What you’re saying, it doesn’t…”

  “The sect leader said it’s probably because my soul got dragged through some crazy stuff on the way to this world,” Micro said, his head starting to hurt as he tried to recall the complicated explanation he’d received from the sect master. “He could explain it to you better than I could.”

  “What are you?” Lena asked, blinking for the first time in a while.

  “I’m a Micro!”