“I fucking hate these things!” Mul shouted.

  His flaming hands propelled him upwards, and Nar reached down to pull him up to the top of the fish they had just killed together.

  You hate everything, Nar thought to himself, quickly letting go of Mul’s fiery hand before it did any more damage to his already nearly two thirds depleted HP, as unlike the rest of the neutral flames in his armor, the one’s raging from his fists were the real deal.

  However, he couldn’t really disagree with the brawler. Stuck to the side of the ship, stupidly tough except for their gills and requiring constant balance and attention not only to themselves but the swarms of beasts around them, and all the aether too, wild and from the ship breaches and from the fish, and keeping pace to all of the ship’s unexpected twists and shifts, and that had to be Nar’s most frustrating and tiring fight yet. And his stamina had plummeted to 74/320 to match it.

  Alongside the other two depleted status bars, he was starting to feel the weariness seeping through his muscles and bones, the sword in his hands growing heavier with each new beast he slayed. That was something that almost never happened in training.

  But this isn’t training, Nar thought, taking a moment to breathe and considered the storm before them.

  He hadn’t seen any more ships go down, and he had managed to catch a glimpse of his fair share of them as they sailed up and down, and alongside the Scimitar, or vice-versa. And luckily, the pilots had managed to keep them from flying into the worst and heaviest of those thick, dark clouds.

  Everytime they plunged into the pick black clouds, visibility dropped to close to zero, and deadly lightning spread all around them, past the aether rods and to the hull, electrifying whole sections of it. Not to mention, wild aether had stabbed into them mercilessly, contributing greatly to Nar’s depleted status, and as the fight wore on, whenever they dipped into clouds, Nar and many others had to increasingly look around in search of and to rescue passed out and aura depleted apprentices, dangling limply from their safety jump belts. Luckily, it seemed as though most of the fish were downed, and the apprentices still in fighting shape were returning to the promenade.

  Mul instead dropped heavily on the back of the dead fish.

  “We’ve got to be full by now, no?” he asked.

  Nar sighed, and he could only shrug in reply. His clock showed that five whole hours had dragged past since they had entered the confluence, and honestly, he wasn’t sure how much more he had in the tank, stamina or no stamina. Between the fish, the pullies, zappers and raimels, the lightning, the wind, the Scimitars unexpected maneuvers, the aether and everything else… He was getting tired. Very, very tired.

  “Just hang in there, man,” Nar said. “We have to be almost done.”

  Nar didn’t hear Mul’s reply in the storm, but the brawler got up ponderously to his feet once more.

  “Alright! Find us another one, then,” he said. “My eyes are going blurry in this shit!”

  Nar nodded and searched around them. Even with his [Sight], the repeated lightning and aether had done a number on his eyes as well, and things were looking noticeably less sharp than before.

  Hopefully we’re almost done, he told himself, scanning their section of the hull. Dead… Dead… Oh! No… Dead too. Dead…

  He went through all the tails he could spot, but all of them looked to be unmoving. He also found a few empty hull breaches, meaning that the fish who had caused them had either died and fallen off, or had their fill and left.

  Those breaches were watched over by crewmembers whose heads once in a while peeked outside to look at either the damage on the hull, or at the storm and the apprentices still zipping about, and it had been a Nexus of relief not to have to guard those breaches. There were few enough of them as it were.

  “I don’t see anymo… Oh, up there! That one’s still alive!” Nar said, pointing up.

  Mul groaned. “Fine, let’s just go and…”

  “Wait, the one next to it is also alive!” Nar shouted.

  There were two fish stuck closely together. They were so close in fact, that they were probably sharing the one, larger breach on the hull.

  “Agh… Fuck my life!” Mul said. “You take the one on the left, I take the one on the right!”

  Nar gave him a tired thumbs up.

  “Let’s finish this!” he shouted.

  Suddenly, an ear splitting scream reached his ears, and Nar witnessed a streak of darkness plummeting directly towards the place where the two bodies crushed against one another in their frenzy to finish their feeding.

  “Was that…”

  Nar blasted off, not waiting for Mul to finish that question.

  No! No! No! No! NO!

  That voice was unmistakable, even in its horror and smothered by the storm, and the shadowy armor he had glimpsed only confirmed his fears further.

  “Jul!” he screamed, jumping from dead fish to dead fish. “Jul!”

  He didn’t have time to flash at his party view and he tried not to think about what he would find.

  Come on! Not now! We’re almost done! He screamed in his mind. [Aura Quickening]!

  He poured the last of his stamina and aura reserves into getting there faster, ignoring the pain splicing through his brain and down his nerves, tendons and muscles, and called upon a second [Aura Quickening].

  He landed, and Jul's strangled screaming reached him immediately.

  “Jul!” he shouted.

  The quam was stuck between the two fish, her body being crushed this and that away, and her left arm was gone into the breach itself, trapped and being mauled on by the two ax-heads.

  Raw fear and rage inundated Nar, and he jumped down into the midst of the two fish, pushing with all his [Strength] against their bodies to keep them off of her.

  “Jul!” he shouted.

  “Nar!” she gasped. “My arm…”

  “I know! Hold on!”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Nar raised his sword and tried to push it through the left side fish’s gills, but in its frenzy and on the angle he found himself on, he couldn’t reach it! Worse, in his efforts to reach the gills, he slipped, and the right fish slammed hard on the two of them.

  Jul screamed again.

  “Shit!” he shouted, putting all of his efforts back into keeping the two beasts at bay.

  He had wedged himself in between the two fish, and that had spared Jul a crushing death. However, from where he was, with all of his [Strength] going into just keeping Jul from getting ground to paste, there was very little he could do.

  Where’s that damned brawler? He thought.

  Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw something flashing red. Fuck! My HP!

  His stamina was also not looking great after the two [Aura Quickening]s he had just used to reach Jul, and the only thing he still had left in him, was that bit of his aura…

  With a snarl, Nar called upon his [Sword Aura], feeding it another 50 points from his remaining 497, and plunged his blade into the fish's side. The beast cried in pain and Nar grit his teeth to keep hold of the blade.

  “Come on!” he shouted at himself, cycling all the aura he could into his arm.

  He had failed the first and only time he had tried that particular trick, but here and now, there was nothing else he could come up with. As expected, the fish’s aether rose against the intrusion of his aura, pushing it back out, and with it, Nar’s sword.

  Come on! He shouted at his own aura. More! I need more!

  And yet, his [Mastery] was like a giant and unyielding wall surrounding his core. A little hole was slowly being widened into it, to allow for more of his aura to flow through, but as of now, his limit of 155 points was not enough to do anything against the fish’s own aether.

  He briefly considered giving up, and trying to pour his 155 points of aura into his [Sword Aura] and attack again, but there was a risk of him not managing to hit the fish a second time. He was stuck almost horizontally with his back on one fish and his feet on the other, and that was the only thing keeping Jul alive. As it was, he had been lucky enough to land that first strike.

  He looked to his side and his heart plummeted.

  “Jul!” he shouted.

  The quam now hung limply from in between the two fish heads, her armor searing and sizzling in between the shining, aether filled, ax-heads of the two fish.

  “Jul!” he screamed again.

  Roaring, he pushed on his aura once more, cycling it to his pathways, feeling the burn and the damage and ignoring the flashing red.

  He didn’t care about [Mastery].

  He didn’t care about his pathways…

  He didn’t care about the rules or what was possible or not. He just wanted that damned thing dead!

  And suddenly, something reached up his arm, in the reverse direction of his cycling aura. Something reached within him, coursing upwards through his arm’s pathway, growling with rage and hunger. So much hunger… And something screamed inside of him, and then, his aura surged forward, blinding, searing, roaring down his arm.

  It was a moment of bliss. Of fullness. Of completeness. For that brief second, he tasted the vague memory of the power that had coursed through him at the end of the Ceremony.

  The yellow light shining through the fish’s wound was whisked out, replaced by blinding gray, and the fish roared in agony as its sides distended with all the aura that Nar poured into it. With one last half-grunt and half-roar, the beast blew up in bright gray and blue goo, gray aura and yellow aether exploding out its other side.

  The blast pushed Nar against the other fish, and Nar felt himself slipping off into the sweet embrace of oblivion.

  No! He was jolted back to reality, and he scrambled for his belt just as a pair of flaming fists wrapped under his arms and hoisted him back up.

  “Hang on!” Mul shouted, dumping him unceremoniously on top of the fish.

  The sword slipped out of Nar’s grasp as he fought to stay atop the squirming beast, and the only thing he could do before dropping it, was send it back to his inventory. And with it gone, he felt a devouring loss within him, gnawing at his aura core as the walls reasserted themselves with obliterating anger, and raw pain surged from his core.

  Nar gasped for air as his body seized, his aura going haywire within his pathways, as behind him, bright orange flashed again and again, the fish screaming under the unyielding fiery onslaught.

  Jul! I need to get to Jul! Nar shouted in his mind, pushing against the pain and forcing his aura to cycle once more.

  His aura jarred and protested within him, but Nar got it back into enough semblance of control and stumbled to his hands and knees. He crawled towards the fish’s head, ignoring Mul’s blind rage, and glanced down in search of the quam.

  “Jul!” he shouted.

  The girl was still hanging lifelessly from the breach, still wedged in between the one fish and the half that remained of the other. With a growl of anger, Nar flipped around and kicked at the bloody, dead ax-head that was still embedded into the Scimitar’s hull.

  Just… Fucking… Let… Go!

  The head tumbled free, and Nar dropped down the fish’s side to jump into the breach and take hold of Jul.

  Her arm had at long last come loose, but the girl herself was still firmly stuck against the breach, and the remaining, thrashing fish was starting to plunge deeper into the insides of the ship, moving in to occupy the space he had shared with its companion, and blocking the breach once more.

  What in the Pile? Nar thought, as he stopped pulling on the girl. He gently tried tugging on Jul once more, and failing that, he tried lifting her up, moving her sideways, but something was holding fast onto her.

  The wire! He realized.

  He blindly felt around her waist until he found the wire, and sure enough, it disappeared right into the ship’s hull.

  She must have gotten stuck when she fell, and she was trying to get free! Nar realized, through the haze threatening to pull him under again. Instead, she got her arm stuck too!

  Nar abandoned the wire, for fear that he would suffer the same fate as her, given how the other fish was still thrashing against Mul’s fire and wedging itself further into the ship, and he hesitated for a moment, considering the danger of what he was about to do. However, he saw no other option.

  “Mul!” he shouted. “Mul!”

  “What?”

  “She’s stuck! I need to cut her wire!”

  “You what?” Mul shouted again, alarm in his voice. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m fucking sure!” Nar shouted. “I’m going to bring her back up! You gonna be okay?”

  “Just go!”

  Without another word or thought, he pulled out his sword again and sawed at Jul’s wire. His sword didn’t even scratch it.

  Ah, for the love of…

  He didn’ dare use his aura so close to Jul, and he stored the sword away again, and instead fumbled for the release clasp on her belt. The clasp eventually opened to his numbed fingers and he got her legs out of the straps. Then, he finally crushed his return button, and shot up towards the safety of the promenade.

  “Nar!” someone shouted.

  “Help!” he cried. “Help Jul!”

  In that exact moment, the ship's engines wailed to a high pitch, and Nar felt the massive Scimitar moving under him. Clouds blew through the promenade, blinding him and seizing him in sharp aether, and he wrapped his legs and arms tightly around Jul, and covered her body with his own, forcing his arms and legs to not let go.

  His aura trembled in his pathways, spent and threatening to wink out before the aether onslaught, and he held tighter onto Jul as his grasp on reality slipped away. Then, through his closed eyelids, light roared, through his battered ears, a ringing silence took everything.

  Nar opened his eyes and squinted against the sudden glare. Before him, beyond the external railing, spread a sea of endless clouds, stretching on into what had to be an endless channel within the Labyrinth…

  It’s over… he realized.

  Someone collapsed against him.

  “What happened?” Kur asked.

  “Jul… She-She got stuck!” he mumbled, his tongue fighting against him. “Q-Quick! Get her to…”

  But Gad had already leaned down to scoop Jul into her arms, and she ran across the promenade towards the inside of the ship, and the healers who had set up temporary residence nearby, at critical intersecting corridors close to the promenades.

  “Are you alright?” Kur asked.

  “Y-Yeah…” Nar whispered, his voice raw and low.

  “Your arm, Nar!” Kur suddenly shouted. “Your HP! Your stamina!”

  Nar looked down to see what the fuss was all about, and fair to the party leader, he found his right arm to be a downright bloody mess. Bloody shrapnel poked through gaping lines of dark, bleeding wounds, and it looked as though something had torn through and out of his arm.

  My aura… Nar thought. It was my aura…

  There was nothing else it could be, but the price for pushing past his [Mastery], however he had managed to do it.

  “Nar?” Kur called him, shaking him gently.

  Nar looked from his ravaged arm to the sea of clouds beyond. He could still glimpse the occasional lightning running across the clouds, and hear the rumble of distant thunder.

  This is the life of a delver, he thought to himself.

  Swarmed in dens.

  Dangling off of ships.

  Risking a horrible, agonizing death with every fight… And he hadn’ even made it inside a dungeon yet.

  There’s no way I can bring my dad out here, he thought, as darkness descended upon him. No way in a thousand years…

  Let them live in the O-Nex. Whatever the people there thought of them, at least they would be safe from all of that insanity.

  And to think, ha Nar was still at the very edges of the Outer Reaches of the Endless Labyrinth.

  What in the Pile is out there… Deeper in…

  Then, he was gone.