“Alright, the idea here is that I want all of ya to capture every one of these balls, intact,” Mel yelled before he tossed thirty green balls that looked better suited for a tennis match than whatever we were doing into the air. “Oh, also, they change shape and fly pretty fast!” I watched as they all started shifting and vanishing into the trees. How the hell were we going to find those?

  “Glorp, grab everyone you can. Elody, work with Rabyn to start hunting down more. Dave, get your tools into the air to scout. Connie, stay with Dave, keep us in contact with each other. Maud, follow me!” Elicec yelled out quickly enough that I had to question if he’d already known what the training was going to be. I didn’t think so, but he was certainly on top of our power sets.

  I released the tools from my System storage and felt Corey guide them through our link. He’d managed to do it without a single word. Whatever the networking protocol my mana channels were utilizing was, it seemed to work pretty great so far. Within seconds, a chat window appeared.

  “Got three of them,” I said as I closed the window.

  “Alpha is due South, and Gamma is in the clearing Northeast of us,” Corey explained.

  “Got it,” Connie said, and then she began quietly singing. Somehow, along with the melody, the message of just where the balls were seemed to float into my ears. Had Elicec and her practiced some long-range communication? How long was the range, for that matter? She hadn’t used it on the last floor, so had she just gained it somehow, or was it too limited for that?

  “When did you learn that?” I asked.

  “Nothing new, just doesn’t work so well in confined spaces,” she replied, stopping the singing. Well, that explained that, great ability but not so useful underground.

  “Oh, you guys that’re still here, just wanted ta let ya know, I invited a friend,” Mel called to us. Connie and I were the only two still present to hear his message. I realized what his words meant at the same moment Trolke’s giant club caught me in the chest, knocking me backward into a tree. Where the hell had he been hiding Trolke?

  “Woah, big guy, how about you just take a nice nap,” Connie said calmly, the weight of her words even affecting me as I felt my eyelids grow heavier. Luckily, the pain managed to keep me awake and focused. I wasn’t sure if most people would consider that lucky, but dammit, I didn’t want to fail our first team training exercise that badly, so I was willing to call it luck and kept the pain management to a minimum for now.

  The luck didn’t hold, though, as Connie’s words seemed to have no effect on the giant, and she took another big swing of his club to her body, the same as I had moments ago. “Hey, big guy, look over here,” I yelled, wanting to test a theory. His head didn’t even move at my words. I figured Mel had deafened him somehow to avoid Connie’s attacks. I pulled up a chat window for some quick orders.

  I closed the chat window, confident that I would at least get my tools, Maud, and the brothers back to the new fight. Connie didn’t look ready to contact anyone at the moment, and Tolke had turned back toward me. At the same time, I placed a shield around Connie and myself; I also let loose several fireballs toward the giant. With Corey’s addition, the new response time on swapping my cores was amazing. Less amazing was the way Trolke shrugged off my attacks with a grin.

  “Sorry, Dave, going to take a lot more than that to take me down,” he said, his smile growing. No, wait, it wasn’t just his smile that was growing. His entire body was. The giant was rapidly reaching twice his usual size, and the club in his hand grew with him.

  The club’s swing at me was blocked just before impact by an equally large scythe that had appeared. While Cecile defended me, his brother let loose a barrage of elemental spells into the giant. All three of the dungeon cores appeared as well, each of them using their new bodies in a coordinated attack of stabs, slashes, and mallet blows.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Now free from Trolke’s onslaught, I ran to Connie’s side and poured some healing magic into her. Trolke had managed to break her ribs and knock her out, but using a combination of soul and core mana, I was able to quickly get her on the mend. The moment she opened her eyes, she leapt to her feet as a series of curses erupted from her mouth. The force of the words pushed me a few steps away from her, but that was nothing compared to the near hurricane-level wind they rapidly grew to as the sound impacted the back of the giant.

  He stumbled forward this time, finally really caught off-balance. The ground under his stable leg gave way as the grass turned to mud. Trolke collapsed forward, his face making a loud thud as he hit the ground. He was moaning in pain but otherwise looked surprisingly unhurt, considering the amount of magic we had just thrown at the man.

  “Enough, he’s down,” Mel called from above. I started heading toward the giant to heal him up, just as several things crashed into my back, knocking me face-first into the mud next to our sparring partner.

  I rolled to the side as quickly as I could to spot several green bat-like creatures lunging toward me. Had those been the balls? I felt another layer of my shield pop into existence, this time dulling their attacks enough to not affect me. I tried pushing myself back to my feet, but instead, I just sank deeper into the mud.

  I pulled up my chat window and sent a quick message to Alpha that I needed their help, and to my slight surprise, they were there seconds later, floating in front of me. I grabbed the mallet’s handle with both hands, and they were able to pull me free of my mud prison while the other cores fought off the ball monsters.

  “Better hurry. Rabyn and Elody are already down, and who knows what happened to Glorp,” Mel taunted from his vantage point. That explained why none of them were back, but what had managed to take those two down? That was worrying.

  “Beta, Gamma, go find Rabyn and Elody. Alpha, start taking down the monsters. Connie, are you doing okay?” I yelled back to her.

  “She’s fine. Looks like that attack on Trolke just took a lot out of her,” Maud replied.

  “Any clue how many balls we’ve taken out?” Elicec yelled.

  Corey’s form appeared next to me before replying. “I can personally account for seventeen of them down. Add that to how many you’ve got, and the four, sorry three, still flying here, and that’s what we have left.”

  “Okay then, there are possibly as many as four still in the forest, but that doesn’t explain what could take down the other three. I don’t even think Trolke could have knocked down Elody and Rabyn. They’re the heavy hitters,” Elicec answered.

  “You won’t find them,” a voice replied. It seemed to come from all around us. Just who had Mel hired for this? I started to channel another shield when I felt my mana just fizzle. As far as I could tell, my soul-core reaction was still working, but I just couldn’t push the core mana far enough.

  “Uh, anyone else having issues channeling?” Cecile yelled.

  “It’s an effect of whoever Mel has hunting us!” I yelled back.

  Maud screamed, and I spun my head to where she had been standing, instead spotting her unconscious form on the ground with a series of dark black shadowy figures spreading out from where she had been standing. Half of them broke toward the brothers while the other half started for me. As I desperately tried to think of some way to fight back, a chat window appeared.

  Before the chat window closed I already felt my soul mana flooding my channels. A new shield shimmered into existence around myself, Corey, and Alpha, and the moment it went up, I felt my normal mana start to flow properly again. The soul mana shield had managed to block whatever was causing that effect. I was too late to help the twinoges, but there was still some time to do something for myself.

  Corey, translating my plans to lightning-quick channeling, put another shield around me while Alpha returned to my storage, and Corey’s form vanished. With great difficulty, I forced the words my channeling required into a whisper, trying to hide my intention. Soon, the pocket of air trapped between the two layers of shields began to superheat and just as I felt my own shield start to give, I channeled a fireball into the open space at the exact moment I dropped the outer shield.

  The blast I had created had been strong enough to nearly destroy my own shield, but Corey had pushed soul mana into another layer of it. Even despite that, it had been compressed enough from the force that I was sure a couple of ribs had been cracked. At least my lungs weren’t hit this time. I could repair this later. The important thing is all the shadows save one, were gone, and it was down on the ground, coughing loudly. I guessed that was the real form of whoever Mel’s big ringer was.

  Alpha was back out of my storage swinging for the head, and I was pushing every bit of mana I had left into another fireball when Mel yelled. “Alright, good enough. I won’t exactly call this a win for the squad, but you managed to survive, which is honestly more than I expected. So, good job. Timon, you still alive?”

  “More or less, Dave can pack a punch when he wants,” the black figure replied.

  Morphogenic rubber balls are a useful choice when training fighters for the Arena, as they can be kept in their smaller forms until needed for training, and while they can appear to be alive during the battles, it is all a form of the natural magic of the rubber trees they are harvested from. There is no actual life within the balls, and the moment their mana charge runs dry, they will drop the ground until returned to their storage unit for a slow recharge. Some Arena trainers have learned how to program them for complex fighting routines, even managing to simulate coordinated assaults, making them an asset in any manager’s bag of tricks.

  for Mort’s Morphogenic Rubber Balls

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