Velik woke up in a strange bed in an unfamiliar room to the all-too-familiar sensation of things hurting. Every part of his body was raw, except for what was so numb that he couldn’t feel it at all. It took a few minutes of struggle just to get his chest to expand enough to take a breath, and that action felt like he was willingly driving himself into a bed of nails.

  But he’d survived, somehow. He could vaguely remember killing the agent of corruption trying to force its way into him, then a slew of system notifications, and nothing after that. Presumably, Torwin and Aria had finished off the rest of the monsters and taken care of the dungeon core. His best guess was that she’d opened up one of her portals and dragged him through to safety.

  At the moment, he was in somebody’s house, somewhere. He could hear other people breathing in different rooms, but nobody seemed to be walking around or even moving much. Unfortunately, he didn’t recognize anything his ears or nose were telling him, and all he could see was a plaster ceiling brightened by what he assumed was a nearby window on the far wall.

  He needed to get caught up, but at the moment, getting out of bed was more of a struggle than he was up for. There were solutions to that—healing potions or taking his wolf form. Those were also a fight to implement, but Velik wasn’t one to give up just because something was difficult.

  Accessing that internal well of energy to use [True Form] proved to be beyond him, so he switched to getting into the system store. That, thankfully, was as easy as ever. His ability to focus on what he was doing was sharply diminished, but actually getting the menus open wasn’t a problem. He bought himself a healing potion, then realized he had a new problem when it landed on his hand.

  His fingers barely twitched at his command. Lifting his arm up and drinking the potion might very well prove impossible. Still, he tried. Over the next half an hour, he managed to get the potion onto his chest with his hand loosely draped across it. Given another twenty minutes or so, he thought he could nudge the potion to his mouth, where he’d probably end up biting through the glass or something if the cork proved too stubborn to get loose.

  He'd been content to take his time with this project to get it right until he heard a door open not too far away and footsteps walking across a wooden floor. Whoever it was, Velik didn’t recognize the smell of them. That forced him to consider that while he’d probably been rescued by his own team, there existed the possibility that he’d been captured by an enemy, or even just that the Monster Hunters Guild wasn’t happy with him. That wasn’t a meeting he wanted to have on his back.

  He inched the potion closer to his lips as he listened to the footsteps come closer, but the door to the room he was in swung open before he could even get his teeth around the cork. “What are you doing?” a man exclaimed.

  He rushed across the room and pulled the potion away from Velik. “Gods, boy, I’ve only been gone for an hour. You aren’t due for another healing potion for at least another four. You could kill yourself drinking this. Where’d you even get it?”

  “Who—” Velik rasped out.

  “Healer Greenbaum,” the man said. “Your friends brought you to me two days ago.”

  The way his mouth twisted into a grimace when he said “friends” didn’t exactly reassure Velik, but the man hadn’t made any threatening moves so far. It’s not like I could do much if he decided to crush my skull with a rock right now, anyway.

  “Now that you’re awake, I’ll let one of them do the explaining. I honestly don’t understand most of what’s going on myself. It’s all been quite chaotic, despite their assurances that they’ve got things under control. For the moment, please do not attempt to drink a potion or even really move about. I can get you some water if you’d like, but it’d be best to avoid eating right now.”

  Greenbaum held a glass bottle with a thin neck up to Velik’s lips for him to sip on, and he also worked some kind of skill that dampened the pain before he left. It was only after he was alone again that Velik realized the skill’s numbing property was also responsible for his inability to move. Though he had to admit the tradeoff was worth it.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Greenbaum visited a few other patients before leaving the building again, or at least that was what Velik assumed he was doing. There were no conversations between them, or if there were, the healer did something to ensure his words wouldn’t be overheard. Velik doubted that, though. The more likely explanation was simply that everyone else was also sleeping.

  Ten minutes later, he heard the door open again, and someone started walking toward the back of the house. Velik took a deep breath and frowned. Jensen. Blood. Dirt. And… something else? What is that? I should know it.

  The man himself entered the room, paused when he saw Velik’s eyes open, and then dragged a chair out from where it had sat unseen against a wall. Plopping down next to the bed, he said, “Good to see you’re still alive. We honestly weren’t sure you’d pull through.”

  “Me neither. What happened after?”

  “They told me that Aria ripped the dungeon core off its perch and broke it against the floor. Then they dragged you through one of her portals and Sildra did her best to stabilize you. I’m still not sure how she even managed that. She tried to explain it to me, something about feeling the skill growing in a completely new direction instead of building on itself. I guess it’s something spell casting classes all do, but…”

  Velik took a second to think about that but found that he agreed with Jensen. Skills grew by becoming better versions of what they started as. What Jensen was describing sounded more like what happened when two skills merged together, discarding parts of the old to make something new. Even then, the new skill usually was just an expression of the old ones combined.

  “Aria says it’s true,” Jensen added with a shrug. “I guess mage classes all expand their repertoires by taking a skill and pulling it in new directions with each rank up.”

  “Jensen,” Velik said roughly.

  “Oh, right, sorry. I’m rambling. It’s been a crazy few days. Short version is that we got you here, then started cleaning the infestation out of town. There were eight of them, which we rounded up and got enough of the locals involved in subduing them that they saw the notifications, plus it’s pretty hard to argue when someone pukes up a giant red blob that then tries to run off.

  “The problem is that Granite Peak is kind of a hub for the region, but there are mining and stone cutting crews, not to mention some local amateur monster hunters. We had to vet all those, too, and there were a few monsters hiding out there. Chasing them down has been a chore. I think the worst was the goat herder this morning. His class was some sort of animal tamer, except for an entire damn herd of goats that kept trying to throw us off the side of the mountain!”

  Oh, that’s what that smell is. Goat shit.

  “Anyway,” Jensen went on, oblivious to Velik’s fading interest, “we’re working on all of that, so you can just relax here. The local healer isn’t great or anything, but I’ve been supplying him with some high-grade system store potions to work with. You did something to mess with your life spark, they call it, and since potions use that as some sort of stabilization matrix, it’s been slow going. I don’t really understand all the details, just that you need at least a week of bed rest and a drip feed of potions specifically designed to help ‘reignite’ the spark.”

  He leaned forward, then added in a low voice. “You… uh… You’re still planning on going with me on that expedition, right? I’m not asking you to pay me back or anything, but I am out about seventy thousand decarmas from this little trip, and I could use some help recouping that. I know you wanted to go to Slokara, but Aria said she’d come along for a few quick jobs in the country to help me get on my feet, then we can look at going across the border.”

  “Ask me later,” Velik rasped out.

  “Oh, right, of course. Sorry. I’ll let you rest,” Jensen told him. “Oh, Torwin got word from the guild. I guess they were going to just kick you out for messing with their plans like that, but Emberson stood up for you. Things are complicated, but you’re still a gold ranker, if you care.”

  “Not even a little bit,” Velik said.

  Jensen nodded. “I don’t blame you. But, the good news is that Emberson said our team deserved the bounty for this job, plus extra for pulling off a rescue on not one, but two teams. So, expect some fancy rewards in your near future.”

  Maybe an apology for being a bunch of assholes would be nice. I’m not sure what else the guild could give me.

  Velik closed his eyes as Jensen opened the door, but the man paused there. “There was one more thing Torwin wanted me to tell you. He wouldn’t explain it to me, but he said you’d understand. Don’t talk to anybody about the blood. He said it was very important.”

  ‘Gold blood traitor,’ Vudra had called him.

  ‘Traitor. The gold blood in your veins,’ Emberson’s parasite had said at the end.

  He hadn’t worried about it at the time, but he got the feeling that it was going to be important to his future. Suddenly, things felt a lot less peaceful, and when Jensen left the room, Velik laid there and worried about what it all meant.