The mobs grew out of the shadows. Two featureless black bodies with long limbs and bat-like wings murmured at Sheyric as they closed in, twisted hands outstretched. Their words carried no meaning yet settled over Ayn like barbed shackles. A different murmur, out of cadence with the rest, came from the back of the alcove.

  Kayara lashed out. Her daggers slipped through the creatures as if they were made of smoke. The mobs’ heads turned independent of their body. The space where their face should have been was as featureless and smooth as the rest of them.

  Bren yelled. A fireball blossomed at the tips of his fingers. Ayn grabbed Kayara by the back of her tunic and pulled. The out-of-cadence murmuring grew steady as the mobs went silent.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  The shadow creatures flowed forward as Ayn pulled Kayara back. Bren’s fireball sailed by. It sunk into a shadowy body without a sound, there and gone. Kayara twisted in Ayn’s grip and shoved. The force pushed Ayn off her feet. She had just enough time to see Kayara blink away from an incoming mob before she hit the soil. The shadow creatures took the change of target in stride. With Kayara out of reach, they flowed toward Bren.

  Ayn watched as they closed in. She was the tank. Her job was to protect her party. She could make it, put herself between the faceless mobs and Bren, yet she couldn’t convince her muscles to move.

  The last murmur had turned into a chant. The mobs halted, elongated fingers inches from Bren’s throat. Their target switched again, too late. Sheyric shot out two more clipped words, and the mobs froze. The shadows making up their bodies dripped away, featureless turned to formless as deep black ink absorbed into the soil of the floor.

  Kayara, who’d been darting back toward the mobs, slid to a stop and scowled. All four of them went silent, a silence which was broken a moment later by a prayer from Bren, and the sound of Sheyric falling to his knees.

  As Kayara went to his side, Ayn finally picked herself up from the dirt. When the mobs melted, the whispers went quiet, and the alarm in her head quieted enough to feel something more than fear. Shame rose readily.

  The last time she’d run into Abyssal mobs, she’d been drunk on the idea of immortality, so full of bravado and recklessness she’d laughed at The System’s attempts to scare her, and in doing so, had led her entire party, including herself, to death. Now, nearly all she could feel was fear, and she’d already nearly killed them all.

  Kayara finished checking on Sheyric and moved over to Ayn. She tried to catch Ayn’s eye. Ayn looked away.

  “It’s okay to be afraid,” Kayara said. “You can let me lead on this one, but I need to know how to tell where they are.”

  Ayn remembered that first encounter. Realizing the mobs didn’t care about walls, or floors, or shields. That any normal weapon or magic didn’t bother them, and that there was no way to know when they’d appear. “There isn’t.”

  “What do you mean? You knew these things were here well before we saw them.”

  “I couldn’t sense them last time. I think I can now because of my new ability.”

  Bren halted his prayer. “You’ve seen these things before?”

  “Stow it, Choir Boy,” Kayara said. “What new ability?”

  “Sixth Sense,” Ayn said. “It’s supposed to warn me about danger. Especially hidden danger.”

  “Like a psychic thing? Fantastic. You get psychic powers right before walking into an Abyssal floor. Damn it, Ayn. Did we really have to jump right into this floor?”

  Ayn locked eyes with Kayara and immediately regretted it. The red flecks in a sea of green were like fires, burning into Ayn’s soul. “I…wanted to help Bren.”

  Kayara simply stared, cutting through Ayn’s facade and leaving the truth bare. Helping Bren had been an excuse to run into danger. She knew it, and somehow, she was sure Kayara knew it, too.

  “Whatever.” Kayara turned away, and an ache bloomed in Ayn’s chest. “We have to finish what we started, one way or another. Sheyric, come here.”

  Sheyric obeyed and held out a rough stone tablet the size of a notebook. A symmetrical set of words was etched on one side. Ayn didn’t recognize them, yet as soon as she looked, the sounds of those words echoed in her mind. “What is that?”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “It’s what he was chanting,” Kayara said. She fixed Ayn with another piercing gaze. “I was going to ask you what it was.”

  Heat crept up Ayn’s face. She’d seen nothing like it during her last run-in with Abyssal, yet considering how she hadn’t stopped to notice anything, she wasn’t terribly surprised. “I…I don’t know.”

  “I see. That’s fine. We’ll just have to go by what we saw here. Sheyric read the tablet, and when he reached the end, those ink-blots melted, and the whispers stopped. Right?”

  Sheyric nodded. Bren looked unsure, and Ayn couldn’t say she’d been paying enough attention to what Sheyric had been doing to say for sure. “I guess so.”

  “Good enough,” Kayara said. “Sheyric, did you find the tablet there?”

  She pointed at the alcove, and Sheyric bobbed his head. Now that the healer had moved, Ayn could see a little altar constructed at the back of the alcove. What looked like femur bones held up a slanted, obsidian slab slightly larger than the tablet Sheyric had. The slab oscillated under Ayn’s gaze. She looked away as her stomach turned.

  “So,” Kayara said. “In short, while we’re fleeing like scared rabbits through this place, keep an eye out for other altars. I’d bet my few remaining coins we’ll need more tablets to beat the floor.”

  Ayn’s face scrunched up at the words “scared rabbits”. She’d been, and still was, embarrassingly scared, but the other seemed more or less fine. Although now that she wasn’t wrapped up in her own terror, what she noticed surprised her. Bren had gone back to praying—an old, defunct religious artifact that begged the divine for protection. He clasped his hand in front of him, but they still shook. Sheyric trembled all over. Little shivers, almost imperceptible under his robe. Kayara, at first glance, looked like a beacon of calm. The steadiness of her body almost overrode the fear in her eyes. The pacing and grumbling of her wolverine further revealed her agitation.

  Shame dug further into Ayn’s skin. They were all scared. She was the only one letting her fear make her worthless.

  “Ayn.”

  Kayara said her name like a command, and Ayn snapped to attention on reflex.

  “I need you to keep leading. Only you know where they are. But I don’t think we can keep avoiding them. If these tablets are what we need to clear the floor, they’re going to be where the mobs are.”

  And the more powerful and important, Ayn added silently, her stomach dropping, the more powerful the mobs protecting it.

  Kayara grabbed her shoulder and squeezed. “I need you to lead us to where the mobs are gathered. That’s our best chance at getting out of here, right?”

  Ayn nodded slowly, her mouth going dry.

  “Good. Then show us the way, O Great Leader.”

  Ayn frowned and turned away. Kayara hadn’t said the title with any ill-intent Ayn could hear, but it grated like an insult, anyway.

  At first, Ayn followed her Sixth Sense, or rather opposed it, and led her party toward the strongest repulsion, like some sort of twisted game of hot and cold. She muttered to herself as she went, soothing the writhing fear in her gut with the fact she was also avoiding the lesser alarms constantly shifting around them. Their path snaked between dirt tunnels, fungus infested rooms, and areas with shapes that changed when they looked.

  Ayn did her best not to look.

  With each step, whatever cantrip Sheyric had cast off of the tablet seemed to fade. It was barely noticeable at first, or at least the increasing dread and whispers were something Ayn could pin on her own failings, yet by the time she drew near the spot of the loudest alarm, the whispers were practically screaming in her ear, and she’d broken out in a cold sweat.

  She stopped in a room that smelled like char. Shadows merged with crust stuck to bubbly and blackened tree roots. The glowing mushrooms hadn’t been spared. The only light remaining was what leaked in from the exit tunnels, and when Ayn stopped, the others bumped into her in quick succession.

  “Ow!” Kayara said. “A little warning next time.”

  The mobs they were running from didn’t stop. Ayn felt them shift direction and speed up as their prey quit moving. They’d been getting steadily closer as the whispers grew louder. Ayn had figured they were just faster, yet now that she thought about it, their pace had been way too predictable. There was only one reason for that she could think of.

  “The tablet,” she said. “We have to use the tablet again.”

  “I agree,” Kayara said. She shoved the guys back and gained a personal space where the wolverine circled. “These whispers are getting damned annoying.”

  “Fine,” Bren said. The word came out clipped and laced with irritation. “But we keep moving while we do. I’d rather not be a sitting duck.”

  “Can’t,” Sheyric said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sheyric held up the tablet. “Can’t move.”

  “Words, damn it. Aren’t you capable of full sentences?”

  “Hey, back off.” Kayara glared at Bren.

  Bren’s face darkened. “No! We’re being hunted by abominations we can’t even touch. If we’re going to be bait while he chants, I damn well want to know why.”

  “Then use your brain, idiot!”

  Bren took a step toward Kayara, hands balled into fists at his sides. Kayara sneered at his advance. Her wolverine bared its teeth at the mage.

  “Stop it!” Ayn yelled. The words echoed despite the softness of their surroundings. A group of Abyssal creatures were almost on top of them. “This is what Abyssal levels do. Can’t you see? They get in your head and turn you against each other!”

  Ayn had seen it happen in her last life. It hadn’t taken long, either. Her party didn’t like her from the start, and she had given them nothing to change their mind. When the Abyssal whispers drove them further apart, she’d embraced it as a new challenge. She’d been the idiot.

  Kayara and Bren turned their glares to Ayn, but a glimmer of understanding cut through their animosity. Sheyric started chanting in the rhythmic, infuriatingly familiar yet unknowable language of the tablet.

  “Very well,” Bren said. “But know I have no intention of dying in here.”

  The sound of something wet slapping the ground ended their standoff.

  One entrance into the scorched room was wide enough for the party to walk side by side if they wanted, and it was down that pathway the three creatures came.