Chapter 37: Admonishment

“You gonna sleep forever?”

He awoke still laying in the shallow water on the cave floor, his body burning with pain. He felt hands grab him beneath the shoulders and was lifted to find Lance looking at him with a smile.

“I was thinking I earned a little nap.” He grinned softly.

“Nah, you gotta go poke the altar, remember?” Garret clapped him on the shoulder, making him groan. “You’re the resident creepy statue activator. So, off you go.”

He grumbled under his breath as a response before he mentally dove into his storage bracelet. It only took a pop of a cork followed by a single gulp, to down his healing potion. “Give me a second,” he said.

The chimera beast was still lying at the pool’s edge, dead. But the cavern had been cleaned up as well. At least, there was no trace of Alex’s blood or the chimera’s purple fluids, that he could see. He assumed Henry had gone to work on the area with a water spell to powerwash it all away. Which was… smart actually.

He knew where he needed to go and a quick jump took him across the small cavern in a single leap.

Landing on unsteady legs, he managed to stagger up onto the platform on the other side of the pool. His bones still burned from forcing his caustic blood into overdrive, every throb of pain a reminder of what he’d done. But he wasn’t about to let that slow him down now.

He stepped forward.

The statue loomed ahead, its carved features were partly eroded, but its depiction of a serpent looking to the sky in anger gave off an aura in a way that set his teeth on edge.

He decided not to waste time and placed one hand on the stone, forcing his will into it. The familiar chime of the System rang in his head.

Hidden Objective Complete – Lake Biome Shrine Reward: +2,500 Dungeon Points [Lake’s Blessing] – Dungeon Effect Applied; The Chimera Hive’s link to the Lake has been cut. Dungeon chimeras have lost access to Kinetic Redirection.

The words echoed like a bell toll through his skull. His lips curled into a tired grin. The objective was another step toward completing the dungeon.

Behind him the others stood in the shallows of the pool. All of them were bruised and exhausted. Garret leaned on his shield with water still dripping off him in sheets. Allie’s glow still flickered faintly at her palms, casting pale arcs of light across the slick walls. Holly caught Alex’s attention across the cavern, a faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth when they locked eyes.

He straightened his posture as best he could, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s two biomes down. Forest and Lake. Means we’re that much closer to finishing this damned dungeon.”

Garret huffed. “Good riddance, I was getting real tired of my own attacks being thrown back into my face.”

“Wasn’t your face, Garret. It was your body. You’ve got plenty of padding there.” Holly said.

“Hey—”

“Don’t start,” Eric cut in, though his smirk betrayed the edge in his tone.

The tunnels sloped upward in a slow spiral on their way back. Alex stumbled near the front with one hand dragging along the wall for balance while the other pulled a cork from yet another glass vial. The healing potion burned like sour liquor as it went down, stitching together torn muscle with a crawling tingle. He was abusing the potions, drinking far too many of them too quickly, something the Heavenly System didn’t like. Hence the burning sensation, and the horrid taste.

He grimaced, then pressed his thumb against the first of the three gems slotted into his bracer. Its inner light dimmed as he siphoned its energy, trickles of its power bleeding back into his aether channels with every inhale of his lungs.

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“Always you, every boss fight ends with you half-dead, knocked out, or bleeding in ways I don’t even want to describe.” Holly muttered behind him.

He didn’t look back at her. He just kept his gaze on the faint shimmer of light Obby was highlighting in his vision. The end the tunnel ahead.

She’s not wrong, he admitted to himself.

“Not wrong at all. You’re a walking joke, meatbag. All that power, and you pay for it by punching yourself in the teeth. Honestly, I’m impressed you haven’t keeled over from sheer stupidity yet.” Obby snickered.

Alex rolled his eyes and finally turned his head enough to glance at Holly. “I’m fine. Really. Just… backlash from a new skill. First time using it. I’ll adjust.”

She didn’t look convinced. Her lips pressed into a thin line as she gave him that look.

He exhaled, the quick rush of air burning at his raw throat. “Look, most of what the System throws my way… It’s either something that gets me smashed into paste… or something that forces me to smash myself into paste for the privilege of using it. Honestly, feels like it’s laughing at me while I do it.”

Garret, who’d been trudging just a few paces back, let out a loud laugh. “So what you’re saying is, your entire build is just ‘hit myself until I hit them harder’.”

“That’s not—” Alex started, but Garret cut him off with another wheezing laugh.

“Tomorrow, the System’s gonna pop up: [New Skill Unlocked: Self-Destruct. Costs: Your Entire Body. Reward: Dead Enemy. Smug Satisfaction. +20,000 experience.]”

That earned a snort from Holly. “For you, it sounds accurate.”

“Hell, it’s already his fighting style isn’t it? He just hasn’t maxed it yet.” Lance added.

Even Eric cracked a small grin by this point, “Gods help us when he does.”

The laughter rolled through the group like a contagion. Even Henry’s lips twitched into the ghost of a smile as he shook his head.

Alex just sighed. “Glad I could be the punchline for you all.”

“The punchline! Finally!” Garret grinned. “He gets it.”

The laughter trailed off into tired chuckles, the sound bouncing against the damp stone of the tunnel. Alex refused to feed into the roast he was getting, and eventually they gave up when he stopped reacting. The group trudged onward instead

“Hey,” Garret said after a while, “credit where it’s due, Eric’s calls in that fight? Dead-on. Had us moving like we actually knew what we were doing.”

Allie gave a small nod. “Can’t argue with that. You kept us from getting gutted more than once.”

Henry rumbled his agreement with a short grunt, which was his version of a standing ovation.

Alex slowed his pace to look at Eric from over his shoulder. “Yeah. You did good. Better than good. I’ve been…” He hesitated to rub at the dried blood on his hands. “…distracted. Trying to track the Chimera adaptations and working out what their aether signatures mean. Honestly, I can’t keep leading and keep my eyes on that at the same time.” He tilted his head and offered a faint grin. “And you haven’t been nearly as much of a hard ass lately, which has been… nice.”

That earned a couple snickers from the squad. “Miracles do happen.” Allie said.

Eric, for his part, tried to keep his face blank, but the slight twitch in his jaw betrayed him. He was about as good at lying as a toddler insisting they didn’t break the lamp even as shards were still crunching under their feet. He let out a sharp huff. “Don’t get used to it.”

But after a beat he added, “But thanks. I wasn’t sure what my place was here. Back home, the military was all I knew. Leading squads, barking orders, keeping people in line. And when we first got here, it felt like… everyone hated that. Hated me. And maybe I deserved it.” Eric admitted.

He rubbed a hand over his shaved scalp, his eyes downcast. “But what I realized was… What I really knew wanted to do, wasn’t leading. It wasn’t being the captain. It was being useful. You know, being needed. Might be a bad thing, leaning on that too much, but…” He shrugged a little awkwardly. “It made me realize I don’t have to be the hard-ass commander. I just need to be what the team needs me to be. And right now, that’s the guy calling shots so the rest of you can do your crazy heroics without getting flattened.”

The silence that followed Eric’s words had a bitter-sweet taste to it. There wasn’t a lot of time lately to share thoughts and feelings like this between them. They were constantly fighting off death, so having a moment to just slow down and get some things off one’s chest, it felt good.

Garret clapped Eric on the back hard enough to make him stumble. “Hell, we’ll keep you around then.”

Lance gave an approving nod. “It suits you better.”

“Don’t let it go to your head, though” Allie added.

Alex watched Eric’s shoulders square up a bit, not with old rigidness or anger, but lighter sort of stance. That of a man finding his footing without the old military uniform.

Then Garret, his tone mock-serious, announced, “Well, if Eric’s not the hard-ass anymore, someone’s gotta fill the role. I nominate Henry. Man barely talks, perfect material for mysterious scary authority.”

Henry grunted.

Garret’s eyes widened. “See? Absolutely chilling. Its already working.”

Laughter carried them the rest of the way through the tunnel until the muted roar of falling water began to echo ahead.

Once they broke down their previous makeshift tunnel wall, the passage opened onto the large cavern mouth behind the waterfall. One by one, they stepped out into the cool spray, the light of the shimmering crystals in the mountain’s ceiling scattered wide above them.

Alex lingered at the rear, wiping wet hair and sweat from his face. The ache in his body was still there, the sting of burned marrow. Even with two meridian imprints assisting him with enduring the drawbacks of aether overloading his body, he was still having issues. How he was supposed to survive these skills without those meridian boosts was beyond him. Though, then again, Alex wasn’t even sure if he was supposed to even have the Wyrm-heart constitution with a human body. Maybe Tom-Tom would have been better suited for it, or some kind of humanoid dragonkin, if those existed at all. Perhaps his body wasn’t suited for dragon-blood.

But, that just told him he needed to unlock his third meridian sooner rather than later.

He looked into his storage bracelet at the [Aether Siphon Plate] he was still working on constructing. The item taunted him with the possibility of implanting another artifical aether gate in his body.

Then there were a couple more ideas he still had floating about in his mind. He chuckled to himself, realizing he was already thinking about ways to possibly wreck his body when he wasn’t even done recovering from his most recent crazy plan.

That was just who he was now.

He was crazy.

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