Too many hours later, Wip practically bounced out the Kimaw and into the Ravelin. He dived into the General Counting Room and shouted, “Victory!”

A few minutes after this had occurred, Luci crawled up the last step of the Kimaw into the Ravelin. With a whine, she collapsed, and her legs thanked her for the rest. It was raining. Water trickled down on her and into steel rivulets embedded into the Ravelin floor. They ran back out to into the Gethalat, taking the water to where it belonged. Luci laid across one of these rivulets, clogging it, causing the water to pool onto the stone floor. It did little to clean her.

Steam was rising off her as a layers of multi-coloured monster goop slowly evaporated. Her legs felt like they weighed a mountain each. She hadn’t bothered to make a light when crawling up the Kimaw because the effort would have caused her to collapse onto the ground and fall asleep on the stairs.

The downside of the Path of the Moon was that it caused her enma to take on two inconvenient properties. Firstly, as she used it, she became physically heavier. It was an effect of enma-induced fatigue. For the last hour, she’d been dragging around an extra twenty kilograms or so. Her legs had paid the ultimate price.

The other effect was that, without exposure to moonlight, she became dreadfully sleepy.

Groaning, Luci rolled onto her back. It was evening—not that she could tell, given how lit up the city was. She couldn’t see through the dark rainclouds, nor could she open her eyes to the falling rain, but she knew the moon was there. She could feel it through the clouds, its faint rays caressing her gently. The moon was bordering on full. Its waxing phase would be completed tonight, meaning it was her best chance to train. That wasn’t going to happen, not when she was this worn out.

Wip opened the door to the counting room and poked his head out. “Luci, you need to bring the shady thing.”

“Okay,” Luci groaned.

Slowly and carefully, she got her legs under her, propped herself up using Lunacogita, then thrust herself up. She managed to stumble into the counting room and then dropped into one of the chairs. It sagged dangerously under her weight.

Stella was at her usual spot. The counter had exactly three kin on it. The cat-eared fence was grinding her teeth.

“Wip,” Stella said in a measured tone. “Could you please get the aftocore from your party member who is clearly too tired to walk on her own?”

Wip mocked a salute and hopped over. He snatched up a sack that had been tied to the end of Luci’s staff. The tired girl didn’t resist and instead groaned, “Thank you.” He pried open the sack and dropped a single black rod onto Stella’s counter. The rod’s insides swirled like a roiling fog then, suddenly, the swirling pattern shifted in an instant and resumed, but now with a different pattern.

The look that Stella gave the aftocore triggered a primal fear response in Luci. She slipped off the chair and tried to stagger out the room, only to slap onto the floor for having not accounted for her extra weight.

A gut-wrenching bang echoed through the room from where Stella had slammed her desk. Luci yelped in terror from her spot on the floor.

“What in Gul were you doing down there?” Stella screeched at Wip. Her tail poked out stiffly behind her.

“Um, fighting monsters?” Wip said.

Stella got so close to Wip that her nose almost touched his. “And what else?”

Sweating bullets, Wip turned to Luci for help. The tired girl had sat up. Her eyes bulged when she met Wip’s, as if to say, don’t get me involved in this!

Wip turned back and grinned to soften the blow. “Collecting loot.”

“Liar!”

Stella slammed the counter so hard that the three kin and one aftocore laid out on it flew into the air. The crystals landed on the floor. The aftocore was caught by Wip, who gently placed it back on the counter.

“But we got a good one, Stella,” Wip said, point with both hands at the aftocore.

“Liar!”

Stella turned to Luci, who’d just managed to ease herself back into a chair. Luci went completely stiff under Stella’s gaze.

“Luci, you’re a good girl, right?” Stella said. The honey in her voice was laced with venom. Luci nodded vigorously. “Then can you kindly tell me what happened?”

“Um, um,” Luci tried. She was quivering with fear. “Mr. Wip kept f-f-fighting things. When I asked him to c-c-collect the crystals, he ran off and started another f-f-fight.”

“Really?” Stella said, feigning intrigue. She turned back to Wip. “And Mr. Wip, Mr. I-promise-not-to-overdo-it-this-time, can you explain why Luci is covered head to toe in monster ichor?”

Wip scratched at his collar. “It’ll go away.”

Stella turned back to Luci. The scared girl wanted to flee again.

Luci explained, “After we fought the big monster”—Stella turned to Wip and her eyes bulged—“um, Mr. Wip decided to celebrate by… fighting more monsters.”

“Wip did that? No.” Sarcasm was dripping off of every word.

“Um, and then,” Luci continued. “I decided to collect the core myself, but I didn’t have a knife so I tried to pry it apart with enma and…” She raised an arm to demonstrate the result. Then her bottom lip trembled as she remembered the experience. “I—I ended up climbing in there. The goop got everywhere. My hair, my shoes, in between my toes, in my mouth—”

Luci cupped a hand to her mouth and gagged. She’d had to eat some nasty things of late on account of her financial situation, but that was beyond disgusting.

“Furry kittens,” Wip said, trying to distract her. “Long-eared rabbits. Playful puppies. Pretty birds.”

Luci swallowed. “I’m okay now. Thank you, Mr. Wip.”

Arms folded, Stella drummed her fingertips on her triceps. “Anything else?”

“Well, um.” Luci’s face dropped as an even more painful memory fluttered to the surface. “This was all after we had to fight a thousand or so monkilyxes.”

Stella sucked in air through her teeth. “Great work, Wip. You’ve traumatised your only party member. How many more weeks is it going to take you to find another one? More importantly, will I starve to death before you can get me some proper loot?”

“But we did get you proper loot,” Wip protested. He picked up the black rod and dangled it Stella’s face. The fence looked like she wanted to claw his hand off.

“It’s true,” Luci said. “At least, I’ve read that stronger monsters provide better aftocores. This one was teleporting all over the place and trying to get close to claw at us. If it wasn’t for Wip, we would have both been dead. He practically punched the thing to death while I did nothing.”

“Ha! Now who’s the liar?” Wip trumpeted. “I could only kill it because Luci caught it.”

“I got lucky, okay?” Luci wailed. “I don’t know why you keep insisting I’m a good party member because I’m not. You would have been fine without me.”

Stella’s eyes darted between the two of them. Luci felt exposed under Stella’s glare. She tried to make herself small by hunching over. Her chair creaked ominously beneath her. Then, to Luci’s relief, Stella’s expression softened.

The fence sighed and snatched the aftocore off the counter. “I find it hard to believe that you stumbled upon a monster that could teleport on the fourth floor. The earliest floor where a monster can be found with spatial characteristics is thirteen. However, I’ll check it out, on the off chance you’re not trying to cover for each other.”

She stomped across the room and then slammed the door behind her, leaving the two of them alone. Nervous, Luci put her fingernails to her teeth, then gagged on the taste of monster. Her usefulness as a party member practically depended upon that one aftocore not being a dud.