“Swift Strikes!” My arms moved in a sudden blur, faster and more precise than was natural for even my strengthened body. One lightning-fast hand sunk a dagger just behind a lizard-shadow’s broadhead, while the other snuck a blade just behind its foreleg.

  The shadow monster hissed in agony, but before it could do much more than that, I twisted my blade, widening the cuts, and it vanished, popping like a smoke filled bubble. Only half a dozen of the things were still milling around the cave we had fled from the day(?) before, and this was the second I had taken down.

  “Dani!”

  I spun towards Fallon’s cry, noticing the three lizards circling the array of crystals she was hiding behind, as well as another one, who had apparently given up on reaching the fledgling cleric and her stinging bolts of light and charged me instead. It reared back as it approached me, and my improved body’s reflexes were just enough to catch the lizard's stubby front legs with one forearm, leaving me to briefly wonder if this sort of fighting was exactly what my body had been healed for.

  It turned out, the “armor points” my conjured coat offered me were pretty handy. My gloves, impossibly, held up under the lizard’s assault easily. More than that, my armor was somehow effective even in the place it left bare, like my particularly exposed stomach. The first lizard I had fought had whipped my bare midriff with its long tail, and I had barely felt anything, as if my skin was protected by an invisible sheet of armor.

  Lifting up with the hand I was holding the lizard up with, I stepped in and jabbed with my other hand, stabbing a blade into the monster’s exposed belly over and over, until it, too, dispersed. Thankfully, my attacks didn’t draw any gore from the snarling shadow-thing, only streams of clinging black smoke.

  By then, Fallon had managed to take down one of the shadows trying to get to her, a searing bolt of pure white light burning through its head, but that left two more. Adrenaline still singing through my body, I ran in, daggers ready. “Swift Strikes!”

  “Do you really need to shout the name of your attack like that every time?” Fallon asked, after the fight. She had managed to slip through the criss-crossed crystals, once again managing to avoid their edges with an ease that made me jealous (seriously, wasn’t I supposed to be the rogue here?) and we were sitting against one wall of the cave, catching our breath and enjoying the afterglow of the fight.

  “This coming from the girl who ran out of spells halfway through the fight.”

  “I didn’t run out! I just… wanted to conserve them!”

  I gave Fallon a dry look, and she stuck her tongue at me. “Shine burns through my foci fast,” she explained, “and I can only make three per day. Not all of us get special attacks we can use as much as we want.”

  “Skill issue.”

  “I hate you.”

  Banter aside, neither of us could keep the grins off of our faces. We no longer had to worry about running away from every one of the monsters we encountered–thanks to our new classes, we had the ability to take the fight to them, and our first real battle had quickly made clear that my earlier struggles hadn’t just been flukes. Once we got past our shock at fighting living shadows, the lizard monsters were shockingly weak, my daggers cutting through them as easily as the improvised crystal had.

  “Maybe you need to work on fighting them without using your spells, then,” I suggested.

  “Seriously? You’ve got half a foot and like fifty pounds on me, Dani. I think I’ll leave the hand-to-hand to you.”

  “Are you calling me fat?” I asked, feigning hurt from her words.

  “No, I’m saying you’re made of muscle,” she told me, sticking her tongue out. “You look like one of those swimmers from the Olympics, if she got kicked out for smoking weed and got really into cosplay instead.”

  I tilted my head, narrowing my eyes at the girl. That was… really specific. “Thank… you?”

  #

  We continued back into the tunnels that honeycombed from that central room, much more secure in our steps now than we had been before. Fallon’s conjured crystals provided a soft glow similar to the one I had used as a light earlier in our excursion, and we were now more than able to handle the shadow monsters when they attacked–especially as they seemed to exist mostly in small numbers. A single use of Swift Strikes was more than enough to handle any one lizard, and they seemed to vastly prefer coming at me over the girl with the glowing death rock.

  After a few hours, we paused to rest, sitting atop a flat rock and munching on sandwiches. Idly, I pulled out the little hexagonal disc I had taken from the altar before we left. It took the barest thought for my floating screen to open.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  [Danielle Starcrossed]

  [Level: 1]

  [Primary Class: Rogue]

  [Status: Healthy, 13/20 AP]

  —

  [Abilities: 1/5 slots assigned]

  [Equipment: 2/5 slots assigned]

  [Class Pool]

  [Action Log]

  “These things are barely wearing through my armor points,” I noted. “They seemed intimidating, but now I’m starting to think they’re just early-game trash.”

  “I really wish you’d stop talking about this like a video game.”

  I flicked my screen away, tucking the crystal disc away before I replied, “Fal, this armor literally gives me some kind of hit points that lets me show off my abs without them getting touched. I can say the name of an attack and move my hands faster than a tennis player on coke. You can wave a crystal around to heal wounds and shoot laser beams. How are we not in a video game?”

  “Because unlike a video game, we can die here.”

  That sort of put a bullet in the head of that conversation. Or a crystal laser beam, as it were.

  #

  “Don’t you have a bow?” It was the first thing Fallon had said in what could’ve been an hour or a month. Being trapped underground really messes with your sense of time.

  We had just finished another brief fight with a trio of shadow-lizards. While the first two had went down easily enough, the last had gotten on my back, requiring a blast of shine to get it off of me so I could finish it off.

  “What?”

  “A bow. You said your rogue weapons include a shortbow too, right?”

  “I mean, yeah, they do,” I told her with a shrug.

  “Couldn’t you use it so they couldn’t keep getting at you like that?”

  I shrugged again, trying not to show the brief edge of worry that had begun to creep into my head over the past couple fights. Even if the oversized shadow-lizards were individually weak, there were so many of them that they were starting to win the war of attrition. The last one had worn my armor down to just eight points before Fallon had gotten it off me.

  “Two problems with that,” I pointed out to her. “First of all, as keen as this new body I got is, I didn’t change my brain. Shooting a bow is as much a mental skill as a physical one, and being a rogue didn’t just imbue me with that knowledge. Stabbing things I can do–even if I never used a knife in self-defense in my life, it’s not complicated to just stab something.

  “Second, one of us has to be upfront. It’s not like you can take the lead, and these things keep catching us by surprise. At least I have some armor.”

  Fallon chewed the edge of her lip. “I guess. I just hate seeing them jump on you like that…”

  I shrugged, as if the weight of the surprise attack hadn’t strained my back. “I’ve got my armor points,” for now, “so they can’t actually hurt me.”

  Fallon seemed less than convinced of that answer, but despite her frown, she nodded. “I guess… I just hope we find our way out of here soon.”

  Now it was my turn to frown, as I looked at the tunnel ahead and behind, the monotony of cool, dark stone broken by sporadic light crystals. I didn’t share with her my growing fear that there might not be an “out of here,” that this cave system just was our new world.

  We continued on, the buoyancy of our earlier energy beginning to fade and sink into troubled waters.

  #

  You probably noticed something, earlier, that neither of us did. Something that seems so obvious in retrospect, but which, to our overwhelmed minds, was an unimportant detail, easily pushed aside.

  My action log referred to the monsters we had fought so far, the ones I dismissed as trash, as “prey shadows.”

  We had just found a place to stop for another rest. Even if we had no real conception of time, hours of walking, broken up only by the occasional sandwich and brief scuffles with shadows, had left us ready for rest. Both of us wished that we had managed to take any water from the pool below with us, but our nifty conjurations did not, in fact, include a canteen.

  Once again, our throats were parched, our fancy magical bodies exhausted. My armor was beginning to show wear, the edges of my coat tattered and my gloves torn in places as my armor points had dropped to just four. Fallon’s Heal spell somehow managed to take the worst of the edge off our healing, but she had only one focus left.

  We found a place where two large spires of glowing crystal jutted up at opposing angles, forming a triangle with the floor that we crawled underneath. The shadows inarguably feared the light of the crystals so, in the absence of another altar room, this seemed like the best we were going to find for shelter, even if the crystals were beginning to dim again, just as the ones in the altar room had, signalling that it was time to rest.

  With a sigh and a thought, I dismissed my armor, my clothes returning to normal–or at least, to how they were when I had first woken up. I also dismissed the daggers I had been using all day, unsure if they were also degrading over time, but conjured the third blade that my ability had allotted me, leaving it in easy reach. Fallon did the same with her last crystal, neither of us forgetting the dangers of the tunnels.

  The smartest thing would’ve been for us to sleep in shifts, but we didn’t even discuss it. We were both too tired from the day. Instead, our earlier arguments forgotten, we curled up, resting against each other without any discussion, each of us taking some small comfort in the other’s presence.

  I had just begun to fall into a black and exhausted sleep when I heard the roar.