Six monstrous bck horses rampaged, whinnying, braying, running amok. They burst through the wooden fortifications and cloth tents of the camp around the Dungeon. Even from so far up above, the whole pce was a mess.

  “Come on, Granavale!” Xander Cooper shouted, trying to rush down the spiral slope to the Dungeon.

  A firm grip nded upon his shoulders. “Hey, let me go!”

  Rory Redmont had held him back. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  “I…”

  Archmund followed Xander’s gaze down to the broken bodies spread across the camp. The scattered bits and bobs of Gemstone Armor — mostly helmets, a few pauldrons or gloves that Archmund had looted in his first Dungeon delve — still pulsed lightly with magical light, but their dimness was nothing like the coruscating armor of Mercy’s Sacred Guard, which surged vibrantly with the bloodlust of victory.

  Did the st pulsing light mean they yet still lived, or was it the st gasp of their magic, cut off from their source?

  He eyed the arrays of traps along the rim of the Dungeon’s pit. Piles of stones. Cauldrons of oil that would take two hours to burn. Ballistas. All too dangerous to use, if people were still alive down there.

  They would have to do this the hard way.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his Gems. They float in the air before him.

  Rory stared. “Huh. You actually…?”

  Archmund frowned. “Don’t you have Gems, Redmont? You… seemed to.”

  He didn’t eborate on how using Gems was basically like doping, or taking human growth hormone, when it came to being powerful.

  “I can’t make them float,” Rory said.

  Rory seemed like a jock, which would expin why he wouldn’t bother doing something goofy like pouring all of his magical energy into a retively mundane Gem instead of practicing with a magical weapon like his Gemstone Quarterstaff. That made perfect sense to Archmund so he decided not to question it any further.

  As he mulled over the rampaging horses, he ruefully considered a vast gap in his knowledge.

  In his past life, he’d been awfully deficient in his study of military history.

  Oh, he knew the names of important battles. D-Day. Waterloo. My Lai. He roughly knew the people on each side and why they fought. He even knew who won, and what happened after. But for the life of him he hadn’t really cared about military tactics. How SWAT teams worked. How to deal with hostage rescue. The sort of thing that would end up roughly analogous to the situation he as in at the moment.

  The curse of having lived in an era of peace.

  Well, there was another analogy. Big game hunting. Except in his era, big game hunting was mostly rich people showing up to a reserve, shooting a drugged-up lion, and taking pictures with it to show how rich and cool they were.

  Conspicuous consumption again.

  This was nothing like that.

  Probably.

  This was actual danger. There were six horses running about doing a lot of property damage and also having killed… four or so people. Maybe. How much of a skeleton crew had they put this pce on?

  The worst part was that he didn’t even disagree with whoever made that decision. It might’ve been his own, possibly indirectly, but he still stood by it. Everyone in the town was in the colosseum for the Harvest Festival Finale Tournament, man, woman, and child alike. It made sense to put everyone of fighting age there, because that’s where everyone could be defended.

  (And as far as he knew this world didn’t have long-distance weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out a town from afar.)

  “What’s our pn, Granavale?” Rory Redmont said. Right. It would be bad if either Xander or Rory got killed while they were with him. He’d fought them both, and while they were at the top of the curve when it came to combatants, they weren’t as egregiously overpowered as the Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio.

  “How many of those could you hold off in single combat?”

  Rory puffed up his cheeks, rather like the way a milk-drinking superhero did in a half-remembered viral gif. “I dunno. I don’t like horses much. They kick really hard.”

  Xander nodded sagely. “My great-great-uncle died from being kicked by a horse for trying to sneak up on it from behind.”

  Archmund did vaguely remember he’d seen the Cooper name in the few criminal records in the manor library. Nothing to do with the modern Coopers, who were completely fine, but there hadn’t been any mentions of horse-reted tragic accidents. Just executions for bestiality.

  “So,” he said, trying to center himself, “just one, as long as it was head-on?”

  Rory shrugged. “My staff’s got a Skill I might be able to use. ‘Block, it blocks anything that comes from in front of me and keeps stuff behind me safe. You might be able to do something if you’re behind me?”

  He was starting to suspect that Rory was more of a “cleric” or “support” type, though a secur one. He had no affiliation with the Church of the Goddess.

  “What about me?” Xander said petuntly.

  Archmund put his hand on Xander’s forehead. The other boy pulled away, but it was enough time to get a sense of Xander’s magic, sprouting in the sense of his higher self. The magic was rich with the abundant possibility of youth, like a sprout that could become a trellis or a hedge maze or topiary, to be shaped in any way that might be needed. There was power, if it could be drawn out.

  He really wished he could get a visual representation of that magical potential. If only he could get stats for people other than himself! Then he’d be able to know whether he could trust Xander to guard their backs.

  Beyond the fundamental issue of whether Xander would shank him the back, which probably wouldn’t happen but of which he was immensely paranoid, the question was whether the skill [Deflection], granted by the Gemstone Rapier, would be enough in Xander’s hands.

  Archmund knew it could block physical blows, but it was entirely possible that he was just so good at it he was able to use it to block all manner of physical blows and in its base form it was only good for blocking swordpy in dueling forms. After all, he’d personally unlocked several upgraded forms of Deflection that Xander was showing no signs of.

  “If you think you can handle it alone, honestly, I could just stay up here.”

  Xander looked rather pale. Despite his bravado and his terror, he was as much of a kid as Archmund. Even more so, really.

  “It won’t be too much, man,” Rory said, ying a hand on Xander’s shoulder, comforting this time.

  Archmund didn’t share that confidence. There were six horses. They were deadly, like regur horses, but probably more so since they could regenerate and weren’t strictly bound by the ws of physics. Hopefully, they were also stupid.

  “Redmont,” he said. “If I could kill one from here, without putting us at risk, do you think I should?”

  “Yes!” Xander shouted. “Absolutely yes! Kill them all if you can!”

  So that provided a rough estimation of where Xander’s head was at.

  “I like the odds of five against three better than six against three,” Rory said. “Plus if you’re sure it won’t put us at risk…”

  “We’re so high up!” Xander shouted. “Do it!”

  Risk was fine. Archmund didn’t mind risk at all. If you took on a healthy amount of risk, an amount you could bear, within your personal risk tolerance, you could do great, learning at the optimal rate. It was like the flow state.

  There was a real chance that if they won this, they’d come out the other side with new Skills. If they didn’t die. Which was also a very likely possibility.

  He honestly wondered whether this was an adrenaline-rush type mechanic or whether it was just “leveling-up”. He honestly didn’t think it was leveling up because not in all his time of looking through his Gemstone Tablet had he seen “experience points” or levels, just his personal strength stats.

  He spun up his Ruby Tetrahedron, as familiar as an old friend. As the first Gem he’d truly used, it was suffused with his power. Feeding it his magic was like plucking a tightened string — the power was there, and his attention merely released it.

  An invisible bst of concentrated infrared light burned through the neck of the nearest Monstrous Horse, its matted mane catching fire like oil as countless joules of pure heat energy were ser bsted into its flesh. Its frenzied braying was cut off mid-squeal, as if it didn’t even realize it had died.

  It slumped, colpsed to the ground, and then slowly dissolved into darkness that first pooled like unburning oil before turning into miasmic bck smoke.

  “What the hell,” Rory muttered under his breath. “What the hell did you do, Granavale.”

  The other Monstrous Horses stopped prancing about. Their ears fred back, and they bared their teeth. As Mary and Raehel had reported, their teeth weren’t the usual ft-tipped grass-munchers of normal horses, but sharp and tearing fangs. They turned their snouts in the air and bulged their eyes outwards like infting balloons. Sniffing. Looking.

  He took a breath and crouched deeper to the rim of the pit. He couldn’t check the exact level of magic stored within his Gems, but he didn’t feel drained in the slightest. Though maybe it was the tension and fear running through him. It had felt like this in so many fights — he felt fully alive and ready when his life was in danger, only to crash right after.

  (Wouldn’t a telepathic interface or something like push notifications be real useful to check how much magic he could still draw on? He’d have to look into that. Eventually. Maybe Raehel would know.)

  He fired another Infrared Lance, and another horse fell. Two down, four to go.

  The four remaining turned as one to face his direction. They sniffed, hard, sucking in the miasma from the dead monsters.

  Another Infrared Lance. This one didn’t pierce straight through — it burned away at the mane of one of the beasts for a short while. The Monstrous Horse fell and died, but it sted longer than the others, its flesh resisting the infrared rays.

  And the three other monsters inhaled the smoke of their fallen brethren.

  For a terrifying moment, they stood perfectly still, snouts pounted straight into the air, as if sniffing out their attackers.

  Then they broken into gallops, up the slope out of the pit.