Imaya followed Simon back to the others and I walked over to Devi. The Sylven girl was standing next to a pair of shimmering circles that floated at chest-height in the air, about the size of a large frying pan, give or take. The portals had a glowing edge so it was easy to spot them, but their insides were completely see-through—more precisely, one portal showed what I would have seen through the other. It was as if someone had torn two holes in the air, then swapped their places. Fun stuff at first glance, full of possibilities at second glance.

“Hi, Devi,” I greeted the Sylven girl as I got closer. “How is it going?”

She looked up when she heard her name, beaming at me. After her argument with Teva’ryn, she had decided that I should call her by her nickname—which apparently delighted her to no end. I had no objections about calling her simply Devi, though I suspected that in their culture it was an overly familiar way to call a person. Something that must have needled Teva’ryn a lot, considering that he was always calling her Miss Devi’lynn.

“Hi Randel,” Devi said. “I test poor-tall. Look!”

She raised Soul Eater – shaped like a sleek sword, the orange gemstone embedded at the crossguard shining in the dark – and brought it down on the top of the portal with a powerful swing. The two-dimensional hole in space withstood the strike without trouble, and Devi then did the same to the inside of her portal with much the same results.

“Strong,” Devi said. “And look!”

She created a clone and made it lean forward, putting its head through the portal. Devi then walked to the second, the one that had the clone’s head poking through, and grabbed her copy’s head. With a mental command she then began to close the portal, and even made the clone struggle a bit. The shrinking portals cut into the clone’s neck eventually, bursting it into smoke.

“Sharp too,” Devi said with a sharp grin. “Poor-tall can cut you up well.”

Faking shock, I backed away from her—only to hit my head in the tunnel’s wall for real. Ouch! Who had placed the ceiling so low?! I clutched my head in pain, waiting for Devi to stop laughing.

“This Dungeon is a death trap,” I mumbled.

“I apologize,” Devi said, covering her mouth. “I want not to scare you to death.”

“I’m still alive,” I huffed.

“Only barely!”

“…only barely,” I agreed, trying but failing to hide my smile.

The two of us then went after the rest of the group, walking in silence behind them for the next few minutes. The cave tunnel led us steadily downwards, sometimes steep and narrow, other times wide and open. As time went by, anticipation slowly turned into confusion; Imaya had warned us that dungeons were dangerous, but there was a distinct lack of traps and spider monsters.

I was about to strike up a conversation with Devi when the front of our group came to an abrupt halt. Simon summoned a fireball into his hand and Imaya’s eyes flared with green light. They murmured something that I couldn’t hear, then advanced slowly.

“Is it alright?” Devi whispered to me, her grip on Soul Eater tightening. “Can I carry your sword?”

“Sure,” I said, remembering only then that I hadn’t taken it back. “I’d prefer if you had it, actually.”

My eyes lingered on Soul Eater’s orange gemstone, watching as the light within pulsed with my heartbeat. In the darkness of the cave, it looked even more sinister than before. If Soul Eater was indeed influencing how I thought – or how I fought – I wanted to see whether it could affect me when someone else was holding it. Devi nodded her thanks, and in that very moment Imaya yelped, letting loose an arrow over Simon’s head. The projectile disappeared in the dark, pinging sharply when it struck stone.

“M-My bad,” Imaya said. “It’s just a statue. Go on, guys! The tunnel ends there, I think, but I can’t see past the corner.”

Her voice wasn’t very reassuring, but we soon got to see what got her so upset; the tunnel led through an archway, one that was shaped like the top half of the spider-giants outside. Basically like a giant spider; bulbous body at the ceiling, segmented limbs carved into the tunnel’s walls. Without the humanoid legs, we got a good view on the gaping circular maw full of teeth, situated at the underside of the creature.

“Keep going,” Simon said, passing under the archway. “Even if we find more of these monsters, they won’t be as large as the ones outside. This place would be too small for them.”

As if the Dungeon wanted to prove him wrong, the tunnel began to widen quickly before coming to an end. We arrived into a large cavern with a chasm in the middle, which extended so far down below that our collars’ meager light didn’t reach its bottom. Water could be heard trickling down below, though Pell’s string of curses made that difficult to notice. The chasm even had a small suspension bridge leading across, or at least leading somewhere, since the other end of it disappeared in the gloom. A pair of wooden poles stood tall where the bridge began, carved spider monsters adorning their top.

Now, I wasn’t exactly a paranoid person, but even I had seen enough action movies to have a bad feeling about crossing this bridge. I could imagine the Inspector rubbing her hands together evilly while she watched us on her monitor, her finger hovering over a button that collapsed the entire bridge. Figuratively speaking, of course. Her finger couldn’t hover over the button if she kept rubbing her hands together.

“I can see the other side,” Imaya said, gazing over the chasm with her magic sight. “It’s not far, and the bridge doesn’t seem to be too badly-built.”

“Could still be a trap,” Tamara said. “Do your eyes pick up anything suspicious?”

“Huh, well, dunno,” Imaya said, shrugging helplessly. “I see glowing lines everywhere within the walls. That archway had a lot of them, but this bridge doesn’t have any. I think it’s some kind of mana flow within the stone. Is that suspicious?”

“It sure as hell ain’t reassuring,” Pell said. “Why haven’t you told us about them earlier?”

“They aren’t that unusual!” Imaya protested. “Lots of things have mana in them, even outside this cave! Like all the trees, for example.”

No one knew what to do with this revelation.

“Alright,” Simon said, adjusting the shield on his arm before turning to us. “We’ll cross this bridge one by one, just in case it couldn’t hold us all up. I’ll go—”

“I go first,” Devi said, surprising Simon. The Sylven girl’s body then became distorted, splitting into two as she created a clone. Simon stood aside as the clone approached the bridge with stiff steps, heading across. It didn’t enjoy the benefit of the collar as a light source, so it disappeared in the dark soon enough. The rest of us waited with bated breaths, listening to the dull footsteps on the wooden boards.

“What is it?” Pell whispered when the footsteps suddenly stopped.

“Beats me,” Devi said in a way that reminded me of … well, myself.

“Did your clone fall?” Pell tried again.

“I know not where it is,” Devi said. “I see not what it can see, feel not what it can feel. But I can do this.”

She held out a hand, and a small shining portal appeared above her palm. I looked across the bridge, noting the glint of light in the distance; the pair of this portal.

“Let me see,” I said, pushing past Pell to peek through. The portal on the other side was quite close to the ground, which made it even more difficult to see anything. Still, it looked like the tunnel was continuing after the bridge. I walked around the two-dimensional tear in space to look at it from the other direction—and came face-to-face with Devi’s clone, lying on the ground.

“It looks as if its dead,” Imaya commented.

“It’s unhurt,” I said. “It would have disappeared if something harmed it in any way. Probably just fell over once the bridge has ended.”

“Ah, alright,” Imaya said. “What now? Who goes next?”

“I will,” I said, then held a hand out to Devi. “But first, my weapon please.”

I found the disappointed look on her face quite endearing, but to her credit, it lasted only a second before she caught on and tossed Soul Eater through the portal.

“You’ll get it back soon,” I assured her, then teleported myself to my sword. Take that, you suspicious-looking bridge! I sprung to my feet quickly, watching out for spike pits, poison darts, balls of flames and whatnot. When I saw that no such thing tried to murder me, I crouched back down and gave the others a thumbs up—just in time for the cave to begin to rumble. Only, the noise wasn’t coming from my side…

“It’s—”

“Oh hell no!”

“Run!”

There was a flash of light across the bridge as Simon threw a fire ball, and in that brief brightness I saw a tall shape lumbering out of the tunnel on its long, segmented legs.

“Damn,” I said, cursing myself for my stupidity. Stone statues coming to life; the second oldest cliché after collapsing bridges. Worse yet, we had fallen for the same trick twice now; mistaking the giant for a hill had been kind of understandable, but we didn’t have any excuse this time.

“And now comes the bridge,” I whispered as the others screamed and shouted in panic. I wracked my brain for a way to help them, a way to divert this disaster, but came up absolutely empty. Neither of my new Abilities would have been able to turn this situation around. The others ran heedlessly across the bridge, the wobbling lights of their collars getting closer to me. Teva’ryn had a pretty good headstart and Devi wasn’t far behind either, but the others were bunched up much too close to each other—with a large stone-spider on their tail. They barely got midway across the bridge when their combined weight was too much for the structure and the entire bridge collapsed.

I stood still, watching helplessly as the others realized they were about to fall. Teva’ryn reacted first, launching two luminescent-blue arms at the ledge beneath my feet. Imaya, Simon, Pell, and Tamara screamed as they slammed into each other, Tamara’s Gravity Orb suspending them in the air. The stone creature wasn’t as fortunate as them and it plummeted into the dark, its eight long legs flailing wildly. As for Devi—

Devi didn’t fall either. She was dangling off a pair of shimmering rings that floated above her, holding onto the portals’ edges. I let out the breath I had been holding. Teva’ryn grunted from below, holding onto the remnants of the bridge as he climbed up, and I hurried over to help him. Injured shoulders or not, he was everyone’s best chance to get out of this alive.

“Teva’ryn, please—”

“I know,” he said, taking in the scene behind him with a grim expression. He set his feet steadily apart and shot a phantom limb at the ball of floating humans. I had been certain that he’d try to save Devi first, so this move surprised me a bit. Had he come to the same conclusion as I had, then?

“My orb is on anti-grav mode now!” Tamara yelled from amid the tangle of arms and legs. “Pull us just a little!”

I doubted Teva’ryn understood her, but he knew what to do anyway. He pulled the others in, the translucent hand clutching what seemed to be Imaya’s right foot. When the four of them were safely above solid ground, Tamara canceled her Ability and they landed in an unruly, groaning heap. After that it took only a few seconds for Tamara to stand up and throw her Gravity Orb at Devi, making her float too. Teva’ryn wasted no time pulling the Sylven girl in, who landed on her feet nimbly when she arrived.

“You were wrong, Teva’ryn,” Devi said. “Had I chosen the other Ability, I’d be dead now.”

Teva’ryn nodded stiffly, looking at Devi’s hands—which, upon closer inspection, were dripping something dark to the ground.

“It’s fine,” she told me, grinning proudly. “Poor-tall do not cut deep. I grab more with right hand, so my sword-hand is good still.”

To demonstrate this, she picked up Soul Eater and smeared her blood all over the handle. Perhaps this was just the lingering shock from her near-death, but she seemed to be more pumped up than ever. I exchanged a worried glance with Teva’ryn. Not giving us any time to rest, Devi turned to lead the way further down the tunnel.

“And she calls me weird,” I muttered as I followed the droplets of blood in her wake.