I charged back into the tunnel worm to help Sonja. Stephen tried making his way through the worm’s teeth and gooey mouth toward Sonja, but I got there first. With instinctive precision, I swung my Ancestral Longsword in an uppercut that severed the worm head Sonja was holding. Both halves went limp, and the half around Sonja’s torso fell onto the teeth of its parent.

Sonja tossed the dead worm outside the mouth, where it landed on the cobblestones with a wet slap. She grabbed her ax at her feet and scanned the darkness with Stephen and me. That black, oily mist encased Stephen’s hands as he stared into the tunnel worm’s gullet. I didn’t know which made me sicker at the moment: Stephen’s magic or the worms.

“And I thought the aberration was disgusting,” I muttered.

We all stood quietly for what felt like minutes before I let myself start to breathe again.

Stephen’s hands returned to normal, and he nudged one of the baby worms with his toe. He muttered something under his breath, then stooped down to the worm and began yanking its teeth from its mouth.

“Do you have to harvest every monster you kill?” I asked with an upturned lip.

“Not every monster,” he said. “Just the rare ones with valuable organs and teeth. It’s how I maintain my magic, pretty boy. Mine doesn’t come as a blessing from a god like Constantine’s, or the blood of my ancestors like yours. I get it the old-fashioned way.” He made a particularly violent pull that made the grossest noise ever and squirted worm blood all up his arms. “As your body is nourished by dead plants and animals, so is my magic. It’s my only defense. Well, magic and my daggers.”

I shook my head. “Even your choice of steel is corrupt. Daggers are dishonorable weapons used by assassins and thieves.” Mace’s instincts still held sway over me, for that certainly wasn’t an opinion I ever remembered having.

Stephen gave me a nasty grin. “A dagger in the back will kill you just as good as a sword in the gut.”

Mace’s instincts wanted to argue the difference, but I felt it would only start another fight. So I let it drop and asked Sonja, “How do we get past this thing?”

She stared into the dark tunnel of worm teeth. “I think we may need to carve our way through it. This corridor is the only way to Level Two.”

I grimaced as I stared into the tunnel worm. All I could see was row upon row of teeth until it disappeared beyond our torchlight. The stench was as strong as a punch in the gut. “Well, this dungeon has been changing since you last went through it. Maybe one of the other corridors we passed in the mausoleum now leads to Level Two.”

Sonja sighed. “That means more days of wandering. Those other corridors were labyrinths filled with dead ends and wandering monsters. We had to waste hours resting just to recharge our Hit Points and Magic Points after every encounter.”

Sonja made that sound like drudgery, but I felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of simply exploring the dungeon and testing my battle skills against monsters. That feeling certainly came from Mace because I wanted to get back home the quickest way possible.

“There could be more baby worms in there,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said, “but worse things are slithering around in the off-corridors. Trust me.” She glanced back at the archway that led to the abyss we’d flown across. “Although I wouldn’t mind jumping the pit again.”

At that, Constantine said, “Hold on. By my memory, this corridor only goes another thirty feet before it opens into a large room. All we have to do is go that far and then carve our way out of the worm and into the room. No need to backtrack.”

“He’s right,” Stephen said as he put several baby worm teeth into a leather bag. He produced a small stone bowl and a grinding tool from his backpack. He placed two teeth in the bowl and started smashing them to dust. As he worked, he said, “So far, the dungeon geography is the same. It’s the challenges and creatures that are different.” Stephen looked at me. “Sorry, pretty boy, you’re gonna have to deal with your fear of worms.”

“Not fear,” I growled. “Wariness.”

“Yeah, well, now that I have these teeth, we won’t have to worry about being poisoned again.” He finished grinding the teeth and then poured the powder into one of his pouches.

“How did you figure out how to do all this stuff?” I asked Stephen. “I mean, all these components you’ve been harvesting. How did you learn that they were important?”

Stephen shrugged. “How did you know how to surgically decapitate that worm attacking Sonja? You had maybe a four-inch window between her face and her hands. A couple of inches in either direction, and you’d have either decapitated her or chopped off her arms. Chris Able sure doesn’t know how to swing a sword like that.”

During the battle, it hadn’t even occurred to me whether I could do what I wanted. I just did it. And Stephen was right; if I had missed, I would’ve either killed Sonja or taken her arms off.

And that’s when it hit me. Oh, God. I could’ve killed Melony.

My knees got rubbery, and I wanted to throw up. I tried to mask my sudden shock by looking down at my forearm to check my stats. Another congratulatory message had popped up on my forearm for killing the baby tunnel worm.

Congratulations! You have dealt the killing blow on a baby tunnel worm! You have earned 15 XP toward your next Rank. You have earned (1) Character Point for killing a second baby tunnel worm.

Do you want to allocate your Character Points now?

Yes, now / No, later

I tapped “No” and saw a green “4” next to my Character Stats label. I also noticed a new entry glowing green under my “Skills” section:

Precision Strike: You know where to attack an opponent to do maximum damage. +20% chance to hit on all attacks.

“I have a new skill,” I said numbly.

“You get something from every combat,” Sonja said. “Sometimes it’s a new skill or an enhancement to an existing skill. At the very least, you get experience points toward the next Rank.”

“So are we going through this thing or what?” Stephen asked.

I reluctantly nodded, grimacing at the tunnel worm’s slimy innards. “I don’t suppose there are any baths or showers in the next room?”

“No,” Sonja said, stepping through the worm’s teeth, “but there is an underground river near the entrance to Level Two.”

“It’s where we found your mutilated corpse,” Stephen added cheerfully.

I sighed. “As long there aren’t eels in it, I’ll take it.”

Then I followed Sonja into the guts of the worm.