"I'm still sore, you ass, why'd you have to go so hard?" Sean complained from just in front of me as we made our way down the corridor lit by blue torch flame. I snickered in amusement. Sean still hadn't let go of the beating he'd been handed a couple of days ago. We sparred frequently enough that he should have known better than to think he wouldn't get his hind parts beaten, even with Vicky helping him. She had taken the loss with the same amount of frustration; she was just quieter about it, complained less, and worked more. A perfect point as to how our baby sister had ended up as a fairly accomplished lawyer, while her brothers had ended up as labourers, more or less.

  "Perhaps you should talk less shit, and train more than, little brother," I smirked at Sean, where he was running point as we made our way deeper into the dungeon. He needed the experience more than I did, particularly since we were only a few hours away from home. We would need to have gone much farther north to find something that would be a significant challenge for me. Sean had asked specifically for me to come with him for this dungeon run, though, and so here I was, regardless of whether I would get anything of value out of it. "Or at least don't get baited into fights you should know better than to take."

  Sean was silent. I could feel the air of contemplation that had settled over him. He knew I had baited him into that fight, and then proceeded to beat him black and blue for a reason. He knew that wasn't the sort of thing I did without reason, so there had to be one. He was never going to ask me about it himself; he would figure it out himself or not at all. That was just the way Sean was, learn everything the hard way or not at all, ever since he was a kid. Little had changed in his adulthood, even if he was rapidly maturing in a way that the whole family was happy with.

  We rounded the corner, and the opportunities for conversation dried up. A dozen spider-like constructs skittered down the corridor towards us on spindly legs made of some sort of stone. Sean charged forward like a man possessed, drawing their focus with a ringing cry and the wild swing of a broad-bladed sword.

  The constructs didn’t hesitate or pause in the face of his charge; if anything, the little bastards sped up, stone claws reaching to tear flesh from bone, not at all intimidated by the mass of angry, swearing Ranker hurling himself into their ranks. Sean crashed into the first of them with enough force to splinter two of its legs, but the rest latched to him in a skittering, hissing mass. I saw flashes of his face through the melee, half laughter, half pure kill-frenzy. He was so immersed he didn’t even notice the thing crawling up his back until it sank a claw between his shoulder blades.

  "Watch your six, dumb ass," I called, more amused than worried. I knew exactly how his Class and other Skills worked. We had spent countless hours going over every bit of power that he had available to him and what he could do to best leverage it. The ability to take all the punishment enemies handed him and dish it back out to them was a core part of how his power set functioned. It had turned him into an excellent front liner.

  "[Retribution Reforged]." The air thudded as Sean's blade glowed red, whirling around from inside the mass of enemies, impacts detonating each time the blade made contact with an enemy. Each detonation of magical power ripped apart a construct; their stone-like bodies simply couldn't handle the raw force applied by Sean's Skill. Chunks of stone debris flew in all directions. I couldn't let him have all the fun, however. The back line looked like it could use a little thinning since I could sense another group making its way up the corridor.

  A pair of [Edge Glare]s ripped off down the corridor, slicing through the air to either side of where Sean battled his own group of construct monsters. The twin Spells ripped into the approaching patrol like a chainsaw through pudding. Legs were cut out from underneath them, only for the second Spell to come in slightly higher and strike the main body. By the time Sean was finishing his last enemy off with his glowing, empowered blade, the second patrol was already long dead.

  Sean finished off the last of the constructs with a triumphant yell, then spun the sword one-handed and shouldered it with the lazy confidence of a man who’d just scored a hat trick. He raked a forearm across his forehead, streaking it with concrete dust and blood. “You sure you don’t want to take a turn on point?” he called back. “I can leave a few for you if you’re feeling left out.”

  “I’m happy to let you do the heavy lifting, keeps me fresh for the boss,” I replied, picking my way through the shattered remains. It took some effort not to laugh at the sheer number of stone limbs twitching on the floor, like some psychotic crab boil. “Besides, I thought you were here for the practice.”

  "I'd get more practice if you'd stop vaporizing everything from the back of the class," Sean grumbled. "You're not even breathing hard," Sean observed, trying not to sound sulky as he kicked one of the twitching limbs away. There was something in the way he said it that caused me to look at him out of the corner of my eye.

  "And?" I shot Sean a pointed look as if to say, 'get it out already'.

  “The deeper we go into this, magic, the System, Rankers, the more I realize I was such a brat. Wailing and squalling over nothing, really, nothing at all.”

  "I mean, you were. We all were, in our own ways. Vicky and I had a running score sheet for years." I picked my way through the debris, feeling the soft, ambient mana haze that coated the corridor start to recede. After hundreds of dungeons, I'd come to favour the dead spaces after a fight—the world still ticking, but with a silence that let you hear things that might otherwise go missed. "Doesn't mean it didn't matter, it just means you can look back and see it for what it was."

  He looked over his shoulder, not quite meeting my eye. "Suppose it's easier for you to say. You were always the solid one." There was an edge in his voice, not quite resentment, not quite anything softer either. "I spent so much time making things hard for Mom, for Dad and you. I get it now, how much of it was just... flailing."

  "Easy has nothing to do with it; that's just growing up. Besides, we all know by now that I'm…" I trailed off for a moment, wondering how to phrase it exactly. "Not exactly right in the head, we all have our own issues. Vicky is probably the most whole and sane out of the lot of us."

  We walked in quiet for a long stretch after that, the torchlight guttering in blue pools across the corridor, leaving our moving shadows long and monstrous behind us. I liked the silences with Sean; even as kids, we'd never needed to fill the space between us with noise. He mulled over the question of sanity for a few beats, and then, just before the next turn, he said, “You think Mom and Dad are proud of us? Of how we turned out?” He grinned, but it was a thin, brittle thing, half-daring me to turn it into a joke.

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  I thought about it for a second. "I think they're proud of you, yeah. And Vic. I think Dad, at least, is...accepting of me. More than mom was at any rate." It was the closest I could get to honest. My parents loved me, but they didn't always understand the person I'd become, even before the System stuff. There was always a faint sense of having to explain myself a little too much. And the looks that came with those explanations. Especially with Mom, she never quite grasped the violence that ran through my veins. The lack of empathy. The vague sense of sociopathy that defined so many things about my personality and how I lived my life. And then she'd passed, and that had been the end of opportunities for change, for understanding from her.

  She'd gotten her wish. The only child she'd ever truly understood was the one who became a criminal lawyer with a thousand quiet, ruthless victories. She would have been proud as hell of Vicky, and she'd have frowned a disappointed galaxy at me for the way I could kill a room just by walking in and sleep just fine afterwards. Not that I'd ever done anything to warrant it—at least, not before all this. Now? Even if she was gone, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about it in quiet moments when I came back from a fresh dungeon, every time I found myself hunched over a corpse and thinking coolly about the best way to loot the remains.

  Dad was a different beast. He'd grown up in a world built from broken glass and two-for-one regrets. Hardly ever talked about it, never pretended to be above it. Just quietly was who he was, continuing on one plodding footstep at a time. I'd inherited more than his jawline. We walked and even talked the same, according to some of Dad's siblings, on the rare occasion we'd seen them growing up.

  In the end, none of it mattered; shaped as we were by our parents and our environments, we were all our own people and responsible for our own choices.

  ——-

  We progressed steadily through the dungeon, clearing chamber after chamber. This dungeon seemed to favour smaller chambers laid out along corridors, like something that had been constructed in clean lines and logical sense. In a way, it made sense; the enemies were all constructs, and dungeons tended to follow through thematically from one end to the other. If there were goblins at one end, there were likely to be goblins at the other, unless there were other things included along the way. Dungeons could easily latch onto an entire myth rather than a single creature type after all.

  It was fortunate in a way, it allowed me the opportunity to bump the quality of Sean's gear up in between encounters, to something that was at least better than the baseline Banner equipment he was wearing. A half dozen chambers later, and a bit of prodding in the right direction with [Spirit Forge], Sean was fully armed and armoured. A new sword, shield, and most of the major armour pieces. He would have to go find a few things himself, like cuisses and pauldrons, if he wanted a full suit, so to speak.

  Eventually, Sean and I stood outside the boss chamber staring at the archway. It had the same ominous, overbuilt proportions as all dungeon boss rooms: a reminder that, for most Rankers, the line between "next challenge" and "final resting place" was measured in seconds and centimetres. The torchlight flickered on the warped stone, casting moving shadows that almost made it look like the arch itself was breathing, shuddering in anticipation of us stepping through.

  Sean bounced on his heels, breathing hard but steady, bracing himself for the final stretch. If he was nervous, it didn't show on his face—he looked more like a kid outside a candy store, impatient for the doors to open. I let out a snort and waved him on to go ahead. Sean darted into the boss's chamber, and I followed a half step behind.

  Inside, the chamber was expansive—larger, even, than the map Sean and I had pieced together from the earlier sections of the dungeon would have suggested. Instead of stone or brick, the chamber's floor was a single black slab, polished to an almost liquid shimmer. It reflected the torchlight in dizzying ripples, and the air hung thick, muffled, the way a snowy day could blanket a neighbourhood in silence. The place felt as if it were waiting, holding its breath for our arrival.

  In the middle of the floor, a massive construct waited atop a raised dais. This wasn't like the spider-shaped fodder from the corridors. This was a huge humanoid golem with a massive, broad chest and thick arms ending in fists that looked heavy enough to pulverize either of us if we got caught. In the center of its chest, a massive gem was embedded deep in the stone; it flickered and glowed blue with magical power to my sight, both mundane and magical.

  Sean let out a low whistle. "Fuck me, that’s a big boy."

  "Don't let it catch you against a wall, and don't waste time on the limbs unless you have to. I bet that big, pretty gem is its heart." I muttered back, already scanning the room for exploitable details—pits, loose bricks, anything that might help. Nothing obvious. The place was pure, polished deathtrap.

  The golem's eyes, if you could call the voids in its forehead that, snapped open as we approached, revealing another pair og glowing gemstones acting as eyes. Rather than the cliche red glow, these burned with a hazy blue light, like a pair of distant stars. It made no sound, no warning, just stepped down from the dais with a room-shuddering thud and advanced.

  Sean, to his credit, didn’t hesitate. He broke right, keeping just outside the anticipated reach of those slab-like fists.

  "Flank it!" I called out to him as I shifted to the left. If we could force it to split its attention between the two of us, this fight would be much easier. One of those massive hands came swinging around in my direction. Rather than try to dodge it, I stopped and planted my feet, fixing my gaze on the multiple tons of incoming stone. In my left eye, I prepared an [Edge Glared], in the right, I readied something new. I hadn't been able to entirely resist the idea of getting a new Spell out of my horde of forged cores. I still needed more practice before I could use it without having to say the name to help me focus on it, though.

  "[Eye of Winter]." Immediately, tongues of frost began to snake their way up the golem's arm, and it slowed noticeably as my Spell dug its claws in and began to take effect. The silvery ice continued to spread up the arm and then to the shoulder and further.

  [Eye of Winter] - Activate [Eye of Winter] for a moderate mana cost. While under the Gaze, the target will be inflicted with [Chill]. The longer the target is under the effects of [Frost Eye], the more it will accumulate.

  [Chill] is a stacking affliction that applies a slowing effect.

  I grinned and unleashed my other ocular Spell. The [Edge Glare] slashed through the air before slamming into the golem's arm. The air detonated with the impact. Barely a moment after the [Edge Glare] tore through the chilly patina I'd laid on, the golem's arm split with a spiderweb of cracks, snow-bright lines exploding out from the point of impact. Chunks sloughed to the floor and shattered with a musical, almost glassy note. The golem wavered, twisting, suddenly off balance, with the imbalance caused by its missing arm.

  Sean wasn't idle. He came in low under the arc of the remaining arm, shield up. Leaping from the ground, he flew like an arrow directly at the golem's chest, sword braced out before him on a collision course with the golem's exposed core. I called the shot as soon as I saw the opening—Sean's attack would strike true if the golem didn't recover in time, and it looked like it didn't have the fine motor control for a precise counter. I continued to channel [Eye of Winter] through my right eye, watching the golem's movement grind to a halt as the stacks of [Chill] piled up.

  Sean hit it dead center, the new sword driving into the stone up to the hilt. The gem in the golem's chest pulsed and flared, a surge of blue fire washing up the blade and over Sean's arms. For a moment, it looked like he was about to be blown back or immolated where he stood. Instead, the fire flickered, dimmed, and then winked out as Sean howled, "Retribution Reforged!" and channelled every ounce of pain straight back into the golem.

  The sound that followed was like a bell tolling for every funeral in the city, amplified through a megaphone. The golem staggered. Its remaining arm windmilled wildly, groping for something to stop its fall. It found nothing and tumbled back to the ground with a thunderous crash, sending dust and debris up into the air.

  When the dust settled, I found Sean seated on the golem's chest, legs splayed out, sword still buried in the down dim core of the monster, grinning like a loon. "This was fun, we should do it more often." He laughed.

  I just shook my head, amused by his antics.

  He might be finally growing up, but he would always be Sean.

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