"Do you think it was a mistake?"

　　Matt and Lucy had been sprinting from dungeon to dungeon for hours. They usually chatted when they travelled, but part of the point of this excursion was for Matt to work on cardio, and that left little breath for idle conversation. Lucy had mostly spent her time in her notes and reference materials during that time, looking for anything that might be helpful.

　　So when she did finally break the silence, Matt paid attention.

　　"That what was a mistake? What the Gaians did? Letting themselves die&"

　　"No. You know."

　　Matt did, although he wasn`t eager to talk about it. "You mean Leel. Leaving him alive."

　　"Yeah." Lucy looked at her shoes. "That."

　　"I mean, it`s not a hard question. It was a mistake. Flat out. I admit it."

　　It was pretty easy to embarrass Lucy, but it was usually pretty hard to shock her. This was an exception to the rule.

　　"I didn`t& huh. I didn`t think you`d admit that."

　　"I mean, I could make excuses. Some of them would even be true. I could say we couldn`t risk the guardian, or something like that. But it wouldn`t be true."

　　"Then why? Why didn`t you kill him? I mean, you couldn`t have known he could bring back the Scourge, but he was still a fireball maniac from planet douche. He wasn`t going to stop trying to kill you. It`s not like you haven`t killed things. You have plenty of pent-up trauma and stress to draw on. Is it a Batman type of thing?"

　　"You mean like the if you kill a murderer, the number of murderers in the world stays the same` thing?"

　　"That`s the one."

　　"No. I mean, I don`t really want to be the kind of guy who kills people. But I tried to kill the sword guy, remember? I even thought I had for a while. But that`s an excuse too."

　　They walked for a while, Matt half expecting Lucy to press the issue. She didn`t, and for a moment, he had an impulse to just let the whole issue die. But she deserved more than that.

　　"I`m sorry."

　　Lucy glanced up. "For what?"

　　"I didn`t want to kill him. It wasn`t a moral thing. It wasn`t a logical thing. It was just& I felt like I had him handled, and he was defenseless, and I think I wanted to feel strong enough to let him go, that I had it under control enough," Matt said.

　　"To be fair, he had gotten beat up by just our camp. It wasn`t the worst idea. But he summoned plant Satan to the mortal plane."

　　"It doesn`t matter. When I bet my life, I bet yours too. Even if you were okay with it, it`s not okay. And now we are in this," Matt waved his hand generally at the entire world, "this mess. And it`s my fault because I didn`t want to kill some kind of magic plantation owner who clearly had it coming. So yeah, I`m sorry."

　　They walked on for a bit.

　　"It`s okay," Lucy said.

　　"Not really, it`s not."

　　"No, listen." Lucy turned to face Matt again. "I`m not saying you weren`t stupid. But you are always stupid. Half the time we live, it`s because we got lucky. You hardly stick to plans. It`s surprising you haven`t accidentally drowned yourself in the dirt by now, or fallen into one of your own traps, or something."

　　"I`m hoping there`s a but` coming here."

　　"Shut up. The point is, I sort of get it. It`s frustrating to be weak. I don`t know if you`ve noticed this, but I can`t actually touch anything or do anything helpful."

　　"You do helpful things."

　　"Well, try watching your only friend get slowly cooked by some kind of intergalactic wizard from the racist dimension and not being able to do anything. It`s annoying. More than annoying, frustrating. I`m part of this team, and all we ever do is try to get strong enough to not die. I get wanting to feel like, I dunno, like we are getting ahead. Doing well. And then you had magic worm powers all of a sudden and&"

　　"Yeah, I let the worm-strength go to my head."

　　Lucy cracked a grin. "Happens to the best of us."If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it`s taken without the author`s consent. Report it.

　　"So we are cool?"

　　"Almost. One last thing. Our plan. For fighting the Scourge."

　　"You don`t think it`s enough?"

　　"I think its enough parts. It`s just& it`s not really us. Yes, we are going in with more stuff than we had before. But our strength has never been&

　　"Being strong?"

　　"Exactly. We can do better than this. And we should."

　　Time was at a premium, but the day stopped right then. They sat and planned until it felt right.

　　—

　　The scythe whished past Matt`s neck mere millimeters from his jugular, but it might as well have been a mile. He had been moving so fast through the dungeons that he hadn`t really had a moment to reflect on his growth as they happened. Now, facing an opponent strong enough that he couldn`t risk simply tanking the damage it could dish out, Matt could use the queen as a proving ground for everything he had learned.

　　Spring Fighter had leveled twice since the beginning of their training, which helped. What had helped more was Matt`s specific training to use it better. He was now efficient enough with pulsing it on and off that it barely moved his stamina bar when he did. Bigger dodges that covered more ground still drained a good amount of stamina, but the last week had refined his short-range dodging so much it hardly came up. He bobbed and weaved like a boxer, keeping as close to attacks as he could without dying from them and jumping immediately into counter-attacks after.

　　In short, he was getting pretty good at this fighting stuff.

　　"Get the leg again, Matt! The front right!"

　　Lucy had been growing, too. In the last several fights, she had been studying everything he did, eventually offering in-fight advice that almost always considered something he wasn`t seeing, either because it was out of his line of sight or because he simply wasn`t observant or smart enough to notice it in the first place.

　　That was why the ant didn`t pose much threat to him. But him posing more threat to the ant was a different story entirely. That was less a function of Advanced Survivor`s Combat, and more of what Survivor`s Reflexes showed him when he switched from his spear to his shovel. With the spear, the ant`s weak spots were well analyzed, showing up as dozens of bright spots shining with various levels of intensity.

　　When he switched to the shovel, the weak spots changed to something quite different. The entire ant shone like a spotlight bulb. The leg Lucy was directing him to strike was one he had hit with his spear before, which had hobbled the leg somewhat without actually taking it out of play. Now he hit it with the shovel, swinging it with both arms and aiming the newly sharpened edge at the same point he had impacted before. Without any fuss, the shovel cut cleanly through the leg, leaving it on the ground looking like it had been lopped off with a circular saw.

　　Where he had been easily dodging the ants attacks before, with one fewer leg in the mix, it was child`s play. He didn`t play with it past that point. The other ants would be back from their pheromone-driven wild goose chase soon enough, and although he was stronger, he still had limits. He dodged a few more attacks, took off the other legs on that ant`s side, climbed the back of the now topped insect and put an end to things with a chopping blow to the back of its neck.

　　"Get the spike, Matt!" By the time Lucy finished yelling, it was already in his hand. He jammed it into one of the detached legs just long enough to fish out some meat, eat it, and make contact with the plinth. Judging by the lack of rumbling outside the room, he had a few moments to look at rewards.

　　Dungeon Objective Complete: Colony Control

　　Hey, Matt. Hi, Lucy. I`m throwing in a couple of trash rewards you don`t need here, and very badly bending the rules to throw in something you do need. Don`t worry about it too much. We have bigger worries than a few days or weeks of Barry downtime. I want to help, and this is something I can do.

　　Another thing I can do is to remind you of something I think you`ve probably forgotten. You know how kids sometimes remember conversations as being very important, even if adults forget them?

　　Early on, everything you said was like that for me. So something I remember that you might not is that when you found your first stash of Gaian emergency food, there was more than just crackers and cooking fuel in the box. It couldn`t have possibly seemed important then, but If you think hard, I think you might find it`s important now.

　　Matt, you can do this. I know you can. But be careful. And don`t worry about me. If worse comes to worst, I`ll see you on the other side.

　　Barry

　　The clearly-not-trash prize Barry had promised lived up to its promise, adding a whole new element to Matt and Lucy`s plans.

　　Tree-Killer Mortars x5

　　Designed to be fired from tubes, tree killer mortars were intended to start forest fires, set fields aflame, and generally damage the growing material resources of enemies. The flames contained in these mortars cannot be put out by any means apart from suffocation or exhausting themselves, and burn hot enough to ignite most organic materials within a few feet of them.

　　"Thanks, Barry. That`s honestly very, very helpful," Matt said to the dungeon.

　　A long time ago, when Matt fought the worm, Barry had promised him something special as a reward, a ranged option. Since he got the Skin of Worm and his Palate of the Conqueror shortly after that, it had been mostly lost in the shuffle of things. It was only recently, when Matt and Lucy had been looking through their resources for anything and everything they could use, that he had even cashed in the reward.

　　Small Artillery

　　This tube loads and fires up to ten artillery shells, running off a rudimentary timer to do so. It`s not technically a trap, but can be set up at just the right angle to bombard your enemy as a distraction, or to destroy them from a distance, provided you can find suitable ammunition.

　　It can also be manually fired and used at short range as a kind of wacky, mostly inaccurate cannon.

　　Matt had not had a good opportunity to use his mortar yet, besides pelting some Clownrats with large rocks just to spite them. The mortars weren`t just good for tactical reasons. It also let him do badass things without a clear, bad-choice driven downside. Leave it to Barry, he thought, to think of the perfect gift.

　　"What did you get?"

　　"Magic mortar shells, or something. Judging by the description, they are basically Napalm."

　　"Rad. How`s Barry holding up?"

　　"He seems worried. Can`t blame him. But he also reminded me of something. Are you up for one more stop before we get home?"

　　"Sure."

　　Matt touched the plinth, and they were out.