We started working toward the guild a few days later, in an Arboreal-typed D-Rank portal.

An unarmored elf dropped into a lunge that would have made Dad proud, and my own attack went off-center as I rotated away from the blade's tip. His leaf-bladed rapier scraped across the Stormsteel breastplate, sparking as the storm ground away at the weapon's tip. I grinned; my opponent was overextended, and I was quick to take advantage.

My Stormsteel rapier flicked out, the movement seemingly slow, but before the elf could recover from his lunge, both my blade's lightning tip and the sphere of lightning orbiting it sliced into its neck. Blood erupted from the cratered, scorched wound, which started healing even as my opponent backstepped.

It was a dance—a perfect waltz—and my opponent had missed a step. His Health gave him an advantage; I could only use Recovery on a single injury at a time, while he could heal everything. But his misstep gave me the lead.

And I didn't intend to give it back to him.

"Kade, you good over there?" Ellen yelled over the fighting.

"Yep. Just getting some practice in," I said. Then I shifted my stance.

Thunderbolt Forms wasn't just a skill name. By bringing my sword up and gripping it in two hands, I could add a lot of power to the already lightning-quick weapon. It had been effective during the Se'dav Va'aki portal break, but as I'd practiced it, I'd gotten it figured out even better. It felt less like foil or saber fencing and more like the more thrusting-focused longsword forms, but with a blade light enough to result in rattlesnake-fast blows.

I brought the blade back, grabbing the grip with my free hand, and launched into a series of vicious thrusts. The elf's rapier danced up, met with my first blow, and started to counter, but my second was already on the way. His face shifted from triumph at his successful parry to worry, then to something approaching panic as the third and fourth impacts slammed his weapon aside. The fifth found purchase in his chest, and so did the sixth. Both ripped through wool, skin, and bone.

His Health slowly got to work as he tried to counter my seventh attack, but the expected thrust never came. Instead, my sword sliced through the elf's half-healed neck. This time, I didn't just catch veins and windpipe. The elf collapsed as I cut through his spine.

"Thanks," I said.

Ellen stared at me. "For what?"

"For letting me finish."

Jeff, Ellen, and I had claimed this D-Rank portal, then taken the first three high E to high D-rankers who'd shown up. The rules were simple: The core went to Ellen. Then, the gear would be drafted, with the pick-up delvers getting the first three picks, then us. Anything left over after we drafted them off would be fair game to sell, splitting the profits seven ways.

One share for each delver, and one share for our long-term guild project. Letting the pick-ups pick first helped mitigate that extra share. It wasn't going to be much, but it was a start. We were on our way to guildhood.

So far, Ellen hadn't done much more than manipulate the shadows so we could see, though she had fired a single Shadow Box at one particularly large elf on a giant spider mount. Rather than counterattacking, it had ridden off. That had thrown me. Monsters always wanted nothing more than to kill—for one to ignore the opportunity felt wrong. But it wasn't a trap portal. Just weird.

We'd also started pushing out of the tunnel—its walls were made of smoothed, polished wood, with windows to the sky spaced evenly around it as its floor rose. The windows were getting more frequent, letting green-gold light stream in, but we'd probably gained three or four hundred feet, and the tree we were clearly scaling the inside of had no indications of getting smaller.

"We done here?" The pick-up support asked. She was high E-Rank, a fully-committed Script-user, and had merged a single, four-skill merge to increase her Scripts' power. I felt a pang of jealousy; she was everything I'd pretended to be when I'd filled that role, and she enjoyed it. Even better, she hadn't pretended to be a fighter when she clearly wasn't; her long spear and shield were both constantly on defense.

She'd go far. I didn't know how far, but she'd found a role that worked with her Unique skill, and she was doing her job. And nothing else.

"Yep. This group's done," I said. The rest of the team was nothing but sustained damage. Lots and lots of sustained damage. With Jeff at Tank, me at fighter/striker hybrid, and Ellen at mage, having a support and two fighters join up was a lot.

But…they met my requirements. None of them knew each other, so they weren't planning anything fishy, and all three of them agreed to our terms regarding the core and seventh share.

Jeff stood up. "Door's over here. Let's get out of this tunnel and see what we're up against."

"I'm ready," I said. All around me, the team got ready for whatever was on the far side of that door.

Stamina: 183/200, Mana: 197/250

It looked worse than it was. We'd fought three groups of elves so far, and aside from this one, I'd kept my breastplate unsummoned. Most of my Mana consumption was tied up in my pair of Scripts and my gear, though I was disgustingly jealous of the Strike Speed Script the support had tossed on the melees.

Jeff opened the door.

The spider-rider stood there. His mount was easily three times our height, and I stared at him as he gestured wildly with a long spear. Its leaf-shaped head flashed in the deep yellow sun. Whatever he was saying, I couldn't understand a word, but I didn't need to. Every muscle on his body was tense and angry.

Instead of him, I focused on the portal world. It was built around a single, massive tree, just like I'd worried. The monster stood on the edge of a wide platform that, while not narrow, wasn't wide enough for me to be comfortable. Two of the spider's legs dangled off the edge, and when I looked out into the portal world beyond it, my stomach flipped.

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"That's a long way down," Ellen half-whispered. I nodded slowly.

There were clouds above and below us, and sandwiched between them were hundreds of massive tree trunks. We couldn't reach most of them—if we tried, we'd simply land back on this one or fall to our deaths—but the entire world as far as I could see was nothing but fog, mist, and wood.

"Is this the boss?" One of the fighters said.

I shook my head. "I don't think so. There wasn't any hint of this being a trap portal."

Spider Rider: D-Rank

Jeff stepped onto the wood-carved platform, and the spider rider moved—but not toward him. Its legs churned against the smooth path, and then, suddenly, the rider blocked the far exit. "It's not a boss," I repeated, "But we won't get to the boss without killing it first."

I followed Jeff as he barreled toward the towering spider, round shield up. His taunt skill went off, the reddish burst filling half of the room, but as he approached, the elf's spear flashed down. He blocked. Then a greenish echo appeared, driving into Jeff's armored stomach.

"Echo mage!" Ellen yelled. "Fight defensively, look for openings!"

The Stormsteel rapier flashed up into my Thunderbolt Forms stance. I could fight defensively, but right now, I wanted to take a few hits. Then I started pouring Stamina into Dash. Between it and the movement speed Script, I felt like a blur. I launched into a quick thrust at the monster's leg.

A third spear ripped across my armor, parting the maelstrom and leaving behind a thin red line. Then my thrust landed on the spider's leg. I gritted my teeth and shoved, trying to knock it over. When that failed, I took two steps back, pulled back into my aggressive stance, and kept looking for opportunities to make contact. In a full team, my job as a striker wasn't to keep punching; it was to get in, do damage, and back off.

I'd leave the brawling to the fighters and Jeff.

The spider's clawed legs weren't my problem, anyway. I needed to get to the elf. If we could kill him, the spider likely wouldn't be tougher than high E-Rank. "Ellen, focus on the rider!"

"Already on it, Kade!" A ball of shadow flew through the air, ripping into the rider's light armor before winking out. "Gonna need an assist, though!"

I nodded. The tree towered over us, reaching all the way to the clouds overhead. Its bark looked like the mud cracks in a Phoenix arroyo a week after the rain, all peeling fragments and deep crevices. But…it did curve over the monster. "I've got an idea."

I pushed my Stamina into Dash again, letting Recovery and my pain-dulling fade to preserve what I could. Then I sprinted at the tree with everything I had. My foot hit the bark, and I pushed upward. One step. Two. Three.

Then I pushed off. As I rotated, I locked eyes with the spider rider. His spear flashed toward me. I ignored it, taking the hit in the hip and dropping Dash to let it start slowly healing. An echo of the attack nicked my calf, but I kept the Stormsteel rapier's tip locked on the elf's chest.

I hit the spider's back. Its hairs stuck through my clothes, poking into my arms and legs. As I rolled, they ripped out of its back. I slowed down instantly, my reflexes weakening.

But my sword stuck out of the spider rider's chest. I'd landed the hit I needed, and I was inside of his spear's reach. I just needed to—

My Lightning Reflexes flashed. Before I could move, the elf leaped forward. His hand flew off his spear, and my sword ripped further into his chest, cracking ribs. But he didn't stop, and I couldn't react before he lowered his shoulder into my chest. The impact threw us both into the air.

I'd hoped to hit the wooden platform.

If I had, it would have been easy to simply roll over and let the fighters beat the elven spearman to death. And we were close—the elf's head bounced off the edge of the narrow balcony. It cracked hard enough that I saw brains below the spiderwebbing. I tried to push off the corpse. To reach up and grab the platform's edge.

But my nerves were full of signals that didn't make sense. They said I'd made it, but my eyes said I was falling.

Falling.

Falling.

I tried to swim through the air. Positioned myself above the corpse of the elven spider rider. He bounced off of something, and I wrapped my arms around him. Then we hit it again. This time, he didn't just bounce. He ruptured, spewing guts across the branch and into the air.

I rolled down the massive branch, then grabbed a wrist-sized limb to slow myself. I'd definitely cracked a rib. Maybe two. But the Stormsteel breastplate had held. As I tried to catch my breath and let whatever had been in the spider's hairs work its way through my system, something else fell past me. Something massive and black.

The spider screeched as it fell. It hit a branch a few yards down from me, then continued all the way until it hit the fog below.

So, the rest of the team had won.

I stared up. Something flashed. Once. Twice. Three times.

The mirrors had been Jessie's idea. She'd been thinking of them as a way to see around corners for ambushes, but Jeff's dad had been a pilot before the Portal Blitz. He'd told stories about calling in lost and stranded hikers who'd used their mirrors to signal planes—according to Jeff, he'd saved at least two lives. So, after some practice, Ellen, Jeff, and I had each started carrying one.

I gingerly reached for my own and held it up. Then I wiggled it back and forth until it caught the faint sun.

Once. Twice.

The signal for "I'm alive, but trapped."

Three flashes from above.

I wiggled my mirror four times. "I'll figure out how to get back up. You keep finding the boss."

One more flash. Then nothing. I sighed, tucked the mirror away again, and pulled myself to my feet.

My back, ribs, and hips all ached from the impact, and I couldn't stop coughing. It was going to be a long climb up.

I reached out and grabbed the next limb. Then the next one. And slowly, I started dragging myself up the side of the massive tree. The only good news was that there weren't any elves out here.

There were spiders, though.

I found the first one on a narrow branch. The elves—or something else—had wrapped the living wood around the trunk, filling the gap between them with twigs. A wall of woven sticks hung along the outside, but I was able to tear a section free and drag myself onto the stick-and-branch walkway.

I got my feet under me—ignoring the sticky feeling below them—and checked my Stamina.

Stamina: 121/200, Mana: 183/250

I'd used a lot climbing, painkilling, and trying to slowly heal. My ribs were still broken—it looked like bones took a lot more time than skin and muscle—-but now that I was somewhere more or less flat, it'd be smooth sailing. I'd find an entrance, get back on the ramp inside the tree, and just follow—

A chittering black mass of limbs launched itself at me, and the Stormsteel rapier flared to life.

I got the sword up in time, and a spider the size of a big dog slammed into it. The blade got between its jaws and my face. Its four front limbs scrabbled against my unarmored chest; it was all I could do to avoid summoning the Stormsteel breastplate.

Instead, I stepped back half a step—all the platform would allow me—and dropped into a lunge.

The spider never had a chance.

I hadn't been in one of the Thunderbolt Forms, and I hadn't fought in a while, so I didn't any Lightning Charges. It didn't matter. The lunge caught the monster between its mandibles. I pulled the attack at the last second, and its jaws clacked shut around the blade, then were slammed back into its own face by the sword's guard.

The weapon came free with a flourish that flicked ichor across the walkway, and the spider died twitching as electricity rippled across its head.

It had been so easy. I almost unsummoned the Stormsteel rapier. Instead, I dropped into a low guard, kicked the corpse into the fog below, and took a few cautious steps around a gigantic knot in the tree trunk.

Then I stopped.

Dozens of eyes and even more skittering limbs greeted me; it hadn't been alone.

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