Evolution of a Healer

Correction, Cyn actually had to do that impressive feat of mana control twenty-five times, in fairly rapid succession. She had hit ten more of the objects, turning them green, within five minutes of managing to hit the first one. Then, she watched in dismay as the first object stopped glowing. Her time had been spent mostly waiting for mana regeneration, alongside a few more early needle dispersions.

She was getting better though, and it was rapidly becoming easier to multitask clambering around the cubes and shooting off mana. This whole thing would be a ton easier if Dana was here. The Archer could aim and shoot quickly, and there was less of a cost if one of her shots did not hit. If Hex had come in here alone he would be totally fucked, and might have to risk trying to jump over a hedge and onto one of the labyrinth paths from a high cube. As they passed one another once again, Cyn breathlessly relayed her problem to the Rogue. “Need to wait…for full mana.” Lowering her own health for mana regen just wasn’t a good solution here. Any physical injuries would make it more difficult to move around the shifting cubes, plus Cyn still wasn’t sure she wanted to continue to encourage her evolution in that direction.

Hex didn’t waste his breath speaking and just nodded, before trying to chuck her a potion. She wasn’t expecting it, and fumbled attempting to grab the blue potion mid-air. The bottle fell from her fingers as Spam gave a croak, and rather than risk herself Cyn jumped to her next cube, assuming the potion was lost. Until a long black tongue shot out of her hood at high speed towards the falling potion.

Not only was it insanely long, the end of Spam’s tongue must have been sticky since it only touched the side of the bottle before retracting just as fast with the bottle attached. The potion smacked the familiar in the face at high speed, dazing it and causing Spam to fall fully into her hood instead of having its face and front legs out. Despite how startling the whole scene was Cyn managed to actually grab the potion before it fell again.

Mana Potion (Uncommon) - Restores mana when consumed.

‎ This potion may have additional effects.

A quick Inspect told her that the potion was a mana potion as she suspected, but likely better than the ones she currently had. Perhaps it was one he had gotten from a puzzle box? Hopefully, whatever the ‘additional effects’ ended up being would not be too detrimental. Surely Hex wouldn’t give her a poisoned potion. Her familiar gave a groggy croak as it pulled itself back into position, and once Cyn had made it to the next cube she quickly downed the potion.

The effects of the liquid were immediate, returning roughly a quarter of her mana pool. Significantly better than the potions she had. At least it was, until the additional effects kicked in. Since she would need more mana to hit all the objects in the grid above in time, Cyn would continue to just jump and climb between cubes. Until, a few cubes later and midway through a jump, she found herself suddenly floating upwards. She wasn’t going particularly fast, as the effect seemed to have activated at the height of her jump, and kept her forward momentum. Confused, and unused to the strange, floating feeling, she began to flail while letting out a high-pitched yelp.

Her flailing limbs only served to curb Cyn’s momentum, alongside causing her to start to spin. She slowly found herself tilting until she was upside down and staring into the empty void below. All the while, Spam was just clinging onto the inside of her hood for dear life, making frantic chirps and croaks as they both rose.

She frantically tried to think of what she could do, what skills she had that might be able to control her ascent or at least save her once the effect inevitably wore off. And she came up with nothing. The only thing she could try to do was Freeform Mana Cast a solution, and that was a massive gamble. Cyn had so far managed to only do two useful things with mana outside of skill usage. One, her needles, had taken a great deal of practice and testing before becoming viable, and she was improving her control of them even now. The second thing she had done, clearing the Illuminant webs, was practically a fluke. An act of desperation with a half-formed idea that somehow worked out. A lucky feat she had to prepare to repeat.

Luckily for poor Spam, Cyn did not have to take full responsibility for saving both of them.

***

It had been the best week or so of Hex’s life. Sure, it was terrifying at first. And confusing as hell. But as soon as he started to understand what was going on, the opportunity this presented, he was elated. The chance to reinvent himself as someone other than his father’s failure of a protege was a dream he had never even dared to think about.

Not that his brief time with the System hadn’t been without regrets. The biggest one had definitely been picking up the daggers without thinking first. Not that he was super unhappy, at least he did not end up a guardian, but missing the chance to be a mage stung. Especially as he was forced to watch some of the things Cyn was learning to do. Though after speaking to his ‘mentor’ between dungeon floors, Hex felt better knowing magic was not off the table for him in the slightest.

His second regret was complicated. He hated how they had left behind so much treasure and unkilled mobs on the first floor. If he had been by himself, there was no way he would have left so many stones unturned. They hadn’t even gone down one of the tunnels!

But Hex wasn’t by himself, and had developed enough respect for every member of the party to not want to drag them down, especially when it was their lives at stake. He was pretty sure all of them were desperate to leave, so he didn’t resist moving on after the boss fight.

Before this floor he would have said he was positive the party wanted out as quickly as possible. When he discovered through the objectives they no longer had to stay together, he was relieved. Hex might not find everything in this labyrinth, but he sure as hell was going to find the center. Cyn had taken him by surprise with her eagerness to find the center of the labyrinth too, but words were just words. He didn’t think the Mage was serious, until they had passed an exit door and she hadn’t even hesitated in wanting to keep going.

Hex definitely was not unhappy to have her along, either. She kept up well enough, and seemed smart if a little ditzy. Putting aside her growing penchant to hurt herself, having a healer would allow him to take risks more freely; and while the strange arena of moving cubes they were now navigating served to highlight his shortcomings, primarily a lack of ranged options, at least with the Mage along there was a chance to solve it.

Speaking of Cyn…

What the fuck is she doing?

Cyn’s yelp had drawn Hex’s attention back to his teammate, and, after witnessing the Mage’s struggle, it was clear that whatever was going on was not intentional. He quickly made his way back towards her, reaching a cube that was rising not too far away from Cyn. It was below the Mage, but not by too much. The cube was just too far away to catch her if she started falling now. One trajectory calculation and quick risk assessment later, he jumped.

Hex’s jump took him just behind the floating woman, now upside down, and he was able to reach out and just barely grab ahold of her belt. Cyn let out another yelp, the sound accompanied by a chorus of noise from the strange pink amphibian she carried around, as the Mage was dragged along with Hex to another cube much lower down. He barely made it onto the other cube, having failed to accurately estimate how much drag the floating woman would create. But they were safe for the next few seconds.

Still holding onto her, now floating above Hex’s head, he quickly pulled a short rope from his storage. He had bought it back in Cogtopia, figuring it would come in handy. Far too short to rappel down the shaft back in the mines, but long enough to make a Cyn balloon.

“What did you do?” Hex tried not to sound as annoyed as he felt while mentally trying to restart his internal timer for the cubes. He would have to try to tie this rope to her after he was in rhythm again, and just looped it around one wrist for now.

“Did you Inspect the potion before you threw it?”

“No?” Spam made a croak just as he jumped to the next cube. The hell was with that thing? Also, why would he have used Inspect on the potion? Hex had seen her mana potions, it was the same shade of blue. The only reason he had kept the potion at all after pulling it from a puzzle box was because he was kind of just hoarding everything he could, at least until his storage ring filled.

“Oh. It said it would have additional effects. I kind of assumed…with your profession…you probably already knew what those effects were so I didn’t need to worry.” Cyn sounded sheepish, and Hex was glad she couldn’t see the embarrassment on his face. She was probably right, he should have used Inspect before just assuming it was a mana potion and giving it to the Mage. He trusted that, because of her profession, if she said a creature was a certain way that it was true. It made sense she trusted to put in her mouth anything he had handled.

Spam croaked again, just before Hex jumped this time. Was the amphibian acting as a timer? “I didn’t think about it. I’ll be sure not to just hand off strange potions in the future.” As he spoke, he tied one end of the rope firmly to Cyn’s ankle, making her officially a balloon. If she was suddenly affected by gravity again, they could just cut it off.

“Thanks, by the way. In good news, I should be able to make an attempt at hitting the whole grid soon.”

“Great, hopefully that’s the solution.” Croak. Jump. “Because this difficulty spike is a bit much.” Cyn agreed with him, mentioning she thought the whole thing might be rigged to favor an archer. In that case, the pair of them were just lucky she had a long-ranged attack.

Hex quickly adjusted his jumping and climbing for the extra drag Cyn created, and the extra tug he had to do sometimes to get her floating body out of the way of a moving cube. The pink familiar did seem to be keeping track of when a cube was going to vanish, but Hex trusted his own timing more. The concern he had now was that if the Mage couldn’t complete the task at hand in the next try, if they were wrong about the solution, or it had a second phase, he was probably going to run out of stamina before they were done.

It wasn’t too much longer until the Mage voiced she was ready to give the timed trial a try.

***

This was super awkward. Not only was it uncomfortable to get pulled around by her ankle while floating in the air, it was clear that Hex was having to expend more of his stamina to account for her. On the plus side, she was pretty sure not having to split her focus with jumping around would make this trial downright easy to pass, especially after her practice with split focus. As long as she didn’t end up getting bodied by a moving stone cube in the process.

Good thing her mana regeneration was pretty decent while at rest, which apparently floating above the Rogue counted as. It wasn’t good as it was when she was near death, but Cyn would take what she could get without injuring herself. Not to mention, her needles had become more mana efficient the more she practiced with them.

Once Hex confirmed he was ready, Cyn once again started firing off smaller than normal needles at the objects in the grid above them. She still missed a few, mostly due to unexpectedly being tugged on while the mana needles were far away, but it was quite a bit easier than when she was first attempting to reach the objects. One by one, all twenty-five turned green above them.

Once the final one began to glow, there was a distant chime followed by the remaining cubes all changing their movement to return to their original position. The cubes were no longer vanishing, and when Hex and Cyn found themselves back at ground level all remaining gaps in the floor filled instantly. Well, the Rogue was on ground level. Cyn was still floating. The square was once again just a suspicious looking flat area, devoid of the Hungering Hedges. Both their exit and entrance had returned as well. The only change was that instead of looking completely empty, there was now a pair of treasure chests sitting side by side in the center of the square.

In the same moment the space returned to normal, Cyn also got a notification. A quick glance into her menu confirmed she had leveled up her class to seven. Honestly that challenge seemed more worthy of experience than the puzzle boxes. She had had to put in a lot of work to complete it. Closing the menu, she found Hex quickly crossing the space, reaching down to touch one of the chests and causing it to vanish before tugging Cyn closer to the ground so she could take her reward as well. Rather than open it now, she willed the chest into her Promising Ring of Holding as the Rogue had likely done.

Of course, she also checked to make sure it wasn’t a mimic first. It was too soon to fall for that trick.

Chest of Agility (Rare) - Contains rewards for completing the Trial of Agility within the Hungering Labyrinth.

‎ Rewards are generated based on your performance within the Trial.

She had not stabbed herself or even been injured this time, so Cyn had high hopes for what would come out of this chest.

As they quickly left the area, Cyn looked up and saw the grid of objects was still glowing green. Was that just an indicator they had completed the challenge? Would it reset for someone else to do it? There were only two reward boxes, which struck her as a little odd. On the previous floor they had all shared kill credit for the spiders, regardless of who helped in each kill. But here it looked like only the direct participants would be rewarded.

Barely back within the hedges, Hex abruptly sat down and sighed, “Any indication on how long that potion is going to last?”

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