Or, perhaps that wasn’t fair.They often saw Ingram as a mad dog who would kill anything that crossed his path, but they usually just saw me as an idiot.
“Look, I want to get this done as soon as possible.There’s no reason to drag it out, and make it take longer than it has to.Let’s just get this over with and get back home.”
“This is barely an A-Rank dungeon,” Ingram said.“I say we can clear it in twenty minutes, tops.”
“Twenty minutes?You used to be able to do this in fifteen.Are you losing your touch in your old age?”I ask with a laugh.
Ingram scowled, a look that might have scared off anyone else.Too bad for him, I’d known him long enough not to really care about his hissy fits.If he was going to kill me, he would have had plenty of chances to do so before.
“A hundred dollars on twenty minutes,” Kenyon said.
“Are you seriously betting on how long it takes us to clear this dungeon?Do you not understand how dangerous this is?”Hart spoke to us as if we had never been in a dungeon in our entire lives.
Maybe that was the problem with A-Rank espers.They liked to think they were special.They were way too concerned about things that they didn’t need to worry about.This dungeon was hardly an issue—even if our squad had been on its own.Between two squads of our caliber, this thing might as well have been a fly we swatted.
It was something that came with experience, with understanding that none of it really mattered that much.As A-Rank espers, they probably had never been into an S-Rank dungeon.They sure as fuck had never gotten sent to one of the permanent ones.There was no way to explain to a person like that what a stable dungeon was like.It meant they freaked out over little pointless dungeons like this one.
“What are you upset about?Do you want in on the bet?”I asked, as though I didn’t understand their point.
He didn’t respond, instead just stammering, his mouth opening and closing time and time again as though he thought that action was going to warrant him some sort of understanding.I could have told him that he was probably just an idiot, but I had a feeling that wasn’t going to help our situation at all.Instead, I looked up toward Shear, who still stood on the cliff.
I didn’t need to say anything, because I was certain he was crawling around in my skull as he normally did.Like many of us, the dungeon amplified his powers.It meant he had a good sense of control over the entire battlefield.I didn’t need to speak to him, didn’t need to give him any signals.He knew exactly what I wanted to tell him.
Which was that it was time to go.
I didn’t bother asking the other squad anything else.They’d just bitch and moan as much as they could, hoping to get out of this entire thing.They still imagined that they were somehow above us.They thought that reputation was what mattered then.They were about to learn they were dead wrong.
If there was anything that I had learned, it was the power mattered at the end of the day.It didn’t matter what they thought about us, it didn’t matter how useless they thought we were, they were about to see exactly why we had the rank we did.
Enjoy the show, you assholes.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kenyon
The way Carter moved always put me on edge.I wondered if he didn’t enjoy throwing himself into danger just for fun.In fact, I wouldn’t even put it past him to do it just to annoy me.I was probably going to die years earlier than I should have, just from the stress of keeping him alive.
Not that he cared.He was probably laughing in that screwed up little head of his.He enjoyed every stress line he put on my face, every hour of sleep I lost, every frantic rush to try to save his useless life.
Well, that probably wasn’t fair.As much as I hated the way he did things, I really wasn’t sure he thought about much of anything when fighting, which was almost more terrifying.
He proved the point when he sailed forward, toward the pillar at the center of the clearing.That held the heart of the dungeon, the source of power that kept this entire place together.I’d seen them before, of course, as it was common in our line of work to run across them, but they always startled me.
We usually think about important things being large and flashy and somehow obvious.Even things like gems had a shine to them, a draw that made people want to own them.The dungeon hearts were entirely different.
If anything, they resembled pieces of obsidian, but not quite as glassy.They were dull and flat and chipped and ragged, as if broken pieces of concrete.And yet those tiny little chips of rock were responsible for all the damage a dungeon could do, all the lives they stole.
Ingram preferred going for the heart.His hands still carried the marks of hearts that he’d removed and destroyed over the years.Maybe it was a personal challenge for him to get in close, to get rid of the entire dungeon in one swoop.
Carter, on the other hand, much preferred killing everything inside a dungeon.Maybe he saw it as a personal failure if Ingram got all the credit for actually closing a dungeon.In fact, I had a feeling that if Carter left a dungeon not covered in blood, he would view it as a pointless task.
It meant that even though Carter moved toward the central pillar, where the heart sat, I knew he didn’t plan to go for it.Instead, it was just an attempt to rile up the monsters.The more that outsiders interfered with the heart, the closer that they got to it, the more vicious the monsters grew.
That meant it was far easier for Carter to gain the upper hand if he set the monsters into a frenzy by threatening the heart first.
Sure enough, before he got anywhere near it, the ground shook.A thundering crack echoed through the entire battlefield, and even I struggled to keep upright.
The terror on the others’ faces signaled them as newbies, unused to the violence that bathed a dungeon.They looked young, but that didn’t always mean much.Espers often looked far younger than their actual age.It was one of the benefits of being an esper.We didn’t live longer.If anything, we rarely made it past fifty or so.
