Theron’s scythe worked best in open space. Long weapon, wide arc. He had used it in the forest, but the trees had forced him to shorten his swings. The open field portal might suit him better.

Bruce’s ink worked anywhere. Distance, close range, shaped constructs, written forms he had not yet tried. The only limit was his energy reserves, which were growing.

He looked at the dark red portal. "Heat terrain, flame-type beasts."

Kael, in a heat terrain with flame-type beasts, would be in his element. Literally. A fire-talent soul in a fire-dungeon, would be in his element. Bruce did not know the exact mechanics, but in his physical-realm experience, an awakened in a terrain aligned with their talent advanced faster than in mismatched terrain. The soul energy in a heat dungeon would be richer, more resonant for Kael. His kills would probably give him more essence per beast than the forest did.

For Bruce and Theron, the heat dungeon would be harder, less aligned. But harder was the right kind of harder, if they could manage it.

He was still thinking about it when Kael’s voice came from behind him.

"You’ve been up for a while."

Bruce did not turn. "You were watching me plan?"

"I woke up when you came back in. Dragons don’t sleep deep." Kael got up from his bed and came to the table, looking over Bruce’s shoulder at the map. His eyes went to the dark red portal immediately. Bruce noted that too.

"The heat dungeon," Kael said.

"I was thinking about it."

"I was going to suggest it today."

"I know."

Kael was quiet for a moment. "You’re not going to let me be impulsive, are you."

"Not if it’ll get us killed."

"It won’t get us killed. It’ll get us richer." He tapped the dark red marker with one finger. "Heat-terrain dungeons have better beast density than forest. More beasts per area means more kills per hour. And my fire..."

"Will resonate," Bruce said. "I know. That’s why I’m considering it."

"And?"

Bruce looked at the map for another moment. Then at the grey stone portal. Then back at the red.

"We go to the forest first," he said. "One quick hour. We’re not full on essence yet, we’re full on food, but we haven’t absorbed enough beast-essence to meaningfully advance toward E-rank. The forest is safe, it’s familiar, we know the prey. We build our energy up for an hour in the forest. Then we come back, we eat from what we kill..."

"And then the heat dungeon," Kael finished.

"And then the heat dungeon. With full reserves, with a proper pack, with the equipment we bought yesterday, and with all of us knowing each other’s range and timing better than we did this morning."

Kael straightened. He considered this for a moment in the way that meant he had been planning to argue and had found he could not.

"Fine," he said. "Forest first. Heat second. But we go deep in the heat dungeon. Not the entrance level."

"If the entrance level is manageable, yes."

"It’ll be manageable."

"Then yes."

Theron, from his bed: "Are you two going to keep planning or can we eat something first."

They ate at the food stall from the night before.

The heavyset woman with the burn-scarred arms was already open, which suggested she opened early for hunters going out. She had a morning version of the stew, thinner, with a different herb mixture, less heavy, and a dense flat bread that held its shape when you tore it and tasted of something faintly smoky. Bruce bought three of each without consulting the others. Kael ate his bread in two bites. Theron dipped his into the stew until the bread was so saturated it barely held together, and then ate it that way with great satisfaction.

"I’ve been thinking," Theron said, between bites, "about my scythe."

"What about it?" Bruce asked.

"In the forest yesterday, I used it to cut. Swings, arcs. The same way I used it in the mist. But the orb at the Guild said my talent class was SSS, which..." He paused. "That’s the highest grade. So why does the scythe only do what a normal scythe does? If it’s SSS grade, shouldn’t it do something else? Something more?"

Kael looked at him over the rim of his stew bowl.

"You awakened when?" he said.

"In the mist. Yesterday morning. Roughly."

"You’ve had your talent for one day, Theron."

"I know, but..."

"My fire is also SSS grade. In the mist I was throwing fireballs. Big, dumb, explosive fireballs. I wasn’t cooking with it. I wasn’t separating the temperature from the flame. I wasn’t doing any of the things I figured out by the time we were in the forest." He set his bowl down. "A talent is not a fixed thing. It’s a starting material. What you do with it, the shapes you find, the techniques you develop, that’s the work. The SSS grade tells you the ceiling is high. It doesn’t tell you what the ceiling looks like. You find that by using it."

Theron thought about this.

"So I have to figure out what a scythe can do," he said. "Beyond cutting."

"Beyond cutting," Kael confirmed.

"The scythe is a tool for reaping," Bruce said quietly. He had been thinking about this since the Guild test, when the clerk had identified Theron’s talent by type. He had not said it then, but the word had been sitting in him. Reaping. It was a very specific word. Not cutting, not slashing, not killing. Reaping, the harvesting of something grown. "What a scythe does, in every culture that ever used one, is reap what has grown. It doesn’t destroy. It harvests. If your talent is really about reaping..." He stopped.

Theron was very still.

"Then what am I harvesting?" he said.

"That," Bruce said, "is what you need to figure out."

The table was quiet for a moment.

Kael pointed at Bruce. "See, this is why I didn’t eat you in the mist," he said. "That kind of thing. You just do that. The quiet observation. What is a scythe really for. Demon priests where I come from spend years in temples trying to think that clearly and failing. You just..." He waved a hand. "You just say it while eating morning stew."

"I was a doctor," Bruce said. "Doctors ask what a thing does before they use it."

"Best possible justification for keeping you alive," Kael said. "Eat your stew."

Bruce ate his stew.

The forest portal was familiar by the time they arrived.

The guard at the post recognized them, or recognized the tokens when they pressed them to the reader, which amounted to the same thing, and waved them through with less ceremony than the day before. They stepped through in single file, the surface of the portal accepting them in its quiet way, and came out into the blue-green cool of the forest dungeon.

This time, Bruce noticed things he had missed the first time.

The dungeon had a density to it that changed as you moved through it. Near the portal the trees were spaced further apart, the undergrowth thinner, the deer-things scarcer. This was the entrance level, where the weakest beasts grazed and the newest hunters learned. Deeper in, the tree-spacing tightened, the glowing undergrowth grew richer and more tangled, and the sounds were different, less chiming, more complex. Deeper beasts. Harder kills. Better cores.

Yesterday they had hunted the entrance level.

Today they moved past it.

Not far, not yet, not on a morning warm-up run before a harder dungeon later. But far enough that the deer-things they found had slightly thicker bark-plates, slightly larger cores, and slightly brighter glows. The improvement was small. It was still an improvement.

They worked with the new equipment and it was immediately, obviously better.

The carrying frames distributed the weight so cleanly that Bruce could move at full speed with a fully loaded haul on his back. The hooks let them hang cuts underneath the frame without tying anything. The hide sacks kept parts organized, cores in one, prime cuts in another, secondary in the third, so that at the Guild exchange they could lay out a sorted haul rather than a jumbled pile. The skinning kit made Kael’s butchering faster and cleaner, the core-extraction hook in particular doing the work of three minutes of careful cutting in thirty seconds.

The soul-seal paste went on the prime cuts as Bruce stripped them. Theron, watching, asked to try applying it on the next carcass. Bruce showed him once. Theron applied it on the second beast cleanly and without wasting any.

They killed two small herds in fifty minutes, cleaned up the kills efficiently, loaded their frames, and came back through the portal with the practiced ease of people doing a job they had done before.

"That," Theron said, coming out on the Xiltra side, "felt completely different from yesterday."