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

"You feel thesame way too huh?" Bruce asked.

"Probably the equipments and knowing what we’re doing," Kael added. "Yesterday we were stumbling. Today we’re hunting."

The guard at the post watched them come out with their loaded frames and gave them the same small nod the food-stall woman had given them the night before. The nod of a working person acknowledging other working people.

They did not stop at the exchange. They set the morning’s haul carefully in the room. Kael showed Theron how to stack the hide sacks against the wall in a way that kept the cuts from pressing against each other. They changed nothing about their equipment except restocking the soul-seal paste applicators.

Then they went back out.

This time they turned toward the dark red portal.

The walk to the heat dungeon took longer than the forest.

The streets it required were further from the Guild district, moving through a part of Xiltra Bruce had not yet seen. The architecture here was slightly different. The soul-stone buildings were darker, a deeper grey, and the lanterns hanging between them burned a warmer color, almost orange. The souls moving through these streets had a different quality to them too, a slightly rougher edge, the kind of neighborhood that grew up near the tougher portals.

More scars on the souls here. More well-worn equipment. More of the middle-ranked glow, B and C-rank, by Bruce’s still-developing eye for it, compared to the F-rank newcomers thick near the Guild entrance.

Stalls in this district sold different things. Less basic gear, more specialized tools. Small vials of heat-resistant paste for protecting equipment going into fire-terrain dungeons. Reinforced carrying frames for heavier loads. A weapon stall with more serious options, mid-rank soul-metal blades, a rack of solid clubs made from a dense black material Bruce did not recognize, a glass case of what looked like enhanced throwing weapons.

They passed a food stall selling skewered meat, the cuts from beasts Bruce did not recognize, blackened at the edges in a way the forest deer never were. The smell was completely different, sharp, deep, the cooking of something that had eaten fire in its life.

Theron bought a skewer. He offered it to the others. Kael bit off a piece without breaking stride. Bruce took a small piece to test the flavor and found it excellent.

"From the heat dungeon?" he asked the stall keeper.

"Fire-scale lizards," the stall keeper said. "Lower level. Popular delicacy."

Bruce made a note of that and moved on.

The heat portal was set into a wide clearing at the edge of this district, slightly larger than the forest portal. The pool was the same circular hanging shape, but its surface did not look like dark water. It looked like dark glass, faintly reflective, with a low deep warmth coming off it that Bruce could feel from several paces away. The air around it was drier than the rest of the city.

The guard here was different too, older, heavier-built, with the kind of quiet authority that came from having spent many years at a post near something genuinely dangerous.

"New to this portal?" she asked, when they presented tokens.

"First time," Bruce said.

"Standard advisory plus heat advisory then. Listen." She looked at the three of them with measuring eyes. "Heat dungeon has three levels. F-rank access is level one only. Your tokens won’t open the level-two barrier. Level one has fire-scale lizards, cinder-crawlers, and occasionally a lava-shell tortoise. Lizards and crawlers are manageable F-rank prey. The tortoise is borderline E-rank and appears without warning. If you see a tortoise, you leave that area and find another part of the level. Do not engage the tortoise. Clear?"

"Clear," Bruce said, even though he was frowning.

"The heat in level one is manageable for most soul-bodies. You’ll feel it but it won’t damage you. However." She fixed them with a specific look. "If any of you have a fire talent, be aware that the ambient heat in there will feed that talent passively. Your fire will feel stronger than usual. Do not overextend on that feeling. Souls have gotten cocky in the heat dungeon and burnt through their reserves twice as fast because the ambient boost felt like free energy. It is not free energy. It is borrowed. When you leave the portal, it stops."

She was looking at Kael when she said this.

Kael put on his innocent expression.

"I’m very disciplined," he said.

"Mm," the guard said, in a tone that clearly meant you are not, but I’ve said my piece.

She waved them through.

The heat dungeon was nothing like the forest.

Bruce stepped through the portal and the first thing he registered was the light. The forest had been soft and blue-green and cool. This place was orange. A deep amber light came from everywhere, from the walls, which were not walls exactly but the sides of a vast rocky canyon, layered in glowing stone that pulsed faintly; from the ground, which was flat bare rock with thin lines of liquid light running through the cracks like veins; from the air itself, which had a slight luminosity that made everything look like the inside of a forge at quiet hours.

The heat was real. Not painful, the guard had been right about that, but present in every breath, a dry warmth that the forest had not prepared them for.

And the sound was different. No chiming. No rustling leaves. Instead a low hiss, occasional and directionless, like steam escaping somewhere in the walls. And under that, if Bruce stilled his other senses, a very faint deep rumble that he felt more through his feet than his ears.

Kael stepped through behind him and stopped.

The dragon stood in the amber light and breathed in once, slowly.

"Oh," he said.

His glow changed. It was barely perceptible, but Bruce was watching, and he saw it. The warm orange of Kael’s soul-body deepened, flushed, went more alive, the way a fire looks more alive when you open the vent and let it breathe. The ambient heat of the dungeon was doing exactly what the guard had warned, feeding Kael’s talent passively, quietly, without him doing anything at all.

Kael felt it happening. Bruce saw him notice it. He also saw him deliberately not lean into it, pulling his shoulders back, keeping his expression practical.

"I’m fine," Kael said, before Bruce could speak.

"I know," Bruce said.

Theron came through last and looked around with the careful attention he had been developing over the past day. His eyes moved across the canyon walls, the glowing floor-cracks, the amber air.

"Where are the beasts?"

"Further in," Bruce said. "Same principle as the forest. Entrance area is clear. We go forward and we look."

They went forward.

The fire-scale lizards found them before they found the lizards.

Or rather, the lizards had been there the whole time, and Bruce had not seen them because they were lying flat against the canyon walls in the patches of deepest orange light, their scaled bodies the same color and texture as the glowing rock behind them. The first one dropped off the wall ten paces ahead of them with a sound like a struck stone and landed on the canyon floor, and then it was simply there, a body the length of Bruce’s arm, four-legged, heavily scaled in overlapping plates of amber and deep red, with a flat angular head and two eyes that were solid orange light with no pupil.

It looked at them.

Then three more dropped off the walls on either side.

"Ambush predators huh," Bruce said, with the interest of a man filing a data point. "They wait on the walls and drop on prey that walks beneath them."

"Useful to know," Theron said. "Now what?"

"Now we find out if they’re smarter than the deer."

The first lizard lunged.

It was faster than the deer by a significant margin, low to the ground, propelling itself in a flat sprint with all four legs churning in a gait that ate distance quickly.

But it was also committed. Once it launched, it moved in a straight line and did not easily redirect. Bruce read the commit after the first step and sidestepped calmly, shaping a tight cluster of ink-bullets as he moved. He fired them downward as the lizard passed beneath him, into the gap between the head-scales and the body-plates where the scaled armor was thinnest.

The lizard skidded and stopped.

Kael had the other three.

In the forest, Kael had used careful contained flames for the fighting and the cooking. In the heat dungeon, he used something different, not the tight fireballs, not the ring-burst. He held out both hands and let the fire come out in streams, long thin jets of flame that he directed with the precision of a man using a tool he knew well in a workshop he was finally comfortable in. The streams hit all three remaining lizards in a fast sweeping arc.

The lizards’ scales, fire-resistant, clearly, since they lived in this place, absorbed the first pass without much damage. Kael adjusted, focused the streams to their thinnest and hottest at the tip, and directed them to the same joint-gaps Bruce had targeted. The lizards went down in three seconds.