Chapter 151 — What the Depths Offered

Chapter 151: Chapter 151 — What the Depths Offered

They pushed a little further before turning back — not deep, just enough to properly close out the day’s dive.

The passage past the goblin camp narrowed into something quieter. Damp stone. The pale fungus growing thicker along the walls the further they went.

"Half hour more," Ilyana said. "Then we head up. No sense pushing a first dive past what it needs to prove."

Arlen nodded, trailing a step behind the others, Hawk’s Eye keeping the shadowed edges of the passage sharp and clear even where the lightstones thinned out.

That was when he heard it.

A low, wet sound. Something dragging itself across stone.

He raised a hand, and the party stopped without question.

"There," Kess murmured, already crouched low, nodding toward a shallow pool fed by some unseen trickle of water further back in the cavern.

A creature lay half-submerged at its edge — long-bodied, mottled dark green and brown, its skin glistening wet even where it wasn’t touching water. Four short legs. A wide, flat head. It didn’t move except for the slow rise and fall of its sides.

"Mirefang Salamander," Osric said quietly. "Rank Four. Sluggish outside water, faster than it looks once it’s actually in it. Poison resistance, decent regeneration — not much offensive bite to it unless it’s cornered."

"Worth taking?" Arlen asked.

"Meat’s edible, if you’re curious," Kess said. "Regenerative organs fetch a fair price too, if harvested properly. Mostly people leave them be. Not much threat, not much reward."

Arlen studied it a moment longer. It hadn’t reacted to their presence at all, either too sluggish or too unbothered to care.

"I’ll take it," he said. "Curious, mostly."

Nobody objected. Ilyana simply gestured for him to go ahead, the same unhurried patience she’d shown all day.

He approached carefully anyway, old habits holding even against something this unthreatening. The salamander noticed him only once he was already close, its head turning with slow, water-logged reluctance, and by then his blade was already moving.

It didn’t put up much of a fight. One clean strike, precisely placed, and it was done.

"Efficient," Grennig said, sounding faintly amused.

They made camp for a short rest not far from the pool, and Arlen prepared a portion of the meat over a small, contained flame, more out of habit than hunger. The others ate their own provisions without much comment, used by now to his particular ritual.

The meat was mild, faintly earthy, not unpleasant.

The warmth arrived partway through his second mouthful — low, familiar, spreading outward with the same patient certainty it always did.

He kept his expression carefully still. Nobody was watching closely enough to notice anyway, the party settled into their own quiet conversation a few feet off.

A name surfaced, whole and certain.

Mireflow Regeneration.

He sat with it a moment, testing the edges of understanding that came bundled with the name — not dramatic, nothing like Ember Touch’s sharp arrival. Just a steady, low-grade sense of his own body knitting small damage closed faster than it had a moment ago, a passive thread woven quietly into everything Enduring Vitality already did.

Eleven, now, he thought, filing it away without any outward sign of the small, private satisfaction settling into him.

"You’ve gone quiet," Kess said, glancing over.

"Just thinking," Arlen said. "Good meal, all things considered."

"High praise, from you." She grinned and turned back to her own conversation.

They broke camp a short while later and started the climb back toward the surface, retracing their path through the settling quiet of Floor Three, past the goblin camp’s scattered aftermath, up through Floor Two’s narrower dark and Floor One’s wide, well-lit thoroughfare.

The checkpoint guards waved them through without much ceremony, the archway mark on Arlen’s badge catching the same soft glow it had that morning.

"First dive," Ilyana said, once they’d properly emerged into the guild hall’s ordinary evening noise, sunlight slanting long through the western windows. "How’d it sit with you?"

Arlen considered the question honestly, turning over everything the day had actually held — the terrain, the scattered wildlife, fifty goblins reduced to background noise for people who’d earned the right to treat it that way, a salamander that had cost him nothing and given him something quiet and useful in return.

"Steadier than I expected," he said. "Less frightening than my first real fight ever was, and this was considerably larger."

"That’s the whole difference between where you started and where you are now," Osric said. "Numbers alone don’t mean what they used to, once you’ve got the foundation to actually meet them properly."

Kess clapped him on the shoulder, harder than strictly necessary. "Guild’ll want the goblin population noted properly — Osric’s already got the report half-drafted in his head, I’d wager."

"Already drafted, actually," Osric said, unbothered. "Someone’ll need to survey it again inside a season, see whether it climbs back this fast on its own."

"Not our problem tonight," Kess said cheerfully. "Tonight we eat something considerably better than dungeon rations, and Arlen’s buying, since he apparently didn’t even break a sweat down there."

"I’ll buy," Arlen said, and found himself smiling at the easy, familiar shape of the evening settling into place — no different, really, from countless nights at Greyhaven’s own tavern, except the company was new and the walls around them belonged to a city he was still, in so many ways, only beginning to properly know.

They settled at a table near the Sundered Rest’s tavern floor, the same one Arlen and his cohort had celebrated at only two nights earlier, and Rurik ordered a round of food generous enough that even Grennig raised an approving eyebrow at the size of it.

"To a clean first dive," Ilyana said, raising her cup once the food arrived. "And to whatever the second one eventually asks of you."

Arlen raised his own cup of water, and found the toast settling into him with the same steady weight every genuine milestone in this life seemed to carry — not triumphant, exactly, just properly, quietly earned.

He thought, briefly, turning his cup in his hand, of the small, private eleventh name now sitting alongside everything else he carried — Mireflow Regeneration, modest and useful, one more quiet thread woven into a pattern only he could see the whole shape of.

Eleven, he thought again, and found the number, however unremarkable the ability itself, settling into him with the same patient satisfaction as every discovery before it.

"You’re doing the thing again," Kess said, catching his expression. "Thinking too hard for a man who just cleared his first proper dive without breaking stride."

"Just grateful," Arlen said, which was, in its own careful way, entirely true.

The evening wound on comfortably around him, and Arlen found himself, sitting among people who’d become, over the course of a single dive, something considerably closer to genuine companions than mere capital contacts, more settled in this enormous, unfamiliar city than he’d expected to feel this soon — one floor deeper into the Sundered Depths, one ability richer, and still, for all of it, exactly the same patient, curious person who’d once watched adventurers pass through a distant gate and wondered what waited beyond it.