Chapter 77: Leeches Love Broken Things
Aether Leeches were ugly in the way useful monsters often were.
No dramatic horns. No noble silhouette. No elegant threat for painters to exaggerate after survivors became liars. Just pale, flat bodies clinging to Bloodstone ceilings, translucent skin pulsing with stolen light, circular mouths lined with teeth too small to respect.
In the game, students learned two rules on Floor Six.
Do not bleed.
Do not waste Aether.
Unfortunately, Team Seven had arrived with a shattered Void Core, a saintess, a hero, a commoner blade with anger issues, a nature mage who listened to walls, and Niko Vale, whose primary combat technique appeared to be regretting enrollment.
A balanced party, if the academy’s goal was stress testing divine patience.
The first leech dropped toward Seraphina.
Liora cut it in half before Aiden finished moving.
Clear fluid splashed across the stone. The red veins drank it.
"Don’t let the bodies touch skin," I said.
Aiden’s sword flashed. "Poison?"
"Signal scent."
Three more peeled away from the ceiling.
Elara raised her hand. Roots burst from cracks along the wall and twisted into a net. Two leeches struck the roots and stuck there, mouths opening and closing in wet little prayers. The third slid through a gap and launched at Niko’s face.
Niko made a sound that history would not record kindly.
I caught it.
Not with a blade.
With my left hand.
Stupid.
Necessary.
The creature latched onto my glove and bit down.
Pain opened white behind my eyes.
Null Touch answered.
Black-violet cracks spread from my palm through the glove. The leech stiffened. Its stolen Aether collapsed inward as if someone had cut the concept of hunger out of it. Then it fell, shriveled and smoking, at my feet.
Silence lasted half a second.
Too long.
Liora saw.
Seraphina saw.
Aiden saw the result, not the cost.
Malcris, if his watchers still functioned, had seen enough to become more irritating than usual.
Niko stared at my hand. "Young master—"
"Duck," I said.
He obeyed.
Aiden’s sword cut through the space where Niko’s head had been, severing another leech mid-lunge.
"Good timing," Aiden said.
"Terrible compliment," I said.
My palm continued to burn.
The glove had not torn, but the leather had tightened around my skin as if cooked. I could feel the inside of it sticking to flesh. The sensation was impolite. My body wanted to shake. Cedric Valdrake’s body remembered not shaking in front of witnesses.
Useful corpse etiquette.
Liora stepped closer, blade raised. "More coming."
She was right.
The corridor ceiling rippled.
Not with three. Not with ten.
Dozens.
In Throne of Ruin, this would have been a simple resource check. Keep Aether output low. Assign the healer to emergency response. Use physical strikes until the swarm lost interest. The forum guide I wrote had three paragraphs and one joke about rich players finally learning basic restraint.
Reality had upgraded the mechanic.
Here, leeches did not hover politely inside attack patterns. They smelled hesitation. They gathered around fear-wet skin and half-open wounds. They shifted toward the strongest output, then corrected toward the strangest one. The game had never rendered the sound of dozens of wet mouths detaching from stone at once.
I had not missed much.
Niko heard it and blanched. Aiden heard it and wanted to step forward. Liora heard it and wanted to cut something before it earned a name. Seraphina heard it and, for one dangerous moment, light gathered around her like dawn preparing to become a shield.
Dawn, underground, was just another dinner bell.
Aiden inhaled. Hero instincts gathered around him like bad weather.
"I can draw them forward," he said. "If Seraphina shields the rear, Liora and I—"
"No," I cut in.
His eyes sharpened. "We need space."
"They do not want space. They want output. You draw Aether, they swarm you. She raises a full barrier, they swarm her. Liora ignites her blade, they swarm her."
"Then what do they swarm?" Liora asked.
Me.
Obviously.
The leech on the floor had not attacked Niko because he was delicious. It had redirected after passing near me. My shattered Void Core leaked wrongness in a room full of creatures designed to drink energy. Aether Leeches loved broken things.
Another private joke from the universe.
"Low output," I said. "Physical cuts only. No full skills. Elara, roots without Aether flare. Use existing cracks. Seraphina, no barrier unless someone is already bitten. Aiden, stop glowing."
Aiden glanced down.
A faint gold aura had begun to gather around his sword.
He forced it down with visible effort.
Good. At least the lie had stopped pretending.
That kind of obedience would ruin his protagonist brand if he kept practicing it.
Liora bared her teeth. "And you?"
"I will be useless with dignity."
"Liar."
"Usually. Move."
The swarm dropped.
The corridor became motion.
Liora cut low, brutal and controlled. Her anger did not spill into Aether flame this time. It stayed in muscle, breath, wrist. Aiden adapted fast enough to be annoying, turning his shining style into plain steel arcs. Elara’s roots struck from existing wall cracks, not summoned with dramatic growth, pinning leeches in batches without feeding them too much energy.
Seraphina stayed behind Niko.
That was the correct choice.
That made it dangerous.
She wanted to heal. Every instinct in her screamed to spend light, to mend before wounds became wounds, to be the saintess before anyone asked. Instead, she watched hands, ankles, necks, breath. She saved power by enduring the sight of pain.
Mercy with discipline.
The Church would hate her someday.
A leech slipped past Liora’s guard and bit into Aiden’s forearm.
Gold light flared by reflex.
The ceiling answered.
Half the swarm turned toward him.
"Suppress it!" I snapped.
Aiden gritted his teeth. The glow flickered, then dimmed. Blood ran down his wrist, bright and heroic and stupid.
Three leeches launched.
I moved before thinking.
False Noble Step carried Cedric’s arrogance into my ruined body. One step forward, one shoulder angle, one borrowed posture that convinced everyone watching that I had meant to stand there all along.
My left hand caught the first leech.
Pain.
Null Touch burned.
The second hit my forearm.
More pain.
The third Liora split an inch from my throat.
Her blade stopped so close I felt wind kiss skin.
"You’re welcome," she said.
"Your generosity is terrifying."
"Stop catching monsters with your hand."
"Stop leaving them unattended."
She almost smiled. Then she saw the tremor in my fingers.
Her expression changed.
Not pity.
Worse.
Understanding.
I hated smart people.
Seraphina reached for me.
I stepped back.
Her hand stopped in the air.
That tiny pause did more damage than a full accusation.
"Not now," I said.
Her voice softened. "You are hurt now."
"Then now is busy."
Niko whispered, "They’re pulling back."
He was right.
The remaining leeches retreated into ceiling cracks, not defeated, not frightened. Repositioning.
Predators did not abandon food. They waited for it to bleed better.
Aiden tore the leech from his arm and hissed as Seraphina finally used a thin thread of healing light, precise, controlled, almost invisible. She closed the bleeding without fully restoring him. Smart. Necessary. Painful for her.
"This is beyond a proximity drill," Aiden said.
"Yes," I said.
"Then the emergency extraction should trigger."
We all looked up.
The monitoring sigil pulsed red.
No voice. No rescue. No instructor.
Only the thin sound of stone shifting somewhere deeper.
Elara pressed both palms to the wall. Her face blanched.
"Something is waking below us."
Liora rolled her shoulders. "Define something."
"Large," Elara said. "Angry. Not fully alive."
"That narrows it to half the academy," I said.
No one laughed.
Fair.
My glove smelled burned.
Under the leather, my palm throbbed in time with the red veins of the wall. The sensation was unpleasantly synchronized, as if the dungeon had learned my pulse and decided to hum along.
The Ledger appeared.
[ Environmental Irregularity Confirmed. ]
[ Bloodstone Halls behavioral pattern deviating from registered route. ]
[ Correction Event #01: Listening. ]
[ Team-Based Survival Variable Detected. ]
Team-based.
Not Kael-based. Not Cedric-based.
The floor was no longer testing whether I could survive.
It was testing whether I would let others matter enough to become liabilities.
Excellent. Another problem wearing manners.
The story had discovered teamwork and immediately made it a weapon.
Niko lifted his scanner again. The needle spun, pointed left, then cracked down the center.
He stared at it. "That was academy property."
"Congratulations," I said. "You are now involved in institutional fraud."
"I don’t want to be."
"No one does at first."
Aiden tightened his grip on his sword. "We need to move. If extraction is blocked, we return to the lift manually."
"The lift path sealed behind us," Liora said.
"Then we find another route."
Niko’s cracked scanner sparked once.
The wall beside him clicked.
A thin maintenance line glowed under the Bloodstone veins. Not academy blue. Not dungeon red.
Old silver.
Niko froze.
"I think," he said slowly, "I found something."
The maintenance line stretched along the left corridor.
The corridor the map had not marked.
The corridor that smelled like blood.
Aiden looked at me.
Liora looked at me.
Seraphina looked at my hand.
Elara listened to the wall and whispered, "It leads away from the thing waking up."
Useful.
Suspicious.
Probably both.
I flexed my burned fingers and felt the glove stick to skin again.
"Then we follow the student with the broken scanner," I said.
Niko swallowed. "That sounds like a bad plan."
"It is."
"Why are we doing it?"
For a moment, no one moved.
That pause mattered. In the original story, Aiden would have chosen the obvious heroic route, Liora would have argued, Seraphina would have protected him, Elara would have followed quietly, and Niko would not have mattered enough for the scene to remember his name. The right corridor would have become a protagonist trial. The left corridor would have remained architecture.
Now everyone waited for my answer.
A hero, a saintess, a commoner blade, a quiet noble, and a frightened background student, all holding still because the villain said the map was lying.
If the World Script had a throat, I hoped it choked.
My palm chose that moment to throb hard enough to blur the corridor. The pain was useful. It reminded me that confidence was just panic with better posture, and I had been wearing mine since waking in Cedric’s corpse.
No one asked whether I was all right.
A rare mercy from people who were beginning to care in inconvenient, fatal directions.
Good. I could work with that.
I would have lied.
The red sigil above us flickered.
For one instant, Malcris’s face appeared in the light.
Not speaking.
Watching.
Then the image cut out.
My smile felt like something borrowed from Cedric’s grave.
"Because," I said, "someone expected us to choose the other one."
