“Coiled Vine Art, Poison Tempered Body, Overflowing Vitality Technique, Beguiling Flower Form, Purple Rosebud Strengthening.” Erich pursed his lips. He’d been trying to sound out names for his new body strengthening technique as he continued down the smuggler’s trail.

  “Definitely not that last one,” he whispered to himself. “Make that the last two. I have to be careful or people will get the wrong idea.”

  Honestly, he wasn’t entirely sure why martial artists insisted on having esoteric names for their skills. There needed to be some way to distinguish between abilities, so naming techniques ‘earth hammer one,’ through ‘earth hammer fifty’ didn’t make all that much sense, but it felt like the conventions had slipped a little too far in the other direction. The name of an art didn’t need a handful of adjectives and adverbs to spice it up. Not everything needed to be named ‘almighty penetrating typhoon slash.’ ‘Wind crescent’ or ‘air blade’ would describe the same ability without any needless frills or flourish.

  Unfortunately, minimalist names like that would stand out. He’d only recently discovered that the martial arts learned by ordinary warriors in the Cothleer Empire were trash, but that didn’t stop them from having grandiose names. Savage Cleaving Iron Ax, Unyielding Steel Defense, Flawless Granite Swordsmanship, and Crushing Landslide Pummeling Blows were a few he remembered from rival schools attached to his column. As weak as those abilities surely were, they all sounded like they were the finishing move of a grand warrior from a bard’s tale.

  If Erich ever had to teach an apprentice or declare his techniques before a fight, needed something better than ‘improved body one’ to describe the changes he’d gone through. Other martial artists would just laugh at him if he walked into a duel with arts like that.

  He sighed, eyes darting back and forth between a couple of suspicious looking rocks that might be hiding imps as he walked. Maybe he was overthinking the entire thing. Erich had been walking for what felt like the better part of a day, and even with his new stamina the omnipresent heat was starting to get to him.

  A glance back at the forest revealed another clearing with a large purple flower in it. Once again, the plant smelled like rotting corpses. Evidently, whatever was interfering with his perception had disappeared along with the seeds in his stomach.

  Part of him wanted to go back into the jungle to refill his water and see if he could find something to eat, even if it was one of the geckos, but Erich suppressed the urge. He was a lot more powerful now than when he first set foot in the valley, but that didn’t mean he was invulnerable.

  If he encountered one of the monsters he’d already seen, Erich had some confidence in defeating them. After all, none of the imps were individually very strong. It’s just that each of them had one or more abilities that gave them unique attack patterns. They might be able to overwhelm Erich with numbers if he wasn’t careful, but that was true of any monster. After all, even a squad of levy spearmen could take down a tier three warrior if they exhausted him enough.

  What Erich was more concerned about was the unknown. He didn’t have anything like a proper understanding of the floor’s ecology. There were some things that he’d been able to infer about the symbiotic breeding cycles of the imps and the large purple flowers, but all of the most important details were missing.

  He didn’t know how many different types of imps lived in the valley, their numbers, or their abilities. Erich’s new body strengthening might make him more resistant to poison, but there was no telling whether or not it would work on other potential abilities such as acid or disease. Even if he did have some extra resilience, Erich doubted that it would be enough to protect him from magic.

  His eyes played suspiciously over the silent leaves of the forest. Erich didn’t see anything, but then again, it would have been more surprising if he did manage to spot an imp. The geckos had already shown that imps could use magic. None of their spells had been strong enough to completely overwhelm him, but there wasn’t any way for Erich to plan and prepare for something as adaptable as magic.

  But that wasn’t his biggest fear. Sathis had only discussed the valley in passing, but the cinderborn warrior had clearly mentioned that lesser demons were seen on the smuggling route from time to time.

  Erich didn’t have any way to know exactly how strong an actual demon would be. He’d heard stories, but that didn’t clear much up. Unlike imps, demons were intelligent, and all of them had magic or martial arts of some sort. The type and strength of that magic of a demon was impossible to know ahead of time. Every actual demon was unique, the sum of the aether and imps that it devoured in order to evolve.

  His stomach rumbled. Erich frowned slightly as the corpse-like scent of one of the flowers wafted toward him. Theoretically, he could try to check the plant to see if it had dropped any fruit, but that seemed like a bad idea. He had motley recovered from his unfortunate experience with the demonic flowers, but that didn’t mean that Erich had forgotten how miserable the experience had been. Even if he survived another round of exposure to the seeds, hell wasn’t a good place to show weakness.

  Weakness. Erich couldn’t stop his frown from deepening. He would need to sleep soon, and that meant leaving himself vulnerable. A glance up into the sky revealed nothing. Erich didn’t have any idea what time it was or how long he’d been wandering through the valley. Still, at least there were some small mercies. There still weren’t any imps up above, but he didn’t think that he would ever get used to the uniform oppressive red light.

  Erich turned his attention back to the hillsides that lined the valley. Other than the patches of cyan that represented breeding pools, there wasn’t much to differentiate one spot of steeply inclined stone from another. He yawned, eyes scanning over the rock as he kept moving.

  Sooner or later he’d find a cave or an alcove. Erich had entered the valley from a tunnel, and the rocks of the hillside were hardly uniform. There were enough crags and jagged edges to make climbing fairly easy, and a lifetime of hiking in the hills outside of Burrwood told him that where there were uneven surfaces, wind and rain would carve caves over time.

  He glanced up at the constant red of the sky. There hadn’t been a cloud since Erich had arrived in hell, just the constant sulfurous heat that made every breath difficult. None of the stories from adventurers had spent much time discussing hell’s ecology or weather patterns. For all he knew, it simply didn’t rain in hell.

  Erich reached up, pressing his index finger and thumb into the sweaty skin of his forehead as he began to massage his temples. There was so much he didn’t know. Where did the river come from? He had found at least one small cave, but there was no way of knowing where that came from.

  Maybe it was dug by a demon rather than occurring naturally. Maybe there really was rainfall in hell. In that case, Erich didn’t have any method of knowing whether or not the rainfall itself could be dangerous. For all he knew the rain was toxic and it came down in great beating sheets like in the coastal jungles that had rainy seasons. It would be easy for the entire valley to flood, sweeping him away in a matter of minutes.

  Another uneasy look around the landscape ended as he settled his gaze on one of the smuggler’s markers. The forest might be able to regrow quickly, but the poles driven into the rock by the cinderborn would only be repaired when another team came through to blaze the trail.

  He dropped down to one knee, running a finger across the rocky terrain. His sweaty digit picked up dust. Days worth of grime at a bare minimum. Erich rubbed his fingertip and thumb together thoughtfully. A flood probably would have carried the markers away, but it certainly wouldn’t have left dust behind.

  Slightly mollified by his conclusion, Erich stood back up and continued walking. It was hard for him to relax in the strange landscape, but maybe that was a good thing. For a couple years in his adolescence, Erich could have sworn that he spent more nights sleeping outdoors than in. He knew the temperate forests of the foothills inside and out. Every plant and animal had its place, and after years of wandering, he knew each and every one of them.

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  Here, nothing made sense. It didn’t even look like the imps reproduced by giving birth or laying eggs. Rather, there was some sort of bizarre process by which imps were forced to throw themselves into the breeding pits only to devolve into a cannibalistic orgy afterward when clones erupted from the cyan geysers.

  The only thing Erich could count on was that the world was that everything in hell was trying to kill him. Danger wasn’t an entirely new thing. Before he learned martial arts, predators were a threat to Erich, and the forests didn’t exactly lack for wolves and panthers. It had taken him the better part of six months of shadowing the loggers and trappers that worked in small groups to learn how to avoid those dangers.

  In hell, none of that mattered. Erich could feel his breath coming a little quicker, his thoughts accelerating to feverish speed. He didn’t know where to go. He didn’t know if his actions were right or wrong. All he had was Sathis’ sword and the promise he had made to the dying cinderborn.

  It might have been the exhaustion from walking all day with little food, but it felt like Erich’s thoughts were spinning out of control. He didn’t know what was happening around him, and that was putting him on edge. Worse, being on edge wasn’t even the wrong decision.

  Erich’s head felt like it was buzzing as he tried to reason through the situation. He hadn’t eaten or slept in who knows how long, and even the rocks themselves could be hidden monsters. A simple walk to the river meant painstakingly hacking his way through vines and trees, all while those awful invisible geckos watched on.

  None of the rules made sense, and he couldn’t even eat or sleep without getting accosted by imps. The only thing that he could rely on was his sword-

  Something between a snort and a smile curled his lips. Even Erich’s internal monologue was starting to sound like Sathis. The old man would probably like that. He’d only spent a week with him and already the old cinderborn was rubbing off on him.

  Imps. He pursed his lips. It felt like there was something that he was forgetting-

  Without thinking, Erich ducked. An imp dove past his head slamming into the rocky hillside in front of him. Its six claws scrabbled on the stone as it spun around, hissing and chattering at him.

  Erich turned his back on it, mana filling his body as he brought his sword up. A second imp swooped toward him, and power surged into Erich’s arms as he swung the blade in a double handed horizontal slash.

  It was like the imp was moving in slow motion. Erich knew how fast they were from his two previous encounters, but advancing a tier had made all the difference in the world. The monster adjusted in mid-flight, trying to pull up in order to dodge his swing, but it was just a twinge of muscle and magic for him to adjust.

  His sword bit into demonic flesh, and the Magma Blossom sword style sang in his head as he cut the creature in half.

  Another pair of imps dropped out of the sky toward him. Erich sidestepped, drawing his sword back to skewer the nearest monster.

  The point of his blade erupted from its back and the flying creature squawked in surprise in pain. Its body convulsed once before curling up in Erich’s sword, clinging tightly to it.

  Erich swung his weapon to the side, trying to pull the dead imp’s body from the weapon. It was half a step slow, finding only air as the other monster zipped past him, thrown off by his earlier sidestep.

  He spun around only to grunt in pain as the first imp threw itself on his chest. Erich’s sword clattered to the ground, winged corpse twitching spasmodically around it.

  The momentum from its attack sent him sprawling backward, and stone knocked the breath from Erich’s lungs as he was slammed to the ground. Atop his bare chest, the imp’s claws slashed away at him. Life mana flowed into his skin, causing the needle-like talons to skitter off his hardened and tempered body.

  A second later, the monster stabbed downward with all six of its hands. Only by directly thrusting straight into his torso with all of its force did the small monster actually manage to puncture Erich’s defenses.

  Already he could feel his mana beginning to heal the wounds, threatening to trap the monster’s tiny hands as it frantically tried to pull its claws free so it could stab him again

  A weight hit his thigh as the second surviving imp landed on him. Again, he felt a dull tearing sensation as it tried to rend its way through his magically hardened flesh.

  Erich reached up, hands clapping themselves onto either side of the monster’s head before jerking it sideways. With an audible snap, its body went limp. He ripped it free from his chest with a spray of blood before throwing the corpse to the side.

  Pain erupted from Erich’s leg, and he reached blindly down to grab the final imp. His efforts were rewarded by the sensation of fangs digging into the palm of his hand as the monster chomped down on him.

  He half sat up, twisting his body so he could get a good look on the feral beast that was trying its hardest to tear into his body. A distant part of Erich noted that his opponent was dangerously close to his genitals for something with so many claws and such sharp teeth.

  Erich hissed in pain, wrapping his impaled hand around the creature’s lower jaw. He balled his left hand up into a fist, swinging it into the imp’s forehead with enough force to make the monster’s body go temporarily slack.

  Taking advantage of that moment, Erich grabbed the top of the imp’s head with his free hand. Life mana burned hot in his limbs as his body strengthening technique peaked.

  Euphoria filled him. Limitless potential and strength surged through his arms, drowning out the pain from the imp’s frantic attacks.

  Erich held its lower jaw in place with his right hand, ripping its head backward with a sudden push from his left. Agony brought tears to his eyes as the monster’s teeth cut through flesh and bone on his right hand, but his grip held.

  With a sickening crunch, the imp’s jaw was torn free and the creature was sent flying. Its wings flapped once or twice in the air as it struggled to regain its balance. Erich rolled up into a crouch, left hand grasping his right as he tried to staunch the flow of blow from his mangled palm.

  The imp brought its claws up to its ruined face, touching the bleeding hole where its muzzle had been before its knees gave out. It dropped to the ground mewling helplessly in pain even as Erich’s mana slowly repaired the damage it had wrought.

  He groaned, looking down and the dozen or so bleeding cuts and holes in his bare chest and thighs. All of it hurt, but it wasn’t anything that his new physique could handle. The most worrying part was how much energy, both in the form of stamina and mana, the healing consumed.

  Erich pursed his lips, grunting as he ripped the imp’s lower jaw free. He tossed it to the side as he walked over to the sword. One foot planted itself against the impaled corpse, and he pulled it free with his left hand. An experimental swing of the weapon sent a spray of the dead body’s blood spattering against the stone.

  “Got it,” he said to himself, grimacing. “Swords are much more effective weapons against monsters than fists. Plus, swords don’t get bit. Use a sword in the future.”

  He glanced around the battlefield one last time. So much for being stronger than any imp swarm he encountered in hell. Erich probably would have won the fight without any injuries if he hadn’t been taken by surprise or if his weapon hadn’t gotten stuck in an imp.

  Still, both of those were within the range of expectations for a fight to the death. He had gotten careless, and his carelessness had caused him both delay and pain. Almost as important of a lesson as ‘don’t lose your sword.’

  Satisfied that all of the imps were dead, he turned to leave, intent on redoubling his effort to find a cave. A distracted swordsman was a dead swordsman, and getting some rest was the key to staying in top form.

  His stomach rumbled, and Erich looked over the carnage of the battlefield.

  Well, getting some rest and having dinner. Food was important, no matter how unappetizing.