Chapter One Hundred and Twenty - Recurring Work

  I hadn't been in this particular portal in... about two months? Three? It was a recurring portal, sure, but it wasn't one of those that came up all that often. Maybe once every two months or so? That was on the lower end of the scale when it came to recurring portals and their 'return' time.

  Interestingly, I vaguely recalled seeing a graph that showed the rate of 'recurrence' in portals. It looked a lot like a bell curve. The lower the rank of the portal, the less frequently it would reappear. The higher the rank, the same. So, the portals most likely to reappear with any frequency were the C rankers. D was second, almost tied with B-rank portals, and on either end of the scale were the A and E-rank portals.

  Like this one.

  On stepping in, I blinked and tried to forget my worldly, bodily issues, because a few moments of distraction could be fatal, even if this was just a weaker E-rank world.

  The room we stepped into looked like the entranceway of a large mansion. The floor was wood, with planks set in... I think the style was herringbone? Thin lattes of wood with a criss-crossing V pattern. The walls were covered in a sort of patterned wallpaper and there was a nice chandelier hanging from above. Not crystal or anything. It was just tin and steel, but it was worked in a nice way and had glass bulbs around candle holders. It was held up by a chain connected to a pulley on one of the nearby walls.

  I'd taken that thing done, once. It was heavy as shit.

  This portal could have been some ancient Victorian mansion. Only it was off. The chandelier was massive. The walls were twenty feet tall, the nearest door was fifteen feet tall and maybe five feet wide.

  This wasn't a place designed by or for humans.

  "Eyes sharp," Eldur said. He had his vacuum spear tucked under one arm, point hovering close to the ground.

  I shifted my weight, lifting a shield up so that the bottom wasn't scraping the ground. I'd asked to be one of the shield carriers. It meant having fewer free hands, but the job was otherwise pretty easy.

  When we went into this portal as E-rankers, it was considered one of those low-risk places, but it was still a major pain in the ass.

  We started, pushing into a long, too-wide corridor just past a set of double-doors. There was art on the walls, looking like large, framed paintings of rooms and chairs, all empty of people. The room was lit by candles in little brass holders on the walls, and there were a few odd pieces of furniture here and there. Chairs that were too deep and narrow to fit a normal person.

  The E-rankers would be lugging those out on carts later. The chairs themselves weren't anything too special, but the cloth covering their cushions was neat and the wood they were made of was apparently worth recycling.

  This probably wasn't the most profitable portal to extract from. But hey, the corp needed to generate some amount of money every day, and having E-rankers and D-rankers sitting on their asses at HQ wasn't profitable.

  "Contact," Edlur said.

  I refocused. Damn, my mind was all wandery at the moment. Frustrating. But yeah, there was something ahead. For all that the lesser air elementals in his portal weren't a big threat, they still had a few advantages. One of them, perhaps the most obvious, being that they were as visible as their namesake element.

  The most I could see of the elemental moving our way was a slight distortion in the air, and that might have been no more than like... one of those little floater things in my vision. The candles on the walls nearby flickering a bit more was a better indication.

  "Alright, newbie, to my left, Erde to my right," Eldur said.

  We shuffled into that position, the other three members of Squad B, Terry, Dharti, and Sol, taking up spots in the back.

  The air elemental suddenly moved faster, and in doing so, became a little more obvious, though it wasn't any less ephemeral.

  Eldur turned on the vacuum on his spear and I did the same a moment later. We levelled the spears up, ends pointed at the incoming monster.

  Before it even hit, the air around us picked up, a strong gust of wind setting clothes and hair to flapping. Then the monster became somewhat more visible. It was a blurry, ball-shaped thing, about the size of a damned mini-van.

  Eldur took a step forward, and I mimicked him. I shoved the end of my spear forwards while trying to use the shield for cover against the wind.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The end of my spear and those of the guys next to me, jabbed into the air elemental with no resistance. Then it screeched as the vacuums sucked it apart. The ball broke up, like one of those super-close-up images of a cell being stabbed by a needle on a microscope's plate. It shook, the wind picked up, and I found it hard to breathe for a moment and chose to just keep my mouth shut and eyes half-lidded.

  Then it was over. The air settled, the last of the wind shifting through the corridor.

  "One down," Eldur said.

  That was it. The monster didn't even have the decency to drop anything on death.

  This kind of E-rank monster could probably be taken out by a teenager with a tennis racket or some grandma with a handfan.

  We continued to push through the portal, and it was... easy. The next room had two more elementals. The one after three. The worst part was a particularly tricky space, a large room that was like a library without the books where we were ambushed from five directions. Terry unleashed a single powerful spell that took out two of them, and then Sol summoned a wave of water out and used it like a large wall to smack the rest of the elementals down.

  In the space of an hour, we'd gone from the entrance of the portal to the entrance into the boss' room.

  That boss was housed in a large greenhouse. A room with glass walls far overhead, filled with climbing vines on these strange racks. The sky above was black, with only a few bare stars visible through the stained, dirty glass.

  A large elemental sat in the centre of the room, in the middle of a ring of candles that flicked and flickered.

  Eldur stomped a foot down, cast a spell, and brought up a thin, tall block of stone that he shoved forwards with another spell. It rushed ahead and rammed into the boss, crushing it. The boss didn't quite die from that, but it did weaken.

  After that, it was just a case of mopping up. The boss created gale-force winds, and I almost lost my shield, but the fight itself was over before things could get too awkward.

  "Alright," Eldur said as he brushed himself off. "Let's backpedal. Check corners for any stranglers, all of the squad leaders got an earful from above last week about securing portals for the lower rankers."

  We did just that, moving back through the portal until we were out from the same portal we'd come in from.

  Our job, now, was to either linger around and wait to be part of the closing party, or we could head back to the HQ with one of the vans carrying E-rankers back and forth.

  I really wanted to stay. Closing an E-rank portal was... not a bad move. It'd mean one, maybe two more points on my next potentiometer reading, but I was feeling like ass, and I think the others noticed.

  "Are you okay?" Terry asked me as I lingered around and watched the E-rankers at work.

  "Cramps," I said.

  "Oh," Terry said. She nodded. "I hate that. Can't focus on anything but the cramping and it makes my magic all weak."

  "Really?" I asked.

  "Yeah. We use emotions for magic. Having your hormones outta wack can't help."

  That was a fair point. I was far from willing to start going on any sort of hormone adjustment regime to better my magic, though.

  I got permission to head out, and jumped on the next ride back. At HQ, however, I didn't have much of a choice but to visit the on-site medic. Luna Corp didn't have a big medical staff. What they did have was a pair of nurses, two on-call army-trained medics, and a doctor that was around during business hours.

  It wasn't hard to explain that I was just feeling slightly under the weather and would rather not wait around for hours. Then I noticed that there was a potentiometer in the doctor's office.

  I set a Save.

  Probably a dumb on, but... dammit, I was curious.

  Last time I checked, my stats were 168 - D-04.

  It wasn't hard from there to ask one of the medics to set it up. The guy was, in typical guy fashion, not all that comfortable talking about periods and the like, and would much rather fiddle with the cool magic machine.

  Once it was set up, I pressed my hand down onto it, and let the machine go to work. It only took a minute for it to spit out a result. This was a medical grade device, not the little portable machines that people used more frequently, and so it was a bit slower, but more precise.

  198 - D-28

  Well, damn.

  ***