Robert took his first step into the real world, ruined book in hand. Amanda blinked and stood up.

"Hey, back from the void so early?" She purred.

Robert laughed. "Yes. Had a little mishap with the Grimoire. Turns out it was cursed."

"Oh, that's so bad!" She whined. "I'm sorry, honey! I'll get you another magical book!"

"No need. I made a copy of everything I needed. And the book held a surprise. Did you check it in the Netherecho?"

Amanda closed her eyes. "Oh, it's a monster."

"Was," Robert grinned.

He winced internally. What was the deal with all this sugary speech? Wait, what the... it was normal between lovers, right? Yes, cool and normal.

"It was possessed by a Life vestige. Once I defeated it, I made it choose between death or servitude."

"You are so strong!" Amanda cooed.

Why was Robert flirting with his boss? He wasn't that unprofessional, was it? Something wasn't quite...

"Amanda, why are we here again?"

She giggled, "It's our weekend retreat, honey! Just the two of us!"

Two? Didn't they just rescue... who, again? The driver of the limousine, who got... impounded? No. She went away after leaving them here, right?

"How did we get here? In this realm, I mean."

"We hiked through a passage we found! It's our little secret, our getaway parad—"

Robert grabbed Amanda's wrist and went back to the liminal void, taking her with him. A sharp lance of headache struck him. It was as bad as the reverse recognition squid's mind spike. But now his thoughts were clearer. Whatever was messing with his mind was left in the real world. But they had little time to enjoy their respite. As he had just emerged, they had only three hours to prepare.

"Amanda, I need you to stay calm and never let go of me. Say 'banana' if you understand."

"What just happened? Where am I?"

Though it was the second time he took her along with him, the first didn't count. She was panicking, out of her mind, and too distracted to notice. Not to mention the crash on the gray-navy rocks. Better not to mention it. Or did he already? Robert's mind was a mess with all this psychic stuff flying around.

"Welcome to the liminal void. All passengers must keep physical contact with the host at all times," he declared.

"You can take people along? That's... impressive."

"Yes, I can. Didn't end well for my last batch of guests, though."

"The Kraven acolytes? Is this how you killed them?"

Robert winced. "I didn't. I was trying to escape, they were grabbing me. I used my talent and didn't knew they would come along. But the moment they let go of me, they froze in time." To illustrate, he tossed the tome, causing it to halt mid-air. "This place is inhospitable to normal people. It's only my talent that's keeping the void from draining our souls. Once those Acolytes were a fraction of an inch away from me, the void started taking their pound of flesh and more. I didn't do anything to them. I neither killed nor saved."

Amanda moved closer and put a hand on his chest. "What happened outside..."

Only then he remembered he could look for Josie in the void. If she was still around the camp, he could spot her. Robert took Amanda and went along, checking the mattress they left her. It was empty if not for the discarded cervical collar.

"Josie is missing," he said.

"How? With the wound she had, she shouldn't..."

The puzzle pieces were starting to fit into place. But he wouldn't say it out loud until he was sure of what was going on. Amanda's input and insight might move the process further ahead but it carried a risk. If the entity out there was controlling their minds to that extent, it could very well read them. He proved to be more resistant to their manipulation than her. Unfortunately, she was on a need-to-know basis until he felt safe sharing the information with her.

"What happened outside was just some entity using us as puppets. They did something to Josie, I'm sure of that. We should ignore what we said out there. It wasn't us."

She nodded with some reluctance. "Yes, that's for the best."

"We will look for Josie when we get out. I'm not willing to abandon her," he said as he checked his clock. "I need both hands. Can you hold my waist?"

"Sure."

Robert checked his notebook and calculated the time they had. He really needed to see if the timekeeping contraption he ordered was complete. But first, they needed to find their way back to Earth. "We have about three and a half hours of subjective time before we return."

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"What do you usually do while you wait to go back?"

"I sleep, read, sleep some more, solve crossword puzzles, make notes about what I read, and so on."

"Do you need to... go while in here?"

"Can you feel your heartbeat?" He asked.

"No, now that you mention it. It's so weird."

"In here, most of our body functions are halted. We don't bleed, no heartbeat, and no need to use the toilet. That's the only reason we survived the fall. It was your first visit to the void back then, do you remember anything?"

"No, not really. Only the bad feelings and despair," she cringed.

"Let's sit down, then. I have some books here if you want to read something to kill time."

"Aren't you worried we will be mind-controlled the moment we return?"

"I believe it will be harder for them to control us. Being aware of it makes their job way harder. I'm only worried about Josie. I believe she is even deeper into their control."

He had sensed something strange when he healed her. What that was, he couldn't tell. But if he considered what he read in the Grimoire and everything else, it didn't give him much hope for the woman.

They read, rested, and talked about delving into the Mollusk Realm. Robert's innate time sense felt the moment to return was near.

"We are going back soon. Remember, question and doubt everything. Try to remember what happened and how we ended up here."

"I will."

They shifted back. The entire realm rumbled.

*

*

"I'm starving. Are you hungry too, hon—" Amanda clamped her mouth with a hand.

"Yes, I could... search for Josie!" Robert replied.

They both winced and almost lost balance as the mental pressure increased. Robert grabbed Amanda's hand, ready to pull them into the liminal void if things got worse. They now could hear the sound of rock hitting rock and the deep bass vibrations coming from the ground. Whatever was puppeteering them also made them ignore the sounds. Breaking the control earned them another massive pain in the brain.

"Where's Josie?" He shouted. Both turned their heads to and fro, trying to see something.

"Over there!" Amanda pointed with her free hand.

Plumes of dust were being shot into the air, causing a dust cloud to form. As the whole realm trembled, the dirt and rocks from Earth jumped and moved, the fine particulate falling deeper into the cracks in the gray-navy stone. Robert could feel his heartbeat drumming inside his ears. He expected something to come from behind and stab them in the back.

"That's not Josie," Robert mumbled.

He used prescience. No big dangers in the next minute. He had to portion his essence because he didn't have many chances to fill the tank. Robert decided to risk a pulse of life sense. He searched for lifeforce signatures in a narrow range around what one-star Archhumans should register as. He sensed nobody. It was as if Josie had vanished, died, fell through another passage, or moved outside of his range.

The spot they were standing on started to rise. All around them, gray-navy rock formations went up or down in no discernible pattern. The cacophony of crashing rocks increased in volume.

"We need to retrieve our items and break camp!" He shouted over the deafening rumble.

They parted to get all the items into their storage rings. Some things ended up taking more space than they should just because they didn't have time time to fold, deflate, and properly put them away.

The dirt and rocks seeped between the native rocks. Chunks of the road broke and fell to the sides. They moved up as most other rock formations moved down. One spherical formation, in particular, popped up at the end of a platform two hundred feet long that linked to where they stood.

Robert wanted to believe the movement was random but the shapes the rocks took were vaguely familiar. The pattern on the side of the spherical formation towering above them at the end of the platform, for example, resembled a face. As the rocks moved sideways, he noticed another platform on the other side of the spherical formation, symmetrical with the one they stood on.

"Amanda, does that look like a nose to you?" He pointed at a particular stone formation in the middle.

"Kind of?"

"And these five protrusions at the end of this flat region we stand, do they look—"

"— like fingers? As if we were standing on a giant hand, and that's a giant head, and the rocks between us are a giant arm?"

"I'm not the only one who's gone crazy, then. We need to run."

They dashed along the arm. The only saving grace of this rock giant was that it moved slowly.

*

*

Crossing the "arm", they got a glimpse of what was going on below. The rock giant was roughly humanoid, with two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. Judging by the arm's length and assuming the same proportions, the thing was six hundred feet tall. With a fifty feet error margin.

"This all started after I killed the book," Robert said.

"I admire your willingness to take accountability," Amanda replied. "But it doesn't matter."

"I think the passage opened because we read the book back on Earth," Robert conjectured.

"I loathe your desire to pass some of the blame on to me," Amanda retorted. "But it doesn't matter. We're going to die!"

He kept to himself his conclusion. Robert believed this stone giant was related to Cerebulon, the deity worshiped in and by the book. If that was the case, it wouldn't try to kill them. Its goals should be to grow their faith and convert people to their cause. But gods didn't exist, not in the sense people believed. Cerebulon might be a very strong eidolon, on a power level that blurred the lines enough for people to mistake it for a deity.

The rock giant tilted its head and stared up. Robert followed its gaze and found the black disk of the passage above. It now had... small things dangling from... people rappelling down from the passage. It screamed.

Amanda sensed a buildup of Earth essence. Wisps burst from the giant's body, leftover emanations of its power. "Duck!" She shouted and pulled him down.

Spears of gray-navy rock formed along the giant's body. They had to dodge and move out of the way. Robert got a cut along his left thigh, which he healed right after. The spears thrummed with power and in the next moment, they launched up.

Too scared to see the results of the stone spear volley, they waddled forward, trying to reach the shoulder before the creature decided to use its arm and tilt the path they were crossing. The terrain was too rough to run over and risk falling. They had to jump from rock to rock and keep their feet from slipping off the round edges or from getting stuck in the many cracks between the rocks. A mishap here could be fatal.

Robert could take them through the liminal void. But he decided to save that for a last-resort option. It was a trump card to break the mental influence of the giant on them. Best to wait until it tried to mess with their heads again, then. Fighting the giant was tantamount to suicide. They were only free to move right now because it was preoccupied with something else. Or because it considered the two Archs inoffensive.

He also thought about trying to take the giant to the liminal void with him but shot that idea down the next moment. He knew that creatures powerful enough or linked to him could move and act regardless of physical touch or not. The giant showed powers similar to the book. Mental contact was as good as physical contact as far as the liminal void was concerned.

They needed to get off the giant, and as far away from it as they could.