CLANG!

CLANG!

CLANG! BUFF!

Gora slammed into the wall, then slid down. She shook her head as she struggled to her feet, stars still dancing in front of her eyes. It took a few moments but eventually she managed to focus her eyes on her father, flexing the hand that he had just punched her with.

“I must say, Daughter, I thought this was going to be a very brief encounter. Quickly see how my daughter had grown up, cut off her head and back to the hells. But I am really starting to enjoy this quality bonding time!” he said, grinning.

“Fuck you…” Gora said and spit out a gob of blood and a broken tooth before readying her sword.

It was not going well. As much as she was loath to admit it, she had no chance here. Her father was stronger than her, faster than her and had years, centuries more experience at fighting. And even if she could get lucky somehow, his regeneration was absolutely bullshit.

He was playing with her, that much had rapidly become clear. And Gora hated being patronized.

“Now, now, that’s no way to speak to your father,” he admonished her, waggling his finger. “Some respect is in order.”

“You don’t deserve shit. What you’re going to get, is the deepest, darkest Infernal pits for all eternity,” Gora growled. “Which is exactly where you’re going to go when we finish here. Once I tell Mother about this little loophole, she’ll close this one too. You will stay there and rot.”

Nezzerorth leaned on his sword and cocked his head.

“First off,” he said in his low bass rumble, “I think you have a slight misconception of the nature of the Infernals. Honestly, it’s not so bad unless you’re…” He waived vaguely in her direction.

“Secondly, how, pray tell, do you intend to tell your mother anything lacking a head?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know? You can’t kill me here. If I die inside the Tree, I get shat back out the portal we entered by along with the rest of my team. The chunk of my soul it eats in the process will be unpleasant, but nothing that I haven’t been through before. Won’t be able to lead teams to the Tree for a while, but I’ll recover in time,” Gora said with a shrug.

“I figure the monsters outside have had a chance to wander off now, so you can just kill me so I can get back to my team.” She smiled back at him, dropping her guard.

He didn’t move. Instead, he just stared at her, his grin growing even wider.

“Gora!” an unexpected shout made her look around. Rita? “Is that true? Is Ava going to be okay? She got eaten by a giant potato!”

Nezzerorth turned and also looked up at where Rita could just vaguely be seen through the blue clouds of fog.

“Why hello there! Are you Gora’s friends?” he called out.

“Umm… yes?” Rita replied after a moment’s hesitation.

“Yes, Rita, Ava will be fine. A little worse for wear but she’ll live,” Gora shouted back, at the same time glad and annoyed at the interruption. No, to be honest, she was mostly annoyed at the monster in front of her pretending to be polite and civilized while he wanted to kill her. Asshole.

“Yes, your other friend should be just fine,” Nezzerorth agreed. “Unlike Gora here. Sadly, I’m afraid she’s not going to be coming back out. But could you do me a favour? If I send her head out, could you make sure it gets to her mother and tell her that it’s from ‘Nezzerorth’? I want the bitch to know it was me that butchered her little girl.”

“Wow, Gora, your dad’s fucked in the head,” Rita called out from above.

Great. So she’d heard that part.

“Yes, he is. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Worst case he kills me and I lose a bit of my soul. I’ll see you outside, okay? Try to stay alive. I don’t know what will happen if you die.”

“Okay, I’m going to go then,” Rita called back. “But before I do, your message says ‘Contracts must be honoured’, okay? I don’t know what that means, hope it helps. Bye!”

There was movement and suddenly Rita was gone.

Well, that had been weird. Gora had never heard of something like that happen before, but everything around Rita was weird. Maybe she’d been crawling along the mist with her spider powers or something?

Gora’s father chuckled. “Ha! Contracts must be honoured indeed. By the way, it’s half, actually.” He hadn’t moved from his position the whole time, leaning casually on his oversized sword.

“What?” Gora asked.

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“You lose half your soul if you die here. The Tree is quite precise in the excision, too. Very neat. It puts most demons I know to shame,” he explained.

Gora narrowed her eyes. Half? That was… a lot. She was not an expert on the soul trade, but that was a dangerous amount to be losing all at once. Good information, though. The Delvers Guild would pay well for that kind of knowledge. If it was even true.

“Does it matter?” she replied. “Half won’t kill me.”

“Was that the prototype?” her father suddenly asked, pointing at the sky where Rita had called down from a short time before.

Prototype? What was he talking about?

“What do you mean?” Gora asked suspiciously. The last thing she wanted was for her father to take an interest in anyone else.

“The Nightmare Spawn that was acting up? She was, wasn’t she? Of course she was. The Tree wouldn’t have allowed her in the internal areas otherwise.”

Gora shut her mouth and listened carefully. Whether he was intending to or not, her father was spilling secrets that no Delver had ever even gotten close to unearthing. Internal areas? Nightmare Spawn acting up? There was a lot more to the Nightmare Trees than the Guild knew about…

“That’s why I’m here, you know,” Nezzerorth continued. “Because of her. Apparently, the Tree wanted her badly enough that it was willing to make a contract to get rid of you. Do you know what it offered me?”

“A pile of orphans to torture and kill?” Gora said.

“Oh please. Half your soul, actually.” He lifted his sword, resting it on his shoulder. “The other half.”

Gora’s eyes widened. “You’re lying. It can’t do that.”

He shrugged, sending a great many muscles rippling. “No, it cannot. But I can. After slaying you I will take my share, and then the tree will take its share. And you will be left with nothing.”

He grinned widely, revealing razor edged teeth like daggers as he swung his sword around to hold it in front of him.

“Still want to take the quick way out?”

----------------------------------------

It was a huge relief to hear that Ava was okay. Not just Ava, either, but everyone! Losing part of their soul sounded bad, but Gora had not seemed worried so maybe they did not need it all?

She had seen Bob raking a giant sandpit, but his clue had said “Do not get distracted”, so she had elected not to bother him. He seemed to be doing fine, anyway. She was a bit miffed that his challenge appeared to be easier than hers, but she had no idea what the story there was. Maybe the sand ate him if he stopped raking.

There was another room with the clue “Return to your instincts”, which could have been Zaxier’s, but trying to look through the walls proved pointless. Blue mist all the way. Whether that boded well or ill for the poor cat was a mystery.

After Gora’s room – Gora’s dad, wow, that was awkward… - the only way left to go was towards the far end of the walkway, through the passage into the brown wall. The remaining doors had had no clue written next to them. Trying to peer inside netted no results.

She was just trying to psyche herself up for moving on when Alice pulled out a suspiciously familiar looking vial from her small backpack.

“Oh! Ava’s vial of essence got duplicated as well?” Rita asked. Alice had appeared in this place with a copy of her knife, but it looked like that was not all.

“Looks like it,” Alice replied, opening the vial.

“That’s a relief,” Rita replied. “I thought we’d run out and wouldn’t be able to talk to… hey, wait what are you doing!?”

Alice briefly sniffed the contents before downing them in one gulp.

She shrugged. “It looked tasty.”

Rita stared at her in shock. “So, you just drank the magical coolant fluid? Are you insane? It glows!”

“Calm down, calm down,” Alice said, making placating gestures. “I had a hunch. And if worst comes to worst and it kills me, well, death isn’t permanent here, is it? This was the perfect time to test.”

Rita stared at Alice sceptically. “It could have just made you wish that it killed you. But okay, fine, what was your hunch?”

“You remember the homing beacon thing we had? That weird sense that we used to find Gora and the others? It came after we sucked out that Masked corpse.”

Rita shuddered. “Eww, please don’t call it that. I’m pretty sure I’m still going to have nightmares about that.”

“Oh, toughen up, you baby. Well, this stuff looked the same as the gunk you threw up afterwards,” Alice explained. “I had a hunch the reason we weren’t regaining Essence like Ava said we should was because we had to eat it. When we ate that Masked, we got our last batch. Make sense?”

“Eww! You basically ate vomit!”

Alice smacked Rita on the back of her head. “Stop acting like a child and think for once. This is survival.”

Rita rubbed the back of her head, glaring at Alice. Vegetables were one thing; Alice was talking about sticking her teeth in dead things! Surely that was some kind of health hazard? What kind of gross, disgusting diseases could one get by chewing corpses? Still, Rita could not see any logical reason why Alice was wrong, as much as she wished that she were. And the glowing fluid did look strangely appetizing. She caught a small part of herself wishing Alice had saved her some.

“So…?” Rita asked.

“So what?”

“So how was it?” Rita asked.

Alice shrugged. “Fizzy. And surprisingly filling!”

----------------------------------------

Ever since she had woken up, the entire environment had been eerie and weird. The Tree had taken it to a new level, with the blue fog and the creepy circus tent, but at least those had still been things Rita recognized. But here, through the passage at the end of the walkway, was the first time it looked downright alien.

They were standing on a ledge on the inside of a hollow cylinder, stretching upwards and downwards, seemingly to infinity. Three branches of the same greyish brown material as the walls met in the middle, forming a kind of wide platform there, suspended above the dizzying drop.

The whole thing had the same texture as bone.

One of the branches was connected to the ledge they were standing on, and provided a reasonably passable, if terrifyingly high, path to reach the middle.

What immediately drew Rita’s attention was not, surprisingly, the three eyes embedded in the walls that had swivelled to stare at her and Alice when they entered, though they were damn close. Eyes were scary, but all they could do were stare. It was instead the pulsing orb on the centre platform, held up and supported by a writhing, wriggling mass of slithering tentacles.

“Well, fuck,” Rita said, staring at the slithering, squirming ball of worms.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Alice replied.

The sudden realization came to Rita: they were inside a tree. A giant, weird, alien fucking tree. One with eyes and tentacles and a big, pulsing, orb-thingy. A heart?

“C̵̤̱̈́͑̆͌͛͊̿O̴̤̮̗̮̝̳̒M̵̱̞̹̉̍͌̍̊͋̎̋̚Ĕ̷̪̆͊̈̍́̚͠͝ ̸̨͔̪̟̼̹͒̈̋͘̕T̸̡̼̘̩͖̖̊̍̔̒̐͋͜͜͠O̸̰̞͙̲̘̔̈ ̴̬̫̞̣̮͓̩̽́̎͛́́̈́̀͜ͅͅM̵̲̫̹̮̜͗̌͒̌̽̄̓͋̕ͅẼ̴̺͈̞̳͖̼̼̭̏̈́̈́̀̔̅͘͜”

The words seemed to emanate from the walls and the ground and all around them in deafening volume. Yet, somehow, there was no way to mistake the source.

The pulsing orb on the middle platform. It wanted them to come closer.