My smoky self solidified on the lower side of the rubble blocking the stairwell. I followed the stairs downward to the entrance, my senses already extending into the city cavern. I noted the fallen pillar above me, as wide as a redwood tree, and the chasm in front of me, plunging toward piles of debris from blocks of fallen buildings.

Across from me, after a gap of twenty or thirty feet, dozens of rectangular ‘caves’ opened in the side of the opposite wall of the chasm. They looked like cliff dwellings but were just the interiors of rooms and hallways sheared in half when this part of the city had fallen away.

I looked upward and considering climbing to the pillar, then walking across like it was a balance beam. That made sense. That was the easiest way to start toward the heights of the city, where I planned to make a stand against the spitbats.

Except after a moment, I threw a hatchet upward instead. When the blade bit into the pillar, I swung out into the chasm on the attached smoke-chain. Wind snagged my hair and I threw my other hatchet before the first chain could dissolve--but the act of throwing slowed me down slightly, as I sort of propelled myself backward. Also, I wasn’t going that fast in the first place, because I’d aimed the first hatchet too near to my current position instead of closer to the center.

So my swing faltered a bit and I compensated too much and ... well, I’ll just say that it didn’t end up being what I expected, a triumphal webslinging swing like Spiderman blazing down the streets of Manhattan. Still, I did eventually manage to land in one of the cave-like rooms on the other side of the chasm. I’d call that a win.

After that, I climbed until I reached an upper street of the city. Clambering upward didn’t look cool, but it also didn’t require me frantically throwing my hatchets over and over like some kind of hyperactive circus act, afraid that the smoke-chains would fade the instant I stopped making new ones.

I pulled myself onto one of the highest streets, then prowled past cluttered squares with broken statues, under the elaborate railings of tilted windows, and scanned for spitbats above me. Well, and for the shittily-named ‘Rindian Stiletto Snails’ around me.

I won’t bother describing all the time I spent harvesting snails. I’ll just mentioned that I did get stung once, despite the fact that my spheresense easily detected the little jabbing cords. I got a little sloppy after I stuffed myself. Still, with my new resistance the paralytic barely affected me.

And with my new ability to deal spectral damage?

None of them survived a single blow.

After a time, I followed the curved ramp of a fallen stupa upward to a high, wide ziggurat--and dozens of projectiles entered my awareness, hailing down at me from above. For an instant I thought they were bullets but of course they were spit.

A flock of spitbats was diving at me from the cavern ceiling, gobbing and hawking. But that time I could track each individual wad. And that time, I danced around them.

Well, I say ‘danced,’ but I more whirled and ducked, and at the same time threw my hatchets. One chopped through a bat, and the other chopped through two. Cutting them but also stunning them, with damage straight to their little spitting souls. Not much damage, but enough that I noticed.

The flock split around the smoke-chains issuing behind my hatchets but two bats were too close, and rammed into the suddenly-solid air before dropping to the floor, flapping and injured.

My ability to track dozens of pebble-sized projectiles simultaneously thrilled me. It didn’t matter if they were behind me, above me: I observed them all with same reflexive ease with which my vision tracked a fastball pitch when I was at bat. Like, I might not be able to make out the stitching on the ball, but I could more-or-less tell if it was heading for the strike zone. Nothing special, right? Sure, but now imagine being able to do that with dozens of balls whipped at you by a whole mob of pitchers.

Welcome to the big leagues.

Still, there were too many narcotic loogies to dodge them all. That didn’t bother me at first. I barely felt them anyway. It would take dozens of direct hits to even slow me down, and with my heightened senses I managed to direct most impacts to the few intact bits of my armor and leggings.

Though by ‘impacts’ I meant ‘gobs of narcotic saliva.’ Which was gross, but it was still better than the blood and guts that sprayed as my hatchets sliced through bat after bat as they swarmed me. I fell into killing rhythm for a handful of heartbeats, my imbued blades killing almost every bat they struck ... then I dropped to my knees and waved my hatchets overhead in looping shapes.

A loose coil of smoke chains unfurled above me--and was pelted with spit. The smoke shielded me from getting struck by an overdose. I waved my axes overhead like a bellydancer with finger-cymbals, refreshing the chains for nine or ten seconds. Then I let the smoke dissipate, now kneeling with my head bowed and my back toward the bats.

A handful of wads splatted the remains of my armored jacket, and some splashed onto my bare skin, but not many ... and I stayed in place. I hunched there as if I’d lost my mind. I even shifted and mumbled to add a certain dramatic flair, as the cloud of bats lowered toward me.

One brave bat landed on me to feed. It dug its fangs into my shoulder, not even piercing my skin through my padding and my fortitude.

The others saw the first one chomping down, and must’ve gotten jealous. Moments later, I was covered in a living blanket. Dozens of claws dug into me, dozens of teeth scraped me. Dozens more bats scratched against the stone floor in a wide messy circle around me. They were clumsy when not in flight, but their needle teeth were sharp, and it wasn’t long before the first ones started drawing blood

I waited until there was a great mass of them around me, then I chopped and spun and hacked. Even glancing blows now hit like baseball bats or ... or stun-batons. Yeah. That’s what it felt like, like low-wattage stun-sticks that jolted them straight in the soul. I threw and retrieved both hatchets, trying to fence them in with smoke chains. My fencing needed work, leaving massive gaps, but the appearance of solid rails in the air panicked the bats and my hatchets flashed with lethal purpose. Blood splattered, amputated wings and hind-parts littered the ground, and I tore through them.

That time, they retreated.

The surviving bats flapped wildly toward the ceiling, and I did a little spitting of my own--because of the nasty bat blood in my mouth--as I trotted across the ziggurat, then through an arcade of arches, heading for the cover of an intact roof.

Halfway there I noticed the cavern ceiling ripple. Yeah, the entire ceiling.

Hundreds of bats were getting to swarm. They tensed to hunt, as if they heard the cries of the ones I’d hurt--and wanted revenge. Even as I realized what I was sensing, the first plunging flock of them dove toward me. I leaped to the side, to the cover of a doorway, as wings whipped through the arcade of arches. They plummeted from above, then leveled out and blurred past me, five feet above the floor--scanning for me with their dark-adapted senses--before jetting upward an instant when they reached the wall at the end of the arcade

The entire flock of them must’ve been wheeling in the sky then flying back to the start like some kind of killing Ferris wheel, because they kept coming, they didn’t stop. An endless river of them, flying as fast as hunting hawks, roared past me. Yet they didn’t attack me, I wasn’t sure why

Princess murmured in my mind.

I said.

A grin tugged at my lips. <‘Expectoration?’ Even you can say the word ‘spit!’>

Stolen story; please report.

I told her.

she said, but I’d heard a hint of mischief in her tone.

She told me.

I said.

she sniffed.

We shared a mind, so I knew that wasn’t entirely true. Princess was sweet, and often silly. She liked to amuse, and to be amused. She wore her affection on her sleeve or her ... her many sleeves. She enjoyed being a little eccentric, and she wasn’t afraid of showing how much she cared.

She was also a predator. Born to hunt. Born to kill.

Now that we’d truly bonded, I realized that I’d felt the echo of her instincts more than once. They’d saved my life more than once. I’d never been a pacifist; I’d always been pretty physical. Yet I’d never been a killer. And one big reason that a cut-throat pragmatism came so easily to me now was the touch of a spider in my mind.

And here’s the other thing: even if I’d largely forgotten it in my previous life, humans were predators, too.

“So let’s disinterestly inquire upside these little spitting furlongs’ heads,” I said.

I shifted position in my place at the side of the arcade, then threw my hatchets toward the arches on the other side. My blades clipped two bats, but I wasn’t even aiming for them. I immediately recalled my hatchets and threw them again and again, forming a sort of lattice of smoke-chains across the arcade.

After the third bat broke its back ramming into a chain, the rest of them veered upward. With the endless cycle of bats briefly broken, I stepped into the center of the arcade, a hatchet in each hand, and waited two seconds for the final chains to vanish.

Then the bats returned, reforming the circle, swarming me from the front.

Flying directly at me--directly at us, because I felt Princess’ mind within my own, tracking targets, measuring distances. Hungry for slaughter.

A strange relaxation came over me, almost a trance, shifting into flow. The spitbats flashed toward me, four or five abreast, I blocked spit with the flat of one hatchet while chopping with the other then juking, chopping with the first hatchet, blocking, slashing, dodging, dropping a hatchet for one heartbeat, just long enough to catch a bat’s throat in my fist and squeezing before tossing the corpse at the oncoming avalanche, then chopping again, hunching and jumping, clubbing a bat with the mace-head of a hatchet while spinning it to cleave another bat with the blade. I dissolved into smoke and shifted a few feet then reappeared with new targets. I crushed them with stun-baton strokes of the flat of my blade. I bisected them before they knew where I was, and I hacked and pivoted and hacked like a machine, like a combine harvester reaping a field of corn.

They kept coming. They flowed toward me and the pile of carcasses grew so large that I had to step back farther and farther so I wouldn’t lose my maneuverability, ankle-deep in the slaughterhouse filth, until at last--at long last--we felt the touch of the narcotics overwhelming our resistance.

I frayed into smoke and drifted to the side of the arcade, under the overhang, then returned to my body and looked at what I’d done. It was a massacre. An absolute slaughter. And I hadn’t come out of it completely unscathed, myself.

Health: 29/60

Which was weird, because I didn’t feel halfway dead. Though I was pretty sure that my normal human health, my health when I’m been summoned to this world, had been 23 or 24. So even at half health I was healthier than I’d been when I’d been fully healthy before. The more I thought about it, the stranger the word ‘health’ sounded in my head. Healthy health health. How much health would stealth health elf if a stealth wealth could health elf?

Whoa. Yeah, okay, I was feeling a little drugged.

So I squatted with my back against the wall and breathed until the heavy, trippy feeling abated somewhat. Then I straightened, and Princess told to wait longer, until the ‘heavy, trippy feeling’ abated entirely.

she told me.

I slurred.

I said.

And then, I swear, I somehow felt her blush in my mind. She’d really liked all that murder.

she said.

I said.

she said, before fading into the depths of my mind.

I smiled, then slid down the wall again, because she’d been right. Still, I didn’t wait until my mind cleared completely before standing again. I just stuck to the safer areas beneath the overhang as I looted the heaps of dead, splattered bats. If I hadn’t had my boon, I would’ve needed to expose myself to the ceiling to harvest the beads as I carved into the corpses.

Instead, I just strolled along, bamfing beads into my domain.

Hundreds of them.

My haul was heavy on the foams instead of pearls, which surprised me--and made me wonder if the ‘treasure’ I received was adjusted according to difficulty. Which made no sense, except neither did little magic beads tucked away inside of all kinds of creatures.

And it didn’t matter. Despite getting about as many foams as pearls, I still ended up with a handful of golds. So I ate one. Well, I wasted one, really, but I was tired of feeling slow and muddled. Also, apparently I’d been bleeding from needle-bites and claw-scratches all over my body. I was so used to pain these days, I’d barely noticed.

Except when the pain stopped, I suddenly felt gooooood. My mind was razor sharp, my body was goddamn superhuman. The Hatchetman. Yeah, except I could also turn to smoke, shoot smoke-chains, and store an entire armory in my personal dimension. Not just an armory: my domain let me store golden beads, magical healing potions, between my teeth. Even among the gemmed, that had to be rare. Most of them, I’d guess, would need to toss a bead from a pouch into their mouth.

Not me. I was too badass for that. I was too--

Princess said.

she said, with barely-suppressed humor,

“Sounds like a plan,” I said aloud.

I said ... then I realized what she meant.

she said.

I stepped into the open, and into a wall of stench even worse than my own. The bat corpses stank. No new flock descended from above, so I took the opportunity to put some distance between myself and the slaughterhouse stench. I climbed the ziggurat to the second-highest level and walked all the way around the square terrace ... and still no bats swarmed me.

I felt them on the ceiling, but they didn’t attack.

So I climbed to the uppermost level ... and they still didn’t made a move.

“Huh,” I said. “I guess they learned their lesson.”

Then I braced myself, because that was exactly the kind of thing I said before an entire mountain of shit dropped on my head. But nothing happened. I wandered unmolested across the rooftops, pausing only to cull a few snails, until I found the aqueduct. I drank and washed--thank God--and filled my water-skins and then marched back and forth along the length of the aqueduct scanning the ceiling for the place I’d fallen from the higher level.

When I didn’t find it, I figured I knew what that meant.

I followed the aqueduct upstream to the place where it entered this city chamber from a dark, narrow tunnel that wasn’t much larger than the aqueduct itself. The current must’ve carried me across the city from wherever I’d landed. So I crawled into the tunnel clinging to one side of the aqueduct, using my smoke-chains to haul myself across the crumblings areas and to brace myself when I slipped. Anyway. It was wet and uncomfortable, but also kind of exhilarating.

I eventually emerged into a ... I don’t know, like a pump room? There were loads of pipes and basins and smaller aqueducts, but mostly there was a waterfall roaring down from above. Half of the cascading water filled funnels and pools, but the other hand just vanished into the depths below me.

“Welp,” I said, looking upward. “I guess that’s where we came from. At least it’s an easy climb.”

I headed for the stone steps carved into the wall, which were so wet from the spray and mist in the room that a trickling waterfall tumbled down them, as well. Slippery as hell, but if I fell I’d just anchor myself with a smoke-chain, so I headed upward pretty quickly. And very happily. Because those stairs, rose higher than I could sense. Definitely higher than a single layer of the Old City. I halfway expected them to lead me all the way to the basement, just under Ryetown.

And then I completely expected that, because:

SUCCESS! You discovered an exit from the Old City. Only took you nine days, and--

“Nine days?” I blurted.”I’ve been down here for nine days?”

SUCCESS! You discovered an exit from the Old City. Only took you nine and a half days, and a pitched battle against ... snails.

“And spitbats and wraiths,” I grumbled. “Homicidal goddamn ghosts I couldn’t even touch before I tiered up. Throw me a bone here.”

SUCCESS! Fair enough. And spitbats and wraiths.

SUCCESS! Also, you tiered up, which is a major milestone, though it functions as its own reward.

REWARD: One level upon reaching the surface, plus a fighting chance to drive the Six Coves forces from Ryetown before they seize the spire ... which will lead to far greater rewards.

“Sounds good to me,” I said, and headed up the stairs.