CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE HOLE IN REALITY
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Theo
Bethany Mattis was from Florida. I had no fucking clue how that was possible, but there it was. She’d been kidnapped from her home on a farm south of a small town called LaBelle, right near the edge of one of the Everglades Preservation areas.
Once she realized she wasn’t going to be boiled alive in a cookpot, she got right down to setting things straight, and she was a chatterbox as she did so.
The key to her shackle had been within reach the whole time, hanging on the same torch post the goblin had held her against. With twenty or thirty goblins surrounding her, it might as well have been miles away.
She unlocked herself as my healing aura slowly brought my burning face back to a more manageable level of pain. I didn’t know how well the healing aura worked in comparison to the potions, so as soon as I was able to get to my feet, I did so, desperately searching the goblin’s bodies for a potion. None of the ones in the cavern had dropped any, so I’d had to blearily make my way into the tunnel where an absolute mountain of treasure awaited me.
Thankfully, I did find two potions and about six more mana ones.
Bethany had gone quiet as I left the cavern, but she perked up as I walked back in with a much steadier gait and a steadily smoother face.
“Ahh… H-Hi?” she said, suddenly nervous. “H-how… how did you fix your face?”
Wonderful. She was as socially awkward as I was. That was great.
“The same way I fixed your throat. When you kill these things, they occasionally drop healing potions,” I said. “Now, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take you back to the surface. These things kidnapped my wife, and if your situation is any indication of hers, I need to move.”
“Oh. Shit. Y-yeah, okay, mister,” she said. “Sorry for… y’know. Talking your ear off before. I talk when I’m nervous. Or… or terrified.”
I shook my head. “That’s okay. It helped. Kept me awake… I do not recommend getting hit by those fireballs. I should’ve taken the time to stop and kill that bastard when I had the chance, but I was worried about what that last goblin might do to you.”
“Th-thanks for that,” she said. “So, what’s your name?”
“Theodore Tande. Most people just call me Theo though…” I said softly. I eyed the piles of loot hungrily but decided I only really had time for the things that glowed gold. Every item that gave off light down here was worth its weight in the stuff anyway.
I gathered all the potions and threw them into my bag, wishing I had fashioned some sort of faster way of getting to them. The glass, at least, had proven quite sturdy as none of them had broken in my duffle.
“Theodore? Not what I expected…” she said.
“And… what did you expect?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Roland, or Arthur. What… happened in that cave? I heard… screams. Lots of them. Did you kill them all with that mace?” she asked but didn’t give me time to answer before continuing. “Don’t get me wrong! I’m super grateful I’m not boiling in that pot. I think they were arguing about how best to cook me! But like… damn.”
“Can we talk while we walk? I’ll get you up to the surface… though I’m from Missouri. I have no clue how to get you back to Florida,” I said. “Still, any place up there is better than down here.”
“True that,” she said, before getting up to follow me.
I noticed her wrists and ankles bore the same marks as Seok’s had as she stood, indicating she too had been tied with that rough rope and carried down here, but the potion had dulled the scars considerably. She was young but not a teenager. I would’ve guessed between twenty and twenty-two. She was barefoot, with dark skin and curly black hair.
The Booyagh and the goblin that had almost killed Bethany hadn’t dropped anything, but from my first potion hunt, I knew that there was plenty of loot inside the tunnel.
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“Holy shit,” the girl exclaimed, hesitating before the tunnel’s entrance as she saw the carnage within. The ceiling was dripping with blue blood. The smashed-in head of the other spellcaster looked particularly gruesome, with blood leaking out of the ruined skull, bones clearly visible.
I remembered a time only a few days ago when such a sight would’ve been more than enough to make me lose my lunch. I was about to turn, hoping it wouldn’t be too difficult to convince her to follow me back through the mess.
“You fucked these guys up!” she said with glee.
‘Well. I suppose that’s a better reaction than I was expecting,” I thought.
I took the time to gather the items that glowed. Two wristguards, and a shiny dagger, both of which needed the use of an identifier before I could figure out what they did.
There was a leather shirt, which Bethany happily donned, as well as three pairs of gloves, none of which seemed any more useful than the ones I already had. Weird.
I was about to insist that we get a move on when I noticed another item. I’d seen these before but I hadn’t yet figured out how to use them.
It was another Portal Stone.
‘God a portal back to the surface would be fucking useful right now,’ I thought as I picked the stone up.
The identifiers had been pretty intuitive. Look at the item through them. Actually, everything had been at least marginally intuitive so far. Why not a portal stone? Since the last time I’d seen one of these, I’d learned that the waypoints existed, but I hadn’t really experimented with them. If I could teleport to one of those, why not a stone that could get us out of here?
As a test, I tried to will some of my mana into it but that did nothing. The next thing I did was just throw the stone at the ground.
I jerked back and bumped my head on a stalactite as a hole in reality sprang to life, emitting a beautiful blue and black aura that was a little hard to look at.
“What the fuck!?” the girl screamed, and I didn’t fare much better.
Still, the portal just stood there. Waiting. It was an oval a little larger and wider than myself. I walked all the way around it and found that no matter how I faced it, it always seemed to face toward me. It turned with me, bending reality around itself. It reminded me a little bit of the twilight zone.
“Okay, that works,” I said when I was marginally sure that some nether-beast wasn’t about to pop out and eat us. Instinctually, I knew it wouldn’t. The blue light wasn’t demonic. It was… comforting. Warm. I could smell the familiar Eucalyptus candles Rio got from Bath and Body Works. I could pick out Genji’s unmistakable odor, and I could almost feel the wood of our dilapidated back deck that had only barely passed the inspection.
This was home.
“What the fuck is that!?” Bethany cried.
“Your way out,” I said with a certainty I had no way to justify. “It’s almost an hour’s walk back to the entrance, and you don’t have any shoes. Instead, we need to go through here. It should take us back to my home on the surface.”
The girl gulped audibly. “Wh-whatever you say, Sir Theodore.”
I snorted. At least she had a sense of humor. Then again, maybe she wasn’t joking? I was wearing a breastplate, after all.
I grabbed her hand and she followed me through the portal. A swirl of blue lights covered my vision as the world faded away, almost exactly the same as the red ones from the waypoint. The world faded back into view on a familiar scene and the sound of a dog barking her head off.
“M-mister Tande?” said a voice.
I turned and saw a rifle pointing at me from behind my own couch in my living room, but the dog held no such fear as she almost bowled into me, barking gleefully.
“Seok?” I asked. “Don’t shoot! It’s me!”
“Wh-what the hell is going on here!?” came a significantly less familiar voice. I turned and saw an overweight cop holding a shaky gun pointed at the both of us.
Shit.
I held up both my hands, and Bethany did the same, though I was forced to keep one hand petting the crazy dog at my feet as she kept jumping all over the place with excitement. The poor thing was still limping a little bit, and I wondered if I could give her a potion.
“H-hands in the air!” the nervous officer said, quite redundantly, as both of us were already doing so as best we could.
“Seok… I guess you saw my message?” I asked.
“Y-yes. H-how…?”
“Long story. They’ve still got my wife down there somewhere. I need to go back,” I said. “This is Bethany. They were about to boil her in a fucking cookpot. I don’t know what these things are, but they need to die, Seok.”
“Shut up!” the cop barked, but I could tell he was scared shitless. If I had to guess, he was probably the same age as Bethany. Credit to him though, he seemed to be keeping his cool.
He pulled out a walkie-talkie and held it down the button before saying, “Joel, you better get your ass back in here. Call for backup too. I don’t know what the hell I just saw, but two people just appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the living room. I’m thinking some sort of trap door shit, but with that creature on the front porch and now this, I’m thinking this is above our pay grade.”
I still hadn’t moved, but I didn’t have time for all of this. I hadn’t let myself entertain the thought yet, but what if my wife was chained beside one of those pots just like Bethany had been? It was one thing to think she was in trouble, but another entirely to know for sure. I certainly wasn’t going to wait around here for this cop to believe me.
I pushed the mana needed into the waypoint ability. I didn’t know what it would look like to them, but I took a moment to look at the cop. “Please get them to come down as soon as you can. I don’t know if I’m going to be enough. Tell them to bring guns. Lots of guns.”
“H-hey! Stop! Stop whatever you’re–!”
The rest of his words were cut off as a flash of red colors filled my vision and I returned to the depths once more.
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