Mary exited the single-room building, leaving me alone inside. The first thing I did, of course, was to move the candle out from behind its shroud, so that the space would be properly lit. Then, I sat back in her pretentious chair and planned my next move.

The hole into the Crystal Gang's tunnels was to my side, with a ladder leading down into that dark Labyrinth below. It was times like these that I wished I had been more into Super's shit back in the day. I had absorbed only what was unavoidable, popular information. No more or less.

I recalled hearing something about the system of tunnels that the Heroes could neither navigate or seem to destroy down in these parts, created for smuggling. The route by which all Crystal traveled. But, I wasn't comfortable just leaving it at that. There were so many blanks.

Crossing the border by air was impossible without Crystal. I would need to stalk the city, looking for anyone who seemed like a user, and then follow them. That was my last option, as far as getting the drug now. Even then, I wasn't likely to find the quantity I was really after. Not with how little time I had left in the Favela.

I wasn't sticking around to see what kind of kill-squad one of the Six Kings could drum up for a problem like me. I was confident with my Power, but there were Supers that could nullify or cancel it. There would be no clever saves after that.

I was just getting used to the idea of my immortality, and I wasn't about to have some Trump-card come along and make a mockery of it. The King would have those up his sleeve. He would be able to take a threat like me.

I had to remember, Seraph ranked me at a potential Class One. 

That meant two of me could, at the top of our game, take on one of the Kings. Zed class were the gods of our world, and that fact definitely made me proud, given that they were within my reach. But, it also meant that three Tulpas could bring me down, even at my best.

The system of ranking was a Fibonacci sequence, with each lower-class needing more and more to take down the one above them. Tulpa was Class Two. It would take five Threes to stop him. Eight Four's to stop a three. And so on, and so on.

All of this weighed into what I decided to do next. Each higher class was also significantly rarer than the last. The Kings surrounded themselves with the best, but what were the odds they could pull together three Class Two's in under twenty-four hours?

"Shit," I groaned. The odds were good. They were damn good. Too good to stick around and find out at least, that was for sure.

I knew now that the minefields were impossible for me to cross. Some kind of Seraph explosives waited there, and they were shockingly good at dissembling all organic matter. The rocket Tulpa had hit me with wasn't half as thorough or violent.

The Labyrinth was looking more and more appealing as an option, despite the risks. Using my patience and adaptability, I could easily explore a maze to the fullest extent. And if that didn't work out, well... I would have exhausted my final option.

As much as I hated defeat, if I couldn't find my way through the maze, I would tunnel back to the surface and find my way to the ocean. Far be it from me to risk an immortal lifetime over my pride, as much as I loved it. I needed to live long enough to wrap my head around what two hundred years felt like. Currently, I couldn't imagine it.

This head of matted nasty hair had to go, first. Pain was meant on a biological level to signal the seriousness of damage sustained. Thereby, I hardly felt a thing when I was yanking it all out. My scalp and face quickly healed. 

I wanted to look good. Ideally, this would be the last time I was in human form. An unexpected novelty.

Bald was much better suited to my tastes. Old, muscle-bound, and bald, like a previously pro athlete. That was the look I went with, at least until and unless my Power decided to turn me into a mole man.

Tunnels were not a good place to adapt to, for aesthetic purposes. I kept that in mind, determining to spend as little time as possible. 

Looking down into the pit, I switched modes on my eyes until I could see the terrain well enough. It was a stretch to their limit, but Nightvision was well within the purview of my permanent upgrades. Echolocation, too.

As I jumped down and hit the dirt, I was sure this would be easy. I had the senses to navigate and a perfect eidetic memory if I needed to backtrack. With the candlelight fading behind me, I pressed on into the darkness.

"Screw you, Mary!" I shouted back, mockingly flipping a bird. I knew she couldn't hear or see me, but it felt good anyway. I wasn't about to let these Villains pull the same shit as the Heroes had. I was nobody's space monkey.

With time moving on, I watched my steps and kept moving south. Birds had the ability to know innately which direction was south, I recalled. The cells were pretty quiet, and I didn't have much sway over them at current. But, I tried nonetheless to set them to solving the problem.

The world where my Power lived was far away. Looking into it was like closing my eyes, just before sleep. Random blotches swam around in the empty space behind, and if I focused, I could almost lose myself in them. They would form into thoughts and associations; potential biological designs that were being considered in response to feedback loops. They would tell me if I was angry, lonely, or happy, by the implications of that.

It was really a meditative exercise at heart. The unconscious had a mind of its own, just like my Power. If I wanted to influence or consult it, I had to lay still enough and get low enough to shut up the overriding sound of my thoughts.

I could almost still hear Hickory's voice down there.

After several hours had passed, my eyes were seeing more clearly. The cells had completely failed to give me a sense of magnetic true north, but they had increased my visual reasoning skills. I could effortlessly layout a map in my head of every passage I had taken and picture it perfectly. Since I remembered which way South had been originally, it was merely a logic problem to find it down here.

Boredom was setting in, so I decided it was time to call the work down and start tunneling up. Surely, the minefield would be behind me now, succumbing to a lovely jungle expanse.

Using my Super strength, I did a split between the two side walls and started clawing my way upward. The jump down had been no more than fifteen feet. Surely, I thought, it couldn't take too long to get back up.

And it didn't. I broke through into open air in just a few minutes. Once the hole was widened enough, I wriggled my body up and through towards the surface. Only, I hadn't arrived at the surface.

Instead, I had come up into more tunnels, exactly the same as the last. That gave me a worried pause.

Stolen novel; please report.

I tried again, wondering if it was a fluke of the maze. But again, I came up into another tunnel, having risen well past fifteen feet altogether.

I scratched my chin and looked around, trying to figure it out and not freak out too much. "Have I been going down this whole time?" I never felt an incline. No. That couldn't be it. The dirt was too soft, still.

Suddenly, I realized just how bad the situation actually was. I had put myself waist-deep in shit. This was someone's Power, and I had walked right into its snare. These tunnels weren't navigable, because they broke the laws of geometry.

I could be a goddamn pocket dimension, for all I knew.

Immediately, I went back down to the ground level. My best bet at this point was to turn directly around and repeat all of my steps. If the labyrinth was at least logical, that would return me to the exit.

My mind was a focused blur for the next hours, going through that sequence and keeping my wits about me, in case there were any more surprises to be had down here.

The stress had amped up my Power some, and I was getting all kinds of reports. The cells were already prioritizing metabolic efficiency in case I faced starvation in this deathtrap. It was not the most encouraging thing for them to do.

Yet, it was dangerously necessary. As I returned with absolute certainty to my starting place, I looked up for the exit that did not exist.

"Fuck!" I shouted, punching the wall in anger. This was why Mary had left first. She left me hoping that I would be stupid enough to try using their tunnels to cross the wall. She didn't need assassins or an ambush. She just needed me to be this damn stupid.

Steadying myself, I did a sense check. There were no smells, no sounds, and no vibrations through the soil. Nothing lived down here. There were no sources of calories to harvest and survive with.

"Hibernation is possible for upwards of a hundred years." The flesh spoke directly to me. It was trying out designs, and they flashed through my mind's eye, much closer to the surface than before. I could cacoon, it showed, turning almost to solid carbon as I waited for any signs of life.

There was no way this labyrinth could be infinite, right? Surely, someone had to come through that I could use to get out. A smuggler with a map.

Who was I kidding? No human had made this place. It was not a physical maze which I could wait to cross one of the smugglers in, but a pocket dimension of some kind. Like Tartarus.

I was completely alone. Yet, it had to be navigable for the Crystal Smugglers, which told me something. "There are only two options," I said, thinking out loud. "They are either watched directly by whoever controls this place. He's omniscient, and just picks and chooses who can escape. That's option one. But, that can't be it..."

"Because it would mean there is no hope," the flesh agreed, sounding like a mountain of grinding metal. "You must assume hope to act..." The inhuman mind concerned me, speaking so openly now.

Was this consciousness present all of the time, watching and intervening only when it had to? Was I sharing this Power with someone... or something else?

I shook my head. There was no time for this. "Assuming I have a chance of escape," I said, "then the second possibility is that you can navigate this place with a map. The tunnel may be non-euclidean or some shit, but it's still logical. Let me check something."

Right around the next corner, my suspicions were confirmed. I had never doubled back before to really see it in action. Walking forward down the path showed me that where there should have been a three-way junction, there was just a left bend. My memory was perfect, so this could only mean one thing.

"The tunnels change," I noted.

The flesh grew quiet, recessing back into the abyss of the invisible. Waiting and watching.

The cells I still had on the surface were long gone by now. As time went on, they lost their connection to my Power. This explained why I had not come back in the middle of the ocean or in Florida when I died, where I no doubt still had cells surviving. In the short time after they're cast off, they adapt to survive autonomously, transforming into a plant or a small creature. But this does not last. These forms ossify.

The flesh confirmed all this for me, showing me a glimpse of my Power's inner workings. All this time, I had been shedding off cells that evolved into completely unique organisms. All the tails I had cut off to shed mass were slithering around, still alive. But they were no longer mine.

That connection didn't last. Not, at least, for very long. If I died or killed myself now, I would reset in the tunnels, only with less mass. That would only make things worse.

But I hadn't given up hope yet. An hour was all I needed, and I had a plan.

This Labyrinth was like an encrypted program, with map directions forming an arbitrary code of decryption. Every wrong move caused the password reset. The exact pin-code had to be entered in order to open the door of the pocket dimension. Only then could someone escape; traditional exploration was of no use.

Through deep breaths, I had to summon my concentration. What was to come next was beyond any feat I had managed with my Power. Even on the Crystal, I had not seen as deeply into the invisible chasm as I needed to now.

I fell down on my knees. With so much focus and stress, trying to screw my eyes shut and look into the secrets there, the cells went into a frenzy. They panicked, unsure of what adaption I was trying to force or why my conscious mind was under such duress. They lacked the intelligence to interpret abstract threats, and they were not yet ready to take direct commands. I lacked the mental discipline to issue them.

"Give it to me!" I tried, all the same, to order them directly. Controlling so much complexity without mediating, I was more likely to give myself cancer than to create what I needed. 

The Power had to cooperate for this to work. But it only responded to selective pressure.

The roots of the prefrontal cortex struggled to bolster their feedback over the lower parts of the brain. The amygdala protested. It wanted override control, to keep the balance of power in check.

I had to dig even deeper than that. My Power was influenced by the unconscious more than the conscious mind, but that was no more its home than any system of my body. It hovered outside, like an observer.

"Why won't you listen?" I strained to get a response.

"I am that which must be. You are contingent. Fallible." Hunger, pain, joy, fear, anger, lust, and every other emotion flashed through my mind. The flesh was reminding me; it made the decisions. Not me. It decided what I valued, and my rational mind did no more than listen and obey.

I grit my teeth and felt muscles tear through my limbs with the tension that was growing to a fever-pitch. "But I have eyes that you don't! I see threats that you can't!" One of my femurs snapped, but I only continued to increase the stress. I had to make the flesh listen, no matter how much it hurt. And it was agony, breaking through my Power's protective barriers. "Gah! I'm the one who s-sees the f-future, you bastard! If you don't grant me this... and trust me. Then... we're going to die. Do you understand that? This labyrinth is a rational problem, and you'd die without me! Pay attention, goddamn you!"

Suddenly, my muscles began to calm. As they relaxed, it was a decision that welled up from the foundations of my nervous system. They were tired and the fight was over. My own rationalization to stop came after.

The bones repaired themselves. The flesh assented. "So be it. This is your purpose."

Without wasting another second, I took action. The invisible channel had opened wide to my direct control, and a new flood of information poured in. Each dead skin cell that I cast off in the last hour was reporting to me. Each was under my command.

"Give it to me!" I bellowed, eyes going wide. All of my physical senses went dim as the overwhelming complexity of the Power assaulted my mind. Neurons lit up like Christmas to handle the load of so much biological data. The mediation barely made it possible to directly give them a design.

With a numb crunch, I started biting off my fingers, one at a time. Once spat out on the ground, the digits twitched and convulsed as information came to them. Through my Power, I could communicate with the cells and send out the final order.

They turned black and hard where they lay. Spindly legs burst from their sides, and insectoid wings unfurled on their back. Ten fingers and ten toes quickly became something else entirely.

My consciousness spread out and it was an uncanny feeling. I had multiple, discrete bodies. Each went their own way down the passages of the Labyrinth. Each had wants and desires of their own.

Triumph rose in my blood as the flew at rapid speed into the black. This place was a single password of incredible length. But, with enough tries, it wouldn't matter. I knew the basics of computer security as well as anyone, and everyone had heard of a brute force attack.

Just as the hour was coming to its end and the drones began to lose their connection, I saw it. After so many thousands of combinations, a spiral staircase appeared. It rose up towards dazzling light and freedom. Out of twenty workers trying every possible combination in perfect synchronization, I had found it. I had beaten the trap.

At last, I knew the password.

My blood was boiling, filled to the brim with adrenaline. When I got out of this place, there would be hell to pay for Mary and all the Conquistador's men. They thought they had me dead to rights, but I had survived, and I would take my pound of flesh in penance.

The Crystal was going to be mine. None would bind me.