“I’m going to kill you at the exit, maybe earlier,” Tanya told Nathan, explaining to him why three out of his four options for what to do with the cryma were irrelevant, “so that just leaves you with core.”

“Accretion,” Honeydew agreed. “Personal consumption. Growth. Probably growth that’ll stick with you past when she kills you!”

Nathan opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it, composed a different message, edited it for brevity and clarity, and then did a final editing pass to tone down the emotions. “What the fuck,” he muttered. “What happened to not murdering me? I feel like we had an agreement about this.”

“It’s hardly murder if you’re a Millionborn,” Honeydew said with a dismissive breeziness. “It’s practically an act of grace! I’m sure the universe will be delighted to reward you for dying to someone as amazing as Tanya, and it saves you from having to deal with Nexus bullshit.”

“I’m still really not clear on—”

“You would be inconvenient,” Tanya explained bluntly, interrupting him. “We would have to deal with a whole bunch of bullshit. You would make waves in the underground—”

Reader, it behooves you to stop for a moment and consider that this idiom, to make waves in the underground, is not a commentary on the ocean or a lake. This subterranean civilization does not look upon water and mark its ripples to track the skipping of a rock. The waves which the idiom refers to are earthquakes, the shaking of the pillars of the world. It is, in a word, dire.

“—and she’s not ready to dip lower. It would be a fucking mess and you’d make it worse and blow everything up.”

“And even if you didn’t,” Honeydew said with a moue that contained not a single quantum of shame, “it would still be… political.” Her voice was more serious than usual, despite her expression. “I have oaths which I’d prefer to leave unbroken at the moment, ones that your presence would contravene by your nature and by our association. I’m sorry, Nathan. You’re a charming young man, but I don’t have an ethical way to bind you in the Slut’s own chains and seal the clasp with the Fulminator’s arc before sun and void and stone, from high to low, from the lost roofless sky to the infinite Depths. And that’s what it would take.”

The man in question, who identified rather more as middle-aged than he did as young, gave her a measuring look and took a moment to consider her words. “So if I weren’t ace,” he said slowly, speaking into the silence which the other two had allowed him, “you’d have, what, seduced me and convinced me to be a slave? Which, sidebar, what the fuck. And that would have let you hold to your oaths without killing me.”

“Wouldn’t be the first one,” Tanya murmured with an upwards quirk of her lips. “You’re not my type, but I doubt the Slut would let that matter. Won’t be finding out, though.”

“Wait, you’re a slave?” Nathan boggled at Tanya, then transferred his boggle to Honeydew. “Isn’t she, like, titanically more powerful than you are? She batted both of us around without having to try.”

“It’s a long story,” the sorceress—and slaver, or so it suddenly appeared—said demurely.

“A jackass about a hundred and thirty Layers down from here ripped my soul out of my body while I was asleep and shipped me up to Topmost,” the swordswoman-slave retorted, “which does not a long story make. I spent a couple, or I guess more than that, centuries as a gladiator and trainer, trying to get free the whole time so I could travel my way Downside one Layer at a time, breaking every one of them as I went to try to destroy the Dungeon Itself. Then this dumb bitch—”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Love you too, dear,” Honeydew interjected fondly.

“—beats me in a fight—”

“I baited her into a recursive bubble of Unreality, it took decades to set up.”

“—and has the idiotic temerity to free me.” Tanya snorted. “There I am with an oath to destroy the world we have left once I broke my chains, and suddenly it’s invalidated. And she’s doing that damn smirk she thinks is cute, by which I mean she’s divinely fucking gorgeous, so I figure maybe the world can live another day while I fuck her again, and then everyone loses their shit and we have to skip town.”

“They caught us Downside one layer,” Honeydew supplies. “I was going to indulge dearest Tanya in a spot of shattering reality together as our last moment together, but one of the gentlepersons who snared us suggested a compromise. I… nearly refused, but she convinced me otherwise. I demanded oaths of them before I would consent to bind her, but they took her far too lightly, brilliant and learned as they could not imagine her to be.”

“I’m old, Nathan,” Tanya said with a soft, predatory smugness. “And I’d spent a couple of centuries studying oaths and chains, bindings and shackles. So what if I’m a meathead? I wasn’t gonna break out of slavery and end the fucking world with my muscles. Or at least, not with my muscles alone.”

“I bound her in silk and cobweb, in the light of the False Moon and the shadow of the Absence—the Sun, long gone, which we will never see again. Bound her in a kiss and a moan, in threads as strong as a gasp and as weak as steel.”

“I could break them,” Tanya translated for Nathan’s benefit, “by the sheer act of wanting to. But it gives me the power of those centuries, the power I put in that oath.” Her voice grew grave and cold, chillingly formal as it echoed in the washed-out courtyard. “The day will come when I choose to break them, on the day where I sunder this misbegotten civilization in a mercy-killing centuries in the coming, cascading the destruction of Reality from the Shaper’s Engine upwards. So long as that remains true?” Her voice went casual once more, like a sword-edge removed from the throat of the listener. “I can kill Gods with that power. I’m going to kill a God with that power, a hundred and thirty layers down from here. And in the meantime I’m head over fucking heels in love with this overbred nerd I’m traveling with, so I’m trying to get her strong enough to survive me doing that.”

“I take it all back,” Nathan said with a voice somehow both flat and wondering. “I am weirdly on board with this whole ‘killing the Millionborn before we leave for the Nexus’ thing you were talking about. Because ma’am and ma’am, I’m getting the vibe that your society fucking sucks. I don’t get why you’re bothering to tell me all of this, though. Or why you didn’t just… kill me in the first place.”

“Because it’s psycho shit to travel with someone, fight by their side, get just a little attached through combat bonding, and then kill ‘em, right?”

Nathan turned to lock narrow eyes with Tanya’s blasé gaze. “Yes,” he said shortly. “It is.”

“Yeah, but you’re Millionborn.” She smirked and gave a shrug, breaking eye contact in a way that didn’t feel like a concession in the slightest. “We did you a favor in the end by taking you with us. We’re doing you a favor now with these.” She nodded towards the crystals on the ground, smirking a little wider. “And we thought maybe we’d do ourselves a favor, but it’s not like we got epiphanies or anything. Fun, though.”

“As to why we’re telling you this?” Honeydew gave a strikingly similar shrug to Tanya’s. “It’s just that—”

“—you never get to tell anyone,” Nathan finished on her behalf with a sigh. “You’ve got all this shit pent up and I’m safe to confide in. Fine, whatever, what the fuck do I do with the pile of cryma.”

The two women exchanged a skeptical look, then a bemused one, and finally a vaguely apathetic one. “I’ll show you,” Honeydew said, her earlier cheerfulness fully restored.

And she did.