The first thing she noticed upon waking up was that she wasn’t dead. The second was that her leg remained broken, signified by her health refusing to go above four hundred out of four hundred and sixty. Blinking away the bleariness and banishing the ache that came with sleeping with her back to a sheer rock cliff Alice, stared at the remains of yesterday’s dinner, quickly devouring them shortly thereafter.

The fire had died not so long ago as embers still danced upon blackened branches now turned coals, the residual heat of the campfire still lingering there. Softly smiling, Alice leaned forwards and rubbed her hands above the dying embers, trying to gather as much heat as she could. The weather inside the cavern wasn’t too hot nor too cold, but a mildly unpleasant middle ground. The heat helped her wake up and banish away the feeling.

She’d bet her life on fire scaring away anything that may have wanted to crack her open and munch on her insides, and she had been right to do so, apparently.

Closing her eyes, she paid attention to the background noises she had tuned out yesterday in favour of a complete focus on the fight against the Irongrip Tarantula. Strange chirps, squeaks, shrill screams and a myriad of other strange sounds populated the entirety of the Dusk Forest, as she wanted to call it for its tendency to only have trees either a shade of blue or purple.

With an exasperated sigh, she stopped procrastinating and actually paid attention to the thing she had resolved to do once she woke up and found her leg was still broken — even if a lot less sore than yesterday.

Alice delved into her core and immediately afterwards stepped outside of it, noticing how her awareness of her surroundings was essentially nil once she had even half a step within her soulspace.

Frowning, Alice looked at her leg intensely, trying to discern with subtle muscle twitches if she could make the trip inside the caverns with it non-functional. A quick stab of mild pain when a muscle grazed something it shouldn’t told her that no, she couldn’t. Not if she didn’t want to have to fight standing on a single leg as some unknowable thing tried to take her head off.

Better not.

With a grimace, she slowed down her breathing, wracking her brain in search of an answer. Well, not an answer per se, but a working solution. The simple and most likely correct answer to her issue would be to simply try and cook up a spell that could take the load bearing from her leg unto itself, without exerting her Ether or the leg itself too much. She didn’t want to make the injury worse, and if she ran completely out of Ether it’d be game over, functioning leg or not.

The issue was that she had absolutely no idea about how she could get around making such a spell. Her first instinct was to completely numb her leg to any kind of stimulus that could be considered pain, but in retrospect, she ran the risk of completely destroying her nerves or having her femur pierce her leg from the side and actually kill her from the massive bleed it’d cause.

Discarding the idea, she came back to the original one that’d accrued to her as she hopped her way across the forest and towards where she lay resting now. Maybe she could come up with some kind of harness with [Oppress] as the base but without the jagged edges and the cursed wounds part.

Gritting her teeth, she started to cast [Oppress] but stopped halfway through, her Ether still in a state where it could be molded.

Submerging herself in her Ether, she navigated the carmine current that made up her spell as it pressed against her core and body from the inside, almost as if begging for release.

Embracing the agony that her magic provided her each time she dove into its depths she wrestled with the spell itself as it ferociously refused to budge from its original purpose.

Alice didn’t possess an unbreakable will nor an unyielding conviction — what she did have though was a capacity for utter hatred and toxic vitriol that she had seldom witnessed in anyone else.

Snarling, Alice squeezed down on her Ether, pressing it from all sides and seething with tyrannical intent. “You’re mine, a part of me and not the other way around — and you will do as I say.”

The Ether buckled and ballooned… but it yielded first, bending under the weight of her command.

Slithering spectral chains burrowed into her flesh and not at the same time, the ghostly implements wrapping themselves around her femur and thigh like some kind of sadistic harness, keeping the bone straight and the muscles stiff.

Freeform Casting detected.

No new spell created.

Hissing alongside searing pain that fortunately faded shortly thereafter, Alice tested her leg as gently as she could, slowly ramping up the effort, and found that it held her weight with no issues save for a stiffness that wasn’t there thus giving her a strange limp that she couldn’t quite get rid of.

Now Alice just had to watch her Ether carefully. If it started to drain faster than it recovered then it was time to completely freak out, curl into a fetal position and wait for her leg to heal naturally, praying to all the gods of this new land so that it wouldn’t take as long as she dreaded it may need.

Alice anxiously waited, her focus completely turned towards her core and Ether, fear gnawing at the edges of her consciousness and riddling her mind with pits of anxiety.

With a sigh, she almost let herself fall down bonelessly onto the floor. Her Ether wasn't being drained, at least not completely, just… almost completely. Her regeneration had turned from something that made worrying for her reserves between fight and fight almost a nonissue if she had half an hour to rest, into a game of extreme resource management.

Ether

489/585

92/h

With her reserves now taking almost four times as long to go back to full, it meant that she now had to carefully think about every expense and maximize every scrap of Ether she could regenerate, which meant relying on close combat to save up the enormous costs from [Mindsnap] and [Ruin].

Relying on a dagger and a broken sword while she had a stiff leg didn't sound like a good plan, regardless of how constrained her budget was right now — scratch that, it wasn't a plan, it sounded more like a one-way ticket into some thing's stomach.

Alice gave one last longing look towards her former campsite and adjusted her backpack. With that done Alice set off once again towards the tunnels, intent on finding something she could use to either call for help, dig herself out with, or, in the most optimistic of cases, a direct exit.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

One could dream, right?

The first few turns and tunnels were fraught with tension and paranoia. Her recent near-death experiences had Alice double-checking every possible turn and shadowed cranny she could find. Even if being so thorough in her exploration left her speed in shambles, Alice deemed it a worthy tradeoff in exchange for safety and the surefire knowledge that there wasn’t anything behind her and waiting for her to slip up and ambush her, as the Gloomstalker had done.

The memory of that worm sent a jolt of searing hate running through her chest, but Alice breathed out slowly, trying to quench the wrathful rising embers within her mind. Rage would do her no good here, where she needed to be careful and methodical if she didn’t want to miss anything and pay for it with her life or a limb later down the line.

Along the way she visited each landmark she knew along the weathered stone tunnels. First came the lake of strangely oily water, towards she only approached one pace at a time, testing if the Kraken had gone back to slumber or if it waited beneath the surface still, looking for foolish prey that wandered nearby.

Fortunately, it seemed that it either had no interest in anything outside its water, or it was simply slumbering beneath the murky waters.

One way or another, Alice didn’t dare get too close to the water, choosing instead to hang back and observe the still pond of curious liquid closely. She hadn’t noticed before when she had been thrown into the lake like a dirty rag in need of a cleaning, but she now could notice a strange sort of pull — a resonance, if you will. Her core vibrated with a strange frequency, and something deep beneath the waters, deeper than she ever thought the lake could go on, something answered her core’s call.

There was something deep beneath the lake, and it called to Alice like nothing had ever done, its clarion call increasing with each passing second.

Afraid of the quickly growing impulse within her mind that demanded she dove deep into the blackened waters and reclaim whatever laid down at the bottom of the lake, Alice turned tail and run — more like quickly hobbled — in the other direction entirely, away from the lake and its enfeebling pull.

As sweat danced along her brow and down her chin, Alice thought that it had been way too close for comfort. Within her own mind, she vowed to never come back to those tainted waters, but deep within, she knew it to be a falsehood.

She craved whatever was down here. She only had to find a clever way of getting rid of a monster that outclassed her so completely she couldn’t even see its tier.

Alice chuckled, her peals of hollow mirth resonating across the cramped tunnels filled with bright moss. It was official, she had finally gone insane.

She laughed a bit harder, needing to put a hand over her own mouth in fear of attracting the hidden horrors that were sure to lurk along these forgotten tunnels. As her giggles decreased into more manageable snorts, Alice took a turn without looking and as her foot stepped forwards, it hit nothing but air.

Alice’s pupils shrunk into a pair of needlepoints, her forward momentum carrying her into a yawning abyss of silky smooth nothingness. If she fell, she wouldn’t survive this time. Something within her was sure of the fact, and as Alice started to fall, she spun and summoned her chains without a second thought, turning the first link of every length of unholy steel into a wide, sharpened point.

Like a nest of coiled snakes, Alice’s salvation sprung forwards, digging into the rock and saving her from a very long fall accompanied by a very short splat.

The chains painfully tugged at her arms as she started to retract them, all her forward momentum suddenly stopped. They rattled and trembled, but the chains fell.

Swinging in a pendulum motion, Alice’s eyes widened at the incoming wall. Just in the nick of time, she turned and immediately afterwards her back slammed against the sheer cliff wall, knocking the air out of her lungs for a good couple of seconds.

Feeling her air intake being cut off once again made Alice panic and thrash around mindlessly until her muscles relaxed just enough for her to take a tiny breath, the panic subsiding by the same amount.

It still took a good minute of recovering her breath as she hung suspended in the air before she could string coherent thoughts together again, at which point she thought of starting to climb the wall — until she recalled that she didn’t really need to.

Alice commanded her chains to come back to her, and stuck as they were within the tunnel’s rock, she came to them. Slowly, painfully and with some scrapes and curses along the way, she made it upwards and towards firm ground once again.

She almost felt the need to kneel and kiss the ground her feet were on once she managed to pull herself up all the way, but decided against it. Barely.

Once she wasn’t hanging down over certain death by just her chains and a modification she made on the fly that she wasn’t even sure she had been capable of before, Alice looked at the chasm under a newfound light.

Perhaps, and only just perhaps, she could lure the Kraken into this chasm and enrage it enough that it followed her and threw itself off the chasm, saving her all the work from having to kill it herself, if it was even possible as she was — which something told her in no uncertain terms that no, it was not possible.

Food for thought.

Even slower and more cautiously than before, Alice made her way through the absolute maze of twisting turns, slight up and downs, and a myriad of just plain, boring old rock and moss.

There was a point where she was so sure that she had seen the same corridor three times in a row that she started to actually pay attention to her feet and how easy it was to find footing among the slightly uneven ground, and only then she noticed that she had been walking in circles as she took a corridor she was sure she had used before and felt a minute increase to her celerity and walking posture that disappeared immediately after she stopped to examine those very changes.

Frustrated, she followed the feeling of something being new or unknown, using her skill as a guide.

Alice walked, and walked, and walked, not knowing whether a dozen or a couple of hours had passed, the changes upon her body making relying on her thirst and hunger an unreliable tool for doing so, as her vitality was wildly different than it had been even a day prior.

Reaching a crossroads between two tunnels that her skill told her were old news, Alice sighed and rested a hand along one of the walls, intent on taking a break and actually think about her route and destination instead of aimlessly wandering along the tunnels.

But her hand didn’t hit the wall — it passed right through as if the solid rock she could clearly see and almost feel wasn’t even really there.

With an undignified squawk of surprise, Alice fell sideways and hit her head as she did so on something that was decidedly metallic.

Hissing in pain and slight dizziness, Alice tried to stand up as fast as she could but a red light pointed directly at her impeded her from doing so, the brightness of it almost blinding.

There was a buzz, a mechanical whirr and an odour that could almost be described as rotten eggs left out in the sun for longer than anyone could imagine, then, there was a voice — scratchy, glitchy and with an undertone of fury that raised the hairs on the back of her neck.

“I I I I-ntRUDE-E-ER!”

A bizarre contraption resembling a mechanical eye that was producing the red light was mounted on a strangely metallic wall hardpoint from where a stiff cabled slithered out, ending up in the alien thing currently yelling at her.

Behind it and after a set of crushed double doors, Alice could spot what almost seemed like a modern lab, if filled with dust to the brim and with strange glyphs and markings etched everywhere.

“Yo-U are UNAUTHORIZED! UNAUTHORIZED! UNAUTH- I m-m-MUST terminate-destroy-annihilate-e-e-e.”

It sparked and smoked, and as it did so Alice stood up and took a cautious step back, fearing that too much movement could set off whatever it was.

Unfortunately, her wishes went graciously unanswered as a couple of hatches along the metallic ceiling opened up, revealing elongated alien contraptions that smoked and sparkled with a strange pale light that made Alice’s core recoil.

Throwing caution off the window in favour of getting away from whatever were those security measures, Alice spun and started to sprint.

Or tried to, anyway.

She had time to take a single step, the tip of her nose almost touching the illusion, before everything was washed away by a soul-deep sensation of utter anguish.

Then, it stopped, and with it came oblivion’s sweet nothingness.