Chapter 104: Desolation

I climbed through the window and half-stepped, half-rolled to the concrete floor.

God, I hated that floor. Almost as much as the pressed board walls. Almost as much as the open rafter ceilings, and the fluorescent lights, and the wires stretching between them.

Nowhere near as much as those goddamn swinging doors, though.

I’d lost all taste for proving myself against the construction site. It won, okay? It scared the hell out of me, and it should, and I found myself okay with that.

At this point, I felt like I’d be happier if I never heard of Third Eye again, and if I never had to go north of the Broadway light rail station again, I could see my way to making peace with that, too.

But if there was even the slightest chance Albie might need our help, we had to go back for her.

I turned around and caught Lena as she slid in after me, then we both helped Erin and Matt through.

“Should we move these ramps?” Erin asked. “Someone’s going to notice the broken windows, in the morning if not sooner, and we don’t want them to find invisible structures, do we?”

“After we leave, we can think about removing them,” Matt said. “Although I’m not entirely sure I give a damn.”

Lena and I nodded.

“This way,” I said. I started toward the door.

“Hey,” Lena said. “How much HP do you have left?”

I’d avoided looking. Time to rip the bandaid off.

3,204. Not bad, for somebody with a max of 10.

Pretty bad, for somebody who’d entered the construction site with over 9,000.

“More than you,” I said. “I’m still taking point.”

I think she must’ve checked her own status, because I heard her grunt as she swallowed an objection.

I tensed my hand over the swinging door.

I shoved it open.

No shadows bubbled through, no distortions ripped out to cut and tear and twist.

No great shaggy dog bowled me over, either, and no little girl with aquamarine hair threw her arms around my waist and told me I was an idiot for coming back.

It was just a dusty hallway, empty and silent.

“Same rules as before,” I said. “Everybody keeps line of sight to the person ahead of them. We head back toward the warehouse, and we try to follow our prints.”

“New rule,” Matt said. “If we see any sign whatsoever that creature is still active, we are running the hell away.”

“Mr. Green is right,” Erin said. “We simply have no way of defending ourselves against that thing.”

“I know,” I said. “I agree.”

Lena kept her mouth shut. I doubted she agreed, but I believed – had to believe – that if it came down to retreating with the rest of us or trying to fight the creature on her own, she would run, too.

Of course, I knew full well that if she refused to flee, I wouldn’t, either.

I stalked forward, not quite at a run, not far from it. After everything, it amazed me to realize my body hardly felt tired. Could I even get physically exhausted if I didn’t run out of HP? Or were fatigue toxins another thing Third Eye treated as “damage” and protected me against?

That sounded great, as long as it actually eliminated the damage. It couldn’t be just masking it, because none of our bodies would have withstood the blows we’d suffered from the creature. Could it just be delaying it?

On the bright side, if that was all it did, I’d never have to worry about fatigue again, or anything else. I’d definitely suffered a few lifetimes worth of fatal blows tonight.

I didn’t think so, though. Donica had only been hurt by the attack that landed after she ran out of HP. The blow that sent her careening into the walls had only knocked her down, and even after that, when she must have had just a few HP left, she withstood the creature’s next strike.

Interesting. I said, “One piece of good news.”

“Oh?” Erin asked.

“I’m pretty sure we saw the answer to what happens when you lose your last HP.”

“You mean what happened to Donica.” Erin didn’t sound particularly enthused.

“Yeah, but not the way you’re thinking. She took one hit that dropped her almost completely.” I glanced over my shoulder. “Then a second one, and that had to have blown past her last HP. It still didn’t hurt her body, though. That only happened when she got hit a third time, after she had no HP left.”

Erin clasped her hands. “Oh! That is good news.”

Matt smiled tightly, and even Lena tried.

“So most of us,” Matt said, “can withstand one hit from that creature.”

I scratched the back of my neck. It had sounded better until he put it that way. “Better one than none.”

“Better,” he said, “it doesn’t come to that.”

Nobody offered an argument.

In the hallways, it didn’t come to anything. We encountered no creature, nor Albie, nor Marroll, nor even, unless I’d gotten completely turned around, any distortions. We could have been walking through the back rooms of any office building.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Until we rounded an intersection and came face-to-face with the warehouse.

I don’t mean the walls of the warehouse.

A few panels from those remained upright, looking lonely and forlorn where they clung to load-bearing pillars of concrete and rebar. Even one of the pillars had crumpled, its concrete coating scattered and its steel core bent at an almost ninety degree angle. Snarls of wire and broken rafters shoved against the shattered walls, like strings of lights from some vast Christmas tree abandoned before decoration began. Chunks of concrete from the floor above had been ripped out and strewn around, baring boxy little rooms we’d never explored. Offices or apartments that would never be. Especially now.

Near the edges of the warehouse, shelves remained intact, though none remained upright. Further in, there was only ash and slag.

At some point, Albie must have added Fire to her mix of Reactants, but she certainly hadn’t abandoned Air.

The metal remains of the shelves swirled and blended in a spiral pattern around the center of the warehouse. Each whirl further in, they lost more of their shape, until, near the middle, where we’d been fighting, they must have streamed through the air as molten metal rain, and fallen and solidified when the wind finally died down.

I took a halting step into the desolation. I felt a hand on my arm, but I didn’t even turn to see whose it was. Another step, and I crossed what had seemed like an all-important threshold between hallway and warehouse. Nothing changed, except that I was surrounded by the frozen, strangely ordered leavings of chaos.

Lena shuffled past me. Her shoulders trembled. She tilted her head back like she meant to call out, but no sound emerged.

There was no sound anywhere. It was like the storm that had raged in here had used it up.

The sight of Lena snapped me out of my shock, at least a little. I caught up to her and wrapped my arms around her waist.

She looked up at me, wide-eyed, open-mouthed. I’m pretty sure I wore the same expression.

“Amazing,” Matt whispered. At least, I think he whispered it. In the awful silence the warehouse had become, his voice sounded loud as a gunshot. Lena flinched and so did I.

“This is...” Erin’s voice trailed off. She drifted past us, her head swiveling slowly to take in the scene.

“This is why Albie told us she’d be fine,” Lena said. “If we hadn’t gotten in her way, she could’ve gone for an attack like this from the start.”

I nodded, but I found I didn’t much like the idea of anyone treating this kind of destruction as an opening move. Once again, I was reminded that, if Albie regularly did this kind of thing, she was basically a child soldier. Complete with firepower that would put a tank to shame – or maybe a tank company. My frame of reference for either was limited to strategy games that didn’t give such a close up view of the destruction.

I’d have rather kept it that way.

For me and Albie both.

I felt Lena draw in a deep breath. She raised her voice and called, “Albie!”

The word reverberated through the ruins of the warehouse. The echoes remained weird, but they’d changed drastically. Instead of rebounding across a cavernous space with smooth but imperceptibly distant edges, they bounced around the jagged remains of walls and rooms.

Disjointed. Discordant.

Unanswered.

I raised my phone and panned it around.

Third Eye no longer showed the warehouse as lit up. Of course. All the lights had been ripped from their fixtures by Albie’s storm. In fact, the warehouse looked identical no matter what set of eyes I looked at it with.

Why not? We’d hardly ever seen anything as bizarre through Third Eye as the state of the warehouse IRL.

Lena pulled away from my hug and picked her way across toppled, half-melted shelves and bits of concrete ripped from overhead.

Which reminded me –

I glanced over my shoulder at Erin and Matt. “You two better stay back. You don’t have hardhats.”

“We should all stay back,” Matt said.

Erin nodded. “Though I understand you have to check.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “We still got HP, remember?”

“Please don’t rely on that,” Erin said. “We’re only making somewhat educated guesses that it will protect against mundane injuries, not just those caused by something associated with Third Eye.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I feel a lot better with that in the back of my mind.”

She lowered her eyes.

I turned and bounded after Lena as fast as I dared.

I didn’t have to go far. She’d only made it twenty feet into the warehouse, near the dividing line between the recognizable, if shattered, shelves, and the swirl of concrete and metal at the heart of the chamber.

I joined her there and saw what she’d stopped to look at.

Two holes had been torn in the floor. One, I knew, was where Marroll had dug his way in. Molten metal had partially covered it, which suggested that he’d pulled his head back down before Albie added Fire to her Air. She must’ve sent him away so he didn’t get caught by her attacks. If she hadn’t been trying to protect us, would she have even bothered to call him in the first place?

The second hole was right at the center of the warehouse, where Albie had been fighting. No cracks or chunks of concrete smashed out of the way here. Like the metal of the shelves, the concrete of the floor had simply melted and swirled into the pattern of whirls most of the warehouse had become.

“She might’ve fallen,” Lena said.

I knew she didn’t believe it, but I nodded anyway. “We have to check.”

We edged our way around Marroll’s hole and up to the rim of the second. The slurry of refrozen metal and concrete felt slick under my boots, and the slush I’d trudged through when we were outside didn’t help. Lena gripped my arm. I leaned away from the hole, while she craned her neck over it.

“Albie?” she called.

No response.

I think we both knew there wouldn’t be.

“It looks like there’s a basement down there,” Lena said. “More or less intact.”

Which explained where the rest of Marroll’s body had been. Although he seemed perfectly capable of tunneling through the earth.

“No sign of Albie?” I asked.

“None,” Lena said. “There’s not even any debris down there. It must’ve all got caught up in... whatever this was.”

“I think...” I swallowed. “This had to have all been under Albie’s control. Right?”

“Had to be.” Lena almost sounded convinced. “I mean, we never saw the creature use any kind of elemental attacks.”

I’d just been going off the spiral the melted objects had formed into, which seemed like a natural extension of what I’d seen Albie doing just before I fled. Lena made a good point, though. “Yeah.”

“Besides!” She perked up. “Of course as soon as she got the chance, Albie would go for the coolest Reactant.”

I patted Lena’s arm. “You can say a lot of things about Fire, but after this, I think we both know it’s definitely more ‘hot’ than ‘cool.’”

She snorted a laugh. “She’s okay, right?”

“She’s okay.” I found I believed it.

I didn’t know what the creature was. Whether it was a Third Eye construct we weren’t supposed to encounter yet, or a bug in the game’s cosmic code, or some naturally occurring weirdness the game had just attuned us to, or something that could’ve dragged us into the darkness at any time, even if we’d never so much as heard of Third Eye. I didn’t know what it would take to escalate from pricking its fingers to actually harming it.

But I knew it had never shown destructive capabilities within even an order of magnitude of the devastation Albie had wreaked on the warehouse. I had to imagine it had been as outclassed by her as we were by it.

Which, in turn, meant she wouldn’t have escalated to this level if she risked hurting herself with her powers, or overtaxing herself.

“Do you think it’s dead?” I asked.

“The creature?” I felt Lena start to shrug against me, then sag. “I think it’s gone. As for dead, I don’t even know if that’s a question that makes sense to ask. We don’t really have any idea what the hell it was.”

“Yeah.” I rested my chin on Lena’s hardhat. “I hope it’s not.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, without conviction.

I don’t know if she agreed with me, but I knew she understood. I didn’t want to have contributed to killing it. More than that, though, I didn’t want to think Albie had to go around killing things.

“One more thing to ask Albie,” Lena said, “the next time we talk to her.”