The path may have been animal tracks before the system brought it’s apocalyptic changes. It wound and wriggled through the trees like a cut snake, ever bleeding downwards. Zoe’s heavy footsteps crunched, burdened as she was by Oriz’s weight slung over her shoulder. Her toes wriggled, dark against the frost hardened earth. With her advanced Vitality, it felt like walking on cool sand.

But she couldn’t wait to find a pair of shoes in town. New clothes. A shower. Something to eat that wasn’t a dead monster or an illusion created by mad cosmic beings.

And people

There had to be survivors out there. She knew there would be contestants on the Gambler’s show. Even if she was in the middle of a forest on a flying island, there had to be other people around.

Why else would there be a town?

White flakes slipped away from the soft silvery scales of her enchanted fish skin suit. She still had Gool’s gift packed away inside her robe. She would open it as soon as they reached somewhere warm and dry to sit down and relax. Hopefully this path was actually leading them toward the town they spied from the top of the hill.

Beside her, Bella walked with an edge more grace. Her jeans and shirt were torn and frayed from her time in the dungeon, but at least she had shoes. Tattoos ran up her arms and throat, and peeked behind the tears in the fabric. The smallest dark circle crowned her blonde hair and a cursed blade slapped against her thigh from its home in her belt.

Anton moved quietly in effortless leaps from branch to log to stone as his eyes flew around the trees. He was stockier than his grace suggested. His hawaiian shirt stained, and his pants torn to cutoffs. He looked like a lost tourist gone feral, except for the placidity of his expression, and the serenity in his eyes.

Of them all, Anton seemed the coldest, with his shorn hair barely stubble after their short time in the apocalypse. But still, they did not hurry. Even despite their strengthened bodies, it was enough to simply move outside the confines of the dungeon. To look up and see a sky, no matter the alien and shifting colors.

Snow glistened in the branches of the forest. Thick and white and fluffy. Breezes blew flurries along the treetops and errant flakes drifted down into the shadowy depths below. A snowflake landed against Zoe’s cheek and melted. It was a curious sensation when her Vitality prevented her from feeling the chill. She caught a flake on her tongue, like eating cotton candy.

A stomach growled.

Bella gave her a smirking side-eye.

“You lose,” she said.

Zoe shook her head.

“That wasn’t me.”

Anton hung from a nearby branch. His silver eyes floated about the forest, and so he didn’t face the women as he acknowledged their stares.

“It wasn’t me.”

He poked at a fruit hanging from the branch. A layer of frost coated the leathery, red skin of the fruit. The fruit slipped and clattered against the hard ground below. Anton grabbed another — there were dozens of the things — and hopped down.

“Come off it,” Bella said, annoyance creeping into her voice. “You lost the first two rounds, and now you lost the third round.”

“There’s no stakes to this.”

“It’s about honor.”

“Well.”

He flipped down to the ground and picked up the fallen fruit. A slooping thing, and frozen solid.

“Bella?” Anton said, ignoring her glare. “Can you defrost this?”

“It’s not a microwave, mate.”

“Please?”

Bella rolled her eyes, but took the fruit and placed it against the flattened side of her cursed runeblade. Heat rippled out. The new acidic nature of the blade, displayed by the thin line of emerald running down the length, lent a bursting, corrosive quality to the arua of drought. The fruit’s skin blistered as it heated, little pockmarks hissing as they dissipated, but the fruit’s red skin bloomed and blossomed.

“Don’t burn it,” Anton said.

“Don’t backseat barbeque.”

Zoe looked around the clearing as her friends continued bickering. She couldn’t tell how much heat, how much seriousness, there really was in their constant complaining. Her suspicion was that they did it to relieve stress. After all, they had fought together in the Mirror Bell dungeon after she fell into Purgatory. It had only been a day or so for them, whereas she spent weeks alone. That disconnect in time still existed, though maybe it was something only she felt, like trying to touch someone’s hands through cling film.

The fruit burst.

Thick yellow flesh blasted out in tiny chunks and fragments. Bella and Anton gagged and spat as baked pulp sprayed their faces.

“Ugh,” Bella retched. “It tastes like eggs.”

Anton wiped gunk from his eyes as he pointed to the ground where one of his silver orbs hovered.

“What’s that?”

A red bug lay on the ground. Steam rose from its eyes and its raw flesh. It was shaped like a praying mantis, a few inches long, but instead of an exoskeleton it had exposed musculature like a skinned rabbit. A miniature set of teeth grinned from the lipless mouth.

“Oh,” Bella said. “They are eggs.”

There were dozens of them in the trees surrounding them.

“It must be the creature I saw in the plane,” Zoe said. “The praying mantis. Anton, do you have eyes on everything?”

He nodded and his silver eyes darted away. They wove between branches and skimmed across the ground.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

“There’s hundreds of mantis eggs hanging from the trees.”

He closed his eyes and concentrated. The silver orbs shot into the distance, vanishing behind snow covered trees.

“I can see more,” he said with surprise. “My range is maybe half again as good as it was in the dungeon.”

“I feel it too,” Bella said. “The dungeon had some kind of drag on us. I think now…”

She trailed off as though it were important. Her finger tapped the second rune along her swords length. Zoe raised an eyebrow, but Bella shook her head.

“Ok, no end to the eggs but I just sent an eye past a mile oh —”

Anton winced and staggered, and Bella caught him with one arm.

“Something destroyed my orb.”

“Did you see what growled?” Zoe asked.

“No… just the three of us.”

Bella pointed at him with her free hand.

“That just proves he —”

A growl interrupted them. Yowling, hollow, like a tortured stomach seeking to fill itself with anything — and everything — available. Anton’s eyes raced around them in a widening circle. The silver orbs like streaks of light.

“I can’t see anything,” his voice buzzed out from orbs, despite his lips pressed shut.

The growl echoed out around them, as though the very space they stood in hungered for their warm flesh. They just got out of the dungeon, would their lives be a never-ending parade of survival and slaughter?

The question made her laugh.

Of course it would…

She flexed her Willpower in an amateurish imitation of Trinch and Oriz’s fearsome presences. An aura of rage pressed out into the forest. The wind stilled. Bella and Anton gasped, faces whitening as they pressed their own Willpower against Zoe in an effort to continue breathing.

[The Self Reflects the World]

Mirror rushed down her skin as she took a crunching footstep toward the trees. The snowy forest enveloped her form, and she became almost invisible.

Her technique reinforced her presence. She flexed the new attributes granted by devouring the Mirror Bell. The system defying weapon now interwoven with the essence of her being. She grinned scarred lips as her Willpower pushed out through the trees and over the snow covered bushes. It felt like an extension of her mind. As though someone had been pulling back at her consciousness like a leashed dog.

But now she could run free.

Was this part of the dungeon itself? Or the presence of the Blackstar dimension? She couldn’t be sure, but her chain slipped around her arm reassuringly. The Black Star system hadn’t spoken to her since leaving the dunegon, but she felt it there. Present if not oppressive.

She wished that she could ask Oriz, but the alien woman hadn’t moved since they left the dungeon. She was fine, though asleep. Zoe needed to trust in her higher level to see the woman safely recover.

Her Dexterity rode through the expanding aura like a wave of fingers. Her mind brushed against the world and felt for something, anything…

Unending cold. Empty. Branches still, the sap congealed like dead marrow. A falling leaf.

Anton sagged to one knee. His eyes wobbled as they floated through the trees.

There.

Her mind surged up around something warm and living in the cold world. She grasped at roosting birds.

A flock of wings beats punctuated the oppressive, unending silence.

“Zoe…”

###

Derek was going to die. He felt it surer than the cold of the snowy forest around him. Why did his stomach have to growl at that moment? And so loudly? He fought for composure. His life depended on him being completely still.

He stared down his rifle’s scope at a demon of snow-coated branches. He had given up any hope of firing. Fear robbed control of his fingers. He couldn't fire, he couldn't risk running, or moving, instead he prayed and gripped his stealth technique with everything he had.

[The Worm Inside the Guts]

He crouched in a fork in the trees. The technique folded space around him, obscuring him behind frozen leaves and snowy branches. His gaze remained glued to the demon, too scared to look away for even a moment.

When he first heard the sounds of people walking through the forest, he wasn't sure if they were humans or some new trick of the mantis. So, confident in his stealth, he went to investigate. They were so loud and brazen, it was easy for him to get closer. When the thick muscular man in the dirty Hawaiian shirt cast a silver eyed scouting technique, he had hidden.

And avoided detection.

The fact his stealth technique was superior gave him the confidence to edge closer. If he could take them out by himself then this could be the start of a loot pile he didn’t have to share with the boss.

Or with the creature his boss served…

The memory of the demon twisted inside him — the touch of raven feathers — the hissing laughter of a snake as he swore fealty — and the throbbing power down his spine where the demonic technique burned…

But that horror was a distant fear compared to the potential death before him. Not a hundred feet away. The thing was shaped like a mirror coated woman.

It edged toward the trees while its companions — a stocky man and a blonde woman with too many tattoos — buckled. He could hardly see it with the mirrored coating on its skin. He thought it was a woman at first. Good looking if a little fake — decent breasts at least — but the way her presence gripped him was like being plunged beneath a frozen lake. It could only mean one thing…

A demon.

He gripped the long rifle in his hands. Its dark metal run along with pulsing red veins. The handle breathed beneath Derek’s grip, its rise and fall a match for the terrified man’s stifled rhythm. The veins continued up from the rifle and into his skin, as soothing as a morphine drip.

The boss would want him to take out the agents of another demon. Or this could be loot. There were so many advantages to taking action, but the fear…

Maybe he should retreat to the gas station? Yes. He'd regroup with the others, change his pants, and let someone else make a plan.

He fought against bone rattling terror as the demon woman's presence groped him. He fought to control his breathing. Not to shake. He couldn’t squeeze the trigger. Couldn’t act past the cold creeping through him as though he lay already on the cold steel table of a morgue.

He closed his eyes. Gave himself up to fate.

“Zoe…”

The man in the Hawaiian shirt croaked as he sank to his knees.

The presence pressed upon him. Blood leaked from his nostrils, but still his technique kept him folded away from attention, buried in the landscape like an intestinal worm.

But it squeezed.

It was too much!

He seized the demonic technique.

[Under My Wing]

His body twisted and split. He wanted to scream, but he had no throat. Skin split into feathers. He raced, sprinted through the air, flying on the wings of a dozen crows.

The presence slipped away from him like a receding tide.

He could control his breathing again, and he focused only on flying as fast as possible.

The boss would know what to do about the intruders, if those damned mantises didn't get them first…

###

Zoe couldn’t shake the feeling she was being watched, but they pushed on. The silence of the forest grew sinister. It was unnatural that so many leaves sagged under the weight of snow, as though winter had snuck up on the world.

The ground levelled out as they entered the forest proper. Just as it became easier to move, Zoe received a quest notification. Her heart rate increased as she examined the quest that had weighed on her since first meeting Rue.

[The Burden Of Being Interesting]

[Objective 1: Keep your meeting with the cohort a secret]

[Complete: Nullified by Quest Breaker]

[My special gift to a returning competitor of my show]

[Objective 2: Reach level 20]

[Complete]

[Step 3]

[Objective: Claim ownership of a Settlement Polyp]

[Time to Complete: 6 days, 22 hours]

[Reward: Conditional]

[Failure: Failing any aspect of this quest will cause the death of your party. Will you let down others as you have so often been let down yourself?]

Zoe stopped walking.

The joy of completing two of the three objectives quickly faded. She had no idea what a Settlement Polyp was. Nor what claiming ownership even meant.

But she only had a week to figure it out, and if she didn't, Bella and Anton would be killed by the System.