The mantis corpses steamed upon the snowy slope. Thick carapaces woven through with wooden fibers and leaf-green claws lay shattered about Zoe as she heaved in a frigid breath. The souls of the dead bugs rose and shrieked. A lamentation of the dead.

She thought this would make her feel better, but…

[Congratulations! You have reached level 29]

[Please select an element to incorporate:]

* Wood:

* Snow:

* Blood:

She dismissed the options since her body path wouldn’t let her absorb them, but also… If Trinch’s corpse was somewhere in this shifting land, she wanted to use it to level up. That bastard could repay her.

Something thumped in the distant trees. To her right she saw the flash of flames. Jack and Anton fought together, while she had gone off alone. She needed time alone. Time to think.

The darkness yawned inside her mind, and it swallowed all thought of friends.

Her chains slid around her fist as she gripped her Trinch Club. The bone vibrated in her hand. It had resonated ever since she touched down on the slope. It could feel the other body parts. The slope had seemed so flat and clear from the cave mouth, but the land twisted around Trinch’s corpse. Gorges deepened the slope as though deep fingers were sinking into the ground, and trees quivered the snow from their branches as though they had just thrusted up from beneath.

The sense of newness set Zoe on edge, as though she were back in the dungeon, back in a world shaping itself around her and plotting her death.

She flinched as the trees crashed apart. A mantis towered at twice her height. Exoskeleton black as the space between the stars. The matte armor swallowed the lurid red light swimming across the sky. Fifteen wings adorned its back. A level 30.

Good.

She wanted a challenge.

As the mantis stalked toward her in perfect silence, the land groaned as rock shifted against rock. The earth ground in agony and Zoe roared.

She charged.

The Grasping Vine always moves forward. She swung the club toward the thorax. A claw sliced out to defend, but her chain lashed up toward its neck. She secured and pulled herself up. The initial attack was a feint, and her increased momentum brought the blow hard into the creature’s head.

Black ichor sprayed out into the air like liquid shadow. The creature flew back, bucked, and hacked at her. Zoe kept her grip with her chain and rode the mantis like a bucking bull. She swung around to its back and raised her club high.

Its levels, its attributes, would only mean it had to be hit a few extra times. She grinned with scarred lips as she swung the club down between its bulbous eyes. The hard thump was silent as it struck the dark exoskeleton. A crack appeared, and more shadowy blood oozed. She raised the club again as it tried to claw back at her uselessly.

The club came down.

And Zoe tumbled through a cloud of shadows into the snow. She knelt, spitting out slush as a black mist dissipated. It smelled like crushed ants. She stood low, ready, her club outstretched and her chain coiling up around her arm as armor. It was growing longer, and perhaps she might split it soon, but the Black Star system still felt sluggish whenever she poked at it.

A black claw hacked from her side. She jerked away just in time. The barbed claw skidded off her chain-wrapped arm and flung her away. She hit a tree, swung about, and faced the sloped clearing. Steam rose from the mangled mantis corpses. The gorge continued down. Smokeless flecks of blackened flame drifted above the trees where Jack cast his technique.

Zoe was trying to keep her Skein in reserve. Relying on her attributes and her weaponry. If she could integrate the Grasping Vine with her Body Path, then her blows would strike with more force. If she could find a resonance in her movements, in her fighting, then the strength of her body would work for her instead of against her.

But if she was being stalked…

[Self Reflects the World]

Mirror coated her skin as her Skein dipped. She walked out into the middle of the clearing. Her club rested at her side. She presented an easy target, hoping that the mantis would take the bait.

She waited a few minutes as the corpses stopped steaming, and her impatience grew. She still needed to incorporate from her last level. The hunger slammed into her control, but she resisted.

For now.

[Our Hearts Toll as One]

She thrust out the technique. The shell of Skein rang out into the clearing. She felt Jack and Anton’s heartbeats nearby. Another pulse. Their heartbeats again, and something else, a heart that wasn’t a part of her party. She pulsed. That heart moved now, hiding somewhere else amongst the trees.

Her scarred lips twitched with a smile.

It felt good to be the hunter.

She pulsed again, but the shadow mantis’s Insight detected her technique. Inky smoke burst in front of her and with it came the rending claws of the mantis. She grinned. It knew she was tracking it.

The claws slashed into her mirrored skin and bounced away. Mirrored force hacked at the creature and Zoe followed up with a savage swing of her club into its legs. One shattered under the blow and the creature tipped. She couldn’t be sure how much Skein it had or how much the technique used, but that didn’t matter.

She wanted to end the fight quickly.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Her chain wrapped around one of the barbed scythes and hauled it closer as she clubbed again. Joy lit up her face as she wailed on the confused creature. She tried to time her blows, to achieve some resonance, but fury broke her timing. She hit too hard, too quickly, her blood boiling.

Or perhaps not her blood, but the Skein she stole from the wrathful boss of the dungeon…

The black carapace shattered before she could finish her thought. Shadowy blood flowed, and then it exploded into smoke.

Her chain fell slack to the ground.

More smoke and a claw struck her in the back of the head. It bounced away. She spun. One leap, one swing, and her club shattered its eyes. It screeched as she gripped its throat and dug her hand into its brain. One squeeze, and the creature collapsed.

She huffed foggy breathes into the frigid air as the pale soul of the mantis rose and squealed.

[Mind’s Eye Incision]

The scalpel flowed into her hand. How was the keening soul stuck to the flesh? That was a question she had puzzled a few times in university before the demands of life brought her attention back to more immediate concerns.

The soul was not entirely separate. The four feet — each needle sharp — connected to the flesh. Zoe approached the soul, and though it was shrill, it did not respond to her.

This would be easier if she had Bella’s soul devouring sword, but she grimly reminded herself that she couldn’t rely on anybody helping her.

Nor could she rely on herself helping others.

She sliced through a ghostly foot. The action was sloppy, and the spectral flesh frayed but did not completely separate from the black exoskeleton. She forced herself to calm down and sliced with intent. The ghostly limb floated above the corpse and the harsh wailing took on a slightly calmer note. Encouraged, Zoe cut through the remaining limbs. The mantis’s ghostly whine became an angelic chord with each severed limb.

The soul floated up toward the swirling red sky.

[You have discovered a hidden quest!]

[The Winter Queen is a viscous necromancer enslaving both the land and the souls of her people. Free the souls of the enslaved for an additional reward!]

[Send even your enemies into the light, that their shadows may burn away]

[Reward: the knowledge that you have done right]

[Reward compounded by Double Experience!]

Zoe frowned.

“That doesn’t seem like a …”

The soul above her exploded into motes of light, and a terrible rush of cold filled her. She fell to her knees, teeth chattering.

[Congratulations, You have leveled up!]

But beyond the level up prompt, she felt the surety of her actions. The system was rewarding her for what she had done. This was right. Releasing the souls was right.

And she didn’t trust it at all.

With a tap of her trembling fingers, she activated the python bracelet.

This was the last charge, but she needed to see.

Her gaze tilted back to the churning red sky as the last motes of soul faded.

And she saw.

The heavens spiraled. A cyclone of teeth scything like a combine harvester as they pulled in the soul light. Each single fleck glowed like pearls, and in each, she saw the visage of the mantis, and it screamed.

Silence, for the python bracelet, only let her see, but she could see the pain distorting the inhuman features as the system devoured the soul of the creature she had killed.

“This is wrong…” she whispered.

But not just to herself.

[Ding!]

The Black Star system unfurled in her mind like a cat stretching after a nap.

[Friends should not eat friends!]

The chain uncoiled from her arm and shot up into the sky. It pierced the spinning cyclones of bladed color in the sky and wrapped around the last fragment of the screaming mantis’s soul.

The dark metal links dragged the soul out of the harvesting sky, and as it descended, the soul leaked into the chains. The links flashed for a moment, and then the coils settled into their original form.

The python bracelet shattered with the sound of a hammer on an anvil.

[Only a fool believes there is no punishment for laying judgment on another]

Zoe sat down as the chain slithered over her with a mind of its own.

[Ding!]

[Crimson Armada is a big meanie. I’m so glad I’m with you. We can hate them together]

Zoe nodded mutely as she processed what she saw. The vast Skein in the sky left afterimages of whirling color burning in her eyes. Also, the Black Star chain held no Skein, or at least, no form revealed by the python bracelet.

[Ding!]

[Silly Zoe! Love is not Skein. Why tangle yourself in threads, when you can forge bonds everlasting? Silly, silly, silly! Tee hee hee]

“I suppose,” Zoe said as one of Anton’s silver eyes drifted toward her from the trees.

[I have a question before sleepy time]

“Yeah?”

[Why did you want to save that soul? You have killed so many. You even let Bella’s nasty sword eat and eat. Why does one soul matter more than another?]

Zoe sat still as the childish voice echoed in her mind. She frowned as she reconsidered her actions over the last few days, and weeks, and further back as she examined her life through the lens of the question.

“I don’t know.”

[Ding!]

[Oh]

[Well]

[Tell me when I wake up. I’m very sleepy]

“I think it was that it rewarded me for doing so. For perpetuating the suffering.”

The Black Star system did not respond, and Zoe was not satisfied with her answer. She needed to think. How did she want to act in this new world? How did she see herself if she was both a piece of the system and someone who wanted it destroyed?

She stood from the snow and greeted Anton’s silver eye.

“Have you found it?” she asked.

“It’s an arm,” he responded with a hint of static. “Just like you guessed. I can show you the way, an hour's detour at the most, then we can go to the town. We’ll have plenty of time before the show starts up.”

Unmentioned was the dread they both felt about returning to the Gambler’s show.

"I want to try something first, then I'll come join you,” Zoe responded.

The Black Star’s question drifted to the back of her mind as she opened Gool's present. The simple needle floated up from the fishskin wrapper. Anton's eye followed the movement with silver interest.

Hunger gnawed at her, but she could suppress it, for now. Especially if Trinch’s remains were close by.

Zoe pointed at the midnight carapace, the words entering her mind through the locket attached to her chain.

"Make me armor, please."

The needle flashed towards the corpse. It sliced through the dark armor and cut away sections with a will of its own.

[Gool's Monstrous Tailor]

[Once per day craft clothing from the remains of a fallen enemy. Attribute boost dependent on enemy level and ability]

Zoe grinned and sent a silent thank you to her interdimensional friend as the needle continued working.

She knew there were hypocrisies in her thoughts and actions, but maybe she could rely on people after all…

“By the way,” a note of hesitation entered Anton’s voice. “We should talk about Jack.”

“Why, what’s up?”

The eye swiveled to face her.

“I think we should kill him.”