The deeper Oriz and Bella went into the guts of the cubic labyrinth, the redder the walls became. The — paint? — so fresh it dribbled down the walls as though the ceiling were a freshly peeled wound. Not every room burst open with monsters, some were empty, or filled with devious traps. Bella wasn’t sure at what point she started trusting Oriz, or when Oriz reciprocated that trust — at some point in the silence between sword swings they started leaning on each other. Together, they might outlast the hunt. Together, they might be more than they were apart. Together…

But no chase lasts forever, and with no exit available, the outcome is inevitable.

The One-Eyed Crow caught them, and there had been a moment of awkwardness — like a dog catching its tail — before the battle began. Wave after wave of crowling cawed for her blood. Oriz and the demon debated and drank while Bella fought below. One woman against a horde.

But she wasn’t just one woman anymore, she had someone to rely on…

She dodged sweeping talons as the slightest blush spread across her cheeks. The crowlings surrounded her, but Bella fought with a fury. Their battleground was a platform in the center of a red cube. The platform was horizontal and wide, but the walls were tilted with a cornered roof high above. When she first entered the room, and the walls slid open, she didn’t even try and guess what might lie on the other side.

Bella wasn’t sure how long ago that had been.

There had been a battle — that new rule seemed to seep through all dimensions — there would always be a battle. It felt as though months had passed. It had been weeks since she last slept, or ate, days since she drank, and though she felt the exhaustion, the starvation, it was such a distant pain compared to the constant glow pulsing through her. The glow leaching from the barbed wires of the runeblade.

It fed her and so she fed it the blood of her enemies.

A part of her that still gripped human hopes and human fear was convinced that no time had passed at all. That this was a terrible dream. She wasn’t trapped in hell falling in love with an alien while she fought crows with a magic sword.

That part of her was small, and almost consumed by the ravenous wires corded through her. Almost obliterated by the fierce excitement raging in her heart. She fought like night falling across the land. Her runeblade burned through flesh, and Bella followed

Fluid as water, fast as a shadow, together they cut through the rushing tide of crowlings. Black feathers flew. Wine-dark blood splashed out even as the wounds sealed up after themselves. The crowlings raked her with talons, but the hardened black blade deflected each strike. Heat pulsed out like an oven, shielding her in the reddish glow, and the crowlings shrieked as they backed away. They limped and scrambled, feathers smoking and skin bubbling.

When you need an opening, create one. One of Oriz’s lessons, and as helpful as the others. She was a brilliant teacher when she let her guard down.

Bella caught her breath in that brief respite. Her sword hung across her shoulder, heavy with blood. Long hair hung down over her face. The tips were bright blonde, but the rest had grown in a brown almost black. She eyed the crowlings as they eyed her.

Fresh pink scars crisscrossed her tattoos.

The crowlings surrounded her, a ring of squawking, snapping monsters. They cawed but dared not invade the dome of heat until the head of the One-Eyed Crow punched through her sword’s technique like a meteor through a glasshouse.

The heat shield rippled out into normalcy. The crowlings stared at the head of their lord.

The bloated crow's head was the size of a small pony. Thick filmed white eyes turned toward Bella. The small mouths on the fat pink tongue like barnacles on a ship split open.

“Tell me honest and true, Bella, do you believe the hunt is better than the duel?”

She croaked, so unused to speaking, so long since she had drunk liquid since she had slept, but she had to continue.

The crowlings descended. They attacked Bella, but they also dove past her toward the head of their lord. Excited squawks as they snatched at the powerful flesh. In such proximity, they slashed at each other. Blood spilled as they raked talon against talon, stabbed beak against beak. Bella’s sword cut like the prow of a ship through the chaos of crowlings.

“How can the hunt be better than this?” she said. “You don’t drive to the beach because you enjoy the drive. You do it for the bloody waves.”

Crimson reared behind her as she sliced through a sneaky crowling jugular.

The demon’s head sighed with disappointment.

“You merely say this to wound me, I know it. Nevertheless, I forgive you for your wrongheadedness. You will one day appreciate the hunt, and I shall instruct you!”

It burst into feathers.

As did all the other crowlings.

And the corpses of crowlings.

The spilled blood and entrails smoked away and the feathers faded into the shadows like black ink into water. Once more the red room glistened as clean as freshly peeled skin.

Bella sagged and leaned on her sword. Oriz floated down to the platform in the center of the tilted cube.

“How do you feel?”

“More blood… must fight…’

Oriz rolled her eyes and smiled.

“Be serious.”

“I’m thirsty.”

Oriz offered the remnants of her cup. Bella blinked eyes pale as a cave-dweller’s. She took the cup and sipped. She tilted the cup back and drank. The alcohol filled her empty stomach.

She handed back the empty cup and swept her hair from her eyes.

“That’s better… how long was I fighting this time?”

“Seven days.”

Bella’s eyes widened as they cleared. The brambles of the runeblade retreated from her mind but remained wrapped around her brain.

“That’s a lot.”

“How did it feel for you?”

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“Like watching my life on fast forward.”

“The connection is strengthening, you’ll have that second rune soon.”

Bella placed her hand on Oriz’s shoulder.

“Thank you, for everything.”

Oriz patted Bella’s hand and smiled wide. Her corn-yellow hair spilled over her shoulders as she blushed with alcohol.

“Of all the times I’ve been stuck in a hellish side-dimension, this was the best.”

Bella’s grin grew lopsided.

“I was being serious,” she said wryly. “You’ve been an incredible mentor.”

“You’re an incredible student. I know it was hard for you initially, but you’ve grown, and… you’re just incredible.”

“You’ll make me blush now.”

[Now synching with real time]

Bella and Oriz started. They looked around. Bella’s hand slipped from Oriz’s shoulder as she raised her blade into a ready position.

[Please standby for connection…]

[Standby…]

“What is this?” Oriz asked.

Bella sighed.

“If I had to guess?”

[I missed you! My favorite contestant! Oh, look at you! Don’t you look strong? And is that love I smell? Wonderful! I just know this episode is going to be fantastic! Best of the season. Hooray, hooray for me!]

[Countdown to the Magnifying Glass: 0 seconds]

The world folded down around them. Bella reached out to Oriz. Their fingers slowed as time bent, the distance between them collapsed as time froze, and they touched each other as the space folded them together in the mad god’s grasp.

The red cube sat empty, and faint, in the distance, crows echoed as they rushed toward a party they were already too late for.

###

Clouds rolled across the sky. Bella lay atop a grassy hill in the Gambler’s Green Room as the notifications sounded in her mind.

[Congratulations!]

[For being the first of this planet to break out of hell, you are awarded the title: Hellbreaker]

[Hellbreaker: your time in hell is treated as real-time and you earn commensurate rewards from death energy and meditation]

[Calculating reward backlog…]

An almost forgotten cold rushed her as though plunging into an ice bath

[Level up! You are now level 30]

Bella’s eyes widened.

She gained 11 levels while she was in that hell. That was a lot of essence she needed to incorporate. The thought almost scared her, and she wanted to speak to Oriz before she selected her essence and looked at the pending notifications for her Body Path.

Her level was almost as high as Zoe's! She gasped at the thought. Zoe had always been such a staunch force in her mind. What would it be like if they were equal?

Though, knowing Zoe, she had probably found some horrific way to grow in power since they last saw each other. Bella wondered, as she sat up and looked about the meadow, whether her friends were here as well.

But these thoughts were cut away as her Skein quivered with a hunger she had never felt so intensely. It echoed the pangs in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten in so long, and her Skein had been satisfied with the offerings of the runeblade she clasped even now. But now her skein hungered. Starved. Craved. Ached into her mind… it was so small compared to what it needed to be.

She needed to find essence.

And — more importantly — she wanted to find Oriz, and, hopefully, the others.

###

The green room was as pleasant as any picturesque rolling meadow can be. The smell of dew-soaked grass reminded Bella of the dairy farm her primary school friend had lived on. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name, only the freckles. They had wandered through the rolling daisy-speckled pastures.

True summers of innocence, even when they found the sun-bleached bones of fallen cows.

Bella walked along the grass, her bare feet aching with the softness of each step. The white clothes wrapped around her body were clean, fragrant, and foreign. A long dress barely lifted from her ankles. Short sleeves exposed the wiry muscles of her biceps. Tattoos flowed down her polished and oiled skin. Even the scars were the healthy pink of healing, rather than that ragged red that threatened to open up at any point.

Her breathing came easy, there was no hitch in her step, the assault upon her body from weeks — months? Years? A small part of her mind screamed as it tried to comprehend the concept of no-time, of time trapped in time, of the recursive six-faced hell inside a rolling dice where a second is worth less than blood spilled along a — some cool breeze whispered through the leaves of a weeping willow and silenced her inner mania.

The Green Room was a place of peace.

A fluffy, cloud-like angora rabbit hopped past her feet. She knelt, and it sniffed her outstretched fingers, before hopping away.

“I still think those creatures are absurd,” Oriz said.

Bella stood faster than she meant to, a slight blush on her face, she wasn’t sure how long she’d been walking, but she could still feel the tightness of Oriz’s high-leveled grip around her hand as the Gambler scooped them up. Grey fingers crushing the bones in her hand and she didn’t care.

Bella brushed a long strand of hair away from her eyes.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hello, Bella,” Oriz said with a smile. “It seems we have more time than last time.”

They stepped closer. Bella felt a blush rising in her cheeks. She hadn’t felt like this since high school.

“So what happens…” she began, not wanting to finish, but needing to know. “What happens to us now we’re out of the cube?”

Oriz shrugged, the motion elegant as she stepped closer, and she took Bella’s hand in hers.

“I try not to change who I am when my environment changes,” she said. “We don’t have to change.”

“Humans have a saying,” Bella said. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

“What is ‘Vegas’?”

“It’s a city in America. People gamble there, party, make mistakes…”

Oriz’s fingers slid through Bella’s, probing, but not grasping, as though to say she was there, but would not hold Bella if she wanted to leave.

“Is that how you saw what happened between us? A mistake?”

“What happened between us?”

“We grew closer.”

“It was more than that!” Bella said with incredulity.

“You’re right,” Oriz smiled. “It was a lot more than that, and I want a lot more than what I got.”

Bella leaned forward, their lips met, and they kissed in the sunlit meadow until Anton interrupted them.

“You’re alive,” he said.

Bella’s face scrunched up as she turned to look at him. Dressed the same but shabbier. No expression on his face. Was she frowning or relieved to see this bastard again?

“How’ve you been?” she asked.

“We got to the town. Found the polyp. There’s a new quest about being nobility and obligation… it’s a whole thing. You’ll see for yourself when you get back.”

And the inclusive certainty with which he said it, as though she never left, made her smile.

“Yeah, once we get this game over,” she said.

“That’s it,” he nodded. “How’ve you been?”

Her smile wavered as she remembered the unrelenting labyrinth of cubes and crowlings.

“It’s been rough,” she said as she glanced back at Oriz. “But we helped each other out.”

He looked between them both and nodded.

“Boss wants to see you. She has big news for the upcoming game.”

“Good news?” Bella asked drily.

Anton barked out a laugh.

“I missed your sense of humor.”

“So it’s bad then?”

“Oh, it’s the absolute worst.”