“You know,” Anton said as he spun and kicked a swooping beak. “I think we should sleep in shifts. One at a time.”
Bella stabbed a mirrodile in its eye and squawked as blood squirted into her mouth.
“Great idea,” she spat. “I’ll go first.”
She ducked her hands into the water to clean her face.
“Trespasser!” shrieked one cranetongue. “Give us your hands! Give us your face and we shall let you pass!”
“Nah,” Bella lay down in the boat's flat bottom. “You two got me covered?”
“We got you,” Zoe said.
Anton and Zoe each took a side of the boat and fought off the creatures. When they killed one, they hauled the mirrored body onto the boat to prevent the braided offspring from escaping.
Zoe fought, and as blood washed her knuckles, her hunger grew. But so too did a plan. If she could use Quest Breaker to analyze the dungeon, why couldn’t she use it on the quest Rue gave her?
Why couldn’t she find a loophole and stick it to that bastard alien god?
Anton slept after Bella, and then it was Zoe’s turn to rest upon the wood. Each of them cleared another level during the tunnel's six-hour boat ride. Zoe planned on examining the quest, but the second her back rested on the rocking wood, she passed out. The stone silent sleep of the dead.
Bright light blasted her eyes. She jerked awake and wiped the drool from her cheek. The boat floated along a lake under an open blue sky. Houses floated atop the water in rings surrounding a forested island. The houses were in a style Zoe didn’t recognize. Steepled rooftops with circular windows. The rooftops glittered in the light, mirrors reflecting the lake and the sky.
On waking, Zoe felt the gnawing pain in her guts. Two levels demanded that she integrate.
[Level up! You are now Level 8.]
[Please select an element to incorporate:]
* [Wood: Dexterity +2, Vitality +2]
* [Water: Dexterity +4]
* [Blood: Vitality +4]
She suppressed the urges. No matter how much it felt as though she needed it, she had slept through the hunger with no problems. So long as she resisted she was fine.
But she would have to level up soon, or else she risked the same fate as Cassy. Fortunately, the gluttony was equally repulsed by such an outcome. Giving herself over to the void, was just as bad as forever resisting, in the eyes of the gluttony. She needed to eat and to eat and to eat.
Which is why she gripped at her urges with every point of her advanced Willpower. Once she started to incorporate, to eat the world, she knew she would not stop until the hunger, the gluttony, was satisfied.
And such satisfaction could only ever be momentary.
Anton and Bella sat on opposite ends of the boat, scanning the water for any threats as the boat threaded a path through the houses. Some trees thrust up from the water. Canopies low to the flat water. Leaves shining.
“How long was I out?” Zoe asked.
Bella started at her voice, but Anton responded without turning around.
“Four hours. You needed it.”
“We all need it,” Bella said. “I know our bodies are changing, but sleep is fundamental.”
Zoe nodded and sat up, stood, and stretched. The flat-bottomed boat rocked slightly.
“Where is this taking us?”
“Nowhere,” said Anton. “It’s just looping through the houses. This is the second lap.”
Zoe felt a prickle of irritation.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Sleep is fundamental.”
“I need to incorporate, we should all make sure we don’t delay too long. I don’t want a repeat of Cassy.”
Bella nodded.
“I incorporated Water twice while you slept.”
“What level are you at now?”
“Five.”
“Your Dexterity must be high.”
“Here,” Bella stuck out her tongue as she concentrated.
STATUS
Name: Isabella Moore
Level: 5
Body: Water, Shadow
ATTRIBUTES
Might: 10 (15)
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Vitality: 7 (12)
Dexterity: 22 (27)
Willpower: 8 (13)
Insight: 10 (15)
Skein: 28/57
Titles: Intrepid, Fools Rush In (Incomplete), Doomed
The information sank into Zoe’s mind. She realized how different Bella’s build was from her own. Though Bella’s Dexterity matched Zoe’s Might, the total score was far lower. Despite herself, it felt good to know she could overpower the other woman should it come to that. She didn’t like the thought, but it happened. Though the power of that blade would only grow.
“Damn,” Anton whistled. “That sword of yours is an unfair boost.”
Bella nodded.
“Only so long as I’m fighting. It will drain me if we stop.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that,” he pointed over the side of the boat.
Zoe’s eyes widened as she gazed into the water.
Beneath the placid lake surface, there was a town. Cobblestoned streets covered in silt. Soft glowing weeds swayed from garden beds. Schools of small and silvery fish swam in and out of open doors and shattered windows. Brick structures still standing in the immobile water, while wooden buildings sagged and rotted into the paved lakebed.
Zoe did not need to ask about the people of the town. She did not need to ask about the source of Blood essence. For corpses lined the street. Soggy and rotten, their skin flaking away, their eyes and extremities devoured by fish, hundreds of corpses. Floating inches from the lake bottom as though trapped in a necrotic caricature of town life. There were mothers, dresses billowing, holding the hands of children. Two men, their fingers rotted down to the bone, clasped hammers and warped wooden planks as they floated on their way to nowhere. A town preserved in a grotesque display of everyday life.
Some disaster struck these people. Some magical apocalypse placed them here. Was it the same one that overturned her world? She couldn’t be sure, but the sight sickened her.
Stoked the furnace of her rage.
But despite her anger, her righteous fury, the hunger pointed at the corpses and thought only of food. More Blood essence lay underwater than she would need for the next dozen levels.
Though the gruesome buffet was not without danger.
Mirrodiles swam, lazy, kicking off the bottom as they cruised down the streets. Cranetongues retracted, they snapped at any fish that came too close. They ignore the corpses with casual reptilian contempt. Did that signal something about the dead? She had noticed how the nature of essence was not consistent, no matter that the increase in her attributes was the same. Could the waterlogged flesh hold some peril? Or was it just not the nature of mirrodiles to scavenge carrion?
She sighed as her thoughts circled the never ending funnel of hunger.
“It looks like we have more than enough enemies,” she said to the others. “We should be able to reach level 20 just fighting the mirrodiles.”
“That’s what I thought,” Anton said. “Even with the diminishing returns.”
“What do you mean?” Bella asked.
“The higher level you get, the more of the death energy you need to progress. You’ll notice it in a level or two, that the mirrodiles give less.”
Bella pursed her lips.
“How come you keep getting smarter?”
Anton waggled his eyebrows.
“Because I have a build in mind. Insight all the way, baby.”
“Show us.”
“Fine.”
STATUS
Name: Anton
Level: 7
Body: Sky, Mirror, Air
ATTRIBUTES
Might: 9
Vitality: 7
Dexterity: 20
Willpower: 11
Insight: 33
Skein: 41/80
Titles: Intrepid, Tailwind, Fools Rush In (Incomplete)
Bella’s eyes widened.
“What does it even feel like to have that much Insight?”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he said with his best Cheshire grin. “What about you, Boss? Since this is some kind of show and tell.”
Zoe gritted her teeth against the gnawing. Seeing Anton’s Skein so close to hers, his level so close to hers, only made the hunger grow. She needed to consume, but she refused to waste her opportunity on Water, Wood, or Blood. She wanted Metal. She wanted the bonus given to her by Lodestone.
She glanced around at the houses.
“Sorry,” she said. “I want to level up, and then I’ll share, but I need Metal. You think that will have some?”
She pointed at a nearby house, the second story sitting above the waterline so that it looked as though it floated. As soon as she pointed, the boat swung out of its automated path and steered toward the house’s balcony. Zoe tried to stop tapping her leg, but the nerves kept building.
She needed essence.
She needed it now.
The boat drew close, and she leaped the last twenty feet across the water and cleared the balcony balustrade. Sunlight sparkled on the water surrounding the house. It was picturesque, with half-drowned trees surrounding the steepled roof, but all she could think about was the aching desire to consume.
She immediately reached out and grabbed the metal balustrade.
[Level up! You are now Level 8]
[Please select an element to incorporate:]
* [Wood: Dexterity +2, Vitality +2]
* [Water: Dexterity +4]
* [Blood: Vitality +4]
She snarled, and concentrated. The System provided the three options that were the most abundant, but she knew — from painful experience — that other options existed. She flexed her Willpower and focused on the metal railing.
[Please select an element to incorporate:]
* [Wood: Dexterity +2, Vitality +2]
* [Water: Dexterity +4]
* [Metal: Might +4, Willpower +4 (Lodestone Title applied)
Without a second’s hesitation, she selected Metal. The railing flashed as the aura became visible. The railing unraveled and streamed towards her. Glinting steel tendrils burrowed into her body.
[The hunger grows and demands satiation. There is enough Metal to satiate the void. Do you wish to continue?]
Yes.
The tiles of the balcony buckled and split as the reinforced metal in the concrete floor burst up like manic roots and pierced her skin in a dozen places. She fell, pulled down by metal tendrils until she lay strapped to the concrete.
Black filth poured from her wounds as the metal poured inside. Her eyelids fluttered as she dipped her toes in the pool of the unconscious.
A vast lake of resentment drowned a town. A feeling of long stasis finally broken. Minds driven beyond boredom into placid insanity, finally able to move, to act, and thus to destroy.
The boat bobbed up to the balcony. Bella stood, sure-footed with her high Dexterity.
“Zoe, are you alright?”
Zoe tried to respond, but metal filled her throat. She choked, gagged on rusted bile, wanted it to stop, but the hunger sucked at the world like an unplugged drain.
And everything spiraled.
[Stop the pain. Reject the System.]
[Yes] / [No]
She cursed herself for that momentary mental weakness.
No.
And the prompt faded, but Metal continued pouring into her. She had never taken in two levels at once, and it was overwhelming. Sickening, like gorging herself on a day’s worth of calories in mere minutes.
The concrete balcony crumbled. Water seeped up through the cracks. She had a moment of laying in a warm puddle before the balcony sank. Metal tendrils still tethered her to the concrete. Bella screamed something, but then water filled Zoe’s ears. Her nostrils.
Her mouth.
She swallowed the water before she held her breath, and the taste bloomed melancholy on her tongue. Shackled by her desire for power, the concrete pulled her down to the underwater street. Down to join the drowned and decaying dead.