Zoe froze, knowing what was coming but hating it all the same. Her willpower strained to maintain her connection to the system. She waited in that blurred second and it dragged on.
Rattling across dimensions, she heard the lightning before it came, crackling, sparking, burning the resistance of another god.
Anticipation only makes such things worse.
A fat beam of lightning struck her between the eyes. Her face lit on fire as her skin sloughed and split. Her clothes singed, melted into smoke. Every inch of her body burst with flames.
She couldn’t scream, but she tried.
Frozen in time as her skin cracked and peeled away like a grotesque banana. It pooled at her feet, wrinkled and blackened and crispy.
Then it was over.
She fell to the ground, weak but not weak, numb but not numb. The damage to her skin healed, or had never been, she wasn’t sure… She rolled over and something crunched underneath her. No. No. No. she lifted her hand and saw shreds of dried skin flake away.
It was too much, and she puked. Thin bile that tasted awfully of the health potion. What was one more puddle when the room was already defiled?
She gazed at the reflection on the back of her hands. Bile hung from her chin. She wiped it away.
Reflection on the back of her hands?
[Technique crystalized: The Self Reflects The World]
Zoe stood.
[Housed within the skin, this technique allows the user to reflect the force of attacks. Activating technique costs Skein. Repelling force costs Skein depending upon the magnitude of force.]
Zoe moved her fingers, entranced by the shimmering reflection. Did Moth know she could deactivate the technique? Was it her choice to wear it at all times?
Questions Zoe could never answer.
She circled the room, enjoying the strange way the air moved against her. All this time she had tried to harness Mirror only to fail. Had the secret been inside Moth all this time? When she siphoned away her attributes, was this ability siphoned? Zoe didn’t think this was the case. Moth came from her, but she was a separate being.
A sister, not a clone.
By ending Moth, and taking her body into herself, Zoe had crossed some emotional threshold. Her mind had resolved in that subconscious way necessary to develop a technique.
Not ending… she couldn’t let herself do that. She had killed Moth. It was a truth she needed to accept.
She formed a mirrored fist. There was not the strength that came with summoning Metal through her flesh. This felt more like armor than a weapon. Once more she wondered why flooding her flesh with Metal did not count as a technique. She would have to ask Oriz when they rendezvoused at the tavern.
In her mind’s eye, she saw that floating head. Demonic creatures spewed from its mouth and filled the sky. How could anything stand against such a monstrous foe?
She shuddered, moved, dispelling her fear with physical action. She gazed up at the rent in the ceiling. There were more immediate problems to concern herself with, like reaching the tavern. She wanted to get up to the roof. From there she could spy the beacon and get a lay of the land. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too far to travel.
Her hunger hoped more bubbles were floating about. With her new strength and her new technique, she looked forward to hunting them. Level 10 was within reach, and with it came the meeting with the mysterious being Oriz called the Smith.
But first, she had an idea to test.
###
Bella stood at the edge of the forest and waited for Anton. The curse of raised attributes was that she could hear him pissing against a tree from a couple of hundred yards away. Corpses littered the beach behind her. Blood and offal soaked into the dark sand. She turned her back to the scene and examined the runeblade. The cryptic glyphs usually helped distract her from the world — almost too much, really — but right now they were almost useless.
Zoe was gone. Hours had passed, and the mirrored yacht continued sailing its irregular looping track. It dragged that black hole with it, and there was no sign of anything emerging, let alone her friend.
The water was pink now from all the spilled blood of the mirrordiles. A liquid ruby under the powder blue sky. The same sky, maybe night wouldn’t come in this room of the dungeon. Bella had lived near the ocean for so much of her life. Once, a whale washed up on the beach. Before it rotted, there was that initial smell. Not of foulness, but of flesh. The scent of a butcher shop packed full of product.
She wanted to get away from the water’s edge.
Anton rejoined her. After their fight on the beach, they had barely spoken beyond pointing out where a monster was lumbering. She felt weary with the killing, but Anton was as chipper as he ever was. Sometime, soon, she would learn what his deal was.
But not right now.
They hiked deeper into the forest of the island, toward the crown. Through the trees, they saw a mansion. Large and imposing. Fat, irregular stone blocks formed the exterior with crumbling wooden trim. There were two stories of the main building and it looked like it could take up a city block. At irregular, unpredictable intervals, a third story erupted from the surrounding tiled rooftop. From these architectural growths, spires extended until they reached needle thinness thirty feet up.
A blasted garden stretched between them and the front door. Dead rose bushes and thriving weeds. There was a winding path of cracked bricks.
Anton pointed.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Do you see that person watching from the windows?”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
He shrugged.
“They’re gone now.”
Bella sighed.
“You reckon there’s a fragment in there?”
“Makes sense,” he glanced at her. “What are you planning on doing with the fragments?”
“The quest didn’t end when Zoe fell down the hole. So, she’s alive. Since she’s alive, we’ll meet again. When we meet again, I want to have the fragments so we can leave this dungeon as quickly as possible.”
He smirked.
“That’s some marvelously optimistic logic.”
“You coming or not?”
“Sure, I’m coming.”
Bella slung the sword over her shoulder and stepped onto the cracked red brick path. The brick settled under her foot as it sank an inch into the dust. Far ahead, the front door creaked open.
“I don’t like that,” Anton said beside her.
She sighed.
“Neither do I.”
Together, they walked toward the inviting darkness of the mansion on the hill.
###
The Bloody Eye was large for a spaceship, but small for a world. Only a tenth the size of Earth’s moon, Rue could lap the horizon in… well… the blink of an eye. Still, he enjoyed the almost wasteful use of time that was his stroll across the red crystalline wastes. Lorrilla had ventured ahead, vanishing into a streaming whip of blood, but Esme remained, her silent footsteps doing nothing to break the peace.
Too bad his pace crunched along the rippled surface. There was something right in the fact that one errant step could break some latticed formation that took millions of years. That was the true meaning of the universe: irrevocable change was instant, meaningless, and constant.
He chuckled, and the sound scraped across the landscape. Crystal edges grew sharper, and the low breeze whistled for a moment, before his laughter died, and dullness returned to the red and barren land.
“What is so funny?” Esme whispered.
“Why, just having thought,” he said. “Meaningless thoughts to while away the hours.”
Her obsidian smirk crossed her face.
“That is the purpose of a vacation, my lord. To think and drink deeply.”
“Quite so.”
He reached into the folds of his malachite robe, deep into the pocket dimension woven into the threads, and pulled out two glass bottles of his home brew. It was neither ancient, nor particularly good, but he was learning. No matter where he went in the universe, where there were humans, there was beer.
He passed a bottle to Esme; she twisted off the cap and a smell of dark malt and dandelion crept into the air. They clinked bottles and drank as they neared the edge of the polyp canyon.
A vast crater that stretched almost to the horizon. Half a mile deep, the flattened bottom housed thousands of fat white towers. Polyp mothers. Each stood hundreds of feet tall, with their roots enmeshed in a vast network of grey-blue and stark white veins. The veins linked the polyp mothers, uploading information from the ephemeral System straight into their precious cargo: the settlement polyps.
The veins hurt even Rue’s eyes to gaze upon, for they were not there. Not entirely. No more than a thought is there in the lightning coursing through the flesh of a brain.
In a few hours, maybe half a day on the outside, the polyps would be ready, the orbit would align, and the Earth would be seeded. He needed to prepare his announcement to the newly integrated masses.
“This is better than the last batch,” Esme offered.
He glanced over and realized she was talking about the beer.
“I want to brew it stronger,” he said. “But it’s hard to do that without affecting the taste.”
“All things come in time.”
Rue gazed up at the blue and green marble. Its scattered lands under swirling white clouds. He thought of the purpose of his visit. Thought of his elaborate and ostentatious suicide. He grinned, and he drank his awful beer, and he waited.
All things come in time.
###
Zoe hopped up and down on her feet in the domed room. It was strange being naked, but she was alone. The mirror hid nothing, but it offered a shield in its own way. Was this how Moth felt?
Hard to know how Moth felt about anything, but her optimistic curiosity, and open heart, were actions she could try to imitate. Try to better herself.
She jumped from foot to foot and then leaped straight into the air.
Her might launched her high, halfway toward the domed ceiling. If she took a run up or tried to launch herself from the wall, she could probably reach the opening above her. If she lashed out with her chains, she could hook on the jagged edge.
But that was not the current experiment.
She dropped straight down. Knees slightly flexed. Mirror coating her skin. Even the soles of her feet. She hit the ground. A rippling sensation passed through her as the technique reflected the force of the ground striking her feet.
The reflected force shot straight into the ground. Two footprints spiked deep into the thick stone floor. Zoe sank a full foot into the ground, with a gasp of surprise.
[Skein 124/131]
She frowned at the outcome. It had only cost five Skein, but she hoped to launch herself, as though she was bouncing on a trampoline. Though, when she recalled her fight with Moth, no matter how hard she struck, Moth didn’t move. The technique only reflected the world.
It was a slight, childish, disappointment, but at least she now understood how it worked.
After an awkward moment of extricating herself from the holes, she took a running start and launched herself at the wall. Her mirrored fist punched a hole into the side and she gripped the new handhold.
She had assumed that [The Self Reflects The World] would be inferior to her Metal infused body when it came to offense, but she was able to use her momentum to double her impact.
She launched off the wall with a surge of joy. Her chains whipped out and pulled her up through the opening in the ceiling. The dome outside was dry, and rough with age. She stood and gazed out at the view. The open sky, flat and pale, and around her stretched green trees and stagnant pools, a network of sand banks and reeds, the endless swamp. Sweltering, steamy air billowed around the tower, but it was better than the still, musty atmosphere within the dome. She would take the smell of decaying nature over the stench of the foulness that came from incorporation any day.
In the distance, she could make out the blue beacon. It marked the tavern, and as she squinted, she guessed it wasn’t over thirty miles. With her restored and raised attributes, she supposed she could make it in a day.
But she had another plan.
A dozen bubbles floated above the surface of the swamp. Some were as high as a hundred feet up, but most bobbed near the surface. They were dangerous in numbers, but alone they represented an unparalleled chance at growth. She would have to be careful, but if she killed as many as she could on her way to the beacon, then she could push her levels toward 20. With luck, she could complete Rue’s quest before she even left this dimension.
Though that brought a sour thought. Oriz held the fragments necessary to complete the quest and trigger the incursion. Without them, she was stuck here. She gazed back in the direction Trinch had tossed her.
More swamp.
If Oriz and the others fell in battle, would she ever be able to find their bodies? Find the fragments? Return home?
No, they trusted her to meet them at the tavern. So they would be at the tavern. She had to focus on upholding her end of the bargain. She faced the glowing blue beam of light. With a childish grin, she stepped off the tower and plummeted, mirrored feet first, toward the ground.