The bodies of thirteen Zees flowed into each other. Fingers became elbows, and the flesh pulsed and pumped beneath the skin. Faces touched thighs, and the skin, unseamed, fused them in a circular web surrounding Bella, Anton, and Zoe.

Pain gnawed at Bella’s missing eye like fire ants chewing their way into her skull. On the brink of madness, she felt no fear and lifted her sword high. Heat pulsed from the blade as she sliced through flesh wadded up like bubblegum.

The slash was a poor one. The blade skipped along the flesh instead of cleaving a way through. The runeblade’s brambles twitched with irritation. It pulled at her arms, tried to steer her subsequent attacks, but she wielded the sword like an axe as she hacked through the flesh surrounding them.

Hands groped for her. Shattered mouths chomped down from where they hung. Spittle and blood leaked. Everything was wet and trying to kill her, but she would not give up. Bella carved a wound as the flesh dripped and suckered.

Zoe gripped the edges of the wound and tore with her monstrous strength. Bones snapped. Muscles peeled. Mirror flushed her skin as the rainbow aura coursed and the pressure of her grip reflected into the meat. Chunks exploded out. A fine spray doused their faces as Zoe pulled them free.

But the flesh bubbled and screeched from sloppy jaws. It split and peeled around, flopping onto them like a blanket of grasping blubber. Darkness crashed down on them, Zoe held the flesh aloft like a collapsed tent, but she was driven down to her knees. Her Mirrored form canceled. In the hot and humid dark, her voice was small.

“I’m almost out of Skein.”

Bella thrust up with her blade and carved. Heat billowed. Blisters formed along her hands and she screamed through her teeth as the scalding blade sunk into the flesh above. Smoke filled her nostrils like a grill full of hamburgers.

For a brief, dissociative moment, she salivated.

Burned flesh fell away, and she burst out onto the blood-dampened stone. Her blade stabbed into the rock as an anchor, and with her new body path, the movement felt true. She reached back and offered her hand through the hole in the quivering mass. Zoe hauled herself out and brought Anton with her.

“It’s not dying,” Anton said as his silvery eyes whizzed around the monster.

The sword stoked Bella’s rage like a poker.

“Do we fight?” she asked.

The flesh collapsed, crushing the space they had held, and split as it faced them once more and reared up high.

“Run!” Zoe cried.

And they scrambled for the boat. It was smaller this time. A slender craft woven of reeds with just enough space for the three of them to sit in a row. Bella led the charge and the second she touched her feet onto the boat, it moved.

The others leaped on, Zoe near the prow and Anton at the stern, and the boat cruised down the river. She held her breath, as the smoking shambling creature approached the edge of the water and hesitated. For a single, light-filled moment, she thought they would be safe.

And then the mass of Zee flesh slid into the water with a hiss of steam.

She understood with the cold certainty of one who lives by the ocean, that everything just got worse. The creature coiled and reshaped itself in the water like an ink droplet, before racing toward their craft.

Grey tentacles surged up from the water. Long ropes of flesh with jutting teeth like hacksaw blades and long fronds of hair dripping with water. They lashed at her like whips, wrapped around the boat, and squeezed. The woven reeds cracked. Bella hacked, careful not to hit the boat beneath the grasping flesh, but for every grasping tentacle she cut, two more speared up from the water.

She fought beside Zoe, beside Anton, but a sense of futility filled her. The shapeless, shifting creatures fought silently. Mouths and jaws stretched into blades. Its movements were economical, brutal, and the humans bled into the underground river.

Rainbow light flooded her vision. The fresh scent of chopped grass overwhelmed everything. A sound like paper falling, and the mutilated flesh fell into chunks. Bella stumbled as the resistance to her sword fell away. Her essence rushed to the surface of her body. The runeblade’s brambles coiled around her brain and squeezed. White pain laced her mind as she saw with the eyes of the sword —

A single seed deep in the dark earth. What is loam but rot? The seed sprouts and crawls like a serpent toward the promise of the sun. She is the seed, the terrifying dark, the swallowing earth and taker of rot, and the blade of grass thrusting up into the air. The wind flows into the blade and is cut in two.

The runeblade purred in her veins.

She blinked. The tentacles were gone, and the boat bobbed merrily along down the stream. Blood dyed the water red, but she saw the shadows of chunks of flesh sinking. Wilted blades of grass drifted through the air, spinning on the slight wind, and floated atop the water.

An alien woman stood upon a long blade of grass growing from the cave wall. The slender leaf bobbed, and the woman balanced with ease as she surveyed them. Grey skin wrapped in a faded grey robe. She held her palms out, in a gesture of empty-handed peace.

All down the tunneled river behind her, mirrordile corpses floated belly up like a series of stepping stones.

All of Bella’s senses, her instincts, told her this woman was unassuming, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that she decimated the flesh of Zees without effort.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

And that her skin pulsed with rainbow aura, the same as Zoe.

The boat ignored the silent standoff and continued floating down the tunnel toward the alien woman.

“I’m glad you’re still alive,” she said to Zoe as she hopped onto the boat's prow.

Zoe’s jaw worked as though she wasn’t sure what to say. An equally conflicted expression worked across the alien’s face, but it was gone in a second and replaced by a stoic mask.

Bella wasn’t sure if the expressions, the emotions, were as translatable as she interpreted them, but she placed her blade between Zoe and the stranger.

For all the futility of the threat, she would stand by her friend.

“You’re Oriz,” Bella said.

The woman’s yellow eyes widened, and she spared a glance at Bella.

“You’re Bella,” Oriz said. “Zoe didn’t exaggerate your virtues.”

Rage flashed in Bella’s depths. The sword had a sky to burn, and it knew this woman could guide them to that great conflagration, but Bella knew the twisted plans working behind that porcelain-featured face.

She wanted to send her away but lacked the physical power. She wanted to say they didn’t need her help, but that was a lie.

The boat shifted.

“I’m Anton,” he said from behind. “Can you help us kill the dungeon bosses and get out of here?”

Zoe and Bella glared at Anton, but he shrugged.

“Pride is for martyrs.”

Zoe opened her mouth, a scolding on her scarred lips, but she screamed as her face melted.

###

Rainbow invaded Zoe’s mind. The burning pressure of the incursion. The world between worlds spun through her flesh and churned.

Blackstar radiation filled her cells with the clinking of chains and she fell. Water splashed to the sound of tittering, and she reached with skinless muscles of — steel, mirror, sound — for someone to grab her. But there was never anyone to grab her, and she closed her eyes as the dungeon bit down upon her soul with white-hot fangs of dimensional anguish. She fell, sank, and —

Someone pulled her out of the water.

She opened her eyes, gasping, coughing, as air and bloody water mixed dirty in her lungs. Retching.

Bella hauled her up, and Anton helped. Her steel body dragged them down and their Might was low. She was a weight dragging on them.

Was this another punishment for something she did on instinct? How many times did the system need to tell her she was a monster before she took the hint and ended it?

Grass looped around her body and hauled her onto the boat. She lay on her back, not breathing, all rainbow as it burned through her flesh.

“What’s happening to her?” Bella sounded so far away.

Silvery eyes floated over her. They gazed into her body, into her essence — easier now that her skin dripped through the woven reeds. Her muscles jiggled under the non-heat of the rainbow aura and soon they too would flow away.

The release would not be sweet, but it was coming.

“The dungeon is eating the Blackstar energy in her body,” Oriz’s grey skin seeped the same rainbow light. “She doesn’t have long before the process kills her.”

“We need to help her.” Anguish passed across Bella’s face. “Can we give her our essence?”

Oriz’s eyes widened with surprise, and a soft sound like laughter came from her lips.

“You truly are new to the system that you would so readily give up your essence, but no, you cannot do that.” She drew a deep breath as Bella protested. “Zoe, Blackstar radiation corrupted certain parts of your soul. As the dungeon consumes the radiation, it burns your flesh. You are not strong enough to resist this process,” she winced with pain as her aura flared. “But you can excise the corrupted parts of your soul. Zoe, you need to perform surgery on yourself.”

“She can’t move,” Anton said as his eyes floated through Zoe’s translucent flesh. “She’s barely even here anymore. How can she…”

“Shut up,” Oriz snapped. “There’s no time. Zoe close your eyes and silence your mind. Focus inward. Remember your fights with the worm. Remember the stillness of the desert as it waits for the afternoon wind. Go inward. Willpower is strength, and Dexterity is skill, Might is the anvil upon which the world rests, Vitality the wind in the bellows, and Insight the light of the fire. Forge yourself anew.”

Zoe focused on Oriz’s words, but it was as though they were in an unknown language. Pain beyond anything she experienced. She was a pool of alcohol being burned. A puddle in the sun. Dying. Losing herself moment by moment. Each cell screamed before being silenced by rainbow fire.

“We can help,” Oriz said, far away, warbling words, and grabbed Bella’s hand and then Anton’s. “They are called body paths,” she whispered. “But the system’s greatest lie is that we walk them alone. Take her hand.”

Bella took Zoe’s hand. Zoe tried to grasp back with the sheer human urge to not die alone, but her muscles remained slack and unresponsive. Despair overtook the pain like the Earth’s shadow racing after the sunset.

Oriz’s essence flared through the circuit they formed.

The open steppe rippled before the wind. Endless grass. Eternal growth. Infinite blades raised toward heaven.

Heaven so far above the depths, where in the darkness, they knew themselves to be true. Hands tight around the chain that stretched up into a sky blazing with a thousand suns.

With such light, the flower blooms. All colors, all scents, as the petals peel back and pollen races out. Spores, fluff, insects, seeds. Life rides the wind into the unknown.

And from the unknown, it shall spiral back. Back to the center of the world. Where a bell waits ready to toll.

Zoe’s eyes, what remained of them, rolled into the back of her head and the world vanished.

###

The harsh, but comforting smell of disinfectant filled her nostrils. She stood in the bright light of a surgery. Scrubs on her body. A mask. Gloves. She blinked, and the room rippled like a projection on fog. Not quite the surgery of her clinic, not quite the rooms from the university, something in between…

The double doors opened as a nurse pushed an operating table into the center of the room. Zoe lay on the table. She blinked. Staring up at herself as she stared down. Vertigo overtook her, and she wobbled, but the nurse placed a hand on her elbow.

“You’ll be alright, Dr Chambers,” said the nurse. “We can begin the surgery as soon as you’re ready.”

Her voice tingled with familiarity. Zoe stared at the mirrored face behind the mask. Something sagged inside her heart as pressure gave way. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“Thank you, Moth. Please, prepare the patient.”