After Anton confirmed it was possible, they entered the mansion like bugs crawling inside the open maw of an insect eater. Everything trembled. Dark, they walked, crouched low, following the silent glow of Anton’s silver eye. Heat like a fire gusted out at them from the winding depths of the corridors. Wet as fevered panting. Infrequent wind, the strain of lungs further into the dark, and the foul bilious, blackened, bloody scent flowing out into the bright rectangle of light that was the window behind them.

The floor beneath them rested like a limp tongue — moist, unstable, muscular — shifting and tasting them with each step. The beast rumbled, walls shaking, as it learned of them. Limp fingers each the size of a telephone pole dragged against the exterior. Bricks and wooden boards shattered and fell into the lake — plinks and plops as the boss battered at itself like a dog scratching for a flea.

Anton’s eye led them further into the dark.

They walked past studies piled with half-digested books, past dining rooms where the tables breathed, dull-half light spilling from the silver eye exposing what should have remained hidden. Nothing came for them, not yet, but they couldn’t relax. Whenever they reached a split in the corridor, Anton sent an eye in either direction and if it split, he sent another eye.

Soon, they stood at a crossroads. The walls breathed and a dull chandelier dripped sour fluid into a puddle on the pulsing floor. Anton focused as his eyes scanned the paths ahead. Bella stood beside him, sword drawn, and scanned the immediate surroundings. Zoe paced as she worked on the problem from a different angle.

They needed to find the Mirrorbell fragment. Initially, she thought this meant cutting into the boss’s stomach and sifting through its guts. Maybe, as Anton initially suggested, even jumping into its mouth to follow the fragment down. But the mansion was offering no clues, and it seemed to continue forever. She idly inspected a bust on a plinth against the wall. Zazzatha in stone, or perhaps an ancestor, but the eyes…

She slapped the bust away. It rolled wetly across the sodden carpet.

“What happened?” Bella asked.

“Its eyes,” Zoe grimaced. “The eyes were alive.”

Anton nodded as he sat eyes closed and legs crossed.

“The same with the paintings. It’s watching us, but I don’t know if it sees us yet. Not really.”

“We have to hurry,” Bella added.

Zoe and Anton nodded, and a silence persisted as Anton focused on searching outward. He tapped the python bracelet with his fingers, expanding his understanding of essence, looking for the Mirrorbell in the flow. Though Zoe had her doubts, since…

“It’s all Mirrorbell essence woven through the mansion,” Anton muttered under his breath. “It’s overlapping, can’t pick out anything.”

But he didn’t stop looking.

Zoe stepped away and lowered herself into the first step of the Grasping Vine. She stepped into the next. Movement following movement, punch following kick. She was approaching the true intent of the stances — still distant, but looming — these moves were merely the beginning of the style. But she pushed the thoughts away and let the movements center her. She focused her mind on the limits of her body, on the fibers of her flesh, and closed her eyes. Breathed, moved, and — there — felt it like a ripple striking the edge and returning to the center.

The humming reverberation of a bell. So soft, just the after-echo, but if she moved again, she felt it tingle, felt it toll. She already used her daily instant access to the center of the world to heal Oriz, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t approach it manually. Behind closed eyes, she felt the world curling up around her. Sloppy, she knew, imperfect, and if she looked it would all collapse. So she didn’t look. She moved and focused on the essence within her. The essence of the Mirrorbell fragment, and the fragment only, not this false equivalency of the mansion, no, she needed to focus on a piece of a whole.

She grasped, and as her body path manifested itself, she brought her palms together into a decisive clap. A strike targeted at herself, and the Mirrorbell fragments within her. A deep toll rang out into the air. The sound rippled over Bella and Anton and they rang in turn. The fragments inside them answering the call. Bella looked over at her with surprise but remained silent as Zoe listened.

There, on the edge of hearing, another reverberation. Deep in the mansion, the specific tolling notes of a Mirrorbell fragment. Zoe opened her eyes.

“Do you hear it, Anton?”

He nodded.

“I’m tracking down the source.” After a moment, he opened his eyes and stood. “It’s this way, follow me.”

###

The winding halls continued. Narrow as arteries, walls sagged under the weight of tissue and rot. They waded through puddles of blood and ichor like water and oil until they reached the stairs.

Anton paused. There were only seven stairs, but they led up into an arch of dark, veiny wood. In the room beyond the arch, a dim, blue light shuttered with a sound like a sputtering diesel engine. The smell of salt, of iron grime, coated the air. Zoe gagged. It felt like every horrible memory of medical school rolled into one sharp smell. It clawed at the back of her throat. From Bella and Anton’s pale faces, she knew they felt the same way.

But, beyond the abhorrent arch, came the tinkling, crystalline toll of a bell fragment.

Bella spat onto the carpet.

“I don’t want to go in there,” she said.

Anton spat.

“Zoe can probably do this one by herself.”

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“What do you mean?” Bella frowned. “You think there’s a boss inside the boss?”

“Why not? They hid a dungeon within a dungeon.”

Zoe eyed the gate. Who knew what to expect from this dungeon? It didn’t feel right that they could enter this mansion so easily. They were lucky the boss didn’t see them enter, but shouldn’t it have been harder for them to sneak past? Foreboding itched between her shoulder blades, an ache out of reach that —

Her Black Star chain clinked lightly as it draped against her back and rubbed the exact spot. Tension faded as it worked away at the spot.

“Thanks,” she whispered with a grin.

The chain snaked down her right arm and wrapped around her hand. It squeezed once, before resting. She rotated her wrist, and found the chain didn’t restrict her motion, but remained around her knuckles.

“Moth?” she whispered.

The chain remained still, and Zoe shook her head. Whether it was the Black Star system, Moth, or her own mind, it felt right to hold the chain like that. She nodded to herself.

“Alright.”

Bella gave her a poke.

“You all there, Boss?”

“And then some.” Zoe took a deep breath. “So how about I head in and get all the experience, yeah? I could use the levels.”

She walked toward the stairs.

“Oh, hell no!”

With a rush of air and a tap on her shoulder, Anton kicked off of her and flipped through the arch. He spun to face her, upside down and grinned as he reached out to push off the skeleton charging at him from the shadows.

He launched off and veered out of sight.

The arch shuddered, and doors slid slowly from within like teeth pushing out of gums. In moments, they would close off the room beyond. Zoe laughed as she sauntered up the stairs, chain creaking around her knuckles. She stepped sideways through the arch, fist swinging, and cracked a skeleton’s head in twain with a single strike.

“Idiot,” Bella whispered from the bottom of the stairs. “Idiots.”

But she chased after, with her sword outstretched and pulsing heat, and passed through the door before it closed with the finality of a sealed tomb.

###

The room beyond the arch was once an observatory. A dome of copper plates etched with astronomical pictographs, and a vent in the ceiling exposing the sky for study. Now, raw pink flesh dangled between the slit in the verdigris. It pulsed in time to the shuttering blue light that lit the mess of the room from its source in the center. A barnacled crusted sphere of flickering blue light was rooted to the floor, weighing it down until the floorboards sank with a constant groaning.

Zoe battled skeletons to approach the sphere. Sleeker than the skeleton warriors from the first room, they attacked with clockwork viciousness. Zoe suspected there was another puppeteer somewhere in the area. Her chain-wrapped fist smashed through the ribs of a seven-foot-tall bone warrior and cracked the spine. It flailed and fell back. A skeleton bashed aside its flailing sibling and swung a scimitar down at Zoe’s collarbone.

The blade clanged off the chain wrapped around her forearm. It was a movement from the Grasping Vine, but did she move her arm, or was it the chain?

She kicked out at the skeleton’s hip. The joint shifted with a crack and the skeleton stumbled. Zoe’s chain lengthened out into a noose around the skeleton’s neck and brought it down onto her rising knee. The skull shattered. Fragments bounced off her skin, dully scratching, and belatedly she activated [Self Reflects the World]. The chain had so preoccupied her she forgot about the need for her defensive technique.

Another skeleton rushed toward her, swinging a mace above its head. Her chain lengthened in retaliation. She swung it in a circle, and the air thrummed before the tip smashed into the skeleton and cleaved through its ribs. The skeleton split into two pieces and cracked on the ground. Zoe’s shoulders heaved to arrest the momentum of the chain, and it retracted slowly into her fist like a living thing. It wrapped around her knuckles, bone dust drifting from its gleaming black surface, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

“Thanks,” Zoe said, though deep down, deep enough she hoped the chain couldn’t hear, she held apprehensions about the sudden helping hand.

Anton and Bella were finishing a skeleton on the far side of the room. There were only three skeletons remaining spread between them. Though the undead warriors were tall and armed, Zoe judged they posed little true threat.

“Hold them off me!” she called. “And keep an eye out for puppeteers.”

“Aye, Boss,” Bella called.

They hurried over to engage the three skeletons, pushing them back more than attempting to disassemble them now that the patterns in their movements were becoming known.

With Bella and Anton keeping the skeletons behind her at bay, Zoe approached the barnacle sphere. Vertigo rose within her, and the chain trembled with some deep remembered fear. She looked down and her mind spun back to the tavern in purgatory. The ground lengthened beneath her, stretching, growing. Pain burned in her thighs as her leg tore.

She hurried and stepped forward, leaped forward almost, and she landed hard on the wet floor. The burning pain faded, though a ring of pores leaked blood around her leg. She coughed once and rose.

Bella and Anton continued their methodical defense, poking or swinging at the skeletons as they rose and attacked, but they stood a hundred feet away. She cupped her hands.

“Anton, send an eye. Don’t stop if it feels weird.”

A silver orb shot toward her. From her perspective, it didn’t slow, but by the way it spun when it reached her, she knew Anton felt disorientated.

“It’s a spacial extension,” she said, trying to remember Oriz’s explanation. “If you cross too slowly, it tears you in half.”

The orb bobbed twice as confirmation, but it looked past her. Zoe turned and faced the barnacle sphere. It stood twenty feet tall, and the ceiling extended a hundred feet above that. The scale sent a little trill of shock through her. Water beaded and dropped from the chandelier of pulsating pink flesh above. She stepped aside to avoid a droplet but returned her attention to the orb.

It appeared like an arch, but she saw it was a spinning coin with a hole cut into the center. Ancient metal, pitted, overgrown and replaced with coral in places. Barnacles littered the surface, still damp, still living, they poked from their gaping shells like watching eyes.

A heart the size of a minivan hung in the center, connected by fat arteries and rusted pipes. From its pulsing, sky-blue mass came the shuddering light.

The barbed edge of hunger tickled a smile onto her lips.

If the boss had a heart, she could kill it.

She reached back with her chain and picked up an errant rib bone. With a contemptuous flick, she flung it at the spinning coin. The spinning coin shattered the bone into splinters and sent them flying into the room and beyond the border. Shards bounced off Zoe’s mirrored skin, and some hit the beating blue heart.

Blood geysered from the scratches. The spinning coin sent the blood flying everywhere, and Zoe sputtered as it covered her from head to toe. The sudden tide stopped, and she wiped away her eyes. A puddle of blood coated the ground an inch deep, but the heart had healed and continued pumping. If she stabbed it again, more blood would pour. Enough to fill the room? Because she couldn’t think of any other way to get at the Mirrorbell fragment ringing inside that pulsating organ.

Would the boss drown them before they could slice open the heart?