The great beast Zazzatha watched with the eyes growing upon its spinning coin at the pathetic creature standing in his core. His vision spun, but he saw clearly the naked greed in her eyes as she gazed upon his pulsing, sky-blue heart.

As though it would actually display its vulnerability so readily.

There was more than enough blood in his body to drown her easily, but he could see in her calculating eyes she had accounted for that. More than likely she only desired the fragment hidden within his heart. His death, if it were even possible, would only be a bonus. Though, she would have to find his other two hearts to achieve such a momentous feat.

He snorted, external eyes squinting closed as he chomped at the lake water outside his body with amusement. There was no way they could stab all three hearts. He was too great. He was too powerful. Zazzatha feared nothing.

But somewhere in the back of his mind doubt lingered like raindrops on glass. He had died before. Countless times. A truth known, a truth denied. Would this creature add another death to his tally?

###

Zoe trudged away from the heart, dripping and shaking blood from her body. It ran off her fishskin suit without trouble and left it sleek and silver underneath, but the gore clung to her skin and hair. Steaming heat cooling into something tacky.

The spacial barrier was no less shocking as she extended herself across. Bella glanced over from where she pushed back the skeleton.

“Alright?” she asked with raised eyebrows.

“Fine.”

Zoe charged as her chain slipped from her hand like a whip. With quick snaps, she knocked the remaining skeletons to the ground. Bella and Anton seized the momentum to shatter their joints and disperse their bones. After a moment, they all stood breathing lightly in the shuttering blue light.

“Do you think there’s a puppeteer?” Zoe asked Anton.

He shook his head.

“I have detected no threads of Skein.”

“Then how were the skeletons being controlled?” Bella asked. “If there’s no puppeteer or thin men moving them, how are they moving?”

“Maybe there are actual skeletons that move around?” He rolled his shoulders in an annoyed shrug. “It’s the apocalypse, I don’t know everything about it.”

“No, it’s a good question,” Zoe said.

Zoe tapped a bone with her foot. It rolled away, bumped into a fold in the fleshy floor, rocked, and stopped. She watched it suspiciously, but it didn’t move. Not even when she looked away for a moment. Her chain squeezed her arm reassuringly.

She couldn’t deny the lighthearted feeling. The joy. Anticipation. It felt like things were almost over, but she worried the light at the end of the tunnel was blinding her to real and present dangers.

“Seems there’s no puppeteer,” she bent down to pick up the bone. “Or if there is, it’s hiding. But hopefully, this bone twitches if they reassemble.”

She led them across the spacial extension and up to the spinning coin.

“We need to slow it down,” she said. “Otherwise we won’t be able to cut into the heart.”

“And inside the heart is the fragment of the Mirrorbell,” Anton added.

“But when we cut into it,” Zoe gestured up and down at herself. “Excessive blood. I think it’s a failsafe to drown us in the locked room.”

Anton raised an eyebrow.

“You can slice open the fragment before we drown though. Right?”

Zoe nodded.

“But it feels too easy.”

“Maybe the dungeon just didn’t adapt right, or maybe it’s because you’re too damned high-leveled. Sometimes things can be easy.”

Zoe raised an eyebrow in response.

“Is that how you found life before the apocalypse?”

Anton returned a placid poker face, but Bella grinned.

“Actually, sometimes things were pretty easy for me,” she said. “But as for this, I have an idea.”

Zoe broke her stare off with Anton.

"What is it?”

Bella rested the flat of the runeblade upon her hand and stared down at her reflection in the dark metal. Her lips moved rapidly in silent communication. A droning bass reverberated at the base of Zoe’s skull. It crept through her bone, shaking her eyes, and her mind. In seconds, it was over, and Bella held her sword in one hand and her spear in the other.

“The blade hungers,” she intoned as blue light flickered across her face and the shadows deepened. “It must be fed, lest it consumes us all.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Leaden veins bulged under the skin of her tattooed hands. They writhed like worms, split the skin, and blood oozed into her tight grip upon the ancient’s blade handle. The barbs of the runeblade’s cables glinted where they were exposed. Blood soaked into the handle, and the whole blade writhed.

It split like a ripe fruit and a long red tongue slipped out into the air and lapped at the spear. The tongue caressed the emerald spearhead for a moment, before coiling around the handle and pulling it back like a toad. The spear disappeared impossibly inside the blade. Black metal bulged, writhed and grew.

Both blade and handle lengthened. Bella’s eyes widened, and she shifted her weight to accommodate the change in proportions. An emerald line ran down the center of the straight blade.

“I wasn’t sure what would happen,” Bella muttered. “The voice in my head sounds different, but it’s still telling me this was a good idea. Everything went according to plan.”

“What did you do?”

“I fed my sword. Helped it grow.”

The runes remained unchanged, but as Bella flexed her Skein, the heat rippling out changed. No longer even waves of pulsing dry heat, now the air bubbles burned. A caustic aura burst around the blade and Zoe stepped back as it stung her skin. The aura flickered away.

“It pulls on my Skein differently, sporadically,” Bella heaved. “But this should work. The problem is that the blood will drown us, right?”

Zoe nodded, and a grin formed as she realized what Bella planned.

“I think that might work,” she said. “Should we step back? That sword’s aura always forms a sphere.”

“I think I can focus it into an extension of the blade, but it’s hard… heat doesn’t want to be directed.”

“We’ll stand back then.”

Zoe grinned as Bella walked up to the illusory sphere of the spinning coin. Her sword extended out, held straight with her internally wired muscles. She activated her Skein, and the air flailed. The air distorted in bubbles around the blade, and when they popped it made the space lesser. The crazed aura extended into the spinning coin, and the metal hissed. Pockmarks appeared across its surface as the caustic aura bit into the coral-coated surface. Barnacles popped and hissed as the heat struck them. The metal glowed as hot scoop marks leaked across its surface toward the core. The coin itself was too thick to be eaten in half, but with a scowl, Bella forced the aura to extend even further.

The bubbling energy struck the blue heart, and the entire room shook. Smoke poured out in the blue light as the beating heart sizzled. The floor wobbled and lurched, but Bella continued directing her blade’s aura at the heart. Zoe and Anton were thrown about as pained waves rippled through the fleshy ground, but Bella utilized her body path to remain anchored to the ground with her blade outstretched.

Her Skein poured forth, and the aura stripped the pulsing blue heart. Scoops formed as the popping aura ate away at the flesh. The wounds seared and throbbed, but the heat and acid cauterized them before they could leak. Soon, the diminished heart hung in the center of the coin like a half-eaten apple on the end of a twig. The metal of the Mirrorbell fragment glinted in the blue light. They could see their prize, but how would they reach it?

Bella sagged, resting on her sword, as the ground continued to flex and release. Zoe and Anton crawled over to her. The coin continued spinning too fast to approach, but the illusion of a solid material had shattered.

“How do we get the fragment out of the heart?” Anton asked.

Zoe extended out her chain as fast as possible, but it bounced away from the spinning coin with a clang.

“Can’t grab it,” Zoe ground her teeth together as reverberations traveled up her chain and through her body. “The heart and coin are connected. Bella, do you have enough Skein to devour the heart?”

“I’m getting very low,” Bella said with meaning.

Zoe nodded slowly.

“Forget that then. We’ll find a new solution, or wait until your Skein replenishes.”

There was always another worm, after all…

But she couldn’t deny the unknown deadline.

“Anton,” she said. “Do you still have an eye on Oriz?”

“She looks as bad as she did five minutes ago. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to tell you. She isn’t moving, barely breathing, glowing like a unicorn.”

Zoe couldn’t know how long until Oriz faded away completely. She had to continue as fast as possible, but risking their lives foolishly would save nobody. Especially since she still felt that itch between her shoulders. Something was watching her.

She glanced up at the few livid eyes poking out of the barnacles on the coin. An idea coalesced between two pulses of her heart.

“Follow my lead,” she whispered, before raising her voice. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

The floor buckled beneath her.

“Yeah,” Zoe spoke louder. “Can you hear me? Bella only stopped because she was worried she’d kill you. She wants this to last. She wants you to suffer.”

The flesh dangling above them pulsed with malice, but the fleshy room was incapable of attacking them. Zoe shook her head with concern.

“There’s nothing you can do to stop her, but I can stop her. I want to stop her. I want to let your heart heal. Because I’m your friend.”

“There’s no way —” Anton muttered before Zoe shushed him with a finger on the lips.

The heart pulsed, seared flesh bubbling as it struggled to heal. The floor rumbled beneath their feet.

“I’m your friend,” Zoe said. “I want to make the pain stop. I want to make the rage stop. Don’t you want to feel something different? Don’t you want to feel normal again?”

Bella raised her sword high.

“I can’t wait,” she cried. “I’m going to torture it some more.”

Zoe dragged Bella away from the spinning coin.

“No, I won’t let you.”

The floor squirmed, but slower, thoughtfully.

Zoe activated [Our Hearts Toll as One] and the technique latched. She quickly flexed her Skein and lowered the heart rate. Before their eyes, the coin slowed. What had seemed a solid sphere, became a clearly rotating piece of metal. It still spun fast by the time Zoe released the hold of her technique, but it was now something that merely required precision, rather than an impossible task.

The eyes growing from the coral on the coin stared at her with confusion. Zoe knew it wouldn’t be long before they figured out what had happened. They had to hurry before the simple trick collapsed.

But even as she had the thought, her technique canceled. The coins spun in fits and bursts. Her hold on the heart rate was gone, but it couldn’t so quickly regain its speed. Without a pause, Zoe leaped forward. Her chain reached for the heart even as the coin slammed into her body. The force flicked her away, but her chain latched around the metal pipes hooking the heart to the coin, and pulled her closer.

She grinned as she neared her prize. The end of the dungeon was in sight.

###

Zazzatha raged. No matter how he bucked and squirmed, he couldn’t reach the tiny intruders lurking outside his heart. They bypassed his trap and humiliated him with lowly tricks.

But it was all part of his cunning plan to lull them into a false sense of security. He needed to activate the latest weapon, and so he turned away from matters of the flesh and connected with the dungeon as a whole. The psychic field brushed against his — white hot nerves of woven ghosts spliced into the great soul-brain woven through his meat — and he became clay in the dungeon’s hands once more.

Brushing the face of God…

He threw his soul upon the floor of the throne room, brow brushing the cool cosmic stone, and he begged to use the new weapon. Was it ready? Was it possible? Please let him be worthy!

A long and painful silence as God processed the request, and then the loyal servant received their reward in the form of ravens.