Order’s hand hovered over the gates of the Cube, mid-knock. She was… formulating… the exact words to say to Life. She certainly wasn’t hesitant to admit her defeat to her father. (Well, there was that too, of course.)

Something as monumental as acknowledging that a problem she had so confidently agreed to handle needed to be treated with the gravitas it deserved. It would be her first time admitting that she was in over her head, after all. Should she begin with the conclusion? That is - should she start off by saying that she was giving up right away? It would save a lot of time, for one. Get all the teasing out of the way from the get go. No, she should preface the message of surrender with the reasons why she was terminating all further research. The data obtained, the affected parties and such. It would soften the blow if the factors were laid out in full before she conceded defeat.

And in this manner of hemming and hawing, she’d held the same position for the past five minutes now - and Stories was getting a tad bit impatient.

“Dude, if you’re going to do it anyway, then just rip the bandaid off. It’ll hurt less that way. Look, I’ll even do it for you.”

He materialised a fist and pounded on the gate thrice, the metal clanging as it received the strikes. Order glowered at him silently.

Couldn’t he see she was building up to it?

Stories shrugged in response.

“Sorry.”

As expected, Death’s figure soon emerged from the darkness to let them in. Order bowed respectfully as he came to the gate. There was nothing to it, she’d just have to go with the second speech combination. In any case, it’d be impossible to perfect the ideal set of words that’d express her deep regrets without taking copious amounts of additional time to analyse the data on the recipient’s behavioural patterns when they received similar news from others, and she was already intending to leave this horrid chapter of her life behind her as quickly as possible; not wallow in self-pity and examine all the other possibilities over and over again like an obsessed fool.

She had better things to do than that – like updating the earliest records in her Library to take into account the expected changes that had occurred over time, something that she’d been helpfully reminded of over the past few weeks of testing.

“My greetings, God of Death and Taxes. We are here today to-“

“Woah! What the heck happened to you, my man? You look like someone tossed you into a blender and hit start.”

Order raised her head to confirm what Stories had exclaimed in surprise. Sure enough, the once smartly-dressed God of Death and Taxes looked like he had been wrung out. His suit was dishevelled and torn in several spots, pale, white skin peeking through. His signature mask was smeared across with a suspicious blue substance, and his cloak was missing a few patches of feathers.

Death pulled his mask aside, revealing a tired face that had obviously been sapped of energy.

“Hello, Order. Hello, Stories. Come in.” Death said wearily, opening the gate. “Life’s in the back – as usual. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to the nasty business of exterminating a few squid zombies that just aren’t polite enough to stay dead.”

“Hold on,” Order said. “They aren’t staying... dead?”

“I can show you, if you want. The portal’s in my room.” Death motioned for the two to follow as he dragged his feet back into the interior of the Cube. The issue seems a little more serious than he’s letting on if it’s taking such a mental toll on him, Order thought. I’ve never seen him like this before. Not even when he was racking his brains over how to tell Life that his favourite colony of mortals had been wiped out by a famine and were now waiting to enter the Netherworld Gates.

Perhaps… there was still a chance?

Stories grabbed onto Order’s shoulder.

“What’s up with that? You still working the problem? Didn’t you say you were done?” he whispered to her. “Done means done; this? Isn’t done.”

“This… seems promising. It won’t matter if we take an hour or two for a small detour, will it? The end result won’t change.” she whispered back, going after Death as he entered his room.

The truth was that she knew that the problem that plagued Life was solvable – she’d latched onto what Stories had discovered only because she wanted a crack at it. The failures she’d experienced thus far had only forced her to face the fact that maybe she wasn’t suited to unravelling the intricacies of the mystery. That she should instead leave it to one of the other countless lesser Gods that Life was producing daily. Eventually, on a long enough time scale, one of them would stumble onto the right answer or be compatible with the theory that had been created.

But if a new clue was literally going to be presented to her on a silver platter like this…

Well, it would be bad manners to refuse, wouldn’t it?

“Here we are,” Death pointed to a shimmering tear in space-time. “The bane of my existence for the past few months, now. The Unkillable Swarm. Or so I’ve dubbed them, anyways. It’s nothing as grand as that. Though they are unkillable.”

“It’s just a dead squid.” Stories said. The corpse shown in the picture reflected in the portal didn’t seem to be moving or anything. It wasn’t like its tentacles were dragging the rest of the squid carcass along the asphalt ground while its cadaver remained motionless – the whole body was just laying there, leaking bright blue liquid from its eyes.

It was, for all intents and purposes, undoubtedly dead. Probably due to blood loss, judging by the pool of blue it was lying in.

“Give me a moment here,” Death raised both his arms, grasping on to an invisible something. “Let me refocus on what I’m talking about.” He swiped sharply to the left, and the displayed image within the confines of the portal became a blur as the portal panned over to another part of the world it connected to.

“Ah. Here we are.” He pulled back his arms as the picture came back into focus, this time showing a squid humanoid, fully clad in military gear, head to toe in combat-ready armor. The squid clutched onto a bulbous rifle and was squeezing the trigger rapidly, the muzzle firing black ink pellets at his target – a lumbering squid-person that was strangely enough, emitting a green glow.

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“Ink? Really? What do these squids think kills other squids like them - bodily fluids?” Stories scoffed. “I think I’ve discovered your so-called problem, Death. They aren’t dying because they aren’t in any danger.”

“Look, if the problem was that this was just a bit of moist fun and their race is just really into drenching each other with ink, I’d have let them be and closed the portal ages ago. No, I’ve inquired into the effectiveness of the weaponry before on one of my many trips to the handful of survivors still making a stand. It’s a nerve-based chemical weapon that works by infiltrating the body through the pores of the skin and quickly works to kill off any cells it interacts with. Which is why we should be a little more concerned that that… abomination… has taken over fifty shots directly to its face and is still moving. Can’t kill what’s already dead.”

“Huh.” Stories watched as the zombie tanked another round of shots and continued its relentless, unceasing approach towards the increasingly panicked soldier. “Oof, there he goes.” The squid soldier was now screaming in agony as the glowing carcass took a hefty bite from his right shoulder. Within moments, the loud cries trailed off, and the zombie ambled off, now disinterested in what he had once chased after. If the squid soldier had joined the ranks of the deceased, then it would have been a rather expedient demise, Stories mused. Right up Death’s alley, ironically enough.

“That’s the next problem. Watch.” For an uncomfortably long minute or so, the three Gods looked at the deceased soldier. And just as Stories was about to chime in with a quip about how staring at a corpse wasn’t going to make it magically not-dead, the body rose to its feet, its eyes unfocused and staring into the distance, arms limp by its sides. The new convert proceeded to follow in the first zombie’s footsteps, in search of another of its kind to infect.

“That’s what I’m dealing with.” Death groaned. “An undead horde intent on spreading its contagion to the entire planet. Maybe the entire star system, if the virus ever evolves to survive in the inhospitable vacuum of space. Now if you’ll excuse me, I-”

“Take us with you.”

“I’m sorry, WHAT?! Hold on there a moment, Death. The two of us gotta go have a little chat right in this corner.” Stories flashed a quick grin at the elder God, then yanked Order aside.

“Ok, first you wanted to go tell Life that you were done running your little experiments. That, I’m A-OK with. No arguments from me here. Next, you had the brilliant idea to have a little look-see about what Death was up to lately. Again, perfectly understandable – you have a boring life by most people’s standards. But,” He made sure to stress his next words. “what makes you think that I’d want to go strolling about IN A GODDAMNED ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE?!”

“We haven’t told the God of Life and Creation anything as of yet - therefore, the experiment’s still going. And as the supervisor of this experiment, you’re obligated to be present when I uncover the reason behind these fascinating creatures.” Order replied coolly. “Besides, I think this might be it.”

“It? What, like, it the solution? What in God’s name drove you to that conclusion? All I can see are a couple of meat puppets, being driven by some sort of disease or virus controlling their every movement. There’s nothing here. Let’s just go and tell Life what you came here to say, then I can go back to my blissfully peaceful life, and you can return to your bland book-ordering. Or whatever dull activities you count as a hobby.”

Order felt that he wasn’t quite getting her point across to the idiot, so she elaborated further, making sure to speak a little more slowly this time. So he could follow along. “You remember that our trials were meant to find a God that could extend the lifespans of mortals, correct?” Stories nodded cautiously. This had all the makings of one of her signature leading questions. Meaning that he’d soon be ensnared in a devious trap of words and trickery if he didn’t tread carefully.

“Good. Then - what if we flipped the question?”

“Flipped? Flipped how?”

“What if we didn’t have to extend any mortals’ lifespans; what if we just prevented their death? The desired result is to allow their existences to continue on for longer, right? If we can isolate the factor of these creatures’ unnatural locomotion despite their readily apparent demise…”

Stories swallowed nervously. She was… making an unfortunate amount of sense to him at the moment. He wanted so desperately to point out that if Gods couldn’t solve the problem, then what hope would a mortal engineered creation have of doing just that?

Then again… no other God that he’d met thus far had come even remotely close to reanimating the dead. He’d seen revivals from near death, and transmutations into grotesque creatures that could likely live for a long time. Not a defiance of the natural laws of life and death like what was being presented here. The possibility that these particular sea creatures had done the unthinkable, while slim, was still there.

He looked apprehensively at her.

“And you promise we’ll only stay up until you figure out what you need for the solution? Not a moment longer?”

She mimed a cross over her heart.

“Promise.”

Stories turned slowly to the waiting God of Death and Taxes, gulping once more as he mustered up the guts to speak. It would be hard to blame him in this particular scenario; even he couldn’t believe he was about to say the words which would actualise their trip into the squids’ world. He was a drama and romance guy, damn it! The horror genre was squarely out of his purview!

But… if Order said she was on the cusp of epiphany…

He had a moral obligation to let her try.

If not to solve the problem once and for all, then to lay rest any lingering regrets she might still have about her spectacular failures. For all her flaws, Stories knew that she was at least attempting to help the mortals. In a messed-up, unfeeling way. And that needed to be cheered on.

Even if it meant that he was going to have to agree to something extremely repulsive and vile like accompanying her into a hellscape.

“Alright, Death, I’m ready. Take us to zombie squid land.”