Before we reached the Safe Circle, Annalise and I got attacked by these rabid gopher things that popped up out of the ground like demented jack-in-the-boxes. They were nightmarish caricatures of their Earthly counterparts, as if someone had taken a normal gopher and put it through a heavy metal album cover generator.

Each one was about the size of a small dog, with matted fur that seemed to writhe and shift colors like oil on water. Their eyes glowed an eerie, radioactive green, bulging from their sockets as if trying to escape their own skulls. Yellowed, razor-sharp teeth protruded from their mouths at all angles, giving them the appearance of furry bear traps with a serious overbite problem.

But the most disturbing feature was their paws. Instead of the usual clawed appendages, these rodents sported what looked like miniature human hands, complete with opposable thumbs. The sight of those tiny fingers flexing and grasping as they emerged from the ground was enough to make my skin crawl.

“Grabby Gophers?” I said after reading the info box that appeared over the slavering rodents. “What the fuck kinda name is that?”

“Who cares?” Annalise said, raising her stick. “Let’s just kill these furry bastards so we can move on.”

“So it’s ‘we’ now, is it?” I cracked a smile before swinging my chain at one of the gophers that came at me. It tried to catch the chain in one of its tiny human hands, but failed miserably. The chain was too heavy, and I was swinging it too fast. It also appeared to do slightly more damage than before, as evidenced when the Grabby Gopher’s skull got caved in by it.

Annalise bashed one of the gophers over the head with her Imp Stick, stopping the creature in its tracks. She then booted it away from her. The gopher went barreling into two others like a bowling ball, knocking them flying. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“Me or the gopher? I can’t—ow! Bastard!” One of the gophers snuck up on me while I was looking over at Annalise. The gruesome critter punched me right in the balls with its baby hand. Small hand or not, it still fucking hurt. For that, I kicked the gopher in the head, killing it instantly.

Annalise was laughing. “Teach you for getting cocky.”

“Piss off. My balls hurt.”

“Poor baby, getting hit by the little baby hand,” Annalise cooed, and I just stared at her.

And as I did, another baby fist slammed into my balls. “Owww. Fuck! Stop punching me in the balls!”

“I gotta say, you’re really killing it here, slick,” Annalise said, bashing another gopher into oblivion. “You keep this shambolic performance up, you’re not making it out of this Circle.”

“Shambolic? You distracted me with your stupid mocking voice.”

“This stupid mocking voice?” she said, using the same tone as before.

“Goddamnit, you’re doing it ag—owww. Fuck a duck!” A gopher bit me on the leg, sinking its many teeth into the flesh of my thigh. I battered the little fucker with my chain wrapped fist, but it held fast, like some crazed ferret.

“Maybe try dipping it in water,” Annalise said, standing watching me now, having taken care of the remaining gophers without much trouble. She seemed to be enjoying my pain, the bitch.

“You see any fucking water around here?” I grabbed the half unconscious gopher and tried to pull it away from my leg, but its jaws were clamped down like a vise.

Status Effect: Gopher’s Grudge

Congratulations! You’ve been selected for a complimentary dose of subterranean spite. That adorable little bastard latched onto your leg isn’t just giving you an enthusiastic hug—it’s pumping you full of its signature venom.

Effects:

-2 to Agility (It’s hard to run when your leg feels like it’s made of lead).

2 HP damage per minute (That burning sensation? It’s not just in your imagination).

75% chance of hallucinating tiny gophers dancing the macarena.

Duration: 30 minutes or until you find an antidote.

“Fuck this. It’s poisoning me!”

“Just rip it off.”

“I’m trying!”

“Try harder.”

Mentally reaching into my inventory, I grabbed Granny’s Knitting Needle of Fury and it appeared in my hand a second later, the chain disappearing. Then I used the needle to stab the gopher repeatedly in the head. Gouts of ichor jetted over me with every stab. But even though the gopher was dead, its jaws were still locked tight. So I used the knitting needle to pry the jaws open, which added more pain to my already throbbing leg. Finally, I pried the jaws open enough to detach the dead gopher from me, relieved as fuck when it dropped to the ground, leaving a nasty bite mark in its wake, not to mention the poison now coursing through my system.

“Goddamnit, I can hardly feel my leg now,” I said, putting the needle back in the inventory.

“I’m guessing that’s the poison,” Annalise said. “The gophers probably use it to immobilize their victims.”

“Well, it’s fucking working. Now I have to wait thirty minutes for it to leave my system.”

“But just think, once it does, you’ll gain some resistance to it. That’s generally how these games work.”

“Cool. So it was totally worth it then.”

Annalise smiled. “Can you walk?”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

After trying to take a step, I lost balance and fell over. “That’s a hard no. I’ll have to wait it out.”

“Fine. I’ll stand guard while you sit on your ass for half an hour.”

“Hey, this is all your fault for distracting me in the first place. Normally I would’ve killed those gophers before they could even clench their tiny fists.”

“Normally? You kill gophers a lot?”

“You know what I mean. Do they have any good loot?”

“Steaks and poison.”

“You shitting me? No antidote?”

“Why would they have an antidote for something that’s natural to them?”

“Well, this is a game, so I just thought—forget it. Hey.”

“What?”

“Did you change your race while I wasn’t looking?”

Annalise shook her head at me and frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? We can’t change race until the next Circle.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Must be the poison then. Your face has gone all... squirrelly. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. You’ve got these massive buck teeth now, and your cheeks look like they’re stuffed with nuts. Oh, and is that fur sprouting from your ears? Gotta say, it’s not a great look for you.”

I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision, but Annalise’s face continued to morph in front of me. “Oh wait, now you’re going full gopher. Your hands are shrinking into little paws. Honestly, I’m not sure if this is an improvement or not. On the bright side, if we ever need to dig our way out of here, you’ll be our go-to gal.”

Annalise’s expression shifted from concern to annoyance. “Kade, you’re hallucinating. My face is perfectly normal.”

“Sure, sure,” I nodded, fighting back a giggle. “Just do me a favor and don’t start chittering, okay? I draw the line at talking to rodents. I’m not about to become the Snow White of Infernum.”

As the world swam around me, I couldn’t help but think that if this was what being poisoned in Infernum was like, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. At least it came with its own entertainment. Though my Health Bar was steadily going down, so there was that.

“I can’t believe you’re trippin’ in a place like this,” Annalise said, finding a rock to sit on.

“You’re just jealous. It’s actually rather pleasant. I’ve never tripped before.”

“Never?”

“I was a drinker. I’m still a drinker. Never had much interest in drugs. You?”

“I took acid once, when I was in uni.”

“What was it like?”

“Not pleasant. Horrible, in fact. I saw a lot of stuff that…” She let the sentence trail off as she looked away. “Anyway. I preferred clean living when I was… alive.”

“You’re still alive.”

“That’s debatable.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and got instantly assaulted by a kaleidoscope of nightmarish images. Gophers with human faces tap-dancing on my eyeballs. Gluepanzees peeling off their own skin to reveal writhing masses of sentient spaghetti underneath. The Overseers, represented as giant, floating eyeballs, playing ping-pong with planets.

“Nope,” I said, snapping my eyes open. “Nope, nope, nope. Not doing that again.”

Annalise raised an eyebrow. “What happened?”

“Let’s just say my imagination decided to take a vacation to Crazytown, and it’s sending back some seriously messed up postcards,” I replied, shaking my head to clear it. “I think I’ll stick to keeping my eyes open for now. At least out here, the horrors are somewhat predictable. In there,” I tapped my temple, “it’s like Salvador Dali and H.R. Giger had a baby, and that baby is throwing a tantrum in my brain.”

I blinked rapidly, trying to focus on what was around me. On Annalise, even though she looked like a giant hamster now, for some reason. “So tell me, Annalise, what did you do back on good old Earth? Damn, I never thought I’d miss that place, but I sure as hell do.”

“I was an actress,” she said.

“Holy shit, really? What were you in?”

“Mostly British TV shows. I played a nurse on a long running hospital drama. Then I moved to Hollywood for a while, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Go where the real money is.”

“Why do you sound bitter? Have you run out of sunflower seeds?”

She shook her head at me. “I just didn’t like it over there. Had a few bad experiences on the casting couch.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry. What happened?”

“Nothing I want to talk about. What does it matter, anyway? What does any of it matter anymore?”

My head spun for a moment as the mood shifted to one of existential despair. “Yeah, I’ve been trying not to dwell on that too much.”

“It’s kinda hard not to, don’t you think?”

“Hey, we’re humans,” I said, trying to raise the mood a little. “We adapt. That’s what we’re best at. Adapting. And shit.”

“Like you’re adapting to that poison?”

“Exactly. Next time one of those little baby-handed fuckers bite me, their poison can go fuck itself.”

“You’ll not be totally immune, you know. Resistance doesn’t work like that. It takes repetition. Didn’t you game before?”

“A little, when I was in college.”

She blinked at me. “You went to college?”

“Don’t say it like that. I’m not all brawn, you know. There’s a brain in this noggin too.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Your current position makes me think otherwise.” Before I could protest, she added, “I’m kidding. Anyone could’ve got punched in the balls twice by a Grabby Gopher… then bit by one.”

I burst out laughing at the absurdity of that. So did Annalise, our laughter helping to dispel the undercurrent of tension that had built up.

“So what did you do back home, Kade?” Annalise asked eventually. “Wait, let me guess. Personal trainer?”

“Uh, please. I’m not smug enough for that.”

“So what then? Are you going to tell me you worked in an office? You don’t seem the office type.”

“I wasn’t, which is why I worked construction.”

“Doing what exactly?”

“Whatever needed doing. I was a jack of all trades.”

“And a master of none.”

I laughed. “Pretty much. Except fighting. I was a master at that.”

Annalise stared at me. “I’m not sure I believe that after what I just witnessed.”

“Believe what you want. I was a middleweight MMA champion, for a while anyway.”

“What happened?”

“Lots of shit. Ancient history now, I guess. I was fighting in underground cage matches before the reaper came for me.”

“Sounds brutal.”

“It was.”

“I did kickboxing. Had a few fights as well.”

A grin spread across my face. “I knew it. I knew you were a badass.”

Annalise smiled and shook her head. “I only did it to stay in shape, at first anyway. Then I started enjoying the contact.”

“Nothing like it, is there?”

“Nope. Until I came here and realized that’s all I’ll be doing from now on—fighting. And killing.”

“Beats lounging around on some cloud in the heavens, though, right?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Fuck it, at least we’re still alive. If I’m honest, my old life was going nowhere anyway. Maybe getting killed was really a blessing in disguise.”

“Speak for yourself, killer.”

We sat for another twenty minutes, chatting idly about Earth, what we were going to miss about it (Annalise: garlic bread. Kade: the sweet, sweet embrace of hangovers).

“Hangovers?” Annalise asked, incredulous. “You’re going to miss feeling like death warmed over?”

I shrugged, a wistful smile on my face. “Hey, don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. There’s something oddly comforting about waking up feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck, your mouth tasting like a small animal died in it, and trying to piece together the previous night’s events like some sort of demented, booze-soaked detective.”

“You’re insane,” she said, shaking her head.

“Probably,” I agreed. “But think about it—hangovers were proof you were alive, you know? That you’d gone out, had a good time, maybe made some questionable decisions. It was like a badge of honor, a rite of passage. Plus, nothing beats that moment when you finally drag yourself to the nearest greasy spoon diner and inhale a plate of the greasiest, most artery-clogging breakfast known to man. It’s like being reborn, but with extra bacon.” I sighed dramatically. “Now look at us. Stuck in a place where we can’t even properly poison ourselves for fun. It’s downright inhumane, I tell you.”

Annalise rolled her eyes, but I could see the hint of a smile tugging at her lips. “Only you could make self-inflicted misery sound nostalgic.”

“It’s a gift,” I replied with a grin. “Besides, in this place, a hangover might actually be a pleasant break from all the other ways we’re going to suffer. At least with a hangover, you know it’ll end eventually. Can’t say the same for whatever fresh horrors Infernum’s got in store for us.”

“And on that cheery note, I think it’s time we moved on.”

“There you go with the ‘we’ again,” I said, forcing myself to get up, happy to see that Annalise’s face had now returned to normal. “Anyone would think you want us to be a team.”

“In your dreams.” Her voice was scathing, but before she turned away, I saw the barest hint of a smile there.