Bright red hair peaks out from behind a wall. Abby glances into the passage, scanning for fiends. Why is Abby outside the shelters?

As she darts to the next corner to take cover, I see ethereal purple vines covered in thorns wreathing her body. They look slightly wilted. Abby does not appear to be hindered by the vines, not physically at least; neither does she acknowledge their existence. What are those vines?

Most of the way down the hallway, she steps on her shoelaces and almost trips. The dull gleam of purple light emanating from the vines briefly brightens, but she seems to not notice. Strangely, this light appears not to reflect off any of the walls.

Showing visible frustration, Abby ties her shoe while trying to keep as quiet as possible. As she goes to stand up, the vines flash brighter again, and she loses her footing, only to barely catch herself from falling.

“What the fuck is going on?” she snarls under her breath.

I’d like to know that too, I think.

As she moves through the halls, she often looks like she is struggling with her coordination and awareness, and each time, the vines glow in their haunting colour of purple. The vines are slowly wilting more and more, but at this rate, they won’t nearly be gone before she gets to the shelter. Normally I would be enthusiastically enjoying her comeuppance by way of the cursed ethereal vines; however, despite how much of a jerk she was, I didn’t want Abby dead, and those vines could easily get her killed while she's inside a rift.

As Abby peers around the last corner, the vines shine once more. The shelter doors are just at the end of the hallway, right next to the offices. Her eyes aren’t focused on the doors though; instead, her two eyes had just met with the seven eyes of the centipede hound blocking her way to safety. Unfortunately, when she looked down the hall, the creature had already been looking in her direction. What shit luck.

Deciding her best option for getting to safety is to confront the fiend and try to fight past it, Abby runs out from her hiding place. Her foot erupts with the flames she is so proud of as she swings her leg at the fiend, delivering a kick with all her considerable enhanced strength. The fiend tries to dodge the kick but is not fast enough to avoid the blow entirely. As her kick connects, the vines glow. Her foot glances off the fiend's side, searing its flesh and knocking it over but not delivering nearly as much damage as the kick could have.

The centipede hound lunges forward, and Abby jumps backwards, narrowly evading its jaws as they snap closed where she had just been standing. The vines once more shimmer with purple light as she lands, and her foot slips forward, sending her sprawling backwards to the floor.

As the fiend towers over Abby, I desperately attempt to call out, Get rid of the vines! Abby doesn’t react at all to what I say; she can’t hear me. However, something else that I did not expect to react to my words does.

The ethereal vines begin to wilt faster and faster. As they release their death grip on Abby, they unwind and fall away, shattering into rapidly dimming fragments of purple light. How did that happen?

From her position, lying below the fiend, Abby kicks up towards the fiend's jaw. No mishaps interfere, and her foot wreathed in fire, strikes true. The creature's head snaps back at the impact, and flames burn through its flesh. It crashes to the floor, shrieking in pain. The noise is unnatural and unlike anything I had ever heard before. Abby quickly takes advantage, scrambling back to her feet. She rushes up to the flailing beast and begins delivering blazing kick after blazing kick, even after the fiend had grown quiet after her first follow-up.

Eventually, while breathing heavily, she draws away from the conflagration that used to be the fiend's corpse. She looks up and around and sees the shelter doors. The doors were horribly scratched by the fiends but appeared structurally unscathed. Not wanting to find out if other fiends had heard the fight, she begins sprinting toward the door as everything starts to fade away. This time, she doesn’t lose her footing or have her shoelaces come undone.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I hazily wake up on the cold concrete floor of the shelter. It is eerily quiet despite all the people. Robin is still nearby but is looking in the other direction toward one of the corners of the shelter. In fact, they are not the only one. Everybody else is also staring in that direction at a small crowd. They appear to be watching something closely. The shelter monitor, I guess, but why?

“Oh my god,” comments the school nurse who is standing next to the monitor.

“She killed it!” one of the students exclaims.

“Someone get the door quickly!” a staff member commands.

The previously silent room erupts into chaos.

“I got it,” Mr Stokes says jumping up from where he was sitting and rushing toward the door. As he reaches the lock mechanism’s handle, loud banging starts reverberating from the other side of the door, but this does not deter him. He forces open the massive lock and puts his weight into swinging open the heavy reinforced doors.

A redheaded girl quickly slips between the doors before they are slammed closed behind her. I manage to get a glimpse of a burning pyre outside before the doors shut.

Abby’s hair is a mess, no longer as perfect as this morning. Her sneakers are awfully scorched, and the cuffs of her blouse and pants are burnt away with still glowing embers on their remains. Trails of smoke twist around her ominously as the room erupts into chaos with everyone trying to talk at once.

“Everyone quiet!” shouts the vice principal. For the most part, his demand works as the volume in the room slowly softens.

I am incredibly confused, and my mind races with questions. Why is Abby here? Why was she outside the shelter? As a matter of fact, why was I already seeing what was happening to her? Was I seeing what was actually happening? And was I asleep? Was I just dreaming?

Abby rests her back against the doors and slides down to the ground as the questions begin. “I was out in the halls when this started. Since I am a junior super, I thought I could get some fighting experience in by killing a few fiends before I headed to the shelter,” Abby reluctantly relates.

This gets the teachers in an uproar, all of them scolding her for how dangerous her antics were, but most of the students seem to be in awe. Abby doesn’t seem to care about any of the reactions as she sits with a disinterested look on her face.

“But how were you out so long? It’s been over forty-five minutes,” somebody finally has the sense to ask.

This question manages to fluster her a bit. “Um, well, I may have underestimated this rift. I was planning to only kill a couple of them early in the rift break before anything got serious and then ditch. It just didn’t go to plan…”

Her response is met with the clearly dissatisfied faces of her audience. Of course, everyone expected a more satisfactory answer than that.

With a long-suffering sigh, she continues, “Well, they just started pouring out of the fissure. Like a shit ton of them.”

“Language Ms Grant,” one of the teachers interjects.

“Yeah,” she says halfheartedly with a roll of her eyes, “There were way more than I expected, and I was already hiding so I could ambush them, so I just kinda stayed hiding is all.”

She was acting pretty nonchalant about the whole ordeal, but her laboured breathing and flushed face said otherwise. “I was also not really having a great day, so I thought I wouldn’t bother. Once the fighting started on the border of the rift zone, pretty much all the fiends ran outside, and I took the opportunity to head over here.”

Is that what I saw, her heading over here?

“By the way, who thought it would be a good idea to have such a slick concrete floor? When I was running, I kept slipping on it. Somebody out to do something about that.”

Is she talking about what the vines were doing? Did she really not notice them at all?

“Anyway, I headed over here and didn’t run into any fiends, except that one out there,” she says, pointing her thumb over her shoulder, “and then I just took that fucker out because I hadn’t got to kill one yet,” nobody bothered to do much more than give a reprimanding glare this time she swore.

“And that’s about it,” she finishes. “Can I just take a breather now?”

At this point, I was no longer paying attention to her false grandstanding or the continued chaos of the teachers admonishing her and the students lauding her. I was much more focused on the implications of her story for me. Why does that match up perfectly with my… dream? I guess it was a dream, as I kinda just woke up now. Was I actually seeing all that? How was I seeing that? And what’s with the vines? She didn’t seem to notice them at all, but I could see them. And did they respond to me? What the hell is going on?