The volcano had erupted to the south-west, and the formerly lush jungle around Camp Goldrush was now a blackened hellscape. Entire roads and settlements along the warfront were drowned in creeping worms of crackling lava, heavy and unstoppable. Smoke turned the air hazy, limiting visibility. Miles of forest on the western side of the volcano were ablaze.

It was an all-day run. We camped overnight, hiding in a burned-out gully without a fire and sleeping in wary shifts, and then it was on to Eden. The fire was mostly on the other side of the mountain, but the haze remained. Everything smelled of burned wood and sulphur - a smell that intensified as we got closer to the Maroons' base. The first thing I noticed was that the stonework of the old city they'd built on had been shattered, blown back by the impact of boulders slung by catapults or mangonels. Then I smelled the fire, older than the fires set by the eruption... and then the bodies.

"We're too late." Angel couldn't see or smell what my nose was telling me, not until I ran along one of the remaining outer walls and we saw the first niner'd corpses on the ground. Face-down, most of them... all either very old or very young.

"Those monsters." Angel voiced as I slowed. "They slaughtered them."

"Not all of them." With a sinking feeling, I spotted that with few exceptions, the teenagers and younger adults were missing from the dead. The few that lay there had died fighting.

Small microraptors squabbled over the looted carcasses, snapping at each other – then shrieking and scattering as I leaped down and crushed three of them under my paws and one tentacle. I almost absently brought it around to my mouth, chomping down on the small chicken-sized dinosaur as we warily assessed the town. The treehouses were all burned. Merc's hut had been gutted... there was no sign of her or her doctor husband. A crucifix had been mounted on the path to the main square. One of Merc's warband hung from it, eviscerated.

"These embers are cold. This happened at least two days ago." Angel cradled her remaining rifle against her chest, almost hugging it as we pressed on into the town. "Hong did this?"

"He gave the location to Targent, or Falks. No wonder they were able to mobilize so fast for Oil Town... the army was already partway there." I was about to declare 'no survivors' when I heard a soft moan from deep within the marketplace. "Sounds like someone's still alive."

Angel almost absently reloaded her rifle. "Let's go see who. And be careful... it could be bait."

I padded in, head low, tentacles unfurled to coil restlessly around us like a nest of boas. Lulu vibrated nervously against my ribs. Within the market square were more corpses: a stack of them piled in the middle of the town, and several more crucifixes. Elijah was nailed to one of them, a noose hanging from around his neck. Ninered. Doc hung from the cross opposite him. Merc's husband moaned again, bubbles of blood wheezing on every shallow breath. He was alive - barely. Hanging onto his last life by a thread, but alive.

"Oh my god... " Angel vaulted from my back, a waterskin in one hand, her gun clutched white-knuckled in the other. "Noodles! Come help me get him down!"

He'd been nailed through the wrists and ankles with big copper nails. To take him down, we had to bring down the whole cross. That was my job, using my foreclaws and tentacles to gently lower the torture device to the ground. Once he was supine, Angel carefully sawed the flat nailheads off, then pulled them through the semi-conscious man's arms and feet.

Lulu made a little 'hup!' sound and bounded from me to the ground, rolling over to join Angel. She gently pushed Angel's hands away and took over: turning him gently onto his side, making sure his airway was clear, then holding out a 'hand' for Angel to pass her potions.

"Will potions bring him around?" Feeling kind of useless, I sat back on my haunches, ears pricked in case some enemy we hadn't seen tried to burst out of the burned and ransacked marketplace.

"Moobuu?" Lulu burbled as she efficiently turned herself into a makeshift respirator and feeding tube, and piped the healing draught directly down the right hole so he didn't aspirate any more than he already had. "Huu..."

"He's got some kind of infected status," Angel signed to me. "I could make him something for it, if I had the right ingredients. We need to get him out of here, though. I don't trust the Centurions not to come back."

"Good plan. Let's move him to a camp and go from there." I stood up restlessly, snorting the stench of decay from my nostrils. "I can't carry him like this, though. We need a sled."

"Goo." Lulu made a little shooing motion with her pseudopod. "Goo moo slood."

"I can do something with bamboo and cordage," Angel signed. "Keep an eye on him, Lulu. We'll be back."

"Oohoo!"

Other than small scavengers, Eden was deserted. It's storehouses, the furniture, the carpets... all destroyed or looted. We found a stand of bamboo and the grass we needed for cordage not far from the outhouse Angel had used when we'd first visited the place. While Angel worked on that, I paced around and dug at the soft ashy soil with my claws, restless and on guard. I hadn't been expecting to feel anything when we were on our way here. But looking at the cold devastation of this town, the dead kids and grandmas, I couldn't help but think about how satisfying it would feel to rip Targent's face off his skull and feed it to him.

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"I hate this," I thought to Angel. "I hate that these assholes have been allowed to run this place. Kaban. Targent. Clive. All of them are symptoms of the same fucking thing. And it all comes back to this Paragon Society, and the people that put us here."

"Yeah..." Angel briefly signed back in the affirmative, not looking up from her work as she braided a line of thin, tough grass rope. "Believe me, I know."

"We can't let them do this." I began to pace, fuming. "We can't let them win. But if WE win... if we move to the next realm, shit here is going to stay the same, isn't it? Or get worse."

"I know. But there's nothing we can do except to beat the game and remove ourselves from it," Angel said. "Once we get back to our bodies, we can do something. Until then, we survive. And help as we can."

I wanted to snap at her, tell her once and for all to stop clinging to the notion we had bodies left to go to. I was about to launch into it when a new message alert appeared.

[New secure message from your Patron, Cold_Fox.]

My eyes narrowed.

I pulled away from Angel and sat down to open the letter, frowning as I read the glyphs inside. Cold_Fox had written to me in ASL glyphs again – but this time, there was some kind of manual encoding as well. A cipher. Which I knew well enough to read fluently.

Vance,

You're here for a reason. Get out of 4th Realm, get rid of Kaban. Contact Clive. Use him.

Still searching for sister. That’s a good thing.

See you on the other side.

A chill ran down my spine. Who were these people? And why were they looking for my sister? And ‘you’re here for a reason’? Yeah, sure. Did that mean I'd... volunteered to be here? There was no way, no way I'd willingly die and let myself be uploaded to a place like this. What other side was she - I was pretty sure this person, whoever they were, was a 'she' - waiting for me on? In the 4th Realm? Or...

I looked over at Angel thoughtfully. What if she was right? What if our bodies WERE alive, held in stasis, while our minds were here? But that didn’t make sense… I remembered dying. Dimitri's letter had been explicit about my death, and how it had happened. Then again, if the ringmasters of Survival of the Fittest could remove memories, they could just as easily implant them, couldn't they? If Cold_Fox was my handler and this was a sting, my people on the outside could have implanted memories of a fake death to convince the operators of the server that I was the real deal. Alternatively, Dearest Dimitri could have set up some traumatic memories and his letter to try and intimidate me, cow me. Cause me to lose hope. Hell, for all I knew, this wasn't a game at all... just some extended hallucination between life and death, a fever dream created by a dying brain. Or purgatory.

I… I actually didn't know what was real any more.

"Noodles?"

I started as Angel's hands fluttered in the corner of my eye. "Huh? Sorry, what was that? I was off in la-la land."

"I said the sled's ready to hitch." Angel was waiting beside the stretcher-sled. "Are you alright? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Yeah... yeah, was just trying to put some memory fragments together." Part of me wanted to snap about not being some kind of beast of burden, that she needed to ASK me, but I thought of Doc's ashen face and sighed. "Saddle me up."

"If you need to talk...?" Angel paused to take the traces she'd made, and fixed them to the rings at the back of the saddle.

"Been getting some weird messages from a fan," I said, doing my best to stand still. "Nothing serious, just kind of creepy."

"Eww. Those are the worst." Angel paused to sign, her nose wrinkling. "After we beat Karkinos, I got about fifty messages asking me for pictures of my feet."

"Yikes."

Despite the grim surrounds, Angel forced a smile. She was... trying to cheer me up. "I know, right? As if I'd do feet pics for free."

"No one should. But now I'm curious." I went back into my inbox, and ran a search on my many, many unopened messages. "Oh hell no. I've got a few, too. Check this one out: "Hi Sir Noodles, I'm a huge fan of yours, I watch your feed every day..." And oh my god, I can't finish this."

"You have to," Angel signed. "Don't you dare leave me in suspense."

I groaned. "Fine, you asked for it. "In the mornings I've started wondering what your paws feel like. Are they rough or soft? Can you show your beans on the camera more?"

Angel couldn't help it. She started to laugh.

"I think your beans are very handsome, you're a very handsome monster," I finished. "Signed, your fan Greg."

"GREG." Angel wheezed. "His... his name's..."

For some reason, that got me going... and as I began to yarp with laughter, we both fucking lost it. High, manic, to the point of tears. In the middle of a charnel ground, where guys had been crucified. It wasn't the right place or time. It wasn't even that funny. But for some reason, neither of us could stop until we were out of breath. Maybe it was because of the horror, the darkness around us. Maybe we either laughed at it, or we went crazy from it.

Once the hysterics were over, we shakily picked our way back down the narrow rocky path to the market-turned-charnel ground. Doc was lying propped up on Lulu, who cradled him like a living beanbag. He still looked like shit, but he was awake.

"Angel... it's you," he groaned. "Whoever named you, they chose well. Mercy, where's Mercy...?"

"We don't know yet," Angel voiced. Her eyes were still red from laugh-crying, but she'd gotten it all out of her system. Seemed like both of us felt calmer. "You need to save your strength, Doc. We have to get you somewhere safe."

"My God, they're all dead. All the elders." The man tried to lift his head, but he was too weak. He began to cry softly. "The elders and the children. Good God."

“I know. And we’re hoping you can help us work out what happened.” Angel was sympathetic but awkward as she beckoned to Lulu. Lulu cooed reassuringly to Doc as she carried him over to the stretcher and laid him out there, folding his arms up over his chest. “Merc, most of her warband, and the healthy adults are all missing.”

"All the younger people... they'll have taken them to Fortuna," Doc said, his voice broken and dry as old wood. "They'll be in the mines. Slaves. Or having their tongues cut. And Mercy… she…"

"Try not to think about it yet, okay?" Angel gave him a gentle squeeze on the shoulder, and bustled back to the saddle. "Come on, Noodles. Let’s get him out of here."