The walls around her training grounds were thick — after ten minutes, they were still moving toward the darkness, destruction whirling softly far ahead, the shadows tinged orange from the rain finding its way down.

When they finally broke through to the inside, they were met with a thicket of reality flaking like an oil painting, prismatic aberrations poking through from beneath the surface of the world.

“Woah!” Isobel let out, jumping far too close, just to inspect them.

Some streaks of destruction were harder to see, so Theora pointed them out to the others while trying to find the best path forward.

“Those sting in my eyes,” Isobel said, blinking.

“Yeah.” Dema slipped through after Theora, careful not to touch the two chromatic cracks they were trying to squeeze by. “Seen it before, in the Observatory. Bun bun said not to look at them.”

“But they’re so interesting…”

After making it through a narrow path lined with threads of eye-piercing destruction, the area widened.

“Oh, wow,” Isobel said.

Theora did not want to look. Instead, her eyes were glued on the ground, where she noticed a green spot. It took her a moment to recognise the shape.

There were plants here now.

Little lichen.

Theora had expected this area to stay desolate and deadly to all forms of life. Still, some remarkably resilient species had managed to lodge themselves between the rifts of voidborne destruction. They covered the ground, and had somehow even grown between cracks in the air. How could they even spread? Had insects learned to avoid the scars?

They descended the path, with Isobel stopping at every moment to take in what she was seeing above, in front of, and below them. Theora still didn’t manage to look at it.

“That’s so weird,” Isobel murmured, while Dema created little blood bridges to help them across cracks in reality. “Seems like there’s almost, like… a structure to it, of some kind? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you built this on purpose.”

“Why, what do you mean?” Dema asked. “Looks kind of random to me?”

“Yeah, no, it’s definitely not, like… a building… More like… Coral? Maybe? Something organic, perhaps? Like, the threads seem to be holding that shell in place, right?”

“Shell?” Dema followed Iso’s gaze, and frowned. “I guess, yea. Looks like a blob.”

“Mhm. We’re too close to see it, but it seems to be a section of a round shape? Are we here for what’s inside?”

Theora swallowed. “We are here to visit my old hut.”

Dema blinked. “Old hut?”

It was nearly impossible to find footing by now without stepping into something destructive. To make sure nobody would fall out of the world, Dema formed larger and larger blood paths and bridges.

“It’s further in,” Theora said.

The suspended, messy core wedged into the world Isobel had been talking about on its own was probably still days away to reach.

“But still, it’s kinda cool, though, right?” Isobel mused. “Look, there’s— these little blobs hanging up there… like grapes?”

“Oh, yeah!” Dema let out. “I can see that. It’s all fruit!”

Iso shrugged. “Not sure. It kinda feels like we’re invading a big ant’s nest.” She clacked her mandibles. “Except the walls are lava!”

“It would be easier if they were lava.” Theora pointed to a little crevice further ahead, and Dema followed the gesture with her own, summoning a bridge in the process.

“Will you be fine?” Iso asked. “Those things are big. The rains are hitting your blood.”

Dema did look exhausted. “Might need breaks, depending on how far we gotta go.”

Theora tried to think of an accurate estimation. “At this pace, it might take around three weeks to reach it.” Without those bridges, it would take much longer.

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“We can take breaks,” Iso said. “Like, there are some spots directly under cracks that seem to be mostly safe from the rains. Should be fine to sleep and replenish there. You said your regen will take care of it, right?”

Dema ruffed through her hair. “Maybe? Never been under it for so long and with that much… surface area. How does it work again? The rains damage your self, right?”

“Yeah.” Iso clacked across the bridge. “They damage your self.”

Dema hummed. “Probably gonna be able to sleep it off, then. Cracks are more dangerous, I think. Better avoid those.”

“Either of you could turn back, if you would like to,” Theora said. “I don’t think you’ll be able to join me at the end, anyway.”

“No way!” Dema let out. “What if you get lost? What if you fall into a ripple? Not gonna leave you here.”

“I’m using [Compute] and some stolen System storage to memorise the structure,” Isobel said. “And I’m making a three-dimensional map of it in my head. So I’ll be useful to have around if we get lost.” She shuffled her belly-legs against each other, getting a bit excited. “And these shapes are kind of interesting. Like, why does it look so organic? It kind of seems as if reality had some kind of natural resistance, and the damage flowed along the areas where it was smallest, doesn’t it? Like lightning hitting a tree, maybe? Kinda sad I got rid of [Identify] now… Maybe we should have waited for Bell to join us…”

“These Skills wouldn’t work on it,” Theora said.

“I figured!” Isobel ducked under a particularly large flake. “But that’s what makes it interesting, right? I wonder if I could use the error readouts to find out more about the internal structure of the System.”

“I thought you’d already made progress on that,” Theora said, voice monotonous. “Didn’t you force an Orb of Seven Wishes to appear as a reward?”

“Yeah.” Iso drove her finger way too closely along a wallowing purple capillary looking like a thin tear in paper. “But that was more like… I lucked out? Found an internal storage address with a helpful exploit, and then a way to write to it using an Interface glitch. You know, by overflowing a container through repeated prompt summoning, similar to what I mentioned before. I tested it a bunch with Bell’s and my own System rewards — turns out, part of the determining variable is the current time, which meant we had to wait for the internal reference to have a specific value for it to spit out an Orb of Seven Wishes… I can’t write to that part of the internal storage yet because it is protected; I’d need to find a break inside that protected area for that. It’s also inconvenient because the ways we have that do write to the less protected storage areas still rely on cumbersome methods; for example, for our Orb-route, the user had to level-up a Skill toward the end.”

“I see,” Theora lied.

Isobel then went on to proudly explaining the exact values she needed to fill and how she’d done it for every single one; she explained the different breaks they’d found and how to cause them, and she did her best to not stay quiet for a single moment.

Isobel’s voice was a blessing. It kept Theora moving. Isobel probably knew.

At some point, Theora received a System message from Bell.

“Everything alright with you all?”

“Yes,” Theora wrote back. “Getting closer.”

The first day passed, and by the end, the surroundings shifted. No more flakes; instead, a kind of web of damage carved its way through the air, causing shifts in perspective along the threads, as if parts of the space in-between were missing. This was more difficult to traverse, and Dema had trouble aiming her blood crystals with reality no longer obeying the principle of proportion.

Isobel spent their breaks sketching the shapes with coal on paper, and sometimes grew frustrated when she couldn’t replicate the sight. At night, she’d spit out a bubble of water to sleep in. Dema had become very tired and mostly silent, but was still hugging herself close to Theora whenever they found a place to sit.

And then, Theora would gently pat Dema’s head, humming melodies to help her fall asleep.

Theora would stay awake. Bell had apparently noticed, because she was staying up at night to chat.

They broke through a new layer a few days later, and that one was largely empty. Massive blobs congregated towards the centre, while all other directions were a vast, dark expanse illuminated by fire drizzle.

Dema produced a very large bridge to get them across, but they knew they’d have to get over it quickly. “Kinda scary,” she said.

“Yeah…” Isobel looked down, no ground to be seen anywhere beneath them. “I kind of didn’t expect it all to be so… much. I mean, I know these were your training grounds, and I suppose you didn’t know the Skill very well.” Her voice was a little laden. “I guess you weren’t aware it would be permanent? You must have used it so many times. No wonder it got so strong.”

Dema’s bare feet tapped along, Isobel’s rock clattered against the blood crystals, and Theora’s boots made soft thumps.

The empty space swallowed all echoes.

“This place had been reserved to become my training grounds when I was still a child,” Theora said. “It used to be a toxic rock desert. No population, almost no wildlife. I had my little hut to live in, isolated. They sent me here so that testing my old Skills wouldn’t cause harm to anyone.”

Dema’s mouth stood slightly open as she listened.

Theora continued, “I used it like that for a long time. [Obliterate] came much later, and turned the place into this.”

Isobel nodded, and reached for Theora’s hand. Her squeeze was soft. “Sorry you had to come back here. I think I kind of get it now. Why you didn’t want to.”

The next layer was one of deep ripples that stung in the eyes like light, but remained in shadows. Thin strands in-between whirled like underwater refractions.

“Just once.”

“Hm?” Iso turned to Theora. “What, just once?”

“You suggested I used [Obliterate] many times, to cause this damage.” Theora shook her head. “I only used it once.”