They made their way to the cave just as the last light of day splattered across the path. Saul had tried to initiate a conversation, but between Ace’s tense replies and Dan snarking that everything she said was a lie, he’d stopped at the halfway point and was probably monitoring them to make sure they didn’t outright murder each other.

“In there?” Dan peered at the cave’s small entrance. “It would be impossible for me to fit.”

“Not my fault.” Ace shrugged. “I’ll being Saul in with me. I mean, you said you trust him, right?”

“What are you bringing me in to see?” Saul asked, wary as he took in the high opening. He might not be the quickest thinker of the NPCs, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that nothing nice and sweet was going to happen in the near future.

“No.” Dan shook his head. “You are going to go in and bring back whatever it is you believe is connected to my Maddy.” He sat, tail thrashing similar to a cat’s. Ace watched as clumps of vegetation piled up at the ends. A moist smell wafted up and there was a slight splash of hidden water. “Saul will keep me company out here, since there are others I wish to know about.”

“I’m not strong enough to bring what I think you need to see outside,” Ace protested, remembering the body. “If Saul goes in with me, he can help me carry it out.”

Dan stretched and cracked his serpentine neck. Then he let out a half-hiss, half-sigh.

“Very well. As much as I maintain that you’ve brought this on yourself and should go forth alone, it’s Maddy who’s important, not my injured heart.” He craned his neck to look at Saul. “I’m sorry to ask, but would you go in with her?”

Saul nodded. He patted the dragon on the shoulder.

“Are you going to be okay out here, all alone?”

Dan snorted, setting fire to a small section nearby.

“I’ve already done this for years, so I’ll be fine. As long as she isn’t lying to me again.” His tail jabbed at the dark entrance. “I’ll wait. And if I decide you’re stalling, I’ll just send some heat down the tunnels to light a fire under your ass.”

“Great,” muttered Ace. “The steam bath I never wanted.”

She started up the route she’d gone before, using the two trees to climb and reach the ledge, this time not breathing heavily as she stood at the opening. Nice to know she still had the endurances she’d built up over the testing period; being broken down to level 1 would have been a horrible realization.

“Hey... hand here?”

Ace turned to see Saul hanging onto one tree and holding out a hand.

“Stretch. You should be able to reach.”

There were two sighs, a small one from him as he stretched an inch, and a larger one from her.

“Fine,” Ace grumbled, anchoring herself so that she could take his weight. She hooked his hand, and a steady pull landed him on the narrow ledge. The two of them were looking down at Dan’s scaly head and snout.

“We’ll be back in a bit!” Saul called out, letting Ace take the lead. Inside the cave, the temperature dropped. Goose-bumps marched up and down her arms. Around the entrance was a heavy moss influence, but as they kept walking, the walls dried out and colors faded to softer blacks and browns. Their breathing echoed, stealing away life to come back sounding like the last desperate gasps of something dying. Ace ignored most of the skittering shadows that crawled away from them and disappeared into cracks; she took out the flashlight and made more creatures run away.

“How well do you know Dan?” she asked, pitching the question low in case the dragon had super hearing along with fire breath. That would be her damn luck.

“Pretty well. We were friends before everything went... weird.” He made a disgusted noise. “I’d come out and go hiking on my own without the scouts, which meant that I knew most of the rangers on a first name basis... They were nice. Friendly people, happy to be here and introduce the wilderness to us while keeping us from hurting it. What did you do to make him so angry at you? The last time I saw him that furious, it was when a bunch of teenagers tried to take selfies with a bear.”

Ace snorted at that. She could imagine how the “tried” had turned out.

“I entered his lookout tower. He surprised me, and I pretended to be Maddy so that he wouldn’t kill me.”

“Ah.” Saul was quiet for a few seconds as Ace maneuvered her way around a rock. “Maybe... maybe you shouldn’t have done that?”

“You’re right.” Ace stopped and nodded, rolling her eyes in the dark. “I should have gotten myself killed instead.”

“That’s not what I meant at all,” he complained, stopping behind her. “Just... he wouldn’t have hurt you, no matter that he’s scary looking. Probably. I think.”

She laughed at that confident statement, the sharp sound vibrating around them.

“It’s hard to tell how people are after the world has ended,” Saul pointed out.

“How about I keep myself alive and you keep yourself alive? Oh, and if that means you want to take risks like being killed after placing your trust in the wrong person, be my guest.”

Ace noticed a broken stalagmite and changed direction to go down the left path.

“You could be a smidge nicer,” he complained, following her left.

“No. I really couldn’t.”

He didn’t have a follow up to that, so Ace was blessed with silence. They continued on their way until they emerged into a slightly taller chamber, one with sparkling purple crystals embedded in the walls. And the laid out body on the ground.

“Is that...?”

“I don’t know,” Ace said, leaning and pressing her shoulder against the rocky wall. “I didn’t know Maddy, so this could be a completely different person.”

The crystals were new, weirdly. She would have remembered them the first time she was in here since it was giving her King Arthur vibes, but when she’d first found this place, there’d been nothing… Maybe some loose soil?

“Not important, Ace,” she muttered to herself. Saul glanced at her, but she shook her head, not caring to tell him what was on her mind. “Anyway. That’s what you need to move.”

Saul groaned, and she agreed. The rotting flesh was going to fall off during the first movement, and moving it was going to splatter them with nasty liquids.

“You could take just the boots?” she asked, already banking on what the response to that was going to be.

“No… I don’t think we can.” He paused. “Wait, what do you mean ‘you’? You have to help me with this, this is all your fault!”

“I have no idea how Dan’s going to identify the body.” She shuddered. “I really don’t care how, either, because thinking of what he can smell and taste is disgusting. But yeah. It’s going to have to be you dragging whoever this was back to the entrance.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Ace nodded, glancing back at the ground. “Because if this is Maddy, then it doesn’t matter that she’s been long dead before I got here. Dan’s going to snap and kill me. You can’t convince me otherwise.”

Saul froze, then gave a slow nod.

“That... makes sense. If this is her…” his voice lowered. “And, between you and me, I think it is… He’s going to be furious.”

“Very.”

“And sad.”

“Yep. Which is where you come in and comfort him.” Ace studied the ceilings. “I’ll stay in the caves. You can tell me when it’s safe to leave.”

He sighed, but bent down next to the corpse, studying where he could pick it up and how he could move it.

“I don’t think I can take the body and keep it intact,” he finally said, straightening up. “It’s too… squishy.”

Ace looked around the chamber, their light flashing across the crystals. “There might be another way for us to go. When I first came here, I didn’t fully explore the cave system.”

Saul looked at the path beyond and looked back at the body.

“I’m going to be honest. I’ll do anything to put this off for as long as I can.” With that, he strode over and took the lead. Ace followed, checking for spider webs and bats, but they didn’t run into much of anything. The cave remained dry and brown, with something in the atmosphere, a richness that held a promise of water.

“Do you smell…mint?” Saul sniffed the air. Ace stopped and took a deep breath.

“You’re right. Mint and... Mushrooms?”

They looked at each and continued walking. It didn’t take long to come across a carpet of small green plants with dull yellow blossoms. After that came clumps of green with smudges of blue, purple, and more of a yellowish-orange.

“I had no idea this was here,” Saul said, looking around the room with wonder. “It’s like a small grove!”

Ace was surprised as well. A place like this could have been a tourist attraction, luring in cash, jobs, and maybe even scientists with the previous purple crystals and the wild garden they’d just stumbled into. She shook her head. This was a game, not an actual society. Nobody needed to lure anything in, the devs placed it where they thought it should go.

“Let’s get past the grove and see where the path leads to.” Ace retook control of the lead and started stepping over plants of all shapes and sizes. In a range of health too, she could see. There were at least three that were beyond dead, almost shadows dusted onto the floor with how their wilted grey stood out against the darker brown. A few others were in the stage right before death, their head dropping to kiss curled up petals.

Ace felt her foot fall into a watery section and cursed, the cold wetness soaking her sock and filling her shoe.

“Water,” she snarled, forging on ahead. Behind her, she could hear Saul splash into the same stream she was walking up. Thankfully, it stayed shallow. It was freezing enough that she wouldn’t want to be any wetter or to have uncovered skin submerged in what felt to be polar bear temperatures. Shit, cold. For a second, she wondered if all her mutations were still in use, but then a thundering sound came from up ahead, and they entered a much larger cavern than any of the others.

“What an amazing waterfall!” shouted Saul, cupping his hands to his mouth. She could still barely hear him over the noise. Ace just nodded, concentrating on carefully inching her feet forward. There was no way she wanted to find out how far the middle of this lake went, but knowing where the deepness started was good. Two and a half shuffles in, the tip of her foot didn’t feel ground beneath it.

“There’s no way we’d be able to wade across this,” she called out to Saul. “And the bones are heavy enough that they’d sink. We’re going to have to take the other route.”

He nodded, and the two of them made their way back out to the shallow stream, where mint covered the ground and infused the air. Ace snapped off a few twigs and Saul sneezed several times at the concentrated wave that welled up.

“Might be better to have something else to smell,” Ace offered. Mint beat rotting corpse any day of the week. And with that lovely thought, she plucked a few more leaves from the plants and shoved them into all of her pockets.

The next few minutes were spent making their way back to the chamber of purple crystals, and they were both silent as they stopped at the body again.

“You take the head?”

Ace gave Saul a look.

“I’m not going with you all the way, so it’d be better if you took the head and I took the boots.”

He couldn’t argue with that. Didn’t, at any rate.

“I’ll still need your help to get past the stalagmites.”

“I’ll be there with you, but after that, I’m going to stay safe in the cave while the large, angry, fire-breathing dragon checks the bones to see if it’s his lost love.”

Saul nodded, and she hesitated. If this was no longer a game, what happened when NPCs died? Would they come back if the game was fixed? Did they get some type of permadeath that would delete their data?

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked. “When he lashes out in anger, he’s going to take it out on you.”

“We’re friends from way back,” Saul said, shaking his head and smiling. “I know he’s a good man, and I trust that even changed by the mutations, he will not hurt me.”

And that was that. Ace bent at her knees to check out the boots. Either the smell was coded to the entrance of the cave so as to lure in anyone passing by, or the mint was doing its job well, there wasn’t that much of a smell. Moving the body had a fleshly ripping sound that trickled down her spine, but there was no noxious cloud of rot, no sickly sweet stench that would have needed the entire herbal path they’d found earlier. She could handle that.

Saul, an expression of extreme distaste on his face, picked up and held the body by placing his arms around the chest and lifting. He went backwards, since he was the one going first, and Ace allowed him to move when he was ready—no sense rushing him if that would cause him to trip and draw this whole thing out.

The stalagmites were a problem. Saul couldn’t see well enough behind him to avoid being stabbed by the damn rocks, and trying to give directions on how to bend resulted in him being frustrated, and her worried that Dan would hear them.

“Every time you try to help me, I end up hurting worse,” Saul accused her, letting go of the body. It thudded to the ground, the head rolling back to state hurtfully at Saul. Or hatefully. If it had been Ace, she would have come back from the dead just to glare.

“How do you suggest we get through this, then?” she asked, wiping her hands off on the body’s stiff clothing.

“I don’t know!” Saul rubbed the back of his head, then stared at his hand in horror. His wide eyes found hers. “Isn’t this your problem?!”

Ace ignored him and walked over to where the stabby rocks started. They really did stick out at all angles...

“You’re going to have to face the entrance and pick your way through.”

“That means I can’t carry my half,” Saul pointed out.

“Turn around, hold out your arms, and I’ll place the body so that you can carry it as you go.” She smiled. “Think of it like you’re giving a scout a piggyback ride.”

“And this wasn’t thought of earlier, why?” muttered Saul, rolling his eyes, but turning so that he was facing the front. “Oh, I know. Because disgusting juices are going to leak all over me!”

Ace dragged the body closer and maneuvered it to be resting in his open arms. With a slight squelch, the body rested against Saul’s back. The relationship she’d worked hard to have with this man was degrading by the second; she’d be lucky at the end of the day if he didn’t view her with animosity.

Although… She took the thought that’d popped up and set it to the side. First things first.

“Can you walk and keep hold?”

Saul took a step forward, avoiding a nasty spike, and nodded, his jaw tight.

“Should be okay. I just don’t want to drag Maddy, or whoever this was, against the floor. And I won’t be able to hold this position for a long time.” There was a wavering sound in his voice that made her think he would choose not to hold the corpse for much longer. And that was fair.

Ace took up the feet again and carefully they started forward. There were a few times she needed to lift the body higher or swing it in an opposite direction so that the rocks didn’t gouge it, but they made it past the stalagmites with only a few wounds to Saul’s legs and all limbs still attached.

She set her part of the body down and helped him unstick it from his back. She saluted him and brought a finger to her lips in a command to not talk about her leaving. He nodded, grabbed her by the shoulder, and squeezed. The best way of saying goodbye, to be honest; she would have slugged him if he’d tried to kiss her while spritzed in cologne de corpse.

He knelt down to pick the body up in a bridal carry and began making his way to the entrance. Ace stepped her way through the stalagmites again, sucking in a curse as one of them slashed the side of her calf. She didn’t stop to wrap it though. At this point, Saul had to have seen—

Agony rippled through the cave in a bellow that left her ears ringing. She picked up the pace, not trusting that Saul could keep Dan from literally ripping her to pieces. Through the purple crystals, splashing into the shallow lake—the entire time she could feel tremors from the floor, see stalactites crashing into the water. Dan was either going to bring this cave down on top of her or he was going to scale the wall and thrust his way in here.

No matter his decision, there was pain, mutilation, and death waiting for her at the end. Maybe even permadeath because the whole damn system was fucked up.

She fell into deeper water. Dan was getting closer, if the intensity of the vibrations was a clue. Something tugged at her, and if she hadn’t been underwater, she wouldn’t have been able to feel it. Surfacing, she took a deep breath and went back under. A current. Snagging her hair, jerking her sleeves.

Ace surfaced for a last gasp, treading water while she tried to think. Embrace the unknown, or wait for Dan to find her. She saw flickering out of the corner of her eye; choked on the smell of burnt mint.

“Fuck whoever said it’s better the devil you know.” One last gasp, and she let the current embrace her.