Goldmine of points or not, there’s no way I’m hanging around if the goddamned God of Death knows I’m here!

Lucy had started to wander around the camp as surreptitiously as she could, looking for the easiest way out. Her new “friend” followed.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” he tried to explain, as Lucy scouted out guard placements and listened for the sound of buzzing wings. “I’m not here to kill you, just to take your soul to hell when you do die!” At her clearly not-reassured look, he continued, trailing just behind her. “…which I’m sure won’t be any time soon!”

She ignored him. After his brief failed attempt at subterfuge, he had admitted to working for Simon, and introduced himself as Rikorlak.

“Really, I don’t know what went wrong. I wasn’t even supposed to be in this form. I just got my orders to go up and bring you back down, and when I was barely through the Earth’s crust, bam! Transformed into a single-celled organism. Shit sucks, honestly; I am not a fan.”

Lucy wrinkled her membrane in confusion.

“What was all that “‘crobe-this and ‘crobula-that” business you were talking about then?”

“Oh, that? I was ad-libbing. The briefing pamphlet said that was a very important skill for field agents. It sure seems a lot like lying, but I suppose that never hurt anybody. I figured microbes might call each other ‘crobes, you know?”

Lucy sighed.

“Let’s say I believe you. How did you find me?”

His membrane rose and fell in a fair imitation of a shrug. “Well, normally the Spatial Magic team just sort of pops you in, I’m told. I was going to let Frank know that an alarm was blinking, but last time I did something like that, Shannon told me it was an idiot alarm and to go fuck myself, so I figured Frank had seen it…”

The gist, Lucy gathered, was that, while the teleportation aspect had worked, something had interfered with Rikorlak’s actual body on the way in.

He kept talking, and Lucy listened with part of her Awareness as she thought things through. She wasn’t particularly worried that Rikorlak was going to kill her. He was clearly unfamiliar with being a one-celled organism, and she could form a spike at any moment if she needed to protect herself. Still, she kept her Awareness trained on him just in case.

She paused in her perimeter of the camp, questioning her reaction as something struck her.

If this guy found me in this particular tiny part of a specific hydrothermal vent, Simon already knows where I am.

More importantly, she was microscopic. She could swim as fast as she could until her energy ran out a hundred times over, and she’d still be in the same vent in the same part of the ocean.

Maybe even the same crack in the stone, she thought glumly.

She turned and eyed Rikorlak.

He looks so human.

As strange as it was, it was true. Simon’s agent may not have been from earth, but his original form must have had arms or something like them, because his outer membrane kept bulging out in little nubs that gestured wildly as he spoke.

Moving between him and the guarded perimeter, Lucy ushered him over to the nearest geyser, where the couple microbes already there immediately shied away from Lucy and towards Rikorlak.

“Why do they keep doing that?!”

Lucy had intended to ask some pointed questions about Rikorlak’s identity and what exactly he’d been told to do with her soul, but that’s not what came out.

The other microbe thought for a moment, an elongating nub reaching to scratch where a head might be.

Or horns, I guess.

“Hmm. You don’t look any different from the rest of us.” He paused to take a deep whiff of the surrounding water through his membrane channels. “You don’t smell any different. Hmmmmmm. Ah! That’s it!”

He held up a nub like a finger, and Lucy thought about telling him not to keep doing that. Then she realized that if the guards hauled him off it would make her life a whole lot simpler, and didn’t say anything.

“I bet you weren’t given the second serum, were you?”

The shots?

Now it was Lucy’s turn to shrug. “I figured it was another parasitic fungi thing, so, no.”

Rikorlak waggled side to side extravagantly, like his whole body was a head that he was shaking in disapproval.

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

“Oh, no! The first one, yes. The second one, I believe, serves as a sort of cohesion-promoter for the group. As soon as they administered it, I began to feel the strongest sense of…kinship with you all. Very interesting.”

Lucy supposed that made sense. Prevent infighting, keep everybody in nice tidy groups.

She eyed him through her Awareness. “Why were you sent to…retrieve my soul, if you work in Analytics?”

He sighed so heavily that Lucy felt a ripple of water brush against her membrane.

“Well, Shilgatoth was out sick, and there’s the whole demon-strike thing going on, so…here I am! Doing fieldwork.” He paused. “I don’t like it.”

“And you swear you aren’t going to kill me? Or get something else to kill me?”

“Kill? Oh, no. That was not included in the training. No, my orders were just to bring you downtown when—err, if you do die. They said it would be a normal grab n’go sort of assignment, but then I came into this area and got transformed, and all these messages started popping up about a System and telling me I was a microbe, so I was like, if I can’t escape, I better fit in, right?”

Lucy stopped in her tracks.

“You have a System?”

Rikorlak shrugged.

“I guess? Weird computer interface that pops up, snarky or unhelpful messages?”

Lucy wondered what this all meant. Unless Rikorlak was a very good one-celled actor, his coming here before she was dead had really been some sort of mistake or miscommunication. But why would he have a System?

Well…I guess I’ll keep Oxidizing and get some more points while I can. This situation is becoming a bit more complicated than I would like, though.

She had a bad feeling that the gods were getting a bit too personally involved in her challenge.

***

Simon fumed, pacing on a red-hot bed of glowing coals. Every few steps he took, fire shot up from the ground and the stench of rotten eggs filled the smoky air.

Jade, as usual, was ruining everything.

Since he’d known about Lucy before he swore the oath with Jade, Simon had set up a few surprises for her in that nice little hydrothermal vent. His surveillance was lacking there since the oath went up, but he knew his measures would be enough to see her killed.

In fact, he’d been so sure that he’d sent the order for someone to go fetch her soul, since it had been days now since the challenge started.

But, as usual, someone other than Simon had fucked up. Thinking it was just a run-of-the mill retrieval, one of his subordinates had sent a schmuck from Analytics.

This is the second time Frank has inconvenienced me, he remembered. If it happens again I’ll have to dock his pay. Or cut off his toes.

Normally, that would have been fine. It was no big deal to pull a soul to the underworld. It was one of the first things Simon had learned to do when he’d started here all those centuries ago. It was easy.

It would have been fine, if Jade hadn’t set up some sort of protective bubble around the entire area around the hydrothermal vent! Simon had gone to visit it himself and decided he had no idea how the fuck it worked or what the H E double hockey-sticks it did.

The important part was that it kept him from seeing what was going on in there, and if Jade didn’t want him to see, anything could be happening. For all he knew, she had given her champion a magical artifact, or a shard of her own power! It would be a surprising move from her, but Jade had surprised him before.

Simon twitched his hand upwards, and a jagged throne of gleaming black stone jutted up from the ground, sharp edges reflecting orange in the firelight. He beckoned, and a trio of his more trusted lieutenants came forward, followed by their own attendants.

On the far left was Silica, an ancient succubus who had been turned to stone by a curse a millennium ago, and who had served Simon loyally ever since he reanimated her lifeless body with a heart of roaring magical flame.

On the far right crawled Trigorius, a once-human soldier of ancient wars whose eyes shone bright yellow, rather than the standard demon red. He was something of a gourmet, Simon knew, and paid lavishly to have the souls he consumed refined by Hell’s finest apothecary, which made his inner light a pleasantly-poisonous shade of yellow.

I still need to get that recipe, Simon mused briefly.

And in the center, a being with no name. A pit of black shadow and endless longing that knew only hunger. Its friends called it The Devourer.

Simon tapped his long fingers on his throne for a moment before speaking.

“Well,” he announced finally to his loyal grotesques, “if Jade’s going to get involved, why shouldn’t we? I had intended to play fair, of course…”

The imps and lesser demons behind the trio chuckled, snorted, and wheezed on cue, and Simon smiled as his lieutenants honored him, each in their own way.

“A pleasure to serve,” Silica said in a smoky voice, as Trigorius stamped the butt of his long-spear into the ground. The Devourer stayed silent, except for a burst of malignant energy that crackled briefly across its surface.

Simon had communicated his desires to them already through a simple touch of magic. This business with Lucy was dragging out more than he’d expected, and now was no time for the confusion of merely verbal commands.

Still, it felt good to say the words out loud, so as his lieutenants and their attendants slithered off to their various tasks, he let them linger in the air as they escaped over his forked tongue.

“If Jade is going to take this little bet seriously enough to cheat, why shouldn’t we?”

***

In her Tower of Life, the Goddess Jade twirled a vine aimlessly, letting it grow as it pleased across her hand, where it pressed against her like a happy little snake.

Something had been weighing on her mind for the last day or so, and her other duties had finally calmed down enough to let her talk it over with the trusted friend against whose bark she now leaned.

She had been talking for some time to the ancient tree, whose roots ran deep into the realm of magic, anchoring the space-time foundation of the Tower itself.

“I’m really not trying to interfere,” she said, for perhaps the fourth time. “I just don’t want him to interfere, you know?”

Massive leaves formed a canopy high above her, blocking her view of the clear blue sky above. The tree’s gnarled bark shivered slightly, and she placed her hand against its trunk to listen, then sighed.

“You’re right, I know my intention, and that’s what matters. It’s just…”

She looked into the knots and whorls of ancient living wood like she was looking for answers.

“You don’t think he’ll see it as cheating, do you?”

Thousands of leaves started rustling madly overhead, and the ground began to tremble slightly.

Jade immediately began to cast a spell of shielding around the tree, and overlapping plates of shining green armor formed over her own body.

What is this? An attack from below? Some sort of magical hurricane?

When she realized what was actually going on, Jade’s alarm didn’t lessen in the slightest.

The Tree of Wisdom was laughing.