My stomach tightens as the mixture finally hits it. Not painfully so, but just enough for it to let me know that it isn’t happy with what I just gave it. I grimace as Ursula tilts the canteen upwards, then smack my lips again to try and get the excess sticky moisture off. But it’s stuck there like lipstick mixed with glue.

“Ech. Salty.” Ursula coughs into the crook of her elbow. “Not sure what else I expected. Ooh, and that’s not a nice feeling. Makes me think I’m going to throw up at any moment with all this not-quite-saliva.”

“Yick, hadn’t thought of it like that.” I shake my head and smack my lips. Again. “Architect, did this do anything weird to her Class Card?”

“Well, yeah. It’s not hidden this time. And it’s… a little… weird.” March says slowly. “Check it out for yourselves.”

Oh. Guess I could’ve checked beforehand. I pull out my Class Card and press on the notification that’s hovering over everything else.

Moltensalt Concentration

Your body carries borrowed powers.

It sees you as one of its own.

The Moltensalt Depths welcome you.

“Ooh, cryptic.” Ursula coos with glimmering curiosity. “I’ve got a theory already, but I want to hear what you two think first.”

She turns to me with a wide smile and newfound energy. I press my lips together in thought as March hums in my ears; there’s a lot of assumptions to be made here. Need to make sure I don’t make any that make me look like an idiot. There’s one thing I can easily test before I say anything, though.

I take a half-step back. My foot lifts completely normally–and it feels like gravity’s pushing down as usual–but it just… stays there. Hovering in the air as I bring it to right above where I want to plant it down. With a thought the strange weightlessness shifts to extreme gravity, crushing the clover beneath my foot in a stomp that feels like it carries a lot of unspoken anger. It doesn’t shake my bones like it should. In fact, there’s less of a shock on my body than if I’d just stepped normally.

“Looks–”

“There’s–”

March and I start talking at the exact same time. I pause to let her keep going, and she doesn’t even stop to recognize that I started.

“-a good chance you’ve both got the same bonuses that a vendigator got from being possessed by a salt elemental. And some more things that you couldn’t see that it got when you fought it. The buff registers as a Mind buff even though it doesn’t give you any stats.”

Ursula raises an eyebrow and swipes through her Class Card. “Well, shit–you’re right. Nice catch. Never would’ve thought to check under my stats. How ‘bout you, Gambler? Sounded like you had something to say.”

“Eh. Architect said pretty much everything I wanted to say.” I shrug and open my Class Card to check, and sure enough, there’s a modifier on my Mind. +0. “I didn’t know buffs showed themselves like this.”

“They usually do, but pure stat buffs are actually a lot rarer than you’d think. Most of ‘em just improve your combat abilities, or one specific aspect of a stat–that’s when you get the plus zeroes like you see here.” Ursula explains as she puts away her Class Card and jumps straight up. “Oh, whoah, that’s weird.”

“Like being weightless without actually being weightless.” I agree and push off to meet her midair. My awareness shifts and twists in my mind as I struggle to get used to this new sensation, but with a snap of deep black, everything adjusts. And walking on thin air is just as easy as walking on the ground.

“Damn, that’s impressive.” Ursula whistles as she awkwardly repositions herself. “So, uh, I saw how the vendigator got down. But we’re made of flesh, blood, and snappable bone–not metal and magic.”

I tilt my head to the side, take a few steps away from the massive crack fifteen feet below, and spread my arms. Ursula narrows her eyes at me like she’s trying to figure out what I’m about to do, but I’ve got no reason to keep her waiting. So I glance down at the ground, smile confidently, and switch from weightlessness to intense gravity.

She yelps in surprise as I slam into the ground. Salt erupts in a crystalline ripple all around me, molten magic and flower-like crystals melding into one big mass of obscuring salt. But… I don’t stop. The crack reaches out to split the ground beneath my feet, and suddenly, there’s nothing below me. Just unfathomable darkness spreading out in every direction but up.

My brain takes a few seconds to register what the hell just happened. Walls of salt around me begin to pulse with inner magic moments after I fall beneath them like crappy motion triggered lights. I reach out and dumbly grasp at one of them, which is more than a little too far to touch, and that’s when my awareness finally snaps my mind into place.

It doesn't feel like I’m falling. Just like it didn’t feel like I was walking on open air a few seconds ago. I clench my jaw and bend my knees a little before pushing off of nothing. My descent and ascent cancel each other out perfectly, leaving me standing in open air as the molten light draining down the walls finally overtakes me. Slowly but surely revealing yet another massive room underneath the field of clover.

Except this one’s nowhere near as open. Canopies of flowering salt crystal trees cover at least half of the overhead view, and a sparkling pool of ‘water’ flows around a massive lotus-like flower that in itself could be a desert oasis. No sunflowers hang from the ceiling, the ground doesn’t look like one continuous mass of the exact same thing…

Compared to the clover field, this almost looks… natural.

“Gambler?! You Okaaaay?!” Ursula’s voice grows louder as she falls to catch up to, and quickly passes, me. She stops awkwardly a good hundred feet below me, jumps a handful of times, and stops right in front of me with relief written plainly on her face. “Oh, thank the lord you’re alright. You just plummeted straight through the ground, and when the dust cleared, you weren’t there any more.”

“Apparently the ground wasn’t as solid as I thought it was. You know, the huge crack should’ve been enough evidence. But apparently not.” I nod down towards the ground far below, then look back at Ursula. “Does this stuff look way more complicated than everything else to you too?”

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Ursula raises an eyebrow, then looks down beneath her feet. She murmurs something under her breath that could just as easily be wonder or worry, then purses her lips and crosses her arms.

“Magic concentration’s way higher down there. And it was already pretty high up here.” She cranes her neck to the ceiling and clicks her tongue. “I bet we’ll be fine because of the buff, but it probably would’ve done some serious damage if we didn’t have it. Hell, we’ll probably still get a bunch of creeping debuffs even with the stuff we drank.”

“Creeping debuff?”

She waves my question off. “Just a word Banker came up with for debuffs that get worse over time; nothing official you need to worry about. We tackling this now, or taking a power nap before we risk it?”

“I don’t know about you, but I could keep going for hours.”

“Same here. But let’s take the descent a little slower, just in case.”

I nod in agreement; no reason to fall feet-first into a possible hell when we can acclimate ourselves to it from above. Ursula takes a deep breath to steel herself and shifts awkwardly, then screams in surprise when she suddenly plummets a good twenty feet. She stops on a dime, staggers a little, and takes another deep breath–this one a little shakier. I laugh to myself and use my awareness to control my drop, plummeting dozens of feet in an instant. Salt and light fly by, and the air gets… grainier. Still just as cold and wet, but now there’s… stuff in there. Like walking through a kitchen after someone dropped a huge bag of flour.

Ursula yelps as she falls a few feet below me, looks up, and decides she doesn’t need to get our heads at the exact same level. Then she tries to take a third deep breath, hitches halfway through, and breaks out into a coughing fit.

“Lord… almighty…” She pounds her chest with one fist and wipes her eyes with the other. “Hope to hell that isn’t going to crystallize in my lungs.”

Wow. Thanks for the brand new fear I hadn’t even thought about. Crystals in my lungs… shit, that’s almost exactly like how the salt took over the vendigator. Is that what this place is trying to do? Make us into hosts for the salt elementals? Well, it’s a damn good thing I can relocate us away from this potential hellhole at any moment. Or else we might already be screwed.

Sharp cracking followed by a melodic, repetitious shattering grabs my awareness like a rope and yanks me straight to it. There’s nothing visible through the canopy, but my awareness slinks down and through until it meets a mass of… something. The salt in the air is so concentrated that it’s hard to make out any distinct shapes or magic, since they’re all so closely related. The sounds die out just as quickly as they came, but something was distinct enough to get my awareness to flare like that.

I turn to Ursula, whose face is knotted in thought, and tap her on the shoulder. “Everything’s part of a huge whole down there. I can’t make out anything like the vendigator, and the air is so saturated that it’s hard to tell anything apart. We’ll have to rely on Architect a little more than before.”

“I’m ready.” March says before Ursula can get a word out. “The magic concentration down here is actually making the devices work faster somehow. I should have a map done in an hour or so. Oh, and there’s still only three exits–but the place is actually a lot bigger than it looks. Lots of layers. Be careful.”

That’s… uncharacteristically chatty for her. And it’s all accompanied by vigorous clicking and tapping, confirming that she’s actually working pretty damn hard right now. If I knew her a little better I’d be able to tell if that’s a good or bad thing. But, uh, from how Ursula’s face is pinched into a worried frown, I’m guessing it’s not great.

“Thanks.” She says flatly. “When you get that working we’ll go down below the treeline. For now, let’s try and keep our feet out of reach of whatever’s making all those noises. You’re, uh, sure it’s not an apocalypse-touched machine?”

“Pretty damn sure. Why?”

She points off into the distance. I follow her finger, and through all the salt in the air, I can barely make out something in the distance. A huge hunk of metal from which grease and oil flow like a cascading waterfall. Not a great thing to see, and from the way it’s half encased in salt, it looks like the elementals are winning handily against the apocalypse.

“Yeah, that looks pretty bad.” I agree. “But what does it have to do with what I saw?”

Ursula insistently points even harder. “Look closer. I–right, your Mind stat isn’t amazing. Even if you’ve got some eye buffs, it won’t do that kind of hard lifting. I think I’ve… yeah. Here.”

A pair of plain old binoculars fly at me. I snatch them out of the air and raise an eyebrow at Ursula.

“Look at the waterfall and the edges the salt’s encroaching. You’ll see.”

“Alright.”

I raise them to my eyes and squint until they’re in focus. The blob of metal and grease looks a whole lot more… brutal. Ripped chunks of metal smash together in senseless angles and broken joints, combining multiple barely discernible colours into one not-quite-monotone chunk. I… can’t make out any one specific machine this could’ve been. There’s broken monitors, pipes, even some things that are probably the actual deep-sea drilling stuff. And that’s not even half of everything that makes up the mass.

But that’s not what Ursula wanted me to see. No–what she wanted me to see is half encrusted in salt. Hundreds of magical pinpricks squirming against a prison of salt. Each belonging to their own elemental-possessed apocalyptic machine monster. I swallow hard as the numbers keep going up and up and up, until I eventually make my way to the waterfall.

More of them. Things that I can’t identify plummeting down the oily cascade in much smaller numbers, but with far more salt covering them. The vendigators were wearing little pieces of armor. These ones are pilots surrounded by a complete shell of magical salt. Actually… no. They’re vehicles surrounded by another vehicle of salt piloted by an elemental.

“Shit.” I lower the binoculars and hand them back to Ursula. “If they’re that covered in salt, they’re more elemental than apocalyptic.”

Ursula sends the binoculars away and drops a little. She clenches her jaw until she stops, then lowers even more. From the way she looks up at me it seems like she’s got something to say, but she’s definitely focusing one-hundred percent on falling properly. I try to grin and fall down alongside her, but the edges of my mouth don’t feel like rising right now.

My eyes trail off towards the chunk of metal birthing the salt-coated apocalypse. This place could be infinitely more dangerous than I thought.

A very loud crunch echoes out. I blink and snap to the source of the noise, and see nothing but a hole in the canopy and a smattering of larger salt crystals floating lazily away from it. And absolutely no sign of Ursula.

“How the hell…”

Mechanical whirring erupts from beneath the treeline. The harsh hum of something rotating very fast joins immediately, and is punctuated by flashes of gunfire. I hiss and try to get myself to fall faster, but somehow, Ursula managed to plummet the last bit way faster than I can manage.

“Come on, come on.” I mutter to myself as I push a few projectiles into coins. “How did she get down there so quickly?”

The canopy rushes up to meet me like a rabid dog. Simple flowers with four diamond-shaped petals each burst into shards as I crash through them, snapping the circular leaves and perfectly cylindrical branches they’re accompanied by as my vision is completely overtaken by monotone salt crystals. Puffs of magic flare out through the destruction and I raise my arms to block my face as my skin is pelted and scoured by everything I fall through. Pain nips then flares as salt makes and gets in the wound, but I barely recognize it through the din of combat going on somewhere below me.

Blissfully the experience lasts less than a few seconds. The foliage disappears to reveal a scene of carnage; long gashes in the ground, trees standing upright by hope and dreams, and bubbling burn marks creating pools of molten salt giving off visible fumes that make my head spin just by looking at them. And in the middle of all of it is Ursula and something very much apocalypse-touched. Something that my awareness can barely make out from the background radiation of salt.

Whatever it is, my feet touch the middle of its back before it can even look up at me. Ursula’s eyes go wide as she recognizes what’s happening, and then my entire world turns into oil and jagged metal. With a little bit of an elemental core mixed in for good measure.

It thrashes violently. But from the half-broken elemental core staring me in the face and leaking magic, it’s not going to be alive for long.