The world around me had become much more twisted than I could ever have imagined. I had no idea why or how, but I was transported to… I didn’t even know. My daughter wasn’t in front of me anymore. Instead of being by my side like she should have been, she was everywhere around me. Not clones of her. Well, there were clones, though not of her entire body. The entire sky, every corner in every direction, was just hundreds of my daughter’s faces, contorted and left in a permanent expression of fear and agony.

I looked down, not wanting to witness such a painful expression Sunshine was forced to take. However, I was only met with even more of her distraught expressions as the whole ground was made up of her face. I screamed and tried to run away, but I tripped on my child’s gaping mouth. My face crashed onto her cheek, and I felt something wet, something sticky stain my forehead. It wasn’t my blood. It was her blood, somehow spilling out of her mouth.

Fear poured into my soul as I crawled out of the way, desperately trying to find anywhere that wasn’t this horrible place. The air smelled like a mixture of rotten eggs and manure, and pinching my nose didn't seem to matter. The faces all around me didn't help either as my stomach churned at the sight of it all. My breathing was becoming erratic, and my heart was nearly beating out of my chest. Wait a minute… my heart?

I stopped moving to examine my body, and I realized that I was human again. Without hesitation, I dug through the pockets of my coat and, as I expected, Sunshine’s baby picture was in there. It all made sense now… this place was the state between absorption! But how the hell did I get here? And how do I get out…?

“This isn't the state between absorption.”

A girl’s voice boomed across the space, vibrating my body uncomfortably. I grabbed my arms, trying to keep my body in place. My eyes scanned every direction, and yet I couldn't see where the voice came from. With how loud she was, it was as though the entire world said that sentence. “Who are you!? Actually, I don’t care who you are… Get me out of here or I’ll-”

“You don't care? After you killed my mother and forced her inside this disgusting, undead body… you're saying you don't care about me!?”

She sounded conflicted, like she wasn't even sure if what she said was the truth or not. Although, that wasn't the only thing I was concerned about. There was only mother she could've been talking about, but that would mean that this voice came from…

“Sunflower!” I screamed to the sky. “Is that you?”

“No shit, old man. Who else would be talking to you inside your body like this?”

We're inside my body? That's impossible! Why the hell would my insides be filled with the pained expressions of my child?

“There's no way we’re inside of me. That wouldn't make any sense… If this were my body, then that means I would have absorbed myself, right? Obviously, that's not tr-”

Suddenly, one of the faces on the ground began to rise, cutting off my words mid-sentence. Her teeth began to sharpen as her jaw extended way beyond what it should've been capable of. Then, the head chased me by its lonesome, and I immediately made a break for it. Adrenaline surged through my body while I jumped over all the opened mouths, taking control of my scrawny legs. Unfortunately though, adrenaline could only take me so far as Sunshine’s teeth were only a few inches away from chomping my head off.

There was no damn way I was gonna get eaten by my own daughter… No! That’s not my daughter. Just some sick creation by a broken girl who had the wrong idea about my situation. And if I recall from my last run-in with Rosalina, anything in your imagination could appear in the state between absorption. And if all this was created with her daughter’s imagination, then that meant only one thing.

I turned back with gritted teeth, a look of ferocious intensity etched across my face. “You’re not real!” I delivered a sloppy punch to her face, expecting it to dissolve in a cloud of mist. Instead, the moment my fist made contact with her skin, it transformed into leaves that scattered into the distance.

“Sunflower, that’s enough!” I shouted, hardening my fists. “I absorbed your body so I could help you. A really bad man hurt you and I-”

“You’re right. A really bad man did hurt me, and I’m looking at him right now.”

“I would never hurt you. I absorbed your mother so I could save your life!”

“And by doing so, you hurt me in a way I don’t think I could ever recover from.” It sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “Absorbed!? Don’t sugarcoat what you did, you fucking monster. No wonder these twisted faces of your daughter are all you can see here. You’re gonna hurt her like you hurt me. You deserve to look at this.”

“Sorry to tell you, but these things aren’t my daughter and they never will be.” I pointed a thumb to my back and looked behind me. “Because she’s right here.”

The area behind me brightened as a pair of small hands began to emerge from the light. Arms, torso, legs, and eventually, Sunshine’s face came into view. She wrapped around my body, clinging to my back. Despite her just being a creation of my imagination, I still felt her warmth, as though the sun came down and embraced me. The scent of her minty fresh flower headpiece did well in erasing most of the rotten smells from my nose. Who cared about all the horrific visuals in this place when I had something to wash them all away?

More faces erupted from the ground a couple feet away from us, their faces a stark contrast from my adorable little girl. Another group of faces began to descend from above, and their razor-sharp teeth were bared and ready to bite.

“You think summoning your kid will remove all the bad shit you put her through?” questioned Sunflower, her voice growing angrier. “All of these faces are a representation of the pain and sadness your ignorance has put her through–will put her through!”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

My head sunk upon hearing this, feeling the weight of her words crash onto me like a boulder. I was well aware of all the problems I’d caused in my daughter's life, problems I had yet to apologize for. The fear of her anger, her disappointment, locked my better judgement in a cage I couldn't find a key for. Honestly, I didn't even know if I wanted to unlock it. And yet, it was keeping those truths locked away that kept adding more of these problems to the pile that already existed. I was doing the same with Sunflower, and I had to fix that… right now!

Sunshine poked the back of my bald head. “You ready, Jerome? Let’s go,” she said with a reassuring voice.

My head rose, pushing against the weight of everything, and I charged forward. One of the heads was about to bite my head, but I ducked just in time as my daughter smacked the head away which reduced it to leaves.

“Sunflower, your mom entrusted me to save your life and protect you!” I screamed, decking a few Sunshines out of my way. “The only one who could’ve revived you at that moment was me. And you know that. You’ve been inside of me this entire time as living energy, and I was rebuilding you!”

“Just shut up and die already!” The moment she uttered those words, the speed of the heads increased, and dodging them was becoming much more than I could manage. It was like they absorbed her hatred and desperation and used that as power.

“You’re not gonna get through to her by talking right now,” my daughter suggested. B, gripping my shoulders tightly. “The only way you’ll get her to listen to you is by restraining her somehow. You can do that, right?”

“Of course I can,” I answered, still running away from the heads. “The real question is whether you’ll be able to handle what I’m about to do.”

“Well, I’m not real so do whatever you want.”

Satisfied with her answer, I tensed every muscle, feeling the fibers of my body shift and the essence of my soul grow radioactive. Ooze burst out from within me, coiling around my body and burning away my skin—along with everything else—until only the color green and my skeleton remained. Then, I launched myself upwards, dissipating the faces I was just standing on.

“Dang! I can’t see any energy for me to absorb,” I said in the air, watching the faces fly towards me. “Don’t know how I’m gonna destroy all this without some big blast.”

“Jerome, you can create anything you want in this space, remember?” said Sunshine. “Just think up some energy and you’ll be fully charged!”

Oh yeah, she’s right!

Energy flared up from my feet, and rocketed myself through the air while the flying heads gave chase. With each passing second, the speed of my flying grew, and more heads rose from their positions to join the pursuit. They chased me like a coordinated army, though an army could only do so much against a Type Two Radion like me–as they would soon realize. Teamwork had its merits, sure, but the tighter they grouped up, the easier it became for me to line up a clean shot at all of them.

I cupped my hands together and shouted…

“Fatherly Beam!”

My technique tore through the sky, the thunderous shockwave nearly pulling my daughter’s fingers off my shoulders, and it completely vaporized every enemy too slow to dodge the attack. Once the beam cleared, I noticed that I had also destroyed a large section of Sunshine’s heads in the distance, leaving a huge hole in the side of Sunflower’s world.

What really caught my eye though was the green orb in the center of that hole.

“Sunshine, you got any idea what that green thing is over there?” I asked, pointing at the orb.

“It looks to be one of the auras you have inside of you. It can’t be yours since you’re already inside your own body, so it has to be one of the other two.”

“Huh? I thought this was the state between absorption! We’re actually inside my body?”

“I already told you, old man,” Rosalina’s daughter cut in. “This isn’t the state between absorption. This is the state between release. They both work the same way, but instead of me coming in, I’m coming out. Unfortunately for you, you won’t be coming out. Actually, I’m just going to kill you.”

“That’s not what your mother would have wanted, and you know that,” I replied. “Even back when you two were in the Slavelands, she didn’t ask for or want you to do the things you did. She just wanted you to be happy!”

“Huh!? Happy?” Sunflower’s breaths were becoming rapid. “After everything this stupid apocalypse put my mom and I through… you expect me to be happy? What the hell would you know about her anyway? Just because you saw a fraction of her life… doesn't mean you're some kind of expert on how she felt about… anything!” A pair of giant, gooey hands emerged from the faces above, leaves raining down on me. “The only way I’ll find out how she felt is by taking that orb and bringing back my mom. Once I do that, she’ll finally forgive…”

Forgive? Oh… I understand it now.

“Sunflower, you can’t blame yourself for what happened to your mother in that shed,” I said softly. “She died to save you then, and she let me absorb her to save you yesterday. Everything she did was to protect you. All the pain she went through as a human, as a zombie… it was all for you. She would never hate you for that!”

“Shut up! Shut up! Just shut up!” An entire body erupted out of the sky. The giant was a girl covered in ooze, and her face looked even more twisted than the ones around us. Then, she talked. “I… I… don’t blame myself at all! Those slave masters made our lives a living hell, but you… you knew, you saw how much my mom was trying to save me, trying to be with me, and yet you still went through with it. And then you move on just because that dumb kid of yours comes back–the kid that you’ve been slowly killing for years. You don’t think my mom wanted me to come back to her? You don’t think my mom wanted to live!?”

At that moment, the faces all turned into leaves and swirled upwards towards the girl. One by one, they pressed against her, merging into a colossal… plant golem of sorts. Her body vanished beneath the shifting, living armor, as if a whole forest had come alive to shield her. Then, a deafening roar tore from its mouth, shaking the entire area–which was now pitch dark–like an earthquake.

“This is bad,” I whispered to my daughter, staring intently at the monster. “I don’t wanna hurt her, but I don’t know how else I’m gonna escape from here. And I can’t just let her steal that Rosalina’s aura from me. I need it for that future fight with Jason.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t seem like you have a choice right now but to fight,” Sunshine replied. “Fortunately for you, this could be good for your training.”

“Who cares about training? We have a seriously saddened kid above me. Training is the last thing we should be worried about.”

“I don’t mean like that other training we were doing before. If Rosalina’s orb is in here, then that means the third one would be in here as well. Use this chance as an opportunity to find it and learn how to transform into it again. Besides, just look at her. She seems more worried about killing you, than stealing your orb.”

So she wants me to find a way to access that third form here? That’s gonna be hard…considering I don’t know where that other orb is!