It was the second time Nyxnthix found itself in the strange hallway. The silver doors with no handles were far less inviting the second time. But it knew that The Game Master had pulled it there. After the Soul Nexus expelled it, The Game Master knew and pulled it for another visit.
It silently waited until a door opened, and one did. The room hadn’t changed, but the man drinking his tea had. His appearance was still that of an older human, but his attire wasn’t white anymore. His suit was completely black, making him seem out of place in a room of so much white.
A gentle stream of steam wafted off the tea that The Game Master enjoyed with a sniff. “You’re back sooner than I expected.” He took a sip before setting his cup and saucer down. “Rushing things a bit? Please, sit.”
Nyxnthix glared at the chair it was bidden to sit in before sitting in it. “Why did you bring me back here? I’m not here to exchange pleasantries.”
The Game Master frowned. “Maybe if you lightened up, you’d appreciate the lives you steal more. After all, you rip someone’s soul from their bodies only to take it for yourself.” He leaned forward and propped his head on a hand. “But, that’s not something that will change. It’s all business with you. I just wanted to check in on my little champion.”
Nyxnthix squirmed in the chair. It could feel The Game Master scouring through its past. It didn’t have a soul, so he couldn’t read that, but it felt its memories were plenty exposed. The longer they sat in silence, the wider the old man’s smile grew.
Nyxnthix shuddered, and its form flickered as The Game Master finished. “Happy?”
He picked up his tea and took another long draw of its aroma. “I do enjoy this one’s scent. But it seems you were enjoying yourself a bit there too. How… unprofessional.” Nyxnthix didn’t like the smile the old man gave him. “But that is truly unusual. When I gave her all that cosmic energy, I would never have guessed she would do that to herself.”
“What are you talking about?” Nyxnthix leaned forward.
That girl had beaten it twice now. There was something odd about that arm blade and metal arms. At first, it thought that was just some very strange armor that she wore. But the blade growing out of her changed everything.
The Game Master took another sip of tea and sighed as he relaxed his shoulders. “Ah, that’s good stuff. Maybe next time I’ll let you pick a body before bringing you here. You’ve got to try this tea.”
The shade was annoyed with the eccentric being, but did everything it could not to show it. He was still one of the more powerful beings, with a reputation for using his power.
“You should try living a little,” the old man said without opening his eyes. “You’ve underestimated her twice, and this reckless charge of yours is, while useful in the short term, going to get old fast. Maybe if you tried to walk a mile in her shoes, you’d understand something you hadn’t before.”
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Nyxnthix couldn’t understand what the old man was doing. Was he trying to help it kill its target? But why? He is playing a game it couldn’t begin to keep up with, but it was without a doubt a pawn in said game. It knew that. And it annoyed Nyxnthix all the more. The way The Game Master toyed with it so effortlessly by using its own rules, nature, and job against it left it feeling helpless.
But it knew The Game Master was right. Something needed to change. It wasn’t hunting a defenseless human girl who didn’t know what she was doing anymore. She was a threat. Something had granted her power it never thought possible, and it needed to figure out what it was.
Slowing down was an option. Nyxnthix thought about what the old man said, but it was too cryptic for it. Nyxnthix just decided that it would treat the human as a high-priority assassination now. It wasn’t a common job for it, but it always found those jobs to be far more rewarding. So it started formulating a plan, and by the time it reached the door out of The Game Master’s little pocket plane, it had five different options.
It just needed to pick one. Because Nyxnthix didn’t fail three times in a row. It never has, and it never will. And the first step in all of its plans was to learn about its target in every way it could. With a wave of his hand, The Game Master opened a door to the Soul Nexus for Nyxnthix.
It was time for Nyxnthix to take the game to the next level. There won’t be a round five.
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On the third floor of the spider-infested abandoned golem factory, an ice statue melted. As the ice melted, a tiny sapient blob burrowed its way out through the head. Killa landed on the ground with a squelch. She didn’t have enough mass to form her usual body, so she was reduced to the beginning stages of a slime.
Manipulating her body was far more difficult now that she was only five inches in radius. It was going to take her a while to accumulate enough mass to be able to speak again. But as she inched her way around the room, looking for anything to consume, a light flickered from the pedestal.
“Killa, you…” Gary’s voice was lost in even more static. “Rina will be glad to…”
Killa deflated slightly. She couldn’t talk back. There wasn’t enough mass to create the vocal cords and push air through them. But she was glad to hear Rina survived.
“Killa, it seems there is something… Rina is headed for the fifth…”
The slime needed to catch up with her friend. But she needed to rebuild her body. There was a hesitation as she found the two corpses. Bark, the one she had thought had been her friend who had gone and gotten himself killed, and the demon possessed by the creature hunting Rina. Slowly, she ate them. As she ate, a wave of guilt flowed through her. In order to collect enough mass to catch up with Rina, she would have to do something she swore never to do again.
She needed to release her self-control and eat everything. The situation called for her to go on a rampage again. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it would only show the world why slimes were feared in her world. But she needed her friend, and her friend needed her. Time was not on her side.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Maybe Bark was right about that. It was her turn to be desperate. As she finished eating him, she thought maybe she was too hard on him. Even though she couldn’t say it, she forgave the shaylip, because if she couldn’t forgive him, who was going to forgive her?
What she was going to do would put what he did to shame. It was time to become a monster again.
For Rina.