Bailey

I lay on the ground, looking up at the hole I fell through.

Everything hurts. Even my teeth hurt. Maybe I cracked one. Or a bunch.

I hurt too much to care.

And my parents spent so much on them.

Get it together.

My consciousness is fading in and out. Has time passed? What happened?

Yeah, I fell.

I’m angry. Fuck Wyatt. Why does he have to be so…

It was the skill that made me do it, wasn’t it?

I want him.

I want to kill.

Not him.

Maybe him.

I sit up. Something cracks. I pretend it’s not one of my own bones.

I taste blood, and realize it’s dripping from my mouth. I spit it out, but more takes its place.

I can’t focus my eyes.

I get up.

Nothing. I can see nothing.

Pain shoots through my face, and after a moment I realize I’ve fallen.

Some distant part of my brain that’s not been utterly fucked by brain damage shouts at me, and seemingly without my permission brings up the weird holographic text interface.

Quintessence: 45

I use it.

How do I use it?

Some of my stats change. I don’t know which ones.

What was I doing?

I activate my skill.

My skill?

I look at my glowing hands. I laugh when I realize the light doesn’t light up the area around me.

My brain is truly fucked.

Then…

Then—

My vision clears and my focus snaps back into place.

I’m on the ground again.

I get to my feet, looking around. I’m in some underground… city? It’s not actually that dark, bright light filtering in through a crack high above me. The hole I fell through.

But it’s mostly closed up now.

And a hundred feet overhead.

Holy fuck how did I survive that fall?

“Wyatt?” I shout up, then stand silent, listening.

The only voice that replies is the echo of my own.

Fuck.

I scan my surroundings. It’s a whole fucking city. An underground city. Not a modern one, and not all that large. Like the one from that old movie, with shining white buildings overgrown with lichen and vines, abandoned for ages, left to be slowly devoured by the ravenous jungle.

Crumbling architecture juts at odd angles, overgrown with vegetation that threatens to swallow the few buildings that remain standing.

So many beautiful buildings lost to time, crumbling to ash while—

Focus.

Then I see him. Or it.

A giant. Quinametzin. Level 9.

My blood boils and my stomach churns. Not in fear, not in revulsion, but in hunger.

I want nothing more than to end this monster. To end everything.

My shouting must have awoken it. It’s already lumbering toward me.

Good.

Muscles ripple beneath mottled skin etched with unreadable markings as it makes its ponderous way in my direction.

It wears a rotting loincloth, feet and shins wrapped in what might be fraying bandages.

One enormous hand holds a crude club that might be a tree trunk.

More of my cognition comes back online and I really look at the thing’s message.

I don’t need to know Spanish to understand what it means. I’ve heard morir often enough. It’s dead.

Well, probably undead.

This enrages me. Killing something that’s already dead? It feels so… hollow.

But I’m not given any choice.

I barely roll aside as it smashes its club down, shattering flagstones where I stood an instant before.

I gain my feet as it swings at me again, duck beneath the blow, rake my fingers along the thing’s thigh.

It roars as black blood wells from the wound and my hunger surges.

Maybe I can rip off its cock. If it has one.

Its size makes it slow and clumsy among the rubble and uneven terrain. But one good hit from that club will turn me into a smear on the flagstones.

The giant lunges again, club whistling through empty air as I leap back.

It keeps coming, swinging again and I try to dash beneath it but misjudge my own footing on the uneven ground.

Pain explodes in my gut as the club catches me with a glancing blow.

Even still, it sends me hurtling into a nearby building.

I hit hard, my head cracking against stone, and slump dazed to the ground as my vision swims.

Bang bang bang. Its feet thump on the ground as it charges toward me, ready to finish the job.

Get up.

Get up!

Move!

I do just in time to catch another glancing blow, this one to the shoulder.

But I don’t even feel it. All I feel is rage. All I feel is the desire, the need, to kill.

Nothing else matters.

I duck under its next swing and grab the thing’s tattered loincloth, ripping it free and reaching out with my other hand for its cock.

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It doesn’t have genitals.

“Goddammit.”

My hand closes on air and I overextend, falling to the ground face first.

I roll over in time to see a massive club about to smash me to gore.

I can’t dodge this one.

Unwilling to give up, I throw up the arm holding its rotting loincloth to block the blow.

An electric jolt of pain shoots through me as a tree trunk the width of my torso smacks into my hand and descends no further.

But all I feel is pleasure. Orgasmic. I hunger for more.

I feel myself smile as I push to my feet, a bone in my arm snapping as the giant bears down on me.

But I stand, and I glare up at it, and then my world goes red.

🞠

Wyatt considered the tiny crack in the ground that was all that remained of the hole that had swallowed Bailey. Then the grid of items open before him.

Crack, items, crack, items.

Back and forth, letting his mind work, trying to figure out a way to get down there.

The only thing he’d come up with so far was to have Bailey try putting herself in the bag of holding. He tried it with a few of the monster corpses and those went in and out just fine without any obvious damage or degradation.

No way of knowing if a living person would survive, though.

And depending on how deep the hole was, she might not be in range. And even if she was in range, she apparently couldn’t hear him as she’d made no response when he’d called down into the tiny crack, so he had no way of telling her to try.

She might not even have survived the fall.

She was still listed on the team status, but he didn’t know whether that meant she was alive or not. Maybe dead people stayed on the list.

He felt… strange. There was a nervous sort of energy building in his gut. He was worried that he’d fail. That he wouldn’t save her.

His mind spun out that future, and it made him… not literally sick, but something very much like it.

The thought of Bailey being dead was… wrong.

She couldn’t die.

Wyatt gave up trying to let his mind passively come up with a solution, and actively ran through all his options.

Might be able to bash it open with the shield, stretch my titan skin to reach down there and pull her out. Or float down myself with my cloak.

But breaking it open might cause it to collapse. I don’t know how big of an area she has down there. It could end up crushing her.

He got down and pressed his eye to the hole again. This was the first thing he’d tried, but he hadn’t been able to see anything.

He still couldn’t.

I can carefully try to widen it.

He formed a blade-hand, then focused on making it more shovel-like. It worked, and he began gingerly digging.

But after only a few moments, he reached that black, white-veined substance he’d encountered in the pyramid. Even tapping it with his shovel caused his titan skin’s cohesion to drop a percent.

He brought down the edge of his shield on it, and while it didn’t lose cohesion, the substance showed no signs of damage.

He tried using Interrogate on it, and was surprised when it actually worked.

Primordium

Origin material for physical manifestations.

Level: ?

Is that what this place is made of?

Question mark for level, just like the rocks and trees and ground. Makes sense if they’re all actually made of the same thing.

He bashed on it for a while longer, but eventually abandoned the endeavor. Whatever the substance was, it was still impervious to his blows.

He sat back, thinking, staring at all the corpses in the field around him.

It was almost dark now, and he checked the time remaining.

Experimental time remaining: 4096 days

Trial 1 time remaining: 2 days

He stared in confusion for a good two seconds before realizing why the numbers were different.

He grunted in annoyance. Using Interrogate had switched to that permutation, and so that was the passive mode currently enabled. And without Perceive’s passive mode being activated, the message went back to being less detailed.

He switched permutations and tried again.

Experimental time remaining: 4095.02 days

Trial 1 time remaining: 1.02 days

It was weird that it was getting dark as a full day ended. Would day 2 be entirely night?

How many monsters were left to kill? He assumed the time remaining wasn’t showing all the decimal places, rounding either up or down.

Without access to Regan’s Navigator skill, he couldn’t see exactly how many monsters they’d killed now, but didn’t really need to. Analyzer had marked 29 ahuitzotl and one ratapua, and before leaving the rest of the team they’d killed 33. Which brought the tally to 63 out of 128. Which left just one monster before ‘day’ 1 ended and night fell.

He wondered about the powers of 2 thing again, and if that was coincidental or if it meant something. Maybe it was some kind of clue?

He shook his head. Stop getting distracted.

I need to get her out of there. I might be able to loot something from these corpses that will help.

Several orbs had already been torn loose during the battle, which Analyzer highlighted for him when he switched back to Perceive’s reactive mode.

He got up and went to the nearest of these, a level 3 Essence Orb, and picked it up.

Devour ⦗Essence Orb⦘?

Certainty: 74%

That’s a huge increase from two percent. I wonder what changed.

Curious, he gave his assent. There were plenty more orbs left.

Rather than exploding like the Overcharged Orb had, this one dissolved in his hand as he felt Devour consume it.

There was a brief moment where he felt on the verge of throwing up, but then it passed and a new message appeared.

Origin increased by 1

Level-based resistance to your skills reduced by 1

Your resistance to deleterious skills increased by 1

Your resistance to beneficial skills decreased by 1

How is that different than leveling up?

When I inspected my level, it said it increases resistance against skills, but this says deleterious skills. Maybe that’s why it was harder for Camila to heal me and Patrick. This seems better, since it still has that increase, but actually decreases resistance to beneficial skills. And it reduces other’s resistance to my own skills.

Does that mean it’s better to Devour the orbs rather than use them at a sacellum?

My efficiency with Debuffer improved after leveling up. But was that just a coincidental correlation? Maybe simply using Debuffer increases its efficiency.

He interrogated level again to see if the message had changed.

Increases resistance against skills, ?

It was possible that the question mark was an increased skill efficiency.

He thought about it.

In both cases he was consuming Essence Orbs, which came from monsters. But what exactly were they? He couldn’t get a description of what essence was, but everything else so far had turned out to be straightforward, so that would mean it was an orb that contained essence. Maybe the monster’s, or maybe the orb was what gave them life.

He wondered again whether people had orbs. It felt like it, but he couldn’t be sure. Were those the cause of the change? Were they put there inside of him and the rest of the team, and as a result they could now smell monsters, could use Energy, could have these magical skills?

If so, was consuming an orb filling up his own orb, and a different method of consumption resulted in a different outcome? Like taking a drug orally vs insufflation or injection? Did using a sacellum bypass something like a first-pass metabolism and therefore have different effects from Devour?

The sacellum didn’t have a level that he could see, but it was also possible that different sacellum’s gave different results—like how different merchants paid different prices for items in games—and maybe using a different one would have given him better results. And there were still delubrums…

But he couldn’t be greedy. From what he could tell, using Devour gave better results than increasing his level, and he needed to get stronger. Then again there was always the possibility that level really was a multiplier.

Was there some way for him to see more of his stats with Analyzer? See their current values? He really wanted to.

Could he control it? Skills ranked up by discovering things, so was the next thing he had to discover about Analyzer that he had more control over it than he realized?

He stared at the air in front of him, hoping for a message to appear. None did.

He sighed.

It felt like there was something there, like he was on the verge of something.

Or maybe it was just wishful thinking.

Either inspecting his level with Analyzer didn’t give him all the details despite not prompting him to use an Essence Orb, or there were other benefits to leveling up. Or it really was better to Devour them.

In any case, he didn’t have to decide now.

It could also be that he would have gotten better results using the orb at a delubrum instead of a sacellum.

He tried to get more information on origin.

There was a message, but it wasn’t very elucidating.

Origin

Your fundamental existence.

This triggered some memory that he couldn’t quite grasp hold of. There was some connection, just there at the edge of his thoughts.

The more he tried to recall it, the further away it slipped, so he stopped trying. It would probably come to him eventually.

He was about to move on to loot the next item—he could see an Item Orb nearby that might give him something that could help him get Bailey out of the hole—when he felt a shift.

He looked around, trying to figure out what it was he was feeling.

It was a building sense of tension; a tightness in his gut.

He looked around for more monsters, but even with Perceive active he didn’t see any.

Then he heard something, coming from the crack in the ground.

He rushed over to it.

“Bailey?” he called down.

No response.

He pressed his eye to the crack.

This time he could see something down there, only a brief flash. A nameplate popped up, but went by too quickly to read.

That was weird, maybe it’s—

It flashed by again, but it was long enough that this time he’d been able to read it. It was a level 9 Quinametzin no muerto, whatever that meant. No death? He was pretty sure muerto meant death. There was also another reticle that flashed by very briefly that he was pretty sure had been Bailey.

Well that’s not good.

He got up and rushed over to the Item Orb, irrationally hoping it would be something that would help him free her.

Spend ⦗Item Orb⦘ to gain random item of type (Cursed)?

But before he could give his assent, another message replaced it.

Day 1 has ended

Welcome to Day 2

Welcome to The Dark

This message faded away and another took its place, of a type he’d received once before.

Save the Tour (Trial Task)

Goals:

• Find Bailey (Optional)

• Find your team

• Survive

Reward: Special Item

Failure: ?

Then the world around him went black as the sun winked out.