Overall, that went way better than it had any right to.

It wasn’t perfect, by any means. I was going to run out of ammo if I tried to do that even one more time, but I did it. I took down seven or eight guys all on my own. No assistance from Madeline, and no plasma bombardment from Tommy.

I let myself lay there for a little longer. I needed to let the adrenaline work its way through my system, and give the subsequent shakes wear off.

My whole body shivered.

God, I wished I was less of an anxious wreck. The characters in my favorite stories never had this problem. They all blasted through combat encounters with ease, and never had to worry about a breakdown afterwards.

Though I supposed they had the fact that they were the protagonists of violent power fantasies in their favor. The characters in those stories were exceptional by default, and I guess I took their superhuman wills as normal. Like that was the expectation I should have for myself.

But that probably wasn’t realistic, I reflected. I wasn’t superhuman. I was just a person.

A person with some unusually good aim, I might add.

I made those hits at, like, one hundred and fifty feet! Go me! I’m a long distance shooting champion!

Though I supposed the significant distance between my and my targets was the only reason that I came out of that unscathed. If they’d been in melee range I wouldn’t have fared nearly as well. I couldn’t instantly chop through multiple enemies at a time like Madeline could.

I got up and stretched. I’d gotten enough rest, and my vertigo was much relieved. If I just waited here I was going to have to worry about the next time I was going to get attacked.

I’d rather be doing something than sit there and stress myself out.

I checked my display before I set off. My CR had gone up by a point, putting me at twenty eight. I hadn’t gotten any more ATP yet, though. In my inventory I had six potions, two rations, and one barrier, as well as a miscellany of other shit. Including one more Magazine, containing thirty rounds of ammo.

I checked the magazine in the rifle. Only three shots were left in it. I decided to swap to the fresh mag. With the bullet in the chamber, I had thirty-one shots. Hopefully it would be enough, or I was going to have to hope I got enough ATP to Animate myself a new gun.

As for where I was going, I did have one clue. Those undead earlier had those same parasite things on them, with wispy tendrils dangling behind them. The tendrils had all been pointing in the same direction, regardless of the orientation of the undead in question. I suspected that those tendrils were either antennas, or some kind of metaphysical cordage that bound them to the necromancer.

Thus, I just had to go the opposite direction that the ethereal tentacles had been pointing towards. I didn’t want anything to do with that necromancer, after all.

I saw what encountering him in this labyrinth would lead to.

So the direction decided, it was time to go. I gently stepped up the slope that led directly upwards. It was a strange sensation, like climbing uphill, only for uphill to suddenly become downhill, and then flat terrain.

I just thanked my blessings that I didn’t trip. Looking at what had been up and was now forward, I saw that I had quite the walk ahead of me.

***

Madeline-Evangaline Burroughs had been swallowed by a completely unfair amount of black fog, and was debating whether or not to start swinging blindly around her in the hopes that would solve something, when the floor gave out from underneath her and her vision cleared.

She was falling through the air. Not one overburdened with hesitation at times like these, she immediately Accelerated herself at a nearby wall in an attempt to slow her fall.

Upon thinking she wished to use the ability, Accelerate would fling her in any vector she so chose. Usually that meant going forward or backwards for her, as hurling herself sideways would tip her chair, and if she went straight up she’d have to worry about the landing.

According to Leonardo, she moved so fast that she seemed to disappear, but she thought he was probably exaggerating. If she was actually going that fast then she wouldn’t be able keep track of where she was either.

From her perspective, Accelerate was certainly fast, but far from being manageable. She could also decelerate at the end of a dash at will. Discovering this had been the reason she hadn’t broken her arm or injured her back again.

She landed on the wall wheels down, with just enough force that her inertia would stick her to it, but not enough that she damaged her chair or herself.

She was surprised to find upon landing that what she had thought was an adjacent wall was actually the floor, given that gravity hadn’t pulled her off of it. Apparently instead of falling she’d been flung sideways down whatever corridor she was in.

It looked a lot like the one she’d seen earlier, all the surfaces were made of glass or something similar, and through them she could see what looked like giant, glowing, knotted cables. It was an odd sight, certainly, and it only got stranger the more she looked. Just ahead of her the floor curved down into a pit, with more square holes that looked like other footpaths visible within.

To her right, the walls sloped upwards at a ninety degree angle, and to her left the path sloped downwards by about forty-five degrees. Behind her, the corridor just traveled on for as long as the eye could see.

Madeline decided to set off down the slope to her left. She didn’t have enough charges of Accelerate to comfortably navigate the paths up or down, and the long ass hallway to her rear seemed thoroughly unappealing.

She supposed she also could have remained in place, hoping that Leo would find her, but she didn’t trust the man to manage his own affairs, entirely. She also didn’t like the prospect of waiting there for all eternity because he got himself killed doing something stupid.

That Leonardo would do something stupid was a foregone conclusion. He was chronically incapable of sitting still.

She rolled at moderate speed, feeling a manageable amount of strain on her arms as she pushed the wheels. It was worth mentioning that ‘moderate speed’ these days was closer to what a full sprint used to be for her.

Her strength and endurance had increased drastically over the course of the last week. Which was something she had mixed feelings about, come to think of it. She liked being strong, but what she really liked was earning it.

But she hadn’t felt like she earned the power she’d acquired recently. And besides, suddenly being able to lift stupid amounts of weight made it quite hard to effectively work out. Madeline liked working out. It was one of the few things in life that made her feel reliably better about the world.

She was interrupted from her musings by the unusual sight of a headless horseman.

The horse had little to no fur or hair to speak of. Just mottled, pink and tan skin. It’s head was all wrong, too. It didn’t have any chops or cheeks, so its teeth shown bare at all times. The teeth were irregular, and It seemed to be missing a number of them. The skin around its eyes bulged, unsettlingly swollen. The eyes themselves gave off a faint cyan glow.

The animal didn’t have hooves either. It instead possessed hands sort of like a human’s, with six fingers instead of five. The joints on each digit were visibly enlarged compared to a person’s too, like knobbly withered sticks, and were attached to a palm that curved like the heel of a foot.

There was some light armor draped around the beast, looking more like hardened leather than plate mail. A blade was sheathed at each of the faux-philly’s front haunches.

The decapitated horseman on top of the mock-mare was reassuringly normal in comparison. It was armored in much the same manner as its steed, with what looked like boiled leather layered under enameled wooden slats.

It wielded a long pole-arm that most resembled a halberd, with a few differences. The axeblade was vertically elongated such that it looked like a falchion, and the hook on the back was replaced with a hammer. The speartip that usually rested on top was entirely absent. The weapon’s preference for swinging, cleaving, and crushing were well apparent.

That covered the oddities regarding the monster itself. It was certainly an impressive specimen, but what really struck Madeline as surreal was that it was standing on the ceiling. It was doing so entirely at ease. Even its armor was draped in such a way that made it seem like gravity was on its side.

It kind of made Madeline feel like she was the one upside down. The thought made her a little nauseous, so she dismissed it. Clearly the monster was the weird one here.

I mean fucking look at it! It is literally missing its head.

Not that she had a whole lot longer to admire the weirdness of the thing, mind you. Stallion and headless steer leaped from their topsy-turvy perch, decelerating mid jump before flipping over and resuming their fall to land some distance ahead of her.

Madeline, still a little taken aback, waved at it. If asked, she couldn’t have articulated why that seemed an appropriate thing to do at the time, just that it did.

The rider was unmoved by the olive branch she’d extended in the form of that simple gesture. The mutant stag, however, curled one of its arms towards its chest and gave a little curtsy, its head nodding genially.

The brainless cavalryman kicked his legs lightly against the surprisingly polite freak of nature that he rode in on, and that was apparently the end of their shared greetings.

He brandished his polearm with a slight flourish, and the two charged forward.

Madeline drew her borrowed sword and briefly wondered what she’d done to deserve ending up where she had in life.

***

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I was still walking up the side of the long hallway I’d started on several minutes earlier. I’d come across several points in the corridor where a hole opened up in what I relativistically perceived as the floor.

Whenever I did, I’d have to sort of stick myself to an adjacent wall, and then crawl up until I was in the center of it so that there was no pull felt from the previous surface I’d been adhered to.

Then I’d walk along that one for as long as I could and switch once there was another hole upon the plane I traversed.

I only had to deal with the occasional bout of intense vertigo.

I’d been traveling that way for about ten minutes, and was honestly starting to get bored. I’d stuck to going in a straight line so as not to get lost, but the thought occurred to me that I couldn’t really become lost if I had no Idea where I was in the first place.

Thus, going down one of those holes was starting to seem pretty tempting. Especially because I was starting to suspect that I wasn’t going down one long corridor, but actually one short corridor that was just looping in on itself somehow.

My dreams of this place had been non-euclidean after all, and if gravity didn’t fucking work right, there was nor guarentee that space was behaving itself either.

I’d been counting the standing lamps and making note of their spacing, as well as carefully observing the patterning on the walls in an attempt to orient myself.

One thing I’d found out by paying attention to the walls in particular, was that the walls with fractal patterns on them couldn’t be traversed. The swoopy line walls were the only ones that came with their own gravitational pull.

I was pondering on that and that and other things, keeping my head on the swivel, when I saw a penny on the ceiling just above me.

What’s that doing there? I wondered briefly, before remembering that I’d tossed a penny much like that one just a while ago.

The question was whether that was the penny. While it wasn’t likely that a whole lot of people were dropping loose change in a place like this, it wasn’t impossible by any means.

I decided to toss a slightly damaged, red juggling pin up at the penny. It landed without much fuss, bouncing a couple times and rolling some distance away from my target.

I then continued walking in the same direction I had been. If I came across that juggling pin again I’d have pretty conclusive evidence that this was a loop.

About ten more minutes of walking and wall crawling later, I got my answer. There above me was that same red juggling pin, gently resting there.

***

Madeline usually preferred to be on the offensive, but she was on the back foot, as it were, due to a remarkable flurry of blows raining down on her from above.

Being in a chair, Madeline wasn’t ever really working with the advantage in terms of height or reach. The cavalry-corpse she was facing, however, was really making her wish otherwise for the first time in a long while.

It was basically the same problem that a lone infantryman facing down a charging knight on a warhorse faced. Except she was stuck at half the height of your average footsoldier, and the mount that her foe was riding could strafe sideways or jump at a moment's notice.

So the standard weaknesses of cavalrymen, such as being easy to take down if their charge was halted, just didn’t apply.

The handy-horse was just infuriatingly agile. The soldier atop it wasn’t really anything to write home about, honestly, but that didn’t matter when it had a really big stick and knew how to swing it.

Madeline only had a few things in her favor.

One, the top speed of the not-nag wasn’t actually quite as much as that of a warhorse. Its jointed hands and gangly arms gave it a bit more flexibility but hindered its gait greatly.

Two, she could use Accelerate to gain distance any time. That had definite limits though, given that she had elected to purchase fewer charges for it in favor of getting access to:

Three, Strike. She could cut through just about anything. Usually that would have won her the fight already, but the shit-stallion was a good deal smarter than its master and would back off the moment she swung for the fences.

She had an Idea, though. Madelie had already deflected a number of blows from the polearm that was hounding her. If she was willing to risk getting injured then perhaps she could disarm the dragoon, and give herself some more breathing room.

As long as it didn’t kill her or knock her out, she could just heal afterwards.

Madeline had only shown such uncharacteristic reluctance in executing that plan for a single reason; she was alone.

No one else was there to cover her back.

She hadn’t realized how much she’d been relying on Leonardo until he was gone.

She snorted at herself derisively. The lancer took that as a personal insult and reared for a mighty strike.

While taunting him had been unintentional, Madeline figured that was as good an opening as any.

She internally sensed that Accelerate had come off of cooldown. She flung herself forward, hacking at the staff of his polearm with Strike just as it came down.

She struck true, cleaving the weapon into two far less threatening pieces.

Feeling greedy, she went in for another Strike, only to get punched in the chest by the crap-colt.

Or possibly kicked.

Whether those front limbs counted as legs or arms wasn’t clear.

Regardless, she rolled a significant distance backwards.

She hadn’t been hit that bad in a while.

In fact, given how much difficulty she had breathing, it was possible her sternum had been badly damaged.

It wasn’t just the paralyzing feeling that came from a normal blow to the solar plexus. There was something much worse going on in her thoracic cavity. She needed to heal, but she was having trouble getting her right hand to move.

And she was suffocating. Panic lit like fire in her brain, causing her thoughts to tumble into the same disarray as her body.

She dimly saw the not-horse use one of its front hand-feet to unsheath one of the blades mounted by its shoulders. It passed the curved longsword upwards to its rider, before lowering its posture into a lupine crouch. It was tensing all its muscles, building up potential energy like a spring.

Madeline needed to move. She coughed, her entire body palsying. Finally she managed to unclench her right fist, tapping with a trembling thumb on her display.

The beast and its warlord bolted forward.

Madeline was too late.

They slashed her once, sword’s edge biting deeply into her defensively raised left arm. The rider yanked the bone-stuck blade out brutally, and then brought it down again in short order, this time carving a long line down from her right shoulder down to her left leg. The not-horse finished by striking her across the side with a back hand.

Her chair toppled over.

Madeline, barely kept from spilling out of her wheelchair by straps around her waist and legs, coughed again. There was something metallic tasting in her mouth. She wheezed, an unpleasant rattling sound coming from her esophagus.

The not-horse drew its second longsword, and spun it with a flick of its distorted digits in order to switch to a backhanded grip.

It raised the sword and plunged it down upon her.

She hardly even felt it.

***

The reanimated beast and its necromanticaly linked companion examined their quarry. It was still now, not even breathing. It had been an interesting opponent, but that was the extent of their thoughts on the subject.

Though really what it had hardly passed as thoughts at all. The rider had no head with which to think anymore to begin with, only able to move due to the ghostly manipulations of its possessed steed.

The rider was more appendage than master.

But the beast was clever enough to make up for that. It puppeteered the corpse of its once leader and friend, emotions that might be mistaken for affection compelling it to pretend that nothing had changed from their glory days on the battlefields of another world entirely.

The necromancer had planted his parasite in them as an experiment, always looking to make use of all the meat and bones it had access to. Most animals didn’t take well to the parasite, but this one had, and remarkably well at that.

Thus the beast of burden was born anew into an accursed existence. Delusional, manipulated, and bloodthirsty. Just like with all the necromancer’s many creations.

It turned to go look for more prey, re-sheathing curved longswords.

But just as it was about to leave, it heard something. A soft clicking of some kind. And then a bang.

***

Madeline had pulled herself back from the brink, waving goodbye to her loved ones who waited across the river as she gasped back to life. She may have been too late to heal from the first blow that took her, but even as her breathing had failed her entirely she fumbled with the menus of the display.

She didn’t actually remember touching the right icon in her inventory, but given that she was still alive she must have.

She was still lying helplessly on the ground. Her enemies had turned their back, making the mistake of assuming she was dead.

Foolish things, thinking she’d die just because she was cut repeatedly and impaled. Nothing was taking her down that easy!

But now she needed to figure out how to take that bastard out. Generally the head was the weak point for zombie adjacent creatures like these, but the rider didn’t have a head.

She guessed she’d just have to target the head of the not-horse instead. That one had been the real threat to begin with.

She took quiet breaths, trying her best not to notify them of her survival. Going through the entire messy process of righting herself would be too noisy, and it wouldn’t help her much besides. She’d dropped her sword at some point after all.

She did have a gun, however. She’d taken her revolver back from Leonardo after bequeathing unto him her twenty-two. Making the shot from this distance wouldn’t be too difficult, even if she was stuck sideways and bent at an odd angle.

She pulled the 1860 army out from her inventory. It had been her favorite gun for many years, even if it was only a reproduction model, as opposed to an original. Even she didn’t have the money to splurge for a civil war era artifact like that.

Still, it shot big lumps of lead at high speed out of a rifled barrel. What more could you ask for?

She pulled back the hammer and drew a bead on the thing’s ass. Hoping to at least take out one of the beast’s legs.

Her aim was dead on. She pulled the trigger. The hammer fell forward, impacting against the bronze colored percussion cap on the back of the cylinder.

But there was no boom.

The cap was a dud.

This was not a great time for a misfire.

The not-horse twitched, and Madeline pulled the hammer back again, rotating a fresh round into place. She pulled the trigger before she had the sights lined up properly, panicking.

The shot went wide, missing her target entirely.

And now the not-horse had turned its gaze upon her. It was startled by the loud sound of the gunshot, momentarily still as it tried to work out what was happening.

Madeline swore and internally prayed to every god or deity she had ever believed in.

She fired again.

This time the bullet landed somewhere in its torso. It jolted, but only in mild surprise.

Madeline pulled back the hammer again. The not-horse jumped straight up, landing on the ceiling with lithe grace unfitting its eccentrically structured body.

Madeline adjusted her aim awkwardly, and pulled the trigger.

The not-horse jumped again. She missed.

The fucker was flying right at her. She didn’t have time to take another shot. She used Accelerate to fling herself up in the air instead of taking the time to prop herself up the old fashioned way. She barely managed to twist in the air enough to land on the ceiling wheels first.

She impacted harder than she’d meant to, almost dropping her gun. She was pretty sure her back was going to give her shit for that one later. She glanced around before she fell, hoping to find where her sword had wound up.

The not horse was spinning her short sword mockingly in its grasp.

When did it have the time to steal it?

Only then did Madeline notice that gravity had yet to draw her back down from the ceiling. Her bangs were hanging down by her eyes.

Apparently the ceiling was, in fact, the floor.

She pointedly decided not to think too hard about that one.

Instead she aimed up/below at the not-horse. She shot it again. Her bullet broke a reinforced pauldron off of the rider, but not much more.

They didn’t appreciate it, regardless. It jumped down/upwards to her, the short sword she’d gotten from Leo hefted in the animal’s queer grasp.

She Accelerated backwards just in time, the sword slamming into the ground/ceiling where she’d just been.

She attempted to fire again, only to find that she was out of ammo. She’d only had five shots, having never reloaded the revolver after Leonardo used it last.

Madeline was really regretting that now.

The not-not horse snickered.