Madeline continued to chop her way through any overly long, mutated limb that came her way, but it really didn’t seem to be doing her any good. The main reason being that even if she chopped the hand off of a limb, the mutant freak would just whip that same arm at her, weapon or no. It reminded her a lot more of fighting a blobtopus than a zombie, except instead of just having to worry about being grabbed, a single clean hit would likely knock her out at the very least.

But it wasn’t like she had a whole lot of other options either.

If Leo was around he'd probably just decimate the thing with a blast of plasma, or shoot it in each of its faces. Alternatively, if she’d remembered to reload her revolver, she could have just finished this with a couple of well timed shots.

As was, she was stuck slowly whittling down the monster’s many limbs and weapons in an attempt to gradually close the distance she needed to take one or more of the Asura’s heads. Problem there was that Madeline, despite her daily efforts, was not a woman of infinite stamina.

Or patience. She could already feel herself wanting to just rush in there and start hacking away, damn the consequences. Madeline was not the sort of person who liked being on the defensive. She played offense as a rule both in athletics and e-sports, preferring speedy rush-in characters in video games and absolutely charging through other players in quad ruby, often to the dismay of her coach.

This whole relying on chip damage and playing slow strategy was just not for her. But Micheal’s wooden baseball bat had disintegrated leaving him completely unarmed. That was seriously hampering his ability to do anything but defend himself. So trusting him to have her back while she went to town like she did with Leonardo wouldn’t work.

Unless. . .

“Hey, take my sword!” Madeline shouted, before promptly tossing the bloodstained blade towards him. He dodged out of the way of the flying weapon, which was probably fair. Madeline wouldn’t have been confident she could have caught it in his position, but she hadn’t thought about that before she threw it.

Whatever, he could figure it out. Madeline had other fish to fry. She spun her chair and dashed out of the way of another flailing limb in order to grab a spear from nearby. It still had a dismembered hand attached to the shaft, but she tore the literally death-gripped phalanges from it without much further consideration.

Michael hadn’t been able to grab one of the Asura’s dropped weapons for himself on account of being too busy not dying. Fair, given that he lacked any movement abilities. He was strong, but not fast.

Taking a moment to look over at Micheal, Madeline saw that he’d grabbed her sword at some point, and was using it to quite handily deflect blows while his duplicates distracted the Asura and busted open the occasional joint.

He was doing a good job of holding aggro, all things told, so Madeline had just enough time to try something she’d been meaning to test ever since her Strike ability had been upgraded.

The way she’d described it to Leo, her Strike ability had two parts.

First, the black stuff. A dark magic would jettison from her blade and tear anything it came in contact with apart.

Second was the flash. Her sword or hand would glow, and for a moment it would feel much lighter. It was her thought that perhaps the glowing was imparting extra force into her swings.

So maybe if she focussed on making the most of the glow, she could throw something really fast. Like a spear.

She’d need to time it just right, but it seemed doable. She couldn’t get any extra strength from her lower body, so she was gonna have to really rely on her arms and core to impart the spear with as much force as she could muster.

She grasped the spear with her left hand, and pulled it back as far as she could muster. Madeline prayed briefly that she wouldn’t miss. She only had one more charge of Strike to play with.

No use wasting hours hesitating either, though, Micheal couldn’t hold out forever.

She threw it.

The short spear took off like a missile, light trailing behind it in a brilliant comet-trail.

It punched a hole straight through the Asura’s torso. The Asura’s upper body folded in half upon itself with nothing to support the weight of its excessive muscle mass and half of its remaining arms simply flopped to the ground helplessly.

It wasn’t dead, yet, but it was certainly a whole lot less of a threat. Madeline searched around for another dropped weapon, and waited for her ability to come off of cooldown.

Micheal had taken the opportunity to back out of range of the now immobilized demon’s range. It was trying to crawl towards them, but was not terribly successful.

“So uh, what the fuck was that?” Micheal asked, having rejoined with Madeline now that he wasn’t in immediate danger.

“I’m not entirely sure to be honest.” She replied.

“Ok, well, can you do it again?”

“Yeah, probably. Give me a sec.”

After a few moment's rummaging, Madeline had found a wide bladed, single edged ax. She wound up and released it much the same as before, and it took off with enough speed and white-hot fury to utterly obliterate one of the Asura’s heads.

“Well that’s a nifty trick.” Micheal said.

“Yeah.” Madeline responded evenly. She kind of wished she’d known she could have done that a lot earlier, but hindsight couldn’t actually change the past, so she didn’t dwell on it.

Micheal walked off, grabbing a chipped and broken longsword for Madeline to throw next. She had a bit more trouble using the busted zweihander as a throwing weapon, but her target was so large that it was honestly hard to miss.

Another head was reduced to pulp.

She repeated that a couple more times, essentially bullying the pitiable creature to death. She even felt a little bad by the end of it. It couldn’t be helped though, they needed past and it wouldn’t have made much sense to turn around and just leave it.

It dissolved, taking its surplus of weapons with it.

***

Amy laughed, figuring I was joking about my search for a toilet.

“No, but seriously, I don’t suppose you’ve come across a restroom?” I asked. I wasn’t being un-facetious, but I did really still need to go number-two.

Amy stopped for a second, looking me in the eyes in an attempt to gauge my seriousness. I gazed straight back, using my stare to communicate that I wasn’t fucking around.

“Dude, I really hate to break this to you but you're just gonna have to find a corner to go in.” Amy whispered, her gaze level.

“Fuuuck.”

“Yeah that about describes it.”

“Allright, well, I’m gonna have to try and find a decent spot where I won’t get stabbed then. What are your plans?” I asked, somewhat invitingly. I’d be happy to have her around if she wanted to pair up. Though I wouldn’t want to force her, of course.

She opened her mouth to say something, then seemingly thought better of it.

“I don’t actually know?” She finally said.

“Whaddya mean?”

“Well, like, I came here because my girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend I guess, talked me into it.” She explained.

“Ok?”

“The reason I say she’s my ex is because I’m pretty sure she left me to die.”

“That’s. . . Not great.” I said, dumbly. “How long have you been in here?”

“Five days, give or take?”

“Jesus christ!” I exclaimed. I couldn’t even imagine being in this labyrinth for that long, but apparently she had. No wonder she was so scrawny looking. The poor woman probably hadn’t eaten in days.

“I ran out of water a while ago, and I’m basically out of food.” Amy admitted softly.

“Do you want a doughnut?” I asked. Least I could do was feed her, and I’d actually saved two doughnuts from the batch I’d made the other day as emergency rations.

“I mean, if you’re offering.” She said, like I couldn't see her swallowing her own drool.

I removed a still warm, lemon glazed, sour cream and mixed berry cake doughnut from my inventory, handing it to her atop a napkin.

She grabbed it with a bit more urgency than she probably meant to, accidentally dropping it in the process.

I caught it before it hit the floor, gently floating the doughnut and the paper napkin back up with telekinesis. Amy’s eyes widened slightly, seeing the inanimate foodstuff hover before her. She looked at me, and I nodded gently.

She grabbed the doughnut cautiously before taking a bite. She froze for a moment. Her mind was clearly having trouble processing something so stimulating as an incredibly tart dessert after being deprived of food for so long.

She woke from her stunned state after a moment, and then inhaled the entire doughnut in two more bites.

I gave her the other doughnut.

She ate that one with no less haste than the last, and was clearly still hungry.

“Well I’m out of doughnuts.” I said.

Her expectant eyes immediately turned downwards, and a look of despair was plainly evident on her features. I wanted to remedy the failings those eyes were accusing me of immediately, but I was worried that she’d hurl if she tried to fit anything more in that stomach of hers. She’d just downed nearly a gallon of liquid and two pastries, so her innards were no doubt sloshing.

It was crushing, but I needed to hold the line lest she vomit and we both got to be sad.

“But,” I made a soothing gesture with my palms, “I’d be willing to give you some beef jerky if you wait for me to do my business.”

“Business?” She perked right up.

“I’ve been holding it in for a while now, but I really do gotta go.”

“Ah.”

“So if you’d be willing to help me keep an eye out, I will pay you handsomely for your services.” I said diplomatically.

“Deal.”

***

Madeline and Micheal had hit a wall. They’d wandered about every which way, marking their progress with tape the whole time. They’d figured out that Madeline’s theory about space being warped was dead on the money, but that isn’t what halted their progress. Nor was it any of the undead.

No, the issue was that they’d run out of places to go.

All that was left was one dark corridor that no amount of light could illuminate. Madeline really didn’t want to go down that one, and Micheal wasn’t really a fan either.

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Just the fact that it was dark was one thing, but that malevolent beings almost certainly lurked in that darkness was another. Being afraid of the dark made a whole lot more sense when you knew there were things in there that wanted to hurt you.

But there was nowhere else they hadn’t checked.

Plus, Leonardo was almost certainly in there. Madeline figured he was just the sort of idiot that would wander down a darkened corridor such as that without a care in the world. But no matter how much she liked Leo, she wasn’t exactly eager to get herself killed looking for him.

Micheal eventually made the decision for her. Despite his initial hesitation, he knew that waiting wasn’t going to actually do them any good. So he set off, and told Madeline she could either wait for him to come back, or just come with.

Madeline was not one to be outdone, so she came with.

It turned out that the corridor wasn’t just dark, of course. It was completely blinding. Her phone’s pitiful light didn’t even reach the ground before it was snuffed out by the fog. Micheal ended up having to hold onto Madeline’s chair just so that they didn’t get separated.

The darkness only got worse as they went further, but turning back hadn’t actually gotten them out of the fog so they kept going, hoping against hope that they’d see light at the end of the tunnel.

Micheal had one of his summons in front of him and another behind them in place of an early warning system. It was little consolation.

Eventually the darkness seemed to swallow sound itself. Madeline couldn’t even hear Micheal’s footsteps, even though he should have been right behind her.

Terrified, she reached back hoping to verify his presence through touch. She felt Micheal’s trembling hand grip hers. While she couldn’t see or hear him, she could tell he was just as scared as she was.

She squeezed his hand back, in an attempt to reassure him.

They both were still for a little while. Blind and afraid.

But eventually they got used to it.

Even the scariest of things can become mundane with enough exposure.

***

I’d had the foresight to pack a roll of toilet paper and some disinfectant wipes on my person, so my business was taken care of without much fuss.

I used to camp a lot, so popping a squat in some mildly concealed location was hardly a new event for me. I just pretended I was in the Oregon woods or the Nevada desert. After that we vacated the premises so as not to be bothered by the smell.

I handed Amy her promised jerky, intentionally giving her something chewy and stringy so that she had to take her time eating it.

I let her work on that for a while while I drank my last watermelon flavored seltzer. In fact, I was almost entirely out of bubble water, which was a real shame. Part of how I attempted to keep myself from getting fat was by not drinking anything sugary. I hated the taste of artificially sweetened sodas, so that only left me with things that were entirely unsweetened.

In other words, I guzzled a lot of tea and carbonated H20.

I was almost out of both, and it was gonna be a sad day when I only had tap water to drink. Though I reflected that that was probably a luxury. Amy had been without anything to drink for god knows how long.

Speaking of which, she’d finally finished her jerky, and was sitting back whilst she digested. I was using my kinesthetic radar to keep an eye out, and nothing was approaching at the moment.

I was planning to wait for as long as she needed, but I supposed I should make sure she was ok with me hanging around.

“So have you decided what you're planning to do next?” I asked.

“Before I ran into you I was following the breeze. I figure I’ll just go back to doing that.” She replied lightly, her throat finally starting to recover.

“Like metaphorically?”

“Like Literally. Since a little while ago I’ve been feeling this slight draft, and I figure maybe that leads to an exit.” She said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

She was silent after that utterance for a while. I waited patiently while she seemed to think.

“So.” She said, pausing again.

“So?” I prompted gently.

“You're welcome to come with me if you’d like. I’m pretty good in a fight, it turns out.” She offered, gently twirling fire-sprites with her fingers. The flames had never left her as we spoke. They danced around her, occasionally settling down on her shoulders like a wreath, only to flit away at the slightest motion like a flock of birds.

“I’d be happy to.” I said.

And with that we got to sharing our abilities.

Amy had a display too, of course. The tattoo on the back of her hand was in the shape of a zippo lighter, and her role was pyromaniac. Her abilities were as follows.

Summon: Allowed her to summon living balls of fire for one point a pop, though the cost doubled after five.

Manipulate Flame: An expensive passive ability which allowed for control of her living flames for three points. Without it her first ability was functionally useless, as the flames would just do their own thing.

Burst: She could cause one of her flames to explode, dealing great damage but at the cost of that fire-sprite. She wouldn’t be able to resummon it until she got more ATP, but the ability itself didn’t take any points.

As for the situation we were in, she knew about as much as I did. There were monsters, she got her abilities after killing one of them, and everything in the city and possibly the world at large had gone to hell in a handbasket over the course of a single morning.

Of note, Amy had come here with her ex pretty early on, and in fact they were the people who we witnessed breaking into the game exchange right before our first siege.

Small world.

As for why Amy's ex-girlfriend had wanted to come here, she’d apparently been in possession of an ability that allowed her to see the future. And unlike my fairly limited future sight, the ex in question could see farther ahead and with greater clarity.

But not infinitely. Just enough to get some poor Ideas. Like maybe clearing a dungeon.

Of course that didn’t work out. While they supposedly had known what was going to happen in advance, they still managed to get surprised by the necromancer. They ran for it, leaving Amy to fend for herself.

Unlike myself, Amy hadn’t been teleported by the necromancer directly, instead going through the emergency exit and finding herself in that same corridor me and Madeline had avoided.

After some meandering through infinite seemingly infinite spaces, and a few life or death battles with enemies that weren’t particularly afraid of fire, she came across the black pit.

One teleporting bookshelf later and she found herself here, surrounded on all sides by zombies.

She only managed to survive by detonating all of her fire sprites at once. That left her defenseless afterwards, so she put up a barrier and huddled in a corner until her ATP refreshed.

Then she just walked.

She’d used all her barriers up, and then all her rations. And then I showed up.

It was after her retelling of events was finished that she then thanked me for the food and drinks that I had provided. I told her it was nothing noteworthy, and we moved on.

As for where we moved on to, we decided to follow the slight draft that Amy had been feeling. I couldn’t detect any sort of breeze myself, but that might have come down to the fact that my haptic radar caused me to feel a tickling sensation all over my body when I was using it.

So Amy led, and I followed.

***

Madeline had found her way out of the darkness. Same bookshelf, though she and Micheal chose a different book. Opening the imposingly large brown tome had resulted in being sent back into the glass corridors.

Though seemingly not the same one’s they’d been in prior. There was writing on the walls. The writing in question was overall quite neat and tidy, though a little lopsided in some places.

The scrawled note they first observed was a simple statement that the path ahead was a dead end. Following the arrow that pointed from the text led them to another small epitaph, which pointed them in the direction of another and another after that.

Following the trail that had been so kindly laid out for them, Madeline found the note that predictably proved that the sharpied messages and pathways were the work of Leonardo.

And just a bit after that was the darkness. Again. The note written just before the threshold confirmed that there was nowhere else to go. Following that, in red was written:

“Tell my wife I love her!”

Madeline chuckled.

Micheal rolled his eyes.

They walked through the darkness a second time. Again, they found the bookshelf, but this time the shelf was covered with post-it notes and sharpie scribblings. Not having any better Ideas, they grabbed the green hardback with writing on the spine from the top shelf and cracked it open.

***

After our first shared combat encounter with a pack of very angry skeletons, it became clear that Amy was in dire need of a weapon. It made a fair bit of sense when you thought about it; undead propelled by primordial flame didn’t really give a shit if you set them alight.

Amy had originally been armed with a snub nosed revolver, but she ran out of ammo a long time ago. Her purse only had ever contained a single speed loader full of extra ammunition, and even that was overkill, she had figured.

I imagine having been proven wrong on that point had been rather frustrating. I was more than capable of fixing that particular problem, though, so after I gave her the rundown on how my abilities could serve to re-arm her, I let her pick between a gun or a melee option.

She went with Melee. That made sense, given that she had a fairly well enhanced body stat. She was a good deal stronger and faster than I was, making busting skulls with a blunt object a perfectly viable option for her.

The specific blunt object she’d selected was a rocket propelled war hammer. The mech it belonged to came from a series in which ranged weapons were completely invalidated by force fields, so all the giant robots all spent a lot of time punching each other in the face.

Scaling the miniature weapon up and animating it cost me the entirety of my reserved ATP, of course. The only reason I suspected I’d been able to afford it at all was because the rocket part of the rocket hammer was pretty low tech.

A magazine of solid fuel boosters ran down the back of the hammer's shaft, and one was expended every time you squeezed the lever, giving you a second long burst of thrust.

It had six uses in total, but I could use resupply on it later if I got another point of ATP, though that didn’t look like it would be immediately necessary given that Amy was just as happy to swing it around like the lethally heavy hunk of metal that it was.

I watched as a poor mummified footsoldier had its sternum shattered with an audible crunch with a single strike from Amy and her new favorite toy. I winced, though it wasn’t like I felt bad enough to save him from his plight. I doubted he would have appreciated it all that much anyway, given how set he and his comrades were upon causing us harm.

I warded off a rotting rogue wielding a pair of daggers by shooting it in the face. It fell backwards, but didn’t dissolve. The twenty two rifle didn’t always have enough power to penetrate a zombie’s cranium, requiring me to use another precious bullet or dispatch them with my vibro-knife.

The assassin before me was mostly indisposed, so the knife was the way to go. I could have used another laser, but the Psy’s big beam had limited uses, and the smaller laser drones didn’t work all that well on the undead, I’d found.

In video game terms, the undead were generally immune or highly resistant to elemental damage. Simple physical attacks were far more effective, so long as you targeted the head.

After finishing off the enemies on my end, I looked over to Amy. She curb stomped a fallen fencer, crushing their head like a cantaloupe. And with that we’d safely survived another bout of combat.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t been wounded once since joining Amy’s party. We could cover enough for each other’s bases that we were never overwhelmed, unlike when we’d been alone. I guessed that was why the necromancer had separated me and Madeline in the first place. Divide and conquer, and all that.

Though I did have to wonder why he hadn’t disposed of us directly, as opposed to splitting us up and trapping us here.

There were only two reasons I could think of: Either he couldn’t actually cause us any direct harm, or he thought that throwing us in the dungeon was the easiest way to kill us.

Or, alternatively, I was overthinking it and the necromancer didn’t actually give much of a shit about us either way.

That didn’t quite fit though, given that he’d bothered to greet us at the door. If he didn’t actually give a fuck than surely leaving us alone would have been the better option.

Instead, he’d actively attacked at least two different sets of people, if not more.

Speaking of which, I wondered how Madeline was doing. Honestly, I could only imagine what Madeline was going through. She was probably fairing better than I had, knowing how capable she was, but that still didn’t mean she was having a good time.

Though I was doing much better overall, now. Having Amy to talk to had been a massive boost to my morale. That mostly came down to the fact that my favorite way to distract myself from my own problems was to focus on someone else’s. It was a large part of why I didn’t like being alone.

I asked Amy if she wanted to take another break. She’d recovered greatly with the introduction of food and water into her system, but she still wasn’t at a hundred percent. She likely wouldn’t be until we were out of this mess and she got the opportunity to rest properly. But for that to happen we needed to find the exit.

I handed Amy another drink for her to enjoy whilst I clambered atop a wooden shelf in order to get a better look at our surroundings.

The library seemed to stretch infinitely forward and back. The ceiling was far above, but mirrored the floor perfectly. Same with the walls. Though looking closely at the horizon line ahead of me, I noticed something odd.

If you looked far enough, the floor almost seemed to curve upwards. It hadn’t seemed like we were going uphill, but perhaps we were on a very gradual slant.

I looked back, only to see the floor curved upwards there too.

That was weird. But mayhaps it was just some trick of the eye. I needed to test it. I hopped off of my perch, gently kicking in the air a couple of times to slow my fall with telekinesis before landing.

I stumbled a bit upon hitting the ground, but I managed not to land on my face.

I grabbed a marble from my inventory. It was painted to resemble the globe, gold stripes making up the latitude and longitude marks upon dark blue seas and black continents. It was a cherished trinket, but I didn’t take it out just to admire it.

I placed it upon the floor gently.

It remained still.

I nudged it slightly with the tip of my index finger. It rolled, but stopped as soon as I ceased applying force.

Amy was gazing at me inquisitively, sipping upon the cold ginger beer I’d handed her earlier. I told her to climb a shelf with me, and she swallowed the last of her drink before doing so.

I pointed to the horizon. She hmm-ed and said that it looked like we were going uphill. I pointed behind us. She stared for a moment, trying to discern what I was gesturing to before she seemed to notice something, and then froze.

She’d seen the marble too. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that something was off. Either were in a valley or a donut, and given how bizarre things had been so far, I was betting on the latter.