We spent the rest of our turn on watch fully catching ourselves on what happened in the time we’d been separate.

Turns out, neither of us had been having a good time, to put it lightly, but talking about it helped for multiple reasons. Not least of which was that Madeline ended up coercing me into using a healing item for all the little wounds I’d accumulated.

The healing hurt, as it always did, but I felt so much better afterwards that it made my earlier insistence upon saving on healing seem a little silly, in retrospect.

I probably hadn’t been thinking straight. Which was no surprise, given what I’d been through. Sure, I hadn’t fought two different bosses back to back, like Madeline had, but I did win out in terms of the number of times stabbed.

Counting it all up, I’d been stabbed seven times to Madeline’s three.

Shit sucked, in short.

We tried not to mope too much though, there’d be time enough for that after we escaped this place.

Instead we got to planning our next steps.

We were both in agreement that our first priority was leaving this place, but the specifics still needed hashing out, of course.

“So I’ve got twelve points of ATP,” I said, “and unlike how we’d been trying to do it, all those points were spread out, so I’m not getting those back all at once. What about you?”

“I’ve got fourteen, and all but two of those were spent at the same time.” Madeline responded.

“And I don’t suppose you’ve managed to keep track of said time?”

“Nope. My phone’s been in my inventory, so it's useless.”

“Damn, me too.”

“. . .”

With everything that had been going on, my internal clock was thoroughly fucked, so I had no Idea when precisely I’d spent my points. Which meant either we accepted that our abilities could fade on us in the middle of combat, or we would have to wait huddled in the barrier until everything refreshed.

Staying here for twenty-four hours would suck, but with the barrier and a rotating watch it could be arranged. We both had two rations stocked, so that would cover both of us well as Amy and Micheal for a meal, at least.

Checking our inventories, Madeline had also accumulated two vouchers, and myself one, so that bought three more plates of food. That plus snacks and all the water I’d packed meant that we were basically covered, so long as we slept most of the time.

The only real issue was using the restroom. Sure, three of us were perfectly capable of popping a squat behind a shelf, but that still left Madeline in a lurch.

Honestly, I wasn’t even sure how to bring it up.

Thankfully, It wasn’t needed.

Madeline had this little folding toilet in her inventory.

It was basically a toilet seat on top of a little stool, the Idea being that you’d put it on top of a hole that you dug in the ground.

There were some additional logistics to figure out, involving some creative uses of the paper from the books that were everywhere, but I’ll spare you the details. All that must be said was that we passed our first watch just fine, and slept like the dead once the other two were awake.

***

We swapped back and forth like that a couple more times, Amy and Micheal fine with getting the extra rest.

None of the undead ever bothered us, but seeing them walk past us occasionally was unnerving all the same, so we built a fort of books and spare blankets to give us some extra privacy, as well as raise morale.

And by that, I mostly mean we just did it for the shits and giggles.

We also cracked into the rations after finding out from Micheal that Items could be swapped between people, allowing everybody to have their own.

My ration produced fried rice with char siu and a side of potstickers, Madeline had a plate of california rolls with some veggie tempura, Micheal a bowl of some sort of thick chicken stew that made him cry, and Amy got a platter of fish tacos piled high with cabbage and liberally striped with baja sauce.

We all enjoyed it greatly.

After that, some number of hours passed with us alternately sleeping, eating, making brief ventures out of our fort to use the “restroom”, and generally just going catatonic from all the trauma.

So not a great time, honestly.

My dreams weren’t helping.

I kept seeing everyone die, each time in different ways, with my own death waking me each time, meeting Psy’s stare.

These awful dying dreams were almost certainly Psy’s future sight bleeding over to my subconscious, both of us trying to find a way out of this mess even in my sleep.

Still, awful as it was, I was too tired not to sleep. We all were. And I couldn’t imagine that would change until we got back home.

So I dreamt, running through the labyrinth, facing off again and again with the Necromancer.

Part of the problem was that in the end, I always died alone. No matter how hard I tried to hold on to everyone else, we always got separated at some point, and picked off one by one in our own battles.

The details were a little fuzzy, my semi-prophetic dreams being not entirely concerned with the fine points of the matter, but the broad strokes were still apparent.

We would not be fighting the necromancer as a team.

A prospect that terrified me, obviously. Thus why I’d been tossing and turning in my sleep trying to come up with some other solution.

But after about four hours of that I kind of gave up. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, I figured, so I let myself believe that my dreams were probably just that, and wouldn’t come to pass, while at the same time preparing myself for the exact opposite scenario.

I got out a notepad and sketched out a basic timeline of events. In all my dreams, we’d spend some time tiring ourselves fighting ghouls and looking for an exit, only to get absolutely nowhere.

After that, we’d sit down and settle back into camp only to be abducted by thunderclouds of lich’s mist and teleported into our own fights to the death, much like how we first arrived.

This time, though, the necromancer would hold nothing back, sending endless waves of enemies at us right at the jump when we were already tired and weak.

Thus why we never won.

There was something of an easy fix there, we just had to conserve our strength. But that had limits. In one of my dreams we camped out for at least another week, sustaining ourselves on rations and constantly cycling barriers to stay hidden, but eventually the stress would get to one or more of us and our little group would break up.

Then we died.

Our mental health was putting us on a very real time limit. Stress could apparently do as much to kill us as any zombie would.

So no waiting out the necromancer, then. Nor could we run away. There was no escape to ever be found here. We’d fallen into a trap, one that I hadn’t foreseen purely because the trap wouldn’t kill us quickly. The future sight I had in my waking hours was apparently too limited to predict that this library was essentially a pitfall that we couldn’t climb out of.

In one dream we’d even tried digging through the carpeted floor, only to find that on the other side was more Lich mist.

No, we were trapped, and the only way out was through the final boss of this awful dungeon.

After realizing that, my dreams shifted. No longer did I die last in my dreams. Instead I died first. I’d spectate everyone else from some disembodied viewpoint, but they all still fell one by one, the weapons that I armed them with disappearing with my demise.

Unarmed, everyone else died even faster than before.

If we were going with a straight up fight, apparently I was kind of the weakest link. That didn’t really surprise me, given how terrible I was with this whole applied violence thing, but it still sucked.

Sure, I was a decent shot, but I always ran out of ammo eventually. I just didn’t have enough ATP to arm everyone else and have enough left for myself.

And without weapons, everyone else died pretty quick.

Being the sole survivor wasn’t an option for me, either. I could say without exaggeration that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterwards.

I was just too dysfunctional to make it through the apocalypse alone.

So where did that leave me?

Well, I needed to kill the necromancer, and I needed to do it before anyone else could die. Now, that scared the shit out of me, but it was better than the alternative. I was ok with the Idea of dying for someone else so long as they got to live.

And if I did everything right, I might not even die at all.

I could work with that.

***

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

I snuck out of camp by saying I needed to use the restroom. The only tricky part there being that we’d been using the buddy system to prevent anyone from getting jumped with their pants down, but I’d just chosen a moment when everyone else was still half asleep and not thinking straight.

Once I got past the barrier line, and the aggressive sound of Amy’s snoring suddenly cut off, I immediately broke into a brisk jog.

I needed to get a decent amount of distance from camp for what I was planning, and I needed to get that distance fast enough that no one had time to wonder where I was.

The trip was uneventful, the only interruption being a pair of two shamblers that I managed to dispatch without too much trouble.

Once I got far enough away that our little base camp was completely invisible, I thumbed my display to put down the last barrier in my inventory. A bit of a waste, considering that the same barrier could buy another twenty-four hours of safety for everyone, but I needed it for the next step.

The next step being to hurry up and wait.

If I’d counted it out right, the Majority of my ATP should refresh within the next five to ten minutes. Something I knew because I’d already gotten a chunk of it back just a few minutes prior.

Sure enough, by minute seven, Psy had collapsed, bringing me up to 9 points out of my total twelve.

I would have liked to wait for the rest of them to come back, but I didn’t have the time.

I put seven points into Animating and Scaling up a gun for myself. A beam rifle from fairly late in the timeline of my favorite series, capable of firing a number of shots before it ran out of juice.

That left me with two points that I could use to Resupply my gun, or more likely re-Animate Psy with in another half hour or so.

For the moment though, I was without future sight and any sort of telekinesis. Which felt odd, now, considering how used to those powers I’d gotten.

I felt, well, handy-capped, for lack of a better term. Doubly so once I realized that meant I lost all aim assist as well.

That might be a real problem, given that my gun didn’t come with sights. It instead had a front facing camera that was supposed to link with its mech, something that I couldn’t make any use of with my sadly organic eyes.

Well shit.

Nothing for it now though. I couldn’t just hang out there waiting for the rest of my ATP to refresh for the next twenty-five minutes and change.

There were decent odds that my absence would be noticed by then, and I couldn’t afford that.

Not for the first time, I wished I was a little less dumb.

My plan kind of sucked to begin with, and oversights like this were not helping. That was the problem with relying so heavily on dreams of prophecy, their inherent vagueness meant that little details like this were always bound to slip through the cracks.

I supposed it didn’t matter, really, I needed to get moving anyway. If I spent any more time second guessing myself I’d either end up talking myself out of it or have a panic attack.

Anxiety was already causing my hands to shake like nobody’s business.

I pulled on my welding goggles and roughly aimed at the carpeted floor just in front of me.

I fired, and the barrier around me popped like a soap bubble.

The ground burned, then melted into slag, and finally dissolved into blackish mist, leaving a person sized hole into the swirling abyss, ringed by the sickly yellow fire of still smoldering carpet.

I jumped in.

***

Ok, so getting into the lich’s mist before everyone else and without their knowledge was the first step.

I can say with full confidence that step one of the plan, then, was an unqualified success.

I was, however, having significantly less success with step two.

Step two being to not fucking get myself killed, or at least, not doing so before I took down the lich and made sure everyone else could escape.

Because if it wasn’t clear by now, yes, my plan was completely one of idiotic self sacrifice.

Though was it really idiotic if you could see the future and were thus somewhat assured of success?

Don’t answer that. Especially don’t remind me that Amy would have some choice words on the topic on account of her absentee girlfriend.

Where was I?

Oh right.

Getting Stabbed. Again.

Or again again. It was becoming a disturbingly frequent occurrence in my life as of late, really.

Would be great if whatever undead menace that was currently doing the stabbing unto myself would just stop, though.

You see, my current problem was that I couldn’t.

I was in another one of those fucking dark corridors full of carbon fog, and this time it was full of enemies and I was actually completely blind on account of not having my improvised haptic radar from Psy.

Thus why I was currently being stabbed.

I shoved the ghoulish body that was clinging to me away, a short blade making sucking noises as it pulled from my flesh in the process.

God that hurt.

Have I mentioned that being stabbed really fucking hurts?

I feel like that bears mentioning.

Because it does.

A lot.

Alright, time to stop dissociating from my wretched reality and actually start working on solving my problem.

First, I needed to heal.

Once again, I rediscovered that I could navigate the buttons and menus of the Display completely blind by hitting the button in my inventory to heal on the first try.

There was definitely something fucky going on there, but boy was I grateful for it at that moment.

Now I just needed to not get stabbed again. I’d started this whole excursion with four heals in my inventory, and I was already down to two, having had to heal myself once before when I’d done the exact opposite of sticking the landing and broken both my legs in the process.

Where was I?

I was finding my thoughts more scattered than usual, on account of the leg breaking, the blindness, and the whole getting stabbed.

Right, I need to find my gun, because I dropped it when I broke my legs.

Ideally before I experienced another stabbing.

I fumbled about for a precious couple of seconds, trying to retrace what few steps I’d taken in this awful place in order to locate the semi-magical firearm that my life depended on.

Through some sort of impossible miracle I did so successfully, finding it after stubbing my toe on it, before picking it up, making sure the business end was pointed away from me, and turning around to fire at the sound of clumsy footsteps behind me.

The bright flash of plasma illuminated my surroundings for the briefest moment, the sheer power of its light somehow fighting its way through the black fog for about eight feet in all directions.

Which was good, because it allowed me to see the skeleton that had been attacking me, as well as the ragged feet of a few others following it.

Sadly, the light went as soon as it came, leaving me blind once more.

I debated firing off a few more shots just to get a proper look at things, but I held off, not quite able to rationalize using what ammo I had for a highly inefficient flashlight.

Instead, I ran the fuck away.

Well, shuffled away, really. I wasn’t sure enough of my footing to manage anything resembling a sprint, and I didn’t want the sound of my own footsteps to drown out those of my enemies.

The undead were not terribly stealthy, after all, so now that I’d manage to overcome my initial panic and secure just enough room to think, I’d realized that I could just avoid everything by keeping an ear out until I got the rest of my ATP back.

Thankfully, it seemed my skeletal pursuers couldn’t see much better in the dark than I, allowing me to stay ahead of them. Though I supposed it wasn’t actually darkness that I found myself in so much as a fog so dense that realistically I shouldn’t even be able to breathe.

God this place was fucking strange.

Regardless, I played cat and mouse with what sounded like a slowly growing horde of undead, their armor clattering and their bones clacking as they occasionally tripped over each other and themselves.

In general, they were proving themselves to be far clumsier than normal, I noticed.

Perhaps the fog was somehow affecting them even more than me?

That would go some way towards explaining why I hadn’t faced any enemies in the first of these dark corridors that I’d gone through.

Maybe the ghostly parasites that piloted each of those walking corpses were just unsuited to this environment, somehow?

I did not know.

But I didn’t need to, either. I’d managed to evade my foes long enough now that I could feel my ATP had refreshed.

Hold on a sec, I could just feel that now?

The absolute fuck!?

How many hidden features did this goddamn display come with?

Whatever. I had a mech to re-Animate and things to kill.

I navigated my inventory blindly but adeptly, pulling Psy out of it and pressing the button to bring him back to life.

With him back, I felt my telekinesis return, and my vision changed subtly, brief flashes of violet manifesting in the darkness.

Flashes were bad. I would avoid those. Then again, those same flashes might just be the things I needed to violently murder.

After a bit of psychic fumbling, I managed to figure out how to re-enable my haptic radar, using the densely packed nerves of my left hand to feel/see in better detail when needed.

Sure enough, the violet lights all felt like moving, solid objects, so probably enemies.

I shot one, and the feeling of subtle pressure that it had been giving off vanished.

We were in business.

***

The Necromancer had a problem.

Invaders.

Nothing new, and not normally even a point of concern, but a few of them were proving unusually troublesome.

You see, the necromancer had been at this for a while.

While it didn’t possess any true sapience, or sentience, for that matter, it did have some limited capacity to learn.

It was essentially a Machine learning algorithm, in terms of purpose and functionality, if not form. A cloud of strange matter, generally in the shape of something humanoid, connected via unknown means to an entire facility that hovered in the gap between worlds.

The facility itself was both factory and bridge, manufacturing and transport, for undead war machines and drones. The facility, and its paired independent overseer by extension, were just one of many that traversed the void, operating at the behest of an unfathomably large empire.

But this particular facility, and this particular overseer, have been operating for a long time. It had helped invade many worlds, and had collected and learned from decades of data.

Thus why counter invasion forces were no real surprise.

The only question was, what to do about it? It had tried sending more undead at the problem, but that had proven to be mostly ineffective. For the moment though, all the surviving invaders were in one place, having managed to trap themselves in a dead end, so it wasn’t a pressing issue.

Thus why the Necromancer left it at that, for a while, deciding that containing the problem was good enough.

At least until one of the invaders came out of hiding, and started digging its way out of the trap.

That one would need some tending to. If the necromancer was capable of feeling things like regret, it would surely lament its inability to directly harm the invader. Killing another through direct means came with consequences, after all, and those consequences were not something the necromancer could afford.

It would have to settle for wasting one or two of the higher quality warmachines on them, as well as a great number of drones.

That should be enough to wear them down, isolated and blind as they were.

Or not. It wasn't particularly important.