Madeline removed a number of bodega-burgled snacks from her inventory, allowing Micheal to pick whatever he wanted.

“Holy shit is that mazapan?” Micheal pointed to an off-white puck wrapped in plastic and branded with a rose.

“I don’t know, but you're welcome to it regardless.” Madeline had truly no Idea what anonymous, floury looking disc was made of, she’d just grabbed it along with everything else in that convenience store.

Micheal took the item gingerly, grasping it like a precious treasure. He unwrapped the plastic with nearly exaggerated delicacy. Despite the care he took, the mazapan crumbled in his grasp immediately upon being freed from its film packaging. He didn’t seem to care, popping a pebbly crumble of the candy in his mouth with relish.

The expression on his face was almost rapturous.

He scarfed the rest of the mazapan with gusto after that first bite.

Madeline naturally found herself curious as to how it tasted, given how much Micheal seemed to enjoy it.

She removed another thick disk of the individually wrapped treats from her inventory, opening it for herself. The puck crumbled into pieces at the slightest touch, turning into a mildly pasty powder when pinched between her fingers. Licking her thumb, she was shocked by how sweet the residue tasted, like it was pure sugar. After that initial punch of sweetness, she faintly detected something nutty.

Madeline carefully picked up a larger piece of mazapan, bringing it to her mouth before it fell apart entirely. It was definitely powdery in texture, but it melted almost instantly, leaving a number of small morsels of something else on her tongue. Chewing briefly, she realized they were pieces of peanuts.

Taking another saccharine bite, the flavor overall reminded her of the inside filing of a peanut butter cup, minus the salt and with extra sugar.

Not bad, not bad at all.

It was a little too sweet for her taste, but she could definitely see the appeal. Micheal had already finished his, and moved on to a pack of plain salted potato chips. Madeline had a spicy jerky stick after she finished her mazapan, and offered a teriyaki flavored meat cylinder to Micheal.

He accepted it gratefully, biting into the straw of smoked, gas-station animal-product with an audible snap.

For beverages, Madeline drank a blue lemonade concoction, and Micheal chugged a sickeningly sweet energy drink that contained enough taurine to kill an elephant. It wasn’t his favorite brand, but given that he normally operated on eight cups of coffee on a good day, any source of caffeine was more than welcome.

Once he’d downed it in its entirety, Madeline passed him another can of the same.

He grabbed it, popping the metal tab open and sipping pleasurably upon the stimulant laced nectar. He finished it faster than was probably healthy after that, his caffeine withdrawal headache finally abating.

“So I have an offer.” Madeline said, drinking the last of her blueberry lemonade. “I got another ten cans of monster-killer-energy in my inventory, and I’d be happy to part with them if you’d be willing to help me find my friend.”

Micheal found her framing of the request as an informal contract amusing, but was more than willing to go along with it. Madeline seemed a nice enough person, and truly he suspected she’d be helping him as much the other way around.

“You have a deal.” He said, after only the slightest pause. “Looking forward to working with you, Madeline.”

***

The endless void I had been in had vanished, and in its place was a library. The books on the many identical shelves were unlabelled, but stretched as far as the eye could see. They hung from the ceiling as much as they stood on the walls and floor, hinting that my standard notions of up and down still did not apply to this place.

The green hardback I’d grabbed earlier had vanished from my grasp, but that was probably for the best. If I was lucky, it had simply returned to its place on that bookshelf, meaning Madeline could make use of it as well.

And if it hadn’t, well there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

Looking around, the mockery of a library I was in gave no clues as to where I was supposed to go next.

The fuckers who’d designed this place really could use a lesson in game design. The complete lack of signposting made navigating this dungeon a pain in the ass.

Then again, that was probably the point. If I was building an awful murder dungeon, I wouldn’t want to make it easy to find your way in either.

Speaking of such things, there sure were an awful lot of monsters in this library. I’d already been the recipient of multiple undead ambushes in the short time I’d spent wandering the shelves.

The assholes stalked between shelves and attacked from above just as often as they did from around corners. My foresight and radar had kept me from kicking the bucket, but not from accumulating the occasional minor injury. I’d gotten a number of cuts from weapons that I’d only barely managed to avoid.

I hadn’t healed any of my wounds yet in an effort to save on healing items. I only had four potions remaining, and I figured I’d need to use at least a couple more before I got out of this place. Better to conserve now than die later.

But still, it hurt pretty bad. There was one long tear down my back in particular that burned and itched as I walked. Any attempt I made to touch it was met only with searing pain. My torn up clothing kept rubbing on all my many scrapes and cuts too, which sucked.

As for the smaller and more accessible scratches, I just cleaned them with iodine solution before super-gluing them shut. I was no stranger to accidentally cutting myself, in both the kitchen and at the desk where I built models.

I’d also taken some basic anti-inflammatory pain meds, but they really didn’t feel like they were doing anything.

Though honestly the real issue was that I needed to use the restroom. This particular library didn’t come with any relevant amenities, so far as I could tell, and I didn’t just need to pee.

The fact that I’d thus far managed to avoid soiling myself amidst all the dangers and perils I’d faced in the last week had been a small point of personal pride. I really didn’t want to ruin my streak just because I held it in too long.

So that meant I needed to pop a squat somewhere. Were this an actual library, or any other sort of publicly available space, I wouldn’t dare. But this was a dungeon populated by naught but roving cadavers.

As well as the necromancer, I guess, but fuck that guy. I wasn’t gonna crap my slacks because I was trying to be polite in the territory of an enemy that almost certainly wanted nothing less than my painful demise.

The question was how to do that without getting ambushed with my pants around my ankles. I’d managed to get another point of ATP as my CR had finally crossed thirty, but I’d been meaning to save that for getting myself another gun.

It was looking like I might need to animate another mech to cover my rear instead. Psy was proving a fine companion, and I was happy to trust him to watch my back, but I didn’t figure he’d be capable of fending off an entire gaggle of ghoulies for any real amount of time.

I hemmed and hawed on the matter for a while, and was just about ready to see if maybe using my last barrier was the solution, until I came face to face with an emaciated young woman.

She was surrounded by many orbits of flaming spherical satellites. The drifting balls of Ionised gas evenly rotated around her person, and were pale yellow in color. Like anemically-golden willowisps.

The lady herself was tall, lanky, and wore a nonplussed expression upon her haggard looking face. Her cheeks were sunken and stretched tight on her skull, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with dark circles.

Looking at her more closely, I saw that she was wearing a black and white striped crop top, exposing a belly button piercing. I averted my eyes downwards, and noticed that her drab olive cargo pants had enough pockets to carry a workshop's worth of small tools, and was paired with a pair of hefty looking brown leather shoes.

“Hello?” I half queried, unsure of what else to say.

***

The newly formed intrepid duo of Madeline and Micheal set off shortly after finishing their snacks, only dallying a little longer to allow Micheal the chance to pee in a corner. Madeline was good on the restroom front, though she knew that wouldn’t go into perpetuity. Honestly she was just hoping that she’d be out of there before it was a problem.

And to aid in making sure that they would actually get out of there alive, they shared the details of their various abilities with each other

Madeline’s radar chart had been almost completely equal in all aspects when she’d started out, but it now spiked upwards into her body stat, while the growth of her other two stats had been much slower.

Madeline additionally had finally reached thirty CR. She didn’t get any new stats from that milestone, but she did find she had a ‘plus’ mark next to her strike ability, though what that meant was unclear.

She brushed it aside and gave Micheal the brief rundown on what she understood of what each of her three abilities did. It wasn’t hard, one let her go fast, another made her hit harder, and the last made her a bit tougher.

On Micheal’s end, his radar chart leaned a bit more heavily into the capacity and body stats than technique, but was pretty evenly split, all told. Micheal had twenty CR and only two Abilities: ‘Duplicate’, and the confusingly named ‘Overlap Duplicate’.

He explained that his role was ‘Busy-body’, and that his first ability allowed him to summon a number of those mummified-ghost things for a single point of ATP a pop. They were far inferior to Micheal in terms of strength and mass, but they could dissipate and re-appear at will, making them basically invulnerable.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

What they lacked in attack power and strength could also be made up for with his second ability. ‘Overlap duplicate’ allowed him to stack one clone directly on top of another, basically doubling their strength. Doing so was highly expensive, it cost double the ATP for each charge on a single clone, but it was generally more worthwhile than having many weaker clones.

As was, Micheal had allotted his entire day’s worth of fifteen points such that he possessed one clone that had been buffed up a total of four times, as well as a single other clone that he only used as a decoy.

Micheal’s primary clone quickly demonstrated its strength, punching heads clean off of skeletons and breaking the legs of any more threatening revenants before finishing them off with a curb stomp.

Micheal was no slouch himself, either, using a cracked junior-league baseball bat to bludgeon anything that got close to him. He wasn’t quite as strong as Madeline, but he was clearly strong enough.

Madeline’s Strike ability had also vastly expanded in terms of utility, as she soon discovered. It used to be that she could only activate strike for the length of a second, but now she could enchant her blade for double the time, just long enough to get two swings in if she timed it perfectly.

She didn’t dare test if she could now use Strike on her bare hands without destroying her fingers. Sure, she technically had enough healing to spare, with six first-aid kits remaining, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed the pain.

Not to mention, she’d just discovered that healing items weren’t omnipotent. After all, they apparently couldn’t remove large foreign objects from the body. If Madeline hadn’t gotten assistance, she probably would have been stuck with that sword in her chest, using a healing item every twenty minutes until she ran out of them and croaked.

Madeline glanced at Micheal from the corner of her eye. He was looking elsewhere, probably keeping a look out for more zombies. Meeting them had been a frequent experience, even in the relatively short distances they’d traveled.

Madeline wasn’t quite sure what to make of Micheal. He seemed nice enough, she supposed. She just didn’t really understand why he’d gone out of his way to help her.

Leonardo’s motivations she comprehended more easily, as Leo was just straight up kind of psychotic. She liked him, but he just had a completely different view of the world than she did. And she’d come to accept that fact about Leo, as well as what it said about herself.

Micheal on the other hand was an unknown quantity. He was definitely a bit surlier, maybe even gruffer, than Leonardo, but he seemed to have that same instinctual need to help others. An instinct that Madeline mostly lacked.

It wasn’t like she was completely bereft of the ability to empathize. She just didn’t do so without good reason. The world was too big a place for her to care about everyone else in it. She just focussed on her, for the most part, making the occasional casual exception for others as she saw fit.

That meant two of her blood relatives, Leonardo Maccantire, about half of the people on her quad rugby team, and one partially-estranged friend from middle school that she’d made a habit of messaging on social media about once a month or so.

Anything past that could go fuck itself. She’d only stuck her neck out the past couple times because she knew Leo would try and help any poor soul he came across, with or without her. And she unfortunately liked Leonardo enough to want him not dead.

But Micheal was bound by no such obligations. He didn’t strike her as having the same bleeding heart that Leonardo was cursed with, either.

Madeline was starting to wonder if perhaps she was the weird one, when Micheal interrupted her thoughts.

He was pointing to something on the right hand wall. It looked like a large, partially dried bloodstain. The suspension of cells in plasma had long since dried out and turned dark, but it was unmistakably human blood. Monster blood was generally more brown than black, even when it was fully desiccated.

There were four long streaks leading out from the stain, accompanied by a trail of shoe prints. Micheal awkwardly raised one foot in the air, examining the sole of his sneakers. The treads looked concerningly similar to the steps on the wall.

The spacing on the long streaks matched the front and back wheels of Madeline’s chair.

Something was fucky, to say the least.

“Well, we’ve got two options here, so far as I can tell.” Micheal stated.

“Those options being?” Miss Madeline asked.

“Either someone else is wearing the same shoes as I am, or we’ve gone full circle somehow.” He said.

“My man, I hate to say it, but I’m pretty sure we went in a straight line.” Madeline replied.

“Yeah, me too.” He sighed.

They were both silent for a bit, considering the likelihood of someone with Micheal’s exact same brand and size of shoe not only being in this labyrinth, but also stepping in a pool of blood, and walking off with someone in a chair that had wheels with the same spacing as Madeline’s.

It seemed to both of them that it was a bit of a longshot.

“Alright.” Madeline said, “Either we gotta worry about doppelgangers eating our asses, or this place is just fucking weird.” She concluded.

“Define ‘fucking weird’, please.” Micheal pinched the bridge of his nose again, not quite reinvigorated enough by the three cans of energizing bevvy to get what she meant.

“You know how your inventory fucks with time?” She asked.

“Your what fucks with what now?”

***

The lady I’d stumbled nearly head first into took a long moment to process my greeting. In her defense, she clearly wasn’t firing on all cylinders, her eyes were somewhat out of focus.

Eventually she gave a timid little wave with a hand that was just barely raised. I waved back cautiously, unsure of how to engage in any further dialogue.

If I’d just run into this woman in more ordinary circumstances, I’d know exactly how to conduct myself. We’d do the same old fashioned introductions, swap names and pronouns and basic questions about each other until we either got into the meat of an actual conversation, or otherwise found a reason to stop interacting with each other.

But we were in the middle of a deadly labyrinth and both visibly armed with supernatural abilities. Neither person’s intentions could be readily assumed. Even if I wished for things to remain civil, she could very well decide that I wasn’t worth the risk. And given that I had a gun and was escorted by a strange glowing hover-bot with a floating knife, I wouldn’t fucking blame her.

My eyes glowed violet for god’s sake. I’d scare the shit out of me if I bumped into me in an alley, much less a geometrically impossible murdermaze where everything you met tried to kill you.

The scrawny individual before me was clearly made of tougher stuff than I was, though. She pulled her dark brown bangs out of her face and tucked them behind her left ear before clearing her throat.

Or at least I think the strangled sound she emitted was an attempt to clear her throat. She tried again, but ended up making nothing but a painful, rasping squeal. It seemed her larynx was in rough shape.

“Would you like some water?” I offered.

She nodded immediately. I put down my gun first so as to free up my hand and reassure her that I didn’t mean harm, then grabbed a bottle of alkaline, electrolyte filled snob-water from my inventory.

It wasn’t to my taste, honestly, but that just made it perfect for foisting off on someone else. She took the elongated plastic water bottle readily, downing the entirety of its thirty-two fluid ounces with vigor. She took a long satisfied breath after that, leaning against a nearby shelf as her system processed the liquid onslaught she’d just consumed.

I had never seen someone so delighted by an overpriced bottle of filtered-tap-water-with-pretentions in my life.

“Would you like some more?” I asked, mostly just curious to see how much she could drink at once.

“Please.” She said quietly, her vocal cords definitely still a little beat up by the sound of it. I handed her a fat polymer bottle of grape sports beverage next. The salt and sugar would probably do good for someone who was suffering from severe dehydration, like I assumed she was.

She drank the sweetened twenty-four ounces of athletic fuel much more slowly, but did so more out of relish than lack of desire.

“My name’s Leonardo, by the way.” I said, awkwardly and belatedly introducing myself.

“Amy.” She croaked.

“Nice to meet you Amy. What are you up to in this fine establishment?” The question got a laugh out of her, which then triggered a small coughing fit as she choked on her purple drink.

“Oh-” she coughed- “just wanted to see the sights and all that. This place has great reviews online.” She joked.

“Does it now? I wouldn’t have guessed given the near complete lack of any amenities.” I replied.

“Yeah I gotta say that I’m not all that impressed either.” Amy agreed, having perked up considerably after rehydrating. She straightened up from her exhausted lean on the nearby bookshelf.

“But what brings you here?” She asked.

“Would you believe me if I said I got lost looking for the men’s room?”

***

Madeline set to a great deal of explaining, recapping a slew of experiments conducted by her missing compatriot that seemed to indicate that the inventory had the ability to relativistically slow down time for any objects stored in it.

Micheal was justifiably skeptical at first, but came around after they tested it on the spot with Micheal’s wristwatch.

A timer on Madeline’s phone was set for two minutes while Micheal’s watch was stowed away in the inventory, the time on the digital LCD screen taken note of. Lo and behold, the time on the clock face was unchanged from the moment it went in the inventory to the moment it went out.

Madeline’s best guess was that this strange glass construct they found themselves in was warping space in a manner similar to how the inventory warped time.

Micheal thought that was as good a bet as any, so they set about figuring out how to navigate a place in which their surroundings were spatially unreliable.

The solution they eventually arrived at was to use a roll of duct tape to mark the walls with various shapes in place of reliable landmarks.

That worked pretty well, and after they got used to the Idea that they could travel along the ceiling and walls as comfortably as the floor, they made rapid headway. Regular undead didn’t prove much of a threat with their powers combined, and they were starting to get just comfortable enough that the universe seemed to think they were owed a visit by something thoroughly unpleasant.

The gruesome object in question stomped heavily around a corner, its massive frame just barely fitting in the corridor. It was a Frankensteinian Asura of sorts, a being of too many limbs attached to too little central body to support it.

Lumps of muscle and unevenly colored flesh sprouted from a number of places on the vicious-vishnu’s torso, from which protruded appendages with unsettlingly numerous joints. The whip-like limbs twitched and twisted in ways that looked bound to tear every ligament attached to every socketed bone, but it held together through gruesome grit and sheer anger anyway.

The demonic-patchwork of parts also included four legs and four fire belching heads in various states of disrepair. Two of the heads were missing eyes, one its scalp, and the other its lower jaw, causing its overly long tongue to droop down with no place to rest.

Each malformed arm carried a weapon, varying from scepter to club and poorly grasped spears. It didn’t carry those weapons gracefully, but Madeline guessed that it hardly needed something as trifling as grace, with all the muscle mass that it had access to.

She was quickly proven right when three of the hindu-hindenburg’s arms snaked forward towards her, spears and longswords pointed to pierce her fragile torso. Madeline had been stabbed enough for one day, so she Accelerated backwards and chopped one particularly persistent hand off at the wrist.

Micheal’s Duplicate blocked a similarly treacherous hit for him, and he used a baseball bat to break one of the multitudinous arms before it could pull back.

Predictably, the monster was unfazed by its injuries. No zombie worth its salt would dare give its opponents a reaction from any sort of injury. And zombie this was, make no mistake. It may have not bothered to conform to any normal conventions regarding bodily proportion, but it was most certainly one of the undead given the familiar blue flame erupting from its orifices.

So not only was it imbued with mutant strength and armed with more weapons than any one person should rightly have access to, it also couldn’t feel pain and wouldn’t die until one or more of the thing’s heads were destroyed.

Thus, even though Madeline cut her way through another flailing forearm and Micheal had completely destroyed his wooden baseball bat deflecting shots, they’d just about made zero progress actually killing the dead-demonic-deity that blocked their passage.

“This sucks so goddamn much.” Madeline whined.