(Strive 13:1)

We mounted the stairs to utter darkness on the thirteenth floor. Each of us chewed leftover candies from the eleventh floor in silence, Artem red, myself green, and Selene and El blue. As we came to the same level as our quarry, our party’s mood seemed to darken as well.

“I should’ve known that the tower would take this chance to throw some spooky bullshit at us,” I said, and my voice felt too loud somehow. “Lucky number thirteen.”

Selene’s Lux spell illuminated a muddy swamp, before the darkness seemed to push back at it, compressing it to a small orb. I tried casting mine, and it was a mere candle, wisping in and out of existence.

“Stay close,” Selene warned. “I’ll lead the way.” She stepped forward, and her foot squelched as it sank ankle-deep into the mud.

“El, you’d better ride with her.” I couldn’t use my flaming Harden spell if the raccoon was too close to me. As a matter of fact, if I were within the reach of Selene’s light, any usage of that spell would be a danger to everyone. But if I were too far away, I’d be prone to ambush in the gaping darkness.

Then again, I was more durable than the others, at least Selene and El. “How about this: I patrol around the outside. Artem can be the up-close defense. Spellcasters in the center.”

“Don’t presume to make plans for me,” grunted Artem, looking even more menacing than usual in the half-light. Thankfully, despite his words, he moved in closer to the spell-casters.

I stepped away into the darkness, activating both Harden and my pitifully weak Lux. Mud burbled around my ankles as it boiled, throwing up a smell of decay. My shield of flames combined with my magic lantern to create a flickering light that enabled me to see a few feet. Nothing but mud and scraggly weeds. I swept at a perimeter around our party in a wobbly orbit, until I bumped into a looming wall that didn’t burn at my touch.

“They’re tree trunks,” Selene said when I asked. “They go up all the way to the next floor.”

I squinted upwards and didn’t see anything above us other than pitch blackness, then got a bit dizzy and refocused. The surface of the swamp rippled near us, and a bubble popped. I shivered and tried to keep moving. A few seconds later, I shivered again. My hair seemed to be standing on end.

“Feels like we’re being watched,” El’s voice said.

“What?” Artem stopped walking, and there was urgency in his tone.

“I said, someone’s watching us.”

We stopped moving. There was a splashing sound in the distance, and I tried to cast Examine on it, blindly indicating the rough direction.

???

Error: Unable to scan entity. Please ensure that lighting is adequate and/or approach the entity for better results.

“El,” I said, my heart thumping. “Firecracker on three. One, two…”

BANG! El let loose a Firecracker somewhere in the distance, illuminating the entity briefly. Just as she did, I pointed a curled finger to examine it.

? Witness

This ?????? ??? ?? ??? floating eye ?? ?? ???? deadly.

???’? ?????? ?????? paralytic gaze ?? ??? ??? mental attack ???????

The brief glimpse I caught was of a floating orb with far too many eyeballs. There was a screech, and then a strange whirring sound that grew louder and louder along with muddy splashes. Artem’s voice came rapidly, and he sounded as nervous as I’d ever heard him. “Lights off. Now.” The light in Selene’s hand went out, and the group of three vanished, replaced by darkness. I deactivated Lux, but a dim red glow still suffused me.

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“I can’t—”

The eye was on me. I looked at the floating eye and the eye looked back at me. I looked at the floating eye and the eye looked back at me. My mind turned inward on itself like a snake eating its own tail, like a painting by that surrealist artist, what was his name. Escher. That's right, M. C. Escher, he of the impossible staircases that went around and around and around and around into eternity, and the other one too, the pencil rendering of the hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing—oh God let me out—hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands—somebody, please help—drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands drawing hands and then the world seemed to jump; everyone was gone, and I stood alone in the darkness.

I felt a sudden stab of hunger. Looking down, the mud had completely boiled away, exposing hard-cracked dirt around my burning ankles. A significant amount of time had passed. The eye had frozen me, locked me in a loop in my own head, for how long? Hours, possibly.

“Artem? Selene? El?” I called each name in turn. “Is anyone there?”

My voice was swallowed up by the infinite dark. I sounded muffled and childlike, and it suddenly seemed an attractive idea, if only for an instant, to retreat to the warmth and artificial sun of Shinar, or even the beach with its giant crabs. Master Shaw was a reasonable man; he would understand.

Then, there was a sound like a riffled deck of cards, and I froze. Inching towards the source, I twitched my fingers, ready to set off an explosion at a moment’s notice. The ground rose up out of the muck at a shallow angle, and on that cracked earth, I saw a body lying prone, illuminated by a weak spell-light. Selene. I backed up a good distance away to detonate my shield, then ran up next to her.

Her eyes went into and out of focus, and her white robes were stained red and gray. She lay on top of some scrawled characters on the ground that I couldn’t read. Sharp burrs stood up out of her skin, and I saw that they were needles. Her braceleted hand looked like a porcupine, pierced through by hundreds of spines. The other hand was unharmed, and I felt a sudden chill. It was almost as if whatever had gotten her had aimed to disable the biggest threat, her spellcasting. There was an uncanny intelligence behind that reasoning. Selene looked at me like she would say something, then her eyes rolled back up in her head as she passed out, her Lux spell winking out at the same time.

I desperately fumbled a health bar from my pocket, broke some bits off from the corner, and rolled them in my fingers. They crumbled easily, like granola, but as I placed them in her mouth, she hacked violently and turned from me, still unconscious. Too dry.

After some thought, I scrounged in my inventory to find a mortar and pestle and used them to grind up the remainder of the health bar. The contents of a can of refreshing soda joined the powder, forming a kind of rough slurry. I gently poured a little of the mixture down her throat and waited to see if she would choke. It seemed okay, so I added a little more. The whole process felt strange and unfamiliar to me. I wasn’t even used to taking care of myself, let alone another person.

Her eyes fluttered open, and I was surprised at how glad I felt, as she began to cough. Two or three needles pushed out from her skin as the mixed restorative took effect.

“Tastes… bad…” she strained.

I squinted at the labels on the bar and soda. “Tofurkey and cherry cola. Sorry.”

She said nothing, just closed her eyes, leaving her mouth open, and I fed her another sip of the evil-looking mixture. More needles popped out of her flesh to lay in the muck.

“What happened?” I asked. “The eyeball froze me, and next thing I knew, I was alone.”

“We have to do something… about that shield,” she said. “We were… attacked. Separated.”

Alarm spiked within me. “By Mia? Where are El and Artem?”

“Don’t know,” she murmured. “Tired.”

“We can’t rest here,” I said. “This isn’t safe.”

She looked at me, and I saw a deep sadness, more than fear or anger. That scared me more than the dark, the resignation that I perceived in her eyes.

“Is there, like, a coffee potion or something?” I asked.

Selene started laughing weakly, and then she punched me in the stomach as hard as she could, which, somewhat concerningly, didn’t hurt at all.

----------------------------------------

I was alternating feeding Selene painfully small sips of my improvised potion and chewing on candies myself, when text bloomed on my udjat. I had unlocked another spell.

Your dexterity has increased to Mediocre!

Your dexterity and Corpus aspect have unlocked a new technique!

You’ve learned the basic technique Quicken, a spell of ephemeral speed.

Energy consumption: Moderate.

It was the same ability that Mia had used in our forest encounter, manifesting with a green aura. When I tried it at first, my movements were so quick that they were uncontrollable, and I almost knocked over the bowl of healing gruel. When I had time, I’d have to practice with it more. But for now, the priority was finding the rest of our party.

“Would an oracle reading help us figure out where El and Artem went?” I asked.

“I’m out of crab shells,” said Selene. She’d recovered enough to talk more, and propped herself up on her elbows. Even in the dim light, I could tell that her eyes had recovered some of their usual sharp clarity. “We need to find something hard and organic, like a bone.”

I had the intensely inappropriate urge to make a that’s-what-she-said joke.