When you have the luxury of time, choices can be easy. You can gather all of the data you need and spend time analyzing every aspect of the options available to you. Unfortunately life rarely allows such a luxury, even for people such as ourselves.
Despite everything we’ve built and everything that we’ve become there are choices that require split-second decision making without access to all of the necessary information to make the best choice possible.
To the remaining members of the board, I say this; What happened to Chief Compliance Officer Verit Mau’sk and Entity Resources Officer Hanni Pesh was the effect of such a choice. It was a terrible choice, made in the darkness of ignorance and with the squeeze of limited time. Also, I wish you all to recognize, it was a choice that we would have made again if necessary.
Later today when we gather for the memorial service, remember that it could be one of you who has to make the next choice…or be on the receiving end of its conclusion.
Ad Astra Quia Oportet.
-Chairwoman Nina Ellory, Ad Astra Space Shipping, Passenger, Mining, Acquisitions, Exploration and Exploitation Corporation.
Alex was still lying prone in the middle of a battlefield. Intellectually he knew that. He also knew that right now he was also standing in an ocean of green mists that curled and twisted around him lazily. What this meant, he realized, was that he was still very much in danger physically, with one of those feeder creepers stuck to his leg.
Sometimes, Alex mused, I sort of wish I COULD panic more.
He stood within the shifting mists, peering around for anything recognizable. There was a strange sense of pressure all around, as if the universe itself were very subtly hugging Alex just a tad more tightly than was comfortable.
Time passed - a second, a minute, it was impossible to tell here - and the green mists thinned ahead. Alex raised an eyebrow at the strangeness he saw. Hanging in the air was a shifting tool - one moment it was a hammer, the next a screwdriver, then a pot of glue. It shifted between so many things that Alex was mesmerized by the flowing, twisting shapes.
Instinct tugged at his awareness, and Alex found he had a name for the morphing thing: it was his skill, [Repurpose], hanging in the air unable to move forward. Alex sensed that it was incomplete; He had used the skill desperately at the last moment, but hadn’t really had in mind what exactly he was attempting to do with it.
“Well, I guess I should-”
~Grow.~
Alex stopped, half-reaching toward his skill as if he could touch it physically. The voice he heard wasn’t in his ears. It came from within himself as well as all around the shrouding mists.
“Hello?” he called softly.
~Grow. Grow. Push. Seed. Grow.~
Alex’s brow furrowed here in this strange place as his mind was subjected to images of warm sunlight, gentle rain, and the soft caress of ambient magic. Urges rose within his heart, to stretch out - branch out - and bloom.
~Grow. We grow. Yes.~
The impressions were basic - elemental, even. A simple drive, with only the barest hints of intellect behind it. Alex felt that what he could sense was smarter than a base animal, but not on par with the average human.
“Hello, ” he said again. He wasn’t sure if the thing could hear him, so Alex gently pushed feelings of calm, of peace, and of gentleness into the words he spoke, “I’m Alex. I’m here to fix things.”
~Grow. We grow.~ A moment of strangeness, a spark of uncertainty rose in the mists. ~Fix? Broken. Not growing. Dead <@@@>~
Alex shook his head. Whatever word the entity was trying to convey was either too alien or far beyond his understanding. However, the images that flashed along with it were easier. A cold place. Sharp and sterile. Artificial sun blazed. The flash of burning lights. Frozen, dead threads weaved within the tiniest of forms. Foreign objectives were pushed within a nascent sapience. Then, a plant, no more than three inches high, sealed away and force fed terrible energies that burned and burned and burned.
Alex cried out, but it wasn’t just the human that did so. The entity - the sapling - cried out with him, or perhaps he with it. It cried out in fear, in abject loneliness. It searched for the forest but found only poison and cold.
~Grow? Need grow. Broken. Fix?~
More images. These flashes were different. A sudden rush of far more poison than ever before that threatened to overwhelm. Splintering directives. Dissolving purpose. Then, need. The need to be more. The need to not be alone.
~Connection. We. Grow. All One. Grow.~
Alex understood. He didn’t quite know how, but he understood. A sapling alone was nothing. A Dendrian, for that’s what it had been, was a forest of minds and bodies; Root systems intertwined and consciousness stretched across impossible distances. All was shared, and all was growth.
Alex sent soothing thoughts to the sapling, and felt his mind drawn into its sensations. Loneliness. Hurt. A purpose lost. A need to grow and change. To bloom. Alien things, unknown and unseen, spliced dead threads within its form, changing it. Repurposing it to be a purifier of poison. Of entropy.
Holism. A system made. The entropy sink gathers the entropic energies. The sapling draws them in and purifies them. It then sends that purified energy outward, powering the carriage. A living creature suspended in time, twisted and forbidden from true growth, kept apart from a forest it never knew but through genetic memory passed from plant to seed.
~Alone.~
“Yes.” Alex murmured. “So you used the power surge - the dungeon break - to reshape the immediate environment. But it wasn’t alive like you are. The scenery, the mosses and trees and vines were all just made of dungeon stuff. Of entropy reshaped. It wasn’t the forest. So you reached out further.”
Images flowed past Alex’s mind faster now. Living beings. Running. Shouting. Panic, screaming, flailing, and then joining with the sapling. Joining with the forest. All those people would become the forest. As would Alex.
“I am not part of the system.” Alex disagreed gently. The sapling pressed that he could be. The human disagreed. “I am not your forest.”
A pang of loneliness. Of sadness.
~Not forest?~
“No.”
~POISON?~ A singular image - a small glowing red gemstone on a rocky pedestal, deep within a cave system guarded by a giant fungus-infected crab. The crab was dead, thorny vines piercing it, crushing its carapace and digging deep into the crustacean’s bulk.
“No. I’m not part of the dungeon either. I’m from…”
There were images again, but this time in the opposite direction. Alex pushed his own memories toward the entity that was all around and within him. The woods he’d walked in as a teen. The great forests on the northern border cut with a great bare line that he’d camped upon illegally whilst practicing diplomacy with great hairy man-beasts. The Appalachian Trail, which he hadn’t walked yet but one day hoped to. The Amazon rainforests, and the Daintree in northeastern Australia.
“My forest.” he said. The sapling gave this some consideration - though again Alex had no knowledge of passing time.
~Not my forest.~ Sadness. Yearning. ~Your forest.~
The sapling felt regret. Alex could sense within his still-prone body back in whatever passed for the real world that thin tendrils of vine that had started to work up through his leg were retreating, gently sliding out of him.
Alex concentrated on what the sapling had been made into. Though his heart rebelled at taking this creature, this almost-person as what amounted to an infant and twisting it into something that Ad Astra could use, his skills and talents strongly suggested that if the system were not repaired that the entire carriage would go dark. No power, and no life support.
With regret, Alex sent careful thoughts to the sapling. It needed to be fixed. It needed to go back to purifying and distributing. The fighting needed to end. The search for the forest needed to end. Alex hated himself in that moment as he tried to convince something that was even less cognizant than a child to choose loneliness.
He just didn’t know how else to stop what was happening outside of this misty nothingness.
“None of the people connected to you are part of the forest.”
~Not forest. Yet.~
It had allowed Alex to not become part of the new forest, but the sapling was not willing to let go of so many others that still remained connected. Alex had memory of his forest. These others had nothing of the kind; None of them had ever seen a single leaf in their lives.
“They are not part of the process. You need to purify the energy you receive, and send it on. Let them go.”
~Alone. Lost. Grow? Forbidden. Halted. Cold.~
“I know. But if you go back to how things were, I promise to do what I can to…do something. I don’t know what. But I will help.”
~Promise?~
“Yes.” Alex nodded, and then sensed puzzlement. The word was unknown, the feeling was foreign. Trees did not lie, they simply lived, so the need to assure was alien. “A promise is…” How can I explain a promise to something that has no concept of requiring one? “A duty. A purpose.”
The tree sent back a series of images, poorly constructed. These were not what had been, but what could be. It released those that still remained connected to it. The crabs would overwhelm it. The tree would die.
“No. I think we can fix that, too.” Alex said firmly, and an idea started to form itself in his mind. “Actually, I think I have a way to solve this.”
The problem was the excess energy. From Alex’s admittedly limited understanding, the entropy sink pulled in environmental entropy and used it to make its dungeon. He had a sneaking suspicion that his arrival and the subsequent damage it had caused had made entropy spike in the area, overwhelming the dungeon which then started to push more and more energy into the sapling. Energy that had broken past whatever limitations or instructions Ad Astra had written into its genetics, causing the strange overgrowth of entropy-ridden trees and vines to burst forth, awakening the consciousness within the sapling that still remembered a place it had been sprouted in centuries ago.
“The energy has to be used up - it needs to be pulled in and purified. Not forcefully, like your attack on the dungeon entrance is, but the way it was before.”
~Too much. Chaos. Uncontrolled. Limited.~
“Yes. It’s too much for Ad Astra’s infrastructure to handle. But, “ Alex pushed out a sense of determination, “With that excess energy, purified to no longer be laced with entropy, you can use my memories of the forest. This place - the cargo bay, “ Alex quickly defined the approximate area in his mind and pushed the image out, “We can make a small forest. A woodland? I’m not sure what it would be called. We can give you a forest.”
It was too much for the simple consciousness to process. Too many words, too many concepts all at once. Alex felt the confusion, laced with a yearning desperation. There was one that it latched on to, one that radiated with its desires.
~Give…forest?~
“Yes. I don’t know if it’ll work, I’m not an expert at all this, but you’ve already created something with entropic energy and fuzzy memory. Why not use good energy, and my memories which are much fresher?”
~Give forest. Give forest.~ A feeling of excitement began to build. ~Give forest!~
“Yes! Exactly.” Vod’ll probably kill me, but this cargo bay is already overwhelmed. Might as well use it. “I can help with my memories, but also with my skills. The [Repurpose] there will probably help with that. ” Alex pointed to the skill that still shifted and shimmered in the air, held in stasis in this misty realm of thought.
~Not alone.~
“Right!” Alex started to relax. He had the sapling on board with the idea, all he needed to do was-
~Not alone! NOT ALONE!~
The excitement that had been slowly building rose to a crescendo. The feeling was literally visible in the air as swirls of mist danced and spun energetically. Then Alex gasped, his mind split with sudden pain as a sensation of otherness seized control of something within him.
~NOT ALONE.~
~({[REpuRpOSe]})~
A tremendous surge of energy rushed through Alex - none of it belonging to him. He felt something break within himself and agony washed over every inch of his body and mind. He opened his mouth and screamed, and screamed and screamed.
*
When Alex fell, Step snarled in frustration. She’d been ordered by Vod to keep the human safe, at least so much as she could without sacrificing herself. The short time she’d spent with Alex hadn’t really endeared the man to her; Alex was far too wishy-washy and gentle to be useful - in her eyes, anyway. Still, she played the dutiful follower up to the point that things became truly crazy.
The mousekin charged at one of the chloromunculi, and with her athletic skills she used it like a springboard before the creature could respond. Alex had one of those vines stuck to him, and Step raced forward with her sickles at the ready to cut it away from the man before he could end up like the others.
When Step was halfway to the prone [Mender], the tree began to coalesce a fog of dark energy. Her sensitive ears heard the crackle of bark splitting, and then the dark energy lit up in a blaze of bright white light. Along its branches, little buds began to grow and swell and then burst open into dozens - no, hundreds - of pollen-light flowers.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Energy flowed through the multitude of vines that stretched everywhere, and everywhere the energy blazed more flowers erupted into bloom. The tree groaned as its blooming vines attached to the dungeon entrance began to split and crack open, weeping dark fluid that slimmered with tiny pinpoints of white light.
Step felt a strangeness to the air, a sort of breath being drawn in, and though she had no true ability to see entropy in its base form, she just knew that the tree was drawing into itself as much of the ambient entropic energy as it could handle. The stone tiers cracked and parts of them dissolved as their energies were absorbed.
All around the tree, the shrub-like constructs Alex had been working on began to smoke and hiss, a mixture of dark fluid and white droplets of energy bubbling from their compromised shells. Step felt overwhelmed, her senses under assault from the light and sound as the energy shot through the connected feeder creepers, and then-
Screams. From all over the slowly crumbling colosseum-like construction, so many screams.
*
Patina was doing good. Not good as in well, but good as in Doing Good Things. Being up here was starting to feel good. People were up and moving, helping each other as they rose from their strange slumber. There were still many still connected to the tree via those horrible creepers, but things were moving forward.
When the number of people being freed had tapered off and then stopped as Alex was caught up in his attempts to avoid injury, Patina was close to making the executive decision to start yanking or cutting the creepers away from the hundreds of people still attached. After all, Alex was simply cutting from the other end, so it made sense that they could-
The air changed. A heavy pressure bore down upon the people all across the tiered stone construct, and then it was gone again just as quickly. From below, Patina saw the damned tree that was causing all the problems light up, a blazing star of energy that hurt her eyes to look at. And then flowers began to erupt with little pops and cracks, traveling up the vines and creepers.
And then everyone was awake - every single person still trapped was released in an instant, the feeder creepers festooned with glowing flowers pulling back from their bodies with the nastiest little suckling sound Patina had ever heard.
As people awakened en masse, Patina and the more with-it rescued souls began to move faster; Moving between folks, talking, pleading, reassuring, urging them all to stay calm despite the strange scene far below. The little goblin grinned. They were doing it! They were succeeding! This was heroic work - it wasn’t just fighting, she was saving people.
“Everyone is gonna be okay, “ she said aloud, almost laughing at the surge of activity as more and more of her people came to wakefulness. The cargo bay was getting brighter, new light-pollen emitting flowers bursting open everywhere. We’re winning, Patina thought.
And then someone started to scream. And another. And another. All across the stone tiers, which were somehow melting and dissolving in places, people were falling to their knees, screaming in agony.
“What-”
Throughout the cargo bay, tremendous detonations rang out as metal screeched and plastic splintered. Gnarled, thick roots erupited from within buried conduits. Flowers budded, bloomed, and turned to strange seeds of chaos. Seeds that sprouted, sucking in all the energy they could, putting down further roots as everywhere, across the floor and up the walls and over the ceiling panels, plant life spread and grew.
It was with bewilderment that turned to horror that Patina found out the swollen buboes beneath the arms of the recently awakened, on their necks, up in their inner thighs, all began to swell and writhe. Shrieking in terror and pain, all around Patina people clawed at their own bodies as tendrils beneath their skin spread and grew.
As the first thorn-covered sprouts split through flesh and reached the open air, Patina was unable to stop herself from throwing up in response. The people started to bloom.
*
>Uncatalogued Entropy-Twisted Bioform defeated. Path Points gained.
>Further Interface messages regarding PP gain muted until out of combat.
Alex barely registered the text; The golden letters were there and gone again before he could read them, even if he had been in any state to process the words in the first place.
Pain. Everything was pain. Alex felt as though he were being used as a garden hose, with a power that he couldn’t begin to comprehend rushing through him instead of water. It burned. It chilled. It tore away at memory and consciousness. This pain would have been, if Alex was in a state to measure such things, the absolute worst he’d ever felt in his life.
And it was overwhelming. Akin to a cork in a storm-tossed ocean, Alex was lost within it, unable to even attempt to regain control. The screams in his head were not only his own, but also the shriek of a desperate child-mind.
~NOT ALONE NOT ALONE NOT ALONE~
Scraps of thought were gathered, only to be washed away again. Part of Alex knew that he had to do something, had to rein in the uncontrolled blast that spread far and wide with his body as part of the conduit. He wasn’t just Alex Orz, a guy from Earth with some small soul-gifted tricks, nor was he a [Mender] and the one tapped to save an impossible train from eventual destruction; No, Alex was in the leaves and branches, carried through roots and sap, blooming on every budding vine.
The Dendrian/Alex flowed outward. Nature screamed to grow and expand, the system sucking in entropy from all around and processing it into something bright and pure and beautiful. They went everywhere they could reach, through every conduit, every power line, every piece of ductwork and corridor. Doors were beaten down, bulkheads smashed through, the paths of resistance crushed beneath the rolling might of the forest reborn from one gene-twisted child.
Not…right… Alex’s brain surfaced for a moment, clarity smacking into him like a poorly thrown life preserver. He had…no…the sapling had…they had taken his [Repurpose] and ran with it, changing everything it could touch. But the system wasn’t just needing redirection, it needed fixing. Alex was a [Mender], and he clung to that one fact fiercely in the face of torment. He had to fix this.
With Herculean effort, Alex tried his best to concentrate on the sapling, the dungeon, the whole system Ad Astra had built as a symbiotic pseudo lifeform. And, desperately, he engaged his skill, [Jury Rig].
>WARNI##@-break-%-y/N?
More pain ripped through Alex as the energies tore at both body and mind. An acknowledgement was needed, but he had no way of knowing what it was warning against. So he answered the only way he could, in this moment and this place.
Yes, he managed.
>FAILURE
>FAILURE
>FAILURE
>SUCCESS
>FAILURE
>FAI-
Alex passed out, consciousness finally giving up against the onslaught that carried him away.
*
Not an incredibly long distance away, two elves leaned against a wall with a relaxed air. Jaek and Helwud had their orders - to guard this doorway, watch for trouble, and if any of the three idiots they had allowed into the duct (which, of course, they had also stacked some heavy crates in front of) tried to come back out, kill them without mercy or hesitation.
There was no loyalty felt toward the mousekin who had been forced to accompany the snotskin and her new human. As far as they were concerned, her death would be one less person on the waitlist for delves into the dungeon - if it were ever somehow usable again.
It was a dull job, waiting, and so the Bruise brothers had fallen back on their usual time-passing activity - developing their characters.
“I’m not saying that it’s unimportant to branch out, I just want hitting things to keep being my main thing, you know?” Helwud rumbled, “When I get my next level-up I want to push further into strength-aligned attributes.”
“You’re plenty strong, my brother, but you need to work on your banter.” Jaek replied with a gentle reasoning to his tone, “Half the time you’re simply echoing my words menacingly which, I admit, can be quite good for the simpler interactions, but we need to expand into dialogue that would elicit more nuanced responses from our victims.”
“Ugh. You’re not going to start suggesting puns again, are you?” Helwud complained. Jaek gave the question some consideration before shaking his head.
“We’ve tried puns before. We received looks from people. We don’t need to bemuse people, we need to amplify our threat level.” Jaek said, adding “As much as we both appreciate violence, we shouldn’t need to get distracted by constant minor skirmishes that a carefully considered remark could resolve.”
Helwud let out a heavy sigh, and cracked his knuckles. “I get it, I do. I just-”
“Hush, “ Jaek cut in, “Do you hear that?”
A rumbling came from beneath the pair, and the sounds of crashing and thumping could be heard very faintly. The clash of heavy strikes against metal. Helwud stiffened and stood up straighter.
“A battle?”
“Something, anyway.” Jaek murmured, eyeing the pile of heavy crates they had placed in front of the vent. “Our heroes may be trying to make a swift exit.”
“They’ll be surprised then, won’t they?” Helwud sniggered. It was a good snigger. He’d practiced it, and his brother had even told him that it was one of the better sniggers he’d heard. Unfortunately the sound of it was lost in the cacophony of screeching metal and heavy blows as the vent slammed open and the solid metal crates went flying across the room.
Thick vines with sharp black thorns surged from the vent, spilling into the room with terrifying speed. Jaek and Helwud steadied themselves, and then charged forward into the verdant battlefield.
*
Self-styled overseer Fabian Vod strolled slowly through the corridors below decks. He was in no great hurry to return to the cargo bay where the remainder of his people still lived. There would be questions, of course, and eventually Vod would have to carefully craft an appropriate tale of woe that not only brought his remaining people closer together but also pressed further blame upon the Ad Astra corporation for their continual neglect of their employees.
After leaving his useful violence-dealers to guard the way back from the other cargo bay, Vod had taken a scenic walk through the corridors, noting to himself things that would need to be looked at if the human somehow survived this - an outcome that wasn’t particularly likely.
If the human and his pet goblin somehow succeeded in fixing whatever had happened in the lost cargo bay - he was already calling it that, and truly didn’t have much hope for anyone to survive in there - then he would certainly find a way to spin that story to his favor. And if the far more likely event of Alex’s failure occurred, well that was just another blood-stained mark in theledger against the corporation. Either way, Vod’s interests could be served.
The [Mender]...he had potential. But potential could certainly disrupt the order of things if not kept carefully directed. Living or dead, Vod would turn Alex Orz into an example that the orc could use - his own very special type of repurposing, he supposed with a chuckle.
There was always a level of background noise to being on board the train. A distant rumbling, and a tremor of the floor plates that hinted at the incredible speeds at which the Relentless Exploitation was traversing the galaxy - this was normal. But Vod paused in his walk as the rumbling increased, and he felt the metal floor beneath his feet tremble.
If this is another shockwave… Vod frowned. The carriage was in no condition to keep taking damage, especially after some of the more serious issues the earlier one had caused or exacerbated. No, this is something different. The sensation didn’t ripple through the carriage like a wave - no, it sounded like it was forcing its way forward with a strength that felt startling to the orc.
From an access conduit built high up on the corridor wall some hundred feet back, scratching and groaning turned to scraping and then a crash as metal and plastic split apart. Vines and creepers poured from the conduit, blooming with glowing flowers that immediately burst and sprayed golden pollen across yards of hallway.
Vod was already running by that point, years of dangerous instinct screaming at him to get as far away as orcishly possible. Behind him, scores of vines grew and moved, blooming more flowers and spraying their corrupted seeds that immediately took root in any crack, crevice, or groove in the molded plastic and metal bulkheads. Grass grew, moss spawned, and more tendrils of thorny vines surged onward in any direction they could.
The destruction Vod could hear as he ran was worrisome, but that was something he would deal with later. For now, he fled, as fast as his muscular body could carry him. The orc was not in bad condition, but the rampant overgrowth was gaining. At a junction he saw another mass of vegetation sweeping forward, root systems pushing up floor plates that split and groaned as the relentless desire to grow overtook any space it could find.
As Vod ran, he started to shout. “Adjunct! Close the blast doors in this section!” The computer didn’t reply, and as Vod was forced to once again change his route due to a pair of actual plant monsters that emerged from swollen vegetable pods. Vod didn’t know this, but they were twice as large as the chloromunculi Alex had encountered. They filled the hallway with their vegetative bulk.
“Adjunct! CLOSE THE FUCKING BLAST DOORS!” Vod screamed, panic rising as he desperately attempted to mentally map out a path back to his own cargo bay whilst charging as quickly as he could to get away.
When no response came again, Vod suddenly realized a very simple truth. The adjunct wasn’t responding because the adjunct couldn’t hear nor see the fleeing overseer. That truth hit him hard as he ran past what he recognized to be a broken camera mount - one of many security devices that had been carefully chosen to suffer unfortunate accidents over the years.
With no hope of digital intervention, Vod ran onward as he bellowed curses at the detestable adjunct and, also, at himself.
*
Alerts rippled throughout Harmony’s systems. She was instantly responding, scanning any and all security devices that were still active. Despite the rumbling and thumping, she was unable to see anything due to so many of the devices not being in good working order.
Without sufficient data, there was little Harmony could respond with in the way of physical action. She couldn’t tell where the problems were coming from - more and more of the carriage was going offline, her senses to it that went beyond the security devices failing. Readouts on carriage systems flickered out, data ceased to flow, and much like a dead limb the computer had trouble recognizing that was being held to the metaphorical hotplate.
By the time the artificial intelligence realized what was happening it was far too late for anything but the more severe of emergency protocols. All along the miles of corridor and countless rooms within the carriage, the lights dimmed and turned a sullen red.
“Security protocol X-Seven in effect. Beginning emergency decoupling process. Time to decoupling:
*By the time Alex came to himself, the mad period of growth had already stopped. Large portions of the initial fecundity that had spawned in the cargo bay were dying off, reduced to thick black sludge that stank of rotten vegetables.
The original entropy-twisted jungle was in the process of being replaced. Alex blinked as he opened his eyes and looked around in confusion. He felt…raw. Inside and out, like someone had taken to the entirety of his being with a wire scourer. There was pain, yes, but it was negligible compared to…
…Alex frowned. He had trouble remembering what had occurred. A sharp sting in his leg forced the man to look down where he saw a little circular wound on his calf that dribbled a mixture of blood and black fluid. He steadied himself by putting his hands palms-down on the thick mat of grass that covered the floor, and then did a double-take.
Grass? Alex’s eyes widened. The floor was indeed grassy, a strange anemic green broad-leaved grass that reminded him of the crab grass his father had battled with for years back home. The sapling still stood, but glowed softly with pale light, and was strung with thin vines covered with pollen-lights. Instead of a colosseum-like structure, the area had been turned into a strange infant woodland, with many trees half-grown up through floor plates, exposing threads of power conduit that they both fed and were sustained by.
Lost in wonder at this strange scene, Alex barely noticed the thin slit that had recently been a torn-open gash in the fabric of reality. Red light glimmered along its length, but the opening was much smaller than it had been. For no good reason but bemusement, Alex shot an [Evaluate] at it.
>Evaluation of Entropy Sink: Working at 100% efficiency. Dungeon entrance: Jungle Cavern, Levels 1-10. Entries per day: 20. Status: Quiescent. Entropy build-up: 0.001%
The dungeon was…fixed? Another glance at the tree and another use of his skill told Alex what he needed to know.
>Evaluation of Ad Astra Power Purification Plant: Working at 100% efficiency. Dendrian base structure stable. Ad Astra proprietary limiter-tech in good working order. Power flow: Normal.
“We did it? We won?” Alex let out a disbelieving chuckle. He sat there in the grass, amazed and bewildered. The most horrifying, terrible, and stressful event he had ever been through was over, and he’d beaten it. Things were working again. Alex felt a surge of triumph in his heart.
A footfall in the grass had Alex turn, and his smile drained away as he took in the beaten and hunched over figure of Patina, who trod heavily toward him. Her face was a mask of dread, and Alex could see thick lines of clean skin down the goblin’s cheeks where she’d been crying.
“Patina!” He tried to get up, but failed. Alex’s body felt weak. “Patina, are you okay? Did everyone get out? Is Step alright?”
“Six.” Patina struggled to say, the words sticking in her mouth. Patina’s throat was thick with grief, and she was on the verge of breaking down. The little goblin leaned on her spear as if it were the only thing keeping her from falling. Alex registered the words, and understood.
Six deaths. That was…not good. But, a certain callous thought suggested, ONLY lives lost isn’t a terrible result considering the sheer number of people that had been in here.
“We lost six? I’m sorry.” Alex said gently. His legs didn’t seem to want to move just yet. They felt rooted to the ground, though a quick examination showed no such issue. “But only six-”
“No, “ Patina interrupted. Her lip trembled, and her wide eyes began to spill over with tears once more. “We saved six.”
We saved six. Six. Out of…
>Notice: Combat complete. 971 Jeweled Crabs defeated. 116 Chloromunculi defeated. 2916 Entropy-Twisted Bioforms defeated. Would you like to see your Path Point tally?
The Interface - Syntropy - registered the tally of everything credited to Alex as a kill if it was an entropic creature. Whether he knew it would have happened or not, when the sapling had taken control of his body, his skills, the people…they had all died. And Syntropy was rewarding him for it.
In that moment of terrible realization, [Unflappable] was overwhelmed by horror and grief.