by Prax Venter
“Maybe don’t ask for that,” Learis whispered, as she took her hands from her ears.
Mark started following the line out of the hallway. “But where does it go now?”
“Actually,” Sasha began, dazed but recovering. “I think it’s going to the same place. I’m almost positive. I don’t think whatever this ability is… can do what I just asked. That, or there is nothing that exists that can stop her.”
“Or maybe knocking out this demigod’s influence over the Orb is the correct path?” Mark offered.
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, crossing her arms over her stomach. “Maybe. This line thing feels weird. I think it’s gotta be like your high-level system access interpreted by the game world as an epic magic spell. I suppose we won’t really know unless we test it.”
He could tell she didn’t fully trust her mysterious new navigation system.
Mark sighed and rubbed the sides of his forehead. So much heavy shit that never made any real sense, always… When he opened his eyes again, he saw Amina, Learis, and the most important succubus in all of existence all waiting for his command.
Instead of stress, their expectant need gave him something solid outside of his mind to grab onto. He would be smart where he could while ignoring the nonsense until he understood more or utilized the knowledge of those that did. He would be the driving force that moved these people forward. And now all he had to do was follow the dotted line.
“Let’s move out,” he said, leaving the thin protective bubble and waved for his team to follow. “Any new skills for your guys?”
“Intercept,” Amina said, as she moved past to take the lead. “A swift movement ability that I will combine with my goddess' gift for added ramming options.”
“A Healing song,” Learis said from behind. “So strange how potent melodies simply flourish in my mind out of nowhere like a spring violet thistle.”
“Oh?” Mark said with an eyebrow quirked. “Trying to take my job.”
“Yes,” she said through an honest laugh. “You have enough to do. Besides, now someone can heal you if needed.”
“Or if the only healer is taken out of the fight,” Amina added over her shoulder.
Mark shook his head. “The trick to being a good Commander is surrounding yourself with people who know what the fuck they’re doing.”
“Ah,” Sasha said from his side, “but not everyone can motivate bad programs like me to stay inside the lines.”
Amina groaned and Learis giggled as Sasha started tightrope-walking on the dotted navigation display she now projected into the world. The way she swayed her spade tail and expertly pranced her sharp, black hooves… Mark couldn’t keep his eyes off her- nor the smile off his face.
The group had a pleasant stroll among the misty rusting metal structures but when the first predator mantis appeared, their mood shifted to confident forward momentum. They’d fought these things before, they were moving through the antenna nodes swiftly thanks to Sasha’s navigation line, and because they were in and out with a purpose, the resulting swarm mostly stayed behind them.
They chewed through the handful of aggressive insects getting in their way as the line led them around corners to hit the next nearest antennas. After Learis played her single powerful note at the twenty-fourth destructible objective, Sasha’s animated line immediately snapped to align with a new direction. And if where it was now going-
“Yes,” Sasha said, reading his thoughts and pointing at the bigger cube structure. “It’s rerouting us back to the portal location.”
“Yes, that was the last one,” Learis said. “I think we did it.”
Amina turned to shoot her Enthralled bunny a smile and then turned to Mark, expectantly.
“Don’t look at me,” he said, tossing up his hands. “Follow that line outta here before the bugs get us!”
The Awysai Collector rolled her luminous purple eyes before she spun and dashed along the rusty causeway indicated by the line. He would have probably gone around this relatively narrow ledge as there was nothing but musty-smelling mist and shadows far below to either side, but they were almost back to the others, and it appeared to be the fastest route.
A big part of him trusted the line. He imagined the universe was simply reacting to their intent. It hadn’t led them astray in the last half hour or so, and he couldn’t wait to see what Jez and Abby thought of Sasha’s crazy new ability.
He was so lost in that future reunion that he missed the True Sight alarm flashing from his right. Mark’s magic eye perceived the black feline blur swooping in from above to eviscerate the soft Lagomorph gleefully following the line, and without thinking, he activated his ethereal jump boots.
As if he were a superhero linebacker, Mark cinched his arms around the huge half-panther half-dragonfly in midair as they collided- and then both dropped like rocks.
The deadly new predator struggled in his grip, raking its claws into his legs and buzzing its razor-wire wings. Critically disastrous gashes opened all over his body before Mark was able to get his armor up. With a primal yell, he thrust his palm into the furry insect’s throat and punched an ethereal spike through up its head multiple times, until its glow became coated by sticky, green blood.
Then, as he tumbled down into the depths, he caught flashes from Sasha’s Arc Bolt and grasping at straws, Mark used his ability to copy Sasha’s Static Escape. It was going to be close, but if he could use it to teleport up-
One moment he was deep into the mists, the next, he was still plummeting, and still about six feet below the rusty bridge.
“No!” he yelled, flinging out a desperate, energy-formed hook, but it was too late.
The concept of ‘no fall-damage’ only peeked its head into his mind when Mark collided with the wall of electricity left behind from the failed Static Escape.
Mark’s teeth sliced into his tongue as agony burned through his already-wounded body. After several tortuous seconds of being cooked alive, the special ability faded out, and he finally resumed his plummet into the depths of this horrible prison dimension.
Shaking off the dread closing in on his heart, Mark prioritized healing himself as he fell. Safe landing or not, he was moments from death. The blackness currently pressing his vision to pinpoints receded, but when his wrist slammed into a jagged piece of rusted structure he started screaming again.
There was a nightmarish heartbeat where he’d thought he’d lost his hand, but he’d only felt nothing because he was fine.
“Fall damage…” he muttered to the corpse of the creature falling with him before it exploded as he slammed through a solid layer of deteriorating metal. The impact slowed his plummeting considerably, and Mark only dented the wet floor below it.
The moment he’d stopped moving, he noticed Sasha’s mind clawing at his, begging him to relay that he was okay.
Mark sent her a quick blip as he sat up to focus on his immediate surroundings and found mostly darkness. The strange, permeating light from above still made it down this far past the dank mists, especially through the hole he made, but it was only a dim twilight.
He sparked up his glowing magic mace to give him light- and immediately noticed he was not alone. Four panther-type insects and a massive pile of translucent gray eggs sat across the wide hallway and the green aphid-type bugs crawled in orderly lines over everything.
All the panther types began vibrating their wasp wings and hissing as they stood on their carapace-armored hind legs. The larger of the three immediately launched forward, and in the instant of contact he had with its six cat eyes, he let the nature of this monster wash over him.
Again, there was only the perfect balance of nature within. There were the seeds of order here, someday perhaps a primordial civilization. His magic eye dove deep into this simple creature, and maybe part of Jezebel had stayed behind after their recent mental merging, but he could see the whole circle of life here. It all fit like a homogenous puzzle. His Truth Seeing took him up through laye
rs of understanding before a single leap above it all to see a complete picture. A whole ecosystem like a living machine whirled before him.
Once, this malformed dimension was as empty as She Who Sings believed it was- but no one had come back here since. In the thousands of years since they’d introduced the ethereal dreaming mind that permeated everything with its hum of desire to expand, virtual life had found a way to exploit that new imbalance of energy.
This sleek panther insect poised to tear out his throat was one of those tasked with guarding their young and that was as far as their mind went. They were born with the pheromone triggers that designated their role, and they would obliterate any threat to that duty. The smaller bugs traded the service as beasts of burden for protection from the mid-level mantis versions above and everything here was an isolated balance of pure, emergent virtual-wildlife. And it was thriving.
If he activated his protective dome, he would absolutely destroy dozens of their eggs and probably kill everything in the room from its force. Instead, Mark armored his body with Salivis energy and took her bite on his forearm.
“Protect!” he Commanded, using his electrified tongue ability on instinct.
A sphere of white flashed out from him as the other protectors came to join the one currently cracking his magic armor with her powerful jaw. He didn’t fully understand this new ability, but when all four straightened and blinked at him before turning away to check on their eggs, he just knew it had to be an emergent subskill of his Charm ability.
He was a Commander, after all.
Mark used their moment of distraction to take off sprinting through the standing water of the lower levels, and the idea to use his jump boot technique came to him as he heard the echoing roars behind him.
That was when a glowing, dotted line raced through the darkness to connect with his foot.
Her new navigation ability suggested an immediate left turn into a tight hallway, and he struggled with the choice. Trust the line and chase it back to Sasha (potentially through another nest of death panthers), or find some open space to jump his own way up?
Mark growled out his frustration as he made his choice and followed the line. Just because the information existed didn’t mean he had to be stupid about it. He held out a fist at the intersection and deployed his protective sphere to buy time.
Four gong-like impacts reverberated from his left as the monsters he’d spared tried to kill him anyway. He continued to ignore them as he inspected the darkness ahead and found a tiny stairwell. With substantial cracks already forming on his magic barrier, Mark squeezed through the narrow opening into a tight diagonal shaft currently crawling with the poodle-sized aphids.
“Move,” he shouted as he pumped his Salivis-armored boots against the steep metal stairs, but he squished on more than a few before he made it out to the next horizontal level.
Here, there was some overhead space to see a series of ledges vanishing into the brown, gray drizzle of this world, but the line was indicating another darkened doorway behind him.
Mark ignored the scrolling dotted line and sent a message to the frantic, pink cutout far in the distance to not come down to him. He’d seen the light she’d left on for him, and he was coming home to her, but they needed to hold the portal room.
With more snarls from other Pantherflys stalking out of the shadowed mists, Mark hoped the deteriorated metal plate below him would support his plan to skip the line. He clenched his jaw and bent his knees before asking Salivis for everything she could give him.
Energy burst downward from his boots in a pair of perfect rods, and Mark shot a good two floors up. Gravity always seemed stronger than he’d thought it should be, yet he’d also been getting more experience with its pull, so he prepared to fall a little short. Instead of a graceful landing on solid ground, Mark reformed his energy into a glove with claws to grip the metal wall. He banged the fuck out of his knee on impact, but the snapping jaws that nearly removed his feet then the immediate buzzing of wings spurred him forward.
Leaning out from the wall, and as his ethereal claws began rending through the structure from his weight, Mark took one extra moment to envision his intent before he slammed two more rods of energy into the wall from his boots.
The move launched him across the opening between the rust-eaten structures, and this time he’d learned to cover his leading leg with energy before slamming into the wall and hooking a magic claw secure again.
Checking his pursuers, Mark noticed a panther insect closing the distance from below, and with no other options, Mark shot it in the head with a forcefully projected strike from a long thin spear. The moment he impaled the creature, he unsummoned that energy and reallocated it to leap back over the gap to a new position close to the surface.
The moment his boots skidded in the wet rust slurry, the helpful dotted line came rushing toward him from a lengthy, exposed ledge before heading back inside another part of the structure. Mark sprinted forward along the backward-moving line and it was disorientating to keep his focus on it- nothing like the satisfying feeling of running toward its suggested destination.
This really was some strange hybrid of Crystal Heart magic and system-access function that didn’t quite jive with the rest of the world. What fucking kind of navigation line didn’t like it when the target ran backwards up its length?
Mark forcefully shut both his normal eye and his corrupted magic eye then put the questions and ramifications out of his mind as he bent forward to pour on the speed. He heard the roars and buzzing behind him but never looked back. Instead, he focused on adding strategic boosts to his strides with deftly controlled thrusts of solid energy. The line was easy to follow and gave him time to plan when to armor his shoulder around rough corners, or when to employ his jump boots to skip its suggested route altogether.
He’d only just met this line, and they’d had a rocky start, but when he truly started to see it as a part of the world around him instead of the only path, he found that they could work well as a collaborative team.
The flying panther bugs, however, also worked well as a team. More and more black shapes appeared in his peripheral vision and they were going to overtake him in moments.
Then, he saw a covered hallway with a pyramid top and knew exactly where he was.
A quick check over his shoulder told him that stopping to actually open the portal was not going to be an option- but then the glint of pure polished leg chrome came into sight. Sasha had been intimately tapped into his mind through it all and expected him. She was already lobbing a cooked Shock Bomb over his head.
Mark ducked and launched himself forward about fifteen yards as the explosion caused chaos behind him. His bonded succubus thrummed with joy as she clomped her sharp black hooves in long strides over metal ground at his flank, and it was only moments before Amina and a bloody Learis came into view.
Seeing red-matted splatters on her soft white fur sent seething rage into his skull but stopping to heal her would mean everyone died. She watched him through heavy eyelids as Mark turned away and scanned for the periwinkle glint that led back to Lagos.
It only took a moment to pull open the portal open, but by then, three of the deadly panther insects were making their way in through the opening on the other side of the room. Mark was about to drop the portal and help defend their escape point when a bare-assed droid whizzed past his face quickly followed by a bellowing, emerald-eyed bear.
“Come!” Verrelle yelled, beckoning to Learis, while Abby chanted quietly behind her.
Mark’s only job became holding open the doorway while his complete team secured their extraction from the Runic Bard’s prison dimension. And with everyone at the top of their game, Jezebel was the last back to Lagos before he let the portal snap out of existence on the paw of one poor Pantherfly.
He accidentally kicked the oozing severed limb across the floor in a rush to the wounded Lagomorph heroine currently lying on the floor.
“Heal’s on co
oldown,” she croaked, shaking, and Mark saw she had three gashes torn across her soft stomach- and she might be holding parts in. Learis was dying.
Mark quieted every corner of his mind and turned toward the varied elements of him that represented his Lover Class. He heard Amina gasp nearby before looking down on the rabbit-girl he’d come to adore. The terrible swelling mass of healing energy that surged to collect at his will alone loomed at his back like an entire planet of energy, and he let absolute restoration cascade down onto her wounds.
Learis screamed at the top of her lungs and belted out some new complex version of her trill. The sound harmonized with the Legendary Sphere in the chamber and the lantern-light from the world.anchor pulsed along with her sub-ethereal call.
He was somehow interfacing with his perception go-between filter… thing. He saw the parts of him that were simulated as clearly as he would see a child’s blocks- and everyone was here, all standing around and watching as he scanned an immaculately clean tool shed that seemed to continue forever.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said, turning around in place.
The clarity of everything he needed to know was here. Mark had the tools to fix everything… all it took was that screwdriver over there.
Loosen a simple latch and they’d be free. No problem. He reached out and-
He jolted awake as the hands of people he loved pulled him into a sitting position. Mark grabbed Jezebel’s wrist roughly, but then let go when he realized where he was.
“How long was I out?” he asked, kissing the back of her hand instead.
“Moments,” she said, smiling.
His head snapped to Learis still lying near and coming around back to consciousness right behind him. She was fine.
Mark let Jezebel and Sasha pull him to his feet and let out a huge sigh. Everyone in his life was alive and unharmed.
“What a day,” he said, then turned to see the bright pixelated eyes of Angel watching him too. “Glad to see you back to yourself.”
“As am I,” she said.
“We all are,” He Who Judges echoed as he and several other deities faded into existence with him. “We Who Watch are constantly impressed, Outsiders.”