The light shot down the tunnel like a speeding bullet, searing into the walls with an impenetrable whiteness.

Sen sprinted, his hand on Em’s arm, and his momentum practically dragging her forward as they sped back down the tunnel. They lost ground faster than they gained it. Sen felt the warmth hit him again. Slivers of it struck his back, and the agonizing warmth returned. It wasn’t the scorching heat of Flow overuse. It was a sickly, yellow warmth, filling his lungs like mucus and squeezing down on his organs like a giant, coiling parasite.

It was Odd, trying to change him. Trying to turn him into something that wasn’t him. Sen panted as sweat poured from his forehead. It soaked his face. His shirt. Em was beside him in a similar state, pale and sick, looking as if she were about to puke out her own tongue.

“It’s too quick,” she gasped, heaving as she stumbled after him. “W-We won’t make it!”

“Keep running! I’m trying to—”

Weakness flooded over him. His legs felt like jelly. His bones seemed to deflate in his flesh, flopping down and away, losing the strength and rigidity his limbs were supposed to have. Sen fell. Em tumbled with him.

They crashed to the ground and rolled. Down, and down, into the darkness even as light ate it all away. They hit a wall. Stopped.

Sen laid there in a pile, Em on top of him. He gasped for air like a fish out of water.

He needed a plan. He needed one now.

Think, think, think!

His thoughts whirled. Sen saw Em, trying to crawl up, using the wall for support. But the light was there, scorching, sickening. Sen grabbed her arm as he pulled her close. He reached for the ground as he looked her in the eye.

“Hold your breath,” he muttered weakly, and Sen inhaled. Em sucked in a breath as he wrapped his arm around her back.

His hand touched the floor. Sen spoke a commandment.

“The ground is like water.”

Slrch! They sank. Sen knew he had made a mistake even before his head slipped underground. The floor swallowed them, warm and red and wet, closing in from above as they slipped away. Darkness. Withering came over him through a pounding headache. Liquefied flesh from the ground flooded in overhead, blocking his sight, trying to slither into his eyes and his nose and his mouth. The disgusting, coppery scent filled his nose. Sen wanted to cough. To retch. He forced it down.

Ten seconds passed.

Mortal Commandment wore off.

Instantly, the ground around them turned solid once more. The liquefied muscles in the floor coiled back into form, twisting and writhing around them like a mass of bloody snakes. He felt Em on top of him, trying to wriggle free. She failed. Sen shifted his limbs, but they were trapped. His fingers could barely move. His legs wouldn’t bend, his arms would move away from around Em’s back, and there was nothing but the darkness. The silence. The wet, pressing pulse of his breath and his heart, thundering in his ears and reverberating across his fleshy prison.

More seconds passed. A minute. His lungs started to burn.

Was the sunlight gone? Was it still there? He didn’t know. He couldn’t find out. All he knew was that it was dark and it was tight and he couldn't move an inch. Sen felt himself shifting in place; a frantic, convulsive movement he couldn’t control. He realized it, then. He was breathing faster. He was wasting air.

A notification about the sun came, but Sen couldn’t process it. Instead, his thoughts turned aware of what he had done. His awareness sharpened—lucid, stark; every detail and every sense exploding with color and taste and sound. He felt Em trying to go free. He felt how trapped he was. He felt how the dead flesh around him made everything slippery and moist with tiny traces of blood.

And he was still there. Breathing. Faster and faster, wasting air with every second.

The thought made his heart thunder in his chest. The thought of hyperventilating only made it worse. He was trapped. He was wasting precious air, and he was down here, no Flow to use to leave, buried in the ground with Em. How deep had they sunk? How far up was the surface? He didn't know. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t open his mouth to scream, because that would shorten his breathing, despite his instincts shrieking at him to kick and thrash and shout. Sen knew he should have been thinking of a way to escape like he always did, but the confined space seemed to squeeze at his thoughts, snuffing them into nothing.

Sen’s entire body was frozen; locked tight. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe enough. Cold sweat poured from every corner of him, and he realized what it was. Fear. Horror. The horrible, icy touch of mortality on the pit of gut.

He was buried alive, and Sen was terribly, terribly afraid.

But then Em shifted, and he felt her breath on his neck. Her voice shook as she gripped his shirt with her hands. "I... I need your help," she whispered, her voice hoarse. "...Can I ask you to trust me?"

Sen froze, before slowly, he nodded. "Just get us out," he whispered. "Please."

Em opened her mouth.

"I will. And I'm sorry."

Her mouth closed down. Her teeth tore into his shoulder and Sen gasped as she tried to rip into him. It was like a pinch—right at the edge, a long crescent around her incisors, squeezing a tiny portion away from the rest of his skin. But his skin didn’t tear. It didn’t break or bleed or rip. His attributes and his augments strengthened it, and so Em bit harder. She clenched her teeth like a savage beast, grounding it back and forth, back and forth, again and again and—

She jerked her head to the side—as much as she could, given the tight space—and Sen screamed through his gritted teeth. He felt his skin tear. Ribbon by strand, the way melted mozzarella strung away from a fork.

Em kept jerking her head, tearing away even as his eyes turned bloodshot.

Sen felt the corners of his vision grow dark from the pain and the suffocation. His throat was raw from screaming. Painful. A sickening glop of nausea pooled in his gut, and the tips of his fingers and toes burned as his skin slowly peeled away from his flesh, sheared off with every pull of Em’s teeth. His lungs were burning, now. He was out of breath. And yet, he could only scream as—

Em jerked her head back a final time, and Sen roared as the flesh finally tore away. Blood poured from the wound, and he felt it: Flow.

Em channeled Blood Manipulation, and Sen felt the blood slither out of him.

It formed into a thin, scalpel edge. A knife of blood, sharper and stronger than ever. Sen saw the telltale crimson eyes of Em’s new Ability next to him, her power strengthening her Blood Manipulation skill beyond its limits. The scalpel scraped away at the flesh above them even as Sen’s vision darkened. His head felt light. His lungs were on fire.

Still, the scalpel moved. The dry, essence-deprived flesh fell down in shredded ribbons, and the blood-knife savaged a hole into their prison. Em shifted. She moved her arm and Sen felt it leave his side. Em pushed at the hole she’d cut into the floor and pushed.

The flesh peeled away with a wet tear. She opened a hole to the outside, and rank, coppery air flooded inside.

Sen gasped as it reached him—a deep, lung-dousing breath of relief.

Em continued cutting. The hole widened. She got her arm out. Pushed. The giant scalpel cut sideways, widening the gap, until Em was there, trying to slide out of the hole they’d been trapped in. She grunted as she squeezed out, then—pop! The floor gave away with a wet sound, and Sen watched Em tumble to the side, out into the open.

She hurriedly pushed her hands back inside the hole and Sen grabbed them, clutching an iron grip onto her arms. She pulled him up.

Sen came free.

He rolled out of the hole and onto his back, staring up at the ceiling as he heaved for breath. He felt hot tears streak down the side of his face. He was crying, he realized. Tears of fear or pain or relief. Maybe all three. He didn’t sob, didn’t cry out. Sen just stared at the ceiling, lips trembling as his thoughts went blank.

Em staggered up to her feet. Her teeth were red with his blood; crimson smeared across the side of her mouth. She stared at him with her own set of puffy eyes, her arms wrapped around herself.

She offered him a shaky hand, and Sen breathed a long, shuddering breath.

He took it. Stood. But she didn’t let go of him, and neither did he. He squeezed her hand and he felt her do the same, her grip shaking and her knuckles white. She stared ahead. Silent, just gripping his fingers in hers. It was something both of them needed. A silent, unquestioning comfort. The quiet acknowledgment of a horrific experience only the two of them shared.

Sen and Em walked up the tunnel, up towards the outside.

Neither of them spoke a word on the way out.

The exit to the Nightmare’s underground domain was a wide, gaping hole digging into the ground. And even as Sen and Em walked up to it in silence, they could see the glow of something outside. Faint blues and reds and greens, intermingling in lights that hummed quietly in the darkness.

Sen felt Em’s hand tighten its grip around his. He swallowed as the two of them crept forward, wary, as they approached the lip of the exit. As they did, their steps slowed, and their eyes slowly widened at what was waiting on the other side.

They stopped right before the way out...

And Sen stared at a Dubai he didn’t recognize.

The two of them exited out into the middle of a highway, flanked by massive buildings and full of abandoned cars. Massive skyscrapers jutted out from the ground around them, but instead of glass and steel and lights, Sen saw corals.

Corals. The ones anyone could find in the sea. Giant, looming forms infested every corner of Dubai. Clamshell discs grew out of the side of buildings, and massive clusters of staghorns and blue corals sprouted from the ground, crawling into cars and blooming from the sidewalk. Clusters of seagrass and moss covered every inch of the asphalt, and Sen looked up at a titanic cone-shaped form: a springing up from the ground like a giant, skeletal tree. Its massive, stretching cap cast hundreds of meters below it into shadow, leaving only the faint, twinkling lights of bioluminescent fauna to light the world below.

It was an alien world. A completely sunless wilderness; a forest of coral that lived without water or sunlight. It slept under a dark, moonless sky, resting in a dead city choked by essence.

Sen felt that essence in the air. A thin, dispersed cloud of wild energy. It wasn’t the kind his body usually absorbed from dead monsters. It wasn’t as pure. It was a wild, chaotic thing, drifting in the air in a faint, white fog. In it, Sen saw shapes moving around under the faint coral lights. Dark, scuttling forms, creeping over and under the corals, skittering from shadow to shadow.

He saw flashes of carapaces and many, many legs. Sen glimpsed pale skin and hairy, writhing tongues. He saw shells that waited under corals, breathing. Giant barnacles and clam-shaped pods.

In the middle of all that, even despite the massive corals providing cover, Sen felt exposed.

He tugged on Em’s hand.

“…Let’s find somewhere to hide,” he whispered. She nodded.

The two of them crept into the sea of shells and surfaced sea plants. The living things infesting Dubai seemed to breathe in the essence in the air, using it to survive. Undulating flaps of coral fanned at the mist, inhaling what particles of energy it could siphon from the wind. Sponges released clouds of wet, orange spores, and dark anemone lashed hungry tentacles at the air.

Sen made sure to avoid them as he ducked under the corals’ shadows. Together, he and Em crept away from the outskirts of the infested city. And there, as they passed a store front next to a subway entrance filled to the brim with coral, Sen paused.

Jarir Bookstore, a dead neon sign said. He looked up at it as he let go of Em’s hand, staring at the dark, lightless windows.

Em stood next to him as she looked up at the abandoned store.

“This is near my apartment,” Sen whispered. He looked around and swallowed, a thick lump rasping down his throat. “Is everywhere like this?”

“I don’t know,” Em muttered. “I don’t think I want to know.”

“…Me neither.”

“Where to now?”

Sen turned and looked up at a tall apartment building, spearing up a few streets away from the bookstore’s parking lot. “Let’s go to my apartment,” he said. “It’s that one next to the hotel.”

Em nodded quietly. “Okay.”

The two of them took to the alleys, away from the open main roads. They clambered over the massive corals infesting those sections of the city, climbing up and down obstacles that grew out from the sides of buildings. It was a surreal experience. He'd walked these same paths many, many times in the last three years. And yet, none of them felt familiar anymore. None of them felt safe. Sen led them towards the lip of an alley, and Sen saw a shadow pass overhead.

A low drone filled the air. A call.

And it came from this massive, armored thing. Sen saw the silhouette of a jagged carapace in the mist. He saw its long, writhing limbs, swimming through the air as if it were water, then the six glowing, yellow eyes peering at the corals. Searching. Sen and Em pressed themselves deeper into the shadows, hiding away from its sight.

It was only after the beast drifted away that Sen finally let himself breathe.

He led them further onward, taking long detours to avoid the things hiding in the Fogsea. And once they were finally there, Sen looked up at the two twin apartment buildings that he used to call home.

They were infested by corals, like much of the city. And yet, the corals didn’t crawl inside the buildings. They stayed outside, latched onto the exteriors, where they could soak in the essence mist and the light of the missing embermoon. Sen supposed that was what night was, now. Moonless, while the days thrived under the light of a scorched moon.

He shook his head as he led Em inside the apartment. The lobby was dark, and blue moss crawled across the floor. Small clovers infested the carpet, while creeping, purple vines crawled in from the gaps of the lobby’s spinning glass door. Together, the two of them took the stairs. Up, up to the fourth floor. Sen walked down the familiar, dark hallway and found himself face to face with his room number.

4016.

He turned the knob and pushed. It opened.

It was good he never really bothered to lock it whenever he left. Sen quietly walked inside, passing the kitchen and the living room, then the veranda by his TV, which peered out into the corpse of Dubai. A group of dead sunflowers sat there, wilted. Four days dead.

And yet, as he entered his bedroom, Sen paused at what he saw inside.

It was a sunflower. The same one he’d left inside days ago.

And it was alive. Bright and yellow, waiting in the darkness. Waiting for him to return. He remembered his tia's words, and how she'd told him to do his best to take care of the one flower that had survived. He felt Em’s gaze on his back as he approached it, touching the petals with his fingers. They were soft. Cool to the touch. Sen closed his eyes and breathed. And then—

He sighed. All the tension drained out of him, and the wires coiled in his body loosened. Sen turned his eyes to the kitchen.

“...Want a beer?”