I spread my wings and took off from the street with a powerful flap, shooting ten metres into the air before my upward momentum petered out. Another, lesser, flap propelled me forward, my extended wings allowing me to glide until I came to a gentle landing on my targeted rooftop. Long gone were the days where every flap of my wings sent me careening uncontrollably into whatever solid surface happened to be nearest. I was finally as at home in the air as I was on the ground.

"Oh, it's you," muttered the downcast-looking demon I had flown up here to find. He was another one of the regular sized humanoid demons, wearing a more elaborate version of the armour the guards wore, with a sword sheathed at his waist. "I suppose you're after a permit to go downstairs?"

I blinked in surprise. "You know me? I don't believe we've met."

"No, I don't know you, but no-one else has any reason to be up here. You must be the player."

I felt I'd reached the limit as to what I could do with a blink, and wished I had better control over my eyebrows. My reaction to that statement definitely required raising them. "Player?"

"Yeah. That's what the big boss called you," said the demon, proficient empath adding a touch of annoyance to his previous despondence. He waved his hand at the street below. "Look at them all down there. See that volucer? You know how many times I've watched him walk out of his house and into that cafe over the past week? Over four thousand. You'd think the cafe would be full by now, but no. More of him just keep going."

Oh, great. One of the demons in this silly town has realised how much of an NPC he is, and is having an existential crisis. Just what I needed. But why him? "Yeah, I noticed they were doing that. I promised the guards on the entrance gate that I'd look into labour laws, given the length of their shift."

He snorted in amusement. "Yeah. They've always been there. Still, at least they have each other to talk to, and can occasionally throw scraps to the hydra that lives outside. Not that I know where they get the scraps from; I swear I saw them pull out a complete lupus carcass once. But I didn't even have that. Stuck in my office forever, alone, without even any paperwork to do. I didn't even get to walk to the cafe repeatedly. So I relocated up here, to watch the world go by, and I've stayed here ever since."

I stared at the demon. Every demon I'd spoken to in this town had sounded self-aware, yet they kept following their assigned route. This was the first I'd met who had broken away from their rails, and also the first who had given any indication of knowing the rails even existed. What made him different?

Wait...

"When, exactly, did you see those guards pull out a carcass?" I asked, the seeds of suspicion sprouting in my mind.

"That would be a few days ago?"

"While you were up here?"

"No, while I was carrying out a gate inspection."

"But didn't you say you'd been here the past week?"

"Yes? What's your point?"

I sighed. This place really was a mess. He might have signs of self-awareness, but proficient empath was picking up nothing but his confusion at my confusion. He was completely failing to see the conflict.

"So, this permit. Can I have one?"

"Yup. No reason why not. I just need you to do a favour for me."

"What sort of favour?"

"Kill me."

Despite my previous self-proclaimed lack of eyebrow experience, I felt my eyebrows move with such speed I was surprised I didn't get a notification for a new skill.

"What the fuck?" I asked.

"You think I want to live like this? I can't eat. I can't sleep. I can't... can't... anything. What other escape is there but death?"

"You could just leave? Go up or down a floor?"

The guard captain continued to stare at me in polite but desperate incomprehension.

"Why can't you eat? Have you ever tried?"

"Of course; I had breakfast this morning!"

"But you just said you can't eat."

"I can't! Aren't you listening?!"

"What did you have for breakfast?"

"Smoked aranea."

I looked around the rooftop for any sign of cooking equipment, and as expected, saw none.

"Look, I can't kill you. I'd get in trouble," I pointed out, trying a different tack.

"With who? I'm the captain of the guard. I'm the one who gets to say who is in trouble in this town."

"But if you were dead, wouldn't there be a replacement?"

Hyriklaxxine frowned for a bit as if working on a difficult problem. Then he froze. Not in some sort of half-hearted way, but he utterly stopped moving, and proficient empath went blank. I waited ten seconds before waving my hand in front of his still open eyes, but there was no response. Giving him a gentle shove resulted in him toppling over sideways, but still no reaction.

"Umm... Can I still get that permit?" I tried, but that didn't get a response either. Oops. Apparently, I'd broken him by pointing out the concept of someone else taking over his job.

While I was stuck pondering how the heck I was supposed to react to that, I felt a sudden burst of wrongness, and the light around me dimmed. Shadows started moving in the corner of my eye, stretching across the rooftop and pooling beneath the frozen captain. The movement ceased for a second before a burst of spikes pierced through him.

Void resistance advanced to level 11

The light returned, but I stood stupefied, the sight of the spears of darkness burnt into my vision. Literally. Even as I looked around, those points of utter blackness moved around with me. My vision destroyed, I could barely perceive the still-bleeding corpse, not even noticing the forming pool of blood until it touched my foot.

"What the fuck?!" I yelled for the second time in the past few minutes.

That had been the black dragon, or if not, something else with the same capabilities. The guard captain had... locked up? Bugged out? Fainted? Something, and the dragon had just killed him. And it had once again used the strange tangible darkness that I was quickly realising was nothing like the darkness in the catacombs. Darkness shouldn't be infectious. With alarm, I noticed that what had previously been well defined spikes in my vision had grown into a much larger blob, with more tendrils spreading across my sight. The sounds of the town below were distorted and wrong. I was clearly in need of another respawn.

But I'd decided to embrace my insanity, and there was a resistance skill to grind here.

I activated trigger respawn, then sat down to wait. What was the end point of this weird darkness infection? My vision darkened until I could see nothing. The distorted sounds faded, leaving nothing but whispers rustling in my ears. My skin started to crawl, as if an army of ants was pattering over it. Under it, as things continued to get worse. Olfactory perception showed monsters all around me, watching and waiting, each with a form more alien than the last. I ignored them, hoping they were hallucinations.

My other esoteric senses showed increasingly nonsensical results. Perceive danger insisted that the biggest danger to myself was me. To be fair, it was probably correct.

The whispers grew louder, and the darkness receded. I could see the rooftop, the dead guard and the pool of blood, but the colours were wrong, and there was more blood than there should be. A thick layer coated the entire roof, flowing onto the street below in fast moving rivulets. Then I realised I could see the demons through the buildings, walking on their predetermined routes, or sitting at their assigned desks.

All the demons stopped. As one, they turned to look at me.

The whispers ceased.

The world shattered, fragments of the building I was sitting on falling around me as I fell further and further into the darkness.

The darkness opened an eye, an iris of black flame, the slitted pupil a hole straight out of the world, a hole I was inevitably being drawn into. Flapping my wings achieved nothing. My breath wouldn't come. I shivered, the chill biting despite my cold nullification.

"I SEE YOU, CREATURE OF BLOOD AND FLESH," came a Voice, every syllable having the same organ rupturing effect as the Name of the black dragon, with the full sentence finally proving fatal.

"What the fuck?" I asked for the third time, waking back up at the abyss' shrine. Some of the passing demons turned around to look at me in surprise before deciding to ignore the mad, ranting woman and hurrying off towards their goals.

Then I looked at my status and barely avoided a fourth repetition. My void resistance had not only evolved to nullification, but had reached level twenty-six. Resistance training successful, then, even if I had missed the notifications. But still, what the hell was that?! That thing at the end hadn't been the dragon, had it?

Which reminded me that the guard captain had been killed before giving me the permit. Damn. Now how was I supposed to reach floor six?

...No, the captain wasn't dead. My minimap clearly showed him being present back in his office, so I went to pay a visit.

"Hello. How may I help you?" he asked politely, his face showing not the slightest hint of recognition.

"I want a permit to visit the sixth floor, please," I answered, employing equal politeness.

"Of course. If you would just fill in this form, I'll prepare a permit."

Paperwork? Seriously? Since when do heroes need to deal with paperwork? I looked over the document, which was basically an acknowledgement that I was going to die and no-one was going to come looking for me when I didn't come back. I signed it, because dying was nothing new or threatening, and the guard gave me a signed card.

"Before I go," I tried on my way out, "have we ever met before?"

"Not that I remember," he answered. "I'm fairly sure I would remember someone so... pink."

"And no complaints about your job?"

"Huh? Not at all. I worked hard to get where I am today."

"Good for you. And thanks for the permit."

I left the office and made my way back to the staircase, ready to get a look at the next floor, and hoping that it wasn't even buggier than this one. What had happened there? Did every demon on this floor have their own equivalent of a respawn cheat? Except that they didn't get to keep their memories? And when a character got too self aware and bugged out, the dragon just killed them to cause them to reset?

I whispered under my breath as I walked. "Goddess, if you're listening, I'd quite like to try some of whatever it is you're smoking. It must be good stuff."

Then I remembered the top floor mushrooms.

"No, never mind. I've tried it already."

And was that ever a scary thought? Given the condition of this world, the Goddess being high on magic mushrooms seemed as reasonable an explanation as any.

I reached the staircase, flashed my permit and was permitted to enter. "Guess we won't be seeing you again then," said one, while the other flashed me a look of sympathy.

"I'm pretty hard to get rid of," I said, stepping down.

"And there goes another overconfident poor sod," said the other guard, once I was a few steps away. Whether he thought I couldn't hear him or just didn't care, I didn't know, but I ignored him regardless and continued on my way.

The lighting changed, the lava-red glow of the abyss replaced by yellows and purples with no discernable source. My perceive mana skill showed a build-up of ambient magical energy in the air, with a veritable ocean of the stuff further below me. The staircase fell into disrepair, with the stone cracked, fragments of it breaking away with each of my steps. And then, with no warning, it ended.

I looked down through a hole in the floor, seeing a wide, purple and yellow expanse below me, sporting numerous black fissures.

No, not just black. True darkness. I recognised the way looking at them made my eyes feel like they were being sucked out.

The passage that held the staircase wasn't wide enough to spread my wings. I could jump through the hole in the floor and fly down, but getting back up would be a pain. Not to the point that I'd need to suicide to get back up, but I did foresee some embarrassing crashes in my future.

I took a breath and prepared to jump, only for the stair I was standing on to crumble beneath me, sending me tumbling down into the strange landscape below.