I watched from above as Third and Fourth siphoned more gas. I’d lost count of how many trips they’d done but there was certainly no shortage of fuel. Parking must’ve been a nightmare for Skylar Industries.

After standing there, in the center of building, right in front of the doors where people had walked in, seeing that blood. Not the scarlet color of life and oxygen but the dark stain of obsidian crimson?

Emotion bubbled in my chest, unbidden. That simmering chill. I’d thought the cold that came with that anger was indestructible. A glacier. But this hell had proven again and again that something could shatter it. I’d thought anger brought my focus to a razor’s edge.

Instead, I’d broken down, cried, vomited, and screamed. I’ve had nightmares the past two weeks, of dying, of failing, of all the twisted horrors that were still to come. I was paranoid, checking over my shoulder, feeling phantom pains where I was uninjured.

It wasn’t anger, truthfully. How could someone be sure of something like that? Maybe it was just a front. A ruse to distract myself from what I really felt. It was an emotion directed at everything. And yet nothing at all. Pointless and meaningless.

It was a familiar feeling. That sucking sensation of something worse than just muddy shoes. A black hole that drained all energy. A bottomless pit of quicksand at the bottom of the ocean.

It was despair. Hopelessness.

I knew, I knew, I was just some guy. I knew that. I was no one special, no one near qualified to face whatever the hell a Field Boss meant beyond the instinctive connotation. I wasn’t military, I wasn’t some great leader or fighter. I hadn’t even graduated college.

But damn I wasn’t about to give up. I didn’t think of myself as a hero. The notion suggested I did this out of some desire to play out a fantasy. In a dream, maybe, not this hell. Not this nightmare.

Where a Field Boss existed that could take over someone’s will. How much more would fall to this trap if this [Rootmother Hivemind] was left alone? I’d spent the better part of two days watching it, dousing the floors, three of them now.

It expanded by water. It was just a hunch that I felt more and more confident on. Every body of water, every pool it touched spawned those strange insects, unable to leave the water. It was why I hadn’t seen anything possessed up until now. For the same reason I hadn’t been outright mind controlled the second I waded through any small body of water.

By sheer dumb luck, the giant swamp tree’s root system had isolated the creature from any larger bodies of water. Instead, its roots’ only access was to the small pools created by the larger root system of the swamp. It was cut off from any major waterways and couldn’t spread further.

But its tendrils were growing, creeping further. Enough to see with the naked eye. Maybe a meter in length over the course of these two days. I’d tracked down its longest tendril, watching it. It was still a long way from even the edge of the clearing, but from there it was only a short reach to the waterlogged terrain I’d been traversing the last two weeks.

It was only a matter of time.

Three floors were doused in gasoline now. From the moment I walked in, the sweet smell was potent enough to give me a slight headache. I was cautious of the fumes, wearing one of those safety lab masks on each of my clones from the science building.

If there was a smell for flammable fire hazard, this was it.

“You think three floors is enough?” I said, outside, watching the building.

From what I could gather from my observation, the [Rootmother Hivemind] was in a somewhat docile state. Its actual body didn’t move very much, aside from the passive writhing motions of its roots. I attributed its lethargy to some kind of energy preservation, that it was focusing on growing its roots since I had no other information on its behavior.

I was apprehensive, weighing the completeness of flammability against the time until it might summon more innocents to its mouth. It hadn’t, not since I’d seen them the first time, thankfully. It just served to put more pressure on me, I was on a clock. I had no idea how the fire would realistically take to the building. Three floors were a lot, and fire spread upwards, but I was nervous.

I began dragging in any dry wood or flammable tinder I could find. Branches, brush, etc. Anything and everything that was dry. I had the manpower and—I hoped—the time to spare.

“Might as well do the fourth,” I told myself. “If I’m taking the time to do all this.”

And so I did. Uncap a random car, feed the vine into the tank, suck, siphon, fill the jug. Drag anything I could find that would burn into the building, climb the four flights of stairs, douse the floor. Repeat. It was hard manual labor, all done through my clones who had half my physicality, which meant it felt all the harder and probably took twice as long.

It was an easy price to pay for safety. I was taking virtually no risk. The problem was that it wasn’t my life that was at risk here. It was everyone elses.

[Solo’s Instinct] went off. It was something like an itch, a tic, and an ache combined. Like something had caught my eye at the edge of my perception, only the equivalent to that as it related to every other sense I had. Combined.

A sudden, pressing, and absolutely certain intuition.

It wasn’t my original self that was feeling it. It was my clones.

Inside, I whirled around, feeling the building groan and creak. The roots and tendrils strewn about the floor and walls, normally dormant and lethargic, began to twist and turn. As if the entire building was stretching. The Field Boss.

That was only one aspect of [Solo’s Instinct] going off. The clones couldn’t see exactly what it was that made them worry. What urged them to act. But no single part of me needed to. Only one needed to see for the whole.

Every single person was walking towards the skyscraper.