There was something really humiliating about this, Ben thought, about how this was the second time this week someone had tried to harvest his soul. Ben reflected on this while tuning out the psycho chatter of Nemo, who was both shameless and absolutely determined to learn all of Ben's secrets. You know, before Nemo killed him or subjected him to something worse than death.

Ben's face couldn't be flatter. Every muscle was relaxed and hanging loose, his eyes were half open and so was his mouth. Nemo was completely oblivious to this, and just kept talking as if nothing were wrong.

The assault had gone off very well, with every gremlin holding a spine staff having been killed. So, it was with an overt sense of outrage, and a secret sense of being impressed, that Ben watched like seven gremlins extract themselves from the army. Ben hadn't gotten it, at first, but as they painted themselves and gave congratulatory pats on the back, picking up the spine staves like they were old hat, Ben realized it.

They'd hidden part of their leadership. Ben's eyes kept wandering over to a gremlin that looked visibly slower than the rest; it was strange in many ways, because none of them showed any physical signs of aging, yet Ben could clearly see the difference between the young and the old simply by their behavior.

The slow gremlin looked old. He moved extremely carefully, his eyes tracked things with a steady, focused gaze, and he spoke very little, while those around him spoke freely.

Nemo was still chattering away, and six of the Elder Gremlins were laying out an enormous ritual circle; it differed in many ways from the ones the Grays had created, but Ben was pretty sure it would kill him no matter what.

The Eldest Gremlin watched the proceedings with half lidded eyes, like he was barely awake.

Ben felt his party stored away in the palms of his hands and wished he could tell if the slime were blocking their airways. He really hoped it wasn't. Ben tried to do pretty much anything with his utility pouch, and was again blocked by Nemo, who seemed like he didn't even notice he was doing it.

The Eldest Gremlin sat on a simple wooden chair that suggested one of two things to Ben; either the Gremlins were excellent craftsmen, or they stole it. Ben didn't expect to find any gremlin carpenters. The Bladed Slayer was still growing, except now enormous, demonic wings were developing in real time, right before his eyes.

“How extra is this thing going to get,” Ben muttered, feeling absolutely terrible. It was like being at the dentist, except his mouth and face were fine, and the rest of his skin was numb. If Ben focused on it for too long, he was seriously going to freak out.

He started breathing harder, the sudden thought that the numbness could spread under his skin and stop his heart or his lungs making his heart and lungs start to work in overdrive. Adrenaline started to flow in a real way. Ben started to fidget, or at least he tried to, but couldn't.

Ben would never wish this experience on anyone, anyone! The feeling of trying to move, and being unable to. It was such a wretched, fearful thing. Every nerve impulse, that is, every failed nerve impulse, exponentially ramped up the panic and threatened to drive him into a frenzy.

Fear is. . . everyone's felt fear. Everyone's thought about it at some point or another, usually after they've been afraid. Right now, to Ben, fear was a worm in the nervous system that made him unable to move; unable to think; unable to speak; unable to feel anything but fear.

Fear was paralysis. It restrained and held its victim still and it wouldn’t let go, no matter what.

What Ben was experiencing then, was not fear, but panic. Panic differed from fear, because rather than holding back, it accelerated all action beyond conscious consideration. A person in panic will do things that hurt themselves and others without the awareness they are doing so. They will do things they would not normally do.

Unfortunately for Ben, that meant useless thrashing.

--

Red sat crouched inside the darkness of the Utility Pocket, feeling it slowly sap away at her energy. Her body was like a prison of flesh, heavy and useless. Her eyes though, were working just fine, and she looked out the tiny window of her open Utility Pocket, watching the strange being as it chattered away.

To her eyes, he looked like a shadow of the void. She’d fought such creatures in The Beyond, and was shocked to see one walking around. Without knowing why, she turned her attention to the brilliant, shining soul gem she still had clutched in her hand. Its light, even from inside a pocket dimension, seemed to push against the shadow being, to eat away at its darkness.

She frowned. Knowing it was a risk and choosing to take it anyways, she willed the stone out of the Utility Pocket.

--

Ben couldn't even feel his fingers or his toes, he couldn’t even wiggle them!

And Nemo was still fucking talking! . . . or was he?

Ben's panic had turned to fear, and his thrashing had ceased. In my objective estimation, his pushing through his fear, through the paralysis it poisoned him with, was nothing short of heroic. He turned his eyes and looked at the void soul, looked him right in his empty, soul-less eyes.

The eyes were not empty, or soul-less. Nemo stared at his hands, his mouth open like he'd been talking and suddenly stopped.

“Hey,” Ben croaked out, feeling his vocal cords, but not the familiar vibration on his throat. Nemo looked at him, and Ben saw something close to terror in his eyes.

“Hey,” Nemo said, then blinked several times and didn't say anything else. Then, he swallowed, and asked a question, “Am I dreaming?”

Ben said no, he wasn't dreaming.

“Oh. So all of this is really happening?”

Then Ben said it was and called Nemo a fucking idiot. Nemo gulped again.

“This has really gotten out of hand,” he said, and ran a hand through his hair. “I didn't think it would be like this.”

Ben called Nemo an idiot again, then ordered him to get him free. Nemo, to Ben's great surprise, started to do just that.

“Look, they're probably going to kill me,” Nemo said, “and they're probably going to kill you too. But I think I'd rather just die here than go back to. . .” he shuddered.

“Just be cool,” Ben said, acting as normal as he could while Nemo started to covertly collect the paralytic mucus with a utility pouch set to suction.

Nemo didn't even try to just be cool. He had gotten most of the slime off of Ben's upper body when he started hyper-ventilating.

“Nemo,” Ben said through clenched teeth, “just be fucking cool.”

“Oh God my name isn't Nemo,” not-Nemo said, running his hands through his hair, “I'm Jameson and I killed all those people,” he said, his voice already elevated from whisper to normal speaking, and his volume elevating.

“I'm a fucking mechanic,” he said, looking at his hands with wide, panicked eyes. “Oh, what have I done,” he said while inhaling, which just sounded, just like, wow, not pleasant to listen to. From that point onward, he devolved, and his volume and body language increased in intensity.

Whatever paralytic agent was in the mucus, it wore off fast, and Ben started to feel sensation return to his fingers and his skin. Not enough to move, not yet, but with it, came a small connection to his mana. If a normal connection could be compared to a four inch gas line, then the connection he had right now could be compared to a pipe the size of a human hair.

But it was there, and with it, he felt his utility pocket start to react. He could feel his party, each one of them completely drained of their mana, each of them except Vivi.

Nemo/Jameson was screaming and clawing at his face, saying something like 'They're inside me, they're inside me, sweet almighty God, they're inside me'.

Ben ignored him and focused on Vivi's utility pocket. He realized the problem right away, he saw what Nemo had done to lock them down and reversed it, taking exactly zero time to try and understand the how or the why.

“Vivi,” Ben whispered, ready to inspire him to courage, ready to tell him to take the others and leave him behind, ready to tell him to stand and fight. Ben didn't know what he was going to say, but he knew he needed to say something. He knew he needed to say something.

But, the thing about Ben was, he was wrong.

Vivi emerged from his utility pocket, white in the way fresh snow is white, and sparkling in the same way. His skin was tough looking, yet soft looking. He was larger than the gremlins. Vivi's eyes were hard, and he frowned a sluggy frown, his soft, delicate little mouth set to a snarl.

Immediately, his long body curved around Ben protectively, and Vivi started talking.

“Hold on tight,” Vivi said, and a gremlin screamed as it stepped into a [Disk of Annihilation]. The rest of the gremlin camp started up in a frenzy and began to charge.

Vivi's eyes moved in the way a human wizard would use his hands to cast a spell, the eye-stalks growing incandescent like an industrial light-bulb, little bolts of electricity or the magical equivalent jumping between them. The eyes extended out and then up, and first, a wall of stone rose around them.

“[Ring of Stone]!” Vivi shouted, “[Blase's Puzzle Shield]!”

If Ben hadn't been watching for it, he would have missed the critical details. The stone wall around them was about three feet tall and angled on top in such a way that anyone who climbed it would have a high chance of falling inside once at the top.

When Vivi cast his second spell a translucent, nearly invisible sheet of energy surrounded them, filling the inner area of the Ring of Stone. It rushed towards them like water, then, at the last moment, surrounded them in a hollow sphere.

“We have two minutes,” Vivi said, “so let's make them count.”

A gremlin scaled the wall and slipped down the sloped top, falling into the strange shield, then vanishing.

“Does that kill them,” Ben asked, strong enough now to lean up and look at Vivi with wide eyes.

“No, unfortunately. It sends them to an alternative realm in which they have to solve a puzzle to escape. If they don't solve it in two minutes, they are ejected from the realm, and I get a portion of their remaining mana. If they solve it, they immediately exit, and are buffed to be twice as strong.”

“That's unnecessarily complicated,” Ben said, “but I love it.”

“It's extremely mana efficient,” Vivi said, “and the puzzle's difficulty is based on what I would find hard.”

Ben at that point realized it was a skill for people who felt like they were smarter than everyone else.

“What next?” Ben asked, eyeing the lemming like gremlins as they surged over the wall and fell into the trap.

“I hope none of them succeed and I get some mana back. I'm not expecting much, because they're, you know, gremlins, but I need whatever I can get. How long until you can get the others out?”

“I'll need to supply the mana,” Ben said, “and right now, I can barely move. Who do you want as backup first?”

“Red,” Vivi said, surprising Ben, “then Ghost Ears, then Short Bus. Both Red and Ghost Ears have mind control type skills, and if we get out of this alive, it's because we get the monsters fighting themselves and we get out of here before that thing,” Vivi said, pointing with an eye to the Bladed Slayer, “cuts its way out of the cyst and starts murdering everything it can see.”

The sound around them was changing and the walls that protected them blocked their vision. The screaming died down, and the rate at which the Gremlins threw themselves into Blase's Puzzle Shield dropped dramatically. Soon, not a sound could be heard except the screaming of Nemo, or Jameson, whatever he called himself. It sounded like he was being restrained, and he was freaking out.

“Shouldn't have taken [Worm Blood],” Ben said, feeling really, really relieved he hadn't gambled with his fate when he had the chance. Above the silence and the screaming, a voice called out with authority, in a language meant for a master's tongue. It was a language of single syllable words, simple commands for slave-creatures.

Jameson/Nemo started yelling as though he were being restrained, and the gremlins that had to hold him down yelled their complaints.

The voice of authority started to hum, a low and sad sound that cut through clarity like a knife of thick, suffocating fog. Other gremlins joined in, and soon an eerie, witchy, goosebumpy song was sung.

Ben couldn't help it, the music pierced his mind in the way music did, bypassing all defenses and making him see. He felt his crown snap on his forehead, the abused twig no longer able to handle the strain of keeping Ben's nakedness at bay. He was small, he realized, very small. If someone said he were a foot tall, he'd call them a liar. His lower body was numb, and he felt sick and cold, like he would vomit at any second. He had a headache, and his bones felt stiff and awkward inside his body.

The song refused to echo, it spread like a cloud, and when Ben looked around, he saw the sheer enormity of the Overcavern Forest. Trees with bases that must have been two, three, four hundred feet thick. These things had branches larger than the largest trees remaining on earth, and those branches had branches that were still comparable. They rose and rose and rose, taller than sky-scrapers, each one of them a mega-structure in their own right.

Ben felt very small and he couldn't even curl in on himself, because he was paralyzed.

“I'm supposed to be in Hawaii right now,” he whispered, treacherous words spilling from his lips, “oh man, I don't like this at all.”

Vivi looked at him and something shifted in his gaze.

“How old are you, Ben?” Vivi asked the question with a great deal of implied hesitation, like it was something he'd never even considered asking.

“I'm twenty nine,” he responded.

“Slime,” Vivi whispered.

Jameson/Nemo's screaming started to trail, then abruptly cut off. The Void Soul laughed, and it sounded awkward more than anything else. The eerie song continued.

“Whoops!” he yelled, “Get off me, get off, I'm fine. Just woke up a little too much, that's all. It was the little dude, my best friend Finger Gun Fairy, bang bang,” he said, and Ben just knew he was doing finger guns, “he got me a little too excited, that's all. I'm nice and asleep, the worms are my little buddies, isn't that right?”

In response, Ben heard a skin-crawling keening sound, like ten billion tiny horrible voices calling out their agreement. Then, the ten billion tiny, horrible voices added their strength to the awful gremlin song. It just kept getting worse and worse.

“Mr. Fairy!” he yelled out, “oh, Mr. Fairy!” his voice was musical, sing-songy and whimsical, “would you be willing to accept a bargain? We really need- ow, fine, fuck, we really want that soul stone back. What would you like in exchange for it?”

“Ignore him,” Vivi said to Ben. Then, Vivi lifted Ben telekinetically and placed him between his eye-stalks.

“I'm prepared to agree to anything!” Nemo shouted, then started laughing. Vivi's eyes were scanning the area, ready for the moment a gremlin solved the puzzle, and or, the moment the shield's effects ended.

Ben's eyes were wide, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get his mind under control.

“I just need,” he said, his breath coming in short gasps, “I just need,” he repeated. What Ben needed was to calm the fuck down, but he couldn't. His connection to his substantial mana pool was slowly widening, and with a start, he felt himself reconnect with his utility pocket.

The first thing he wanted to do was pull out one of his backup crowns and immediately put it around his skull.

“Vivi,” Ben said, “Is there enough room here for everyone else? I'm going to be able to let them out.”

“Wait till the shield ends, it doesn't distinguish between friend and foe,” Vivi said, his eyes still scanning the area.

Ben, having covered the important things, immediately equipped a backup crown directly from his utility pouch, and the effect was immediate. The tension in his body didn't leave, and he wasn't filled with a sudden surge of confidence, and there was no alteration of his mood or personality.

What did happen was the crown straightened his will, amplified it to a degree that Ben was able to push past his fear and his situation, and behave in the way he knew he needed to.

“Ten seconds,” Vivi said, his voice quiet, “feeling better your majesty?”

“As good as I get Lord Slug,” Ben shot back, leaning up and rinsing his body off with saltwater. As Ben expected, the ocean water had no effect on Vivi, but it did wash off the rest of the numbing slime quite effectively.

“I've got to get some of that stuff,” Ben said, watching the slime dissolve and run off his clean body, almost immediately regaining full feeling.

“Five seconds,” Vivi said, his eye-stalks growing incandescent again. Ben quickly evacuated the area, dodging the dangerous looking electrical discharge as it arc'd between the stalks. He was flying again, close to Vivi, but not too close.

Four, three, two, one.

The strange, almost invisible field vanished. Simultaneously, gremlins started appearing in the order they had vanished; first into the mysterious puzzle dimension, first out of the mysterious puzzle dimension, exactly two minutes after they disappeared. They popped into existence like a herd of very unfortunate isekai protagonists, one right after another.

The gremlins were unsteady on their feet, and Ben felt a tangible pulse of mana enter Vivi's body as each one appeared.

“This almost isn't even worth it,” Vivi said, a scowl on his face, referencing the meager mana he gained from his trap, “but it will have to do. Let them loose Ben.”

Ben did so. Two utility pockets opened and a giant shark man as well as a normal-sized chaos warden appeared. They landed on their feet and both of them immediately doubled over and started vomiting noisily, clutching their heads, and groaning in pain.

“Slime!” Vivi spat the curse, “they're mana-sick. Ben, how long until-”

Ben doubled over and vomited, his own overtaxed mana pool finally asserting its displeasure on Ben's body. He'd been supporting the three's costs since the moment they ran out of magic, which had been fine, until he had to pay the cost of setting them loose as well.

His headache turned from awful to 'I could die from this', and his stomach ache turned from bad to 'my guts are going to melt'.

“Slimey slime!” Vivi yelled, “Ok, I guess it's just me.”

Short Bus held up a finger like he wanted to say something, but then he just started dry-heaving. Red looked super confused, then puked up. . . nobody knew what the fuck she'd been eating before being summoned into The World, but there was some strange looking stuff mixed in with the magic peas she'd eaten earlier. Ghost Ears looked absolutely miserable, but he kept trying to draw his swords and failing.

“Void and slime!” Vivi was swearing in the way most individuals do when suddenly their situation went from 'die' to 'can't die, protect the helpless'. He was glad his mother wasn't here to hear him swearing like this.

Then, the gremlins who had all their mana stolen tried to advance, and they started to puke as well.

“This is just outrageous,” Vivi said, the smell assaulted him, and it was gross. With contempt in his magic, Vivi began whipping the gremlins with air, sharp cracking sounds filling the dark forest with each strike. The sounds of the gremlins song faded with each whip crack, and Ben felt the insidious effects on his mind end.

The voices faded, until a single, ancient voice was all that was left. It was silent except for the cracks of the magic whip, and the ancient gremlin singing. He trailed off and loosed a low dark chuckle. His voice was powerful and carried meaning more effectively than words ever could.

“Won't you surrender peacefully?” Nemo called out again, and more gremlins started to chuckle, “won't you trust us? We're extremely honest!” the chuckling began to grow in intensity, turning to dark laughter, “I promise I won't betray you, nobody would betray you here!” the laughter grew in intensity, “We can all be friends, we can all get along, we can build a mutually beneficial relationship!”

The laughter grew from merely dark to murderous, and from mere laughter to full on hysterics. Imagine that, being doubled over with nausea, surrounded by your allies, who are also doubled over in agony, with only a giant magical slug for protection. Imagine it, the sound of a thousand evil monsters all around you, laughing, laughing at you, laughing at the things they were going to do.

It was, by far, the single most terrifying moment of Ben's life thus far.

The swarm of fairies above them, still hidden and watching with rapt attention, had no intention of interfering. The hit squad from Solas was minutes away, an eternity compared to how long Ben's party could hold out. Frankie was almost done, was almost ready to warp the Pocket of Sanctuary in and save the day, but almost wouldn't be enough.

It was all up to Vivi, who crumbled under pressure, who couldn't get through a job interview to save his life, who was easily grossed out, who was a coward in his heart and boastful in his words.

It was all up to Vivi.

The Aeon Slug steeled his nerve and found something inside of himself he didn't know was there. An energy which wasn't magic, which couldn't be turned into a skill, but which was none-the-less potent.

He found his courage, the gremlins attacked, and Vivi defended his strange, strange new family.