She'd no frame of reference to describe the feeling of [ Punishment ] kicking in, reacting to the damage from the exploded trap and enhancing her abilities accordingly. Roughly though, it was akin to the sharp confidence produced by being really, really pissed off paired with the ability to actually do something about it.

Splinters of wood lay shattered at Sláine’s feet. The open box lay bare before her. Ignoring it, along with whatever treasures it might contain, the [ Berserker ] whipped around, body wet with blood and her halberd honed and keen.

There was one final step of Sláine's calculated gamble that she hadn't yet decided on, having pushed the verdict off until the heat of the moment to see whether it ‘felt right’. She had one more [ Skill ] available to further improve her chances of hurting the thing, but the language of its description left numerous questions in her mind.

What exactly did it mean by 'lose sight of everything but slaughter'? Would she lose her ability to think entirely? Would she forget about her ultimate goal; that is, delivering Red's crystal to the center of the creature? And just how much would her mental state be affected by this?

If the Protocol could drastically alter her perceptions... what other ways could it toy with her mind?

That thought should have upset her, but it didn't.

Honestly?

...She just wanted to see what it was like.

Decision made, Sláine kept the cube wedged against the hollow of her cheek and let the momentum carry her through a dire, piercing strike.

[ Battle Frenzy ]!

Everything went quiet. Level. Clear. The world settled into a still calmness, like the mirror-fine sheen on an undisturbed lake, and the petty distractions of the mortal world melted away from her perception. She watched, fascinated, as cut gelatin peeled apart in a vertical line and caught the light like a gemstone. She went forward, and the axe's edge pressed smoothly down.

It was beautiful. It felt right.

Something nagged at her; a pain in her cheek, an insistent memory pressing into her with a geometric point. She rolled it around in her mouth, its planes cold and hard. Ice, she thought, and as the flesh split apart like tender fish carved from its bone, she spat, stabbed, and pulled back.

A glint of merry blue shone against the murky green before it sunk into the depths.

From somewhere there was a voice, raised, but the words were unimportant. No — beyond that, they faded into the background, unable to distract her from the creature ahead. It wobbled forward, and she prepared to strike again, cleave it apart properly this time, when the air in the corridor turned cold.

The slime froze from within, florets of ice lancing out from its core and crackling over the liquid in its membrane. The hue of it deepened, like liquid jade trapped within the frigid surface of a winter lake, and Sláine could only think of it as clean. Purified. If disease was a thing of warm humidity, then it only made sense that the frost of the north stood in direct opposition to it. The Swarm had no place in the tundra; all shall fall before the perfect preservation of frost. The slime would never move again.

It was captivating.

The edge of her blade came down upon it with a screech and the chunk of shattering ice. Shards scattered across the floor, and she struck once more, another break in the rounded surface. Ultimately though, this was just a means to the end, not the end itself.

She was not the kind of person who toyed with corpses of the already dead.

The final blow was dealt with the back, and she drove the hook sticking out from the opposite side of the axe-blade deep into the ice. With a quick tug, she ensured she'd gotten it stuck, and then Sláine shoved her boot into one of the rough divots she’d made. Even as her toe slipped down, she flung her hand up and secured her fingers in the second chink, and with her other foot she sought purchase on the newly formed glacier, digging her toe into the jagged slash that hadn’t had a chance to reform after being frozen. Now secure, she pushed, clambering up further along the ice and using her halberd for support.

Pull. Wiggle the hook free. Spike it into the ice once more, rather like a mountain climber, find a foothold and repeat. From somewhere, she heard more yelling, along with the musicality of crystal. Mucus splattered against the wall.

To those that hear them, words spoken in a foreign language had no meaning. Mysteries shelter possibilities, this is true, but to the average bystander, something unknown does not exist. Therefore, only things that are known matter. In the context of people’s hearts, only things that are observed are real.

Something must be real to have purpose. Something must have purpose to gain meaning.

To Sláine’s people, the fearless warrior clans of Flora, one’s personal legend was synonymous with their worth. Failures were not recorded; glories were. If one was not recorded, one did not exist, and as it was pointless to acknowledge anything that did not exist, these things had no power in the world. Therefore, by having power, one must exist, and the more power that is gained, the more solid said existence becomes.

Powerful people mattered. Powerful people left a mark through their legacy. Powerful people enforced their will on their world.

The Fears — those wretched Systems that filled the world with monsters — proved that time and time again. Through slaughter and conquer they became known. They tore apart hopes and left them meaningless corpses; they crushed societies under their collective heels and left only memories within their wake.

Memories were more fragile than sugar-glass, so easy were they to warp, twist, shatter and mutate.

This was why Sláine loved to fight.

Fighting had meaning. To be good at fighting meant that one had meaning. Compared to war, everything else had no point. In that sense, Sláine agreed with the philosophies of the various Fears. Fear was powerful; they gained power, and therefore they carved their marks so deep into history that the ‘fact that they existed’ could never, ever possibly be challenged.

The Fears weren’t wrong, Sláine thought.

— Their philosophy was just bullshit.

So Sláine would kill and become more real than anything else in the world, or she would die and cease to exist at all. Either was fine. Death wasn’t frightening, just as surviving wasn’t inherently desirable. The frightening thing was seeing what the powerful could do to the powerless, and fully realizing that having a physical body wasn’t enough to actually exist.

If no one was willing to record you, what was the point of anything at all?

Sláine crested the makeshift mountain, crouching there on the precariously smooth surface and observing the scene below.

A gelatinous tendril extended from one end of the waterway, a fat, bulbous thing that gave off the impression of a head due to the skull suspended in the baleful green muck. Other bones littered its form, as did corpses, the tails of rats and mice hanging from it like chin-hairs. She even recognized a few tunnel mites in there, just before a bright light flashed and a warm heat whooshed through the air.

Sunspots sparkled across her vision, and she blinked hurriedly to clear them.

There was nothing there for her to do, then. Her ears twitched at a shuffle, and ignoring the sound of a voice, she turned her head.

The thing at the other end of the hall had a long, slender body with a brown cap-like head that fanned out into ethereal milky-white frills that floated in the air. A mushroom, she thought, then stopped processing at it looks delicate. She threw her legs forward and slid off the frozen slime with a reflexive grunt. Pain shot up her leg as she landed, but she ignored it. She could still walk on it.

She could still run.

Sláine swung mid-step, wrenching her arms back and carrying her momentum forward into a lunge. The first slice carved a space into its stalk, and with the thrust, she pierced straight through the manufactured weak point and sent the head flying off onto the ground, leaving the white trunk wiggling aimlessly.

She smiled.

Once she turned the corner, she realized that’d just been one facet of a larger fungal body. Kneeling on the ground were bloated legs that once had belonged to a humanoid form, but from the severed torso now grew a forest of oscillating mushrooms. It seemed capable of movement, at least of a variety as it crawled forward, and Sláine found satisfaction in the idea of halting its movement forever.

It cut apart easily, though as the heads fell, clouds of spores burst out of the gills that wafted around her legs and made her skin tingle. It reminded her of finding specimens in the forest with Ailís, breaking apart the caps to properly identify —

No. That thought was locked in a box with all others, and she sank into a place without worry, without concern. Sláine discarded everything beyond her forward momentum, the driving tip of her spear carrying her further along the path she’d set for herself.

[ Poison Resist has reached level 5 new skills have been added SLÁINE SNAP OUT OF IT! DON’T KEEP GOING!!! ]

Leaping soundly over the chopped body, she realized where the creatures had been coming from, and only narrowly managed to avoid a careless misstep that would have sent her plummeting through one of the precarious gaps in the crumbling concrete floor. The entire path ahead was dotted with holes and jagged gaps, and the smell of damp mold filled the air, patches of mushroom covered hands clumsily groping at her from the darkness. She stepped on one, the bones of its fingers crunching beneath her heel, and swung her blade in a downward arc to carve another reaching limb apart at the wrist.

Less neat this time, blade stopping at bone. It spilled no blood, and feeling no pain, the fingers continued to desperately scramble for a grip on her feet. Were they trying to pull her under?

How cute.

Sláine pierced through the back of third hand with the spear of her halberd, then danced down the hallway, springing over the cracks and hacking apart the horde of parasitic growths. Stray limbs and malformed corpses, a mouth split open with shelves of orange mushrooms that she stabbed and slammed into the ground, a torso that, when hacked open, spilled half-decomposed matter and sour-smelling peat… she slaughtered her way down the hall, stopping briefly to kick a stray chunk of flesh off her weapon before turning her head towards another form heaving itself from the dark a few feet beyond.

It was huge, a thing of dirt and bone and twining mycelium, the mushrooms had claimed the desecrated remains of some unlucky souls or fallen adventurers and combined them into a single hulking figure. It moved unnaturally, one of its elbows snapping up a full beat before its arm shot forward, and its fist crashed towards her in a lumbering, off-balance swing.

Sláine sidestepped it easily, securing enough distance to chop at its torso, but it was untroubled by the rattling clamor of bones.

Dirt fell from its ribs. Round mushrooms dotted its forms like blisters, and they popped, spewing yellowish clouds of spores that made Sláine’s eyes water.

On reflex, Sláine coughed.

“—oor you idio— stop — !”

She heard yelling again, this time closer, but there was a vast difference between hearing and understanding, and Sláine was in the throes of a different tune.

Breathing in the spores affected her, a dizziness threatening the stability of her precious fugue, and she grit her teeth before flinging herself at its perpetrator. The solution was simple — if it had no body left to cut, Sláine would simply offer it up to the dark, and she jabbed the tip of her halberd straight into the mud-caked cavern of its chest. Grunting, she threw her weight forward, summoning up the brunt of her unnaturally heightened strength to shove the thing back into the hole from whence it’d come.

It was then, finally, that Sláine’s fervor abated. The serene highs which she’d chased so desperately melted further out of reach, and her pulse, that rapid, comforting thrum, began to slow. The sound in her head became more tangible, the words taking shape and sense within the haze of exhausted delirium.

[ AP Drained. Battle Frenzy now ending. ]

With it came understanding of the contents of that crackling voice behind her, words clipped and desperate as a more friendly hand tried to catch her arm.

It was, unfortunately, too late. Sláine, in the fading throes of her murderous frenzy, had paid no heed to the waves of fungal limbs stretching out of the crumbling floor, and the fingers hungrily grasping for the warmth of her still-living skin grabbed onto her boot. Energy spent, she had no power with which to keep herself upright, and she could not resist as they dragged her into the dark as well.

The last words she could remember hearing were, “YOU OWE ME FOR THIS, MORON.”

>> Fall