Congratulations, your level has increased!

Level 14 reached.

People screamed around us. The woman fell to the ground with Soul Eater in her throat. The air blurred around her as she died, and her appearance changed to become much plainer-looking, but with a collar around her neck. The dead Thardos lay in her arms still. Not Tora, or anyone we knew. It filled us with relief and guilt. Relief, because we hadn’t lost anyone important to us. Guilt, because we didn’t feel sad about the death of this mortal. But why should we have? Mortals lived and died all the time. We couldn’t care about every single one of them, just the ones that were important for our goals.

We eyed the dead woman at our feet. There was another feeling in there, besides the guilt and relief. A more visceral, primal emotion. A taste of fervor, as if we had just drunk the first sip of water after a long day of thirst. Difficult to resist, leaving us wanting for more. It had been a while since we last killed with Soul Eater. We shook off the alien feeling.

“There are traitors in our midst,” we spoke up, turning to the gathered people. Some of them had run away when we murdered the woman, but there were others who were watching us with wide eyes. “I suggest you find a place to hide tonight. Don’t get in the way of the Reapers.”

We teleported Soul Eater out of the woman’s neck and transformed it at the same time. Orange veins raced across the black metal to shape it into an axe in no more than two heartbeats. Then, without further ceremony, we swung at the woman’s neck. The angle wasn’t ideal, so it took us three swings to decapitate her.

Why were Players with mind control going after us all the time? This woman had cast some powerful Ability that would have been a powerful trick against most Players. She just got unlucky at choosing her target. But was this really about her luck, or was this the Inspectors testing the limits of our control?

Our thoughts distracted us from the gory task of getting the collar off the dead Player. Her blood made the sleeves of our shirt stick to our skin. Annoying. When we straightened back up, we found that some of the people were still watching us. Hadn’t they heard us when we told them to hide? We turned to the closest human and tossed the collar at him.

“Clean that collar and keep it safe,” we said. “I’ll be back for it.”

“Y-Yes, sir.”

We rolled up our blood-soaked sleeves, then crouched back down to the beheaded woman to wipe our hands in her clothes. Unlike teleporting Soul Eater, teleporting ourselves didn’t leave the blood behind so we had to make do with ordinary methods. They brought back some memories. Funny. No matter which world, no matter which species, cleaning off the blood was always tedious. Killing ourselves to get a cleaner body wasn’t an option either.

“Randel.”

“Yes, Devi?”

“Are you … alright?”

We stood up slowly, tilting our head at her. She looked concerned. Of course she would look concerned. We knew very well what she was thinking. We stepped closer to her, holding her gaze.

“We are alright,” we said, quiet enough so that the humans couldn’t overhear. Devi clenched her hands into fists and narrowed her eyes. Our words had seemingly infuriated her, though she kept herself in check.

“You can’t keep possessing him for long,” she said. “It will exhaust his body too much.”

“Possessing?” we asked. “We’ve already told you that we are not possessing anyone. We are one. All three of us. As for the exhaustion, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. You know nothing.”

“I know that—”

She flinched as our right hand shot up, cupping her face. Her eyes went wide, but she held our gaze.

“You seem intent on stopping us,” we said. “Be careful with how much you push us. You don’t want to be more trouble than what you’re worth.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said, touching the hand that held her. “If you’re truly not possessing him, you’re one-third Randel. He wouldn’t hurt me.”

The corner of our lips twitched. Damn, this woman. We let her go and took a step back. She looked so confident in her ignorance.

“You’re wrong again,” we told her. “We are not one-third Randel. All of us are him. The person you fought side by side in the Dungeon? The competent fighter, the man who always had your back? It is all of us, hundred percent Randel. There is no one-third here. The person you’re thinking of, the person you call soul-mate, simply does not exist on his own. Not anymore.”

Now that was finally a barb that got to her. She broke our gaze, her resolve wavering. We turned to go.

“Come,” we said. “Do not waste our time like this. There are intruders to kill, aren’t there?”

She followed us quietly as we walked deeper into the Refuge, leaving the shocked spectators behind. This side of the settlement looked as if a tornado had swept across it, but it was quiet and empty otherwise. Not too surprising. The intruders were way ahead of us, getting close to finishing the first puzzle, perhaps.

“There are intruders to stop, not intruders to kill,” Devi spoke up. “We don’t have to kill all of them.”

We sighed. “Is there some fight left in you still?”

“You’re good at getting into my head because you’re in my soul-mate’s head. But I will not give up that easily.”

“Give up what, Devi?” we said, rounding on her. “You are antagonizing us for no reason, mortal. We have been very reasonable so far! Tell me, how many innocents died by Randel’s hand recently?”

“I … don’t know about any.”

“That’s because there wasn’t any, mortal. It would be the world’s easiest thing to make some of the refugees disappear, wouldn’t you think? We could feed on all these people who live here. So how come we haven’t killed anyone?”

Devi said nothing, just glared at us.

“That’s right. We are capable of showing restraint. Does that surprise you, mortal? We avoided painting a target on your beloved soul-mate’s back. We cannot change our mortal shell, not anymore, so we need to take care of the one we have. You should be thanking us, Devi, instead of hindering us. Because if we chose different methods to feed, things would be much, much more inconvenient for you. There would be Quests to stop the Mad Painter’s bloodshed. There would be Players after our head to deliver justice and retribution.”

“I—I understand,” Devi said. “You need to kill others to feed, but you don’t want to draw attention to it. So you waited for someone to attack the Dungeon. You planned for this to happen.”

“There were no plans, just setups for opportunities. You’re right, though. We expected something like this.”

We continued our walk, leaving Devi behind. Breathing out slowly, controlling our emotions. We had no time for this drama.

Our mechanical leg whirred with each step as we got closer and closer to our prey. The first puzzle could be found at the center of the Undercity, but it was more than likely that the intruders had passed it already. Two more challenges would wait for them before they reached the boss room. Thankfully, those would take longer to solve—assuming that none of them cheated their way through. With how versatile Players tended to be, we couldn’t exclude that possibility.

“I understand that you need to feed on souls,” Devi said, refusing to shut her mouth for long.

“Good.”

“And you’re at least somewhat smart about it, which I appreciate.”

“Somewhat?”

“You risk much like this,” Devi said. “Surely, you had safer options. For a pair of ancient ghosts with plenty of knowledge and experience, your plan is rather … impulsive. Almost as if it was Randel who thought it up.”

We closed our eyes for a moment, maintaining control. She was deliberately provoking us.

“Why would it be impulsive?” we asked, deciding to indulge her. “We had always known that we would need to defend the Dungeon. That was half of the reason why we settled down here.”

“The Dungeon is not finished and we are outnumbered. Tell me, shades! Is this truly how you imagined you would feed yourselves?”

We frowned, glancing at her. Deliberating on how much to tell her. We wanted to lie – our pride was on the line – but some part of us insisted on honesty.

“No.”

“No?”

“No, we didn’t expect an attack of this scale. We didn’t expect the city’s gangs to coordinate against us. We hadn’t prepared the Dungeon against multiple groups—we foolishly thought they would come one after the other. We thought that the fights would start small and escalate over time—that would have made more sense, narratively. We also haven’t gathered enough intel about rival Players yet. We’ll have to go in blind and hope for the best.”

“I see,” Devi said. “So it’s bad.”

“We will most likely lose the Dungeon tonight.”

The two of us walked the rest of the way in silence.

When we arrived at the center of the Undercity, it was mostly empty. There were signs of struggle, a few dead bodies, and a few injured people already tended to by the locals. Devi went to talk with them while we walked to the center of the square. The square had eight vertical portal disks around it, placed in-between the roads that led here. They could be used to create portals, but the puzzle itself didn’t need them—they were just distractions from the round floor tile in the very middle of the square.

We walked up to it, noting the smudged chalk marks at the sides; apparently they had messed up the drawing first and had to wipe it off. We bent down, picking up a piece of chalk from the ground. Hmm. Perhaps we could ask Imaya to upgrade this puzzle to accept only paint. That would punish mistakes and give us more time. It would also fit the general theme. The trials of the Mad Painter.

First things first, though. We walked to a portal disk at the side of the square, raised the chalk in our hand—and I started to draw. Not the symbol for the first puzzle, but a much simpler symbol with bold intersecting lines. Its pair was etched into stone deeper down in the Dungeon, near the sparring rooms—and not far from where the first puzzle would have brought the raiders. Devi came to my side just as I finished drawing, and I started to feel some trepidation once again. What if the enemy Players were waiting on the other side of this portal?

“Come on,” we said, stepping through.

The portal room was empty, lit only by the swirling purple-white glow of the portal we opened. The rest of the portal disks were inactive, which was a good sign. With a mental nudge at our vambraces, we changed to our battle gear to make use of our headgear. The sunglasses improved our sight, hearing, and sense of smell. There were a pair of carved sweller sculptures above the doorway that we didn’t remember requesting from Imaya, but they were just that—sculptures. Other than that, nothing was standing out.

We took another moment to check for Mark of Replacements and felt a pair of them right next to us; Devi had two Marks on her left wrist. At Ability level 5, Mark of Replacement allowed us to leave up to two Marks on a living being, but currently it was only Devi who had more than one. It helped us distinguish her from the rest. Our marker-sense allowed us to feel the location of the Marks, but nothing more; from afar, we couldn’t tell who wore our Marks. This was the only way to mark Devi as important so that we wouldn’t accidentally sacrifice her.

Aside from Devi’s Marks, our immediate vicinity was empty. That wasn’t unexpected, though part of us hoped that some of the Thardos kids had silently followed the invaders to spy on them. Well, no matter. We felt a small scattering of Marks higher up, all thanks to our bond with Nosy. He was prowling the Refuge and we could feel the Marks around him. If he remained near Marked people, we would be able to retreat by swapping places with someone. That thought made us uneasy, though. Better to take that only as a last resort. We didn’t know who we would swap places with, and we would be leaving Devi behind.

We moved to the exit of the room, scanning the corridor outside. It looked uneven and tilted as if someone dug it with great difficulty instead of just creating it in an instant. The sunglasses didn’t grant us true night-vision, but they made the shadows recede. Devi activated her collar’s screen, which gave us enough light to proceed. We remembered that there were some glowing mushrooms up ahead – the original design for illumination – and so we wouldn’t need to rely on the collar as a light source. That would make sneaking easier, though with the noise of our mechanical leg we didn’t expect to be very sneaky anyway.

We had a good idea of where the invaders could be. The second puzzle was about obtaining a key from a shifting maze, so ideally all of them were in one place. We took a glance back at Devi as we walked. She looked serious and composed, her amber eyes glinting with determination. No sign of anxiety. We wondered if that was truly how she felt. This was the first time she would be facing other Players, after all. She noticed us looking and gave us a firm nod. We returned it. Neither of us was foolish enough to start talking here.

We didn’t head directly toward the maze; instead, we stopped at an intersection where the tunnel branched off into three different directions. Ignoring the tunnels ahead, we extended Soul Eater into a long pole and quested the mushroom-covered ceiling with it. There was a hole half-hidden by the glowing mushrooms, barely wide enough for a person to fit through. We pushed Soul Eater through and formed a handle on the other side, then teleported ourselves to it. Another gloomy tunnel, this one barely high enough for us to stand.

We didn’t want to waste one of Devi’s marks, so we knelt down beside the hole and reach down with one hand. Devi was already standing on the back of a clone she had created, grabbing our arm. We hauled her up, or at least tried to, though our body was still so lacking in muscles that it was Devi who did most of the work. We almost fell down as our mechanical leg randomly twitched, unable to interpret our current activity.

We gritted our teeth and got back to our feet. Being confined to this sub-optimal body was certainly making things more … challenging. We stalked along the secret corridor, the whirring of our leg much too loud in our ears. It wasn’t long before we reached the spy room, a cramped little space with cracks along the wall. We signaled Devi to stay in the entryway, braced ourselves to jump back in case the intruders had already noticed the spy room, then peered through one of the cracks.

The area below us was well lit, for obvious reasons. It was a lobby of sorts, a gathering place in front of the high walls of the stone maze. The spy room lay almost a floor above the lobby itself, so we could see everything below at a top-down angle. There were people down there alright—quite a lot of them.

The first person who stood out to us was a fat Noruk Player carrying an oversized hammer. His small beady eyes were shadowed by a prominent brow, looking past the sharp horn in the middle of his face. The armor he wore barely covered his rough gray skin, but we didn’t doubt for a second that he would be difficult to hurt. Much like Sylven Players were famous for their ridiculous firepower, Noruk Players tended to have an absurd defense.

Another non-human among the raiders was a Thardos Player. The others were watching her as she knelt at the entrance of the maze with a palm on the ground, sending ripples of light over the surface of the stone. Waves of light ran along the walls of the maze, going over and returning periodically. Thardos Players and divination Abilities; no surprise there either. The Thardos raider was too busy scanning the maze to notice us in the spy room, but we would have to be careful with how we engaged them.

Apart from the Noruk and the Thardos, everyone else was human. There were more than a dozen of them but we didn’t know how many of them were Players; our point of view made it difficult to see their necks. Human Players were annoying to fight against because they were too versatile. Unlike Players from other species, humans didn’t excel in any field—but they didn’t have to. Being unpredictable was more than enough to win battles.

We turned to Devi, forming a series of hand signals to tell her about our plan. Both the hand signals and the battle tactics they represented were things that the two of us had devised for times like this. Devi had offensive powers, we had mobility. Together we had a few tricks that synergized with each other, and hand signals were a neat way to convey them quickly.

Devi created a clone and made it stand next to us, doubling the number of Marks of Replacement in our vicinity. She then opened a pair of portals in the entryway, one in front of her and one behind her. Looking into the one at the front let us see through the one at the back, basically allowing us to look down the tunnel without seeing Devi. That wasn’t why we needed the portals, however.

Devi fired the first iteration of her Recursive Ray and hit herself in the back, charging up her next Ray’s power. We didn’t have much time until it would start straining her body too much, but we didn’t need much time. We pressed Soul Eater into one of the cracks on the wall, making it ooze through into the lobby. Quick and silent. If the invaders had looked up, they would have seen the glowing orange lines pulsing down the black material as it rapidly extended above them—but we found it much more likely that Devi’s crackling beam of energy would be the one to give us away.

Surely enough, people down below started to turn around, looking for the source of the noise. We struck the end Soul Eater with the heel of our palm, dislodging it and dropping it down below. The long black tendril – looking vaguely like a spear – fell down right behind the group, hitting the ground just as Devi finished firing her Ray and got ready for the next one. The invaders turned, their eyes fixating on Soul Eater, drawing weapons. Too late.

We teleported ourselves to Soul Eater, arriving on one knee, dropping the weapon, raising both of our arms at the group. They didn’t even have time to blink before we activated one of the Marks on Devi and swapped places with her, finding ourselves standing in-between the portals. A heartbeat later a deafening crash shook the stone walls of the tunnel, accompanied by the loud crackling of Devi’s attack. It lasted for several seconds, which we used to inch past the portal and the clone to look down through the crack once again.

The light was so bright that we could see only because of our sunglasses. Devi’s Ray had carved a path through the middle of the gathered people and destroyed a good chunk of the maze on the other side. Unfortunately, the Thardos Player survived; the fat Noruk was standing in front of her, shielding his eyes from the light, unbothered by the energy beam. No sign of dead bodies, but there were noticeably fewer humans. That was all we could take in before Devi’s Ray died down—and since we didn’t want to give the invaders any chance to retaliate, we swapped places with her again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my Dungeon,” we said, allowing ourselves some dramatic flair. The fabric of the Material Word felt thinner as storm clouds gathered along the ceiling; one of the Players had been hurt so much that their Domain activated. The disorganized group of invaders turned as one, eyes locking onto us, with the fastest being the Noruk who had already raised his hammer. He stopped when we extended a hand, palms up, and summoned the Dungeon Core in it.

“I have only one thing to say,” we said. “Perish.”

The Dungeon's self-defense mechanism activated with an explosion of dark purple flames that burned everything other than us. This power could be used only once per day, but we saw no point in saving it for later—not when there were so many invaders gathered in one place. The flames washed over the raiders hungrily, making them scream. We couldn’t see anything but the flames, yet the further thinning of boundaries between planes indicated that even more Players got hurt.

Once the flames stopped, we dismissed the Dungeon Core from sight. Five people remained standing. The Noruk, the Thardos, and three humans—two in rather unassuming leather armor, and one in burnt clerical robes. Their Domains bent the world around them. They looked deceptively taller than they were, thunder rumbled ominously above, and there were tiny red hands and arms emerging from the ground. We nodded our acknowledgment at the remaining five, then swapped places with Devi’s clone.

Devi was already by our side, extending a wrist that we grabbed and placed two more Marks of Replacement on it—halving our mana as a result. A moment later waves of light washed over the stone beneath our feet; the Thardos was scanning her surroundings. We teleported Soul Eater to us and shrank it down to a dagger. Devi finished closing her portals and drew Silverfang, nodding to us.

“I’m ready.”

“Good,” we said. “Then run.”

“What?”

Not waiting for her to catch on, we ran back out to the corridor and headed back the way we had come. Devi’s powers were amazing, but there was no way we would fight two against five in a place where multiple Domains had already been triggered. Domains gave Players a second shot, a chance to turn the battle around—but in turn, they couldn’t be activated at will and rarely triggered twice against the same person. Our strategy was simple: deny our opponents the chance to utilize their Domains. Let them waste their trump card.

We heard Devi’s footsteps behind us, easily catching up in spite of her worn-out state after having fired her Recursive Ray. We also heard a loud boom—the sound of the spy room being demolished. Our opponents would catch up to us quickly. We exited the hidden tunnel and jogged back to the portal room, grabbing a piece of chalk as we entered.

“Draw distraction portals,” we told Devi. Another one of our tricks; with the help of her clones, she was able to draw simple matching symbols on the empty portal disks. Since every portal that the Dungeon created looked the same, it would be impossible to tell where the portal led. While Devi got down to work, I started on the slightly more complex portal to Undercity’s center—back to the site of the first puzzle. I felt a bit bad about leading the invaders back to the Undercity, but for the moment my worry was overshadowed by concerns about giant hammers and clawing red hands tearing me into pieces.

“Done,” we said, taking only a brief look at Devi and her clones before stepping through. Chalk still in hand, we jogged to the next stone disk and began to work on it. I was so focused on my work that it barely caught our attention that something was wrong—the only thing that alerted us was that the portal behind us shimmered three times instead of one. We knew Devi, and she wouldn’t bother bringing two of her clones with her.

It wasn’t Devi who followed us through the portal.