No, no, no— NO!

The rain fell as Ryan ran through the forest. Somewhere behind him, the rat-thing rambled. In the distance, blue and red bats glowed in the overcast shade as they stalked on all fours and screeched. A river of yellow light flowed into the distance. Scales of the titanic centipede.

At its head, Micah was screaming. That was all he could hear, even as his ears felt like they were bleeding.

Then there was silence and he could only hear his own ragged breaths, the sounds of the raindrops pattering through the canopy. He swallowed a lump in his throat, stumbled past a twig, and pulled himself up a hill. The duff rolled away beneath him. His boots were heavy with mud. He was almost there. Almost. Just a minute longer, and Ryan could save him.

He— he was alive. He had to be.

Suddenly, the air whistled as the titan ran. The trees’ crowns shifted in its wake. Ryan was left behind. He reached the clearing where Micah had been and smelled blood, found drops here and there. He also found his knife, but no corpse. Had it taken him away or had it—?

His stomach turned at the thought and he shoved it aside before he threw up. No. No. Micah was alive.

Ryan slipped the knife back in his broken shield and kept on running even though his lungs burned. He gasped out a word, “[Surge],” and nothing happened. He’d used it too often already.

Across another hill and he saw the yellow lights flowing to the river. Something hit its surface, but the raging waters quickly swallowed the sound.

“Ebaheral! Where are you?” the monster called behind him, almost in a singsong voice. “Is this where you were going to flee to? Who were you going to have save you, little deceivers?”

Ryan shoved him out of his thoughts. He didn’t have time to worry about it. He needed to get to the river.

A bat ran through the trees in the distance. He ignored it as he scrambled down the hill, praying that Micah was alright, that he wasn’t floating down the river as … as a way to get rid of what the centipede didn’t need.

He heard a gasp, coughing that went on for minutes, and broke into a tired grin. He was alive.

Then silence again. Was he drowning?

From a hill over, Ryan saw hands extending from the front of the centipede holding something underwater. Micah. The front few segments of the beast were hunched over the river, the rest of it supporting it.

Ryan rushed forward and shoved his spear in its underbelly, at the first glowing organ he could see. “Let him go!”

The weapon barely pushed past the tip. A single leg swatted him aside like a fly.

His shield broke when he blocked the strike and he smacked into a tree, knocking the wind out of his lungs. He hit the ground with his face and couldn’t breathe. He tried to stand, but his body wouldn’t listen. He reached for his mana and found nothing left.

Micah was still underwater, drowning, and he was lying here in the duff and grass, impotent.

“Ebaheral!”

The singsong raspy voice came again. This was it. Micah was drowning. That thing would kill him. They never should have become climbers. Never should have left Westhill, not even with Lang.

Something slammed into the titanic centipede like a lightning strike and the entire beast shifted. It crashed onto its side, breaking trees and throwing up the earth. Its yellow scales cracked around the impact and oily black ichor spewed out, hissing as it boiled into light, then smoke.

The yellow light of its scales cast the black in iridescence.

It shrieked, quieter than the bats or the butterfly, but all the more terrifying coming from its gaping human maw. It sounded somewhere between a woman’s feral cry and a bobcat screaming.

Ryan didn’t care. He found a tiny sound in the midst of it all—Micah coming up for air, gasping.

The rat-thing ignored the beast to turn around on the river bank and smile at Ryan. “There you are.”

A feeler whipped it away like a breadcrumb and the thing went sailing through the trees. Ryan could hear the crack of the wind, the breaking of branches. It had to be dead. A hit like that— But a second later, he heard it calling out again and an uprooted thornbush slammed into the centipede.

It jumped after and took a slice out of its underside while it was distracted, then ripped out the leg that slammed it away again. Light leaked from the wounds and the beast screamed.

The rat-thing looked unhurt as it jumped back into the fray.

Trees were uprooted, the river splashed, and earth tumbled in waves as the two fought. Ryan struggled just to get up on one knee, then a leg, and wobbled down the hill braced against his spear.

He dodged flying branches and debris and looked for a figure in the dark water. Two bats stalked toward him from the distance, halfway between muscle and smoke, their wings in tatters.

Ryan was ready to jump from the hill into the river to avoid them, but the centipede’s head smacked into the ground a few yards off and made them jump. A stag’s head flowed over a bobcat one and it roared at them with a deep cacophony.

The bats fled.

The centipede went back to fighting and Ryan scrambled along the river. He heard him first, then spotted him clinging to a root at the edge, trying to pull himself up. Micah. The root tore and he was swept away.

He ran after.

The world went mad around him as Micah slapped his wet pack onto the river bank. A wave pushed up against it and water spilled from inside, almost sweeping a few more belongings away.

He coughed and tried to hug it close. Things dripped down on his scraped chin and he looked up in panic before he realized it was the rain. A coughing fit seized him and he tried to push himself up.

He couldn’t. Not even a little bit. His arms moved with swiping movements, far too wide as if he were drunk. He tried to search for something in his pack, but his lungs were burning and everything was underwater inside. He found a bottle, pushed it away. Another, larger.

He dragged it out, took a sip, and promptly threw up.

Deep breaths. He waited a moment, then tried again, gulping down as much stamina potion as he could. He had to stop himself halfway when he felt his stomach lurch and put the rest back, then found his second bottle of healing potion.

He almost took a shaking sip before he realized what a monumentally stupid idea that might be, to drink it so soon after the stamina one. He simply spilled it over his head and body instead. Hopefully, it would find its way to the wounds to heal them.

He threw the second bottle back inside and frowned at his shaking hand. His pinkie and ring finger were bent the wrong way. Micah felt the constant irrational urge to move them, to figure out if he even could move them, but a wall of inhibition stopped him. His hand shook as the two desires warred.

He grabbed his pack with his other hand and crawled to his knees, leaving them be. Where was he?

Deeper down the river. His was in the far end of the small valley where it flowed into a small lake. A hill rose to the right. At the top, between the trees, Micah caught a glimpse of silver light.

An exit?

If it wasn’t, he wasn’t sure he would survive the disappointment. He almost took a stumbling step up and toward it before he stopped and looked around.

Where was Ryan?

“ryan?”

His voice was hoarse as he called his name and stumbled up the hilled forest, almost a whisper. In the distance, he heard coldlight bats crying out and the rat-thing and titanic centipede both scream as they fought one another.

No Ryan.

“Ryan!” he tried again and coughed. He was so slow. The stamina potion was working and he could still barely move. He got the bottle out of his dripping backpack and took another two sips before he went on, felt his muscles warming up. He could almost breathe.

“Ryan!”

Ryan didn’t answer him, but the rat-thing did. Across the river in the distance, it had one hand in a tree trunk and its arm stretched away to search the forest. It spotted him and its face split into a grin.

It jumped. The centipede slapped it into the river with two feelers and its stag and bobcat heads stretched back to reveal the woman. She shrieked at Micah and a thousand legs carried her over the water, each one stabbing down at the rat-thing.

She was running at him.

Micah stumbled back and away. He only got three steps far before he was caught up in a thorn bush. He tried to wrench himself free. The first of the legs hit the ground next to him and her arms were reaching out for his face. He gripped the branch that held him and broke it off, then went tumbling down the hill.

The woman shrieked and followed after him, pushing aside tree trunks like curtains to try and catch him as he fell.

He hit the bottom hard and lunged behind a trunk, forcing it to move around if it wanted to get him. When it went right, he ran left into the woods, trying to stick to the underbrush and roots to stay out of its reach.

It didn’t work.

It ran, paused, shrieked back at something in the river, then ran again, and still caught up to him. Micah was out in the open between two trees when he felt the impacts of its legs behind him. He looked back and wondered if he could hurt it somehow. Its eyes or throat still had to be vulnerable, right?

He felt useless.

He caught a glimpse of something red. A tiny lizard made of light jumped at the woman’s face and exploded.

The force threw it back and Micah’s ring warmed up as he was thrown across the rest of the clearing.

That lizard— Lisa?!

He saw another running at the beast from the distance, gasped in relief, and started running the way it had come, calling, “Lisa?!”

As it ran past him, he saw a tiny red fire crystal and a mana ring hovering inside the summon and frowned.

It jumped at the centipede and exploded. Shrapnel from the black stone ring cut past his face, the woman shrieked again, and Micah called, “Lisa? Lisa where are you? Answer me!”

He wandered for a second, heard no reply, then broke into a sprint between two hills where it hopefully wouldn’t be able to get him.

At the top, the centipede had caught up and he bellowed, “LISA?!”

No answer.

Arms reached out to grab him and a third lizard was running toward him at a sprint. It rushed past him and he kept on running. No. No, she was wasting her items on him. He was dead already. They both were. She was only buying seconds. Those mana rings had been expensive.

“Lisa, please,” he whispered, but the only sounds were the explosion in the air and the monsters snarling behind him. “Please, stop it.”

“Micah!”

Another voice answered him, hoarse and deep. He glanced up and saw mud-clad boots sprinting toward him as the beast shrieked. Ryan.

Boots. His boots.

It would only buy seconds, but if they were going to die anyway—

“Give me your boots!”

“What?”

“A boot! I need a—”

They slammed into each other and almost went tumbled to the ground. Micah was already reached for his leg to pull one of his growing boots off. He could hear the sound of a pickaxe hitting stone as the centipede gained on them.

Ryan stopped struggling and helped him get it off, so he switched to searching inside his pack and found a small jar that had once kept cream.

He scooped all of its brown contents out at once and slathered it over the boot, then did it again with another as it already bulged in his hand. The leather started warping and distorting as arm-thick strands of leather shot out of it in all directions like a fungus that had months to grow.

The centipede reached them and lifted Micah off the ground. The woman head shrieked. He shoved the boot down its throat with a twisted satisfaction. Its eyes went wide. It choked and tossed him away.

He heard Ryan shouting as he hit the ground, and something choking beyond them. A dozen legs struck the ground hard as the woman head tried to pull out the leather that was growing down its throat.

He hoped it would die on it.

The rat-thing arrived and started tearing into it with glee.

“There’s an exit,” Micah huffed as Ryan dragged him up and placed him against a tree.

The beasts fought behind them. They ignored them.

“Where?”

“Top of the hill. End of the valley,” he coughed and started walking. “We just have to—” His side started stinging, the last thing Micah needed right now. He shut up and focused on breathing as Ryan helped him stand.

The rat-thing crashed through the ground in front of them and hit a tree hard enough to shatter it. The centipede ran after, ichor spilling from its mouth. The boot was gone, but it had done some damage.

Unlike before, the rat-thing didn’t throw itself right back into the fray. A groan slipped from its lips.

Micah saw hints of dark on it. He’d thought it had been mud, now he thought it might be blood. Was it wounded?

The two had cut off their way, but Ryan didn’t stop running.

“Ryan, what are you—”

“Shush. Quiet.”

He led them between the centipede’s legs, ducking low enough that they wouldn’t touch it. They shifted around them. A single wrong step and they would be dead. A ceiling of glowing organs shifted above them and Micah felt the irrational urge to stab one. He knew it would be useless.

They were halfway out its other legs when the centipede lurched again and Ryan threw them to the ground. They scrambled away, thrown up dirt, debris, and raindrops raining down on them.

Something crashed into the ground to their left and the yellow back of the centipede coiling up smacked them away.

Ryan was up before him, wheezing and checking Micah’s face to see if he was alright. He nodded and glanced back. The rat-thing was in the center of the centipede’s coil like the victim of a constricting snake. It had three broken legs under the nook of its arm and its hands on the bobcat head. Stag skin was trying and failing to flow over its arm, but the half-formed mouth roared all the same.

One of its antlers was missing. Light and ichor poured from a dozen wounds. Blood oozed from the rat-thing’s hide-like skin.

Ryan tried to drag him away, but it spoke, spit dripping from its mouth, and Micah listened.

It couldn’t, could it—?

“Maria. You should have stayed in your hole.”

A crack. It wrenched the head from its socket, along with a bone spine and a flood of ichor. It threw both aside, to burst into smoke, and punched an arm in with an impact that made the entire centipede shift.

The stag head melted away off the side of it.

Micah called out a warning, but he was too late. The entire titanic centipede burst into a river of yellow and grey smoke that blanketed the forest. The trees were pushed back like a snowstorm.

Ryan was thrown away from him. Micah fell into another bush. He slapped his hands back over his mouth and tried to hold his breath, hoping that the smoke would clear just as quickly as normal monsters’.

If not, they might just suffocate in it.

When he managed to free himself from the branches, it was beginning to thin. He took a ragged breath and coughed. The forest was eerily quiet around him. He couldn’t even hear the rainfall or the riverflow.

He stumbled up to where they had stood before and found the rat-thing lying on the ground in the distance, next to a stretch of see-through cloth. It was moaning in pain. He glanced up the hill at the portal. It was more than a hundred meters of uphill climb away.

If it took up the chase, they wouldn’t make it.

Micah stumbled forward and took a bottle from his belt. His hands shook as he opened it, threatening to spill. For a moment, he didn’t know what to do with it. He doubted the thing would drink if he held it to its mouth.

A small part of his mind told him to drink it himself.

He fell to his knees next to the rat-thing and spilled the poison into its open wounds, where the centipede had lashed it with its feelers. One long cut along its chest. Some at its shoulders. He held the bottle against each and made sure some spilled in.

It shifted and he scrambled away, but it wasn’t attacking him. It was just writhing in pain. He leaned forward to spill more into its chest wounds again. Those were the broadest. They could take the most fluid.

“What—”

Micah found a puncture wound on its other shoulder and held the bottle against there.

“What are you doing?” the thing asked him. Its voice sounded so human. Old and raspy like a grandfather.

He used his broken hand to slip his healing potion from his hip and held it out toward its nose to sniff. “Healing. Healing potion— I’m healing you. Here, take a sip.” His grip faltered—it wasn’t an act—and he dropped the bottle. Some of it spilled. He picked it back up, but the one he held to its mouth next was another.

The rat-thing leaned up and swallowed a first sip of poison. It frowned, but he pushed the bottle at it insistently and it took another sip out of reflex. By its throat, he could see it swallow. He could hear the sound of it. By the third gulp, it had caught on to what he was doing and was trying to push the bottle away.

Micah whimpered and pushed back.

“N-no.” Poison spilled past its lips as it tried to speak. “No. What are you doing?!”

“Micah?” Ryan called in the distance. “Micah, where are you?”

“Healing,” he insisted. “Shush. There. Drink.”

Micah held the bottle back to his mouth, but it pushed its face away, the instinctive roots of the gesture for no. His hands shook and he poured some over its face, then tried to pour it on its wounds again.

“Just calm down,” Micah lied to it, trying again. “Everything’s going to be alright. This is for your own good.”

It lunged with one hand and he jumped back, scrambled away. It turned onto its stomach to lunge again and caught his leg just above the knee in a vice. It glared at him, but its head wavered as if it were about to fall asleep.

Micah kept still.

Its eyelids fell, then surged up.

“No,” Micah pleaded. “No, please. No—”

It squeezed.

He dropped the bottle and fell to the ground screaming, clutching his leg.

“Micah!”

Ryan tackled the rat-thing and they went sprawling the other way. It could barely defend itself, body hurt from the centipede, blood and stomach filled with poison. It was moaning.

Ryan managed to get the upper hand and set one boot on its shoulder to keep it still, trained his spear at its mouth.

Micah watched through the pain and almost sighed in relief. Of course. The throat. Ryan still had his weapon. Micah doubted its throat would be as protected as its hide-like skin. He could kill him.

Kill him, he thought. If Ryan killed him they could finally …

… leave.

He frowned. Kill him? Where had that thought come from? Kill ‘him’, not ‘it’? Somewhere along the way, Micah had given himself to [Savagery] and it was whispering in his ear to kill the man who would threaten them.

But just because it looked like one— Monsters were things, they didn’t have sexes. So why was he thinking that?

He could keep quiet. He could say nothing. Ryan would stab it and instead of light, blood would flow out. He could just say it was fully-formed instead of unmade. His friend would believe him. Anyone would believe him.

They could leave.

Help me.

Fabian’s voice in his other ear. If there was even a doubt—

“Ryan, no!”

His cry brought the strike off course. The spear struck past its chin instead and didn’t even cut the man’s skin. He struggled beneath his friend’s one boot and Micah used the chance to push himself up on his broken leg and tackle him.

He missed. His leg gave out, he cried in pain, and he barely brushed past Ryan. Not even that. He couldn’t even do that.

Ryan glanced back at him, spear still trained on its throat, and demanded, “What the hell, Micah?”

“He’s alive!”

“What?” His spear wavered.

“Don’t kill him! He’s a person!”

Ryan’s face shifted into disbelief. “That? Just because he can speak and write, Micah—”

“No, not that,” Micah interrupted him. “This isn’t about monsters and ethics, Ryan. He’s a human being. Or at least, a Northerner. There’s no crystal in his body. If you take off his shorts, you’d be embarrassed. Trust me.”

Ryan glanced back at him, unsure, but he tightened his grip on his spear and grit his teeth. “No. We’ve seen more monsters eat more than normal. We’ve seen insects. If some of them have— No, Micah.”

“Ryan, don’t.”

He was doing this for him.

“How do you know?”

His defense was laughable. “My Path told me.”

Ryan looked down at the half-conscious man one more time and his spear wavered. Then, as if the words had finally sunk in, he threw the weapon away in horror and scrambled away from him.

“Ryan?”

“I—” He was wheezing, staring at his hands.

“Ryan?”

He looked over, saw Micah lying on the ground, and ran over to help him up, saying, “We have to get out of here.”

Micah winced as he stood up and almost fell on him when he moved away to get his spear.

“Micah?”

“My leg. I think it’s broken.”

“Fuck. What? Okay, lean on my shoulder. We just need to—” He shook his head. “What am I saying. We can leave the spear behind.”

He started walking, but Micah protested, “We can’t leave him here.”

“Yes. We can. He tried to kill us—”

“No, not that. Again,” Micah scoffed. Why was he constantly misunderstanding him? “I don’t want to help him, Ryan. He attacked us. We have to bring him back, bring him to the guards. Tower crimes— Attacking other climbers is horrible. He almost killed us. He has to answer for it.”

“We can’t—” Ryan glanced back. “What are we supposed to do?”

Micah reached over his shoulders to get at his backpack. “Rope. You still have some, right?”

He dragged out the flimsy rope between them and felt the doubt sink in. Just how petty was he, that he would risk their lives to punish a man? There was no way that would hold him. He could break through trees. He had killed that centipede on his own. What use was tying him up just to haul him in front of the guards?

They should run. Safety was more important right now.

Ryan started moving away from the ratman without saying anything and Micah was forced to follow. He couldn’t stand without him. Did he want to drag him away despite his protests? Micah almost sighed in relief.

“I changed my mind. You were right. We need to leave,” he said. Ryan knew what was best.

Instead of running, his friend set him down against a tree. “No.”

“What?”

“No, you were right. It’s not— Leaving him here wouldn’t the right thing to do. In the stories—”

“The stories?”

“I—” Ryan shook his head and took the rope from him. “We can’t leave him here, Micah. What if he attacks someone else? That would be on us. On me. If he really is a person, we have to bring him back. I’m … sorry.”

He stumbled back to the ratman with his head down and kneeled next to him. He rolled him on his back and started tying his wrists.

Micah stared. I’m sorry? He looked up at the raining canopy and felt like shit.

They stumbled up the hill with faltering steps, Micah using Ryan’s spear for support and the other dragging a man behind him by rope. If it woke up, they wanted to be able to leave him and run.

He had drunk the rest of the stamina potion, but they could both still barely stand. He drew the man up in fits. Pull, stop, breathe. Pull, stop, heave. He only wore one boot on his feet.

A coldlight bat had come dangerously close to attacking them, but ran away. Micah suspected the man’s [Open Level] was still scaring them off. If he even had that Skill and wasn’t some Northerner abomination.

What if he was a spy?

Micah hopped on one leg next to him. The cloak he held over his left arm glowed yellow when the raindrops hit it. They’d found it lying next to him.

“Do you think it’s a magic item?” he asked with a smile. “It’s glowing. Does it glow because of water? Maybe it has something to do with the water then. The centipede tried to— I mean, there’s a river here. Maybe it has to do with a river. And a lake. But where did it come from? Did you see a treasure chest? I didn’t. Maybe it belongs to the man. Do you think we’ll get to keep it if it belongs to him? Would that be stealing? Why would he have a cloak and no clothes, anyway? I don’t think it’s his.”

They got high up enough on the hill to look back over the valley and he saw the stone structure of the stairs they had come from. He wondered about this place. It was ringed by stone walls on all sides, but the sky was real.

“Do you think there are other valleys beyond this one? If we climbed those rocks walls, I mean. Or maybe there are connections. Tunnels. Paths. Maybe there’s something underneath the lake? Maybe we should go swimming. I doubt I can, with this leg anyway. But we could be in the Gardens.

I mean, I don’t think these are the Gardens, because they don’t match the description. Although, all forests are in the Gardens, so that’s not really true. But maybe these are the ‘new’ Gardens, you know? Or maybe this is the new Fields. What do you think, Ryan?”

His friend grunted as he dragged the man behind him.

“If these are the new Fields, I doubt many people will come here. I doubt this is the third floor, too. I mean, not that Geb and the others lied, but they totally lied to us, don’t you think? Assholes. I mean, we did … ignore their advice. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone up those stairs after all. If we had snuck away instead of fighting the golem, would the man have found us? Maybe he would have. He seems strong.”

Still, no answer. Micah limped for a while and grit his teeth, trying to ignore the feeling of his bones shifting when in his leg. He closed his eyes and smiled again as he spoke, “Anyway—”

His voice cut off when Ryan stopped walking all the sudden and he looked ahead. The portal stood there.

It was circular and brilliant silver like they normally were. Around it, bricks formed a circle. White symbols glowed on the stone. The portal wasn’t even set into the wall of the valley, it stood a few meters off from it in the grass.

Ryan started dragging again.

“What are those symbols? Dwarfish? Are they decorative or functional, do you think? I wonder what they mean. Should we copy them down? Oh, but I don’t have any paper. We should have asked the others for paper, even if we were in a lake. I could try memorizing some of them. Maybe they’re important. Could we take the bricks with us, do you think? If we used Clay—”

He broke off.

“Maybe we could use the spear to lever them out or something. What do you think would happen if the arch broke?” Micah asked next. “What if the centipede had crashed into it during the fighting? Ryan?”

He grunted, “The portal would probably vanish.” It was the first reply Micah had gotten in the last half hour.

“You really think so? I mean, yeah, that seems likely. But what if we could make our own portal with the stones? How awesome would that be? I mean, elsewhere in the city. We could tax it for people to go into the Tower or something. Of course, we would have to find another exit now, but, I mean, you know? I would be nice.”

Ryan shook his head. There was a lump in his throat when he spoke, “Micah, can we just go home?”

“Oh.” Micah nodded and swallowed. He tried not to think of the own lump in his throat or the pain in his leg.

Together, they stumbled through the silver doorway with Ryan dragging the ratman behind him,and fell onto the ground outside the Tower. It was afternoon. Guards looked at them in alarm. A hospital tent had been set up closeby. Smoke rose somewhere beyond the Guild building.

People started shouting and rushing toward them.

Ryan looked lost. No, worse. He looked afraid and held up his hands as if to defend himself, but didn’t have a weapon. His shield was a sliver of wood.

A man started saying something to him.

“Southwest entrance,” Micah told him and his friend let go of his held breath. He dropped his hands and only then seemed to recognize their surroundings.

They were back.