Unearthly tendrils the color of viscous tar, poured onto a motionless body. They flowed over the cooling flesh, slithered through the body's veins, branching and forming threads.

Filaments contracted, and flesh writhed.

Snap. Crackle.

Shattered bones shifted and knit back together. The catastrophic wound laying open their chest slowly closed. Their torn muscle fibers were stitched, and shredded sinew was realigned.

The only issue was their missing heart.

A torrent of black threads spewed out of the body, blanketing the ground. Crawling and seeking, they happened upon a bloody chunk of slippery flesh.

Feeling and grasping. The piece of meat was reeled back into their chest. Arteries and veins were sown onto the now beating heart.

Skin flowed into place, and the wound was healed.

Charlie's eyes flew open with a startled gasp.

A wave of noise crashed over her and dragged her under. Terrified screams and screeches of shredding metal pierced her ears. Her vision was also swimming as the metallic ceiling seemed to warp in front of her eyes.

Clapping her hands over her precious eardrums and screwing her eyes shut, she curled up into a whimpering ball.

What by the outer gods was that? Her head was pounding from the sudden sights and sounds. She was feeling nauseous just trying to process it, which was understandable considering this was her first time experiencing the wonders of having eyes and ears. The soothing darkness of the abyss was preferable to whatever she had gotten herself into.

Struggling to tune out the faint green glow creeping through her eyelids, and the meaty pulping of internal organs, she moaned in agony as she felt her bile rising. She cursed the massacre that her main body was currently carrying out. Couldn't the cultists be slaughtered more quietly?!

Even lying down she could still feel her head spinning. A numbing blanket of whiteness was constantly flickering behind her eyelids as she labored to draw each breath. With each rasping gasp she could feel the numbness in her extremities ebb and flow.

This was so much worse than anything she had felt before. Throughout the eternity she was trapped in the abyss, hunting and being hunted in turn, she had never had to deal with this kind of stomach revolting disorientation.

The pain of being severed in half by an abyssal guardian doesn't hold a candle to this cloying nausea. At least the pain of being dismembered was normal and could be suppressed­­—there was no calming the roiling of her stomach.

She rolled across the floor and vomited. The foul smelling substance half landed on the ground and half landed in her long black hair.

With a sigh of relief she flopped back onto the ground.

That felt much better.

She lay there in the filth and gore as she waited for her full-body shiver to slowly subside. The background noises had finally stopped triggering her gag reflex, and her breathing had evened out.

Peeking out from under her eyelids, the faint green glow suffusing the room revealed the same swimming ceiling. Promptly regretting her existence, she screwed her eyes shut and weathered the wrongness permeating through her mind.

This was just ridiculous. How did the humans manage to survive in this hellscape? Maybe she should go back to the abyss.

After giving it some serious thought and deliberation, she decided to soldier on.

Slowly cracking her eyelids back open, and rapidly blinking away the forming tears, she managed to endure the faint green glow that was illuminating the steel-plated room. She glared at the perfectly flat ceiling until it stopped moving. Okay, that was much better.

She was no longer sick from listening to the din that appeared to be dying down, and she could look at the ceiling without vomiting.

Charlie levered herself up on shaking arms and could only stare wild-eyed at the macabre room.

Severed body parts and shredded black robes were strewn across the steel-plated floor. The metallic walls were liberally smeared with viscera and painted with dripping blood. Such a scene would horrify even the most jaded cultists, and traumatize them for life.

However, Charlie was aghast at the waste. Blood and flesh were strewn everywhere, and no one was consuming the bountiful sustenance. Back in the abyss, every scrap of food was dearly won—hunted down from a troublesome prey or pried from the cold grasp of a competitor.

She shook her head. Even though she really wanted to clean up the spilled food, she should first study the rest of the room.

Looking away from the massacre, she instead focused on the dying ritual circle that was the source of the green light.

It was a priceless feat of craftsmanship. A pentagram carved into the steel floor and filled with a liquefied mixture of black powdered bone and crushed emeralds. Blood sigils were carefully drawn around its borders—instructions linked to the pentagram serving as a power source.

The amount and quality of just the crushed emeralds alone would probably make even a nobleman blink. Although Charlie couldn't care less.

She was too busy being entranced by the way the gemstone powder gave off a faint glow that played off mesmerizing refractions against the metallic surface of the room. A dancing light. Reflecting and fascinating.

It was very shiny.

With some difficulty she averted her eyes, and tried distracting herself by deciphering the sigils' written instructions. She couldn't even identify the sigils by sight—which looked like weird squiggles to her—and was instead categorizing them by intuitively feeling the sigils' nature.

Yup, some to break the barrier between realms, others to stabilize the ensuing fissure. Wait. That clump of sigils looked like safeguards to be activated in case the summoning grew out of control.

"Ummm...this probably counts as losing control," Charlie mumbled as she glanced at the bloody walls.

Luckily for the cultists—unluckily for her—they managed to trigger one of the safeguard sigils, collapsing the dimensional rift and severed the questing tendrils that her main body was sending through the gap between space.

Charlie stared at the massive heap of twitching black tendrils that lay around the room and trailed through the door.

Literally through the door, since her main body had hammered a fist-sized hole through the 3 inch steel door, and had squeezed a number of feelers out of the warped opening.

This was troubling. The plan was to slaughter everyone in the facility, but the feelers barely even made it out of the room.

Maybe she shouldn't have capitalized on the moment of inattentiveness. The cultists were beseeching her main body to cast a curse on a rival cult with the sacrificial girl as payment, only to lose control when a tendril jerked the corpse's hand and smeared a blood sigil.

Ha. She chuckled. As expected, the cultists created protections to stymie any questing tendrils, but didn't account for using the body as a proxy.

Actually, this wasn't so bad. She still got the body in the end. And she even picked up a few of the cultists as morsels.

Too bad she wasn't able to take over the ritual room in time to stop the dimensional rift from being closed.

Charlie looked around the room. There didn't seem to be anything interesting left, and all her senses were sorted out. She should probably check the rest of the facility to see whether there were any surviving cultists. But first of all, food.

Getting up, Charlie tried taking her first tottering step... and fell flat onto the floor.

Blasted depth perception and a high center of mass.