A jail cell, that’s what it looks like, feels like and there’s a word for it: this room is pent. Pent up, pent in, claustrocum.

Todd hoists the leather strap of his magic bag over his head, drops the whole thing at the edge of the room and then rummages through his wicker basket in the corner. He digs out the last lump of soap, the rest of the supply eaten up by yesterday’s laundry and a thumb sized spindle of surfactant its last remainder.

The square obsidian panel of the store relay is inset on the other side of the room, recessed into the wall and beneath the dim of the lighting fixture. Maybe he can buy more.

Arching his back with a groan, Todd presses his fingers against the cool stone plate and spends a few minutes paging through [Blood Curdle Saber]s and [10,000 Devil Impalement Fist Needle Gauntlet]s until he finds a passable pig bristle toothbrush and wood-ash paste. Lacking a towel, he impulse-purchases a [Riverflax Rag] while he’s scrolling down for... aha! The [Rare Hooting Ape Fat Soap] is priced fairly cheap, but Todd balks at the buy; after all, vote with your dollar right? Further about a hundred entries, he finds and procures some [Dusksong Poppy Oil Soap] for just under double the price. Stripping off his everything, and unwrapping his new purchases from their waxed paper packaging, Todd ducks his head into the waterfall crevice in pursuit of hygiene.

Tomorrow was a day of rest, pixie Befor had said. Todd emerges from the cave soothed and refreshed to the point that even stubbing a shoulder against an exposed rock can’t foul his mood. Rest was something Todd truly felt he’d earned, that he deserved, and that it would be deeply unwise to take in full; so he resolves to enjoy it now tonight. Stripping the thin mattress off of the bed trestle, Todd lays it down atop the bamboo floor mat and lies face-down into it. The spicy, woody smell left by the soap is invigorating to his blood and soporific to his mind, and Todd breathes it deeply as he tumbles fast into slumber.

The secret is in the cohesion. That’s the trick. It can’t travel the distance if it falls apart. Chewing on wax, full mouth. Too much wax. Marmalade why? Grandma’s make marmalade? Old ladies, no that’s weird. There’s a keyhole in a door and inside there’s a mouse, and he has to hit the mouse. Aiming, aiming, aiming. No, the mouse ate the soap! Soap bubbles, but he can’t pop them. Big mushy pillow and it won’t pop. Annoying.

An urgent metallic chirping noise rouses Todd from a restless sleep. Whatever sense he had of time is fast decaying as his changing needs for rest have confoundingly upended his internal clock. Rolling off of his arm and finding it asleep, he agonizingly works his shoulder until the feeling comes back and he rolls himself up to his feet.

There’s that sound again. Almost sounds like an alarm.

Todd waves the other arm just in case the lights will respond, but they seem to be on the late night settings still and remain dim. He perches over on the lip of the bed trestle and chews out a staggered yawn. Maybe he should try the Skill treasure now, Walter had certainly made some great progress in his [Violet Tortoise Armor] out of the stuff. Alternatively he could make some progress on his channels, but he’s been sucking on Cosmic Energy for two days straight and is largely sick of it already.

What else could he do? There were some interesting treasures in the store, he could browse for a little while. That’d waste an hour or two.

The blaring noise has grown louder, and this time, Todd notices the lights dim slightly as it sounds. Idle mind cuts to urgent as a chill rides up his spine; Todd is fully awake now. Rising to his feet, he rapidly scans the room and as he does he filters an angry scratching noise out from the ceaseless falling water. Ducking lower and turning right, he pinpoints the source: from behind the little knee high table in the corner.

A long, serrated foreleg pokes out from the shadows, scrabbling against stone. There’s a hole in the wall, and it’s getting larger. The scratching noise grows more frantic, clattering and clawing at the rim of its egress. A long filament unfurls into the room under the table and begins to swish around, and Todd understands the identity of his guest: it’s a redburr stinging crab.

“Shit,” he grumbles, pinching his eyelids to unblur the world.

Lunging over to the other corner, Todd flops open the [Greed Satchel] and begins rooting through its contents for his [Mercury Rod]. It’s somewhere sliding underneath the pieces of his wood armor, and stubbornly rolls away from his searching hand.

The roach-beast chitters and squeals as three of it’s arms fit into the room and cut deep scores into the wooden legs of the table. The second antennae quests along the floor now, and the arthropod tries pushing its whole thorax through. Stuck only at its shoulders, the crab flicks an antennae, perturbing a malicious propagation across its graded differential. It cracks with a bullwhip snap across Todd’s naked calf, lashing a shallow laceration.

“BUCK a SUCK a FUNDLE, OW,” Todd leaps up on his bad leg, which has just, rather excitingly become his good one. Curling in over the pain, he falls forward into the wall with one shoulder, then rolls to lean his back against it. “Why’s no one EXTINCTED you yet?”

Giving up on forcing its way through, the invader backs its thorax deeper into the cavity, and four of its legs hack ginsu-style at the wall. Little chips of stone fly loose as the bug’s chittering voice rises to a squeal and the tunnel foramen further widens. But Todd’s gone too far furious for fearfulness, so he sticks out his mitt most sinister and administers twice his new friend’s recommended daily hydrous intake.

Directly, and at speed into its eyeball.

The ricochet spray of his [Water Spear] in the cramped space hits everything. The pained caterwaul of the redburr overbears everything. Todd is deprived, in that moment of sight and sound. “Ack,” he says, blinking and dripping.

It hadn’t been enough. All ten knife legs, keratinous and rust-iron red, unleash in a frantic, weed-whacker dervish. Stone flakes fly out from the tunnel, and Todd’s abused table fails at the leg. Nicked in the clavicle by a stinging rock chip, Todd hops awkwardly as the collapsed table surface shoots across the room at his feet. By this point, the perforation in his room’s large enough for light and what’s visible’s unwelcome. The redburr’s body is much larger than the fellows Todd’s been acquainted with; rough guess it’s the size of a coonhound and its legs are long enough to claw a third of the way through the room.

“Get out of my room!” Todd shouts hoarsely, dipping at the knees to line up another shot.

The bug’s head is mashed on the right side, with a compound eye drooping out of its socket. One of its legs is cloven at its base, such that it can still flail but any weight or leverage will tear it further out of socket, and in its frenzy, it’s chopped one of its antennae right off. But none of that changes the fact that there’s a whole lot of killing machine up and operational, so Todd channels another strike.

As he feels the current of energy draw into his hand, he feels something new and different. Like a sonar echo: his first insight into the geometry of the magic in his hand. And while it’s interesting, it surely ain’t pressing, so Todd focuses on the bit that’s functional: there’s some wiggle room now at the connection, and it’s happy to take more juice.

So he pushes a little harder. Hazy aqua energy swirls out of his hand into a wobbly blob, then it collapses into a high pressure point before punching out a high speed ribbon of water. The difference isn’t dramatic, maybe a quarter again more energy drawn from his center for thicker jet of spray. It’s the kind of control he’d been hoping for the first time he’d used it, and an encouraging development.

The crab is better prepared this time, tilting its body downward to angle the shot off of its harder upper shell and lifting four or five legs criss-crossed defensively in front of its face. The [Water Spear] cracks a leg wide open, and it flaps back like a hinge as it fails. The rest of the beam deflects off of the shelled body, slamming it with force downward, and then as it loses its grip, shoves its body down and back like running it along a cheese grater.

A mist catches the light, while back-spatter soaks the floor mattress and Todd himself. He grits his teeth and drops even lower. Wincing from the pain in his calf, he falls to a knee and peers over his thumb at the open tunnel and the little rivulet draining into his room. But this time he waits to take the shot. The monster’s shell has proven difficult to breach, even at close range, and the wedge shape of its body leaves few direct angles to target.

Screaming like a rattlesnake mixed with a cicada plague, the stringing crab charges back out from the depths and slams its body against the hole. Every limb that fits through is put to the purpose of stabbing Todd dead, and every limb that doesn’t, pushes. It’s going to get through.

Gritting his teeth and squinting as he aims, Todd focuses on its open, tearing mandibles. The creature’s head bobs up and down, and it’s arms are a brambly defense, but he releases one last torrent and guides it true. The ribbon wobbles as he keeps it on target, knocking another arm crooked and tearing open a seam, but a bandsaw length of the attack cuts deep and manglingly into bug innards. The creature’s body writhes for a moment, it’s lower body distended and rupture, then it simply lies still and vomits water and ichor onto Todd’s floor.

“No, this time she’s gone too far!” Ciforre accuses.

The four star sisters of subsection four float carefully equidistant in three dimensions. Tetrahedrally, they orbit around a square model diorama of the plaza and the molar shaped buildings around the edge glitter with tiny red flickers of light.

“Oh please,” Before growls, her snarling head at the center of a swarm of electric wasps, “our survival rate was getting out of hand. I had to do something.”

“You had no right!”

Aefore looks severely at her feuding sisters. “I have to agree with sister Befor. She was well within her bounds to rate the home invasion event at a level four. In fact, I would say it is a necessary consequence of your actions.”

“Mine?”

The gold pixie reaches a hand out to the diagram and as she pulls it back, tiny transparent figures lift up with it. “The average performance of our group is exceeding expectations. To your credit sister, our numbers in the field exercises are nearly comparable to subsection one! For a group four, that is an incredible achievement.”

“But your goodie two-shoe weenies are keeping the losers from eating their rightful dirt, it’s time to push ‘em a teeny ‘lil bit.”

Ciforre’s accretion disk flares up over her head, and her curling fingers deepen in violet. “I’m not angry at the level fours, you nitwit. Aefore, she sent a level 8 redburr hunter at my PRIMARY.”

Befor’s disassembled body implodes down into her humanoid shape and she wrings her hands and effects a guilty smile. “Oh, that.”

Defour laughs viciously as Aefore crosses her arms and scowls. “Is this true?”

“Oh I was doing her a favor,” Befor wheedles. “You were so upset when your little wet dishrag lost his event, I figured…”

“That you’d kill him?”

“No, no! I figured, well I may have sent a level 6 over to little miss darts Genton’s place. Your boy can win by default!”

Aefore and Ciforre blanch at once. “You WHAT?” They cry in unison.

“Oh please, I made if fair didn’t I? If your primary couldn’t survive one level eight, he doesn’t deserve the treasure or your attention.”

“And if the girl doesn’t survive?” Ciforre asks. She and Aefore float closer to the model, raising up one building in the display and it balloons in size.

Then a tiny red dot on the upper level flashes and winks out.

“Well then I guess we hope we kept track of the fourth place winner,” Befor giggles, “don’t we.”