1

The steel door and the ceiling mouth opened simultaneously after the last cipactli was killed. Damon and Sierra retraced their steps out of the maze, staggering past the waterfall that had hidden the entrance. The teammates rushed to them, and the healers got to work repairing their injuries. Despite numerous rounds of Mana Heal, the pair had sustained permanent scars. The hole in Damon’s left cheek never closed up and Sierra’s lip was gone, but Zahra told her it would eventually grow back.

“You won’t be so lucky,” she said to the orc general, who spat on the ground in disgust, not realizing that he was blowing a thin film of saliva through his cheek hole.

Like a spouse at a dinner table, Angie rubbed her cheek discreetly. Damon wiped his palm across the mangled flesh, saw the wetness and cursed under his breath.

“Now you can talk out both sides of your mouth,” Zack quipped, and Damon glared at him. His Marine friend chuckled and brushed his long blonde hair back. “Ah, so you can dish it out about my hair, but you can’t take it?”

The orc general continued to glower at his longtime friend. “You should know me by now,” he grumbled.

Zack laughed out loud. “Yeah, I do. I do.”

Still, his humor wasn’t abated and he jabbed at the team leader a few more times as the group dropped down to the fourth floor to check on Harper. The veteran mage was leaning against the wall.

“So, how ya doing, hot legs?” Zack asked.

Harper told them that she had attempted to stand on her feet several times, but the pain was just too great. Her calves and feet continued to look like something you would see in a burn ward. She asked Sierra how it had gone.

The rookie mage glanced at Damon. “It was intense and scary.”

Harper coughed and borrowed a line from Zack that they hadn’t used in a while. “Welcome to Team Death Row.”

2

Back on the fifth floor, the team re-equipped their armor and weapons before launching their buff spells. Sierra lined up behind Damon as the team got ready to jump to the sixth floor. She guided her light orb up through the face sculpture’s opened mouth. They gazed uneasily up at the next room. Something felt different. It seemed darker, and a light fog floated above the opening.

“Anyone have any intuition or ideas?” Damon asked, but was met with silence.

He grunted and jumped up through the opening, passing through the cool fog and landing on a slippery slope. His feet slid and he landed in a pool of water with his back against a large slope. As he stood, he saw that the slope he had landed on was a patch of hard, immobile tendrils, thirty inches high, surrounding the room’s entrance. Sierra jumped through next, and Damon lunged to catch her before she slipped.

He set her down on the flat underwater surface, then shouted down to Zack, “There’s a slippery slope up here. Jump. I’ll catch you and then you can take care of the rest of the team.”

The blonde Marine soared through the opening, and the two orcs clutched at each other as Zack found his footing.

While Zack guided the other members into the room, Damon and Sierra had a look around. The thick tendrils that formed the mound snaked under the pool of water that was a foot deep. About twelve feet out, the olive green-and-brown tendrils weaved upward to the ceiling, forming a multilayered wall around them.

“That looks almost like a chrysalis,” Sierra muttered.

The wall’s opaque strands blocked any further inspection of the room. Damon grabbed a section of the slimy but hard filament. The four-inch-thick tendril snapped off. He removed one of his steel gloves and touched it, feeling its plasticky surface.

He looked up at the face sculpture in the ceiling, unsurprised that it was closed. “Maybe all we have to do is tear this down.”

Sierra shook her head. “I don’t know. This seems more organic.” She carefully touched the stalks. “They look like intestines.”

While the last teammate, Zahra, jumped into the room, Damon ordered the members to start tearing down the wall structure. The orcs went right to it, but the other members approached the tendrils more warily. As the hard green stalks were snapped from the mesh, the hole in the floor suddenly slammed shut.

3

Sierra was trying her best to break off a thick piece of the chrysalis, but it was much harder for her than the eight-foot orcs. As she heard the sound of stone slamming behind her, the brown stalk suddenly came alive in her fingers. It squirmed under her skin. She yelped, let go, and took a step back from the wall of suddenly moving appendages. The green-and-brown tendrils wiggled in the air, descending from the ceiling. Behind the vertical tendrils, she saw movement further in the room, but it was mostly obscured behind the tendrils, just passing glimpses of an ominous figure. She looked over at Damon. He and the other orcs had raised their weapons, ready to rip through the living wall.

A voice shouted, “Now!” and the tendrils dropped into the pool. They slithered under the water. Sierra felt them circle her feet and skipped nervously, trying to avoid them.

With the barricade gone, she was finally able to view the entire room. The water that had been flowing into the lower levels came from the opposite side of the room, through a six-foot-wide hole in the limestone brick wall. Displaced roots framed the rupture, while a large pile of rocks and stones had accumulated on the floor beneath. The clear water swept across the floor to the large cracks they had showered under the night before.

Not far from that location, a feminine figure stood near the wall. Only it wasn’t standing at all. Its nude, ravaged body hovered above the fog with legs that had been eaten away. Ripped tissue dangled from the mangled wounds, but their color wasn’t red or pink. It was the same greenish brown of the tendrils. One leg had been severed below the kneecap. The other just below the groin.

More tendrils had burrowed through the female’s body. One entered through its back and came out the front, at the belly button. As she watched the figure suspended above the water and the fog, Sierra’s Creature Description details appeared.

SORCERESS MELYNIA (Level 47)

HP: 579

MP: 378

STRENGTH: 65

CONSTITUTION: 57

DEXTERITY: 21

INTELLIGENCE: 37

WISDOM: 29

XP: 334

DESCRIPTION: Failed research experiment from C9’s Exotic Dancer Division.

“How dare you trespass into our domain,” the Sorceress hissed in a metallic-sounding voice.

While most of his teammates took a step back, Zack barged forward. “Don’t mind us, Melynia. We’re just passing through.” He paused, then added, “Um, you wouldn’t know how many floors there are in this shithole, would you?”

The Sorceress seethed as the tendrils that lanced through her body fluttered in the air. She wore a tall headpiece that covered her forehead and extended two feet above her head. At the top, a thick and ribbed dragon’s tail ended with an arrowhead point.

“Mock me all you want now,” Melynia growled. “You will soon be dead”

Beside her, a massive dragon moved slowly, taking up a quarter of the large room. The water rippled from its low, steady growl. Thin, black human hair hung low from its plated head. Its three eyes, two at the sides and one on top, focused only on the Sorceress. As it moved sluggishly, more tendrils fanned out from under its thickly plated body. Two long arms extended forward from under the appendages. One long-clawed hand gripped the Sorceress’s plump flesh. It squeezed against her skin.

“How would you like to die?” Melynia asked. “By dragon or by magic?”

Zack opened his mouth to speak, but Damon yanked him back to the group. “Shut the hell up,” the orc general hissed.

As the Sorceress waited for her answer, the Creature Description details finally came up for the dragon.

ASSIMILATION DRAGON (Level 65)

HP: 989

MP: 312

STRENGTH: 87

CONSTITUTION: 98

DEXTERITY: 46

INTELLIGENCE: 31

WISDOM: 19

XP: 455

DESCRIPTION: Half-dragon, half-worm. This monster assimilates its prey to use its powers.

Lying flat on top of the Assimilation Dragon was a fat man, whose body appeared to have been assimilated, even melted, into the hardened brown scales of the Dragon. With most of his legs and arms gone, the human should have been dead. But he looked over his rotund belly at the team. His eyes were glossy and black.

“So, who do we kill first?” Damon asked the teammates. “The Sorceress, the Dragon, or the poor sucker on top?”

Before anyone could respond, Sorceress Melynia answered, “You won’t ever come close to any of us!” Then the hundreds of tendrils that were submerged in the water rose up and shot toward the team like an army of snakes.

4

As the pointed ends of the appendages ripped toward them, Sierra took a defense-first approach. “Everyone! Crowd around me,” she yelled as she launched Damage Reject, creating a green barrier around them.

The orcs bumped roughly against her, jarring her neck. She glanced up at the top of the barrier. Their heads extended past it.

“This isn’t going to do us any good,” Damon grumbled.

“I know, I know,” the rookie mage replied, trying her second defense-oriented spell.

She had seen Harper use the reject spell, but Sierra had no idea what to expect as she cast Wall of Thorns. The spell created a growing wall of thorns and brambles. Melynia cried painfully as the tendrils bashed into the wall then retreated. Along with her light and buff spells, the rookie mage was left with an MPR of 2.5 per second. More than enough to use other spells without even dipping into her mana pool.

She heard the Dragon lumbering heavily from behind the thorn wall. It’s going to try and bulldoze the wall, she thought. But from the sound of its stomps, the beast was moving slowly. I still have time to push it back.

She queued a Fire Bullet and dashed to the left edge of the thorn wall, where the hunters had gathered and were firing their aerial weapons. The Dragon was just three feet from the wall. Sierra whipped the fireball at its head.

The Dragon lowered its head and let the projectile slam into its thick, plated hide. The beast sustained minimal damage, losing just 53 HP, but the flames caught on its stringy human hair and flowed up its body, burning the half-human perched on top. It squealed an otherworldly sound that was high-pitched and piercing. The Dragon didn’t slow down. As Sierra queued a Boulder, the beast bashed into the thorn wall, shattering it completely.

The Sorceress pointed her arms at Sierra, and appendages coiled around the rookie mage’s limbs. She was lifted into the air. Her legs and arms were pulled into a spread-eagle position. Below her, she saw the Sorceress directing the tendrils. Sierra was slammed onto the Dragon’s back, behind the eviscerated fat human. Ribbed veins sprang from the dragon’s heavy plates and gripped onto her skin. At the same time, the tendrils snatched away her druid staff, cape, leather armor, and canvas undergarment.

Great. I’m presenting to the team, beaver first, Sierra thought.

Then the hard veins tore through her skin and pulled her skin and tissue flush against the Dragon’s back. She screamed and felt tingles at the edges of her body. It felt like hundreds of small ants were crawling on her skin. Sierra’s flesh began transforming, becoming part of the Dragon’s hardened armor.

She telepathed the group, Someone get me off of here!