Onei and Drauko ran through the sewers, each perturbed and scared.

Onei was busy rubbing the pain off her cheek. “You didn’t need to be so forceful about it!”

“Sorry!” Luuko said, “I’m just scared my life’ll be thrown into the gutter, you know?”

“Don’t worry. I know how that feels. Well, mostly the being in the gutter part...Annnd now the haunting telepathic messages are coming. How fun and happy I feel hearing demented screams in my head.”

“What screams?” Drade asked, curious.

“You know, the type that repeatedly tells you...” She cleared her throat as if preparing a great speech. “Die die die die die die.”

“...I know you’ve killed people, but now I’m sure you need a therapist.”

“You don’t say I need a therapist. I thought I was perfectly sane after living a life of going through the motions for literally no reason. Err, but really, I don’t think a therapist is helping me with this kind of dementia, more like a spiritualist.”

“Want me to call one for you when we get service again?”

Onei raised a finger, informing Drade of his foolishness. “Only if the symptoms last more than twenty-four hours.”

“Well, remind me, so I don’t forget.”

“The one person who doesn’t forget me, and they’re asking for help remembering. I hope you don’t get early Alzheimer’s, or I’ll be all alone again.”

“No need to hope. I’m immune to that type of disease.”

Convenient...Luuko commented.

Drauko yawned, then held their phone further out. As they ran, they passed a line where the ‘old’ sewers turned into the ‘new’ sewers, a place less well built and clean, despite the name change. The old sewers were mostly present in the west side of the city and had recently been reconstructed, while the new sewers were in the east side. There was also the death sewers, as Drade called them, and the sort of things found there were...

Dragons. Drade thought to Luuko, giving her all the knowledge they would need for their theoretical delve into the Changeton sewers’ depths.

Is that a joke?

Nope, acid dragons, specifically Nyssia, the great death dragon.

Drade, I swear half the things you say make me wonder if you’ve got a sense of humor, but pretend you’re serious to get reactions from people.

I have a sense of humor! Three times a day, exactly.

You modulate the number of jokes you can make a day?

No more than a joke a day keeps the Chaos away.

Drauko looked back at Onei, Luuko’s slight guilt at slapping the girl and maternal sense of duty making her worry for the purgatory-trapped teen.

For a brief moment, they saw a neutral, glossy expression, a sobered frown with no lively reprise.

The face Drade knew too well.

Onei quickly recovered her fake expression, shooting them an encouraging smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

Well, at least she was alive.

They looked forward again, averting their eyes from the depressing reminder that life wasn’t fair.

Say something to her!

Why?

You’re the one person who can understand her.

Understand...her? I don’t comprehend.

You saw that face! It’s like...she...she doesn’t care. Everything she does has no impact.

But how is that similar to me?

Aren’t you some type of nihilist?

Ruefully, I must be.

Well, she’s kinda a nihilist too. Now say something to her!

But-

Do it. Maybe you’ll ‘comprehend.’

“So...” Drade said, turning a corner as he spoke to Onei. “H-how is your life?”

“Cruddy?” Onei said with a curious expression. “Why the small talk?”

“Luuko just s-”

Oi! I didn’t say for you to explain that to her!

Drade’s deadpan voice turned robotic, “You just seemed interested in staying with me, so I thought it would be nice if we talked.”

Why do you talk like that when you lie?

If I actually tried to lie, you wouldn’t know. I also don’t think I should lie without reason.

Onei didn’t seem to care. “Well, if you die because you talked to me, at least I don’t exist, so you’ll be ok.”

“You exist,” Drade said, denying reality with his acceptance of it.

“Practically no, I don’t,” Onei refuted.

“You exist to me,” Drade said honestly, his voice growing soft.

Onei’s eyes widened at that sentence, and she blinked away tears, Drade’s exceedingly dumb and black and white thinking somehow piercing her heart. “T-thanks. Umm...so...w-what’s your hobbies?”

“Well, bite and sm-” Luuko screamed out, being the one paying attention to the road, “OH BY CHAOS! What is that!”

In front of them, blocking the way, was a giant black dome of slime nestled in the sewer’s hall.

Onei shrugged, then casually walked up to it, struck a finger through the goop, then placed it in her mouth, tasting it.

Luuko seemed ready to shriek at the grotesque act. Onei just threw it aside with her finger, then scrunched her face up, trying to articulate her thoughts on it. “Hmm, I have no f-ing idea what this taste is, but it didn’t taste...bad. It tastes...incomprehensible. Is that a taste?”

Drauko pointed at Onei like she was some kind of monster. “Y-you, you just tasted that...that monstrosity?!”

Onei shrugged as the goop shifted behind her, then opened up to reveal a gooey, ominous mouth. “What? If I’m going to be immortal, I may as well taste test every...” She raised an eyebrow, observing Drauko’s eyes as they looked behind her with fear. “It turned alive, didn’t it?

They nodded.

“It wants to eat me, doesn’t it?”

They nodded vigorously, the slime beginning to stealthily encompass her without touching.

“Well, you know what they say, if all else fails...nigerundayo!” Onei shot away as it tried to collapse on her, zooming past the one/two in an instant. “Last one to run away turns into jelly!”

Drauko broke into a sprint. Luuko yelled at Onei, her sense of self-preservation making her the odd one out. “I’m fighting to survive here, and you’re just going to drop me like a sack of potatoes!” She couldn’t say more because the slime shot a ball of acid the size of a basketball at them, and they had to dodge clumsily.

It has no magic.

Who cares, and what the heck is that supposed to mean!?

Well, I don’t know. I’d normally easily dodge magical attacks!

The acid hit the concrete wall and burnt a foot-deep dome into it.

That would’ve killed us!

Get used to it.

Drade and Luuko had known each other for a while, but he rarely involved the Friends in his higher-profile excursions. Atop basically being a talent-seeking agency, the Friends were paid by Drade and Uffield’s father, Gau, to be her...well, friends. Their status as a ‘cult’ was mostly a joke to the mob boss. In part for that reason, Drade tried to keep them away from the dangers and mind-boggling events of his life.

Because he didn’t want them to turn out like him, losing their childlike wonder and replacing it with apathy towards not just the mundane but the imundane.

Err, but enough of the mushy character-analysis, because the mushy black blob expunged a few smaller black blobs, which each revealed their own mouths and chased down the two.

“What a goopy situation!” Onei half-punned as they ran, the slimes catching up to them.

They approached where they had turned the corner, then began to take a turn to the south, only to dive straight west instead, when Drauko saw the soul of Kai’Vra shine from where they had come from, her bluish-black soul identifiable and unique.

They were right to do so, as some sort of bulletlike projectile shot where they’d stood, shattering the concrete wall.

Onei paused in a dramatic surprise when it passed in front of her face but didn’t linger long, continuing into the west pipe’s cover. She got a glance of the nymph’s smiling, shadow-veiled face just as her arm tried to spear Onei from fifty feet away, turning into green planty cartilage as it did.

They all sprinted faster than they thought they could, their death imminent as Kai’Vra calmly and menacingly said, “You can run, but it’d be folley to hide.”

“Cliche!” Onei responded as she ran away with dramatic arm-flailing.

Kai’Vra lost her composure as she said that. She’d been thinking of that line ever since she’d begun chasing them! It seemed that to impress these humans, she needed to think outside the box.

It wasn’t like she wanted to impress them. She was just inclined to, baka!

Kai’Vra began chasing them but was approached by two small blobs, which shot acid at her and hit her face.

She stopped, then frowned before she turned the corner, amused by the strange creatures. She leaned down to face the little creeps and got scalded by acid again. She was immune to most acid(she had adapted over the centuries), so she didn’t mind.

Kai’Vra noticed they were mundane...or something else. Her own manasense was nothing as strong as Drade’s, but it gave her good observational skills.

“Hm...” she said, pulling a small bag of puffin-pollen from her leaf-built shirt(it was technically part of her body).

She carefully opened the bag, then sprinkled it on one, testing a hypothesis she’d made on the spot. The slime shriveled and died, its five-foot-long body falling limp in the sewer water.

“Interesting, just like me, they react poorly to this...Perhaps they are eldritch in nature?” She stood, then pocketed it between her breasts. She didn’t need to include sexual organs in her human form, but she needed a way to distinguish herself as a girl rather than a boy. “Anyway, back to my...ahhh...’business.’” She began to run towards the hunted, not stressing her body too much. “Now, what other line would spook them..maybe ‘I’ll be back’...?”