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Falling through the darkness, Crystal clung tightly to Michael. ‘I hope you have a plan for this!’ She screamed mind-to-mind at him, causing him to laugh wildly.

“Not at all! I just knew we couldn’t hang around up there and I figured jumping was better than being pushed off or slammed into by a leaper!” Cackling wildly, Michael had to admit, he positively felt alive. Wind rushing by, ground rapidly approaching, and no real plan of survival – what could be more exhilarating?!

Reaching downwards into the darkness, Michael could sense the shattered remnants of his marble boulder, and the crumbled remains of what was once the stone steps which lead up to where Mongo and the healers still remained. Resisting the urge to lose the contents of his stomach from the vile touch of the taint on the stone, Michael forcibly grabbed the scattered debris and began shaping it to rise up to meet his and Crystal’s arcing descent. As the smooth stone slope came into sight, he moved it directly to their path, shaping it into a spiraling slope downwards. At the bottom of the huge slope, he extended another spiraling slide upwards.

“Hang on! This is going to be a wild ride!” Water parks and their super slides had nothing on the slide he’d constructed on the way down. Bouncing and spinning, Crystal and Michael slid down the spiraling ramp, slowly decelerating from the friction and the gradually altering angle of the slide. Reaching the bottom, they still had a massive amount of momentum and shot up the other side, slowing gradually, until gravity took over again. Like a marble in a ‘U’-slide, they spun, turned, and twisted as they started back down.

Trying to sense up at the place where they’d fallen from, Michael had a vague sense of Mongo, Jess, and Tiffany peering over the edge into the darkened abyss below them. Fighting the nausea from both the wild ride and the sickening greasy feeling that working with the unpurified tainted stone gave, Michael closed his eyes and focused on forcing a huge gust of wind up the slide, through the empty vastness of the cavern chamber, and into the tunnel where Mongo and the others were. At the first howling blast of wind, all three leaped back from the edge and hunkered low against the ground – not that it mattered any more.

Once the magic traveled to the intersection where the dead were just beginning to clamber down towards the group up top, Michael pushed the air into a tightly compressed wall and shot it back down the passage. With the floors and walls covered in the slick goo that had been the zombies and leapers, Mongo and the girls were shot out of the tunnel like a cannonball. Screaming frantically as they careened through the darkness, a golden mist rained down upon the cavern below, as Michael forced the wall of air to guide them forward and onto the same ramp which him and Crystal had just finished sliding back down for the final time.

“We’d best move,” Michael suggested as he tried to crawl out of the slide. As he hit the ground, the impact was too much for his stomach, and he heaved everywhere. From the dim glow of some florescent mold nearby, it appeared as if they had ended up in the midst of a large flat surface – surrounded by the dead walking. Staggering out of the slide, Crystal weakly waved Heartblade back and forth, trying to recover from the intense vertigo which enveloped her. Neither man nor woman was built to endure the ride she’d just found herself on. Skeletons crumbled all around, destroyed by Heartblade’s aura.

Weakly, Michael forced his head up and willed a wall of fire to encircle them both and the base of the spiraling slide. The girls frantic screaming was rapidly approaching, and after just a few brief moments, it zipped past them and up the other side of the ramp. Like Michael and Crystal, their momentum was too great to halt in a single pass up the ‘U’-slide, and before long the screams could be heard coming back down the other side – and then back up the first side once again.

Several times Mongo, Jess, and Tiffany slid up one side and the back down the other, before they finally came to a complete stop at the base of the giant spiraling ‘U’. “Hiyas guys! Did you miss us?” Cackling weakly, Michael leaned over and barfed once again when Jess crawled half out of the slide and did the same. By some miracle of will, the wall of fire held and the dead melted and burned before they could enjoy the warm flesh of the weak and disorientated living before them.

“Bottom floor; everything up,” Michael joked, as he tried desperately hard not to throw up again.