A girl with grey skin and hair, a shirt labeled ‘2’, and wielding a mechanical staff walked onto the barren shore.

With an expression of perpetual annoyance, she overlooked the false shore. Where a sea had once been now stood an enormous valley of sand and rock.

She stepped through the highest part of the desert, where greenery most took root, sparsely overtaking the perimeter of the beach.

“She sure did a number on this place,” she muttered as she walked through the sand barefooted.

She didn’t make any inclination to halt as she walked into a small grove of shrubs, too thick to reasonably walk through. Instead, she held up her staff, and a bitter red flame melted through the wood blocking her path.

“What a monster...” she muttered. “Not that I’m not one, too...” she gritted her teeth.

It was a while before she reached the continental slope, a massive, sheer cliff that fell far over a mile as though she were at the top of a mountain.

The young woman planted her staff into the ground, then closed her eyes.

“Agony, hatred, regret. What a place I’ve walked into...” she muttered, using her magic to feel the applicable feelings of the creatures beneath the sand. ‘applicable’ meant ‘negative’, in this case.

She held her staff limply over the edge, letting it balance between her middle finger and thumb.

“But I can only assume the dangers lurk at the bottom of this cliff.” She chuckled to herself, then spoke with a coat of vitriol. “If the staff wills it, I will show them the door out of this miserable li-”

The staff slid out of her hand suddenly, quickly sliding downward despite the perfect balance it had previously kept.

The witch watched with a twitching eye as the staff tumbled down the cliff, clinking on each step along the way.

Down...

Down...

Down...

She put a hand on her face, groaning.

The witch leaped down into the canyon, the slope requiring more than a few long jumps to descend. By the time she finally made it down, she was rubbing her forehead in annoyance.

The very bottom had its own greenery- namely cacti, tumbleweeds, and shrubs that looked questionably alive.

Her staff of metal, with a saucerlike tip with a yellow ball slotted into the end, on the other hand, looked to be quite a bit more alive, creating a trail in the dirt as it moved forward through the sand, creating a path like a snake might.

“Draedon’s tech...ugh,” she muttered, picking it up, then putting it back into the hanging position she’d put it previously.

It pointed diagonally down, slipping from her hand before she caught it with her other.

“So this place is...down?” She smiled cruely. “A wonderful defensive location!” she said with fake appreciation. “It would protect you from all but people capable of destruction.”

She pointed the staff down and forward, then she mustered all the horrid emotions a hatred toward Draedon she could and unleashed her power through the enhancing staff.

In an explosion large enough to rattle the earth itself, a three-meter wide flame of brimfire bore an enormous, perfectly round hole through the ground, taking much of the girl’s energy as it did.

She grimaced as she regained her breath, hands on her knees. “Perhaps...” she admitted, “I should’ve just walked above the damn place.” I’m so damn stupid.

As she questioned her own competence, a rumble shook the earth again. She didn’t think much of it, though.

After about a minute, the woman planted her staff in the ground, then walked toward the diagonal hole, where she could see chaos unfolding as...water flowed through the tunnels from far, far below the surface.

Then, she heard a chittering sound and stopped in her tracks, her eyes widening.

“Was that...wurmspeak...?”

A rumbling approached.

“Shit shit shit-” she dashed into the hole just as an enormous creature roared where she had been, tunneling out from directly beneath her.

Its skin was brown, rough, and scaled, with spikes jutting intermittently from it. It’s mouth was covered in twisting, jagged teeth, which were aligned in horrid rings that would rip apart anyone who happened to fall into its mouth. It was ten meters in diameter and could have exceeded a mile in total length.

“That is a wurm!” she yelled in fear, running through the tunnel as quickly as her superhuman abilities could take her, which wasn’t that quick. “Damnit, why can’t I fucking fly!” she yelled as the wurm arced over the entrance, then plummeted into the surface and began churning through the earth, making a beeline straight toward her.

“Gah! I’ll have to fight, won’t I?” she said to herself as rumbling approached from above.

Deep down, she saw a cavern flooded at the bottom with water

That’ll be my arena since I was dumb enough to trap myself in its domain.

She raised her staff, and as the creature burst through the stone above, she leaped to the side, shooting a bolt of brimflame in the opposite direction.

It exploded on the other side of the creature’s mouth, redirecting its momentum away from her.

Just as she thought it might clip her leg as she slid across the rock, it grazed her and continued downward. Instead, a boulder fell atop her.

She slowly lifted it off herself, only for something else to burst through the stone above, its mouth gaping as wide as her body.

She couldn’t evade the attack and was forced to press her hands against its teeth while it shunted her into the larger wurm’s body, which ground against her back, a spike quickly clawing against her back, ripping a small tear in her clothes and skin, then the scales opening the tear further.

If she shot a bolt from her hand to escape, she couldn’t follow up to hit its head directly with a killing blow.

The smaller wurm’s body tensed, the rest of its body buried in the rock above and providing the force needed to push against the superhuman’s strength.

She saw, however, that its body began curving upward, reaching toward the ceiling as it tensed, its tautness peaking.

Patience... she thought, watching and enduring as that curve bent further and further.

Then, it snapped. The wurm’s body suddenly curved too much, sending its head careening into the ground.

In that instant, she shot a bolt into its body, decapitating it before it could dig away.

She dashed through the cavern again, but she’d wasted time.

As the great desert scourge suddenly burst from beneath her, the very ground chipping into boulders which crumbled up then began to fall into its maw, she leaped off the one she stood onto, sending it, then another bolt of brimfire into the side of its mouth, but as she did, she saw a yellow glow deep in its gullet.

“I don’t want to know what that is!” she yelled, readying another bolt of flame as she narrowly avoided the creature’s trajectory, her movements slicker as she flipped through the air.

“This would be so much easier if I could fucking fly!”

She heard even more tunneling approaching her, so she briefly focused her thoughts, identifying their locations through their negative emotions.

But the tunneling didn’t match up.

Suddenly, as she shot a bolt toward one of the nonliving tunnelers, she briefly saw a phantom of a wurm, made of a translucent yellow magic, before her bolt exploded in its maw. Then, three more erupted from the ground.

She held her two hands out to block two, but the third yellow wurm crashed into her front.

Its teeth ground against her face, scraping her body as it twisted in place.

Then, the living wurm crashed into her back, its teeth clawing against her back as she was nearly thrown into the depths of its body.

PAIN!

Pain!

Pain.

Pain...

She let out a guttural growl as she bared her teeth, the creature’s acidic spittle flying into her mouth, then she unleashed a powerful bolt of flame into one of the phantom’s mouths, dissipating the magic.

They were strong but not durable like the real things.

She stood against the living wurm’s mouth as she tore the magic one away from her damn face, sending the magic crashing into the one behind her.

For just a moment, it made the creature tremble, giving her just enough time to leap out over the other phantom as she let it also crash into the living one, pushing it back as they mindlessly tried to turn toward her.

She stood on its translucent back, her hands outstretched and arms bleeding in long but narrow streaks, then focused her pain forward.

“Don’t take me for mere fodder, you piss-brain!”

Destroying a wurm from the front would require a lot more effort than blowing it apart from the side, where the attack could quickly hit the wurm’s brain.

She felt her footing shiver and felt the living wurm’s fear peak, the creature pushing upward with all its strength as the flame began to build in the woman’s hands, readying to blow forth in an explosive strike.

Yet the wurm couldn’t move, even in the throes of danger, the two others powered by its mother’s magic pushing it back without reason in their mind. It chittered in fear, trying to communicate with its mother, hoping she would hear its vibrations and halt the spell.

“I’ll see you in hell,”

Just as she lost her footing, the wurm disappearing beneath her feet, giving the living creature only a split second to move out of the way, she unleashed a massive explosion of pain-powered fire, quite literally eradicating the creature’s head from existence in its entirety.

“You know...” she muttered as she dashed away from the rumbling falling diagonally unto her, “I probably should’ve used that on-”

Another burst of rocks spilled forth as the great scourge tunneled from behind her, giving the girl no chance of escape.

“...the big headass.”

She dashed directly toward the hole leading into the waterlogged cavern, and just as the wurm was about to consume her, she leaped down into the cavern.

Convenient for her, the woman was a descendant of the Brimstone Tribe and could see a little in the nonexistent light.

As she plunged into the water, she braced her legs, then leaped off its tension, giving her just enough distance to land against the heavily sloped wall.

The great wurm clicked with anger, its voice echoing through the chamber as it tunneled through the thick walls, not revealing its potentially vulnerable body.

“I know what you’re saying,” she yelled as the great wurm spoke its language. “For some reason...” she muttered offhand. “I’m not the person you think I am!”

The rumbling came from all around her, now, the wild animal encircling the cavern from all sides.

“Damn, where are you...”

She concentrated on feeling the negative emotions around her, but before she could locate its head, it burst from below her.

Her vision blurred as she was taken by surprise and fell into its mouth.

In desperation, the clone reached for one of its massive fangs, her hand gripping onto its hurtful serration, then held on as she was dragged through stone.

The creature began grinding her through the stone beneath the desert.

The pain built and built, her clothes and skin ripping against the earth’s beating while she used all the strength she could to hold on with just one arm.

Her other was aimed into its mouth, her staff gripped just as hard as the tooth.

It was incredibly difficult to concentrate on just one emotion for the hatred-fueled girl, but she didn’t really need to try.

Because being used as a toothpick to dig through stone really, really hurt.

In a massive explosion, her attack arced into the creature’s mouth, causing it to chitter loudly in pain as its insides were liquified by unholy flames.

The creature, which had purposefully avoided the strange underground springs, perfectly aware of its home terrain, blindly tunneled into one in pain, giving the witch a relapse and a moment to leap out.

She fell into the water, the emotion of relief forsaking her even as she escaped the imminent danger. Her blood infused the water as her wounds seeped.

She began to quickly swim to the edge, but the wurm wasted no time turning and attacking her once again, filled with rage as four yellow wurms appeared from the rock, preparing to pin the witch down.

Then, as it tunneled from beneath the water, slightly upward, its magically created kin began to burn and twist in impossible agony inside the pool while its own body began melting.

She smirked as she looked back and barely reached the edge of the pool, watching as her blood enchanted the water with an apparently quite painful enchantment.

The wurms couldn’t have cared less, despite that, as although she’d somehow inflicted the yellow wurms with pain, they didn’t have the brain to act on that pain and escape.

So...she still needed to escape.

The witch punted a foot against the stone beneath her, doing a backflip over the great wurm before the four other invertebrates shot toward her from below.

Thankfully, the first missed her by an inch, giving her the opprotunity to kick off its back, evading the other two, while the third was more patient, or just positioned worse, and tunneled up through the burning water last.

The great wurm crashed down upon her from above, and as the stone flung at her, she entirely redirected her momentum on one of the stones, sending it crashing into the wall as she kicked toward the wurm’s turning mouth with a bolt of brimflame readied.

As she hit the edge of its mouth, she blew a hole through it with her flame and flung through it.

Two more wurms crashed in from the ceiling not far above her as the great wurm roared, and she hit one with her legs, sending it careening and her back toward the wurm’s body.

She gripped onto one of its spikes, sending her falling down faster than she could do so personally, and kicked off again as she reached the bottom, evading the desert scourge’s mouth once more, then shooting a bolt of flame at a nearly approaching magic wurm.

It blew up, leaving only drifting sand where it had been, but the others shot toward her.

They’re going to catch me eventually. I need to end this.

She leaped off the wall again once she hit it, evading one but having her momentum screwed up as the mouth of another scraped against her legs, sending her flipping uncontrollably.

Pain, pain, focus on the pain!

She crashed into the stone, back first, but gripped a nearby stalactite to avoid falling.

Her staff, yet still held in her other hand with the strength of a dead man, began to accumulate flame once more, but her concentration meant that her ability to evade would lessen.

She swung across the lake as the magical sandwurms approached her and flailed in the air as the greater one erupted from the pool of cursed water.

The witch landed on the rim of its teeth, unable to do anything about its

She saw the hole she’d made earlier in its mouth and leaped off its mucus-covered skin, toward it.

Just as she did, it twisted to stop her from escaping, causing her to land significantly away from it.

The stone approached her rapidly, and her eyes widened.

The only place more dangerous than its mouth, right now, was the desert scourge’s inside, where she could sense a torrent of magical acid, which was used to enhance its digging.

And kill opponents who didn’t die easily.

She leaped off its skin once more, this time toward the stone it readied to crush her against, and flipped just quick enough to land feet-first on the stone, exactly beneath the center of its mouth, as it invited her straight into the guts of its maw.

Then, she was devoured.

For a moment, the cave was filled with silent rumbling, the wurm moving as normal, its body looping all around it in a mess almost like the hanging wires of the woman’s ‘birth’place.

Then, in a domino effect of explosions, her magic first blew it in two near its front with an explosion of dark red flame, then caused sequential explosions of energy, caused by the nature of her arcane power, which exploded the guts of the wurm one by one, its body sliding to a stop and bursting into gore, each of the creature’s many hearts trying to keep it moving, yet failing as they combusted spontaneously, the built of magic of a thousand years of life failing it in its final moments.

The witch, falling crazily into the pond, felt the creature’s emotions as all its life ended.

-

At first, it lived a life filled with such foreign concepts as ‘serenity’ and ‘happiness’ as a pet to a family of fishlike creatures who treated it as its own.

Then, its home, family, and life were eradicated in an instant.

The witch of true calamity destroyed its home, evaporated its serene ocean as though it were trivial, and took away all it cared for.

The wurm, hellbent on revenge, refused to die in its sea turned desert. Despite the tribulations, it consumed all who lived, let alone opposed it, hoping to one day become as strong as the great wurm of the cosmos said to protect the universe from the gods’ whims and vanquish the heinous witch.

But it never stood a chance, not even against her clone.

-

“I’ll carry your legacy,” she muttered painedly as she scraped onto the shore of the cave. “I’ll kill that damned woman, or I’ll die trying.”

The sound of air sputtering preceded the opening of the doors.

As the witch shambled through the sliding, titanium doors, which shit behind her, a voice echoed out: “Identifying...identitfied: Clone number 2, alias: Catastrae: rigid collapse. Welcome back, Catastrae.”

“Its not good to be back,” she said, gritting her teeth.

The hole she’d dug through multiple shots of concentrated brimfire had led her to this place, another of Draedon’s labs, buried deep beneath the desert sands.

“Is anyone in the lab?” she asked, looking about.

Sure, Catastrae had wrecked her previous lab, but she’d known Draedon enough to know that he had no sense of spite, or maybe emotion at all, given how he’d casually given her nothing but negative ones as a test without realizing the pain it’d put her through.

“No, Catastrae,” the voice said. “This laboratory is unmanned, as the experiments done here have been on temporary hiatus for, as of now, seven months.”

“Wonderful,” she said with a sneer. “Where is the medical bay?”

“Follow Repdrone 002, please.”

A mechanical spider crawled up to her, a red light glowing on its back, then paused. After a second, the light glowed green, and Catastrae followed the creature, putting her hands beneath her ripped shorts in the absence of pockets.

Much of her clothes were ripped, but they were built of Black Spider silk, which was enhanced even further by Draedon’s technology to make nearly indestructible clothes. It was a testament to the wurms’ power that they could create even the smallest of tears in it, let alone the massive rip on its backside. Were the clothes built more for protection than durability, however, Catastrae wouldn’t have been bleeding all across her body, only able to move because of her impressive tolerance to pain.

As she walked with the spider, she found herself walking through a glass tube, which overlooked an enormous cave.

The water shone blue, crystals beneath it and sticking on the walls glowing their pale colors. Countless creatures swam through and crept above the miniature sea, which had various levels and elevations, the massive pools not flattened at sea level as the ocean would normally be set.

It was a beautiful, relaxing place, but unfortunately, its viewer couldn’t easily identify beauty and couldn’t feel relief besides when she felt complete emptiness inside her.

She was led into a room with four beds, where the spider ushered her to lay down.

As Catastrae did, throwing the white blanket over herself, her vision quickly began to fade, and she felt the sweet release of sleep.

Sticking in front of the main terminal, which looked quite similar to the circular, holographic display back in her previous home, was a pillar with an indent set in the top of it, where something curved and pointed could fit in.

Catastrophe stretched as she looked at it, her body feeling as good as new after the machines healed her during her sleep.

She set her staff’s bottom to the ground, then grabbed the top, plucking it out.

It almost looked like a spinning top.

She set it into the indent.

A buzzing sounded, along with the same voice that had greeted Catastrae. “One second. . .Terminal key accepted. Are you a wanderer or issuing an emergency command?”

“Umm...traveler?”

“Understood. Loading encrypted message. . .What is your decyphered alias, Catastrae?”

“Rigid Collapse.”

“Confirmed! Decyphering encrypted message. . .”

A hologram of Draedon appeared, his lanky, mechanical form once again shown in front of Catastrae, causing an aura of dark-red palpable hatred to leak from her, her hair waving as if an upward draft had caught it.

“Hello, Clone 2. I must say, I was not anticipating you to take up my grand challenge. When I heard the news of your escape, I was...distraught. I thought you had decided not to seek to rival your peerless sister, which wasn’t my plan. It seems, though, that your personal tragedy has pushed you to grow.”

Catastrae scowled, halfway to yelling at the recording in anger. ‘personal tragedy?’ He makes it sound like a stepping stone.

“However, those who take up the grand challenge must prove themselves worthy of the power they gain through it. For that reason, I have limited your powers, a factor you have surely become familiarized with.”

“Ch!”

Draedon continued. “With your arrival here, I can tell that you have the drive needed to go on and perhaps even continue the grand challenge. All I expect you to do is to defeat the Desert Scourge, a creature seen as a guardian deity by some who live in this desert. Once you do that, a guide in the module you have carried upon the Mal-staff will be encrypted, which will give you a step-by-step on how to upgrade your staff with the sea prisms found within the Sunken Sea.”

He continued as the footage cut. “You may be tempted to destroy your staff to unseal your powers. Doing so will disqualify you from the Grand Challenge program. You must improve your staff if you wish to gain the great boons stored within my facilities.”

It cut again. “Don’t disappoint me, Catastrae.”

The footage cut, then the mechanical voice echoed from above. “Decrypting Exo-staff data. . .Guide decrypted. Desert Scourge has been defeated! Upgrading Grand Challenge Module to Grand Challenge Module 2. Two guides available: Exo-Staff Upgrade 2 Guide and Module 3 Guide. Which-”

“Exo-Staff Guide,” Catastrae said, rolling her eyes.

“Please make your way to the Observation Deck.”

She walked through the halls, intuitively understanding how to navigate now that her module was completed. Her companion spider tried to keep up but failed. Clearly, he could stop me at any time with the nanomachines buried in my body...Just what does Draedon want from me?

She arrived at a large, hexagonal balcony that oversaw a large crystal hanging from a chain.

“Please place the Exo-staff on the provided pedestal.”

A pedestal with a circular top, curved just to it could hold the staff aloft, rose from the ground.

Catastrae placed her staff atop it.

“Now stand back. The upgrade requires no manual construction.”

She stepped back as mechanical spiders crept from beneath floor panels, along with machine limbs and pushed-up metals. The metals were then melted by a blow-torch limb, and the machines started their work, improving the staff.

Though, its soon-to-be wielder raised an eyebrow as it got bulkier and more impressive, wondering if she could really hold it with just a hand.

Eventually, the crystal was harvested by some spiders with laser drills, and pieces of the prism, perfectly cut along its hexagonal ridges to make perfect prisms, were inserted into various points on the staff.

Eventually, after the robotic voice called out each stage of its creation, it said, “Shrinking.”

A bubble of blue energy enveloped the now bulky staff and shrunk it down to size, once more small enough to fit in her hand comfortably.

The whole process took about ten minutes while Catastrae sat at a provided lunch table. Apparently, the observation deck was both a scenic cafeteria and the location where the machines would harvest prisms. It was ingenious, though Catastrae would never admit it.

She slowly stood up and took the staff into both her hands as the spiders looked up at her in anticipation.

Suddenly, a burst of blue energy surged around her hands, the eight shining prisms set into the staff somehow de-limiting her abilities.

Catastrae’s mouth curled in some approximation of a smile as she felt some of her sealed power return to her.

If her life didn’t end before she showed Draedon and her sister who was boss, Catastrae would have revenge of a sickening sweetness.