“That’s probably for the best. Taking some time apart.” The younger version of me answered. I did a double-take. Was my voice really that subdued and robotic?

“What?” Daphne asked, her warm disposition unsettled.

“There was a notebook in my bedside table. It’s gone.”

“Maybe Ellison was being nosy?” Daphne tried.

He shook his head. “Nope. As far as I can tell, it’s no longer in the house. Did you take it?”

“I didn’t even know you had a journal.”

“I don’t. It was mostly a series of half-formed thoughts and plans for the future. Some documentation of the trial. And post-therapy notes. Since you didn’t answer, I’ll ask again. Did you take it?”

Daphne breathed a heavy sigh. “God, you’re an ass.”

“We’re done.” I rose from the table and slid the book into a backpack.

“Wait, Matt—“

“With all the legal shit, we shouldn’t be talking anyway. Different camps and whatnot.”

Daphne stood to her feet, placing her palms flat on the table. “We’ve been friends for years—“

“During which, you’ve tried to drive wedges between me and my family, followed me around, and repeatedly violated my privacy. I’d say the friendship has run its course.”

I winced at the harshness of the scene. It wasn’t that Daphne was a bad person back then. The good always outweighed the bad. But the bad was too substantial to ignore. She was obsessive. I think, if her father had ever been willing to get her tested, she would have easily been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Our friendship started normally, if a bit awkwardly, with our parents constantly bringing us along for lunches and dinners thinly disguised as business meetings.

It was uncommon back then for me to have a friend my age, and as such, I thought that our relationship was normal. The irregularities a more social person would have picked out went entirely over my head. Daphne seemed to always be available and never flaked. She was interested in me, and being an adolescent with very little idea of who I was, we shared that interest. There was some friction—she wanted to invest far more time into our relationship than I did, and had trouble identifying social cues or subtle indicators that I was ready for our interactions to come to a close.

It was only after a few years that the veneer cracked enough to reveal the reality beneath.

In reality, Daphne didn’t always have time for me. She just chose to prioritize me over anything else, sometimes to serious detriment.

She got angry and standoffish if I didn’t spend enough time with her.

Some of my personal items, including anything I’d so much as scrawled in began to disappear sporadically.

And it wasn’t so much that she had trouble identifying social cues, more accurate that she intentionally ignored them.

It’s common for people with BPD to develop a strong fixation on an individual. That fixation can be romantic, or as it was for us, platonic. Occasionally, it works out well enough. Often it doesn’t. What it came down to was that Daphne had boundary issues, while I had boundaries in bulk. Even if our history hadn’t been recently complicated, it was a terrible fit.

“Matt, stop.” Daphne called out to the younger version of myself. In my memory, she’d sounded angrier. Hearing it again, she just sounded sad. “Are you going to tell?”

The inevitable question, and the one thing Daphne cared about more than me. Her secrets.

“Depends.” He shot Daphne a bland look. “You planning on making this difficult?”

“No,” Daphne said quietly.

“As long as that’s true? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Daphne left the younger me standing there by the picnic table. An expression of anger filtered over his features as he watched her go.

Slowly, he turned to me. “How little—“

Before he uttered a word, I slid beneath his ribcage. He coughed once and fell to the ground, his face white. The last thing I was interested in right now was listening to the lithid puppeteer some twisted version of myself. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that the more I let it speak, the more power it would have over me.

Still, it was strange. Seeing myself like that.

”Talia.”

Nothing. Not even a half awake response.

For a moment, I considered dismissing and resummoning Talia. Then immediately thought better of it. If the lithid was capable of reading this deeply into my history, it was absolutely capable of reading my more recent memories of how my powers worked, and setting any number of traps.

Leaving Talia aside for the moment, I tried to summon Audrey as a test case. Instead of pain, I felt nothing. Like attempting to siphon water from stone.

That answered that.

I took a seat at the picnic table and began to sort through the contents of my inventory. There wasn’t much beyond the usual suspects. My bike and weapons still took up the majority of the contents, along with a few healing potions and the rollback charm. The first new additions were a pair of earplugs, and what looked like a knock-off Sony recorder.

With little reason not to do so, I pressed the play button as I continued sorting through my things.

”Your name is Matthias. You are seventeen years old and a senior at Talmont High-school. Assuming it ever opens again. In a few minutes, you’re about to enter a floor of the adaptive dungeon that contains a creature called a lithid, capable of creating hallucinations and, if Talia is correct, full-blown delusions. You must keep in mind that nothing you’re seeing is real, and any psychological effects or distortions you’re experiencing are temporary. The same holds true if you can’t remember anything at all.”

My dictation carried on for some time. While I was careful not to make any direct mention of the Ordinator class, I specifically called out the results of the transposition event, the situation at region six, and the recent developments at region fourteen, along with my position as region owner.

”Mom and Iris are fine. Things aren’t great with Ellison, but they’re mendable if he comes around. Everyone’s alive and safe.”

I stopped rooting through my inventory when I found the bow.

It was made of a dark-gray wood, augmented with tarnished silver swirling embellishments.

Description: This longbow is enhanced with magical accoutrement in the form of enchanted runes. Some runes reduce the draw weight of the bow, allowing greater range and power regardless of the strength of the User. Others seed the projectile with traces of the divine.

Item Ability: The first shot fired inflicts an additional 200% damage, with a significant boost to critical damage. This effect resets every hour.

Item Class: Epic

God damn. It checked both the boxes for long-range and burst damage, shoring up weaknesses I’d carried forward since the beginning. It wasn’t a perfect solution, necessarily—the cooldown left something to be desired—but it was one hell of a start.

Still, I was worried. There was no way the name was a coincidence.

”By now, you’ve probably noticed the additional items in your inventory and on your person. The bow is of particular interest. Kinsley had no history of it in her records, and as far as we can tell, the entry appeared minutes before you started searching for a bow. It was too good to pass up, and the price was a steal, but I’m all but certain we’ll pay more for it later. At the very least, it shows Nychta has a continued interest in our survival.”

I hefted the bow, feeling out the weight one more time before replacing it in my inventory. Concerns about Nychta would have to wait until my life wasn’t on the line.

”Now, onto the plan. If you’ve already put it together, stop this recording. If not, I’ll lay out the details now. If the lithid is as powerful as Talia expects, it will likely already know what we intend. No point in trying to hide—“

The recording cut out suddenly.

I reached over and scanned backwards, replaying the last few seconds. It stopped at the same point.

Panic welled up, and I crushed it ruthlessly before it could overwhelm me. This was par for the course. If I’d thought far enough ahead to make a recording, I must have also known the lithid screwing with it was a real possibility. Which meant, if I’d done this right, it should be possible to piece together my plan from the inventory and Talia alone.

As I continued cataloguing my inventory, the panic slowly faded. That was a good sign. was far harder to handle before the integration. Still, I hadn’t attained the integration until I was already in the dungeon. The decision to use it wasn’t the strange part. What seemed off was that I’d waited until entering the dungeon to use it.

It served as my first indicator that something was wrong. Maybe that was intentional.

The arrows made perfect sense. A viable way to use the Spider Matriarch’s toxin at range. They were longer than a standard arrow, with a hammerhead glass tip that contained a green liquid. There was flavor text that indicated this was an ideal projectile to use on a slime, meant to be shot in its path, rather than directly at it.

I was already wearing the amulet, which hopefully stacked with my armor.

But the last two acquisitions had me entirely at a loss. What kind of fucking plan was this? Trying the Matriarch’s toxin on the lithid made sense—it was sourced from a trial boss, and likely packed significantly more punch than anything you could grab on the open market. Yet, the seemed like an utter waste. It specifically denoted that it was only effective on low-level creatures or NPCs, unless imbibed voluntarily.

And I had no idea how I’d intended to get a psychic monster to willingly drink poison.

The goblin confit was—well, a disturbing introduction to confit. Supposedly a troll delicacy, it was created by force-feeding goblins an excess of sweet berries for months until they expired from the strain, then slow-cooking cooking them in gilded truffle goat butter.

Which—I mean, what the fuck. I sure as hell wasn’t going to eat it.

Maybe the intention was to trick the lithid into eating the confit laced with poison, but again, it being able to read my thoughts made that a tall order with questionable returns, considering that the poison’s effects lasted less than ten minutes.

A groggy growl reverberated in my mind.

”Talia?”

Talia’s voice was drowsy, only slightly more lucid than before. ”What a terrible dream… where are we?”

A flash of movement from the corridor caught my eye. I scurried out of the spotlight, unsure if it’d even make a difference. ”It wasn’t a dream. We’re on the fifth floor of the adaptive dungeon. The lithid is screwing with our minds. Breaking out of the initial delusion was the first barrier.”

”I’ll shred it to pieces,” Talia hissed.

”You’ll get your chance. Are you coherent enough to fight?”

One by one, small shadows emerged from the darkness. Humanoid silhouettes around half my height. Smiling white teeth glittered in the dark. They all held short blades that looked strangely domestic, more like something out of a kitchen knife block than a fantasy equivalent.

”Oh yes.” Talia answered, her voice so raw with spite, I couldn’t help but wonder what the lithid had shown her.

“Then get ready.” I drew and threw it directly into the center of the advancing shadows.