Half a minute later, Flow’s preparedness echoed through the bond along with Y’talla’s indifference. Elach dipped his fingers into one of the shell shards around his Issi down to the end of his fingernail and let out a long exhale, pulling his hands apart with his container in the middle as he did. He felt small tremors carrying through his headspace, and a note of acknowledgment from Flow, but held the pull for as long as he felt comfortable. His chest tightened and his breaths came quicker and quicker over the next few minutes, but eventually he lost the glutted feeling and his Issi fit perfectly inside his container. As it was meant to be.

Shoving the idea of a terrible rebound to the far reaches of his mind, Elach opened his eyes to the unchanged inside of his headspace. He stepped as close to the scattered wall of symbols as he could and knelt down, reaching for a baggie of chalk that he’d mixed with his Issi so that it wouldn’t fall through the intangible floor. He added another mark right on top of the one that already existed, a now seven inch long stretch of white that was the only tangible sign that he was, in fact, making this place bigger. One small expansion at a time.

“Only a few months to go until the next compression.” He mused, wiping away the dust from the mark so that it was a perfect rectangle. He grunted as he stretched his back, striding over to the map and flipping the coin between his fingers. Flow and Y’talla could go as they pleased, but he was stuck paying the toll each and every time. As he pressed the coin to the indent that would move him to Y’talla’s preferred space, he sent out another message to Flow. “Time for an Issi bath, buddy.”

Something sharp dug into Elach’s shoulder. He slapped his hand over the wound and grumbled sleepily, cracking open one eye to see that his hand was perfectly clean and that nothing hurt at all. He blinked sleepily and stretched as he yawned, pushing himself into a sitting position from the soft peat of Y’talla’s portion of his headspace. A sense of desperation washed over him for some reason, but it wasn’t coming from here. It was coming from outside, where Shar was alone in the woods of the twenty eighth floor.

His eyes shot open to three sets of glowing yellow eyes staring down at him and something sharp digging into his shoulder. Whatever was holding it started to twist, sending a wave of pain into Elach’s mind, and he lashed out at the darkness.

Shoe met carapace and he pushed. A massive hornet-person thing hissed burning acid onto his face, then buzzed away to join the countless other eyes that ringed the small campsite. Elach wiped his face and pushed Issi to heal his burning skin and cut-up shoulder, looking around to try and find Shar in the darkness.

He found her off to his right, red mist wrapped around her in an unspoken threat as she slowly paced around the edges of the campsite. “So this is the survival part of the survival floor?” He chuckled grimly, Shar’s head snapping to look at him with an edge to her expression that spoke of annoyance.

“I tried to let you sleep, you know.” She said. “You’re getting so close to your next step, and the other two are so close to their own breakthroughs. If I woke you up during any of them and ruined it… well, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”

A buzz broke off from the group, and Elach turned to face it with his Issi flaring. That was apparently enough to dissuade the monstrous hornet’s charge, hovering in place for a few long moments before it backed off and rejoined the circle. “Thanks, I guess? But if you have to choose between interrupting me and letting me die, please wake me up.”

The hours of darkness passed by at a crawl, the massive hornets breaking off at completely random times to launch an assault, but never more than two at once. Even when Shar shot to Elach’s side to intercept a blow that would have left him with an inconvenient hole, no hornets moved to capitalize on the opening. As the night went on, Elach had a feeling that this was a puzzle they needed to solve, but the hornets didn’t give him a moment to rest or think. And, as was proven by Shar getting batted aside by one of them, they were terrifyingly strong. If they wanted to, they could have swarmed in and slaughtered the slaughter manifestation without much effort at all.

But they didn’t. And as the simulated sun rose over the trees, the shadow hornets retreated somewhere into the forest with no fanfare. Elach’s body refused to back off from the edge he found himself on, his Issi blowing through his pathways like a raging river against a threat that was no longer a threat.

Shar finally broke the night-long quiet with a rattling sigh. “The floor doesn’t want us sleeping.” She said, leaning down and shouldering her pack. “The hornets appeared around an hour and a half after you retreated into your headspace. Is that around when you fell asleep?”

“Maybe?” Elach shrugged. “I don’t have a good internal clock, but that sounds like it could be right, give or take fifteen to twenty minutes.”

“If that’s the case, then I have a fairly good idea of the challenge this floor presents. A test of our Issi reserves, and the ability to refill them without taking time to let our bodies truly rest and recover.” Shar theorized, reaching into her pack for the sickfruit seeds and rattling them in their tin. “We were given a way to recover our Issi at the cost of our comfort, many different fruits that we haven’t discerned the use of, and a sprawling landmass that we wouldn’t be able to cover in a week’s journey without speed Issi.”

Elach crossed his arms and shook his head. He didn’t believe for one second that it was that simple. “Those hornets were like the bigger, angrier brothers of the ones we fought earlier. There’s gotta be something else there.”

“I hope you’re wrong, but that was the assumption we made yesterday.” Shar sighed. “No, you’re probably right. I managed to break this off one of the hornets.” She handed Elach a forearm-length stinger that leaked bright yellow from the jagged end. “Could you ask Flow to track their scent? If there is a hive somewhere nearby, it will drastically change our prospects.”

A drowsy muttering answered his question, but Flow eventually relented and left his headspace with a low trill of annoyance. “Sorry you didn’t get your ten hours, buddy, but we’ve got work to do.” Elach said with a roll of his eyes. “And speaking of, you might not get to sleep at all for the next week. This place doesn’t want us to, and if you falling asleep makes the shadow hornets attack us, you’re going to have to stay awake with us.”

Flow cawed in indignation, whacking the side of Elach’s face with their wing as they pointed out Y’talla’s current state.

“Y’talla is deep in meditation, not sleeping.” Shar answered as Elach held up a hand to block Flow’s wing attacks. “But if that is considered sleeping by the floor, we might have to deal with the shadow hornets. Her breakthrough could be an immeasurable asset to us in the war to come.”

More muttering, but Flow accepted the stinger in one talon and lifted their foot while lowering their head to get a good look at it. They cooed in interest at the yellow sludge that dripped from it then shuffled so they were holding it the other way around, guzzling down the liquid like they were dying of thirst. They ruffled their feathers from head to tail as the liquid worked through them, holding out the stinger for Elach to take with an order for him to save it for later through the bond. And a request to save as much of the yellow ichor he could find.

“I mean, sure, buddy.” Elach slowly agreed. “Can you lead us to them?”

Flow whistled a happy tune and took off, hovering in the air between two trees off in the distance before turning back to make sure they were being followed. Elach followed without looking back at Shar, and her footsteps fell in time with his after a moment. Flow slowly sped up until Elach was panting hard to keep up with them, then stayed at that speed as they darted between the forest with the grace of a much smaller bird.

“Hup.” Shar grunted as she vaulted over a fallen tree. Her even breathing was a stark contrast to Elach’s own ragged panting, and after a few minutes of running in silence, she broke it with a cough to get his attention.

He tilted his head to the side in question, ducking under a branch and pushing through a spiderweb that hung beneath it. “What?”

“If we end up fighting these hornets, can you leave the fighting to me?” She requested, then quickly added “You aren’t strong enough that you’re guaranteed a victory, and I don’t want to risk losing you over something pointless like this.”

The hornets had been strangely strong, and Elach didn’t want to admit it, but he didn’t think he could kill one on his own. He rubbed at his shoulder where a stinger had pierced him, the slight ache a reminder of the huge insect’s deadliness. Their chitin armor was too strong, they shook off his chaining after moments of being restrained, and they had Issi reserves that were an order of magnitude greater than his own.

“I hate that you’re right.” He said between breaths. “I’ll stay away.”

“You don’t need to stay away. Just…” Shar paused for a moment. “Stay behind me. Be ready to stop anything that gets too close to me, and try to distract some hornets so I don’t get swarmed. You just don’t have the raw strength that I do, and the hornets’ defenses are too high for you to risk wading into the thick of it.”

As a massive overturned trunk blocked his path, Elach stopped. Flow cackled down from thirty feet above, then cawed in surprise as a chain manifested right in front of their face. “I get what I have to do, don’t worry.” He said seriously, locking eyes with Shar to make sure she understood. “I’m not in a hurry to die. But back there, you didn’t kill any of them. How are you going to fight a swarm by yourself?”

Shar didn’t flinch away from Elach’s gaze, and he knew she knew what he was insinuating. “You think I’m hiding how strong I am from you.”

“I mean, you’re hiding everything else from me.” Elach pointed out with a small amount of frustration. “Why would this be any different?”

“I’m not hiding everything from you.” Shar said defensively. “Only that which I don’t have the permission nor the authority to share.”

Elach pulled himself up to the top of the trunk, looking down at Shar who seemed frustrated. “Everything you don’t have permission to share is what I want to know. Hoalt is a tyrant, even if he isn’t a monster, and you somehow have his trust. Enough of it to get a clearance level I’m betting is reserved for friends and family. But he kept you locked up on the eleventh floor, like a guard dog, yet didn’t send you after whoever he sent Prisoner after.”

Shar ripped through the trunk with a vicious outburst of Issi, splinters flying every which way in the short amount of time it took her to carve through the tree. Elach dropped down beside her with a grunt, and saw her Issi mist clinging tightly to her. Like she was protecting herself from something.

“Is there an enemy nearby?” He asked, extending his Issi sense as far as he could. Aside from Flow, the bizarre trees, and a muted Shar, he got nothing. “Shar?”

“All that, and you still walk beside me without hesitation.” She said quietly. She shifted her mist until it resembled a scarf, covering the bottom half of her face that was already blank. “You either have no fear of death, or a degree of confidence in your abilities that will eventually kill you.”