Hari slammed the Airfoil rapier into a wolf-man's mouth, and pulled it back. She tried to ignore the ringing in her ears as she looked about for the next monster.

She had to blink twice, eyes searching for moment without her thinking, before her brain caught up: she was hearing silence. They had killed the last monster in the mega-swarm they had entered the floor into, and she could taste blood and Goddess knows what else that had splattered her beyond the concept of clean or dirty. She couldn't belive how much death they had dealt on the rise they were on.

She turned to The Spider... no, turned to Growl-Whine and looked into her eyes. Once Hari had met all three then all six and gotten a little chirp, Hari flopped to her ass and heard two other soft squelches as her other party members plopped into what before had been a disturbing amount of blood and gore. They couldn't get much dirtier, anyway.

It must have been a full dawn to dawn day of fighting. Every time she had felt she had hit some limit, Brines would shift his aura a little and she'd bounce back able to keep killing. The green version erased enough little wounds to compensate for monsters clawing her arms and legs. She wasn't physically tired, as the standard white version seemed to slough off muscle pain, exhaustion, hunger, and even the need to use the bathroom. Her mind wasn't tired either as Brine's blue variant kept her senses as sharp as she would have been first thing in the day. It also kept her with more than enough mana to perform [Blink-Strike] on both stragglers and the rare acid spitting monster that didn't just charge in. It was like the time she had a whole pot of coffee on a dare from Seru: she could feel a buzz that would let her spring to her feet and start doing jumping jacks.

The problem with all that was her soul didn't want to move an inch, let alone keep killing. She needed something else besides screaming and blood.

The spider looked between them, and started blinking them as they sat. After the first jump it left them for a while. Hari was pretty sure it was after treasure after she saw it climb under a bent over tree, drag a chest out, and kick it open. The creature clearly had a storage ring or some other device somewhere on it, maybe in it, as stuff vanished into nothing around it.

Bearer turned to Hari. “Hey Hari... I haven't seen this much blood in a month.”

Hari was so beyond grossed out that she chuckled once at it.

Brines said “Bleh, really?”

Bearer-Of-Burdens shuffled closer to Brines, leaving a smear of monster blood and ichor where she had been sitting before. She did a minstrel's whisper as she said “Well, if you wish to learn for yourself, I'll call you into my room in day or two...”

Brines shot to his feet, flicking a bit of blood and fried monster off him as he moved to put Hari between him and Bearer. Hari used the moment to take a rag from her pack and start wiping her face and hands, writing everything else off as hopeless until she could jump in a soapy stream.

Bearer slinked around her, plopping right next to Brines and unbuttoning her shirt and moving her bra aside a little. “It's like a monster blood tanline!”

Hari pulled her chainmail away from her chest a little and saw that she had a line of blood that had gotten in and between her breasts, then reported it to make Brines look even more uncomfortable.

“You two are worse than Seru! Come on, we're wasting time. I'm here to help Corvayne, and I'd much rather be working on that than listen to Kayla tease me.”

Hari shot to her feet. “Shit! It slipped my mind a moment!”

Bearer got up and stretched. “I didn't even know you knew my name Jimmy! And Hari, you needed a break from thinking about it. That, or the Spider was hoping you learn it's word for 'stop'.”

Their discussion was cut short by Growl-Whine appearing, using a limb to anchor extra stuff wrapped in silk to her back. It then started blinking them again, whisking them past hills until they were standing in front of a hole rimmed with white grass around gray dirt.

Brines stopped before going up the stairs after the spider. “Wait...”

Hari saw what he saw. Five feet away from the stairs up, in the same face of the hillside just angled away a little, was the orange stairway they had come from, ringed with blood.

Bearer started laughing. “What a fucking TROLL she is! I love her!”

Hari felt her ears twitch. They could have SKIPPED this floor! “What... why... were... we... here... for a WHOLE DAY.”

Brines didn't look mad, just defeated.

The spider didn't look guilty or innocent, just stared at them until they followed her up the stairs.

The ninth floor was a broad street in a slightly off-looking stone town with buildings that were strung with steel and regular vines both up the walls and across alley ways. The floor had a breeze come through, causing a noise that Hari thought of as clashing when steel plants knocked into each other. There was a reflecting pool they used to quickly get some of the muck off, Growl-Whine included, before they blinked away from the entrance.

The insect didn't waste time, blinking them twice before it started killing a pack of monsters that looked like beetles with pyramids on their backs. It was careful with it's strikes to not get dirty again, even as it made a mess splattering golden blood everywhere but itself. The blood seemed to sizzle and glow for a moment before it turned brown. From a too-strong lemony smell it was probably a strong alchemical substance but Hari was too tired to worry about trying to collect it, and the Spider finished the last one in the pack and started teleporting them three times to another stairway, this one on a tower that overlooked another road a few hundred feet down. From the edge she could see the area was atop the sloped side of a massive ziggurat, with more streets stretching out to the tan haze below them. Perhaps they were standing on a wall, rather than a road?

She shrugged and trudged up the blue stairs, into a space that looked sort of like the village they had arrived at on the high plains in their quest to find the glittering flying objects. Cresting the top of the stairs she could see it was actually parts of the village bent around a taffy-like stream of ground. The sky here was black even though the surroundings were bright, making the earth tones of the land-vines stick out. Buildings sticking up from distant strands of land made her think she was looking at a tangle of thorned vines. Hari squinted, and could see things walking on the bottom of a nearby curve. One figure on a branch was walking on two legs, upside down. If not for the previous few days she'd have gotten vertigo from the complex and conflicting information about what direction she was facing.

The spider gave them a few seconds to observe the floor before it started dragging them through the terrain again, flashing from roof to roof as they followed a twisting path, sometimes rolling as they shifted to an entirely different gravity field.

Hari felt that even with the teleporting she was in a weird state where she was just too beat to get sick from either teleporting or her guts getting shifted as local gravity changed. She was hungry though. Killing monsters all day she hadn't stopped to eat or do more than drink when a rare gap happened. Perhaps Brines aura wasn't getting rid of her hunger as much as pushing it back, but now she really wanted to sit and camp and maybe eat something they had killed. It had been a little hard to adjust to how little greens there were in what Mister I served to them in her first Tower run, but now she would have eaten a whole fried tree slug on her own.

As if agreeing, she heard Brine's stomach grumble.

Sadly, the floor kept going. It was getting on her nerves as they kept jumping thread to thread, almost shocking her when she realized she was honing in on the direction they had moved, starting to feel which place they had come from, and that she knew where they were going to go before they went. It was like every blink the spider did let her get a little more familiar with how she had twisted the spell into her impressive variation.

She even knew that they had reached the stairs seconds before the spider started scurrying over the rounded horizon of the root they were on to enter a stone tower.

Hari had sort of hoped they'd arrive at The Inn and was disappointed when they arrived at a large blue stone hall, vaulted ceiling rising up on dark silvery lines. Not that she thought they'd stop for a bite to eat, but she was sure they could get something to go. Pizza with pepperoni and some of those pine needles would really hit the spot. Her nose told her that there was no food, just plenty of dust in this sub-floor.

The Spider stopped and looked around. Hari guessed she was surprised, or perhaps it was just that it was the largest lobby Growl-Whine had ever seen.

Actually, maybe she was just looking for the door out. Even the stair they had took was sort of slippery to look for given the dark blue colors all around them.

Brines was blinking. “Weird... it's a church?”

Hari noticed statues then in the alcoves, some she knew like a knotted cane for Isalapode The Shepard, or three flowers in a bowl of water for Kelha. Others were ones she thought she could place. A giant icosahedron was certainly Gygax, given the focus on that shape she had seen from his followers. A woman hammering a sick man healthy was Lythandies if she had to guess. That left the vast rest of them as unknown shrines.

“No, not a church. A temple.” Hari corrected him. Perhaps a place of power.

She considered who had helped her on her journey, and placed some of her gold at the altar for Lythandies and some before Gygax.

“My thanks for your help.” She whispered. The silence that followed felt warm, and it felt like some of her stress was drifting away. When she glanced back, her offerings had vanished. More than some gods did, that was for sure.

She contemplated the divine for a few minutes until Growl-Whine started dragging her and Brines out to a pair of double doors.

Hari was shocked when the Boss floor looked like home. The forest she grew up in, with it's titanic trees and carved homes spiraling up their trunks. They were at the clearing near her parent's place, and standing there were two figures.

Brines looked between her and the figures. “Hey, they look kinda like-”

Hari snapped her hand out to catch The Spider. Weirdly, she somehow stopped it from using it's [Blink] without actually casting [Anchor].

“No! You can't kill them!”

Growl-Whine shook herself free and looked at her, then her parents (who were standing still and not reacting at all to her being there) and then at her... then scurried away from them to a dirt patch and started to draw with a dagger. It drew five webs with stairs between them, a hybrid of her drawing of the average Tower floor.

“Are you guys going to do art or fight? Just kill these things and let's go.” Bearer tapped a wrist without a watch.

“I can't kill my mom and dad.” Hari said, not bothering to quantify that with a bunch of statements about how much she actually liked either of the two.

“It's to save Corvayne. Also, they are probably not real.” Bearer explained in what Hari was sure was intentionally the wrong order.

Hari saw the same argument in pictograph form from Growl-Whine, who had made a drawing of a little monster in a spider's head and what looked like lines to project it as a big monster on top of the 5 floors.

Hari was still looking at her mother's bored stare before Brines spoke up. “Oh yeah! There was a fight I had last week where I went into a dungeon and the boss was my dad and uncle, they even bickered over wine during the fight but I called them afterwards and neither were dead. It's fine, it just pulls stuff from your mind.”

Hari felt that was a little too casual for what should have been very traumatic for Brines, but perhaps it was the effect of a day of just killing things.

The spider was looking at her, so Hari pointed and then covered her eyes. She heard sharp and wet sounds then a moment later she was dropped into the weird elf garden in her mind, now on a summer evening lit by the warm light of glow-flies dancing in little streams. There were no strangers in the garden with her, but the air felt charged, and she suspected the reason was how many monsters had died to their group.

She considered her dice, and rolled it. Instead of landing on a flat surface, it wedged itself into a crack, giving her the numbers 1, 2, and 3 from the points at it's end.

“Six... hmm.”

She strolled through the garden, looking at the options. The campfire. A dwarven arch with a beer mug and a shield... absolutely not. The staff and sword melded, which she might have taken if not on a deadline. The shadowy gate, the ranger. Then a new option... a woman accepting a star from a taller being with six points.

“Sixth gate, Six pointed star...”

She hesitated. The woman accepting the gift did not look entirely happy. The being offering it was not looking AT her, rather over the woman.

She looked down at the phantasmal die, playing a hand over it's wood surface. A cowardly thought snaked into her head. She could run. She had fled from her life with the elves, had replaced herself in her party, and had not made plans to seek Undine out once again.

She clutched the dice she had pulled out of her pocket. That refusal to engage, to take risks... that was what made her hate her parents. The rejection of hardship was what pushed her away. They were so strong but never even considered going out in the wild world to exert their power for good or ill. It wasn't even some ideal about not disrupting the world with their strength. They just were beyond caring about their borders.

She was here. She was alive, taking risks. She loved Corvayne, maybe more than she should. He had saved her, and he didn't think about it. There was no debt in his mind for rescuing her, it was just what he'd do and would always do, and that thought more then anything was what made her step through the portal.