There were two of them.

The first was a thirty something blonde woman, with a starved face, gaunt eyes and empty cheeks. She dragged a trolley covered with a sheet of cloth behind her. Unless the rules around this place had changed, that was his meal. The other one was a lithe young woman, with thin ginger hair, brown eyes, a plum-shaped face and a rather plump pair of lips.

Instantly, the Screen displayed the results of its analysis.

BREMETAN

Bipedal, lifeforce-producing organisms. 99.9% similarity with the HUMAN species.

Soul Architecture damaged. Extreme signs of possession.

REIKI

Soul Architecture shows 100% similarity to REIKI from Monster Prototype Array.

Not dissimilar then. The gaunt-looking woman was a reiki possession, reminding him of that reiki that used to bring him meals and had followed him into the Crypt. Her name was — Mozi?

He considered the other.

ONI

Chimeric Entity. Result of Spiritual Fusion of VANIR species with YUREI species.

Bipedal, lifeforce-producing organism. Capable of Metamancy.

98.6% similarity with the HUMAN species.

Mutated Soul Architecture.

Lukas blinked. A vanir? From Kvasir’s treatise, he knew that vanir existed, but this was his first time encountering one. His hands instantly went down to his waist bag, only to find it missing. Had it torn off during the fight?

That brought a frown on his face. His grandfather had instilled in him a healthy appreciation for book care. The most important things in life, the man used to say, were more than often the most helpless. Hence, they needed to be treated with extreme care. He knew the treatise was a copy, but that didn’t justify losing it.

“Searching for something?” asked the ginger head.

Language Identified — Faecani

Replicating…

“Uh, yeah,” he said, “I had a waist bag with a book in it.”

“Ah yes,” the young woman replied. “Kvasir’s treatise. A most unexpected gem. Where did you get it?"

Lukas didn’t reply. At least the book wasn’t lost. Kvasir rambled too much about the Norse Gods. No doubt this Vanir? Oni? — whatever woman would find it interesting.

Hang on a sec. Hadn’t Tanya said that one of her own team members was a Vanir? One that had been—

He froze.

—Possessed?

Yes. Yes, that was it. The medic.

It took him a second to school his features. It took him another to realize just how indifferent he was to the entire thing. It’d have alarmed him in the past, but now, he just accepted it as part of life and moved on. Bremetans enslaved Kami to do their bidding. Yokai possessed bremetans to do theirs. It was an interesting inverse-relationship shared between two races on two extremes of the spectrum.

“Greetings, Outsider,” the reiki said in a very familiar Felleisen accent. “Mizo, be excited to see Outsider again.”

“....”

Of course. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The creature had taken a new body. Physical bodies were disposable, after all.

“Mizo,” he said, effortlessly altering his language to pure Felleisen with just a thought, “Nice to see you too. Solana put you on waiter duty again?”

Mizo let out a high-pitched, grating laugh. Like the sound of chalk on slate. “Mizo be told to give food to Outsider. Mizo not be told to wait.”

Lukas sighed. Why did he expect Mizo to know about waiters and restaurants? He turned to the other woman, the Oni.

“Greetings,” said the ginger head, “I’m Maude. I believe you and I share a few acquaintances.”

So his hunch was right. This was the same vanir that was part of Tanya’s team in the anomaly.

“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice level. “Where is she?”

“She?” Maude arched an eyebrow.

“Tanya,” Lukas said. “Where’s she?”

Maude’s stare was not a matter of lightness. “She’s currently… indisposed.”

Lukas felt a little icy chill go through his guts, way down low. “I want to see her.”

“The Leader asked me to wait until you’ve eaten. After that, I’ll take you to her. Maybe if she agrees, you can go see Tanya.”

That rankled.

“I’m not sure if anyone told you this, Maude, but I’m not a fan of following orders.”

“Leader said you’d say that. She also asked to remind you that this is an underground territory, and she’s an accomplished terramancer.”

Lukas cocked his head. “I want to see Tanya, and I’m not asking.”

Maude eyed him for a moment, before her uncertain brown eyes gained a gleam of devil-may-care defiance. It looked a lot more natural on her. “I liked you better when you were a paranoid survivor. Gaining strength has made you cocky.”

Lukas arched an eyebrow. “Have we met before?”

“Before I became me, I was Malon. A yurei.”

Malon. Of course. Malon and Mizo. The two guards that Solana had offered him as support. He hadn’t accepted either, but Solana had sent them anyway, to track his performance and report on his displays if nothing else. Malon had possessed the vanir, forming the Oni that was chatting him up.

Tanya mentioned your name, as did Olfric. Once, I think.” He paused, waiting for some reactions. Finding none, he continued, “Though it looks like you’re quite happy here after all.”

Maude gave him an impish grin. “You could say that. It’s quite a change from the Empire. The environment is dreary, but I’ve grown attached to it.”

“And you’re an Oni now.”

Her smile widened. “You can tell right off the bat, huh? Leader said you were an interesting one.”

Lukas weighed his chances. Despite his glaring handicap, he was reasonably certain he could outfight most people in here. But Solana was maintaining her veneer of hospitality. Knowing the witch, she wanted something and was playing the long game.

That was fine. He could play too.

“If any of you harms a hair on Tanya’s head, I’ll burn this place down.”

“Mizo no likes Outsider’s threats,” the reiki growled.

“Not a threat,” said Lukas. “A promise. Solana wants to talk? Fine. I’ll play ball, but if anything happens to Tanya, you lot will have to find a new place to shack up.”

Maude, or Malon, or whatever she was now, merely cocked her head, studying him. “Tanya is currently asleep. Her injuries required her to be sedated if I was to heal her.”

“Malon!”

Maude ignored the sudden snap from her fellow worker and focussed on Lukas. “Don’t worry about her.”

“I’ll believe that when I see her.”

“Suit yourself.”

Lukas frowned. There was no way to determine if this woman was lying to him. But the yokai had so far been nothing but hospitable to him. Torturing Tanya wouldn’t get things any better for them. No, if Solana wanted something, a healthy Tanya was a better ransom than a tortured one.

Maude gestured at the food trolley.

“You should eat. Leader wishes to meet with you. I’m supposed to show you the way.”

“I know the way. I’ve been here.”

“Not since the latest renovation, you haven’t,” said the Oni. “After you killed the anomaly core, we took over the entire anomaly. Speaking of… why is that metal on your person?”

She said the word ‘metal’ like it was the vilest thing imaginable. Lukas looked at Blob, still acting as an undershirt. The metal slime was a horrifically overpowered tool against spiritual predators. No wonder the Oni didn’t…

The rest of his thoughts died as something else hit him.

Blob.

Fucking hell. He’d almost forgotten.

ROLLBACK PROTOCOL SUCCESSFUL!

Nexus Established

Accessory Confirmed

Reading Data…

“That metal,” Maude barely suppressed a shudder, “it is alive, isn’t it? Just seeing it makes me want to….”

She looked like she was about to throw up. Given how casual and composed she had been, it was weird. Her expression was akin to a cornered cat surrounded by dogs.

Analysis Complete

Rendering…

NAME

CRYPT OF FIENDISH WORMS

TYPE

HETEROMORPH

CONSTITUENT

AQARU

Deciphering Spiritualist Constitution…

Decoding…

Rendering Complete

Nature

Conglomerate

Number of Skills

16159

Number of Monster Prototypes

5387

Direct Access to Monster Prototypes Hindered under Warmonger Protocol

Reconfiguring…

Finally!

He couldn’t wait to see what this thing was now capable of.

“Aguilar!”

“Huh? Yes, it’s alive. And it’s mine. Keeps people from being too grabby.” He paused and cocked his head. “Is that why I still have my clothes on this time?”

Her expression told him everything he needed to know.

“How do you have it? Why do you have it? How is it possibly alive?”

“It’s a souvenir,” he replied, “from my battle with the Anomaly Guardian.”

It was more than a souvenir. A lot more. Especially now.

Accessory Active

Configured Access to Accessory Monster Prototypes through Accessory Heteromorph

Like a machine that had been switched on, Blob snapped awake, and hundreds and thousands of prototypes flashed across his mind in less than a second, but somehow, he understood it all. Every single prototype — most of them crafted by the Anomaly, others killed by the monsters and added to the Crypt’s soul crypt. And then there were some that it scraped from the fossils hidden beneath the desert sands.

Fossils that belonged to creatures of a different time and age.

Prototypes that the Crypt had been unsuccessfully trying to reproduce.

And with them came a wealth of information. The Crypt was a terrain-based anomaly. Access to Blob’s reserves brought with it an impossibly precise knowledge about the composition of the terrain. What was the terrain? How was it created, molded, transformed? What was the soil? Sand? An indefinite number of ratios popped into my head, bringing exact specifications of organic matter, inorganic matter, and minerals. Granular, non-granular, thick, thin, spheroid, light, dense — it had it all. Chemical compositions, structures, bonding, flexibility, viscosity, structural stability, chemical transformation of compounds — he had just gained the master key to the largest repository of knowledge on Terrain, and it was all in Blob, ready to be used with a thought.

And this was just him getting started.

“Looks more than a mere souvenir.”

“Oh, yes,” said Lukas. “I can teach it all kinds of tricks. Wanna see?”

Maude crossed her arms. “Only if it involves destroying it.”

In your dreams.

He smirked.

“You’re interesting, Lukas Aguilar,” said Maude. “More than I had expected.”

“Mizo thinks Malon should stop flirting with Outsider,” Mizo said in a no-nonsense tone.

Maude blew her a kiss.

“Leader is waiting,” Mizo said stubbornly. “Leader says Outsider goes to Leader’s room after a meal.”

“Someone’s antsy.”

Maude laughed and winked at him. “You know what they say. Making a lady wait is the height of rudeness.”

She lifted the lid off the food tray.

“I’ll be waiting outside till you’re done,” she said, and walked off, trailed by Mizo who gave him a deeply distrusting look.

Lukas smiled until the door was closed, but as soon as they were gone, the smile dropped and a cold, calculated pragmatism ran free.

He wasn’t foolish enough to think he was safe. Solana had been very clear when he had left for the mission. She’d kill him if he joined up with the Asukan crowd. But she didn’t know that his reach had progressed far beyond Asukans and Yokai and their prejudices. Kvasir had rambled about the Time Before, but he had no way to prove his theories.

That wasn’t true for Lukas. He had established a Nexus with the Haze. No, not the Haze. The Ikai Realm, the Ginnungagap, the Cradle of Creation. A world of mist and anomalous energy entwined around other worlds. A medium through which he could travel to any of those worlds he had sensed.

Inanna was right. He had been thinking like an individual all this while. He had to think like a world.

He needed answers.

Answers to questions like how he had gotten here. Was it because of Blob? No. That couldn’t be. Blob’s reconfiguration notwithstanding, there was absolutely no reason for him to arrive in the anomaly. The only thing remotely connected to the Haze was…

Solana.

Or the portal she had opened into the Haze the last time he had been here.

No wait. That wasn’t it.

She hadn’t opened a portal. She had just… walked right in. Theoretically, that meant that the room was part of the Haze, or connected to it. An outlandish possibility. But he’d rather believe that she had the ability to freely enter the Haze. Perhaps the Haze was always connected to the real world, but it took an ethereal creature to cross the borders? No, no, had that been the case, the kami could’ve done the same. Unless….

Unless they couldn’t because they were bound to Asukan souls via the Ritual?

Also, did that mean Solana could enter the Haze from virtually any place? Or was it limited to locations satisfying particular conditions, like there in the Desert, where there was no Eternal Light?

Lukas wanted to believe it was the latter. Solana was scary enough as it was.

His fingers caressed the pendant again. Finally, after all this time, he had found an answer. A way forward. He could fight, kill and siphon monsters all he wanted, but in this world of bremetans and yokai, there was only one thing that held absolute importance to him, aside from Tanya.

Lukas allowed himself to breathe slowly.

The Haze.

Yokai might travel through it, but only an Omphalos could connect to its awareness. He had done something similar with the Crypt of Fiendish Worms at one point, and it had shown him a path to power even back then.

He had achieved a Nexus with the Haze.

Become part of its system.

If he could do that again, he’d have access to its entire structure. Its architectural framework. The paths. The routes. If every Well connected to the Haze, and the Haze was all-pervading, then…

That would give him the ability to travel across realms without concern for geography. Unlike the yokai, he wouldn’t have to fear the Eternal Light or try traveling across the ocean across known routes. He’d have the entire map in his head. With it, he could disregard all laws with utter impunity, and avoid retribution from the Empire and the Yokai alike. He could go anywhere. Escape from damned near anything. Gather information like no one could.

It was exactly the sort of thing he needed to get Inanna back. New worlds would mean new creatures, new skills and new information. He could have quick and easy access to stronger and superior creatures to kill and siphon. He’d become stronger, more flexible, and level-up faster. Not only that, he could guarantee Tanya’s absolute safety from the Empire. He’d have absolutely no need for Zuken, or Olfric, or any of the home crowd.

Such temptation.

Lukas wondered if he’d be able to handle it. Not too long ago, he had fought tooth and nail to avoid the temptation of power, and done his best to deny becoming Inanna’s henchman. And now, he was succumbing to it, to get Inanna back.

Lukas looked at the food tray. A cup of juice steamed there, with a little plate filled with roasted meat and something that looked like a pancake sprinkled with veggies. He sat back down, came to a decision, and ate the food thoughtfully.