I shove Clutter’s shoulder as hard as I can, then break into a sprint. His eyes widen, first in confusion, then in worried surprise as he looks down at the blood pooling around his feet. In two perfect circles. He bursts into motion less than a second after I did, his feet leaving behind long, sticky strands of blood connected to the floor. They strain with slight elasticity as they thin out, but snap when Clutter’s body weight proves too much.

  “Crap, crap, crap!” He yells. “Did I do it wrong? Is this my fault?!”

  “Hell if I know!” I say as clearly as I can manage. “Pearl, what’s the magic look like on this stuff? I can’t feel much of anything.”

  She doesn’t answer right away, her focus instead locked on the mass of gore and blood shambling behind us. I… how did it… how did I not notice it before? All of the twisted paindne… they spawned ahead of us. We kept running. And the only time we slowed down was for Clutter to take on two of them. Shit, that’s what happened. It was just out of my range the entire time and only now caught up.

  But Pearl should’ve seen it for a while now. So what the hell?

  “Pearl!”

  Her entire body shimmers from head to toe. “I can’t tell what it is. But the magic that kept those paindne together is making that puddle of yuck.”

  I shake my head. “Not good enough. Why no warning?”

  “Because I’m stupid and forgot to mention it.” She says sarcastically. “Actually, the stuff wasn’t there until about thirty seconds ago. The quest must’ve teleported it to us once we killed enough of the paindne.”

  “So what about those thirty seconds?” Clutter asks.

  Pearl frowns. “...I got distracted. Sorry.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “With?”

  “The fact that the exact same magic making the puddle slide at us was also used to keep the paindne together. If it was… flesh animation magic, or matter control, it would’ve had to change at least a little between forms. But it was exactly the same.” She taps her heels against my shoulder as she stares back at the stuff. “I think it’s some kind of liquid manipulation magic. Or we’re looking at a ton of the plastic, not actual things, and the plastic control magic is really complex.”

  Clutter coughs, reaches into his mouth, and pulls a strand of flesh from his throat. I grimace in disgust, but he just tosses it to the side like a piece of corn was stuck between his teeth.

  “Dude.”

  “What? It got caught in my throat. And of course I’m not going to swallow any of that stuff. Can you imagine the diseases it might be carrying?” He shudders. “I could get something that nobody’s heard of before. Like head-fall-off-itis.”

  “Oh, but the taste is fine? And the… the texture?” I ask in utter disbelief. “How aren’t you at least a little disgusted by this?”

  He shrugs. “I guess it’s a paindne thing.”

  “It definitely is.” Pearl confirms. “Nothing eating-related disgusts Illumisia. Now smells? Smells are a different thing. Not the smells you’d think, but some smells. I–wait, we’re off topic. Did the spell do this? Or are we just not that worried about a puddle of blood and guts chasing us?”

  Clutter glances over his shoulder. “I mean, after the stain with teeth, this kind of feels… not as dangerous? Hey, maybe this was supposed to happen first. It’s kind of like a way less scary version of the stain.”

  A flicker of magic appears ahead of us. Two twisted paindne blip into existence way out of the pattern, giving weight to the theory that killing enough of them triggered something. Which means killing more of them could trigger something else. Most likely something horrible, but there’s a little chance that this is what we’re supposed to be doing.

  “Run through them!” I order as Clutter starts to pulse with shadows. “Killing them could be a mistake!”

  “Or it could be the thing we have to do.” Pearl says, echoing half of my suspicion. “But trying something else is worth a go. I’ll actually keep an eye on our backs now.”

  I nod as one of the pair lunges at me. An arm bloated with flesh and blood swings unnaturally toward my neck. A small shield blocks its path, then branches out into a web of hexagonal plates that bristle with far too much magic for this little return. I shove it to the right, and the twisted paindne jolts painfully as it gets pulled along.

  Clutter goes invisible, then yelps when he’s reminded that the normal invisibility doesn’t work against these things. I roll my eyes and shove my shield in his direction. It slams the twisted paindne into the other wall with a heavy thud, and Clutter gives me a shaky smile of thanks.

  “Just do the shadow-y invisibility next time. That seemed to work.”

  He nods vigorously. “I would if I could, but it’s not that easy.”

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “...Do I get an explanation for that, or no?”

  “It’s complicated! I tried to tell you a minute ago, but things happened!” Clutter looks down at his feet and grimaces. “It’s a spell I haven’t used at all. Illumisia gave it to me.”

  My face twists into stunned disbelief. “She can do that?”

  “It’s not… like that. She can’t actually make the system do anything, but… I’m… a paindne. That means she can force my body to do things it normally shouldn’t be able to.”

  “She altered your biology?” I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “Damn.”

  He shakes his head. “No, it isn’t that either. She just made something the system shoved into the background come to the forefront again. This is… something I’m supposed to be able to do anyways. But I can’t just use it like a spell; the system doesn’t help me at all, and if I can’t focus, I can’t even get it to work.”

  That sounds like messing with his biology to me. But if he’s convinced otherwise, then I’ll let him keep believing. I run my palm over my mouth in thought, trying to come up with something to help him. Nothing jumps out at me, mostly because I have no idea how I’d go invisible without a spell or skill directly doing it for me.

  “Did she say how it works?” Pearl asks.

  “I… kind of? Maybe more, but I didn’t really… um… understand it.” Clutter admits sheepishly. “She said it works by running mana over my fur, and then a lot of stuff that made my brain hurt. Only some of it was censored by the system, too.”

  Pearl shoots him a sideways look. “Then just keep doing it. Have you been practicing at all?”

  He glances away guiltily. So that’s a no.

  “Illumisia would’ve killed me if I shirked training.” I mutter to myself. “How the hell did you get away with it while she was staying with you?”

  He doesn’t have an answer. I take a deep breath through my nose to center my thoughts; he has a magical ability outside of the system. In a magical world, it shouldn’t be that surprising. But I can’t imagine the system uplifting painted danes into paindne without putting a shit ton of limiters on them, or at least making them completely reliant on the system. Illumisia must’ve done far more to Clutter than she let on.

  But… why? I can’t imagine it was out of the goodness of her heart. Hell, I doubt Clutter’s body even had the ability to do whatever he just did before she got to him. Maybe… she’s using him as an experiment. To see if the paindne are still connected enough to the painted danes that she can… do something… with them. No idea what the hell that could be, though.

  “Clutter, is your new skill in the system at all?”

  He shakes his head. “It didn’t show up anywhere at all.”

  “Hm. Looks like you’ve got a choice, then; try to make the system register the new thing as a skill, or keep working at it alone.” I snap my neck to glare at the sound of another tap. “Same quick time between this one and the last. Pearl, are the others following us?”

  She nods. “At the exact same speed as the rest of the gore. They’re kind of being… dragged along. It’s not a pretty sight.”

  I scrunch my nose as my imagination fills in the holes. “Can’t imagine it would be. Clutter, you’re killing one of these. I’ll make sure the other can’t hurt us. …Clutter?”

  He runs silently next to me, eyes staring blankly off into the distance as if lost in thought. It must be something I said. Maybe he’s trying to get the system to register his new ability as a skill. That’s definitely not what Illumisia would want, so if it works, I’ll apologize to her later. I open my mouth to try and get his attention one more time, but his normal invisibility shimmers over his body and his eyes focus on the twisted paindne closer to him.

  “I think I know what to do.” He says confidently. “But I can’t do it yet, sorry. I need one of those hexagon rocks that Dizzy has.”

  “What? Why?”

  I slam my target into the wall and run past it. Clutter summons his flowing hand wraps and twists the paindne’s neck fully around, then kicks the back of its leg as he sinks his teeth into its neck and twists even more. He starts to talk, but it comes out muffled around the gooey flesh in his mouth.

  He turns, spits it out, and sprints to catch up. “Illumisia showed me how to do the shadow thing after I showed her the rock with all the plastic in it. Maybe she recognized what the hexagon rocks could do and that’s why she showed me. So I can put my shadow thing into the system the same way you put the map into the system.”

  “I don’t think she’d–”

  “No, she has to know!” He says excitedly. “This is where the hexagons must’ve come from! She had to have known that! If I wasn’t so scared to show you back then, maybe I could’ve done it at Dizzy’s lab.”

  “Wait, you were scared to show me?”

  “Kind of!”

  “...Why?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know anymore!”

  Ah, of course. I sigh and glance over my shoulder at the growing mass of blood and gore. It’s picked up the body Clutter left and the one I shoved against the wall, and they’re just kind of… scraping along the ground. Getting a little bit shorter by the second. Almost like they’re being… grated down by the floor. Yurgh.

  I shudder and turn back to the hall in front of me. Nothing’s obviously changed up front, and I haven’t sensed anything like the scratch on the wall that led to the other subquest. There’s no way we’re just supposed to run until something happens, right? That’s the antithesis of what the other subquest was trying to show us.

  …Actually, with the mass of gore following us, this is damn close to exactly what the subquest was like. A lot less deadly for Clutter, and not for me, but it’s… well… derivative. Except this one seems like it’s real, and the other one was blatantly plastic. Does that mean something? Should it mean something to me? To Clutter?

  It feels like I don’t have enough information to make the call. I wonder if that’s part of the quest’s plan, too.

  Something magical nips at the edge of my awareness. I blink to focus and feel at the tile that doesn’t look any different from the others–and the almost defunct magic that swims underneath it. It doesn’t feel like a trap. Hell, it actually feels like it’s built into the tile–not added afterwards. ‘Course that doesn’t mean it’s safe to step on. I motion at it, and Clutter nods in understanding as he moves slightly out of the way.

  We run right by it. Nothing happens. I turn and watch as the mass of gore creeps onto it. Magic seeps out of it like a bag of oranges crushed under a press, then erupts into a… floating square. It hovers in the air aimlessly for a moment, then orients itself perfectly for my eyes to read.

  ← Yunrov District

  Lifad District →