“I don’t think so?” Elena said, turning around. But the man had already gone back out of the morgue. “Why?”

  Arcen stood off the supply crate he was sitting on. “What does he have to do with you?” He asked, urgently.

  “He delivers messages sometimes,” She said, pulling out a ziplock bag with a piece of paper in it.

  “Messages from whom?” He asked, peering over.

  “Well, this one’s from Rika,” Elena said, straightening the polytene to make the note clearer. It was just a diagram. “She wants me to get her something from this chamber.”

  What does this mean? Why is she taking orders from this Rika woman?

  There was a chance Elena stole the egg for this same reason. This Rika could the source of all his problems. The more he thought about it, the more that man resembled Commander Wells. The scars actually lined up perfectly in his mind.

  “Are you okay?” Elena asked, looking up at him.

  “What was that guy’s name?”

  “Colin, I think. He’s not a friend or anything. Just the message guy. Rika’s got hundreds of people running errands for her,” she said, waving the ziplock bag. “I’m one of them, as you can see.”

  I have to keep an eye out for this Colin.

  “Why do you look like that, though?” Elena asked again in a worried tone.

  “Like what?”

  “What’s this about? Who is Wells?”

  “Commander Wells from Helviter Asset Recovery. He’s the one who got me to sign an NDA and then shot me in the head.”

  “Let’s talk about this outside,” Elena said, dragging him to the desk to pay for the clothes and the lighter.

  Elena was lost in thought for a while. They walked back into the doctor’s tent. Arcen saw Zuhara and Jelly passed out in a new pose. Elena kept walking, dragging him along. She was heading towards another chamber veil in the far corner.

  “I’ve been thinking, but that’s really strange,” she said as they reached the veil. “Helviter just wouldn’t do that.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They just pay people to shut up. They don’t kill them right away.”

  They did pay me before shooting me.

  Thinking about it now, that didn’t make sense. He got a personal letter from Lionel Helviter himself. He had the hush money in his bank account. He signed the NDA. There really was no reason for them to pay half a million just to kill him right after.

  “They did pay me a lot of money upfront. Salary increase. Paid leave. It was all in a letter from the CEO.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. The worst they’ll do is relocate you to a better life where you won't complain. They’re good with people. They know the exact amount of money it takes to make someone not a problem anymore. They’ve done it a thousand times.”

  Elena continued.

  “You’re a civilian in their employee registry. If you die on the job, that’s not a good look for them either.”

  “Wouldn’t that be why they wanted us gone? Because a lot of people died, and it looks bad on them?”

  “Think about it. All dead with no survivors sounds worse than luckily some survived. Because when you survive, they can then do this whole drama with you. They can show the world here’s how Helviter takes care of their employees.”

  That is what that letter did.

  “They took Ms. Jenna with them. The lady you found alive,” Arcen said, rubbing his chin. “She would be enough for their survivor story, right? I mean, doesn’t matter who survives. One or three. They can use one. She was already in a coma; she won’t be talking for a while, if ever.”

  “I guess that is true.” Elena crossed her arms.

  They had walked into a new chamber. This one was muddy and had planks thrown on the ground to hop across. All the dangerous creatures had been slaughtered. A few docile ones that looked like seals scattered the edges, idling near water streams.

  “I still don’t think they’ll kill you right after paying you. I mean, why even bother paying you?”

  He already knew she was right. That letter could’ve been a fake one, but he did see the money in his bank account. Paying half a million to trick him into signing a document would be nonsensical. Half a million was worth less than dust to Helviter, but they wouldn’t spend their dust for no reason.

  “You’re telling me Helviter never killed anyone?”

  “They don’t do that to civilians. Especially their employees. They do hire people in towers who may kill each other trying to do things. But that’s what everyone else is doing. All corpos in the world do it. Anyone rich enough to hire people can do it. Not just Helviter.”

  Paying people to kill each other? Maybe we got caught in the middle of a clusterfuck like that?

  Whatever it was that put a bullet through his forehead, it was more complicated than he’d realized. Based on what Elena was saying, towers are a playground for multiple players with different interests. He didn’t have enough information to figure out what those are yet. He only knew the black egg had something to do with it.

  They crossed the planks on the mud towards the chamber veil. This chamber had likely been cleared to keep the doctor’s chamber safe from any dangerous creatures that could pass through the chamber veil.

  “I wonder how you keep coming back from the dead, though,” Elena said as they crossed the veil. “Do you wanna test it out?” She curled her fingers, ready to snap them into a spark.

  “Hell no,” Arcen said, jumping out of the way.

  Elena laughed, shaking her hand. “I was just joking!”

  He caught up with her as they stepped into the next chamber. This one was immediately different from the one they came from. There were rock formations that resembled worms, twisting in and out of each other. Shouts of people came from all around them, sounds of an ongoing fight deep in this mess of wormy rocks.

  Elena grabbed his hand, pulling him to the left. He saw it too late; there was a huge bird coming straight at them like a heat-seeking missile.

  Arcen braced himself, ready to jump and roll away. He almost activated Mirage Blade right away, but stopped himself just in time. He couldn’t just swing at a bird and hope to hit it.

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ SKILL ╰︶

  ????

  DETONATE

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  ╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯

  It hit the bird on the face, knocking it slightly off-course, but it twirled around, dashing straight at him.

  Elena pushed him behind her, swinging her hand at the bird. She snapped her fingers with the other hand, setting fire to her oil immediately. A melting hot layer of napalm covered the bird.

  She leaned out of the way as it flew past her shoulder and splattered into the rock wall behind them, screaming like a siren. It went quiet seconds later, cooked alive with burning oil.

  Why did I even bother using Detonate?

  “There’s a nest of them in this chamber. No one knows where it is!” She said, rubbing excess oil from her hand on her long coat.

  “A nest? What do you mean?”

  “These birds keep coming out of it. It’s somewhere in these rocks.” She patted a wormy rock surface nearby.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “Well, back there, I saw a room that was totally burned. Why don’t they do that here?” Arcen looked around. These birds came in various sizes. Some were as large as a chicken, and some were as large as pigs. They were fighting amongst themselves in the wormy rocks at the far corner.

  “Because these things are delicious. It’s a farm. This is what you ate today,” Elena said, pulling him under one of the rocks as a huge bird swept above them.

  They got an angry chicken farm!

  Arcen followed Elena through a string of chambers where climbers were doing things. It seemed the chambers near the doctor’s were all being used for gathering various resources.

  There were hunters carrying a dead creature that had somehow been made to hover like a helium balloon. There were miners hauling carts full of red crystals. There were foragers in one chamber that had pink mushrooms and pink worms the size of a forearm.

  As Elena described, these were frontier activities. These people had caught up to the 456th floor in their slow climb that took months. Usually, this was a race for discovering valuable things, but since this tower had been stuck on this floor, the activity was much higher than usual, with climbers and everyone else forming a large community that was about the size of a suburb. They even had signposts and named areas.

  Climber activity diminished the further they went. The chambers grew wilder and wilder with more creatures than humans, and eventually, they reached one with no hint of climbers anywhere.

  It was a chamber full of trees with huge flat leaves that created a layered ecosystem. There were sloth-like creature with horns clinging to the underside of the canopy above. From a distance, they looked like humans.

  As they walked through the gaps in the trees, he saw one quite close by on a lower leaf. It had huge red eyes with intricate yellow patterns. There was no mistake; something about this creature looked oddly human.

  “Now, be careful. Don’t look any of them in the eyes!” Elena whispered, pulling him along.

  He kept his head down, following her closely as she guided the way.

  At one point, his eyes brushed by a leg to his right. Someone was sitting there. Elena gripped his hand tighter, telling him not to look at it.

  He sneaked a glance at the man anyway, careful not to look at where the head was. It was a climber, wearing tattered clothes. There were blood stains the further up he looked.

  Is that a dead guy?

  The body shifted, slowly like a cat getting into stalking. Arcen looked away immediately, the man's face only a moment away from coming into his field of vision.

  The climber quietly got into a stance, just like one of the sloths up in the trees. He heard a low, painful grumble behind him as they walked.

  Elena kept a steady pace, dragging him with her. Eventually, they came to a clearing. Elena squeaked, slapping her hand over her eyes. Arcen did the same, barely catching a glimpse of a large gathering of these sloths. Some of them were wearing climber outfits.

  “There are a lot of them here!” Elena said in a panicked whisper. “We'll go around.”

  She only let go of his hand when they were near the chamber veil.

  “What the fuck was that?” Arcen asked, hand on the exit wall, trying to relax. His heart had been in his throat this entire time.

  “They’re mimics,” Elena said, flipping her oily hair back behind her shoulders. “If you look at them, they kill you. When they bite you, you become one of them.”

  What a fucking nightmare!

  “It would be helpful to know what's in the next one. You’ve been through here before, I haven’t.” He said, rubbing his chest.

  “Tyranil Kites!” Elena answered, “and Laaraites.”

  “Yeah fucking keep speaking Greek, why won't you?” Arcen snapped at her. “What do they do?”

  Elena's pupils divided into four, and a hum grew in his ears. He saw two creatures at once. One looked like a manta ray with saws attached to its flaps. It was flying like an airplane, twisting along its axis. The next one was a stump with three legs. It looked like something between a sea urchin and a hedgehog with spikes as long as a forearm.

  Arcen remembered seeing some people with multiple spikes just like these piercing through their bodies in the doctor’s chamber.

  “Oh fuck, no.”

  “Just do what I say, it'll be fine!” Elena laughed, patting his back.

  Elena knew safe ways through dangerous chambers just like Jelly. It was more or less the same experience of sneaking past, sticking to safe areas. They did pass by some horrendous ones that made his heart rate spike, but there was always something there to make traversal easier.

  While these chambers didn’t have a lot of climbers, these were well-traveled routes. There were guiding ropes, natural tunnels marked with paint arrows, or Elena knew some specific method to avoid drawing attention.

  They faced only two creature encounters along the way. Elena swiftly took care of them both, cooking them alive with napalm.

  Eventually, they arrived at their destination, the one Elena had set out to fetch something for this mysterious Rika woman.

  The chamber that felt like it was one closer to the stalk. Arcen spotted about eight different types of creatures here. There were two that they had to really look out for. One was a pack of cannibalistic lemurs, and the other was a hive of strange black dragonflies with oddly humanoid faces.

  There was a pond in the middle of the chamber collecting water from three streams. It was shallow, not more than a couple of feet deep. The water was tinted orange and pink with some sort of alien algae. Lining the edge of the pond were hundreds of moss-covered boulders that were shaped like capsules.

  “It’s right there. I’ll just get it,” she said after they got to the edge of the pond, crawling through bushes on all fours.

  They were here to take what was written on the piece of paper that she got earlier, the one that she got rid of before he could read it. Arcen looked around, trying to spot anything that was of any value in this Gatorade swamp.

  The only thing that stood out was a bright orange fruit poking out of the water like an elongated pineapple with four-petal lily pads scattered all around it. There were four others like it in the pond, but none were as bright or big as the one at the center.

  What the fuck is this even for?

  “Don’t tell me we came all the way here just to steal that fucked up looking pineapple.”

  “That’s not a pineapple. Get ready to run. We’re going to get chased,“ she whispered, pointing at a mossy rock near the pond.

  ”Wait, a rock is going to chase after us?“

  ”That's not a rock. Those are not rocks.“

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ SKILL ╰︶

  ????

  REVEAL

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  ╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯

  They were indeed not rocks.

  ╭ ╰︶?? ERITHERIA ?? ︶╯ ╮

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ ACTIVATION SUCCESS ╰︶

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯╯

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ SPECIES ╰︶

  ????

  KARTACYNTH

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ SENTIENCE ╰︶

  ????

  47%

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ TRAITS ╰︶

  ????

  CAMOUFLAGE

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ AURA ╰︶

  ????

  1,227,748

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  Fuck me sideways. One million Aura each. There are at least a hundred of these things around us.

  She waded through the water towards the fruit. She grabbed it like she was trying to strangle an oversized corn. Holding onto it, she snapped her fingers, shooting bright sparks towards the rocks.

  Three nearby rocks unfurled into orange creatures with exoskeletons. They looked like crabs mixed with ants. She sent more sparks, setting more fires along the shoreline as more rocks turned into these crab ants, gathering where the bright sparks fell.

  When they were distracted, she cracked the fruit off the stem, twisting her body around. A scream came out of the 'fruit' as loud as a fire alarm. All the crab ants went into a frenzy, wading directly towards her like nails pulled by a magnet.

  She threw napalm on three of them, boiling them alive in their own shells. Their screams also sounded like fire alarms.

  ”Run! Hurry!“ She yelled, splashing out of the pond.

  They ran like maniacs through the chamber. Elena used her oil like a personal water slide to escape faster, and Arcen fell, slipped, and slid along desperately trying to keep himself upright.

  The ants were coming at them from all directions. It seemed like none of the rocks in this chamber were actually rocks. There were giant ones that shifted in the distance, shedding moss blankets as they broke into exoskeleton segments.

  Elena came to a sudden stop, jumped out of her oil trail, and let Arcen crash into a tree. She lit the trail with a single spark, setting their escape route on fire. Some of the creatures jumped off, derailed by powerful flames.

  ”Come! Now!“ Elena yelled, pointing at the chamber veil, which was on their right. Arcen slipped a couple more times. He'd been thoroughly coated with her oil during their escape.

  He followed her lead and jumped headfirst into the next chamber through the veil.

  He didn't even get a chance to breathe.

  He splashed headfirst into a shallow pool of water, hitting his nose on the bottom. His eyes flashed white with pain, tears coming out almost immediately as the sharp jab of pain rippled on his face.

  ”Oh fuck!“ He groaned, pushing off the ground, trying to look around. His eyes were blurry with water, and he felt hot everywhere the water touched him. The water itself wasn't hot enough to feel this way. It was cold to the touch. It took a while for him to process what was happening.

  The water here was spicy.

  He'd fallen face-first into a broth.

  Holy shit, I can't see anything!

  He rubbed his face furiously, unable to clear his eyes. Everything around him looked distorted, like he had a polythene bag over his head.

  ”Help!" He yelled, choking on the spicy water before he could say another word. He started coughing his lungs out, spurting water from the nose. He heard Elena yelling something, but he couldn't understand a word of it. The spice in the water had overloaded his brain. It was all that he could think about.

  Suddenly, the ground shook under his knees, sending waves rippling all around him. Squinting around to see with his reddened eyes, he saw a huge shadow moving above him. It was a figure as tall as the chamber itself; in his blurred vision, it looked like a moving building.

  He rubbed his eyes as fast as possible, trying to get away as the giant thing leaned towards him. The second time he looked up, he saw what it was. It had a face, a beak.

  It looked like a gigantic bird with a long neck, a heron with rocky scales, and two gigantic eyes bulging out next to the beak. The tip of the beak was only a few meters away.

  Arcen jumped, flailed, and rolled away, trying to dodge it. A foot the size of a car splashed next to him, shaking the ground and soaking him head to toe with spicy water.

  He knew what to do. He wiped his teary eyes and focused on the foot.

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ CONTRACT ╰︶

  ????

  WORM PIT

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  ╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯

  Risking it all for a weird ahh pineapple, what could it possibly be for?

  Next chapter on Friday.

  Regular reminder to rate/review if you’re enjoying the ride!

  Advance chapters on