Cyanic radiant eyes stared up at that ceiling above…which stared back down, as if judging and taunting. A despicable stare, she wanted to destroy that ceiling; for no reason; no logic; just a desire. Burning with exhaustion, the skin underneath those eyes was baggy and strained; yet they remained open, unable to be closed for long.

  There thus the foreigner laid in that bed, mostly nude but wrapped within the confines of that thick blanket nice and tight. Yet she could neither feel the comfort nor the warmth; cold as the nightly air of the world outside; yet even cold was a sensation, and she felt nothing; hollow and vacuous all such were, thus not even cold but empty.

  Despite this day; despite the days before; her body at least was still functional and operational. To her, such was all that mattered indeed… Even if right now, everything felt brittle and burning.

  Days upon days, weeks upon weeks, much time had passed, yet hardly much time at all. How miniscule of time, indeed, mere ‘weeks’ were with respect to the scale to which she was most accustomed. Time had flowed so quickly and indiscrete; it had felt like one single…everlasting and never-ending day.

  She yawned, exhausted and tired—such an alien feeling, certainly, yet also one far so familiar. Maybe she had always been exhausted, since the very beginning. Who knew.

  Yet she could not sleep. She refused to sleep… Sleep was not the same as it had used to be. An empty abyss of obscurity and shadow, yet every time she closed her eyes…

  That scene. Those scenes. They would repeat over and over again, despite the time that had passed. That giant colossus of crystallized armor and parts; each one of their deaths seemed to have been engraved into her eyes; their screams and cries encarved into her ears… Those adventurers… Those denizens and their noises…

  As if an alien infection, they infested her mind; she could not get them out… As if voices trapped in time, echoes haunting and chasing…

  She could have easily saved them; it was within her power to do so. But she did not; she had not.

  Though… Such was always the pattern, was it not?

  Throughout most of her existence; throughout most of their War; they never were able to save a single one—not in any proper and true sense, at least… For was it even ‘saving’ when all they could do was run and run, chased by the inevitable.

  Though, did they even try?

  Frozen silence as a surge pulsed within, tightening her posture as breaths became more curled, memories and sounds flashing across time and space… Realizations entering mind… Only for there to be a slight ‘blink’ in that sigil of her ignited eyes, as if servitude tightened its shackles; her laying posture so abruptly relaxed.

  Who knew. Whatever. She was a Violet-Coat; it had been a long-long time since any of this was her domain; ‘denizens’ and the like were not exclusively her operational concerns, but rather more specialer things.

  None of it mattered anyway. What happened, happened. All she could do now was simply let none of this matter; let her mind finally fade away into that nothingness… Slowly but surely, her eyes at long last thus began to shut close; slumber’s obscurity soon took hold—that darkness devoid of thoughts and feelings; that escape away.

  For so long, indeed, she had kept that rotting shadow deep within her mind quarantined and locked behind that reinforced wall and shell; secluded and always behind comprehension’s window, all those things she never wanted to think about… However, slowly but surely, cracks were beginning to form and fracture; the shadow was starting to ooze out its blight, bringing out with it…all those things she so tried to escape from.

  Yet like the heart of a dark star,

  There is no escape from that pull passed the horizon.

  There is only that single converging point

  Of certain inevitability.

  -?-

  Shooting stars raining down from the falling night, relentless as if all the cosmos was descending upon the meagre earth below. Malformed and twisted, it almost seemed, as all the stars above were bleeding vapor and cloud from the squeezing grip of that malignant orange flaring out from the night sky’s throbbing heart; a pulsating wave thousands of years from the past reaching now from beyond and across the great abyss.

  All done just to get at them.

  Breaths suffocated from the foggy stream of malevolence that rotted the air, twisting it into poison. Ears bled with the sounds of shrieking turmoil and scattering carnage. Voices... So many voices tore and ripped from the ceaseless clamoring; so many piercing and wails and cries, screaming out…pleas and begs… Countless souls stomped and crushed each other, stampeding as fists and hands pounded and banged away, pushing and squeezing.

  They could not describe; they could not define; none of what was befalling made sense, despite all the warnings and foreshadowing… It was as if the entire night sky they had once so cherished had turned against them, hungry stars setting sights upon every soul, wicked and starving for torment. All they could was cry out for salvation to their defenders; to all those who claimed to protect them; to all those who promised to save them, no matter what…

  Yet it was too late.

  It was far too late.

  One condemned fate that awaited them all; it could either be given then and there, painless and merciful, or it could be given by those that had arrived to leisure in these very screams and cries.

  Thus, so too had their sworn shields turned against them too.

  Trampling and stumbling, a million souls, faces blank and missing, so fell and crushed; a million screams so begged and wept, throats shattering; a million voices, so loud and piercing, were silenced, forsaken and abandoned. Yet cracking out from those shells were ghosts and phantoms, echoes whose continued shrieks and screeches joined as one as they haunted and circled around and above, crying out through time and space…merely wondering…

  Why?

  Twinkling ignited eyes sprung wide open and awake as she jolted straight up and out, nearly falling off the bed… Such a terrible cold and frigid sweat dripping and dropping, she breathed and breathed and breathed, yet suffocating from each and every breath as if the life was being slowly drained and squeezed…

  Inhaling and exhaling, she rapidly looked around, yet her mind was lost and all over, unable to ground or focus; unable to even remember where or what she even was… The past, the present, none of it made sense… All of it was one and the same, entangled in a web of memories both fresh and eroded; both recent and ancient.

  So many…strange…strange feelings burned so deeply within the nothingness of her chest, yet she shivered from the freeze… Crushed by the weight of ancient sins bygone, she merely crumbled down…into a tight meagerly ball, gripping her legs as she tried to breathe breaths that gave naught.

  She rolled and rocked back and forth lightly, her breathing so raspy and cramped, her jaws trembling as her teeth chattered, her overloading mind…overwhelmed from this sudden and sheer onslaught of such…strange and incomprehensible yet nevertheless felt and alive…feelings that so ate and cut and pierced and flailed, memories and thoughts…

  She could not comprehend any of this, any of what was happening, besides default to this unexplainable instinct, one so primeval, to curl up into this…broken ball.

  Yet as abrupt as this tide of crushing weight and drowning affect so overwhelmed, her ignited eyes brightened temporarily as that sigil of her essence so ‘blinked’ its glow… And just like that, everything within hollowed numb and flat, even if the cuts and pierces were still present but unfelt. She froze in place, the shivers and trembles ceasing, breaths stabilizing…

  As if something had happened, she proceeded ot just sit herself up and look around, flat affect… ? Nocts adúc oi’st… ? It was still dark, she saw; it was still night. Sighing, she laid herself back down, her baggy and tired eyes looking up at that ceiling again… ? Iterù… hic… ?

  Truly, sleep was no longer that liberating bliss… This…was happening somewhat as of late. Even though she had the technical vocabulary, she still had not the words to define or describe what this…this even was… Quite frankly, she did not even want to know.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Either way, sleeping was something she seemed to be doing less and less as a result…

  Yet even now as she laid awake, in this moment of peaceful silence, so many things continued to linger within… Cracks leaking out from which was that shadow within, infesting and infecting… Thoughts, memories, and realizations.

  Despite the effects of her inhibition, her breaths once again began to shift perturbed even if vaguely. It was difficult to remain stationary in this position; her legs began to jitter, restless. These thoughts, these…feelings within, these…whatevers, they continued and persisted and… She could sense it…remerging, that crushing weight squeezing and squishing within…

  An escape. She needed an escape—an exit. She needed to shut it off before it all came flooding out again.

  ? Síne la pointa…est… Ergo oportet me aliquod aghere… Aliquod méhi aghethéon est… ? The foreigner calmly sighed; she simply sat herself up yet again before getting up and off her bed. She lit an oil lamp and looked around, identifying all that which she had…simply taken off and left scattered around.

  She began to put on her dirtied and torn chemise, before donning her battered and warn tavern kirtle dress, followed by all of her necessary equipment and arms.

  She needed to do something, seeing that she clearly could not sleep at all… And there was only one thing she could even think of doing, indeed; one place she could even conceive of going.

  Thus, once readied, she immediately departed that apartment and ventured out into that world beyond, cold and colorless. With no wagons to hire at this hour, she marched the whole way there, back to that same sunny-cave… All the while, mocking from the night sky above…were all those taunting stars, staring down with such utter contempt.

  -??-

  Bright, vibrant, and glimmery. The foreigner was deep underground, deeper than she usually would go. She was far below wherever those so-called ‘glow-spiders’ usually inhabited, for such were not her targets for once…

  No, she had finished all those duplicate quests—which was to say, every single one of them that had been on the quest board until they stopped reappearing. Thus, no longer did she need to fetch so-called ‘glow-stones’ and ‘sea-shrubs’… A vacuous of a feeling indeed, were she able to comprehend her feelings. Of course, there were still quests on that board that took her back into this sunny-cave, and that was the quest she was doing.

  Truly, many things had changed, yet much remained the same.

  However, her tactics and equipment were certainly amongst these changes. Indeed, despite the invasive thoughts and memories, she had certainly learned from that incident with the crystalline colossus. No longer was she exclusively relying on her revolving pistol as her primary weapon.

  Contrary to what she had been hoping, however, the replacement was not in the form of that gunner adventurer’s bizarre firearm…

  She had tried to repair that thing herself, granted, although, as she had so come to discover, she was by no means astute with primitive technology—she was Violet, not Teal; technology in general was not exactly her forte. She had attempted to get that firearm repaired by a local gunsmith instead, though that too failed since none of the gunsmith’s she had found were proficient enough to handle ‘dungeon engineered stuff’, as they called it.

  She ultimately opted to sell that damaged pump-action repeater to one of those gunsmiths, who was interested in ‘dissecting it’ or something, and for rather the sum as well. However, in retrospect, even if she had been able to get that repeater functioning again, she likely would been unable to make good use of it. That pump-action repeater utilized metallic cartridges—an expensive rarity in this continent—and also a different type of powder—not the far more common black-powder.

  Nevertheless, the foreigner ultimately had found herself once again rummaging through her former associate’s own…extensive and diverse collection, from which she had selected a suitable alternative. It was a rather strange, likely experimental, repeating rifle that utilized the same revolving mechanism of her revolver; much like that pistol, likewise, it was also ‘dwarven’ in its design, being bulky and heavy. However, unlike her revolver, it could fire ten shots—not six—and the cylinder seemed a lot tighter and more sealed—likely to prevent gas from burning her hand. It also had a longer potential range and higher muzzle velocity.

  However, there were caveats: this thing was a little…awkward to hold—being evidently designed for…wider hands—, did not appear to be the safest thing to use, and was equally painstaking to reload as her pistol. However, at the very least, it utilized the same ‘dot-44’ caliber bullets and the same powder grade as her revolver, meaning that she could share munitions between the two; it also had a neat and convenient strap attached to it that allowed her to carry it over her shoulder.

  While this revolving rifle was a suitable replacement to her revolver, which was now relegated as an auxiliary weapon, it was not the…firepower boost she wanted. For that, there was the second firearm strapped around her other shoulder.

  A strange thing upon first sight, it was a so-called ‘handmortar’—a primitive grenade launcher, in effect. ‘Dwarven’ again in its bulky and thick design, it was fairly advanced despite being likely several decades old; it was breechloading and utilized an internal firing mechanism to discharge its small-but-potent percussion explosive rounds, which detonated upon impact rather than relying on a time-fuse.

  Indeed, it was quite the boom launcher, having been an instrumental tool that had simplified her subsequent…glow-spider culling, since she could simply blow them up during their mass mating rituals.

  However, there were clear caveats to this thing: it was somewhat unwieldy, its weight was evident, and it required its own dedicated ammunition and thus its own dedicated ammunition bag which she had managed to squeeze onto her figure. These explosive rounds were heavy and…sizable, thus she could only carry twenty-five at once; they were also highly niche and specialized—unlikely to commonly found and thus not easily replaced. Although her former associate had quite the sizeable stockpile—for whatever reason—, she nevertheless needed to caution her usage, using it sparingly and…tactically.

  Tactics, indeed, with these new arms, she had with them new tactics… She had become more aggressive and decisive in her engagements, utilizing her range advantages though also not hesitating to get close. It mattered little if she died, after all. However, her tactical adaptations were not purely in combat either… No, no… If she was struggling to find something, as she had so learned, it was perfectly acceptable to take it from others when they were not looking.

  Though, speaking of others…

  ? Tam vaquos… ? Indeed, it was so empty where she was.

  This area of this sunny-cavern was quite peculiar, indeed… In fact, it hardly seemed like a cavern at all. It had structure; halls, rooms, chamber, and evident style and design—culture. Yet, of course, it was composed of crystalline compounds, yet not necessarily rock. Marble, glass, and brick… It seemed almost like a subterranean fortress or…settlement or…something like that—ruins of bygones.

  In many ways, it reminded her of that trap-den from before, the crystalline materials being similarly exotic yet with far greater longevity, and, of course, they lacked that towering atrocity of existence… Instead, these sections were filled with different atrocities of existences, these so-called ‘glow-golems’.

  The Guild classified them as Steel-rank, apparently, and they were awfully similar to that ‘guardian colossus’, being bipedal and humanoid; however, these were…more appropriate in height, being neither towering nor menacing, and they lacked that same ‘armored’ appearance.

  They were essentially animate featureless mannequins of exotic crystal, being weirdly squishy too—her bullets could easily penetrate. They had some kind internal skeletal structure to them with a spine-like component connected to some kind of…exotified central nervous system; however, they were clearly being driven purely by their own lobotomized essence… They had a bright glowing ‘heart-core’ which was a critical point which dispatched instantly when shot.

  She still did not really know the true functions of these exotic ‘heart-cores’ these crystalline monstrosities seemed to have, though she had her speculations and theories. Although, lately, she was finding it difficult to care about even contemplating such pointless things…besides completing her directives needing to be done. And, indeed, such was the target of her present quest, therefore…not to be shot.

  Albeit, granted, she had…forgotten to actually bring a sack with her to even collect those so-called ‘heart-cores’.

  In reality, she was just here to fight them; to hunt them… To trigger her combat state and associated inhibition over and over again, that focusing calm that so flattened everything within, bestowing to her temporary relief from her own renegade mind. She herself, of course, was not cognizant of these motivations.

  And from her limited encounters with these glow-golems so far, they seemed rather intelligent and utilized tactics…albeit sometimes questionably so. They seemed to come in many specializations, being equipt with an array of crystalline weapons—sword-and-shield, polearm phalanxes, javelin skirmishers, and such.

  While they were not exactly lethal in close combat for the experienced, they always came in numbers… However, their propensity of needing to constantly form some kind of formation often caused them to ‘blob up’, so to speak, allowing for an easy dispatching with her explosive firepower. Indeed, she simply never allowed them to get close to her…

  However, hmm… ? Ubi sont, vuondero… ? Where were they, she wondered…

  Usually, those glow-golems would be congregated in areas like here; yet despite wandering about through and around, ears and eyes attentive, she could not find any.

  Hm… Well, no doubt, such meant that there had to be a commotion befalling…somewhere around here.

  Those glow-golems were freakishly connected, essences seemingly synchronized; they seemed to have some…capability of reciprocal communication even at disconnected distances. Consequently, whenever a bunch of them were around to notice something happen, such as a fight, it would not take long before an entire legion of those things would come rushing, emptying out entire sections and areas of their presence…

  Though, the question was thus… Where was this likely commotion? The foreigner began to track and locate, searching and seeking… Yet… Ugh… This area was so forsakenly bright and day-like, it was difficult to readapt her ears to be more sensitive and attuned, her eyes receiving too much stimuli… She could not track bouncing sounds as easily.

  Although, she could nevertheless certainly try… And try she thus did. As she aimlessly strolled and patrolled, she focused more and more on her hearing, closing her eyes as tightly as she could to deny any light into her sight… Her ears took in every detail of sound they could, as she continued to wander…

  Before, finally, at long last, she halted in place… Her ears could make out bouncing around and about, making way and through, those sounds emanating from somewhere else afar and deeper within…

  A fight, she was able to tell—and a big one too… Ah, thus, that was where all the glow-golems likely had tumbled themselves to… She was not the only adventurer here.

  With eager speed, she thus promptly began to make way, tracing and tracking those faint and mellow sounds bouncing about.