Seeing the nigh-immortal Sin of Wrath drop to his knees inspired a flavor of panic in Clarisse she was not mentally equipped to deal with at that hour.

  She scrambled forwards, dropping the bag with the scarf to grab Nikolas before his mask hit the floor. “Nik! What’s wrong?!” She exclaimed, trying to hoist the surprisingly lightweight hollow.

  She only received a dazed groan in response, before a smoky mist burst out from the slits in his mask with a rough cough. “I–” Another pair followed in quick succession as the hollow tried to take a breath but instead wretched, launching plumes of ashen smoke into the room. A thin line of it entered Clarisse’s nostrils as she breathed, enlightening her on its toxicity by the accompanying surge of pain.

  “Okay, don’t talk!” Clarisse quickly slipped her shoulder under his arm to help him stay upright, and maneuvered them towards the bathroom. Kicking the door open, she led him to the sink, where another series of coughs polluted the air with their toxic stench. The last of them was particularly severe, although without a barrage of smoke to follow. Instead, a black liquid, thick like tar and just as ominous as the preceding mist, seeped through the slits of the mask this time.

  “Oh, Thened no…” Clarisse murmured a vain prayer to the God of holiness and life, watching the pitch-like substance coagulate in the sink. Her hypocritical plea was only met with another wheeze. As more of the darkened bile regurgitated into the basin, Nikolas raised a shaky hand to the side of his mask, undoing the bottom part covering his mouth before he lurched forward into the noxious pitch. Another series of vomits ensued, by the end of which the fox had rendered himself unconscious.

  “Eww…” Clarisse groaned, pulling Nik’s limp body away from the sink. A slim string of the pitch smeared on her fingers as she sat him up against the wall. “OW!” She cried out, as a surge of sizzling pain shot through her arm. She leapt for the showerhead, but even washing herself clean of the substance didn’t ease the lingering pain. “What the heck…” She left the bathroom with a whine, making a beeline for Nik’s backpack.

  “Sera! Sera, Seraaa!” The only other person she could turn to was incidentally the wooden doll. Clarisse shook the doll up and down with violent urgency in hopes of awakening the queen of Atraxia from her long-winded detours of rulership.

  The doll’s eyes lit up midway into the girl’s frenzied shaking. “I’m – whoa! Clarisse- I’m here- stop- STOP IT!” Seraphim tore herself free from Clarisse’s grip, levitating awkwardly in the middle of the room to let the disorientation pass her by. “Fuck, what’s wrong with you children…” she complained with the cadence of a desiccated fossil.

  “Sorry–!” Clarisse squeaked, but shame wasn’t on the priority of her emotions at the moment. “There’s something wrong with Nik! He was coughing and vomiting and now he’s not moving–” she blurted out in a dreadful tone and led Seraphim to the bathroom.

  Seraphim circled around the comatose hollow, pausing by the tar-clogged sink and crossing her arms. “You idiot, what were you doing?” she muttered to herself, scooping up a bit of the pitch in her fingers and watching thin lines of smoke rise from her corroding palm.

  “He– he’s going to be alright, right?” Clarisse asked, summoning the little sliver of optimism still left in her. “It’s not too bad, right?”

  “Yes and no,” Sera replied with a resigned sigh. “Any ordinary hollow would erode into dust when subject to a strong enough holy arcana for long enough. Him and I are thankfully a little more durable than that, by virtue of Shakuni’s blessing. Our bodies are designed to expel corrupted mana before it burns through us.”

  “So all this,” Clarisse gestured towards the clogged sink with a shudder of disgust. “This is all corrupted mana?”

  “Correct. Best not to touch it, it’ll dissipate on its own.” Sera instructed, swooping down to tidy Nik’s face as best she could. Afterwards, she grabbed Nikolas’s collar, and like a tiger carrying her cub by the scruff of its neck, she hoisted the homunculus out of the corruption-tainted bathroom, out towards the beds.

  Clarisse followed in tow, jumping into action when she saw Sera trying to get him to lay down on his back. “Is there any cure for this? When will he be okay?” Questions that plagued her mind were immediately peppered onto the arcane doll.

  “Hmmm…” Sera levitated with her arms crossed. “This isn’t exactly a normal problem, so no one’s tried to find a cure yet. Staying away from Thened’s mages is the rule of thumb. The real trouble is how long it’ll take for him to recover enough mana to wake up…”

  Worry knotted the redhead’s brow as she sat at the edge of the bed. “What if someone did this on purpose?”

  “Were there any big commotions nearby?” Sera asked, shrugging in response to the shaking head that followed. “Nik wouldn’t let someone openly attack him like that. If he truly felt threatened, a few city blocks would be missing.”

  “It still doesn’t feel right,” Clarisse whined, pulling her legs up to her chest. A dejected exhale left her lungs as she glanced at the present she had bought for him. “Everything seemed fine when I left…”

  “All in the death of an avatar,” Sera gently descended to Clarisse’s knee and gave her a pat. “Ease up. If worst comes to worst, I can take him back to Atraxia and let him wait it out.”

  “Is there anything I can do for him here?” Clarisse asked again, glancing at Nik. She couldn’t help but be concerned – the one time she had left to do her own thing, things had gone terribly wrong and she was only there after the fact.

  Sera crossed her arms again, taking a seat on the girl’s knees. She went through scenarios in her head, slashing off each one until she had exhausted the orthodox options. Finally, she laid her eyes on the redhead again, this time with uncertainty. “I’m not sure I should let you do this.”

  “What is it?” Clarisse perked up with purpose, urging the doll to continue. “I can at least give it a try!”

  Sera rose from her knees, donning a muted expression. “There is one thing. There’s no precedent for this either, mind you. Once Nik is done expelling mana, his recovery should only be dependent on how fast he can regenerate his mana reserves.”

  The realization hit Clarisse almost immediately, much to Sera’s annoyance. “I can share my mana with him! We’ve done this before, he gave me a mana drain potion and I recovered pretty quickly using his mana reserves!” Excitement surged through her as she scooted closer to Nikolas and reached for his neck.

  “He gave you a what now-!?” Sera interrupted her eager advance by landing on Nik’s chest, arms crossed and eyes wide open with the protective rage of a mother. “No, I think I’ll let him rot for a week just for that!”

  “You’re overreacting, Sera,” Clarisse casually glossed over her near death experience, reaching for the homunculus’s exposed skin. “If it’s going to be anything like last time, he’ll be up in a jiffy!”

  “Fine, try it for yourself.” Sera let Clarisse venture her mana to Nikolas, watching patiently with crossed arms.

  A minute passed, then two. Clarisse’s excitement waned and replaced itself with confusion with each passing moment. “Umm… nothing feels like it’s changing, Sera. My mana isn’t flowing away at all…”

  “The bodies of hollow avatars reject all mana for a period after being corrupted,” Sera explained with visible annoyance. “We’re sitting ducks during this time. Only after all traces of corrupted mana have been expelled, can we start generating, or in your case, accepting mana and wake up.”

  “Oh… that sucks,” Clarisse spelled out the obvious between them, letting go of Nik to make herself comfortable on the bed again. “So when should I begin? Are there ways to tell when he’s ready?”

  “It varies from avatar to avatar, so you’re better off going to sleep and worrying about it in the morning.” Sera replied with a tinge of frustration in her tone. “I need to get back to my work too.”

  “R-right. Sorry for dragging you out for this,” The apology came naturally to Clarisse’s tongue, but it didn’t register in her mind. Keeping the Atraxian from her duties would be a praiseworthy act for anyone else in the kingdom. “Thank you for helping. I’ll watch him.”

  “He’s survived worse,” Seraphim floated to Clarisse and caressed her cheek with a mildly corroded hand. “Sleep. I’ll come back in the morning to check on you two.”

  For several minutes after Sera had returned to being an inanimate doll, Clarisse sat across from the unconscious hollow, a mix of emotions tying knots in her stomach. The scene before her seemed familiar, all too familiar to the redhead. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, or keep her fingers from fidgeting with the red scarf in her hands.

  “I’m not going to watch it happen this time. Not to another person… not again.”

  Gathering her courage, she got up from her bed and clambered onto Nik’s. She slipped the folded scarf around his neck once, twice, three times in total, until it covered every bit of exposed skin. Tucking it through the loops, she let the end flow down the side of his torso. Leaning back to inspect her work, another fearful thought invaded her mind.

  “It won’t be enough. I have to do more. I don’t want him to remain asleep forever.”

  She raised a hand towards Nik’s face, the latter half of which lay unprotected. A hair’s breadth before contact, she withdrew herself. Conflicting fears between Nikolas and PH:OV kept her saddled with inaction, and she soon scooted back to the edge of the bed.

  “Sera’s too busy for this. He doesn’t have anyone else to care for him…”

  An uncharacteristically perverted thought for the tension of the moment crossed Clarisse’s mind, and she whipped her eyes away from him to calm herself.

  “Can’t. Definitely not yet. But…”

  When she faced Nik again, it was with hopeful determination. She dimmed the lamps in the room and returned, making room for herself by pulling the hollow to one side of the bed and sliding under the sheets on the other side.

  Taking off one of his gloves and laying it on the pillows between them, Clarisse claimed his hand and interlaced it between both of hers. A frail blush developed on her cheeks, and for a moment, she forgot the abject bundle of strangeness that comprised Nikolas. His hand felt cold to touch, rough to caress and still as death. He smelled of herbs and flowers; sweet, earthy, spicy and citrusy all at once. The feeling of being so close to him, while he had no clue, brought an unfamiliar joy to the redhead.

  “Sleep well, and get better soon. You’re in good hands now.” Clarisse whispered to him, before closing her eyes and letting sleep gradually claim her with a self-satisfied grin.

  Clarisse couldn’t make out when exactly the shift between dream and reality had happened, but she jolted awake in much the same way she had slumbered – holding Nikolas’s hand. Except this time, the Nikolas who lay across from her was far younger and unmasked, and in similarly dire straits.

  A meaty salamandrake fist drove into the boy’s bandaged, blood caked face, pummeling him into the stone floor underneath. Its owner sat above the child, snarling at him in impunity as he rained more strikes down.

  Clarisse scrambled backwards, sleep long gone in an instant. A brief glance told her all that she needed to know, her dreams had brought her back to the research facility. Children in thin, sanitary garb surrounded her, completely oblivious to her presence.

  “Nik!?” She exclaimed in shock. It was the same salamandrake she had seen in her last dream, Sylvester, with green scales lining his body and a muscular frame that rippled with each punch on the child underneath.

  Nikolas made no efforts to stop him either. His arms were similarly bandaged like his face, and lay limp while he took the beating. The other children watched in silence, with some averting their gaze but none stepping in to stop the one-sided beatdown.

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  Clarisse turned her head when a loud sound erupted from outside the cell. An adult stood outside, shouting at them in unintelligible speech as he fumbled with the locking mechanism. A moment later, the barrier blocking the door shifted from red to green and the man stepped in. He wasn’t wearing a mere lab coat like the rest, instead covered in grey gambeson and carrying a glowing baton.

  Clarisse backed away from the door with the rest of the children as the guard passed by, looking for any way out of the dream. Even before anything had begun, she really didn’t want to continue watching her friend get beat and abused. Right as she began searching for a way to wake up or at least leave, her attention was drawn by Nikolas being thrown into the air.

  The boy’s nimble body careened across the room, landing squarely on the guard’s chest. In a swift motion, Nikolas grabbed onto the man’s collar and maneuvered himself to the other side, holding the guard’s neck in a chokehold from behind. “NOW!”

  The signal was followed by a charge from Sylvester, and a punch under the guard’s belly. The salamandrake gave no quarter, pummeling the padded guard until he went down. Only when the man lay groaning and gasping for breath on the ground did he take pause to knock his baton away. “Do it.” The salamandrake issued an execution order to his nimbler partner.

  Nikolas’s bloody mug cracked into a smile as he grasped the man’s head and broke his neck with a swift, lopsided twist. He held the corpse until its limbs fell limp, before getting up with a hand from Sylvester. “One down.”

  Clarisse watched the scene unfold with wide eyes, bewildered by the revelation that Nikolas had volunteered to get beat as a plan.

  “Good job. Plenty more to go,” Sylvester acknowledged, snatching the guard’s identification device from his wrist and walking towards a petite, brown-haired elven girl. “Alright, Nik and I will take point. Mika, take the key. Free as many as you can on the way. Hrothgar! You’ll handle the back, make sure we don’t get surrounded.” He shouted commands to everyone before giving the giant huddled in the corner another stern look. “Don’t chicken out. They will kill us.”

  The prisoners of the group cohort leaped into action, with Nikolas being the first one to triumphantly step outside. “Told ya I’d escape…” he hissed with a bloodlusted grin, wielding the glowing baton of his first victim in his search for more.

  Sylvester caught up to him with long, powerful strides. The salamandrake needed no weapons, his bare arms were passable for flanged maces with their sturdy, scaly exterior. “Follow us!” He called out to the other abducted children who were flooding the halls behind them.

  Clarisse’s eyes would have lit up if she hadn’t remembered Nikolas’s story from before.

  “The boy wanted to save his friends and escape, but he never found the way out of that deep labyrinth. That was what he had said.”

  Clarisse followed the pair, phasing through numerous children as she did. Their attempt to overrun the facility stained the marble floors with blood, both theirs and their captors’.

  Nikolas jumped from wall to wall using windows, ledges and bodies to launch himself between clerks, nurses, doctors and surgeons alike. His methods were agile, arming himself with arrays of confiscated surgical tools and martial techniques to expedite murder. Sylvester preferred the blunt end of the spectrum for violence, pummeling bodies into the walls and smashing their heads into the sanitized marble floor. There was nowhere to hide from them, no barriers the staff could conveniently hide behind that couldn’t be opened by another key from their fallen. It was a gruesome affair on all accounts, one which the adults seemed wholly unprepared for.

  Clarisse eventually fell back, letting the crowd phase through her. Her eyes fell on the elven girl who was among the last of the large group. She looked frail in constitution, notably more malnourished than the others. Sharp ears poked through her brown bangs on either side, and an exceptionally wide smile made up for her thin frame.

  “Follow the others! We’re all going to get out of here!” She called out to each cell, holding the barrier open for the prisoners to escape and join the movement flooding through the facility. Hrothgar guarded her flank with his massive frame almost taking up the entire hallway.

  Clarisse tried to peek past him, but she only found a blurry screen on the other side. Having met the limits of the dream’s manifestations, she decided to head back towards the front.

  Phasing through the crowd was easy enough, but stagnation caught her attention. The crowd which had so far been moving at breakneck pace in search of numbers and freedom had suddenly stopped, and a panic erupted from further ahead in the group.

  “AHH! Something’s got me!”

  “What is THAT!?”

  “RUN! WE NEED TO RUN!”

  Clarisse’s body tensed, hearing the collective screams and delirium of several children spreading panic through their ranks. Running to the front revealed a dire scene, full of faces she recognized.

  “Now now,” A man wearing glasses, a stark white lab coat, beige sweater and leather pants stood in the middle of the hallway, carrying an array of notepads in his arms. A navy blue web of threads spread outwards from him, creating a dense network of entrapments across the floor. To one side, Nikolas was stuck to the wall with a dense mass of threads pinning him tightly. Sylvester’s arms and legs and snout were tied together in similar fashion on the other. “Children shouldn’t misbehave.” Dr. Arahschel spoke in a perfectly calm tone, flashing a thin smile as he surveyed the test subjects before him.

  Clarisse felt a chill run up her spine as soon as she laid eyes on him, reminded of the way he took particular interest in Nik’s suffering. Her eyes were attracted to his feet, where it seemed he had suddenly gained a few inches by severing his feet and growing threads outward from the gap to restrain the children.

  Arahschel’s gaze swept across them like a shepherd’s might over his sheep, or a farmer his cattle. “If you wanted to spend time outside your cells, you could’ve asked~” He spoke in a matter of fact tone, leaning down towards Sylvester to lay a hand on his snout and push his head down.

  The salamandrake’s response to such a slight was instant. His anger surged into a decisive rip of the threads tying his mouth shut, and he lunged forward to chomp Arahschel’s hand. The doctor’s skin tore off into Sylverster’s mouth like paper, but no blood followed suit.

  Underneath the doctor’s arm lay a similar mass of threads to the ones they were all restrained by. The skin which had torn off was only a single layer, something present only for the sake of show. “Ahaha~ feeling hungry, are we? Subject T-02-71… Sylvester Rutherglen? Sylva.” Arahschel’s smug grin only grew. It grew from ear to ear, stretching until his mouth and lips were beyond anything that could be considered normal. “I am hungry too, Sylva. I wonder who I should eat~” His face contorted to accommodate the change, stretching itself across the growing mass of threads that emerged from underneath. Despite not speaking through a throat, tongue or mouth, the threads spun against each other to mimic humane laughter perfectly.

  Clarisse’s first instinct was to run. Every muscle in her body, even knowing full well that it was just a dream, told her to turn around and put as much distance between them as possible. But glancing behind herself revealed that running wasn’t an option, summarized by the blurry boundaries of dreamscape collapsing onto their immediate vicinity.

  Nikolas’s body froze, and Sylvester whimpered in abject fear as the supposed doctor shed his human head like a hood, tearing open a carefully stitched neck to reveal a constantly morphing worm made of millions of oily, flowing threads. The head hung back like a deflated sack save for a jaw and a pair of eyeballs, and its hands flailed like gloves hung from the wrists, if the good doctor’s appendages could even be called that.

  “Allow me to educate you,” The doctor’s body grew larger, growing into its human shell until it looked ready to pop at the touch of a pin. It occupied the dimensions of the hallway completely, walking past Sylva and Nik to address the impromptu mass of children it had restrained.

  “This world has contracted a dreadful disease,” Its oratory began, making the sound of a pipe organ reverberate through the facility with every word its threads spun into the air. “A disease of the mind, body and soul. It infects your actions, your every waking breath. The threads of fate that bind you to stories told time and time again…”

  Clarisse could do naught but cower in the midst of its sermon. She covered her ears, but the organ dominated her eardrums regardless. Even as a mere visitor in a dream, she was powerless to the absolute control of the doctor. Its words invaded her mind and spoke to her soul, making every atom in her body resonate with its purpose.

  The children around her were suffering a similarly dire fate. Many of them were yelling, shouting with their ears plugged. Others suffered from rivers of inconsolable despair flowing down their faces. Most had descended to the floor, squirming and tearing uncontrollably at their own ears in a desperate search for respite. But there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nobody to scream to… only an exchange of reverence and absolution that drowned out their suffering.

  The good doctor treaded forward, leaving its severed feet and shifting through threads until it reached a particular child. The child lay spasming on the ground, utterly terror-stricken by its influence. “And I tell you, you are blessed. Upon your bodies I will build my altar, and the gates from beyond shall not prevail against it.” The tendril of threads extruding from where its head had once been lowered around the child, gaping open like the jaw of a python.

  Clarisse averted her gaze from the child, fearing what would happen next. But time was a slow and cruel mistress, hiding herself behind the dreadful symphony of the organ. She had no clue if it was over, or if anything had happened to the child at all. All until a single voice pierced through the reverence.

  “STOP IT! DON’T YOU DARE! THEY. ARE. NOT. YOURS.”

  It was a desperate, guttural declaration from Nikolas, still firmly trapped within the good doctor’s threads. Even when everyone’s found only futility, somehow his voice tore through the operatic sermon to reach Clarisse’s ears.

  “WE. ARE. NOT. YOURS.”

  The good doctor did not acknowledge the injured child’s screams, and if it did, there was no indication. Threads from below morphed into a pedestal to elevate its prey, and the boom of the organ grew ever louder. The threads wrapped around the disconsolate child’s head first, muffling his fearful cries and twisting around him. The boy’s limbs flailed for freedom, banging on the creature’s threads frantically as they tightened around his neck.

  SNAP!

  Clarisse didn’t bother to shield herself from the headless corpse’s spray of blood, terror seizing every muscle of her body and forcing her to witness. She could still hear Nik’s faint screams in the backdrop, but that was all they were. Background noise in the primary, no, only consequential sermon that the world could offer.

  The good doctor baptized its followers in exsanguination, spreading threads across the ceiling to shower crimson along the suffering hallways. With each word it spoke, the meaning became more and more unintelligible, and yet their weight only grew, latching onto the hearts of all but one.

  “?A?n?d? ?j?u?s?t? ?l?i?k?e? ?t?h?a?t?,? ?a?n?o?t?h?e?r? ?s?o?u?l? ?t?h?a?t? ?f?o?u?n?d? ?t?h?e?i?r? ?w?a?y?.? ?????I????

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  I??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????m??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????u?????????????????????????????????????s????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????t???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????c????????????????????????????????l??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????e????????????????a???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????n??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????s??????????????????????????????????????????????e?????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????t??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????h?????????????????????????????????????e???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????w????????????????????????????????????????????????????o???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????r????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????l?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????d????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????…??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????”????????????????????????????????????????????????????

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