Instead of making a suicidal beeline toward the sun and the undead wyrm or charging into the valley of the Marked Legion, they first marked their position relative to the wreckage with a crude system of slashed bark, scorched earth from Son’s lasers, and a pile of chopped branches. Then they moved perpendicular to both major threats, in a direction David mentally categorized as ‘west, I guess.’ The forest thinned into rocky, uneven hills. They encountered a few level 3 imps and a pair of scrawny juvenile wargs under level 4. David hung back, letting the others—the weaker ones, as he saw it—handle the skirmish, but he insisted, with a flat tone that brooked no argument, that everyone ensure Chloe got a few solid hits in on each creature.

  As the group moved, David turned the five inert flesh-golem raisins over in his palm. If he could figure out how to wake them up, he’d have five unthinking, obedient slabs of muscle under his command. A mobile wall. But nothing worked. Shoving demonic energy into them did nothing. Pushing heat through them just made them warm. Trying to prod them with his demonic energy field got no response. They were just dead, leathery nuggets.

  Jamie came over, his shoulders slumped with a fatigue that went deeper than just being tired. He kept glancing at the gore on his spear like he couldn't believe it was really there. His voice was quieter than usual, but he still tried for a note of normal curiosity. "Hey, what's that stuff? It looks... kinda nasty."

  “Party favors from the pope,” David said, not looking up. “Supposed to be golems. They’re currently just expensive jerky.”

  Jamie fell into a closer step beside David, his eyes darting to the spot where David’s arm and chest had been vaporized and then violently regrown.

  “Does it… does it hurt?” Jamie asked finally, his voice hushed. “When you come back like that. It looked… it looked really painful.”

  David considered the question clinically. “Yes. It’s worse than just getting cut. It’s your body building itself wrong on purpose, fast. Like all your bones are splinters pushing out at once.” He glanced at Jamie. “Don’t recommend it.”

  “How do you even… do that?” Jamie asked. “Just decide to come back?”

  “You decide you don’t want to be dead,” David said. “The rest is just screaming and waiting.”

  They walked in silence for a few paces over the rocky ground, the tattered robes of the floating priest-torso fluttering ahead like a grim banner.

  “You were like a fighter or something, right?” Jamie blurted out, his words tumbling together. “Before. Like, special forces or… or UFC. You have to have been. I wish I knew how to do any of that.”

  “Construction,” David said. He left it there. In his head, the reasoning was a single, flat note: it was work that didn’t ask questions he couldn’t answer.

  “Oh.” Jamie sounded almost disappointed. He scuffed his boot. “I just did school. And drawing. I was pretty good at it.” He paused, his voice softening. “I’ve got six brothers and sisters. I’m the second oldest. Always kinda had to look out for everyone, you know? Make sure the little ones didn’t eat Legos, help with homework.”

  David gave a non-committal grunt.

  “Do you have any? Brothers or sisters?” Jamie pressed.

  “No,” David said. The word was final. A period.

  “Just… just you?”

  David was quiet for a long moment. The only sound was their boots on the scree. “I had a daughter. Once.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn't look at Jamie. The sentence hung in the air and then fell, dead, between them.

  Silence settled, broken only by the distant sound of dripping water from a crevice.

  Jamie broke it, his voice small but focused. “Do you think… Will we actually make it to the second floor? Ever?”

  David looked at the grim, unnatural landscape, then at the floating remnant of the priest leading their way. “We’re moving,” he said, his tone pragmatic. “That’s the only way to find out.”

  Jamie nodded slowly, absorbing the non-answer. He looked ahead, not with hope for rescue, but with a weary determination to see what was over the next ridge. “Yeah. Okay.”

  David listened to the kid talk about Legos and homework, about being the second oldest of seven. The pieces clicked into place with a logical snap. Everything he shows is a coping strategy. Extroverted positivity was a learned mechanism. He’s used to being a pillar. Supporting six other people has been his job forever. The priest’s little sermon about us being system food was an attack on the very structure he relied on. The foundation he depends on is rotten. The fortress he built is fraying. David watched Jamie’s profile, the determined set of his jaw as he stared ahead at the floating torso. He’s staying strong. Strong is the only gear he has.

  David watched the floating priest-torso bob ahead of them, a ragged puppet against the hellish sky. He glanced at Jamie, then spoke, his voice low and stripped of any pretense.

  “That priest said we’re cattle. Said this place exists for a reason, like we’re part of some plan.”

  He snorted. “That’s bullshit. There’s no hidden meaning in this. No destiny waiting to be unlocked. And if there is one, it sure as hell isn’t meant for us.”

  He looked back at the path ahead. “All there is is what happens—and what you do afterward. A test from God? No, it’s just the conditions we’re stuck in. Same as the weather. Or hunger.”

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  He paused, letting the words settle in the rocky silence.

  “What matters is the choice you make while you’re in it. You can curl up and let it chew you apart, or you can stand up and make yourself a problem.”

  After a beat, he finished, his voice flat.

  “That’s it. That’s the only meaning I see.”

  Jamie was quiet for a long moment, staring at the ground as he walked. He finally mumbled, “Thanks,” though it was unclear what for—the conversation, or the brutal honesty. He drifted away from David’s side, falling back in the line until he was next to Theo.

  The group walked for another twenty minutes, sticking to the straight, perpendicular line David had chosen. The terrain grew rockier, the redwoods thinning into jagged stone outcroppings. They fought three more times. The enemies were familiar now: roaming packs of imps, juvenile wargs, and the many sets of clanking possessed armors that fell apart when Jamie froze their joints. Then an adult warg, level fourteen, lunged from a high ledge. It was large, heavy, and moved with a speed that blurred its grey fur. It took a concerted effort. David darted in low, his demonic energy lashing out to slice through the tendons in its hind legs, crippling its leap. Rhea drove her telekinetic strikes into its eyes, blinding it. His thrall and the undead were a constant, armored distraction, taking the brunt of its swipes and keeping it from turning on the others or a recovering member too slow to evade. The floating priest's aerial blasts kept the creature confused. When it finally fell, twitching, a notification flashed in David's vision.

  [You have defeated an Adult Warg Lvl 14]

  [Lvl 9 ? Lvl 10]

  David dumped his free stats into Demonic Energy, then immediately swiped the notifications away, not willing to give in to distraction.

  Because the battle with the warg had driven them sideways into a broad, unnatural clearing.

  The ground underfoot turned from dirt and scree to a hard, packed earth that was unnaturally cold. It was the first cold ground they'd felt since arriving, a strange, soothing chill that seeped through their boots.

  Nothing grew here. The towering redwoods formed a perfect, dead ring around the clearing, their trunks charcoal-black and leafless on this side, as if repelled. In the center stood a structure. It wasn't crumbling. It was derelict, a stone building the size of a large house. Its lines suggested a small, sharp-angled cathedral, but the stone was a matte black, scorched as if by a fire that had burned without heat. Jagged, knife-like spires reached up. There were no windows, only empty arches filled with the remnants of something that might have been glass, now just vicious shards clinging to the frames.

  Statues flanked a yawning doorway. They were humanoid, but elongated, their features smoothed into blank, oval faces. Their hands were raised, palms out, but each finger ended in a carved, barbed point. The stone they were made from was the same scorched black, but veins of deep crimson, like cooled magma, ran through them. Faint, eroded symbols were carved into the base of each statue—coils, spirals, and jagged lines that hurt the eye to follow.

  The walls of the structure weren't adorned with murals. They were scarred with them. The stone itself seemed to have been grown with images fused into its surface: vast, tentacled shapes floating in voids, multi-jointed limbs curling around small, screaming figures that might have been people or something else. The images were not painted. There were variations in the stone's texture and color, darker blotches and raised ridges, making them look less like art and more like fossilized memories pressed into the rock. Around the base of the walls, half-buried in the cold dirt, lay scattered bones. They were not arranged. They were dumped, a tangle of ribs, femurs, and skulls—some humanoid, some not.

  The floating priest-torso, which Mara had been keeping ahead of them, slowed its drift as it approached the clearing's edge. It didn't cross into the dead ring. It simply stopped, hovering, as if waiting for a command it didn't have.

  Harris was the first to speak, his voice a tight murmur. "We go around."

  Rhea's eyes tracked over the symbols on the statues. "Go around what? It's a clearing. The forest is dead around it. The path is around it."

  Corbin shifted his grip on his weapon, his gaze scanning the dark doorway. "Or through."

  Through? David thought, Is this guy an idiot?

  Jamie just stared at the blank-faced statues, his earlier energy gone, replaced by a frozen sort of dread. He took a small step back.

  David looked from the bones to the doorway to the hovering thrall. The cold ground felt like a warning. The silent, repelled forest was a warning. The entire place was a sign saying 'DO NOT ENTER' in a language of dead trees and fossilized nightmares. He knew they couldn't stay in the open. He also knew walking into that doorway was asking for a specific, ugly kind of death.

  "We skirt far around the edge," David said, his own voice low. "Deeper into the trees. Not a sound. If anything moves from that door, we run. Not fight. Run." he pointed back in the direction they came, where he'd already asked Son to carve a large symbol into the redwoods “That way. Back where we came. Nobody splits up.”

  The group moved, slowly, keeping a solid distance between themselves and the dead clearing, after about thirty seconds, nothing tentacled, horrific, or biblical appeared to disturb them. A few of them exhaled, the rest kept their breathing hitched. And as their discussion of strange creepy temples and dead clearings had barely faded into background noise, Mara stepped directly into David’s path, her face pale with a fury that was cold and precise.

  “What did you do to me?” she asked, her voice a low, controlled blade.

  David stopped. “First of all, there’s a list. Second, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Look at your teeth,” she said, not blinking. “Your canines.”

  David ran his tongue over his teeth. He felt it immediately. A sharper point. An almost imperceptible length where there shouldn’t be one. The tip of his canine pricked his tongue, drawing a faint, coppery taste. He stared at her.

  “Check your status,” she said. “Because you definitely did something.”

  Curiously, he pulled up his status. He scanned past his level, his known skills. At the bottom, a new line.

  [Skill: Touch of the [Unknown]]

  He had no idea what it was. It hadn't been there the last time he'd checked. He didn’t feel any different. “[Unknown]?,” he muttered.

  “I knew it,” Mara hissed, stepping closer. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” David said, his mind racing through possibilities—the priest’s final attack, the strange energy he’d absorbed, the new heart. “Might be the priest’s parting gift. Or the abyss. Or whatever.”

  As he said it, he noticed something else. The demonic energy he held. He could feel its connection to Mara, the thrall link. It wasn’t a channel anymore. It was a seamless loop. The energy flowed to her and back as smoothly as his own blood moved through his veins. She felt like an extension of his own circulation, his own pool of power. He looked at her eyes. The thin red line in her iris was there, just barely, imperceptibly thicker. He only noticed it now because she was so close, so angry.

  “Do you know what the thrall notification said?” she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper meant only for him. “When I received it?”

  “No,” David said, his own voice flat. “I’m guessing something awesome.”

  “No. It said, ‘You have been completely captivated, fascinated, and absorbed by the nascent Fiend, David Carter, and are being turned into its thrall. Once the infernal thrall process is complete, there will be no escape.’” She didn’t blink. “What the fuck is a Fiend, David? And why does the system call you a nascent one? What the fuck is ‘nascent’? What did you do to me?”