Lacie convinced me that I should let her talk to some crawlers with more expertise and see if anyone knew an addiction cure for Rev-Up juice. Apparently, addiction-curing magic was a thing in here.

  I was feeling trapped in the personal space, so I went out for a run. She didn't say anything, but I could see how worried she was as I left. She hadn't been that worried when I dropped into Calcul's tower to fight a city boss.

  Needing to sweat out my problems, I decided to really push myself, to squeeze every last ounce of speed from my limbs. Skating at top speed on the water, I tried to get going fast enough that I could stay up on the exterior wall of the bubble, but that was too flat to let me ring around it like a velodrome.

  I'm not sure how long I skated like that, but eventually even my dungeon-augmented endurance gave way to a burning ache and I started to cramp up. I skidded into a near crash and found myself floating in the sea, right near the force-field of the bubble.

  I just drifted for a while, staring up at the weirdly-inert clouds of this world. Eventually, the cramps relaxed and I started swimming back.

  Lacie: Quick! We need to talk!

  I sprinted back, finding her standing outside the personal space, waiting for me.

  "Wow, I think that's the first time I've seen you panting since we got here."

  I groaned and straightened, cracking my back.

  "I guess I now know that two days of sprints is what it takes," Lacie said.

  "Wow, two days?" I chuckled, thinking of how preposterous my life had become. "I zoned out, lost track of time. And not sprints, one sprint. I did laps around the water at the outskirts of the bubble. Sweating helps clear my head."

  She stared a second. "Life in here gets increasingly weird. Now, you need to go find the stairwell down from that ship, cut it out, and drag it here."

  "What's going on? Did you find a way to open that up."

  "Actually, I'll help. And explain while we work."

  We got started, but once she explained, I said, "We should be going to the surface."

  "What?"

  "This place is underground! The chance of a collapse is high. What happens if some stone jams between the safe room and the stairs? That could have happened with the collapse in the dwarven city. Come on. There were stairs at the bottom of the Contraption. It's not too far from there to the lopsided safe room."

  What I was calling the "lopsided safe room" had been in the land quadrant. It had stayed indestructible, but hadn't stayed vertical. We weren't sure about the rules around moving safe rooms, but that one had moved.

  Now, it was at about a sixty-degree angle on a massive slab of stone. Lacie had some suggestions, but I just started sending spun-up fastballs into the slab. The Extremely Sharp Knife went about six feet into stone on a throw.

  It took about twenty minutes to put pin-prick holes the breadth of the slab, then four well-place Heavy Fastballs caused a deafening cracking sound and the whole thing fell in half.

  The safe room was upright once more.

  The stairs, well they were more difficult. Way too heavy for us to drag anywhere. This time, Lacie did have an idea. Two, in fact. The first, fairly-good idea worked alright. We anchored a chain-winch we bought from the goblins, wrapped it around the stairs, and she used her tree spell to sprout underneath and lift the whole thing.

  I thought that would be a clever exploit to put large items in her inventory, but she said the system didn't count her tree-growth as lifting something. Still, it moved the stairs about twenty feet up.

  That wasn't enough, so it was time for phase two. She put all her buffs on me, I skated up-slope at it, spinning, and body-checked it higher while she tightened the winch.

  Phase two sucked. I broke my shoulder nineteen times before we got it topside.

  While I worked, Lacie talked to one of her contacts.

  Lacie: We're in #1005. We need to talk.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Elle: Well if it isn't the psychos who blew up their world. Come begging for help, finally?

  Lacie: Firstly, what they said about us attacking them was wrong. We didn't kill anyone. They attacked us for leaving the party, and they lost. The blast was Vitorio blowing his stash. Secondly, no, we don't want direct help.

  Elle: You know how many people are whining at me about their problems? Most of them at least aren't in a bubble where the other residents already reached out. Personally, I'd take them up on the idea of icing the downstairs neighbors who ruined the entire bubble, but Imani's nicer than me.

  Lacie: That's exactly it. We want you to take them up on the offer.

  Elle: You get dropped on the head too many times? You did get the brief on how this works, didn't you?

  Lacie: Look, when Vitorio blew his stash, it broke the subterranean level. Because the level was broken, when we killed the boss, it also exploded and that blast broke everything else. We've tried like thirty things and have no way up to those cloud cities, and the crawlers up there have given up on solving their problems. If you summon some feral god thing in here, maybe it just blows the sky-city up and opens the bubble. We're moving a stairwell to the safe room about six inches from the safe room door. You summoning them and leaving us down here is our best shot.

  I did six more sprints, shoulder-checking the stairwell higher and there was no reply. "Why isn't she messaging you back?"

  Lacie shrugged.

  Five more painful shoulder-checks. "You should message her again."

  Lacie bit at her lip. "Give it another four, so fifteen total between messages, then we ask. She's really cool, but also seems like a bit of a bitch."

  As I did my third of the four runs, getting very tired of repeatedly breaking my shoulder, but also kinda used to it, a reply finally came.

  Elle: Imani approved it. You'll be in the final phase. And I'm not gonna be wasting my time delaying this to send a ton of messages. Your warning will be when a fucking feral god appears, so stay in the safe room.

  Saved At Last

  All told, we got it in-place and bolted to the side of the safe-room three hours before the sky changed.

  I held onto Lacie, just in case, as we watched from the doorway.

  The air boiled, and suddenly there was a mile-tall tarsier, tentacles dangling from his mouth, making the bubble seem awful crowded. He was clinging, upside down, to the bubble, looking all over with his enormous, round eyes.

  He did nothing.

  We waited a while, then got the dinner we'd been planning on having and ate, both of us crammed in the doorway so we were mostly in the safe room while we had monkey soup with crackers. The soup was bad, but if you added goblin spice-poppers—Lacie had grabbed a bunch of the weird stuff—it was somewhere between interesting and fine.

  An hour after we finished eating, it had crawled a few steps and let out a few incredibly loud and incredibly high-pitched shrieks, but had done nothing else.

  "I think, if I do it right, I can reach his tail and climb—"

  "No!" Lacie cried. "Just be patient. We have two full days left."

  "We can't wait forever."

  "Alright, if it's done nothing in eight hours, we'll reassess, okay?"

  I grumbled but acquiesced. She wasn't wrong about how suicidal trying to climb that thing's tail would be.

  Seven hours and forty-three minutes later, I was prepping myself for the leap that would let me grip that tail when he darted forward, now fully upside down, high above. The tentacles in his maw lashed out, wrapped around the cloud-castle, and destroyed it.

  Bubble Notification. The Cloud Kingdom of Thurbidel has been successfully destroyed. The Air Quadrant has been liberated!

  All give congratulations to the feral god who successfully ate the throne room. All hail feral god Shu-Tep the Shrieker. Hail Him! HAIL HIM!

  All crawlers who originated in the Air Quadrant, well they left a while ago. Fuck those guys.

  The bubble vanished. I sprinted through the safe room, into the personal space, snatched Lacie from her crafting room, and skidded to a halt as the world shook. The open door now revealed the golden-brown fur of a giant tariser. He had been hanging directly overhead when the bubble ceased to be a part of reality.

  "Oh fuck," Lacie said.

  I didn't hesitate, I pushed into the mass of hair, just enough to be technically outside of the safe room, and started stabbing. Shu-Tep the Shrieker was only a level-148 feral god, and for all I knew I could start some ruptures on him and bleed him out. He didn't react until the debuffs were stacking up. When he moved, the earth shook.

  "Get back in here!" Lacie yelled.

  I stopped stabbing and let her drag me back in. The godling flipped upright, and we could see him scurrying about. The stairs were clear. "Should we go?"

  She just sat there, staring. "Um, actually, I think not. I mean, yes it's incredibly dangerous, but the next floor is dangerous, too. I want to finish some things up. But you keep watch, and never go far. If there's a hint of danger, don't ask, just grab me and drag me down the stairs."

  Lacie seemed to have tons to do. She scooped all the blood she could get into glass vials, claiming that, "Living Blood of a Feral God might be alchemically useful."

  Then she was in the personal space, and back out an hour later to talk to the bopca. In again, then out in another fifteen minutes to ask for a bunch of the items she'd previously given me. She took the huge sword I still hated carrying around, so that was nice.

  For me, it was mostly just waiting.

  I wouldn't risk hitting Shu-Tep, as he was so close he was sure to notice, but sometimes I'd see something moving further off and send a few shots its way. I didn't get skill-ups for non-combat work, in general, so the rest of my practice was about my actual skill as a person who was familiar with my abilities, as opposed to the dungeon-nonsense training to improve abstract traits.

  At seven hours out, Lacie came to right outside the safe room door. "So, I have been iterating a lot with the dye recipes and the clothing patterns. I have a lot of things ready to go, some dyes already mixed and ready, but the tables all upgrade when we change floors, so I need to wait until floor 6 to make the good stuff."

  "So, no more work for the next hour?"

  She sat down and leaned against me. "No more work for the next hour."

  We watched Shu-Tep the Shrieker, never hearing a single shriek. At six hours to floor-collapse, we went down.