Instead of immediately moving towards the direction of Hallowsville the second the referee said “Go”, I had another plan in mind. There was no way I was gonna leave Barclays Center without picking out every piece of marijuana that was in there. Rosalina had unknowingly given me a gift to give to my daughter, and I planned on cherishing it till that disease was gone for good. Obviously, that meant we were behind in the race, but who said we needed to run the whole thing? Cars existed for a reason, and my daughter along with Jesus agreed that carrying two big bags of weed on foot sounded like a shitty idea.

  Unfortunately, there was one problem about owning a car in a post-apocalyptic world. You needed gasoline to keep it running, and we didn't have any of that. So until Jesus could come back with some gas, we had no choice but to use this first day as a rest day. We could’ve used this time to gather food, strategize, maybe even have a proper conversation about what happened this month. However, Sunshine had a better idea. An idea that was definitely a good use of our time.

  “Alright Jerome, you ready?” asked Sunshine, practicing hits with her baseball bat on a large rock.

  “I guess… But I don't really feel right about fighting my daughter,” I said, tying my vine hair into a bun.

  Unlike my last transformation back in the Underground, this plant one lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. My last transformation disappeared after two battles, and yet this one was still here for the whole day. Jesus had used Energy Sense on my body and noticed that there were three distinct forms of aura inside me. According to him, anyone with powers like ours had one and they were permanent. I presumed that two of those auras belonged to Rosalina and I. The third must’ve been that Type Two I absorbed during my fight with Dante. And if that was the case, then these forms should work like transformations. But how would I access the third one?

  “We're not really fighting… It’s more like training,” she noted, taking her backpack off. “Training for you, obviously.”

  “Oh, I see. You're gonna train your old man, eh?” I readied a battle stance, mimicking an old boxer I saw online once. “What's my little girl gonna teach me?’

  Sunshine pulled out a water bottle from her bag and chugged half of it. “You lost that fight with Jason. Why do you think you did?”

  “Because his Radius ability is way too unfair to fight against. I mean, you know how it works, right?”

  “Yeah, it's a strong power. But every power has some kind of weakness,” she said, placing the bottle back in her bag. “You can't absorb energy unless your body’s touching it, and I can't use my Mind Trick unless my fingers are pointed at something visible. As for Jason's weakness…” She spun her metal bat in her hand and, with a powerful swing, struck the weathered rock, shattering it to small pieces. Then, she picked up one of the rocks and asked, “You see this rock, right?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, confused by where she was going with this. “It was pretty jarring to see my nine year old perform such a crazy feat. What kind of training was Jesus giving her!?

  Suddenly, the rock was mere inches away from my face, but I was able to grab it and crush it into dust before it could hit me. “What did you do that for!?”

  My daughter chuckled, swinging the bat on her finger like a basketball. “You were able to touch that rock, right? And you were able to crush it?”

  “Yeah… where are you going with this?” I asked, wiping the dust on my grass pants.

  She held out her hand to me. “Do you see a rock here?”

  “No… I feel like you're messing with me somehow.”

  She whipped her arm towards me, seemingly pretending to throw a rock at me. “Did you feel the rock hit you? Did you hear it hit you?”

  “Didn't feel a thing. What does this have to do with Ja… Oh, I see what you're trying to say. This has something to do with senses, doesn't it?”

  She smiled. “I knew you'd get it eventually. Yeah, the best way to counter Jason’s power is to prevent an interaction with three of his senses. He needs to see, smell, and hear you to activate his ability. Escape his line of sight, and you’re good. Even if he does see you, as long as you don’t say a word or some outside source is muffling your personal sounds, his ability won’t have any effect.”

  Wow! Who knew such an overpowered ability would have a weakness that could be easily exploited. If I remember correctly, I could sense that he attempted to use his ability on Rosalina’s wood dragon when he first dropped in. Something about AIDs I think? I didn’t see any visible changes from the dragon nor did it look like it was affected by the phrase. Our beam clash must’ve drowned out the roars flying out of the beast’s mouth so Jason had to resort to a dropkick.

  Then, he attempted to use it again, though I grabbed his face before he could say it. Although, I was pretty sure my hand couldn’t stop him from finishing the phrase, so the only thing that could’ve prevented the activation of his ability was my hand luckily covering his eyes. Now that I think about it, that was like the second time that freak was trying to give me AIDs… Is AIDs really that powerful!?

  “I’m confused about one thing though… I’m pretty sure Jason was able to see, hear, and smell you when you two were fighting, so how come his ability didn’t work then?”

  Sunshine grabbed a green marble from her pocket. It was the mini forcefield Dante used. “The whole three senses thing applies both ways. I couldn’t hear him thanks to these earplugs, so I didn’t die in a bloody explosion. Pretty cool, right?”

  I clapped aggressively, in awe of how cool my daughter was now. “How’d I get so lucky with a daughter like you?”

  Sunshine tried to cover her rosy cheeks. “Oh, I’m not that great… But you can keep praising me I guess.”

  “There’s no way I’m gonna lose to that guy now–not after that new info!” I said with high confidence. “Plus, I should be able to use more of these plant moves now that we’re out in the fields. Jason hasn’t seen any of that.”

  “Actually, there is another reason you lost.”

  “Is it the plant thing? I already-”

  Before I could finish my sentence, Sunshine zoomed through the air and appeared before me, a fiery emerald energy surrounding her baseball bat as she prepared to strike. She swung her bat and, thinking quickly, I grasped it firmly, holding her up in the air.

  “You're gonna attack me instead of telling me the other reason? You've gotten bolder.”

  “I learned it from you,” she replied. I noticed that her body was enshrouded with a bright aura. It was as though I was a piece of the sun was right in front of me.

  “How about I learn what the other reason was?”

  “Well, the reason’s simple. You’re slow.” Her aura surged as she flashed out of my sight, leaving her baseball bat in my grip. Dust erupted with each step she took, swirling upwards like miniature storms. She circled around me, a trail of green marking her rotation. My daughter didn’t make a sound, so I had to rely on my vision to catch her lack-

  A punch from a small fist caught me off-guard, slamming into the side of my chin. I looked to my right, my body firm and still, and noticed Sunshine had actually landed a hit on me. It looked like I was in store for another attack as she raised another fist. However, she didn’t throw a punch yet. The nuclear energy from the sky quickly gathered around her fist, like it was a black hole swallowing the essences of the universe. But her hand wasn’t absorbing it. The energy was latching onto her skin, coating it like armor.

  She attempted to land another punch, and I caught her fist before it did. “The energy in the air… You’re using it to power up your body, right?” I asked.

  “Exactly!”, she exclaimed, jumping off of me. “Apparently, most of the Underground Radius members and the Radius users we haven’t seen yet can power up using the energy in the air. Including Jason. I’d say he’s one of the better users of the technique.”

  “Well, that’s not good,” I muttered, tossing her bat back to her. “Not only is his ability dangerous, but he can use that technique well too. Although, I’m pretty sure whenever I absorb energy from things, I’m practically doing the same thing, right?”

  “Eh, not really,” she denied, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t think the energy absorption is like… increasing your strength and speed. The main thing about it is that it lets you release it in different ways. I think it only makes you feel stronger, but you’re just using strength you hadn’t tapped into yet. I read about it in one of the books you got me. I think it’s called ‘hysterical strength’.”

  “Oh, I know that thing. It’s like when a mom is trying to lift a car off her child in order to save her. Like an extra boost of adrenaline.”

  “Yep. What makes what I do different is that I’m using an outside source to strengthen my body, not an inner source. You just need to learn how to do that and you’ll probably be good.”

  I don’t like the sound of that “probably”…

  “Ok then… How do I do it?” I asked, slamming my fists against each other.

  “Oh, that’s the problem! You can’t,” she said, holding back her laughter.

  “What!? Then what was the point of giving me that whole explanation? And why can’t I do it?”

  “Jesus said it’s ’cause you’re a zombie,” she answered, composing herself. “But don’t worry! I think there’s a workaround you can try. The whole aura strengthening thing is getting the energy on your skin and making it stick. Maybe if you absorb it but stop right before it goes inside of you, it’ll be the same thing. But you have to keep using the absorption. Like a constant state of it.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  That… could work. It was a risky move though considering I could screw up Sunflower’s healing process within me if I absorbed any outside energy. Damn! I should’ve asked that fat wood dragon if he knew how long this would take… Well, there’s no use in complaining now. I’ll just have to risk it!

  I raised my hands to the sky, and I began to bring in the surrounding nuclear energy to my hands. I had no idea how to absorb using the rest of my body, aside from my mouth, so strengthened hands would have to do for now. Once I felt the energy grace my fingers, I tried wrapping it around my hands. It wasn’t easy. Usually, I’d already have it inside of me, though now I had to keep my ability in a constant state of activation. I felt like a bodybuilder having to keep 300 pounds in the air for twenty seconds or more without completing the set. This was… Shit!

  To my dismay, a massive burst of energy washed over my glowing body and drowned me in its overwhelming intensity, entering through every hole it could find and invading my body. This was too damn much! Where the hell did all this come from!? Even though I had no lungs, it felt like I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed my neck, hoping whatever was attempting to destroy me would come out.

  “Jerome Hunter… I think I’ve had enough of your body. This state of absorption… is not for me.”

  That feminine voice… It sounded so familiar, and yet I know I’ve never heard it before. She almost sounded like an older version of Rosalina’s daughter.

  I wanted to speak. Unfortunately, the energy was stuffing my mouth so much that I couldn’t even scream out for my daughter.

  “Jerome, why did you kill… my mother…?

  The world around me had become much more twisted than I could ever have imagined. I had no idea why or how, but I was transported to… I didn’t even know. My daughter wasn’t in front of me anymore. Instead of being by my side like she should have been, she was everywhere around me. Not clones of her. Well, there were clones, though not of her entire body. The entire sky, every corner in every direction, was just hundreds of my daughter’s faces, contorted and left in a permanent expression of fear and agony.

  I looked down, not wanting to witness such a painful expression Sunshine was forced to take. However, I was only met with even more of her distraught expressions as the whole ground was made up of her face. I screamed and tried to run away, but I tripped on my child’s gaping mouth. My face crashed onto her cheek, and I felt something wet, something sticky stain my forehead. It wasn’t my blood. It was her blood, somehow spilling out of her mouth.

  Fear poured into my soul as I crawled out of the way, desperately trying to find anywhere that wasn’t this horrible place. The air smelled like a mixture of rotten eggs and manure, and pinching my nose didn't seem to matter. The faces all around me didn't help either as my stomach churned at the sight of it all. My breathing was becoming erratic, and my heart was nearly beating out of my chest. Wait a minute… my heart?

  I stopped moving to examine my body, and I realized that I was human again. Without hesitation, I dug through the pockets of my coat and, as I expected, Sunshine’s baby picture was in there. It all made sense now… this place was the state between absorption! But how the hell did I get here? And how do I get out…?

  “This isn't the state between absorption.”

  A girl’s voice boomed across the space, vibrating my body uncomfortably. I grabbed my arms, trying to keep my body in place. My eyes scanned every direction, and yet I couldn't see where the voice came from. With how loud she was, it was as though the entire world said that sentence. “Who are you!? Actually, I don’t care who you are… Get me out of here or I’ll-”

  “You don't care? After you killed my mother and forced her inside this disgusting, undead body… you're saying you don't care about me!?”

  She sounded conflicted, like she wasn't even sure if what she said was the truth or not. Although, that wasn't the only thing I was concerned about. There was only mother she could've been talking about, but that would mean that this voice came from…

  “Sunflower!” I screamed to the sky. “Is that you?”

  “No shit, old man. Who else would be talking to you inside your body like this?”

  We're inside my body? That's impossible! Why the hell would my insides be filled with the pained expressions of my child?

  “There's no way we’re inside of me. That wouldn't make any sense… If this were my body, then that means I would have absorbed myself, right? Obviously, that's not tr-”

  Suddenly, one of the faces on the ground began to rise, cutting off my words mid-sentence. Her teeth began to sharpen as her jaw extended way beyond what it should've been capable of. Then, the head chased me by its lonesome, and I immediately made a break for it. Adrenaline surged through my body while I jumped over all the opened mouths, taking control of my scrawny legs. Unfortunately though, adrenaline could only take me so far as Sunshine’s teeth were only a few inches away from chomping my head off.

  There was no damn way I was gonna get eaten by my own daughter… No! That’s not my daughter. Just some sick creation by a broken girl who had the wrong idea about my situation. And if I recall from my last run-in with Rosalina, anything in your imagination could appear in the state between absorption. And if all this was created with her daughter’s imagination, then that meant only one thing.

  I turned back with gritted teeth, a look of ferocious intensity etched across my face. “You’re not real!” I delivered a sloppy punch to her face, expecting it to dissolve in a cloud of mist. Instead, the moment my fist made contact with her skin, it transformed into leaves that scattered into the distance.

  “Sunflower, that’s enough!” I shouted, hardening my fists. “I absorbed your body so I could help you. A really bad man hurt you and I-”

  “You’re right. A really bad man did hurt me, and I’m looking at him right now.”

  “I would never hurt you. I absorbed your mother so I could save your life!”

  “And by doing so, you hurt me in a way I don’t think I could ever recover from.” It sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “Absorbed!? Don’t sugarcoat what you did, you fucking monster. No wonder these twisted faces of your daughter are all you can see here. You’re gonna hurt her like you hurt me. You deserve to look at this.”

  “Sorry to tell you, but these things aren’t my daughter and they never will be.” I pointed a thumb to my back and looked behind me. “Because she’s right here.”

  The area behind me brightened as a pair of small hands began to emerge from the light. Arms, torso, legs, and eventually, Sunshine’s face came into view. She wrapped around my body, clinging to my back. Despite her just being a creation of my imagination, I still felt her warmth, as though the sun came down and embraced me. The scent of her minty fresh flower headpiece did well in erasing most of the rotten smells from my nose. Who cared about all the horrific visuals in this place when I had something to wash them all away?

  More faces erupted from the ground a couple feet away from us, their faces a stark contrast from my adorable little girl. Another group of faces began to descend from above, and their razor-sharp teeth were bared and ready to bite.

  “You think summoning your kid will remove all the bad shit you put her through?” questioned Sunflower, her voice growing angrier. “All of these faces are a representation of the pain and sadness your ignorance has put her through–will put her through!”

  My head sunk upon hearing this, feeling the weight of her words crash onto me like a boulder. I was well aware of all the problems I’d caused in my daughter's life, problems I had yet to apologize for. The fear of her anger, her disappointment, locked my better judgement in a cage I couldn't find a key for. Honestly, I didn't even know if I wanted to unlock it. And yet, it was keeping those truths locked away that kept adding more of these problems to the pile that already existed. I was doing the same with Sunflower, and I had to fix that… right now!

  Sunshine poked the back of my bald head. “You ready, Jerome? Let’s go,” she said with a reassuring voice.

  My head rose, pushing against the weight of everything, and I charged forward. One of the heads was about to bite my head, but I ducked just in time as my daughter smacked the head away which reduced it to leaves.

  “Sunflower, your mom entrusted me to save your life and protect you!” I screamed, decking a few Sunshines out of my way. “The only one who could’ve revived you at that moment was me. And you know that. You’ve been inside of me this entire time as living energy, and I was rebuilding you!”

  “Just shut up and die already!” The moment she uttered those words, the speed of the heads increased, and dodging them was becoming much more than I could manage. It was like they absorbed her hatred and desperation and used that as power.

  “You’re not gonna get through to her by talking right now,” my daughter suggested. B, gripping my shoulders tightly. “The only way you’ll get her to listen to you is by restraining her somehow. You can do that, right?”

  “Of course I can,” I answered, still running away from the heads. “The real question is whether you’ll be able to handle what I’m about to do.”

  “Well, I’m not real so do whatever you want.”

  Satisfied with her answer, I tensed every muscle, feeling the fibers of my body shift and the essence of my soul grow radioactive. Ooze burst out from within me, coiling around my body and burning away my skin—along with everything else—until only the color green and my skeleton remained. Then, I launched myself upwards, dissipating the faces I was just standing on.

  “Dang! I can’t see any energy for me to absorb,” I said in the air, watching the faces fly towards me. “Don’t know how I’m gonna destroy all this without some big blast.”

  “Jerome, you can create anything you want in this space, remember?” said Sunshine. “Just think up some energy and you’ll be fully charged!”

  Oh yeah, she’s right!

  Energy flared up from my feet, and rocketed myself through the air while the flying heads gave chase. With each passing second, the speed of my flying grew, and more heads rose from their positions to join the pursuit. They chased me like a coordinated army, though an army could only do so much against a Type Two Radion like me–as they would soon realize. Teamwork had its merits, sure, but the tighter they grouped up, the easier it became for me to line up a clean shot at all of them.

  I cupped my hands together and shouted…

  “Fatherly Beam!”

  My technique tore through the sky, the thunderous shockwave nearly pulling my daughter’s fingers off my shoulders, and it completely vaporized every enemy too slow to dodge the attack. Once the beam cleared, I noticed that I had also destroyed a large section of Sunshine’s heads in the distance, leaving a huge hole in the side of Sunflower’s world.

  What really caught my eye though was the green orb in the center of that hole.

  “Sunshine, you got any idea what that green thing is over there?” I asked, pointing at the orb.

  “It looks to be one of the auras you have inside of you. It can’t be yours since you’re already inside your own body, so it has to be one of the other two.”

  “Huh? I thought this was the state between absorption! We’re actually inside my body?”

  “I already told you, old man,” Rosalina’s daughter cut in. “This isn’t the state between absorption. This is the state between release. They both work the same way, but instead of me coming in, I’m coming out. Unfortunately for you, you won’t be coming out. Actually, I’m just going to kill you.”

  “That’s not what your mother would have wanted, and you know that,” I replied. “Even back when you two were in the Slavelands, she didn’t ask for or want you to do the things you did. She just wanted you to be happy!”

  “Huh!? Happy?” Sunflower’s breaths were becoming rapid. “After everything this stupid apocalypse put my mom and I through… you expect me to be happy? What the hell would you know about her anyway? Just because you saw a fraction of her life… doesn't mean you're some kind of expert on how she felt about… anything!” A pair of giant, gooey hands emerged from the faces above, leaves raining down on me. “The only way I’ll find out how she felt is by taking that orb and bringing back my mom. Once I do that, she’ll finally forgive…”

  Forgive? Oh… I understand it now.

  “Sunflower, you can’t blame yourself for what happened to your mother in that shed,” I said softly. “She died to save you then, and she let me absorb her to save you yesterday. Everything she did was to protect you. All the pain she went through as a human, as a zombie… it was all for you. She would never hate you for that!”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Just shut up!” An entire body erupted out of the sky. The giant was a girl covered in ooze, and her face looked even more twisted than the ones around us. Then, she talked. “I… I… don’t blame myself at all! Those slave masters made our lives a living hell, but you… you knew, you saw how much my mom was trying to save me, trying to be with me, and yet you still went through with it. And then you move on just because that dumb kid of yours comes back–the kid that you’ve been slowly killing for years. You don’t think my mom wanted me to come back to her? You don’t think my mom wanted to live!?”

  At that moment, the faces all turned into leaves and swirled upwards towards the girl. One by one, they pressed against her, merging into a colossal… plant golem of sorts. Her body vanished beneath the shifting, living armor, as if a whole forest had come alive to shield her. Then, a deafening roar tore from its mouth, shaking the entire area–which was now pitch dark–like an earthquake.

  “This is bad,” I whispered to my daughter, staring intently at the monster. “I don’t wanna hurt her, but I don’t know how else I’m gonna escape from here. And I can’t just let her steal that Rosalina’s aura from me. I need it for that future fight with Jason.”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t seem like you have a choice right now but to fight,” Sunshine replied. “Fortunately for you, this could be good for your training.”

  “Who cares about training? We have a seriously saddened kid above me. Training is the last thing we should be worried about.”

  “I don’t mean like that other training we were doing before. If Rosalina’s orb is in here, then that means the third one would be in here as well. Use this chance as an opportunity to find it and learn how to transform into it again. Besides, just look at her. She seems more worried about killing you, than stealing your orb.”

  So she wants me to find a way to access that third form here? That’s gonna be hard…considering I don’t know where that other orb is!