Char crouched by a tree, Lulu at her side, considering the rusting metal fire doors of the misplaced chemical plant. A little meditation had her health bar back at full, a little lunch had her feeling human again, and the walk had cleared her mind. She’d even killed the last two corrupted creatures for her quest, though killing Dire Opossums had felt a little anticlimactic after the last few fights.

  The quest was done, she’d gotten the notification:

  Congratulations! You have completed the Quest:

  Something Toxic

  You have discovered a nest of corrupted creatures. Something has

  caused these creatures to become twisted and more aggressive.

  Find the source of the corruption. — COMPLETE

  Prize for completion: Experience. A suitable weapon of Rare quality or better.

  Optional: Kill at least 30 corrupted creatures.

  (30 of 30 killed) — COMPLETE

  Prize: [Flesh Affinity Stone], Potion of Poison Resistance

  You may choose your weapon now.

  Then, the screen had changed. Now, she was staring at a floating, virtual weapon rack, slowly spinning in the air before her. It held every sort of melee weapon or bow she could imagine.

  There were swords, spears, pole-arms, daggers, machetes, flails, maces, and even something that vaguely resembled a Klingon bat’leth. The various bows and crossbows didn’t interest her. Having a ranged option would be great, but the blades were what held her attention.

  She paused on the Naginata, her hand hovering over it. She liked the reach and the wicked grace of it, but she shook her head. She had to be practical. She didn’t have the training for it.

  She did have some training with the sword, though. It had been a duct-tape wrapped rattan sword, but it was still a sword. She grabbed a simple hand-and-a-half sword with a heavy round pommel. The weapon display flashed and vanished, leaving her chosen blade in her hand. She tested the weight and balance, then identified it:

  [Bastard Sword]

  Rare quality

  A simple, well-crafted blade.

  Upgradeable.

  Upgradeable? That sounded promising. Standing from her crouch, she adjusted her feet to a ready stance and swung it. It felt right. It wasn’t flashy or exotic, but it was the right tool for the job.

  Another notification flashed for her attention. The experience from the Dread and the quest reward was enough to gain another level:

  Congratulations! You have gained a level.

  You are level 19.

  You have gained 5 free stat points.

  Five more points to spend. She pulled up her status screen to decide where to spend them. Her highest attributes were strength and speed, and with a 35% bonus to each from her titles, she’d get the best bang for her buck if she used them there, but… She’d just gotten a sword, and dexterity would come in handy for that. One more level, and she’d have access to magic, and she’d need intelligence. Dexterity and Intelligence were her lowest stats.

  She stared at the numbers, turning over the pros and cons of each choice. In the end, she went with her gut and put the points in Dexterity. That done, she opened the last unread notification:

  New Quest: Something Toxic II

  Enter the Toxic Rootworks, find the source of the contamination,

  and destroy it.

  Rewards: Experience, Armor, Domain Affinity Core

  She accepted the quest and swiped it aside. Standing, she took a deep breath. She’d railed against the dangers of this new way of life, despaired over what the killing was doing to her soul, and the constant combat was doing to her psyche. But here she was, making the conscious decision to walk into more danger, to put her life and Lulu’s at risk. For what?

  She knew the answer, but she turned it over in her mind again, ensuring there were no other angles that had been overlooked. She needed to get stronger. That was the bottom line. For all that her gut burned with hatred for the Dominion, she could use the tools they’d provided to grow. It was also, just a little bit, because getting rid of the corruption was the right thing to do. Other survivors passing through here would have an easier time of it if the local wildlife weren’t all hyper-aggressive murder machines.

  It definitely wasn’t because she was becoming a danger junkie. Nope. Not her.

  She checked the laces on her jerkin, making sure they were tight. Then, she checked her Quick Access slots: potion, dagger, crowbar, road flare. She made sure there were empty slots in her inventory for loot.

  Now, she was just procrastinating, and she knew it.

  With a deep breath, she marched forward, Lulu at her heel.

  ————————————————

  She pushed open the rust-rotten doors. Any chance of stealth was ruined as they squealed like a soul escaping hell. The dungeon notification popped up again with the same warnings about levels and group sizes, and she dismissed it. The air rolling out of the factory was chemical-tainted and acrid; heavy with humidity and a foetid undertone of decay. It was dark inside, only lit by the occasional beam of sunlight punching through the crumbling roof.

  Slithering sounds came from the darkness, and Lulu’s hackles stood up as she let out a soft growl. Char let the door swing shut behind her and held her ground for a minute, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. The back of her neck prickled with sweat and foreboding.

  This first room had once been a lobby, with a reception desk, a few chairs, and posters showing off the products once produced here. All of it was spotted with mold. Stains of black and green and virulent orange spread in organic fractals across every surface. Twisting vines grew along the floor and climbed the walls, tendrils coiling around chair legs and up over the desk. The vines were growing into the room through a set of double doors that opened onto a dark hallway beyond. The leaves had an oddly thick, fleshy appearance that raised the hairs on Char’s neck. The growth was thick near the doors, and she shuddered at the thought of having to push through them. It was hard to tell if it was a trick of the light, but she could have sworn she saw one twitch.

  She examined the lobed leaves and triggered Identify Plants:

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Unknown Kudzu Hybrid

  Habitat: unknown

  Uses: unknown

  “Unknown? What the hell?” On a hunch, she tried again with Assess Foe:

  Vasculex Hybrid

  Level 20

  “Great. As if kudzu wasn’t bad enough on its own. Now we’ve got alien kudzu hybrids. Probably flesh-eating. Where’s a damned flamethrower when you need one?” She muttered under her breath as she eased forward. Lulu stayed at her side, still growling softly. Something shifted behind the desk.

  Char edged to the side, trying to get a look at whatever was making the clumsy rustling noises without getting too close to the vines. That wasn’t easy. The vines covered half of the room. She was trying to watch every corner, the desk, the vines, the hallway, keep track of Lulu, and mind her footwork. Her brain was being stretched trying to keep track of it all, and all of it vanished when someone stood up behind the desk, making her nearly stumble as she took an involuntary step backward.

  It was hard to see through the gloom, but the person behind the desk looked like a sickly young man in trousers and a pale green button-down. The dark rectangle of a name tag hung askew on his chest. He hunched to one side as if he had a stomach ache, or maybe a wound in his side. His skin was pale, nearly white against his black hair. There was something off about his eyes. He was just off-kilter enough to give Char the creeps.

  He didn’t speak, but took a shuffling step towards the edge of the desk.

  Char took another step backward. “Hey, man, you look a little rough. Do you need help?” Scenes from half a dozen zombie movies flickered through Char’s mind, but the words had slipped out before she could catch them. ‘Can you be any worse of a cliche, Char?’ She berated herself. ‘He’s probably going to try to rip my throat out. Why am I talking to him like it's any old Tuesday?’

  She lifted her sword to a ready stance and shifted her feet, trying to place them as her instructor had taught her over a decade ago. The System might have sharpened her mind, but the muscle memory had long ago atrophied.

  Lulu bared her teeth, and the quiet growl shifted into a more ominous gear.

  The man took another step, and then another, a little more certain each time. As he moved out from behind the desk, Char saw with horror that vines were trailing from him. They had punched through his skin, into his body. They pulsed and quivered as he took another step and passed through a beam of light from the fractured ceiling.

  Char realized why his eyes looked wrong. They had the milky opaqueness of a corpse. The tip of a vine curled out of his mouth. “Oh… fuck me! They’re piloting you like a flesh mech.” The protein bar she’d eaten earlier tried to escape her stomach, but she clamped down on the reaction. The guy was already dead. There was nothing she could do for him except to put his remains to rest.

  The vine-puppeted corpse took another step forward, and this time, instead of backing away, Char stepped in to meet it. With a jerky movement, it raised an arm toward her, but Char had seen enough horror movies to know how to deal with zombies. She stepped to the side to avoid the puppet's hesitant arm motion. With both hands on the hilt, she brought the blade around from right to left, aiming to take off the poor man’s head.

  It didn’t go as she’d imagined.

  The blade cut halfway through the neck and lodged in the spine. She tugged, trying to free it, and only pulled the vine-puppet off balance. She put her foot against its side and pulled harder. The vines didn’t seem to understand how a human body was supposed to move. They were slow and clumsy, and tried to move in directions joints weren’t meant to bend. The arms reached out, but the body was at an awkward angle.

  Char kicked and pulled at the same time, and the blade slid free with a schlorp noise that was going to make cameos in her nightmares for a while.

  Lulu had been circling, watching for a chance to enter the fight. When Char’s sword came free, she lunged in and took a bite from the hamstring of the walking corpse, tearing free a chunk of muscle and tendons. The corpse-puppet listed to the side, the flesh no longer able to support itself.

  Char expected the body to hit the ground. She cursed softly when it didn’t. Vines grew through the leg as she watched, replacing the missing flesh and sinew. When she brought her eyes up to the cut she’d made, she saw tiny tendrils of vine weaving across the gaping neck wound, pulling the flesh back together.

  “Oh, come on!” She raised the sword back to a ready position. “That’s cheating.”

  With every movement, the vines learned more about how to drive the corpse. The jerky, hesitant movements were smoothing out. Char couldn’t afford to give them more time to learn, but she needed to use this opportunity to learn herself. She’d used a sword before, but always in sparring; a rattan stick against shield and armor. A blade in flesh was an entirely different beast.

  She used the corpse as a training dummy, going back to her earliest lessons. She lunged, sliced, and stabbed, reminding herself of the movements while trying to whittle down her foe. Lulu darted in and out, biting and slashing, keeping it off balance.

  Each time she had a chance, Char sliced away one of the trailing vines connecting the flesh-puppet to the larger mass. She figured those connections had to be there for a reason, and she hoped that severing them would end their control.

  The whole time she fought, she felt like her soul was splitting in two. Half of her was trying to treat the body in front of her as an object, a training aid, trying to remain clinical and get the job done. The other half of her was incandescent with rage at what had been done to this man, at what she was having to do to his remains, at what the fucking Aldevari had turned loose on her world. She had to put the anger and disgust away to fight and survive, but she wasn’t willing to give up her humanity.

  Her internal struggle was distracting her. It was preventing her from doing what she needed to do. This was the first room of the dungeon. Her foes weren’t going to get any easier than this, and fighting this battle in her head every time was going to get her killed. She knew it. She had to draw some lines.

  The thing she fought was only empty flesh. Whoever had once lived in it was gone. That was her first line. She could protect the living, but there was no point in dying for the dignity of a corpse. That was an easy one, but she knew, just as her foes would grow stronger, the ethical dilemmas weren’t going to get any easier either. For now, she pushed away the anger and disgust, folding them up and putting them in a mental footlocker to deal with later.

  She breathed, just as she had when meditating, and put her full focus on the fight.

  The distraction had cost her. While she’d been dealing with inner demons, the vines had gotten better at moving. They were faster now. She’d whittled down the connections; there were only two left, but the vine-puppet had gotten much better at keeping them away from her, turning to meet her and blocking her blows with its arms and legs.

  Every slice she made in the flesh was replaced with vines. They pulled the body back together almost as fast as she could damage it. She probed and side-stepped, batting aside a reaching arm. Lulu darted in again, and the puppet kicked out at her. That was the opening Char needed, and she brought the sword down, slicing through one more vine.

  The creature turned back to her, seeming more desperate now, swinging its arms faster, trying to drive her back. Her foot came down on a vine, and her heart skipped a beat. It was pushing her towards the vines. The vine under her foot twitched, and a tendril tried to wrap around her foot. She pulled away and spun to the left, back towards the open part of the room. She slashed out at the puppet, opening a line across its abdomen, spilling out a slimy mess of intestines and writhing vines.

  Lulu edged around the puppet, about to lunge in again, but her path took her too close to the vines spread across the floor. She yelped. Char glanced over. One of the vines was wrapped around Lulu’s hind leg. It was pulling at her. Lulu turned to bite at the vine, and Char lost sight of her as the puppet cut off her instinctual step in that direction and sent her reeling with a blow to the head. She saw stars and backpedaled to make some space. Blinking her eyes hard against the pain, she snarled and waded back in.

  With renewed determination, Char laid into the thing with slice after slice, hacking away at it, determined to get to Lulu before it was too late.

  She kicked out, sending it off balance, and finally severed the last vine-tether. Unfortunately, the creature didn’t fall over dead as she’d hoped. It did stop healing, though. The last few cuts she’d made weren’t pulled back together by the vines. It seemed clumsier now, like it had forgotten most of what it had learned over the last few minutes.

  It didn’t have any weak spots. Char stabbed into vital organs, sliced at major arteries, cut into the joints—but none of that mattered. Once it stopped healing, the damage added up. She whittled it down, keeping out of the path of its flailing arms. The more she hacked, the slower it moved. The vines inside it tried to fix the worst damage, but it was as if they had a limited pool of energy, and she was slowly depleting that with every cut.

  Lulu yelped again. She was wrapped in two vines and struggling to keep from being pulled into the greater mass. Char kicked her foe with all of her strength, sending the weakening puppet sprawling backward to slam into a row of chairs. It hit hard and rolled to the floor, twitching, but it wasn’t getting back up.

  She hurried over to Lulu and brought her sword down onto the vines, cutting them loose. She was breathing hard as she pulled Lulu away from the reaching vines. She pulled out the dagger and used that to cut away the vines that wrapped the dog, checking her over for wounds as she went. Her fight had dragged on, and her arms felt like overcooked noodles. They’d both gotten out of the fight with only a few bruises. It could have been much worse.

  As she petted and comforted Lulu, she watched the corpse as its twitches and spasms grew weaker and eventually stopped. The visible vines that peeked through the skin turned brown and withered, and only then did she get the notification:

  You have killed

  Vasculex Flesh Puppet — Level 12

  Experience Gained

  If this was what she was facing in just the first room, this dungeon was going to be a slog. The thought of what might come next twisted her gut, and she wondered if she was ready for it.