The dungeon wasn’t going to give her time to plan. The vines were moving across the floor towards them. They weren’t fast, but they were coming. She had to decide now if she was going to chicken out, or push forward.

  She had three road flares, one in her Quick Access, and two more in the tool bag in her inventory. She pulled the two out of her inventory and shoved one of them in a pocket. The other one she opened and used the striker on the cap to spark it to life. It glared red, blinding her for a second. When the spots faded from her vision, she walked over to the nearest advancing vine and held the flare to it. This test would tell her if she should go deeper, or leave and come back better prepared.

  The vine shrank away from the heat of the flare. Not just the vine she was holding the flare close to, but all of the vines in the immediate area.

  They pulled back.

  She was going forward.

  As she went, she tested the vines’ reactions to the flare. It wasn’t the light that made them move, she had to hold the flare within six inches of a vine to make them react. When one vine felt the heat, all of the vines within five feet of that spot would pull back. When she set one of the vines on fire, the portion that was burning disconnected and dropped away, like a lizard shedding its tail, while the vines around it pulled away. Unless she could get to the heart of the plant, fire wasn’t going to be the answer. But it did give her a clear path.

  Lulu followed along, keeping a wary distance from the vines and growling at them the whole way across the room. She stiffened her forelegs and bounced at the vines, chuffing out a challenge, daring them to come at her. Char tried to suppress a smile at the dog’s antics as she imagined Lulu with a voice, shit-talking the vines. The smile fell away as they reached the doors to the hallway.

  The vines were thicker here, both in numbers and in diameter, with some of them being as big around as her wrist, more like a jungle liana. The thicker, more wooden vines moved slower, but they bent the metal of the door-frame as they withdrew before the intense heat of the road flare. Char gulped at the sight, imagining what that sort of pressure would do to flesh and bone if they managed to wrap around it.

  The road flare was supposed to last for half an hour, but waving it around was making it burn faster. Char estimated it would last maybe fifteen minutes, if she was lucky. With only two more, she was going to have to get to the main trunk fast. If she ran out of fire before she got there… she shuddered, not wanting to picture that outcome.

  She took a steadying breath and stepped into the narrow confines of the hallway, waving the flare at the walls to force the vines back. The hallway was about thirty feet long. A ominous green glow came from beyond a set of double doors at the far end. The flare was messing with her vision, and she couldn’t make out was was beyond the open doors, but she got the sense of a large, open space.

  On either side of the hall were office doors, two on each side. They had to be checked, and that was going to slow her down, but she couldn’t afford to leave hidden foes behind her. She eased toward the first one on her right.

  Before she could wave the flare to clear away the vines, the door opened, and so did the other three. Two vine-controlled puppets lumbered out of the closest door, forcing Char to back away. More poured out of the other doors in ones and twos. As she gave ground, the vines that had been clearing back pushed forward again, reclaiming their lost foothold.

  There were six puppets, a mix of men and women, and all were dressed in either business attire, or slacks and pale-green button downs like the receptionist. “Well, y’all give new meaning to the term ‘office drone,’ don’t you.”

  There was no room for Lulu to flank them in the hall, and Char couldn’t get to their backs to cut away the vine tethers, but if she backed into the lobby they’d be able to surround her. They were stiff and slow, but they’d whittle her down if they trapped her. It was a slow moving ambush, but an effective one.

  Each of the vine-puppets had five or six vines trailing out behind them like grotesque power cords. Char started zig-zagging from one side of the hall to the other, forcing the vine-ridden corpses to turn and shuffle from side to side as well. They jockeyed for position, crossing each other’s paths as they followed her. She couldn’t keep it up for long, she had to keep backing away to stay out of their reach and the hall was short. Not all of the vines got tangled, but some of them crossed and bunched into a knot. It would have to be enough.

  When she’d nearly run out of hallway, Char crouched and lobbed the flare low, aiming between the legs of the puppets and into the tangle of trailing vines.

  The vines reacted.

  Some of them released their puppets and slithered away. Others broke themselves, abandoning charred and flaming sections. Those farthest from the flare simply twisted to the side, avoiding the flames.

  Two of the puppets were completely free of tethers now, and Char went to work on them. The flare cast the hallway in a red haze of acrid smoke and dancing shadows as she fought. She angled to the side again, trying to lure the ones still tethered to tow their vines across the flare, but it didn’t work. The vines shied away from the heat. It kept them back while she fought with the two untethered corpses.

  Just as with the first one, she had to injure them over and over again, wearing them down and using up whatever energy it was that animated them. She focused on crippling their joints and avoiding their flailing limbs. They landed hits, but without their connection to the master plant, they were weaker, bruising her, but not seriously injuring her. The bruises added up, though, whittling down her health bar and making her move more slowly.

  The floor was a slick mess of mold, blood, and sap that made her footing treacherous. The flickering light made shadows dance and the shambling corpses hard to keep track of.

  It wasn’t a hectic test of skill, but a slow war of attrition: her resource pools against theirs. Her stamina was draining fast. Time wasn’t on her side. The flare wasn’t going to last forever.

  Lulu took every opportunity to slash at a leg or bite a hamstring. She lunged at one of the puppets and knocked it to the floor before bouncing away to tangle the legs of another. She bought time for Char to finish off the first two corpses.

  She was getting better with her sword as she went, getting more comfortable with its weight, learning how to swing it for best effect. It was a training dungeon, and she was certainly getting some training in. With a hack to the knee of one, and a thrust into the pelvis of the other, she dropped them both and let them twitch out the last of their imitation lives on the floor while she turned to the others.

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  Two of the still tethered puppets were on the ground, thanks to Lulu. One was trying to regain its feet, while Lulu had the other by its throat, pinning it and savaging it with vicious shakes of her head. Char lured the last two out into the lobby. She circled them and hacked at the vines, darting away again before they could flank her. It took several tries before she managed to part all of them, and she took more bruising blows. She was starting to feel like a punching bag.

  When she had one finished, she started in on the next, and between them, she and Lulu managed to take them down. Char was breathing hard again, and she resolved to put points into Endurance as soon as she had a chance. There was no time to enjoy the victory, though, as the flare started to gutter. Char staggered to it and kicked it down the hall, forcing the advancing vines to skitter backward. It was barely burning, and the breathing room it gave her wasn’t going to last. She pulled the second one from her back pocket and sparked it to life.

  She felt like one big bruise, and her mouth was dry and sticky. Exhaustion made her limbs feel like lead, but there was no time to rest. She opened her inventory to grab a bottle of water, and the vivid green of a potion vial caught her eye: the [Weak Stamina Tonic]. She’d looted it on that first day and then forgotten about it. All of her fights before this had been over quickly, and she hadn’t needed it, but now she praised her good fortune.

  Pulling out the vial, a water bottle and Lulu’s water bowl, she split the water with the dog. She was trying to move quickly, all too aware that every second they took now was one less step forward before the flares ran out. Her tired muscles and brain made her clumsy, and she almost spilled the water. She had to force herself to slow down. “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, kiddo,” she reminded herself, repeating her father’s advice.

  Once she’d had a drink and her mouth no longer felt like it was full of glue, she popped the cork from the potion. The [Weak Stamina Tonic] went down like a shot of distilled lightning. It didn’t do anything for her aches and pains, but her stamina bar shot up from almost empty to a little over half full. She suddenly felt like she’d been mainlining coffee.

  “Wow!” She shook her head in a fast little jerk, “That’ll get you going in the morning.” She bounced on her toes, suddenly ready for round two… or would it be round three? It didn’t matter. There were monsters that needed killing. Lulu had barely finished her bowl of water before Char had it stored and was heading for the hallway once more. A tiny voice at the back of her mind whispered that she’d need to watch out for those potions. A boost like that might get to be addictive. But she barely heard its cautions in her excitement to get back to making progress.

  She grabbed one of the rows of chairs. It was three seats connected together; typical waiting room fixtures. But, these were at least well-upholstered waiting room seats. That meant they would burn.

  It had only been three days since the world went mad and Char’s new strength still found ways to surprise her. She’d expected to have to drag the seats across the floor and into the hallway, but she lifted them easily. She had to pass back through her earlier battleground, and she paused to tap each corpse with her foot to loot it, getting only a handful of silver credits for her trouble. She worked fast, expecting the vines to return at any second.

  She carried the seats to the middle of the hallway. The first flare was barely a spark now, and the vines were creeping back in to claim the hallway. She touched the new flare to the fabric and set it alight. It took a bit of effort to make it burn. The cloth covering melted rather than igniting, but the stuffing on the inside went up just fine. It burned bright, but with an acrid, plastic stench and a billowing cloud of black smoke that made Char think that this might not have been the best of ideas.

  She needed some way to keep the vines back while she checked the offices, though, and this was what she had to hand. She pushed the burning couch down the hallway, forcing the vines back through the double doors at the end. When she was about three feet from the doors she stopped, leaving the burning seats to block the hall. It would have to do. When she was sure it was going to do the job, she turned to the open door on her right and lifted the flare to see by. Her sword was ready in her right hand, and Lulu was alert at her heel.

  The office was a shambles. The chairs were overturned, a potted plant in the corner had been tipped over, and a metal file cabinet leaned at an angle against a bookshelf loaded with three-ring-binders labeled in Chinese. There had been a logo on the lobby wall, but it was partially obscured by the growths. Now, she could see the same logo on the binders: a stylized DNA helix with sprouting leaves. Because of course it was. An image of a an East Asian version of the old guy from the Jurassic Park film flitted through her mind. “Just because you could, doesn’t mean you should,” she whispered as she moved on with her search. She shook her head. ‘No, that isn’t fair. This is a dungeon, it has to be a curated experience. Besides, how would humans get a vascu-whatever to experiment with, anyway?’ People could be shits, but they didn’t deserve to be blamed for this, even in her mind. She wondered if the aliens were trying to turn them against one another, or if they’d just seen too many movies.

  The monitor and keyboard that had been on the desk were smashed on the floor. Everything was covered in the ubiquitous mold, or fungus, or lichen, or whatever it was that was growing all over the walls and ceiling. There were no more monsters, and nothing else of interest.

  She pulled an armload of binders from the shelf, suppressing a shudder at touching the mold. They went onto the smoldering seats in the hallway, the paper bringing new life to the waning flames. That gave her enough time to check the other offices, but the next two were much the same as the first. She pulled flammable items from each office to feed the flames keeping back the vines, trying to find the balance between an effective barricade and burning the whole building down around herself.

  The fourth office had something different.

  There was one thing in that room not touched by odd growths or violent destruction: a small chest on the desk, perfectly centered. It was made of wood with a geometric pattern inlaid in bronze, and it gleamed like it was brand new. It stood out like a Maserati at a demolition derby.

  “What do you think, Lu? Is that a loot chest, or a trap?” She approached it cautiously, circling the desk to make sure there was nothing hiding behind it. Lulu was snuffling at a spilled potted plant and didn’t answer. “Yeah, I know. You’re not a rogue, so what am I asking you for? That’s fine. I’ll do it myself.”

  She poked the box with the tip of her sword. Nothing happened. Black smoke was starting to roll in below the upper edge of the doorway, reminding her to hurry. She moved closer and leaned in for a better look.

  The box had hinges, but no latch or lock. The geometric pattern on the lid and around the sides wasn’t a pattern she was familiar with. She started to reach for it with her hand, then thought better of it. Standing back a little, she used the tip of her sword to flip open the lid.

  Two objects lay inside. One, she’d seen before, and, leaning her sword against the desk to free up a hand, she identified it as she picked it up:

  [Weak Healing Tonic] -Consumable.

  Uses 1/1

  Heal a small amount of damage.

  The other object was a milky-white crystal about as long as her hand. She identified it as she lifted it.

  [Skill Crystal - Sword - Proficient]

  Consumable. Uses 1/1

  Imparts the knowledge required to raise a

  Sword skill to the Proficient tier.

  She checked her skill list. Her sword skill was at Novice. This crystal would take her right past the Apprentice tier. She needed the boost. Her fights with the corpse-puppets had shown her just how little she actually knew about using a sword. She’d gotten the job done, but she’d known there had to be a more efficient way to use the sharpened piece of steel she was waving around.

  But how did the crystal work?

  She turned it over in her hand. She tried to mentally ‘click’ on it like she did with her HUD, but nothing happened. It was too big and pointy to be meant as a pill. Feeling silly, she pressed it to her forehead. It felt cool against her hot, sweaty brow, but it did nothing. Bringing it back down, she gripped it in her hand and stared at it, trying to will it to work.

  Something moved.

  Not in the crystal, but in her.

  She recognized the hot-cold tingle of magic as a thread of it stirred within her. With a gasp of surprise she dropped the crystal to the desk. The feeling vanished. She took a deep breath and steadied her nerves.

  Her flare was burning down, she could feel the heat getting closer to her hand. The seats in the hall had to be burning down, too. She didn’t have time to be fumbling around with this. But she needed it. She scooped the crystal back up and focused on it again, willing that feeling to come back.

  She felt the power answer her will, and this time she didn’t flinch from it. It flowed out of her center and down her arm into the skill crystal. When the magic touched the crystal it pulsed a soft white, and the world dissolved around her.

  She was standing on a wooden floor in an otherwise empty white expanse. A tall, thin man with ochre skin stood before her. He wore loose, flowing pants, a wide sash around his waist, and was shirtless. He had no hair. His eyes were green and slitted, and his ears were pointed like a cat’s. He drew a sword from a scabbard at his waist and started to move. Without deciding to do so, Char found herself moving alongside him, following along with the sword forms and katas as he demonstrated them. The movements were flowing and graceful, one stance melting into the next; a deadly dance.

  She didn’t have any volition in the vision, her body simply moved without any input from her, and the motions sped up with her riding along like a passenger in her own skin. They got faster and faster until they seemed to blur by. It felt like living through a VR simulation at ten times or more the speed it was meant to play at. She couldn’t consciously keep track of the action, but she felt the knowledge sinking into her, writing itself onto her brain and into her muscles as she sparred with the alien in fast-forward.

  Then, with no warning, she was back in the destroyed office, and it seemed as if no time had passed at all.