The skill crystal dissolved into dust in Char’s hand as she blinked her eyes and tried to reorient herself. She shook her hand and dusted it off against her pants. Her head felt crammed full, as if her brain had been stuffed with polyfill. Her hand found the hilt of her sword. The weight felt more right there than ever; natural, like she’d trained for ten thousand hours and was ready for Carnegie Hall. Or… well… the martial equivalent. Whatever.

  She shook her head. The experience had thrown her off, and she wished she had more time to digest it. It had been both unsettling and empowering, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Notifications flashed, unread, at the edge of her HUD, but she didn’t have time for those either.

  The flare she was using for light was almost gone, and she only had one left. It was time to see what was in the room beyond the hall. The lack of a dance beat to go with the vines and green glow made her pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a fun time. She swapped out the [Potion of Poison Resistance] in her Quick Access menu for the [Weak Healing Tonic], figuring that if she needed it, she would need it with no delay.

  The fire barricade was burned down to a blackened and twisted metal frame dripping plastic and embers onto a floor that, thankfully, turned out to be epoxy-coated concrete. The acrid smoke stung her eyes. She glanced down to check on Lulu at her side, braced herself for whatever was coming, and shoved the remains of the seats to the side of the hall with a kick.

  She expected the vines to return as soon as the heat and flames were gone, but the doorway remained quiet. Holding out the flare, she walked forward, cautious and expecting a jump-scare with every step.

  As she stepped through the door, the silhouettes of machines, pipes, conveyor belts, and work tables resolved out of the green-tinged darkness beyond the light of the flare. The green light came from somewhere deeper in the building. It was dim here, barely enough to make out shapes, and adding a creepy green sheen to the stainless steel tanks and fixtures. The room was huge, and the machinery created a tangled maze that blocked her line of sight more effectively than the dim light.

  Somewhere in the darkness, something unseen rustled and slithered. The smell of unidentifiable chemicals was sharp in the air. It reminded Char of the pesticide and fertilizer shed behind the Co-op, where her dad had taken her when he bought seeds and hay. It was a strange blend of the chlorophyll tang of cut grass and the plastic-acrid pinch of targeted chemical death.

  Char stopped just inside the door. She’d expected a rushing mass of vines or a Vasculex-puppet ambush. There was nothing but a disconcerting lack of attackers. Lulu’s hackles were up, the standing hair on the back of her neck making her look larger and more ferocious. The hair on Char’s neck was standing as well, prickling uncomfortably. The lack of an immediate attack was a bad sign. It meant their opponent was smarter than Char had given it credit for.

  The maze of machinery was too obviously a trap. Char considered going up and over the top, but that would leave Lulu alone and vulnerable in the twisty passages. They would have to do it the hard way, and that got even harder as the flare in her hand burned down to the point that it was starting to hurt to hold it. Char picked a path and lobbed what was left of the flare in that direction.

  The flare landed and bounced, skittering across the concrete floor. It came to rest in a corner created by a machine of some sort and a stainless steel vat that had been shoved together. Scratches on the floor showed where the equipment had been dragged to form the maze. The sudden shuffle and rustle of movement in the wake of the flare told Char that there were ambushers waiting for her.

  She and Lulu waded in.

  They were only a few feet into the narrow corridor between two work benches when the first flesh-puppet stepped out of a hidden alcove between two pieces of equipment. It was wearing dark overalls, a white hard hat, and safety glasses. The sight reminded Char of a game she used to play where the plants and zombies were on opposite sides.

  She moved smoothly into a stance that would allow for lunging thrusts in the narrow confines of the machinery maze. It was her first time using her new sword skills, and yet she knew these forms as if she’d drilled on them for decades.

  Injuring the plant-zombie was useless as long as the tethers were there to direct it and feed it energy, so she didn’t use the sword to harm, but to redirect. She deflected a punch while stepping to the side, forcing the puppet to turn. Quick as a striking snake, she severed two of the tethering vines before the puppet could reorient itself.

  Lulu slipped past her, circling the puppet before darting in to attack its legs. Every time the puppet turned to bat at the dog, Char used the chance to cut another vine. She nearly had it cut free when another zombie-puppet stepped around a corner and lumbered toward them. She had to find a way to do this more quickly, or they would be mobbed and beaten down.

  Fear made her heart beat faster, but she refused to let it control her. She swung and thrust with more confidence as she stopped overthinking her newly imprinted skill and let it work. She knew what she could do with a sword now, so she let go and let herself do it, moving faster and with greater surety.

  The tethers on the first foe were cut, and she turned to the second, trusting Lulu to finish off the weakened puppet. She planted a foot on the edge of a conveyor belt and used it to launch herself over the puppet, twisting as she landed and slicing through the trailing vines before following up with a diagonal slash that bisected the corpse before it could turn to face her. She left it twitching and glanced to check on Lulu.

  The dog had finished her foe, and together they moved deeper into the labyrinthine aisles. She was stronger and faster now, but she’d barely been using her physical stats. She’d been living and fighting as if she were the same person she’d been three days ago. She needed to push herself and find her new limits, or they weren’t going to survive this.

  Darkness closed in as they moved away from the last sullen glimmers of the dying flare. Char’s eyes adjusted to the dim green glow. It wasn’t much, but it let her pick out shapes. She was actually kind of thankful that she couldn’t see the faces of the bodies she had to cut apart. Fewer accusing eyes to haunt her dreams this way.

  They took down three more former factory workers the same way as the first two, as they went, but then the enclosing machines opened up onto a clear space. There were openings from the maze in four directions, and Vasculex Flesh Puppets spilled through three of them into a makeshift arena.

  ‘Well’, she told herself, ‘You wanted to test yourself. Here’s your chance.’

  She stepped forward and met the first zombie. Their movements were smoother than the ones in the lobby and hallway, with less jerking and fumbling, but they were still slow. Their advantage was in their numbers and in the extra effort it took to slice away the controlling vines before she could even get any damage to stick.

  Char and the dog worked as a team. Lulu distracted and harassed the zombies, keeping them from mobbing up on Char while she danced and wove through them, cutting away vines and limbs. The sword felt like part of her, a limb she hadn’t realized had been missing for the first thirty years of her life.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  She pushed. The fight became a chance to find the edges of her new strength and speed. Freshly unearthed memories of long-ago ballet, tumbling, and Tae Kwon Do classes merged into her movements, meshing seamlessly into her new sword skills as she wove, pirouetted, ducked, and kicked between parries and slashes. She took the lessons of an alien being, imprinted into her with alien technology, and she made them hers.

  The puppets were working smarter. They tried to surround her, to use their trailing tethers to trip and entangle her. After she took down the first few, the vines got more aggressive, shooting out of the puppets to grab at her. The first one was a surprise that nearly got her.

  She’d lashed out with her left hand to shove away one of the corpse-puppets while she slashed at another one, and the flesh of its upper arm parted, torn open by a vine that slithered out and wrapped around her arm. A side kick shoved away the half-dead puppet on her right, sending it staggering back onto the spindles of some sort of wrapping machine. The vine that wrapped her arm pulled at her, trying to reel her in. She brought her sword down, severing it, just ahead of another vine that quested out of the corpse’s mouth.

  More of the flesh-puppets sprouted vines, turning the scene from zombie flick to eldritch horror. She had to move faster, not just to avoid the grasping tendrils herself, but to cut Lulu free when they grabbed her. Char turned her attention to slicing through as many of the tethers as she could, freeing the corpses from the control of the vines. She let Lulu handle finishing off the untethered puppets.

  The pit bull was a vicious fighter. She crippled her opponents to take them to the ground, then went for their bellies and throats. It was an effective tactic against living foes, but the plant-zombies had no need to breathe, and no survival instincts to protect their vulnerable bellies. This meant that Lulu spent longer on each creature than she needed to, but even so, without her help, Char would have been hard-pressed to survive, much less prevail.

  The flood of puppets slowed to a trickle, and then even that dried up. When the fight was done, Char stood panting. She’d taken a few blows, but nowhere near as many as she had in the hallway fight, despite taking on twice as many foes. Actual training made all the difference, it seemed.

  As she caught her breath, she tapped each corpse to loot it. The puppets she was fighting all counted as separate entities, giving experience and loot, and having their own levels, despite being piloted by another creature. The zombies ranged in level from 11 to 15, and, despite killing over two dozen of them, Char still hadn’t reached level 20. She wasn’t sure if that was because of the level gap between herself and the creatures she was fighting, because the zombies were an extension of another creature, or if there was a huge jump in the experience needed to reach 20.

  She found it annoying that there were no experience numbers given, or even a percentage-based progress bar to the next level. It would be nice to know how close she was. That grayed-out affinities tab felt like it was mocking her with its promise of power just out of reach. She shoved those thoughts away and reminded herself that this wasn’t a game.

  It had been a long day before she even came into the dungeon, and it was catching up to her. The constant fighting was taking a toll that wasn’t reflected in her resource bars. She couldn’t stop now. Not without leaving and giving up all her progress. She was down to one flare, and she was pretty sure she would need it for the floor boss, if there was one. It might have been a mistake to rush in without resting first, but they were here now, and she wasn’t going to back down.

  She used the brief lull to hydrate and check Lulu over for wounds, then they pushed on.

  They wound through twisting passages created by piles of conveyor belts shoved up against chemical tanks, flanked by toppled forklifts. Flesh-puppets hounded them, popping out of niches in the makeshift walls and shuffling down the corridors. More and more, they sprouted vines and tried to wrap and entangle the pair instead of just beating them down.

  As they pressed deeper into the building, Char realized that the green glow was emanating from three different places around the cavernous room. The room itself was far larger than it should have been, larger than the building had appeared from the outside. The aliens were either playing games with space or messing with her head.

  She had been pushing for the back of the room, choosing paths that led in that direction as often as she could, but now she angled their path off to the left of center, aiming for one of the green glows.

  As they fought their way closer to the edge of the room, the light grew brighter. They passed between two steel tanks, and the floor changed. The concrete ended, dropping away to reveal a lower floor crossed by a walkway made of industrial metal grating. The grating was wide, about thirty feet long and a dozen feet across, with minimalist metal railings along the sides. The walkway crossed from the factory floor to another catwalk running along the wall. The light came from the floor below the walkway: a vat of glowing, toxic sludge, like something out of an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

  Char barely had time to whisper out an incredulous, “What the fu…” before the walkway's guardian charged them. It was a flesh puppet, but not like any of the ones that came before. This one was twice the size of a normal human, barely fitting into the stretched and ripped cover-alls that tried to clothe it. It had an extra set of arms sprouting below the normal pair. The worst part, though, was the way its skin bulged and rippled, pressed outward by the motions of the vines within.

  On the wall behind the charging monstrosity was a large metal valve wheel under the stenciled word “Outflow.” The word was in English, while everything else in the hellish re-purposed factory had been in Asian characters. It couldn’t have been any more blatant that this was the quest objective to stop the corruption leaking out into the creek… or one of them, at least. There had been three glows, so there were probably three valves.

  The grating rang and bounced as the monstrous flesh-puppet crossed it, moving far faster than any of its smaller counterparts. It trailed only a single tethering vine, but it was as large around as a telephone pole, more like the tentacle of a Kraken than a woody vine trailing off into the darkness to wherever the main plant lurked. That was going to be a bitch to cut through.

  Char ducked and rolled away from the swinging arms of the giant flesh-puppet. The appearance of the thing had caught her off guard, and she berated herself for gawking like a rube instead of moving. Her roll took her closer to the giant vine. She hopped to her feet and took a testing slash at it. The sword shaved away some of the vine, but not enough. Hacking through it was going to be a job, and the monster wasn’t going to give her time to play lumberjack.

  She vaulted over the vine, kiting the monstrosity back towards the center of the open area. She couldn’t afford to let it pin her against the wall of machinery. It followed, and Lulu lunged, leaping high to hit it in the lower back, knocking it off balance as Char slashed out at its reaching hand, lopping off several of its fingers. She expected it to turn and focus on Lulu, but it didn’t. Their usual trade-off tactics weren’t going to work.

  She ducked under another swing and slashed at the puppet’s knee, catching the kneecap in a spray of clotted blood and milky sap. It was no good. Just like the smaller puppets, the vines within replaced the missing flesh, and the monstrosity kept coming. Lulu raked her claws down the back of its leg, and Char slashed open its arm from elbow to wrist before backing off to make space.

  Circling back around, she hacked down at the vine again, trying to hit the same spot she had damaged earlier. The sword went a little deeper, carved out a small chunk, but then the fist of the giant caught her and sent her rolling away. She felt like she’d been hit in the side by a baseball bat. She struggled back to her feet, wincing, and pretty sure she had at least one cracked rib. She almost reached for the healing tonic, but her health bar was still at 78%, so she decided to swallow the pain and hold the potion in reserve.

  Lulu jumped again, and this time she hit the creature while it was mid-step. She knocked it to its knees. While it struggled to get back up, Char rushed in and, gritting her teeth against the pain in her ribs, brought her sword down on its neck like an executioner’s blade. For an instant, her heart leapt, a spike of hope that maybe, just maybe, it would be that easy.

  But, of course, it wasn’t.

  The head came off and bounced away. Starting at the ragged edge of its neck, the skin of the monstrous flesh-puppet split down the spine like the zipper of an overstuffed suitcase that had given up the fight. Vines exploded out, thrashing and waving, punching out with incredible force.

  One of the thicker ones hit Char, and this time she knew her rib was broken when she heard it snap. She was sent flying. Her sword hit the grating with a clang as it fell from her hand. Her back hit the railing that lined the walkway, and she tipped over it. The glowing green goop of the vat filled her vision before she splashed into it, and her world went incandescent with pain.