Then he stared, disbelieving.
“Listen, Gaudemunda... Do you... Do you feel any pain?” he asked, afraid to touch her.
“What?” She glanced back. “Pain? No. Not really.”
The mechanism around the cage was ramping up without mercy. That sick blue radiance swelled with the grinding roar. In seconds, they wouldn’t hear each other at all.
“You can’t break the chains, can you?” she asked, voice shaking.
Noah didn’t answer. The problem was, there were no chains on her wrists. Both wrists were pierced clean with a butcher’s hook. The hook wasn't chained to anything, so, in theory, he could yank it out.
Also, in theory, it would hurt like hell.
But he no longer had time to ponder what-ifs. Noah felt a prickling crawling over his skin, as if it was ready to melt. He watched, horrified, as drops of glowing “water” began sliding down over his hands.
Gaudemunda believed chains held her... She has no nervous system. There's nothing to feel pain—except belief that pain exists. If she didn’t see or know…
Finally, the noise hit its peak, the machine going full tilt. Teeth clenched, Noah twisted and ripped the hook free. The woman gasped. Noah also hissed through his teeth. The prickling tipped into real pain—building—but still bearable. Still nothing like touching the glowing liquid itself. Without hesitating, he grabbed her by the arm and hurled her out of the cage, diving after her.
They hit the cold stone and rolled. Metal clinked—a butcher’s hook he’d kept skittered from his grip. At the last second he’d decided to hang onto the tool. After all, tools in this place were too precious.
The moment they cleared the cage, the pain ebbed fast. The device still blazed and howled, like it meant to turn them both into a puddle even now.
Then, after a few moments, it started to slow. A minute later, the light died and the works stopped. The cave fell quiet—save for Gaudemunda’s faint rustle.
She sat up slowly and looked back at the cage. Silent or not, it was still a monstrous thing. The chains clunked dully, and both she and Noah flinched. The cage was already descending into the lower abyss, about to vanish into the dark.
Noah’s tablet chirped insistently:
“Warning! Only 2% charge remaining!”
“Damn it,” Noah snapped, springing to his feet. Bad.
“What happened?” Gaudemunda looked around, alarmed.
“My charge is critical. Stay here—I’ll be right back!”
“Wait! I’m coming with you!” she said, scrambling up.
* * *
They hurried through the dark passages toward Noah’s first grotto. Halfway there, he realized what else was wrong: she didn’t have her tablet. She had no idea what her own charge level was—and likely couldn’t refill it anyway, since this abyss belonged to him.
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On the other hand, she looked fine—alert, steady. He shot a glance at her wrists: the holes were already gone without a trace. She didn’t seem about to collapse.
Could she have fallen out of the system somehow? Perhaps the charge no longer applied to her?
No time to finish the theory, though...
At the pump, he filled both buckets with glowing water. Gaudemunda, breathless, watched every move, careful not to get in his way or pepper him with questions—something he was genuinely grateful for. The light above the abyss was flickering dangerously, and he felt the fatigue slowly creeping in. Thankfully, those three points in Power were paying off, and he reached the abyss much faster than on that first death march.
He poured.
The ceiling beam brightened, and from below, he heard the tablet beep with refreshed numbers.
Gaudemunda caught up and stopped in the lit platform, torn between staring at the black pit and the buckets.
“Was I… supposed to do the exact same thing?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Noah sighed. “For whatever reason, that’s how it works here. You pour from something into nothing so you’ll have the strength to go on.”
He studied her again.
“But you don’t have your tablet… You won’t know when your charge drops into the danger zone,” he muttered.
“What does that mean?” she asked, worried. “Am I… going to die again?”
He shrugged. She already looked shaken, so he wasn’t about to lob worst-case scenarios at her.
Best case, there was a built-in way for her to survive. They just had to find it.
Worst case, she would simply “power down” and sleep—and maybe that would give Noah a shot at meeting the admins face to face.
He still didn’t know whether the cage’s arrival had been scripted or random. If scripted, freeing Gaudemunda probably was part of the plan. Why else leave the cage gaping open, practically inviting him inside? And if it was part of the plan, there had to be a way for her to survive.
If it was just a coincidence and he’d gone off-script, her future would get fuzzy fast. Noah remembered what she’d said: she’d gone to sleep on the bed and lost her charge. Yet in the cage, she’d behaved as if charge no longer mattered to her at all. So either she had no connection to the glowing water anymore, or they’d have to discover some other method for her to live.
“By the way… thank you,” she said suddenly, pulling him from his thoughts. “For getting me out. I thought I was done.”
She gave him a small bow, eyes on the floor.
“Sure. You’re welcome,” he muttered, suddenly awkward. He lifted the buckets and nodded toward the stairs. “Come on. I need to do this six more times.”
“I… I can help!” Gaudemunda said at once, following closely.
They descended at an easy pace. Without death breathing down his neck, Noah decided to run a few quick tests. First he filled one bucket and asked her to lift it. She couldn’t budge it. Even straining with everything she had, the bucket didn’t move a millimeter.
The pump, though, didn’t seem picky. She filled the other bucket without a problem. Unfortunately, that was the limit of her usefulness, and “help” didn’t feel like help when he stood idle beside her. There wasn’t much else to do in these caves anyway.
While she worked the handle, Noah checked the tablet’s latest status:
“Current charge: 8.32%.”
“Wait—what?” he blurted.
He’d just poured two buckets, and the charge was only eight percent? The afterlife math was broken—again.
He distinctly remembered: at the very beginning, before points, one bucket equaled ten percent. After his first upgrades, a bucket was worth about seven. Now it had dropped again to roughly four percent.
He opened the calculator app and punched the numbers. The answer sent a chill through him.
He’d need twenty-four buckets to hit full charge. Somehow his load had just grown by another ten buckets.
And he already knew where the extra weight had come from.
Gaudemunda wiped her hands, stepped back from the pump, and gave him a shy, proud smile. She believed she’d just lightened his burden a little.
Noah didn’t have the heart to shatter that illusion.