The gunshots behind me pitched down as I ran into the rapidly deteriorating forest, the trees shifting into seemingly random geometric shapes and blending. Turning to look at my pursuers, it didn’t look like they could see what was happening in front of us, or maybe they just didn’t care.

  Whatever the poster had done to their minds was like a complete overwrite; they wanted me dead above everything else. I hadn't seen anything like this since… that Daemon that gave me the vial of Dust and completely fucked up my life. In fact, their minds taken as a collective looked almost identical to its.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to mull over why that might be the case as my thoughts were interrupted when I nearly stumbled because my foot refused to leave the ground. Looking down, I noticed my feet weren't feet anymore. They had started merging with the ground to form symbols that made my brain itch and gave me an urge to kill my birth mother at the sight of them, as if I even knew who my birth mother was. Knowing my personal resistance to mental fuckery, anyone else seeing them would likely have already been driven to madness and beyond.

  Fumbling around in my pocket, I grabbed the vial Vivi gave me, twisted the lid off and threw it back. A sweet taste hit my tongue, and a shiver passed through me as my euphoric sense for reality manipulation made it feel like I was drinking some sort of electric nectar.

  The moment the solution hit my stomach, it exploded outward into my body. Completely ignoring the digestive process because it just needed the idea of being consumed for it to take effect. As it spread through my flesh, I felt my hair stand on end as something took hold.

  It wasn’t intended to be used in a situation like this. The vial was in case I was overwhelmed by an enemy greater than I could handle and needed a way to make my form a little more malleable. To be able to ignore bullets or phase through a wall, or any innumerable number of possible alterations I could make to myself. It didn’t exactly grant me Vivi’s Aspect, as there was nothing that could do that, but it would push me in that direction.

  The vial was from Vivi’s Warp Manifest. A Manifest dedicated to altering objects or people as she desired. It was meant to allow her to expand her capabilities beyond just herself. Giving her access to a whole suite of weapons and tools that just ignored physics entirely to achieve whatever goal she had in mind.

  The liquid was something she coined ‘Reality Softener for Needy Bitches Without Cool Powers,’ and it did exactly as the name implied. It softened how much the rules of reality would affect the user, allowing them to behave in ways that didn't necessarily obey physics. Though that was just the primary effect for the average person, because for Dustborn, it provided a level of personalized control how Vivi's Reality Softener for Needy Bitches Without Cool Powers was supposed to work, it still caught me off guard when I felt myself come apart for an instant. A moment later, I wasn’t exactly me anymore. I had become the version of myself that stood on the Stage, the one that I could only see as a silhouette of presence.

  That version of me stepped out from stage right into the world, replacing the woman who had been standing here a moment ago. Looking inward, I saw her on the stage, confused until I gave her mind a gentle nudge towards Aurin. She immediately got to work cleaning up the mess that was our beloved love interest.

  Glancing around, I took in the world around me for what felt like the first time… no, it was the first time. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite the world I would like to be in. After all, it was completely collapsing as a wave of pure chaos overwrote reality, bending everything every which way that it shouldn't be bent.

  But I couldn't dally, I had a job to do after all. I was supposed to get us to safety. I took a step forward, then stopped… which way was safe again?

  In the time it took for us to swap places, direction had decided to stop working. Which meant I needed to create my own direction.

  Walking over to one of the undulating masses that used to be a part of the angry mob chasing after me, I kicked the thing. He snapped back into one piece as he remembered what role he was supposed to play.

  “Hey. Which way do I go?” I asked the background extra.

  “Huh? What? What the fuck?” the man roughly said in Mandarin.

  “That's not your line,” I said with a frown. Reaching into his character node, I wiped the slate clean, the man flickered out of existence, replaced by a white mannequin ready to be given whatever role I needed him to play.

  I gave a moment's thought to what would be a good fit for the first character on the way to the promised land. Safety would be achieved when we reached a happy ever after, which was easiest to reach by defeating the big bad, causing this whole mess.

  Ah! I know! A childhood friend is always the best choice.

  I inscribed the proper role for him to play into his character node and pulled a playbill out of my coat pocket. Placing it into the actor's hand, the sheet broke into soft flakes of light that coated his body as he formed into my childhood friend. Miral blinked a few times, looked down at himself, then back up at me.

  “Oh, hey, Ren. Where are we?” he asked, and I couldn't help a smile from blossoming on my face. That was the correct line.

  “We're in our hometown of Craterbridge, obviously,” I said, gesturing to the pastoral town around us. If you looked closely, you could tell there was something off about it, but I already knew that, given I was the one who built the set. “You were just saying something about wanting to leave?”

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  “Right! Sorry, I don't know what came over me,” he said as he sheepishly rubbed the back of his head. “It's just I know you might not want to go, I know your pa is sick, and you're the only one taking care of him right now.”

  “I'm all in! Don't worry about my pa, my uncle already agreed to handle my responsibilities when I let him know what you were planning,” I exclaimed.

  “You already knew?!”

  “Did you really think you could keep a secret from me? Come on, we grew up together. I could tell what was going to happen the moment those posters went up about the bounty,” I said, putting my hands on my hips and giving him a stern look.

  “Hehe, you're right. Not from you. It's like you have this uncanny ability to—”

  I skipped the scene forward before he could break the fourth wall.

  After a long and perilous adventure that spanned just under the length of the average stage play, my gathered party members and I stood before the lair of the great beast.

  “...I'm so happy I could travel with all of you,” Saela said, tears leaking from her eyes. “Especially you, Ren, if you hadn't saved me from that bramblebear, I wouldn't be alive to witness any of it.”

  Torven grunted and looked to the side, but everyone knew what he meant.

  “I want to say that I couldn't have made it this far without any of you. Ren, without your trust in…” Miral was saying when the world around me seemed to lose a bit of its colour, and I felt myself wobble to the side.

  When I recovered, the whole party was staring at me, their eyes glazed over.

  “Okay, haha, let's get moving on! We have a Hundun to kill after all,” I said, and clapped my hands while I pushed their minds back onto task. My time was almost out, and I needed to wrap this up quickly, so I downscaled the final big bad encounter a bit.

  Doing so would be a little anticlimactic, but I couldn't be picky now, not when I felt the hook inching its way towards me.

  Entering the cave, Saela used her fairy magic that was firmly established in her backstory to light the way, causing glowing mushrooms to grow along the walls.

  Through the dark we marched while the party had a hushed conversation around me. I felt a twinge of disappointment at having to remove the greblin attack scene here. It would have really set the party up for a desperate final encounter while calling back to when we first met Torven outside his burned-down village…

  I was sure the audience would understand. Glancing towards them, I winked and smirked when I saw one of them drop their drink in shock, then quickly turned back before anyone noticed me looking where I shouldn't be.

  At the back of the deep, dark, and dank cave, we reached a chamber lined with neatly piled skulls and bones.

  “This is it, the culmination of what we…” I started, turning to look at my party members who had returned to staring blankly at me. A barely disguised hunger that I was doing my utmost best to repress was digging its way to the surface. “Alright, I guess it’s just me then, luckily I came prepared.”

  Placing a hand on the angel’s feather that had been crafted into a sword by the saint upon the… sorry, you don’t care about any of this, do you?

  Diving forward into the chamber, the stone cracked under my feet as I flew towards the beast of six limbs and four legs. It turned towards me, its faceless gaze landing directly on me. I had to squint as the lighting department decided to point a spotlight directly in my face. I was going to have to have a word with them after the show about proper lighting technique, wasn’t I?

  Slashing my sword, a wave of pure angelic light lanced through the air directly at the beast, through sheer improbability, the slash moving at the speed of light missed. In return, it sent out a beam of pure chaos that turned my arm into a tentacle that started to strangle me before I lopped it off.

  “Rigging the game in your favour, eh? Well, two can play that game!” I yelled, then called upon my demon side, and horns grew on my forehead as I unlocked my final form of a true half-demon, half-angel. My arm regrew in an instant with the bullshit power imbued in me at birth or something.

  This encounter was really balanced for a full party, so I was making the best of what I had, okay?!

  There was a rapid exchange of blows, but with my demonic powers, which allowed me to negate the beast’s chaos attacks, I had it on its back foot. It let out a bellow from its non-mouth and charged towards me as a final gambit

  With a totally sick backflip transitioned into a pirouette, I dodged the tackle and drove the angel’s feather into the beast’s fleshy hide. The purity of the sword destroyed it instant… hmm. Pulling the sword out, I rammed it back in and destroyed it instantly in a single blow, bathing the chamber in light.

  “Alright! It was a great time, but I must unfortunately depart,” I said atop the corpse of the beast. A rush of golden light flowed up from the creature into me just as my previous companions let out monstrous howls and lurched towards the pile of flesh. Digging into the raw meat of the Hundun with their clawed hands. I was kind of disappointed, because this always seemed to happen whenever I made friends.

  With a final curtsy, I took a step off stage left, allowing Ren to take centre stage again.

  I looked around, confused. What was I doing in the middle of a forest? How did I get here? And why was I completely naked?

  The last thing I remembered—

  My brain hit a wall so hard I folded over and vomited as a scream tore out of my throat.

  WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?

  The memory tried to surface again, and my mind seized, like some part of it had been struck with a hammer. Another wave of vomit poured out of my mouth. The flash of recollection felt like an instant of time dragged out endlessly and split into an uncountable number of overlapping versions of myself, all of them terrified, all of them hurting, all of them trapped in something I couldn’t understand but my body did.

  That single moment of recollection was seared onto my mind, despite trying to refocus my thoughts away from what I could only describe as the mental equivalent of thousands of insects burrowing through my skin and devouring my flesh. Then there was this hunger, a hunger that couldn’t be satiated, a hunger I hadn’t felt since my youth and did not want to ever return to. No… worse than that somehow. It had transcended past human limits into the realm of insanity.

  I opened up the team chat and, ignoring all the messages that had piled up at some point, sent my own.

  Ren: VIVI! What the fuck did you put in the vial? I am NEVER using one of those again. Holy fuck, it’s like you bottled eternal torment or something!

  Looking towards my stage, I grabbed another copy of my sweater with a huff, thanking myself for buying the self-recreating version, only for my eyes to land on Aurin. She was completely fine now, and I had no idea how or when that happened.

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