System Report:

  Voices in the Rain

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  Streaking down rain-soaked alleys, Lionel felt once more the familiar, unpleasant void of having no proper System connection—the sensation of walking blind in a muffled and uncertain world. Annabell, having quietly resigned herself to being tucked under his arm like some vaguely sentient parcel, offered no assistance whatsoever. And the two Delvers trailing behind were busy with their own, pressing concerns—chiefly keeping one of them alive, shared between both of them.

  Perhaps it was cruel of him to push on ahead like he did, ignoring their struggles. But cruelty was one of those things that depended heavily on perspective. And from his perspective, personal survival made a very persuasive argument. This was a Dungeon, and Dungeons had a way of punishing altruism almost as harshly as they punished complacency.

  He scanned the quiet buildings and the dripping side streets for danger. So far, there had been none. Just the relentless rain, the oppressive quiet, and the creeping sense that something should be happening.

  The misfortunes of a few random Delvers weren’t his concern.

  Billions, hundreds of billions, perhaps more, nameless individuals met their end in the Underfold every day. The moment he started fretting over random strangers would be the day he stopped turning a profit—“And profit is everything, isn’t it, Lionel?”

  The words echoed unpleasantly in his ears.

  With a frown, he came to a halt. The path split before him, both branches curling off into misty obscurity, barely lit by flickering oil lamps.

  “Profit?” he quietly repeated, cold droplets running down his face in a persistent, judgmental drizzle. Because really, profit seemed the least of his concerns at that precise, sod-it-all moment.

  It might have mattered back when he still believed in the comforting, mechanical logic of Dungeons—when all that was required to resolve any situation was to follow the scenarios to their inevitable conclusions. But now, having flattened an entire church on what should have been the final boss, nothing had changed.

  The world hadn’t congratulated them. There’d been no triumphant fanfare, no shower of golden light, not even a polite ding from the System. Just silence, rain, and a gnawing sense of unease that kept crawling higher up his spine with every step.

  “Just leave the dead weight behind and get out of this place on your own,” came the little whisper at the back of his brain. “You’re perfectly capable of that, aren’t you? Just do it, and everything will be fine…”

  “And how, exactly, am I supposed to do that?” Lionel wished to hiss back, but he wasn’t so far gone as to argue with the inside of his own head. Not yet. Still, had there been any obvious way out of Ashenmoor, he wouldn’t have stuck around this long.

  The eternal pitter-patter sounded as if it was mocking him, and he tried—rather unsuccessfully—to gather his thoughts.

  It was all a headache. A headache that had started with her.

  Feeling irritation begin to bubble up through the exhaustion, he unceremoniously let go of the back of Annabell’s hoodie as he turned.

  She didn’t make a sound when she hit the ground. She simply flopped, caught herself on hands and knees, and got to her feet as though merely wondering why it had taken him this long to drop her.

  “Any updates from the System?” he called, though the rain offered no reply.

  The two Delvers had fallen behind even further, two distant shapes under pouring eaves that might as well have been made of tissue paper for all the protection they offered—“They are dragging you down,” the little voice offered. “Just leave them…”

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

  A faint tug at his sleeve made Lionel glance down.

  “I don’t think we should…” Annabell began quietly, her head bowed, her words almost lost in the rain. He shrugged off her fingers before she could finish.

  What he needed right now was a reliable System connection, not more nonsense.

  ***

  Too much had happened. Too much kept happening. Gami hadn’t had the chance to reflect on anything yet, not properly. Not on Jodi’s death, or Cassius’. No, ever since this nightmare began churning last night, every waking minute had been a relentless parade of terrible outcomes.

  Sure, there had been relief when she saw Yenna and Alana still alive—small mercies, like finding a dry patch in a rainstorm. But what about the others? Alek, Desmond, Mari…?

  Her jaw clenched as dark memories resurfaced. Churning water, confusion, a swarm of tentacles pulling Alek deeper as he kept hacking and slashing, desperately trying to get away. Blood-soaked flagstones within a burning church—the pale corpse of a girl, face twisted in horror, the one she dearly wished she’d never seen.

  And then there was Alana: cold and lifeless beneath the pouring rain, snatched away in the short time it had taken Gami to look for a safe way out. She hadn’t even had the chance to ask what had happened.

  Yenna had been stabbed as well, leaving a haze of uneasy guesses in its wake, creeping in the way only uncertainty could.

  “Shouldn’t have left them… All your fault… Too weak to protect anyone.”

  If there had been a way to fight them, Gami would have happily strangled every last one of those whispers until there was nothing left. But here she was, under Ashenmoor’s eternal deluge, and the voices clung to her as resolutely as the damp and cold. Unpleasant, eternal, and slowly gnawing their way into her bones.

  “Just hold on,” she murmured, low enough that only the rain could hear. “Just a little bit longer…”

  Whether the plea was directed at Yenna, at herself, at the rain, or at Fate itself, she couldn’t have said. Yenna had ceased replying some time ago. Now, she just limped along with the thinness of an hourglass running dry, one arm draped over Gami’s shoulder like a reluctant shawl—heavy, in the way few shawls ever are.

  “It’ll be alright if we just—” Gami began, only to raise her head and see him there, halfway down the rain-slick street.

  Pallid as a corpse and with eyes darker than the night, he wasn’t the visage you hoped would swoop in to save you in a dire situation. There was something about the way he looked at her that made the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. Something not quite human. Not because he acted like a monster—monsters were honest about it—but because whatever he was, he kept it carefully wrapped in a suit of casual competence.

  “Any updates from the System?” he asked, his voice carrying an edge that did not belong to the weather. It was that same probing question from before—“As if he knows you don’t trust him…”

  Gami’s eyes slid away. “Nothing,” she said.

  The rain hammered on, indifferent. Yenna’s breath came thinner, a tiny metronome counting down. “She will die if you keep following him…” the whisper continued.

  It was spoken not so much as a warning as a confident prediction, the kind of sentence that wished to be proven right. She wrapped her fingers tighter around Yenna’s shoulder.

  “He was there as she was hurt… as Alana died… wasn’t he?”

  “If he wanted us dead, we’d already be dead,” she almost growled back. Instead, she said out loud, “We can’t go on like this. Her wounds… they need treatment.”

  His eyes moved briefly toward Yenna. He must have seen it already, how more and more of her weight had shifted over onto Gami’s shoulders with every step they took—her head perpetually lolling to the side, no longer able to stay upright.

  The sodden curtain of her hair blocked Gami from seeing whether there was anything left behind Yenna’s eyes, but he would have been able to.

  “Treatment alone won’t save any of us if we linger much longer,” he said, his attention snapping back to Gami with that dark, unreadable gaze of his. “You must have felt it too. Things didn’t end there, back at the church. The longer we stay here, the worse it will get.”

  Gami did feel it—in the small, unpleasant way you feel a draught under a door and know the house is letting something in. She probably felt it even more than she wanted to admit. More than him. Like the faint scrape of claws on wet stone, or the smell of something waiting just out of sight.

  The voices, patiently waiting for the moment she gave in. In one moment, hissing at her for standing still, and in the next, mocking her for not being there when her friends were killed.

  “Because she’s already dead… No matter what you do: dead…”

  “Then leave us and go,” Gami said shortly. “We’re not gaining anything by sticking together. We’ll stall for time here, and you can go ahead and escape this place on your own. The one thing I know: I’m not letting my friend die like this.”

  With Yenna still folded against her shoulder, Gami pushed past him, steering her steps toward the only building that didn’t seem like it would collapse on itself. A tailor’s shop abandoned so long ago even the mannequins had forgotten their shapes.

  Its lock, if it existed at all, did not survive her boot.

  She didn’t pause to see if he followed them inside. Part of her almost hoped he wouldn’t. It would have made that persistent message, hovering at the corner of her eye, all that much easier to ignore:

  Warning: Anomaly Detected!

  Don’t trust them…