The trio followed the skeleton, which moved with a jelly-like gait, almost like a strut, through the dark corridor that stretched on and on. David's lighted courier plaque and Niala's glowing potion seemed subdued, and the sound of their steps echoed back to them, distorted.

  The walking bones hadn't shut up since the start of its escort. “...but now that you are here, I have so many experiments that can be brought to completion. Even if my extreme genius has no peer, I find myself currently lacking free-willed labourers! These vessels can barely contain my essence, and lack the strength to even pull levers!” The skeleton's head swivelled a full 180 degrees, looking straight back at them as its body kept advancing. “As pedestrian as you are, your squirming muscles are well engorged, and should operate appropriately.”

  Its flaming eyes squinted. “As long as your encased brains have the capacity to process simple instructions...” The voice said with doubt, before its head rotated toward the front. “We are arriving at the grand lobby. Preclude falling off to your death, I require your flesh to be self-ambulating.” It instructed.

  As warned, the corridor soon gave on a hand-railed walkway, extending out into the darkness. Even though its exact dimensions were obscured, the room felt cavernous, large enough to have a faint thermal plume that moved air about, blanketing the emptiness with a moaning thrum.

  They kept walking for another few minutes, Geralkko droning on about performing experiments, before their lights reached a large central column, easily a hundred metres wide, with an open door awaiting them at the end of the walkway.

  The skeleton moved right in without pause, waiting for them inside the room, while David looked back at his companions. Niala's ears and tail were drooping down as she stood close to him, while Jordo looked as unperturbed as always.

  Shrugging, David stepped inside, followed by...

  No one.

  He swivelled on the spot, Niala and Jordo's footsteps having vanished, and found a featureless wall. Dropping into a combat stance and powering up his imbuements, he pivoted toward the skeleton, which was looking at him, its skull slanted.

  “Aggressive, as I would have expected! Your feeble mind lacks understanding, so it revolts to primitive instincts!” It cackled haughtily.

  “Where's Niala? You have one second.”

  The skeleton's jaw popped open and dangled in sordid mockery. “You make demands? Lowly cre-”

  David's fist pulverized the skull into fine bone dust, the blast of displaced air extinguishing the green orbs.

  The rest of the skeleton broke apart into clinking bones, falling into a heap on the metal floor.

  The disembodied voice echoed through the room, coming in from David's left. “Waste of energy, and pointless emotions.”

  He turned to face its source, only to find a floating skull, its green fireball eyes rolling in their orbit. The thing spoke again. “If I wanted you excised, I would have done so within a thought! No, I wi-”

  A bone speared through the floating skull, shattering it in a hundred fine pieces that bloomed through the air, the green flames of its eyes fanning out to nothingness.

  “Ignorant! Your cavorting will result in none! Docilize, and inquire my words!” Green eyes flared up on another floating skull, a few meters away, glaring at David. “You are present, I will of-” Another bone destroyed the thing's new mouthpiece.

  The scene repeated a few times until the voice roared, intense enough to force David to cover his ears. In front of him, deeper into the room, a small bead of baleful green erupted into a ghostly emerald apparition, the upper torso of a skeletal corpse with vestiges of skin still clinging to it, clothed in a rotting piece of robe. Its eyes of green fire glowered at David. It lifted an arm at the same time that a bone flew through the intangible form, pointing it at David.

  “You! Stop your uselessness! I, Geralkko, wish to offer you GREATNESS!”

  “Where's Niala?” David asked with finality.

  “The female is being offered the same! AND YOU SHOULD LISTEN!” Geralkko screeched.

  More Strong Arm-thrown bones sailed through Geralkko's form. By the tenth one, the ghost face-palmed and floated towards David, ignoring the projectiles.

  He extended his left arm, palm up, a red orb of light appearing upon it. “To you, and her, I ask, and offer! Do you wish for great power? To overcome any and all in your path with powerful arms? To bend their bodies like leaves, take all of your desires by physicality? Clamber to the top, on steps of broken bodies!”

  His right arm extended in the same way, and upon it, the translucent image of Niala. “Or, do you wi-”

  “I choose Niala.” David cut him off before stepping up to the ghost and throwing imbued Strong Arm-boosted punches into it, finding nothing to hit.

  Geralkko let his arms flop down, giving David a death stare. “Understand, I am offering the same to both. The first to accept my offer will go. The other will remain. Will the female cho-”

  “Yes,” David said.

  “You are concluded! There is a single path to life, choose!”

  It once again extended its left arm, “Do yo-”

  “Niala.”

  “LET MY OFFER COMPLETE!”

  “Don't need. Always Niala.”

  “INSUFFERABLE ANT! I OFFER RICHE-”

  “Niala.”

  “MAGICAL AB-”

  “Niala.”

  “ETERNAL LI-”

  “Niala.”

  “YO-”

  “Niala.”

  “I-”

  “Niala.”

  “IM-”

  “Niala.”

  The exasperated apparition of Geralkko's upper body floated in front of Niala, arms dangling, head slumped forward, staring with vexed eyes at the catkin as she yelled obscenities at him while throwing the occasional phial his way.

  “You pig-brained anal reject! Get me back to David! I don't want any of your piss-stained gifts! Stuff them up your rotted ass hole so far up you choke on them! Get this into your bleeding mind: I don't want anything except David!”

  “List-” Geralkko began to speak, but Niala had already taken in another breath.

  “I'm not listening to your word vomit! I'm going to find David, and then we're going to find your brain or giant maggot or pile of shit or whatever it is that keeps you alive and we'll turn it to cosmic dust so quickly you won't have time to fart out one of the gut worms that's infesting your putrid bowels, you useless waste of time!”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “YOU WI-”

  “You think you can keep us here at your will, you pus-filled leech? You bloated carcass of a taint! You have no idea what we're going to do to you! You'll wish you had died trampled under pox-ridden chickens while you choked on the diseased eggs they shat in your mouth!”

  “WHY WOULD CHIC-”

  But Niala was already slamming both her hands on the floor. Her mana, having been yelled a story for the past five minutes, almost seemed eager to leave her, as it rushed into the magic-resistant material as if it were a dried sponge. A violet glow pulsed down her arms and into the metal, expanding into a mandala pattern within a few heartbeats. She lifted her steely stare at the ghost, whose eyes had gone wide.

  “What are y-”

  “Eat vomit.” She cut him off.

  Giant demonic clawed hands of violet energy, clad in the shattered metal plates of the floor, erupted all around the room and plunged for the ghost.

  The first finger speared into its form, piercing a hole as if through tangible smoke. Then the rest of the limbs reached it, and Geralkkos' scream ended as suddenly as it had started.

  The apparition in front of David went wide-eyed, one of its hands clawing at its chest, as a sudden and short-lived scream echoed from nowhere, followed by a tremor that shook dust loose from the ceiling.

  Geralkkos' phantom looked up at David, mouth open, panting, as if it had just survived a heart attack.

  “That must be Niala. My turn.” David said, putting his hand up against the ghost, calling forth his mana, compressing it at the tip of his palm, feeling the sea serpent coil around his being once more. Reality began to distort in front of David's palm, small blue lightning arcs jumping through the air before evaporating in a haze.

  Geralkko's flaming eyes went even wider. “WA-” It began.

  David released the leash on his creation.

  A blue sun dawned. The king in the shadows burned.

  Jordo stood motionless in front of a large blackened gate.

  The floor shook, debris falling from high above, just before a blue flare illuminated the web-like patterns of walkways crisscrossing the spherical cavernous room above him.

  He turned his head up, toward the top of the central spire, his eye zooming in and out rapidly.

  His warbly voice was as chirpy as ever. “Sir and Madam are quite energetic. I do believe their frolicking over the past few days has them in good spirits!

  Geralkko's desicated body flinched and gasped, its empty eye sockets erupting in green flames as it gripped his throne with one hand, and its chest with the other.

  Eyes wide, he panted with a missing breath, his lungs being long gone.

  He looked at the massive blackened stone gate that guarded his sanctum, the central control room of the repository.

  Had it always looked so fragile?

  A span of wall unfolded into thick tendrils, forming a platform under the impromptu door. Niala walked out onto it, inspecting her surroundings.

  She was on the outside of what looked like the central shaft they had approached at first, and she could barely make out half a dozen walkways going to and fro around her, but none directly at her level. Maybe on the opposite side?

  A blue glow, roughly 50 metres up above her, caught her eye. She looked up and smiled as she spotted a head pop out of a slagged hole.

  “DAVID!” She shouted, waving.

  The head spun around, and a smile drew on David's face as he recognized Niala. “Hi! Are you alright?” He shouted back.

  “I'M FINE! DO YOU WANT ME TO GET UP THERE?”

  “No, wait for me.” He said before retreating back into the hole. He came back out a few moments later, crawling out of the hole and hanging from it one-armed. He looked around, spotting the walkways that went in every direction, and nodded.

  Niala's breath caught when he flung himself into the void, before a long tendril uncoiled from his arm, latching onto one of the walkways, swinging David around. The courier aimed himself at Niala's platform and released his hold, arcing through the air, activating his Iron Body imbuement and landing in a crouch in front of Niala, giving her a roguish smirk.

  She jumped at him, lacing her arms around his neck and giggling into his chest, rubbing her head into him for a good minute.

  His arms around her back felt so good.

  She eventually relented and unpressed herself from his body, looking up at his smiling face. “What was that thing? On your arm? That you used to swing like a monkey?”

  “Grasping Tendril, a courier's tool, and I'm not a monkey.”

  “You looked like one!”

  “You're the one who has a tail.”

  “I'm not the one on trial for being a monkey!”

  “On trial?! What's the verdict, your lovely honour?”

  The sly compliment sprinkled her cheeks red. “On account of being a big muscly hunky monkey, you're sentenced to a big kiss with your cute and amazing girlfriend.”

  He mocked despair. “Just one kiss? This is way too harsh.”

  She giggled as she rose to the tip of her feet, craning her head upward and offering her puckered lips to him, a gift that he readily accepted.

  A few minutes later, swinging from walkway to walkway using the grasping tendril and carrying a squealing catkin, whooping as they swooped through the air, David landed on the ground floor, at the bottom of the immense room. They explored the area for a few more minutes before spotting Jordo's glowing red eye and moving toward him.

  They were soon at the blackened stone gate, looking at it in all of its conspicuous glory.

  “If this is a janitor's closet, I'm going to be very disappointed,” David said.

  Jordo turned his head toward the courier. “I highly doubt it, sir. Janitor's closets do not merit blackstone doors.”

  David grimaced. “Boring name.”

  “I think it's fitting. It's black, and it's stone.” Niala piped in.

  “Why not shadow stone, or obsidian slate, or Negalite?”

  Niala and Jordo blinked, staring at David.

  “What? Negalight is anti-light, or shadows, and Lite means stone. Nega-lite. It's a play on words.”

  Niala spoke up. “Sometimes, I forget you're actually smart.”

  “What? Why?!”

  Niala waved her hands up at the walkways. “Because you're big and muscly and you're a perfect big muscly monkey!”

  “And you're a tiny cat that I'm going to catch!” He said, stepping toward his girlfriend.

  “Nooo!” She shouted, turning to run away, only for David's grasping tendril to wrap around her waist and pull her into his embrace, from where he then lifted her up and over his shoulder.

  “Monkey caught the cat.” He grunted, walking up to the Negalite door while Niala pounded his back with her fist, coiling her tail into his face.

  David turned his attention to Jordo, ignoring his squirming prize. “Important room behind that gate, then?”

  Jordo nodded. “I would bet my remaining arm on it, sir.”

  “Good bet.” David nodded, stopping a few steps away from the gate and observing it and its frame, not seeing any sort of interface or handle.

  “Any idea on how to open it?”

  Jordo shook his head. “I have no information on the specifics of this facility, sir, and Blacks- apologies, Negalite gates have no standardized designs that I know of. Most likely, the central consciousness would have scanned whoever requested access and opened the gate as permitted.”

  “Punch our way through, then?” David asked.

  “It would be the most expedient way.”

  Niala stopped thrashing around, craning her head toward David. “Monkey, can you put me down? I want to try my way.”

  David sighed and put the catkin down gently. She gave him a little pat on the chest before turning toward the gate and planting a hand on its frame.

  Violet light ensconced her hand, gaining in intensity for a short while, before flowing out and into a thin line that framed the gate, flashing bright for an instant before disappearing into the stone. A grinding sound was heard, as the gate seemed to vibrate slightly, before everything stopped.

  David arched an eyebrow. “Did it fail?”

  Niala squinted as she inspected the gap between the gate and its frame. “No, I don't think so.” She turned toward him. “This just needs a monkey's touch.” She said with a grin.

  Rolling his eyes, David walked up to the gate, empowering his fist with Iron Body and Strong Arm before giving the stone a good punch.

  The solid smack made the gate shake and grind, before something went loose and the entire slab fell into the floor in a cloud of dust, stomping to a stop as it filled the recess below it.

  The trio looked within the revealed room. Hundreds of skeletons carpeted the floor, with what looked like workstations arrayed around the periphery of the room. At its centre was a Negalite throne, upon which sat the very physical and very unnerved body of Geralkko.

  “YOU DARE INTRUDE UPON MY SANCTUM?! Very well! Step closer, breathing flesh! Geralkko will bestow upon you a gift!”

  “We don't want anything from you,” David told the thing from outside the room.

  “Truly? Then why are you here?” The corpse thing asked, tilting its head.

  “We need information from this place,” Niala explained.

  Geralkko's puzzled stare turned into a dark smile.

  “Then, you do want something from me. You see, this facility is mine.”

  The screens inset into the wall of the room all turned on at the same time, Geralkko's ghostly green face appearing upon them, mirroring the real one at the center of the room, all speaking in sync. “And I am its.”