She was swallowed by the burning light.

  The light eroded her. The glow invaded her. The fluid enveloped her and attempted to dissolve the boundary between her and it. Her eyes were closed tight, but the glaring green seared into them. Her skin ablated away, burning myalgia faded to cold numbness as nerves ceased to feel, even to be. Her teeth cracked as she ground them against the agony, against the urge to scream out her last precious air, to breathe in the caustic death that surrounded her.

  Phosphines became pixels became words.

  Warning!

  Mutagen encountered.

  Mutation in progress…

  Error!

  Internal resistance.

  Bloodlines in conflict with mutation.

  Do you wish to sacrifice your earned Aetheris to

  empower [Unknown] bloodlines?

  If [No], mutation will commence.

  Her lips were gone. Her tongue was gone. Her name was gone. Her mind held on by a bloody fingernail. In her head, in her soul, with a voice abraded raw with terror, she screamed “Yes!”

  A windswept plain was illuminated by a flash of lightning. Her heart beat.

  A jungle cat roared. Her heart beat.

  A tree the size of a universe swayed in an unfelt breeze. Her heart beat.

  From under a hill, secret eyes watched. Her heart beat.

  Power ignited within her. A spinning core of fire and ice and electrical jolts at the place were her body and soul joined, a place that wasn’t a place, that had always been there, but she’d never known existed. She felt something fluid and dense being pulled from her flesh and fed into that bonfire, becoming changed by it, and flowing back out of it through veins that weren’t veins, feeding through her body. It diffused through every cell, woke her, and rewrote her. It made her more herself.

  Bloodlines identified:

  Nahual 8%

  Thunderbird 16%

  Vanir 13%

  Tuatha 6%

  Bloodlines compatible.

  Awakening…

  Warning!

  No Core found!

  Creating Core…

  Error!

  No Affinities awakened.

  Creating Pure Spirit Core…

  Lockout bypassed by Root.

  Core Formed.

  Awakening Bloodlines…

  Bloodlines awakened.

  Mutation successfully rejected.

  Caution.

  You are flooded with excess Mana.

  Excess Mana shunted to physical reconstruction.

  Departure from hostile environment recommended.

  ‘No shit, departure recommended!’ Char could feel herself coming back together. The green goop burned, but her skin seethed with the fire-and-ice feeling that she’d come to associate with magic. She thrashed, fighting through the thick fluid to the edge of the vat, racing against time to get out before the excess Mana ran out.

  Her hand found the edge of the vat, and she pulled herself up, kicking her feet. She overbalanced on the rim and fell hard onto the concrete below, landing in a heap and a splat of green goop. Her breath came in shuddering gasps. Blood thundered in her ears as her heart pounded against her ribs. Her brain felt like a goldfish swimming in circles. Something shifted inside her. That strange ball of power in her center seemed to flip, turning inside-out and hiding the blazing sun of its power behind something dimmer, something false. She wasn’t sure how she knew what it was doing, but she did.

  The weirdest part is that it didn’t feel wrong. Whatever it had done, it felt, somehow, safer that way. She didn’t like knowing things without knowing how she knew them.

  Her skin was red and tender. Her vision was fuzzy. Her ribs ached, but the displaced wrongness of the jagged rib-end poking into her lung was gone. There was a stack of flashing notifications holding a rave at the edge of her vision. She rolled to her side and coughed, one arm wrapped around her middle against the all-too-vivid memory of the pain there. The concrete was cool under her cheek. She wanted to lie there and enjoy the feeling after the burning pain.

  The sound of barking and the metal walkway clanging under an impact made her heart leap. Lulu was still up there, still fighting.

  When the coughing fit passed, she forced herself to her hands and knees. She tried to get to her feet, but her legs wouldn’t cooperate. She crawled a few feet away, out of the puddle of green goo. Her arms shook, trying to hold her weight, to move her forward. She leaned against a wall. She wanted to get up and run back up the stairs to check on Lulu, but her limbs felt like the bones were made of jello. Part of her wanted to dive in and read all of her notifications, but it would take time to process it all, and she couldn’t just sit down here reading while Lu was all alone up there.

  She could feel the warm spark in her center that the messages had called her Core. Little jolts, like aftershocks, pulsed out of it at irregular intervals, like it was still processing the dregs of the Aetheris that she’d sacrificed to it… Whatever that was.

  How did she have those bloodlines? Did that mean she was descended from mythological beings? That didn’t make any sense. She shook her head. She’d have to sort it out later. The shakes were passing, and she felt stronger. The burning-freezing zip of magic running through her had faded, and the ache in her ribs was barely more than a bruise now.

  The sound of barking came again from above. She pushed herself to her feet, her goo-covered hands slipping on the smooth concrete. This time, her legs held her.

  “Hang in there, Lu, I’m coming.” With every step, she felt steadier. Within a few steps, she was running.

  There was a metal staircase along the wall leading back up to the factory floor. She grabbed the railing and let her momentum swing her around to run up them, barely slowing. She didn’t have her sword, so she pulled the [Dread Fang Dagger] from her Quick Access slot. Her throat was dry. She could barely swallow down the lump of worry. It settled in her stomach in a hard little knot.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  The stairs led to a landing, and the landing opened into the machinery maze, but this time, she didn’t have anything keeping her from climbing up the equipment and jumping between the makeshift barricades. Another bark and yelp from Lulu helped her find the right direction. She sprinted across the maze, jumping from one unidentifiable machine to another.

  Lulu wasn’t far away. The vines had pushed her off the walkway into the maze, but not very far. From her vantage at the top of a large steel tank, Char could see the walkway. The telephone-pole-sized vine stretched across the walkway from the catwalk along the back wall, past the abandoned skin-suit of the four-armed giant, and into the machinery maze.

  The end of the vine-trunk flared outward like the hood of a cobra—or maybe the palm of a hand would be a more apt comparison. Smaller, more tentacle-like vines radiated out from the disk at the end of the vine, like spokes from the hub of a wheel.

  No… As it moved, Char got a better look and realized that it wasn’t a disk. It was oblong, vertical, with a crease. It reminded her of a Venus Flytrap. She could only see the back of it from where she stood, so she didn’t know if it had the same sort of bright red and sticky leaf-mouth, but Lulu was no fly to be lured in.

  The pit bull was holding her own. She wasn’t winning, but she was staying out of the grasp of the flailing vines, and even biting off the ones she could get her teeth into. Char could tell that she was tiring, though. This vine needed to be pruned, and her little dagger wasn’t going to do the job.

  Lulu was OK, for the moment, and jumping down there wasn’t going to help, so Char hurried back to the walkway. The metal grating clanged and shivered when she landed on it. The pile of abandoned flesh looked like a costume in the green light; a forlorn and forgotten Halloween decoration. She knew it wasn’t, but she didn’t want to dispel the optical illusion. Her sword lay only a few feet beyond it.

  The vine stretched through the center of the walkway, large, round, and brown-green. It pulsed and twitched like a muscle contracting and spasming under chlorophyll-tainted skin. It was a disturbing amalgam of flesh and plant.

  Putting the dagger away, Char scooped up her sword, relieved to have it back in her hands. She brought it down hard on the vine. The best relief she could give Lulu would be to bring the monstrosity back here. If she could cut through the trunk before it got here, all the better. She chopped down again. “Paul Bunyan, if you answer prayers, I could use all the help I can get,” she whispered, as she sliced in again, this time at a slight angle to her first cuts, cutting away a wedge of plant-flesh.

  The vine shuddered and flinched away, and the cruel little voice in the back of Char’s mind, the one that most decent people shy away from, cackled gleefully that the damned thing could feel pain. Char hit it again, cutting deeper into the V-shaped wound. The vine writhed, looping away until it hit the walkway railing, but Char followed.

  The walkway rang with a thunderous impact. The business end of the vine had arrived. At first, Char ignored it, fixated on chopping apart the vine. The memory of the pain of being tossed into that vat demanded recompense, and her awareness had tunneled down to killing the cause. It was right in front of her, and it was wounded.

  It came as a surprise to her and the vine monster, both, when she dodged an attack that she hadn’t seen coming. She’d felt it coming a split second before it arrived. Not as the movement of air against the sensitive hairs of her neck, but something harder to explain. It was a knowing, bone deep and certain, that danger was imminent, and from that direction. The movement away from it was instinctual. There was no thought involved; her body just reacted.

  She flowed. She swayed back from the lashing vine, let it pass barely an inch from her face, and brought the sword around to face the virulent yellow fly-trap maw of the vine. Pain and fear and anger congealed into a white hot numbness that wouldn’t let thought through, only action, and she moved with a grace and efficiency she would never have believed possible. She couldn’t pull enough coherent thoughts together to remind herself that she had limits, so she fought without them.

  Dodging a tendril as thick as her thigh, she rolled. Her sword came around and sliced it away in a spray of milky sap that burned where it landed on her skin. Foreknowledge a split-second ahead of the event, let her vault away from two converging tentacles that tried to crush her between them. Her leap brought her back to the wound in the trunk, and she sliced it again as she passed it, whirling around to avoid another lashing tendril.

  The vine was learning her patterns, her tricks. She swayed out of the path of one lashing vine only to put herself into the path of another that she couldn’t avoid. Foreknowledge was great, but it was useless if she wasn’t fast enough to use it. The vine caught her shoulder, slicing it open with a thorned tip. “Thorns? Fuck, when did it get thorns?” She spun away, bringing the sword up in time to block another swipe.

  Lulu was there, but there wasn’t much she could do to help. She clawed and bit at the vine-monster. She dodged the lashing vines and kept them from focusing on Char. She wasn’t doing much damage, but she didn’t stop coming, wouldn’t give up or give ground. Char had to win this fight because Lulu would die trying, otherwise. Pit Bulls just didn’t have any quit in them; they were bred for tenacity, and in that regard, Lulu was a paragon of the breed.

  Char used a foot on the railing to vault over a thrashing, truncated vine stump. Her leap took her towards the open nightmare leaf-maw of the vine. Ice washed through her as she thought she’d made her final, fatal mistake. She twisted in the air, shoving against a reaching tentacle with her foot and changing her trajectory just enough to miss the open maw and its dripping, viscous digestive enzymes. Her sword sliced through the fleshy membrane, carving away one of the vine-tentacles at its base.

  She hadn’t been aiming for the maw, but it had worked out. Her real target was behind it: the injured, half-severed trunk. She’d cut more than halfway through it in hit-and-run slashes and chops. She couldn’t leave it alone to heal; severing it was her best chance to end this fight. She brought her sword down again into the wound, deepening it farther.

  More of the vines were sprouting thorns. Char could see them changing. The transformation wasn’t fast, but it promised to be painful. Her arms and legs were already scratched and bloody from near misses. Two more chops, maybe three, and she could end this, but the vine was not going to make it easy.

  Vines came in from all around and drove her away from the wound, lashing at her with thorny tips or grasping to entangle her limbs. It was all she could do to thread the narrow gaps between them. She paid for her escape with more slices across her back. The maw itself drove down at her, trying to trap her against the grate. It missed, but only just.

  It had to be something to do with the bloodlines that had been awakened in her. She moved with a fluid grace that she never could have imagined before. She was a little faster, a little stronger, and the new danger sense let her use that speed and grace to its best effect. It was more than just physical stats. There was a new instinct for combat, a sense for when to strike and when to melt back. The joy in her new physicality was tainted, though, with confusion and worry, and anger… always anger.

  A dodge, a twist, a slash, and roll… She was past it again, slamming her sword down into the ever-widening gap in the vine. This time, a shudder ran through the whole plant, a stiffening and lashing that spoke of deep damage. She pulled the sword out and slammed it down again, cutting it dangerously close before leaping away again just ahead of the nightmare maw.

  It crashed down where she’d just been standing, but… the vines stopped twitching, and the maw didn’t rise again for another try. It quivered. Then it was still.

  You have killed

  Vasculex Devourer

  Level 24

  *Aethe*** Error!*

  Permissions reverted.

  Experience Gained.

  The last line of the notification flickered. It looked like it started to say something else before it was replaced with the normal message. Char filed that away. It felt important, but she didn’t have the mental bandwidth for it just then.

  She was breathing hard as she limped over to Lulu. The dog’s tail was wagging so hard that her rear end threatened to knock her over. Her front paws were tippy-tapping in excitement, and she wore the biggest doggy-grin Char had ever seen. “Yeah, I’m OK, girl. Glad to see you, too.” Char scritched Lulu’s ears and tried to keep the exuberant dog from drooling all over her.

  Movement behind her pulled her head around, and her sword back up. The severed trunk of the vine was pulling away from the withered remains of the tentacled fly-trap horror. It shushed over the metal of the grating and disappeared into the darkness, withdrawing back to whatever central horror had sprouted it. It left a slime-trail of caustic white sap behind it.

  She touched a tentacle-vine of the severed Devourer and looted it, letting it crumble away to dust.

  You have received:

  [Nature Affinity Stone]

  [Pulsevine Bracers]

  2 gold credits, 14 silver credits

  Her health, nearly full after the mana overload from whatever had happened in the vat, was back down to 48%. Lulu’s wasn’t great either. She put a hand on the dog’s head and fed a little vitality into her, just enough to get her up over 60%. That took Char down to 35%, and she was feeling it. She hurt all over, and the blood loss was making her sleepy.

  She stumbled back to the wall where the valve was. The wall was a nonsensical mosaic of pipes and conduits. The aliens had done what they could to make it look like some sort of inscrutable industrial horror, but they’d missed more cultural cues. Cat-9 cable and PVC piping were running next to outdated iron steam pipes and copper plumbing lines. It didn’t look intimidating; it just looked ridiculous.

  In the center of it all was a bare space of brick around an oversized green-painted pipe with a blue valve wheel. Over the wheel was the word ‘Outflow’, and around it were helpful curved arrows labeled ‘open’ and ‘close.’ It was so contrived that it was almost comical, but Char was too tired to laugh. If anything, she was thankful that she didn’t have to think too hard about what needed to be done.

  She turned the valve wheel to close it.

  You have made progress on quest:

  Something Toxic II

  Valves closed: 1 of 3

  Source Destroyed: 0 of 1

  Exhausted, she put her back to the wall and sank to sit, her knees up before her. Lulu came and leaned against her, but the dog kept her eyes on the darkness beyond the walkway and the pool of green glow. Char had a lot of messages to read, and she needed to meditate. There was still more fighting to do, but it would keep for a few minutes, at least.