“MOVE!”

  I turn and shove Clutter out of the room. Thousands of gouges appear on the walls, floor, and ceiling not a moment after my feet leave the threshold–but not the rest of me. Pain blossoms down my back mixed with immediate sticky wetness, continuing down the backs of my thighs and just up to the bottom of my neck. A cry of pain rips free from my chest, but my eyes are focused with a surge of adrenaline.

  Clutter looks like he’s about to hyperventillate and pass out. “What’s happening?! Why’s the room attacking us?!”

  “It isn’t.” I clench my teeth as I run with all my might down the hallway. “Something in the room is.”

  Horrible screeching, like a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards, accompanies a stain in my awareness leaving the room. Not magic–and not anything real–just a… colourless, formless splotch overlaid on top of everything else like a translucent sticker. I swallow hard as the thing lurches towards us, leaving masses of scratches along the almost impervious material of the hallway.

  Somehow, it doesn’t just keep pace with us. The scratches grow closer by the second. Our only saving grace is that it took a few seconds to actually get out of the room, or else it’d already be on top of us.

  “Pearl!”

  She clenches her fists as she stares at the stain. “I’m trying! But I don’t know what I’m supposed to be trying for!”

  I clench my teeth and push my legs as hard as they can go. Clutter yelps as I surge past him, then leans down and pushes past his limit with a terrified howl. He just barely keeps my pace, and even though he’s panting so hard his throat will be raw in minutes, it seems like he’ll be able to keep it up.

  “Can you attack it?!” He huffs through the exertion. “It has to actually exist, right? And if it doesn’t, then you should be able to purify it!”

  My awareness screams at me that it won’t work. But it’s worth wasting a few coins just to make sure. I summon one of each of my combat spells–purification, shield, and projectile–and slip them between my fingers without slowing down at all. Since it’d be the best if it actually worked, I drop the projectile at my feet and push the shortest lasting, strongest projectile I can manage into it.

  Clutter steps over it half a second later. I bite my tongue to focus, and the taste of iron spreads through my mouth in an instant. One second passes. Then two. The stain grows ever closer with each passing heartbeat. Three seconds. Four. Then five, six, seven and eight. On second nine, the stain finally passes over my projectile. My awareness screams as something rips into it, tearing at the coin’s surface as easily as a chainsaw through whipped cream.

  But it doesn’t destroy the coin like Ashmaw did. The spell inside bursts free as its host is sliced to ribbons, and for a moment, destruction exists inside of the stain. Or, more accurately, the destruction is covered by the stain. It does as much damage to it as a bomb to a shadow, and the stain doesn't even react. No anger, no pain, and no speed up or slow down.

  “Damn it.” I hiss as the projectile winks out. “That was a damn five Worth projectile and it did jack shit.”

  “It didn’t do anything?!” Clutter wails. “Teleport us out! We don’t have to fight this thing! I don’t want to die!”

  Pearl vigorously shakes her head. “Whatever you do, do not do that. We have no idea if this thing is going to keep chasing you until some objective is met, and if it is, teleporting back to the tower would just delay the inevitable. We need to find out how you’re supposed to ‘prove yourself’ like the quest said.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” I ask seriously. “Are the side objectives not scaled to clearance level? Because this feels infinitely deadlier than anything we’ve seen so far!”

  Clutter gulps. “How do we do what?”

  “We… actually, wait a second.” Pearl grunts, then pops her head out of her shell. “Think, you two. If this little side-thing isn’t completely stupid, then something we did to actually get here should tell us how to deal with it.”

  “That makes sense!” Clutter cries. “I can barely think right now, though, sorry! My brain’s way too scared!”

  I shake my head. My brain’s not thinking as clearly as I want it to, either; it’s like there’s a veil of adrenaline that every thought has to push through to actually be… well… thought. It’s definitely my brain protecting me from the shock of all the wounds on my back, but it’s making it really hard to look at this normally.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Okay. Damn. I…” I swallow hard and close my eyes to focus. “I got this. The first thing we saw from this subquest is… the gouge on the wall. Then we broke through the wall, activated a plate, and followed the line it made until we found another scratch. After that… we did the same thing again, and followed a really slow line into another room. Am I forgetting something?”

  Pearl frowns. “I feel like you are. Was there anything important that the plastic construct told us?”

  “Nope!” Clutter cuts in. “Nothing that helps at all. The quest censored pretty much everything.”

  True. I can’t remember much of anything that’d be applicable here, unless the ‘event’ the construct alluded to is related to the stain. Even if it is, that doesn’t give us any help with this thing. What… mrg, I feel like I’m forgetting something important. Scratch. Plate. Follow the line. Another scratch. Another plate. Then… another slow line.

  “That’s gotta be it.” I grin and try to turn to Pearl, but since she’s half in her shell, she just turns with me. “You copied down the path the line took to get to the other door. There has to be somewhere we can use that pattern.”

  “In a hallway that’s only ever been straight?” Pearl asks. “If we find something like… a sign, or a fork in the hallway, then I’m all for giving it a shot. But I don’t see anything like that, and my awareness isn’t showing anything more.”

  “Okay, well… what if… the directions on there are telling us to go up or down? Like, if we flip it ninety degrees, then what would the path look like?”

  Pearl shakes her head. “No. We don’t have time to wait for the doors to form, and we don’t know if the stain can just go through the floors. It has to be a solution that’s feasible with the cards the quest dealt us, and with abilities that are feasible for pretty much any class to have.”

  My awareness flickers. Something in the stain lurches sideways, and for a split second, the thing crawls up the wall for seemingly no reason. Scratches etch into the wall effortlessly, and then it just slides back down to the floor a second later for equally no reason. There’s no protrusions, no signs, no nothing that could’ve forced it to move. But it did. So… why?

  Before I can get too introspective, the thing twitches, stretches, and grows a good twelve inches in all directions that pop into existence in a flurry of gouges. It only eats up our lead by a fraction of a second, but now it can almost touch both walls from where it sits on the center of the floor. In minutes, combined with how it’s still accelerating, we’ll be absolutely trapped.

  “Did it sliding up the wall make it grow? How the hell is that possible?” I ask in disbelief.

  “I couldn't tell you.” Pearl responds with a frown. “Logic would say it took in enough mass to grow, but it’s been gouging out material for a while now. It should’ve grown a whole lot, not just after it climbed up the wall.”

  Clutter coughs. It’s dry, but he doesn’t stumble at all. Not sure how long that’s going to last.

  “Then I don’t have a damn clue.” I say as I flick purification at the stain. It only takes six seconds for the thing to hit it, and when it bursts, the thing doesn't even flinch. “And that doesn’t work either. Damn it, what the hell are we supposed to do?”

  There is something I’m forgetting. I just know there is. But… what? We followed the line, activated some plates, and went into the room. That’s all we did that was actually involved with the sub-quest. So… wait. My Class Card. It wasn’t actually involved with the quest, but the plastic paindne appeared pretty much exactly how the leeches did–out of nothing. And the stain didn’t appear until all the smoky magic disappeared from the room.

  I hold up my shield coin and nod to myself. If this doesn’t work, I’ve got one last thing I can think of–and if that doesn’t work, we teleport back to the tower and use the time we’ve got to think up a new plan. I drop the shield at my feet, and the moment Clutter steps over it, I flare it into the most durable shield I can manage that’ll still cover the entire hallway. The damn thing creates an airtight seal on all sides–if this doesn’t stop it, then no walls will.

  The stain encroaches on my shield within seconds. It batters up against it for a heartbeat, and I dare to hope that it’ll actually hold. Then it starts to climb the shield, painting it in a sickly, translucent grey. Damage racks up at an increasing rate as more of it touches my magic, and before it can climb a quarter of the way up, my shield shatters into nothing. The moment it does, the stain simply appears on the ground exactly where it would’ve been if I hadn’t even thrown down a shield in the first place.

  “No dice. But for a second, it looked like it was working.” I grimace and raise my left hand. “Maybe if my shield was five times as strong, it could’ve held out long enough. Clutter, get ready to dodge towards your closest wall!”

  He startles in surprise, but nods anyway as his tongue lolls from his mouth. With his understanding confirmed, I focus on my awareness and summon my Class Card–which is already open to my map tab, even though I haven’t done anything. I blink in surprise and stare down at it for a split second, and… the map looks wrong. Completely wrong.

  Instead of the bird’s eye view of the entire place, it’s a zoomed in view of the hallways. Except it isn’t the hallways–it’s a perfect grid, and there’s a legend right next to one of the lines that says each ‘segment’ is a quarter of a mile. There’s another new thing on the top left of the map as well–two circles made of arrows, one pointing to the left and the other to the right–with the number ‘90’ inside of them.

  I reach up to tap on one of them, but my awareness flares before I can get my finger in place. “Clutter! Now!”

  He jumps to the right. I jump to the left. My legs burn from the exertion of jumping, landing, and trying to keep the exact same pace all in a very short window. Clutter yelps and stumbles. It takes him less than two seconds to get back up to speed, but it halves the distance between him and the stain.

  His eyes widen in pure terror as he looks over his shoulder. “I’m not fast enough!”

  Three plastic projectiles whizz through the places we were just standing. I turn to look, even though my awareness can feel it, as the plastic leeches completely miss us and soar into the space overtaken by the stain.