The pain at the front of her head wouldn’t quite leave. Karah was just finishing sorting out her tools, discarding stained clothes and folding the clean ones. Vic grimaced when she realised she didn’t recall what Karah had used those tools for. They didn’t seem to be used for surgical operations, they looked like different type of wands used for who knew what.

  She didn’t ask about them even if she wanted to. Karah would find it weird.

  “You ready?” Vic asked redundantly once Karah had finished tidying up. The girl nodded, awkwardly staring her in the eyes before looking away from them. Vic really hoped that after sleeping the glowing eyes would go away.

  Right as they left the cubicle, closing that prison door made of metal bars, Vic heard a priestess spot them and walk poisedly towards them. Vic felt herself crumple up. This was way too much like having an npc abruptly let out an exclamation point before walking to them and making them go on a blasted mandatory sidequest.

  “My lady,” the priestess said, while Vic pointedly was looking away from the priestess, towards Karah, who was herself looking emptily in the air, “His Eminence wishes to speak with you. He is waiting for you over the suspended bridge you walked on to enter this storehouse.”

  “I’m busy…” Vic said, then lowered her voice. “…fucking working,” she said. And spoke a little clearer afterwards. “Can’t he make the trip to me himself?” Vic said. Karah gave her a blank stare.

  There was a short moment of silence.

  “…No, my lady. The disease affecting the incurables would react to his presence,” the priestess said. Vic rubbed her eyes. Fuck. She was tired of this shit. She just wanted to sleep.

  “Sure. What the hell. Let’s take the scenic route,” Victorya said. She smiled back to the priestess.

  The priestess flinched. Vic blinked several times. Oh. Right. The eyes. She pointed her eyes to them and wiggled her fingers at them to add comedic value.

  “That’s… a very recent change after having helped out the sick for a bit too long… I can’t turn it off for now, but it’s not as bad as it sounds” she said to the priestess, who didn’t move. She didn’t lie about the fact that it was normal. It wasn’t. “A good night of sleep will probably fix it. Most times sleep fixes me a bunch. I’ll be fine.”

  “…That must be why his Eminence wishes to speak to you,” she said, like that logic was sound. Vic nearly rolled her eyes. Motherfucker would be of no help and would probably just want to satiate his curiosity if he’d actually felt something had happened. Hopefully it wasn’t the game system’s glitching that he’d… felt. She didn’t know how she’d feel about it if it were the case. If… if… it could be detected, if… whatever this evil god was had actually interacted with her game interface, did it mean that the game system was not just an external window from which she viewed this world, but a part of it that could be messed with by other gods?

  Vic felt that anxious feeling at the pit of her guts. She didn’t know what any of this meant.

  “…Vic?” she heard. She blinked back.

  She was in another corridor. The walls on her right weren’t the cubicle stone ones but made of the bricks of the storehouse. Karah had been asking her that question, just at her side.

  Did she just… space out while walking?

  “Sister Yona was simply asking if you needed another healer to replace me. But you’re going to bed right after talking to his Eminence, isn’t that right?” she said. Vic blinked back. She gulped.

  “I apologize for my enthusiasm,” said Yona, too reverently. She was the priestess who had come to them right before, the one who’d announced that the resident fake god needed to talk. She was lightly bowing, standing behind Karah. “You are a miracle worker by all means, and word of your dedication was being shared in the common rooms. I only… and it might have been overstepping propriety, but I only wished to aid in the making of one of your miracles.”

  “I don’t make miracles,” Vic said, ashes in her mouth, her words coming out more slurred than expected. She frowned deeply. How was that girl so polite? “I’m not… I’m not a saint, I’m not a god, I’m just… a player. I find exploits at best and cheese them. Don’t… Don’t think I have any sort of moral standing. I’m not that. I’m not… I’m not fine. I need sleep.”

  She turned away from them and used the fact that she was out of sight to open a window of the game system. It glitched as she did so, but it still opened. Vic grimaced. She motioned to open her status window to check if she had any worrying statuses. Besides the obvious exhaustion related one, there was nothing like [infected] or [mind-controlled] or anything the likes. She’d… never been mind-controlled before. The puppet god had failed to do that a thousand times, even when she was barely levelled up. Nothing could mind-control her. She’d never doubted that. Was there even a status for that? She angrily bit her thumb between her teeth for a short moment, then put her two arms strictly at her sides. She had to have spaced out during a chunk of the conversation. That’s the only reason why Yona would be so cordial as of now. She’d probably participated in the conversation, but it mustn’t have been memorable. She needed rest. Vic turned back to them.

  “No, to answer you, I don’t need a replacement for Karah. I’ll be resting. Let’s just keep going.”

  Yona and Karah were there, before her.

  Yona nodded. She motioned for them to keep walking straight ahead. Then Karah looked at her too. The two of them just stared, not moving out of the way. Vic stared back.

  Karah seemed a bit awkward.

  “Uhm… Vic, the crane is in the other direction… behind you,” she said.

  Vic gulped down.

  “Right,” Vic said. She turned back to where she was headed. The two girls didn’t walk next to her. They walked behind her. Vic felt the front of her head ache again. The pain came from the back of her mouth. Her vision was blurring.

  She reached the elevator. It was the same one she’d used to come down before. Karah motioned to crank the lever down. After she did so, Vic stared at the unmoving lift as it stayed in place and didn’t come down.

  She stared back at Karah, then at Yona, who looked both as puzzled as one another.

  “The elevator’s not working, my lady” Yona stated blandly. “It worked just… fine an hour ago.”

  “There’s another way through the corridors. It would just be another detour, Vic,” Karah said gently. Couldn’t Vic just climb up there? She’d done that before. Would it be too rude to leave those two behind? Vic sighed and stared at the wall. Yona said then something about the energy source of the elevator and Karah replied sharply.

  The runic construct was right there, within the wall. She could feel it, but it wasn’t working like before. The flow was… wrong, sort of circular in a place where it should just be going straight ahead, up towards where the crane was. She absent-mindedly heard Karah and Yona start bickering. Vic slowly tilted her head. The words became muffled, like spoken through water. Something was off. She gently put her hands against the wall. Her throat was getting dryer. Her vision blurred a little more in its centre.

  Fuck it.

  Her shadow armoured claws dug in the mortar in one swift move. She pummelled the weak point of the wall and tore out a huge clump of bricks. She barely registered any yelps or yells behind her nor anything that was spoken.

  The runic construct was in full view. She could see it clearly. There was a dark pink ooze bursting out of its extremely numerous thin runic lines, some jelly like substance making bulbous blobs out of it. It turned to a glowing orange beneath her very eyes.

  Vic laughed.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “FUCKING GREAT,” she said. She turned back to the apprentice priestesses. Vic smiled toothily. “It’s in your walls. You’ve got the jelly poop monster in your freaking walls.” She chuckled. Oh. Oh they both looked like they were shitting bricks right now. “You know what? I can’t help you. Not anymore, fuck it. I’ll burn the whole building down if I’m tasked with dealing this. This is out of my so called expertise.”

  Vic looked abruptly right behind her, just in case they’d been staring at her because the monster was right there, but it wasn’t the case. The jelly had just turned orange all over its exposed sides It still seemed pinkish in its innards. She looked back at them.

  The terror that had first been on Karah’s face looked less intense. Ha, maybe Vic taking this jokingly had actually helped.

  “Couldn’t you… use your purifying needle to purify the mana construct?” Karah said.

  Vic blinked back a few times. She felt stupid. She didn’t reply immediately, but she had to concede the point.

  “Yeah. I guess. I guess that could work,” she said.

  __

  When had the governor gotten here? He was talking to Karah and the other girl right as Vic finished up one of the last three orange clumps that were currently visible.

  She sniffled it. The smell was indescribable. More like barely perceptible. Vic blinked. Oh right. She had her shadow armour on. She couldn’t smell stuff right now. The governor commented on the fact that the room where the generator was did not have any visible traces of the monster’s substance.

  “Oh, there was access to this piece of machinery- uh, of runechinery in another room?” she asked, a bit sidetracked while “purifying” the second to last bulbous orange pus. Yeah it was. This whole thing was pus, she’d decided.

  “…Yes, my lady. You broke into it from the back,” he said.

  “It’s not broken,” Vic said. “I barely dented it when I removed some of those bricks.”

  “…As you say, my lady,” he said, and Vic frowned. “But you were right to do so anyway. There is an intelligent being at work, hiding its tracks. All runeworks in the vicinity of the storehouses are going to be unearthed.”

  “That’s gonna have dreadful results,” Vic said, and looked back at him. He warily looked back at her. Oh. Right. She’d gotten used to that feeling of crawling ants over her eyes. There was nothing to be done about them. This was like having a constant 1d4 intimidation buff in all social interactions no matter what she intended. Behated sparkly eyes. Maybe she should at least check herself out in a mirror, to see what she saw there.

  “Just so you know I can sense them pretty easily I think,” she said.

  “Vic. Please,” Karah said. “You’d promise to rest. You can leave it to the priesthood. You can trust in them. You’re not… in capacity to do any of that right now. We talked about this.”

  “I guess you’re right…” Vic said. She didn’t have to find the locations of the different rune infections. She stared at the last bulbous blob of pus left. It turned to a golden tint and started slightly shining. Vic blinked.

  She immediately shoved her magic pinprick into it and saw it deflate in no time while losing its previous colour. Yeah take that, loser. It was quickly gone, making a pathetic “poof” before wilting away. Sucker.

  “I’m half-tempted to just go to sleep right now. Your god can wait, haha,” she said. Surely if she could accept to postpone this work, Alberon could accept that he wasn’t very high in her list of priorities.

  She sighed a little, breathing in and out to relax. She frowned. The fingers of her hand that weren’t holding the pinprick were slightly shaking. The hairs of that arm slowly rose.

  Behind her, on her right, at her eye level.

  Opposite to where Karah and Yona and the governor were.

  There was a presence. A warm one. The corners of her vision swam in bleak starkness.

  She didn’t want to look. She stopped moving. She tensed up.

  But she wasn’t a coward. She snapped her head there, to that empty corridor. She caught a light motion, thirty metres from where she was. Right where a prison door was open, at the fifth cubicle, there had been the motion like a peeking head that had returned to hide away.

  Vic stared uninterruptedly. It slowly returned. She saw the darkened head, haloed by the light of a torch behind it, peek again. That person was standing, staring back from afar. The mouth on that face was opening slightly, before closing, before opening again, unheard words meaning nothing at all. Vic’s vision finally stopped swimming, and she saw that their eyes were fully black.

  No. The person had blinked. They weren’t fully black. There were tiny eyes within it. There were eyes within the eyes. Those eyes were tiny warm embers, far away and welcoming.

  Vic rainbow blasted it.

  The plasma beam arced from her hands.

  She was shaken up by someone screaming. Karah woke her up, trying to hold her despite the shadow armour. The raucous noise of the plasma splattering over the corridor was strikingly brutal. She stared at the burning plasma melting in the ground.

  “There-there was,” she immediately said, trying to explain. “Something’s not right. There’s. There’s the… the…” she pointed, but there was no one standing at the door where that silhouette had been. No one had been in that corridor.

  “Vic…” Karah said. “Vic!”

  Vic didn’t feel right. She wasn’t right.

  “I can’t sleep,” she suddenly said. Something became cold within her guts. Yes. Yes, she couldn’t go to bed. That didn’t feel just right, it felt true. “…I mustn’t.”

  “No, Vic, please, please just go rest. You need it. Don’t hurt yourself. That won’t bring anyone back. You- you can hurt people if you’re not well-rested. Please,” she said.

  “I can’t,” she said, and she chuckled. “Can’t go to bed.” Her voice sounded unhinged, even to herself.

  Vic brought a hand up to her face. Something was wrong with her awareness of everything. The plasma beam… it… it hadn’t hit anyone. That had to mean that the evil deity didn’t have full control of her actions, nor even its placement in her lapses of awareness. Why would it not choose to appear near people to have her kill them? That would create so much chaos. Her fingers tensed.

  But it still meant that she couldn’t fully trust what she perceived. She stared at her latest notifications, but nothing new was amiss. Did it include the game system? Could she trust her perception of it? Was there anything that she could trust?

  Vic heard Karah whisper to someone else that she was doing empty gestures in the air.

  Vic looked back at them. It was just the governor and Karah. Yona was gone.

  “Where’s Yona?” Vic asked. She must have been real, right?

  “I sent her to explain the situation to his Eminence as magic communications are currently failing,” he said, pointing at his ear, giving her a stern look. Vic felt her fingers clench. He pointedly wasn’t looking behind her, where the plasma remnants remained. “My lady, you need to rest. It’s not a matter of-”

  “Sure, no problem,” she said, and the governor blinked at her, his opened mouth closing down. “At the condition that that anti-sleeping potion you spoke to me before is brought to me. Antekellum or something. I won’t drink it, I swear, but it’s important I have it on hand just in case,” she explained.

  She was going to drink that as soon as they gave it to her.

  “Please, I swear. It’s just for my peace of mind,” she lied.

  The governor sighed, but then nodded.

  “Youth…” he said to Karah. “Please ensure she stays put for the time being. She’s more likely to listen to you.” He then looked at Vic straight up. “Do not run off to heal more people. I’ll be back very shortly.”

  Vic blinked, and saw the governor stepping back towards them, holding a vial containing a potion in one hand. Karah was trying to smile to her. They weren’t in the same position as before. They were several more metres away from the crane and the hole in the wall. A hand was over Vic’s shoulder, or was trying to be there at least. Another hand was trying to be against her arm. It was Karah’s hands. Her layers of shadow armour were still there. She jerked a little. Oh. She shouldn’t remove them at any cost. This was the only actual barrier between her and whatever fucked up thing that deity was doing.

  The governor spoke to Karah. Vic stared at them both.

  Was she asleep or not? How could she check that she was yes or no… asleep? To read words. She had to read words. If they were comprehensible, that meant that she was awake. She opened her notifications, and they flashed abruptly. A couple piled together. The very last one warned her to flee. “Abscond”.

  She grinded her teeth. She seethed quietly. Was there anything to do? They were going to think that she was paranoiac.

  How did she make them all understand that the zombies were going to zombie around? How did she make them understand that something terrible was about to happen?

  “Hey, everyone,” she said quietly, whispering. They both turned to stare at her. Terrific audience. Alright. Talking intensely had worked to catch their attention at least. “That evil deity is trying to take over my mind to maximise damage, probably,” she calmly said, taking the vial out of the governor’s hands in one smooth movement. “That’s why I mustn’t fall asleep. Secondly, the moment it realises I’m not going to sleep, I’m pretty sure it’s going to attack, somehow, some way.”

  The governor stared back.

  “Are you… are you sure, my lady?” he said. Things felt quiet. But it looked like… there was trust, there. Karah seemed to believe her. There was trust. Good.

  “I think it can hear through the incurables. I think. I am not sure,” she admitted. She stared back at Karah. She needed to tell her to leave. “It’s not gotten a proper grip on me yet. But it’s still very fucking bad right now. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the remaining sick…” she said. She faltered a little. No. Honesty wouldn’t do her any good there. Being vague would work better, probably.

  “…But I think there was a reason as to why I felt I had to heal as many as I could before that… thing happens.”

  The hollow sensation in her chest deepened again.

  Ah. Impending doom. That’s what she’d been feeling.

  That’s what she was feeling.

  And suddenly, the others also seemed to understand it. Much more than that, they seemed to share the feeling now.

  “Victorya, are you not coming?” Alberon said outloud, from above, a hand rested against the handrail, right next to the crane.

  He was not fucking helping, was he?

  “Al… alright, what must we do?” Karah said quietly.

  Vic blinked several times.

  “I’ve already gotten the anti-sleeping potion. I… should probably drink it now. I don’t know… Afterwards. I don’t know.”

  “Let’s get you to his Eminence, first”, the governor said, walking on. No. No, that wasn’t a good idea. She didn’t know why, but she just… knew. What was going on?

  “HEY!” she yelled, looking at Alberon. “I think someone’s really going to mind-control me this time around! Alberon! You better prepare!”

  Alberon stared back down without a word.

  Damn.

  Damn, no, she refused. She actually refused to get mind-controlled. She would not allow that reality to exist. She wouldn’t be helped. She wouldn’t need him. Over her dead body.

  She bit on the cork of the vial and spewed it out, drinking the potion in one large gulp. A sensation like deranged electricity spread through all her limbs.

  Vic yelled with the full air of her lungs.

  “AND YOU STUPID ZOMBIE ILLNESS, you’re not going to get me,” she said, staring at the cubicles. “You’re not. I know what you’re doing. I fucking see through you, and you’re paper-thin. I see you for what you really are, you pathetic nothing-burger. Imagine needing to overtake someone else’s mind to do your own dirty job. That’s so PATHETICALLY powerless. Imagine being so weak that you can’t defeat this piss ass god over there,” she said, and vaguely motioned above to where Alberon was, “without the help of someone actually powerful, which is me! Honestly, I can’t actually believe that you fooled me into thinking you carried any threat what’s so ever all on your own. I really believed you were powerful, but turns out you’re weak enough to need others. Imagine that. Such a weak, pathetic god that you are. You can’t even smite your enemies properly on your own! I’d call you impotent, but considering you’re using an illness to pressure-cook that weak god over there while using puny strategies to get the best of him, that’d just be stating the obvious, wouldn’t it? And I really dislike stating the obvious, but I think I will make an exception just for you, because you don’t deserve any better. You are weak. No. Wait. You’re a coward. A spineless, pointless, forgettable coward. And case in point, you’re barely even there.”

  The sensation of ants crawling around her eyes intensified.

  And that’s when she heard a soft groan from the closest cubicle.