The spectral sky swallows the very heaven. The caravan trundled forward, wheels creaking beneath the weight of goods, the discombobulation, and the silent, torturous feeling of unease. Her name lingered in the dust, and their footsteps kicked up in the empty silence that superseded the lighthearted mood of old. Depressing.

  Thankfully, Assert’s absence was inconsequential over the next few days. Without any complications, the caravan trudged through the final stretch of the swamp to see a magnificent, snow-swept mountain range, that expanded for miles along the coast.

  The Seashine Mountains rose starkly against the horizon, their colossal height casting a shadow over the coastline below. Despite their name, there is little brilliance in this accursed, lifeless place—only the pale reflection of the sea’s light bouncing off barren rock. The land is stripped of life save for the occasional, tenacious Otherworld mold that would fester on the dead bodies of any unfortunate fowl that would fall onto the rocks. Winds, howling, speed past and over crags and boulders, echoing through the countless caves that riddle the mountainsides like hollow trails left behind by massive worms of old. A single well-trodden trail goes through the ranges, used for decades by many, and it’s the route the caravan will traverse.

  “Thanks to this road, we should be able to cross the mountains quite efficiently,” Cedric explains as he points out the route on the map.

  The party and Cedric are in a medium-sized tent, which is relatively cramped for three humans and a honey badger. Using a cut branch as a pointer, Cedric drones passionately about his meticulously thought-out plan, labeled precisely on the coastal map spread vertically on a board. Durand interrupts him.

  “Shorter than the swamp?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it won’t take 7 chapters?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” he dismisses.

  Cenvin raises his hand. “So if there’s nothing in these mountains, specifically nothing to eat, then why weren’t we conserving our rations?”

  “Good question! You see, the Royalty, Queen Bethaza, had personally experienced the treacherous trails of the mounts. After the war, she claimed the throne and bestowed a blessing on travelers and merchants like us. Recruiting what was left of the Dwarven druids, she grew a magical fruit tree in the middle of the route to provide sustenance.”

  Blinking in slight surprise, Lenny scratches his head and speaks.

  “Dwarven…druids? Aren’t they all dead, massacred by Starmetal Orions?”

  “A few escaped persecution by working for Shadow’s Edge. What of them now, well, are confidential secrets.”

  He lowers his furry head thoughtfully. Seeing no more questions from the party, Cedric waves them away and turns back to his machinations.

  A merchant bursts through the curtains and almost crashes into Cenvin.

  Taking a massive, panicked breath, he enters an expeditious rant: “Thecaravanisunderattackthere’saninvisiblemonsterweneedhelpwehavealreadylosttwo—”

  Being the only one succeeding in his Insight check to understand the merchant’s speech, Lenny turns pale, picks up Rikki, and dashes out of the tent. Thankfully, you, the readers, don’t have to roll!

  “Calm down, my friend, and please tell us slowly this time,” Cedric soothes—

  “WE ARE BEING ATTACKED!” The merchant shrills before collapsing, clutching his knee. “It hurts! I was only grazed, can’t imagine what the others felt like…”

  “Say no more!” Durand cries heroically. “We got this!”

  Cenvin pauses as the merchant adds, “If only Assert were here!”

  He cranks his head around to see the shriveled, hollow, and pitiful creature of pure disgust sprawled on the floor, Cedric trying to comfort it. He instinctively draws Shimmerim, but he regains control of himself before he does. Shaking the illusion away, he follows Durand out of the tent.

  To see the caravan in utter calamity!

  Serpentine tentacles erupt from the ground in chaotic bursts, stretching up to three meters tall. Their slick, adhesive surfaces grope blindly for anything within reach, with an eerie preference for humans. Once they find their prey, they lurch for the earth, dragging their captive underneath instantly. Several merchants have already vanished into the suffocating muck, their muffled screams snuffed out by the shifting mud and soil. Others scramble desperately onto their wagons, seeking any refuge from the relentless grasp of the writhing appendages.

  The party hesitates briefly before gritting their teeth to charge into battle. In 5 seconds, two tendrils have already been cut down.

  “What are you hacking at? Air? Hurry up and help us!” One of the merchants call. “Get off the ground or you’ll get pulled under!”

  “Knucklehead! You can’t see the tendrils, so shut up and let us do our jobs!” Cenvin shouts back.

  “He makes a valid point for once,” Lenny points out as a new tendril burst from the ground. It swipes at Durand, who ducks in time. Wiping the sweat off his face, Durand mutters something unintelligible.

  “Say that again?”

  “These tendrils feel familiar.”

  Cenvin pierces it with a good rapier stab, and it shrivels down to the ground.

  “How so?”

  “Remember Chapter 5, when something dragged our food into the dirt? I feel like that thing has grown since we last encountered it. That was before we met you, Lenny, funnily enough.”

  “Oh yeah, it exposed my ass.”

  “I thought it was a one-shot monster! How much foreshadowing did Diem put back then?”

  Lenny breaks into the conversation.

  “Sorry to interfere, my friends, but we have a bit of an… octo-problem on our hands.”

  …

  No one’s laughing. This is awkward. Let’s move on.

  Where were we before you forgot about the situation and started chatting away? Oh yeah, you were getting jumped by scary tentacles.

  “I’ll try to burrow with my ability to see what’s controlling them!” Durand cries.

  Are you sure?

  “Yes!”

  Absolutely sure?

  “Yes!”

  Positive—with finality— is that your final choice?

  “Yes!”

  Okay, you evaporate the dirt before you go under the tendrils. You go deeper and deeper, and the dirt above you begins to solidify. Soon, you will be suffocated in your hole. Unless, of course, you resurface.

  “I roll an Arcana check to boost my ability, and I keep going deeper! I’m finding out the truth!”

  Alrighty, roll. DC is 25–

  “Nat 20!”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  DAMN! You go deeper and deeper and faster and faster. But you keep accelerating. Finally, it almost feels like you are falling. However, you still haven’t reached the tendrils yet, and you’re tired out.

  “Con saving throw?”

  Yeah, go ahead. DC is 30, with disadvantage.

  “Nat 20… and rolling again…”

  I swear, if it’s nat 20 again, I’m going to–

  “You don’t wanna hear this… NAT 20!”

  WHAT THE HELL ARE THE GODDAMN ODDS?!? I AM GOING TO STRIKE YOU DOWN, YOU HEAR? I’M RETCONNING THIS! THIS ISN’T CANON! YOU’RE NOT GONNA FIND OUT THE TRUTH BEFORE THE FINAL BOSS FIGHT!

  “This thing’s the final boss?”

  Oops, spoiled that. I’ll put a spoiler alert before the chapter then. Uhh, I concede. Durand, your sheer luck and determination are astonishing. This is the type of stuff Cenvin would pull. Fine, you wanna find out the truth behind this random Otherworld entity?

  “Heh, Cenvin could never… I have the superior Worldview, it seems. Yeah, I would like to know.”

  A tentacle bores through the rocks and stabs Durand. With no room to dodge, he is shoved through all the stone and dirt he had dug through to get this deep, breaking the surface and launching him into the air. He falls to the ground with a crushing “oof.”

  “I’m going to have to use my ability!” Shouts Cenvin.

  Durand blocks him with his arm.

  “Don’t!”

  Cenvin furiously pokes at the nearby tendril with his rapier’s reaching properties.

  “My primary usefulness here is carried by my Shimmerim, that’s boring! I want to contribute!”

  “You’re a rogue, alright? Your use is to sneak around and steal stuff! Your class isn’t designed to be excellent at open combat!”

  A tendril creeps up behind them. With a sudden lurch, it wraps the two like a lasso, and it begins dragging them underground. They desperately flail to no avail.

  “Lenny! Help us! Use your Glow, or Wild Shape, or anything!” Durand pleads.

  Focusing his concentration on his ability, he sends three fist-sized orbs of light flying into the retreating tendril. It convulses as if it’s burned. He launches two more into it. Durand and Cenvin are tossed away as the tendril crawls into the mud. Cenvin scrambles to get up.

  “Thanks, Len-”

  Smash!

  A small tendril has penetrated Lenny’s chest. Blood splatters across Cenvin’s horrified face. Durand takes out the tendril with a well-aimed arrow. Lenny collapses, his fur stained crimson, his breath light and fading.

  Cenvin screams into his ear.

  “Lenny! Transform with Wild Shape to gain health! C’mon!”

  Lenny doesn’t respond. He coughs up some more frothy blood.

  “Are you with us? Are you listening? Wild Shape!”

  “Damn it!” Durand rushes forward with a fistful of Goodberry, which he shoves into Lenny’s open, bloody mouth. The bleeding slows down.

  “I’ll roll Medicine while you cover me!” He orders Cenvin, who affirms and turns to skewer a sliding tendril.

  “17!”

  Success!

  Lenny takes Durand’s hand and stands. Then he is slammed against a tree.

  “Why didn’t you use Wild Shape!?” Durand spits.

  Avoiding eye contact, he whispers, “I’m afraid.”

  “Do you have PTSD or something?”

  “M-maybe.”

  “Uh, guys, I need help! These things are endless!”

  “C’mon, Lenny. Let’s relieve Cenvin of some pressure, and then we can plan from there.”

  They charge down some tendrils and quickly climb on top of an empty wagon. The situation around them has temporarily stabilized. Most merchants, including Cedric, had gotten on their wagons. The tendrils flail around, looking for any stragglers.

  “I don’t know how we can kill this, there’s infinite,” Cenvin sighs. “Best we can do is to lure it away.”

  “With what? It seems to be only interested in humans,” Durand questions.

  “I’m wondering… do dead bodies count?”

  Durand and Lenny instantly turn pale as if they’ve just heard an unholy sentence.

  “We can go dig her up and use her as bait to lead it away,” Durand replies hastily. They both turn to leave.

  “Pause!” Cenvin catches up. “You don’t know where she’s buried. We all go together.”

  Durand glances at Lenny, who shrugs as if saying: Improvise.

  He turns back to Cenvin.

  “Just tell us where it’s located, and we can get there quickly. You need to stay behind and protect the merchants.”

  “No! I’m coming with you. I’m not an encumbrance, I swear!”

  “Ugh… you can come, but be sure you’re useful.”

  “Can I turn around now?”

  Durand steps out of the hole with Lenny, wiping dirt off his hand, “Keep looking for any threats. You’re doing great!”

  “Okay,” Cenvin happily acknowledges.

  Stuffing the decomposing goblin’s body into a bag, Lenny hauls it out of the empty grave.

  “We got the body. Now, let’s go put it back to the village. Hopefully, the creature will go for it instead of grasping at straws.”

  They begin striding back to the caravan. Along the way, Cenvin gasps something unintelligible. Sprinting alongside him without much effort, Durand and Lenny try to ignore him.

  “I’ve been thinking– gasp– that we might need to give the monster a bit more bait for it to leave us.”

  “What’s your idea? Sacrifice some merchants? Never!”

  Tears fall freely from Cenvin’s eyes as he speaks his conclusion.

  “We sacrifice the boys from the village. They’re side characters, they’re worthless.”

  “You seem to have a very… liberal view on NPCs. Don’t you like Brett? Shyn? Even Cedric?”

  “They’re good people, but most others are quite hard to get attached to. No offense, Diem.”

  Offense taken.

  “Right. Anyway, I’m sure there won’t be any objections?”

  “Nope. Now, let’s think of how we should break this to them…”

  The waterfall of tears melts into the mud as Cenvin holds the boy firmly, his shivering back towards a massive writhing tendril.

  “I’M SORRY! YOU’RE GOING TO BE FINE! JUST… RUN BACK TO YOUR VILLAGE! WE WILL MAKE SURE YOU WON’T DI– who am I kidding?!”

  He collapses before the petrified boy, sobbing. “You’re going to die. A horrible death underground, drowned by dirt and rock.”

  The boy doesn’t reply. The party silently watches the scene unfold from a polite distance. The other boys had already been pulled under, but they’ve made most of the distance to the village, where “Assert” is buried.

  “Please… believe me when I tell you… that the death will be quicker at the village if that’s some comfort to you. There will be more tendrils there, so maybe you’ll get ripped apart before you drown… who knows!”

  “Let him go. He’s just an NPC, after all, right?” Lenny sarcastically smirks.

  The boy mechanically shakes himself free from Cenvin’s grasp and sprints towards the distant village. Cenvin covers his face. Durand taps him on the shoulder.

  “Let’s go back. This ordeal is over.”

  Cedric stops the party as they walk through the ruined caravan.

  “Thanks for stopping that… invisible thing! We are reorganizing and confirming our losses. We might have to stay here for a few days. Cheer up, what’s wrong?”

  “I just sent four boys to their deaths for the benefit of us, the main characters who are supposed to have plot armor.”

  “Huh?” Cedric turns his head like a confused kitten.

  “You won’t understand,” Durand adds darkly.

  On the side, Lenny seems to be in a psychotic state of uncontrollable giggling. He’s reliving his memories of death and trauma.

  “I have something for you, Cenvin, that might cheer you up,” Cedric smiles.

  He places a metal trinket into his hand. The trinket consists of a blocky body with a thin rod attached to it. The ambient blue hue suggests it consists of Starmetal.

  “Assert left this to me. A Worldview Tuner. She was originally planning to give it to you directly, before, ahem, the ‘incident.’ She told me this would effectively fine-tune your Worldview. Just stick the tip of the rod against your temple, and activate your ability. This might help with your chronic coma condition every time you use your ability, Assert said, and she suspected it to be related to your Worldview,” Cedric shakes his head in shame. “She wanted to give this to you ever since she told you about Worldview. She just didn’t know… the best way to give.”

  “Cenvin, are you alright?” Durand asks sympathetically.

  Prodding the rod vehemently against his temple, his maniacal, traumatized smile etched into his face, he activates the Tuner without hesitation.