Chương 35: Alice au Pays des Horreurs

They fought their way to the entrance and found it sealed. Really sealed. The gap in the rock where the daylight should have been was a thick grey curtain of webbing, thick like a wall, and beyond it Alice could see the greyed-out suggestion of the outside world, the trees, the mist rolling in, and she gave the webbing a hard tug with both hands and it didn't so much as flex, didn't give at all, it was like she was trying to bounce on a trampoline that had been mounted directly to the rock.

She knew, distantly, that there should be a joke here. She had picked up on the rhythm of them already, the two of them, in twelve hours she had learned the pattern: this was where Ben said something, where Ben went of course the exit is blocked, of course it is, the system reads one dungeon escape scenario and now we are trapped, this is so cliché, and Maddy told him to shut up, and it made the situation survivable for a second. Ben didn't say something. She looked at him.

He was at the webbing, hand pressed flat to the middle of it, studying it maybe, and he wasn't saying anything. His usual temperament was gone, sucked back someplace behind glass.

She knew this particular look, knew it from across many small tables, and she knew what it meant, which was that the body was still there but the person inside it was curled back an inch behind their own eyes for some reason, that this was too much for them and they needed to be reassured, needed grounding and simple words, and she went to stand beside him prepared to say all of it, even prepared to offer the five things she could see, but instead she found herself unable to get it out, unable to perform the usual stuff she always could.

She was just as bad.

"Move," Maddy said. Ben looked at her.

"Move, move, move."" Maddy, what are you—" She already had the little glass vial of potion in her hand, pale neon-green liquid sloshing around inside, fizzy and idiotic and bright. Ben got out of the way, because Maddy had the face of a woman who was about to make a problem much bigger than it needed to be. She downed the potion, made a face, made a little gagging noise, then pointed two fingers at the sealed entrance. She drank it again, and again, and again, and again, until her spear was glowing with light.

"Hyperbeam." Yellow, then white, then a violent blue-white fork of electricity leapt from the end of her spear and hit the webbing dead on, sending the entire cave flying with light, sending shadows leaping and twisting across the walls in great dramatic shapes, and Alice dropped to her knees, and so did Ben, one hand over his face. Maddy planted her feet and held the beam steady, teeth clenched, arm shaking, sparks flying from the webbing, the air tasted of burnt sugar. When it died, the entrance was still sealed.

Still not open. Still not giving. The webbing didn't even bulge. Maddy dropped her smoking spear. She dropped to her knees. Her system screen flashed and beeped and bleeped loudly. [This door cannot receive physical damage.]"... fuck," Maddy said. She uncorked the vial again, drank deeply, and got up off her knees after a few seconds.

Alice was holding her own Stanley cup against her sternum, both hands, and some animal part of her had decided, in the dark, that if she could just press it hard enough, press it into her ribs until her sternum bruised and cracked, that it would get her out, and she was clutching at this ridiculous hope with everything she had, because the forty-ounce TikTok cup recommended by an algorithm was her last real chance to leave, and she was clutching at it and she knew it was ridiculous.

"Ben," she said, quietly.

"Ben, hey. Look at me. You're okay. We're—we're here, we're right here—""We have to fight it," Maddy said.

"We... We have to. I'll fucking—I'll just fucking Energize a hundred time if it's what it takes." She'd gone to check the walls. There was nothing there, her face said. She was sorry.

"No," Alice said.

"No no no. Maddy. Did you see them. Did you see them. They had—the one had a hockey stick, that's like ours, that's a normal-person weapon, that's exactly what we are, and they got—" she didn't say the word, "... they got taken apart. Three of them. They were probably level whatever like us and they got, they got disintegrated, and you want to walk toward the thing that did it?"

"You see another door?"

"There has to be another way, there's always—""There's not always." Ben said something, finally. Something to no one. He'd turned his back to them, to the cave, to the sealed entrance, and was looking at his own panel, and his voice was raw and scraped.

"System. Hey. We need out. How do we get out." His panel responded. Alice could see it, from the corner of her eye, his blue one, and she could see it change, could see the difference, even from a distance. It was his own personal panel, after all, and she should have known. [Exit sealed.] [Dungeon clear conditions not met.]"Then what are the conditions. What are the requirements. Tell me the requirements." [Eliminate the primary threat.]"The—" Ben's voice rose, "The screaming thing.

The thing that did that to those people. That's the requirement. Beat the thing that—" There it was again. The screaming. Closer this time. It rolled up through the rock, up through the soles of her white sneakers and her teeth, and that same horrible grieving sound was in it, and all three of them flinched at once, and Ben's panel did something strange, something she had never seen it do. The sparkles died. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She'd gotten used to his and Maddy's—blue and pink, the little floating sparkle emojis in the actual text, the of course Ben!, the cheerful clanker chirp of it all, the way their panels lit up when they were happy. That was gone.

The whole thing had gone flat and blue-grey, no particles, no flourish, the font smaller and squarer, and the lines shorter and more to the point, and Alice knew she had seen this before, because Ben had described it once, at the inn, at the ambush, his system shutting down all the fluff when the thieves had come. Three short lines, no sparkle. This was that. [Advisory.] [This location has destabilized into a true space.] [System influence here is reduced.] [Proceed with extreme caution.]"A what," Ben said.

"A true space? What does that mean? What the fuck does that—" and then his voice, the thin scraped sound of it, tore open into something with real heat in it, and Alice almost felt better, because anger was a real emotion, and it was good he was feeling it, and she was grateful, and she wished he'd yell more, really, because this was not a time to be polite or post-cute little messages to the sky.

"You made this. YOU made all of this. You built the whole world, you put the spider on the door, you rated it D-rank, you sent us in here with a sparkle and a good luck Ben, and you're telling me there's a thing in here you don't even control? You knew. You had to know. WHAT DOES TRUE SPACE MEAN—" [This location has destabilized into a true space.] [System influence here is reduced.] [Proceed with extreme caution.] It just said it again, word for word, the exact same lines, like a phone voicemail, like a thing reading from the only card it had left, and Alice watched Ben slump against it, because you couldn't even fight it, it wasn't being cruel, it was being limited, and that was so much worse somehow. Her own panel was up, her own advisory. She hadn't noticed it, because she'd been watching Ben, but she looked now, and the flowers were gone.

Her sweet little garden border was gone, her well-meaning clanker-border turned to static, and the whole thing was greyer, paler, and Alice hated it. She hadn't expected to hate it. But there was something about the lack of spark there, about her little hopeful system turning in on itself and getting all protective and concerned, that landed worse than anything Maddy's siren-screaming or Ben's red warnings had. Even hers. Even the nice one. The one that said good morning and drew little smiley faces.

Even it had stopped pretending this was fun. Even it didn't want her in here.

"Okay," Maddy said.

"We can't get out. We can't talk our way out. We can't wait it out, it's coming to us. So." She looked at the two of them.

"We find a spot. A real spot, defensible, our backs covered, and we don't get jumped in the open like those—" she didn't finish.

"We go and pick the ground. That's the only thing we get to pick."

The crystal room was off a side passage and it was small and it had one way in, and Maddy walked the perimeter once, fast, and said it would do. It was, helplessly, beautiful too. The walls were studded with little crystals, pale violet ones, and they glowed with their own light, so the room was softly illuminated with the glow, and Alice would have loved it on literally any other day of her life or death. The three of them made small adjustments in their own little ways.

Maddy paced the entrance with the spear, checking and re-checking the one approach, her lips moving with no sound, running something, building something behind her eyes. Ben sat with his back to the crystal wall and turned the wax knife over and over in his hands and stared at the floor and Alice could see him talking himself down or talking himself somewhere, his lips going too, both of them muttering to themselves in the glowing room like two people praying to different gods.

Alice sat with her cup in her lap and tried to breathe in for four and out for six, the count she taught everyone else, and got to about in for two before her chest jumped. And the little spider came back. It came in low along the wall, the fluffy cat-sized one, the soft grey down and the big wet eyes, and it stopped a few feet from Alice and it lifted one little leg toward her again, the same gesture, slow, into the air between them, and she looked at it. And she cried.

Just water running down her face while she sat there, because the spider had come back, the one gentle thing in this entire horrible place had come and found her and lifted its little leg, and it was so scared too, it had run from the same thing they were hiding from, and it had still come back to her. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. She thought about the girl with the green eyes. She thought about the hockey stick on the ground.

And something in Alice, somewhere under the crying and the cup-clutching and the in for two, got up off the floor before the rest of her did. She was level fourteen. She knew that didn't mean anything to her, not really, she didn't feel the difference between fourteen and four, the number was just a sound the system made.

But Maddy and Ben had made a whole thing of it at breakfast, they'd been salty about it, level fourteen, and she'd cleared a whole dungeon alone and it had been easy, it had been little slimes and a lot of dings. Those three in the wall. Maybe they'd been weaker. Lower. Maybe they'd been careless. Maybe they'd walked in the open like Maddy said and gotten jumped one at a time, alone, with a hockey stick. They weren't going to walk in the open. And there were three of them. Together.

And one of them was a god, apparently, even with the broken regen turned off. Maybe they could win. Or, and this landed cleaner, this was the part that got her standing, maybe it wasn't even about winning. The system had said it. Eliminate the primary threat. Maybe it was just about the requirement. About the door. She stood up.

"Okay," she said, and her voice came out wobbly and then less wobbly.

"Okay. Let's... let's do the requirement." She didn't have to argue anyone into it. That was the thing she noticed, standing up. That nobody fought her. Maddy just nodded, once, fast, and Alice understood that Maddy had wanted to fight since the second the exit closed, maybe since the second they walked in, that the picking-the-ground thing had only ever been Maddy buying time for the other two to catch up to where she already was.

And Ben got up off the wall with the wax knife and didn't say anything either, and Alice knew he couldn't have stayed back here even if they'd made him, because Ben was a knife, he was close-up, he couldn't hang at the rear and throw spells, he had to be in it. The little spider scurried back into its crack. They left the crystal room. It didn't let them get anywhere.

They came out into a wider chamber, the threads thinning, the light going dim, and Alice had one second of okay, open, bad, Maddy said open is bad-- And it dropped on them from above. It came out of a cavity high in the ceiling and landed in front of them with a sound like a building settling, and the rock beneath it cracked, a pattern of fractures spreading out from where it landed, and Alice stumbled backward into Ben and Ben caught her shoulder and they all three froze. It was a woman. That was the worst of it.

It read as a woman. Tall, taller than any of them, and so pale, a white like the underside of something, like a thing that had never been in the sun. She had two eyes in the front of her face, red, large, and beside each of them a second smaller eye, four in all, set in a face that was almost a person's face and missed it by just enough to make Alice's whole nervous system scream. She wore a robe of silk, red and white, layered, and it moved around her like it was underwater.

"There's no... cutscene," Ben said.

"Maddy. There's—It's not like the Hobgoblin. It's..." Alice didn't know what that meant. He said it almost to himself, low, staring, and there was something stripped and frightened in how he said it, there's no cutscene, like the absence of a thing she'd never seen was its own bad sign, and she filed it without understanding it.

The thing just stood there in its broken crater and looked at them, four eyes moving, one to the next to the next, and Alice's stupid trained brain, the brain that could not turn off, read it plain as a sentence: It was assessing them. It was doing exactly what the little spider had done. The freeze, the read. Are you safe. Are you a threat. Except the little spider had been afraid of this, and this was afraid of nothing, this was just measuring.

"Where are you from," the woman said. Shit. Her voice was soft. Alice had braced for a roar, a snarl, some growled villain thing. It was quiet. It was almost gentle. It was a real question, and it landed in the silence so wrong, so human, that Alice felt her eyes sting again.

"Why," the woman said.

"Why do you keep coming in. I—" She stopped. Her hand, she had hands, long pale hands, went up to the side of her head, pressed there, and her face changed, twisted, and a pulse of red light bloomed up from somewhere inside her chest and ran out through her like a heartbeat made visible, and she made a sound, a short cut-off cry of what Alice could only read as pain, and then her head came up and the next sound was the scream. The grieving scream. The one from the tunnels.

Up close it was unbearable, it had a physical wave in front of it, Alice felt it hit her sternum and shoved, and all three of them rocked back on their heels.

"I—" The woman's voice came through gritted teeth, ragged.

"Please. Please, stop coming. You'll only die." And then she moved, and the time for reading her was over.