John snapped a chunk of tooth off one the mutated trees in passing. The cracking sound was neither that of bone nor wood, but what he held a moment later was a simple branch. When it refused to change again, he dropped it into the slimy grass, where it rapidly withered, died, and returned to full health. All under the magical light radiating from Purgatory and Rex Magnar and what little the moon had to spend. During their long drive, the day had faded.

“Only things connected to the landscape are affected,” John hummed. ‘It’s best you don’t materialize, Undine,’ he reached into his mind. ‘Even if there is no Lorylim threat, I wouldn’t want you to accidentally absorb any of the Sands of Time.’ It was doubtful that the grains permanently maintained their ability to alter time. Outside of the hourglass or another source of recharging, their energy would eventually fizzle out. John had no idea how long that would be, however. Maybe Undine would be able to just clean herself by going incorporeal again, but who knew.

It was best to just avoid the situation.

“What even is this slimy stuff?” Metra asked.

“Observe says it’s an alchemical by-product,” John answered. “Mildly toxic, but I don’t think any of us need to be on guard about something like that.” Metra and Beatrice were metal, he had Gamer’s Body and the idea that Eliza could be bothered by some kind of poison was almost hilarious. “How are your feet doing anyway?”

“Stable,” the First of Wrath answered and raised her feet. The sandals she had been wearing originally had been discarded after just a few minutes of walking. Her feet themselves remained unchanged, thankfully. The effect of the Sands of Time on sapient beings and enchanted items seemed much diminished compared to regular objects. Otherwise, Metra would have continuously had the shape of her soles changed. She had assumed more than one shape throughout the ages, after all.

“Stable,” Beatrice echoed, following much the same reasoning.

“Fucking pissed,” Eliza cussed and kicked the ground. Her naked foot dug a trench through the dirt as if she was dragging it through water. Earth and grass showered down on the path ahead. “Fucking dumbass sand ruining my favourite boots, piece of shit who put this here will have their tongue pulled out of their rectum.”

“You have more of them back home,” John tried to calm her. As much as he loved the black leather, belt covered thigh-highs and how they made her already fantastic thighs stand out even more, they were not worth her ripping the head off the first person they found. “If you want, I’ll buy you a few more.”

“I mean… I don’t need any more of those fucking fantastic boots…” Eliza said, glancing over at him, then glancing away again, leaving something unspoken. She fidgeted with the black piece of cloth sitting tightly around her neck, kept in place by a clasp at the back. She wore them regularly nowadays, only rarely those she had to obscure her rather unusual appearance, and John kept breaking them in the expected ways.

“I’ll buy you some more chokers when we get back.” His promise was met with a gleeful series of giggles. It wasn’t about what he bought as much that he bought her something. As stereotypical as it may have been, gifting Eliza with something always made her ecstatically happy. It didn’t even have to be that costly.

“M-my feet are doing fine… if that question is still pending…” Gnome mumbled. “Still hard to sense anything underground through all of this constant shifting. It’s like trying to pick a sound out of white noise.”

“But you do feel something, right?” John asked. With no other clues whatsoever, they had been following her guidance. Apparently, there was some sort of tunnel network underground. At the moment, they were trying to find the entrance to it. “We are on track, right?”

“I’d say so, yes,” Gnome answered, a concentrated expression on her oriental face.

Eliza ignited her Aura and raised her foot. “Just need to stomp once and this shit is settled,” she announced.

“I’d rather not collapse our way into whatever kind of underground complex this is,” John told her and the Aura disappeared again. “Also, you might break the entire barrier if you use Seismic Step here.”

“I can control my dumbfuck self! Maybe? A little?” the pretty little psycho got progressively quieter, “I can be useful outside of being a cumdump…”

“No need to prove that.” John smiled at her.

“Statement: I love you,” Beatrice chimed in. “You are appreciated.”

“…Fuck me, even hearing that from an emotionless submissive slut makes me unreasonably fucking happy. I’m about as deep as a puddle…”

“It makes me glad my words pleased you, emotionful submissive slut,” Beatrice returned.

“Fuck you for being nice to me.”

“You are welcome.”

“I… urgh.” Eliza gave up trying to be offended and just trotted along as they followed Gnome’s lead. After about twenty seconds of silence, she pointed at something in the distance. “There’s that disgusting techno-colour nightmare again.”

John spotted it in the distance. “Think it might be trying to guide our way?” he asked the rest of the group. “It has been popping up in the direction of our path repeatedly.”

“If it is, it doesn’t matter much,” Metra answered. “I’d rather rely on Gnome’s senses.”

John was in full agreement with that and so they kept moving until arriving at a shed between two fields. It looked so inconspicuous that they couldn’t have been sure if it was in any way important or just a copy from the regular landscape. “Something is moving inside,” Gnome warned. “Should I…?”

“No, I’ll take the lead,” the Gamer asserted, having a bad feeling about this. Usually this would have been grounds to send his physically sturdier party members ahead, but given a particular scratching on the bones of his right arm, he felt he was best equipped for this. “Take a step back,” he told the girls, who obeyed, and each went into a battle-ready stance.

He put his hand on the handle of the well-maintained door and pulled it back slowly.

“Hehehehehe…” something laughed on the inside. “John. Joooooohnnnnnn. Undinnnnneee… delicious names – terrible names – No beats, no drums – Eat the beats, eat the beast, make the foreign hearts stop.” There was a snapping sound as the thing continued to cackle. The Gamer opened the door completely and calmly stared at the speaker.

It once had been a person. Pieces of that were still evident underneath the spongy outgrowths that covered the skin. They were black and dark grey, extended from the limbs and the sides of the torso like mushrooms on a wounded tree. Two horn-like protrusions had grown out of the brain, cracking the skull open in the process and leaving part of the grey matter plainly visible. The protrusions split into several veins, which crawled over the wall against which the broken body leaned. Veins extended halfway down the face, and when it spoke, gooey strands connected its partly liquified lips and puffs of spores rose with every word.

“Newman – Newman – Newman – Newman – A fate better than the phantom – she was so unwise to keep her body there – Newman – Newman – Vessel – Vessel - Ves-” the Lorylim chanted in pain, before John blasted its head off with an Arc Lance. Then there were only gargles out of an exposed throat and the thing fell over, the synapses getting pulled off the wall with a wet sound. Its chest continued to tense a couple of times, as if it was laughing, before finally coming to a stop.

“Of course, they are involved somehow,” John mumbled and scratched his right arm.

“Fucking hell, that is disgusting,” Eliza stated, while looking into the shed. “Why do we keep running into things that look like they belong in the blender today?”

“Right, this is the first time you've actually seen a Lorylim,” John realized.

“Doesn’t seem like they’re all they are hyped up to be,” the pretty little psycho stated, stepping around John. Before he could stop her, she kicked the corpse in the side.

The chest burst open. An umbilical cord with a hood made of the shattered rips flew towards Eliza. A solid circle surrounded by unsteady gills sat in the middle. It narrowed as if blinking, turning into an opened maw surrounded by jagged teeth, ready to tear into flesh.

Eliza slapped the thing with such overwhelming force that the entire shape turned into a splatter of droplets so tiny, they evaporated into black spores before they hit the ground outside. The rest of the girls were careful not to breath any of it in. “It was a rather weak one,” John said. “Not exactly a proper Lorylim. More of a visible outgrowth of the network.”

“If there was a proper one, why is the representation of them so inaccurate?” Gnome thought out loud.

“More important question is if there are more of them,” John said, looking at the spiralling staircase behind the corpse. With the Lorylim dead, the infections that had grown deformed like melting wax, spreading more of the spores. “For the moment… Salamander, take care of this.”

“With gusto,” the apocalypse elemental cackled, once she had materialized. They may have strayed from the anti-Lorylim path, but she still had been an endflame elemental once and her fire retained at least a moderately raised effectiveness against the foul creatures. While she cleansed the corpse and the shed, John thought about the implications of this thing being there.

“It’s been a while since we ran into Lorylim…” he mumbled, “…and I don’t think we ever saw one this weak.”

“Aside from the infection Undine had, we only ever dealt with this Izha… consciousness?” Gnome pointed out. “We still know too little about them…”

“And we know even less about what they are doing here,” John said and looked over his shoulder. Whatever was happening here, the Lorylim had not been the source. “It mentioned that I was a better fate than the phantom. Whatever that is supposed to mean.”

“Some cryptic shit that I wouldn’t bother with,” Metra stated.

“Good thing I’m calling the shots then,” John returned with a smile. His guard was more raised, now that he knew what kind of power was involved in this whole affair. Despite that, he felt less threatened by the alien presence than usual. Perhaps because he had grown so much stronger that corrupting him would be a much more difficult task. ‘Perhaps they’re just not focused on me,’ he added a more cautious thought to keep himself in check.

The shed had soon been reduced to a smouldering pile, with only ash still rising from it. “Salamander, item form,” he told his flame spirit. The red-skinned woman nodded and fused with Purgatory. Their minds intertwined, allowing him to wield her power as effectively as possible. The dragon claw became engulfed in cleansing fire and the Gamer led the group down the staircase.

It was clean down there. For whatever reason, the Lorylim upstairs had remained there and not even tried to corrupt anything underground. As difficult as it was to read an insane, alien hivemind, it passing on the opportunity to infest something seemed rather odd.

They went deeper in. The corridors vaguely reminded John of the inside of a hospital. Simple, clean, straightforward, barely decorated and only as wide as they needed to be. There were lightbulbs under the ceiling, the long kind that continued on and on along the corridor. None of them were on at the moment. After they had turned two corners, nothing of the faint light of the night remained. There was only Purgatory and Rex Magnar.

“Rrrrrrrrrooooooooooo…”

The group stopped when a resentful wail echoed through the corridors. There were no other sounds. John sent a fireball flying into the darkness. Nothing was ahead. He furrowed his eyebrows, and looked to Eliza. Where his senses failed, hers could succeed. Yet, she shook her head.

“Rrrrrrrrrr…”

The rolled noise sounded happy, almost like a greeting during family dinner. Almost. It rose into a hateful scream.

“OOOOOOOOOOOooooo-!”

And stopped with a sound like a bursting watermelon.

The group slowly began to move again, continuing through the network until they came across a puddle of alchemical fluids and sand. The same slimy mixture they had found so much of above. “What the hell is this place?” John mumbled. Something he repeated when they found a door and violently opened it.

There was only a single thing in it. A machine, taking the shape of four seats attached to a massive glass tank that stretched between floor and ceiling. Each of the seats was taken up by a bloody blob, human bodies whose bones had been removed. What remained was a disgusting mass. Even the skin had been torn open.

John inspected the corpses closely. The blood was dry, but was still of a pronounced reddish-brown colour. “They have been dead for a couple of days. Before the distress call. Whatever has been happening, it’s been happening for a bit,” he analysed. He noticed that the epidermis had been removed not through simple skinning, but by tearing it off with small hooks or in a similar fashion. He had seen injuries, past and recent, like this before. “…This looks like Marathyu’s scars… the Lorylim that had infected them was either killed or retreated. The latter, given how the feet look.”

“Is this a mana factory thing?” Eliza asked, looking at the machine itself.

“Observe says its purpose is to unify the consciousness of several people and project their unified thoughts on the environment,” John relayed what he read on the window that appeared in front of him. “I suppose this is the ‘Gestalt’ the guild named itself after. It also means there are still some people alive somewhere in here.”

“Some fuckers need to dream up that nightmare out there,” Eliza agreed.

“Rooooooooooooo…” They heard the wail again, much further away this time.

“I honestly preferred it outside. I can deal with weird surroundings, but I hate cramped places crawling with things I don’t know about,” John complained and walked towards the door. He would have loved to look for more clues. Rescuing who was still alive was a more pressing duty, however, and smarter when it came to information gathering in the long run. “Tell me if you see the frog. Chances are that’s the joined gestalt of the survivors trying to get us where they are.”

They went back into the hallway, kept their senses ready and their backs covered. Every door they found, they burst open and checked the inside. They found twelve more corpses, each in groups of four, a communal kitchen, a sleeping room and some kind of child raising facility. This had been a long-standing operation by the looks of things.

Deeper and deeper they went into the complex. Inside the hallways, they sometimes walked through slimy patches. What this wailing entity was that got them there was still unclear.

A hand peeled out of the darkness. Seven still fingers, thin like blood vessels without skin or muscles or the root of a young plant. John stopped, ready to throw a fireball at merely the sight of that thing. When it remained motionless, he carefully advanced further.

With an electrical buzz, the lights in the corridor flickered to life. It revealed a massive and dead Lorylim. Its long body looked like several spines fused together, with other bones thickening the construct or protruding from it to create the basis of limbs. Fleshy pieces of dry Lorylim matter kept everything from falling apart. John could only see half of the head of the thing. Human leg bones had been fused together to create an oversized jaw, while skulls had been conjoined to form the upper half of the head. The eye sockets still oozed liquifying Lorylim matter and spores.

The Lorylim was lodged into the walls. To be more exact, it seemed as if the walls had eaten it. Concrete was shaped into arms and at some points it looked as if it had boiled. There was not a single crack anywhere. John refused to believe a Lorylim wouldn’t be able to break simple concrete. Yet, when he cast Observe on the wall, he was given no information that indicated he was looking at anything different.

The lights flickered and died, only to come back to life. From soft flame to hard artificial illumination, the brightness of the corridor switched back and forth without control. “Seriously, what the hell is-“

“ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMUAAAAARGHHHHHHHH!” The scream was raw anger. It was right beside him. Right in front of him. A shape of mud and slime. There was no time to move, to scream or even to Observe. Time wasn’t a thing. Time…