Chương 36: No Wonders in Here

She crossed the whole chamber in an instant and hit Ben. Alice didn't even see the in-between.

One moment the woman was in her crater and the next she had Ben off his feet and slammed into the crystal wall hard enough that the violet crystals cracked and rained down, and Ben, Alice saw it, the reflex of it, faster than thought, Ben got his forearm up across his body with the wax knife along it, and the wax bloomed, it surged off the blade and spread into a flat curved sheet across his arm, a shield, a slab of yellow wax taking the wall behind him so his skull didn't, and he grunted and slid down the rock and the wax shield held.

It didn't look like the arc thing he'd told her about.

"BEN—" Lightning went past Alice's head. Maddy had thrown her hand out with her spear and a bolt formed on the tip of it, white and loud as heck, and the bolt cracked across the chamber straight at the woman. The woman's free hand came up and threw a fan of webbing into its path and the lightning hit the web and spread, arced out sideways along the silk in a hundred branches, lit the whole strand-hung chamber blue-white for a second, and did not reach her. The web ate it.

The web took a Thunderbolt—Alice heard Maddy say the name under her breath, furious, and the attack gave back nothing.

"Okay," Maddy said.

"Okay, fine."

"My cup," Alice said, and her hands were already moving. She grabbed the Stanley cup off her hip and as she swung it forward it changed, the cream-colored cup pulling and narrowing and stiffening into a slim white baton in her grip, smooth, the top still being the Stanley cup. She leveled it at the woman, her body remembering her own dungeon, and she fired her Needles, a dozen of them, really thin, pressurized water sharpened to threads, off the tip of the cap in a spray.

They were cheap, they barely cost her anything. She swept them across the woman like a hose and most of them missed and a few of them didn't, peppering the pale arm, the silk, drawing thin dark lines, and the woman flinched and turned partly toward Alice and that was good, that was something, that was the woman's attention coming off Ben.

Beside her Maddy had the test tube out, the Monster one, and tipped her head back and drank, fast, three big swallows, and Alice saw the green stuff go down and saw something change in how Maddy stood, a charge coming into her, her shoulders dropping into something readier. Ben was up.

Ben had come off the wall and gone wide, circling, getting behind, and Alice watched him line up, the wax knife came back, and the air in front of it bent, and a crescent of the yellow shimmer leapt off the blade and crossed the gap at the woman's back. Wax Arc. The thing he'd actually told her about. The woman dropped under it without turning around. She just…

folded, fluid, the arc passing through the space her shoulders had been, and then her hand snapped out behind her and webbing took Ben around the chest and pinned his arms and she pulled, and a second strand came off her other hand, this one different, this one barbed, studded all along its length with little black spikes, and it whipped across the chamber and caught Ben across the upper arm. Ben made a sound Alice had never heard a person make.

The barbed web tore through his sleeve and into him, deep, and when it ripped free the blood came after it fast, too fast, a dark sheet of it down his arm, and Alice could see even from here that it was bad, that it had gone deep, bone-deep, and Ben staggered backward, the wax knife dropping in his grip, his face white, his legs going loose.

"BEN—""KEEP HITTING HER," Maddy snapped, and threw her spear forward, and two bolts went out, back to back, crack-crack, Thunderbolt and then Thunderbolt again, and the woman wove away from the first and ate the second on another web-fan, and Alice kept the needles going, sweeping, sweeping, a dozen at a time costing her nothing, yet nothing started to pile up, but she needed to keep the pressure, to keep her eyes on her, while her real brain, her under-brain, screamed Ben Ben Ben he's bleeding he's bleeding out— The cup.

She'd healed in her own dungeon with the cup. Drink from the cup. It would do it for Ben. She snapped the baton back into a cup in her hand—it flowed back, cream and rounded, the lid sealing, and she screamed "BEN, CATCH—" and threw it, the whole Stanley cup, hard, across the chamber toward him. The woman caught it. A strand of web shot up and snatched the cup out of the air mid-flight, ten feet off the ground, and held it there, dangling, and Alice's heart went through the floor, and Maddy threw the spear.

"Volt Toss!" She threw Bolt, a wide swing, and it spun and it locked, it changed course in the air to find its target, slammed into the strand holding the cup and lit it up white, electrified the whole web, severed it, and the cup dropped, and Bolt curved back through the air into Maddy's waiting hand like it had never left. Alice heard her say it, teeth bared. Volt Toss. Maddy had told her Pikachu Frisbee. Ben caught the falling cup one-handed.

He got it to his mouth and drank, three desperate gulps, and Alice watched the change run up his arm, the torn flesh drawing closed, the blood slowing, stopping, the color coming back into his face, and he flung the cup back across the chamber, a quick "thanks—", and Alice caught it and felt the small warm refill-hum of it going dormant, an hour now until it would do that again, just water until then, and she didn't have time to do that math, Maddy did math, Alice just knew the cup's spent.

"My turn," Alice said, and brought the baton back, and aimed properly this time.

"Triple Jet." Three spears of water formed off the baton's tip, fat and fast and bright, and they didn't need her to aim, they found the nearest enemy on their own, and the woman saw them come and threw a wall of web up flat between them, a sheet, a barricade. And the jets curved. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. They split around the web and bent back in on the far side and hit her dead-on, all three, center mass. The woman was thrown.

She lifted off her feet and flung back across her own crater into the rock, and she hit it hard, and slid, and for one second she was down.

"YES," Alice yelled, which wasn't a swear, but it was loud.

"Alice, drink this—" Maddy was throwing her the test tube, the Monster one, green and bubbling, arcing across the chamber, "—refuel, drink it, GO—" Alice caught it and pulled the stopper and tipped it back. Her panel detonated, bright red, instantly, and her careful seatbelt-border panel going PANIC all at once and the letters jumped up huge and a sound went off that her system had never made, an actual alarm, and the words came fast and stacked: [ALICE—STOP.] [Foreign substance. Unidentified.] [Toxicity: SEVERE.] [EXTREME DANGER. DO NOT CONSUME.] Her body obeyed the panel before her mind did. Her throat closed, her stomach moved, and she doubled over and threw up onto the cave floor, the mouthful of green coming back up burning, her eyes streaming, and she couldn't drink it, she physically could not get it down, her whole system was rejecting it like poison, and she shoved the tube back out toward Maddy"I can't—I can't drink it, it won't—" she said, gagging, on her knees— She didn't see the spear.

She heard Maddy scream her name, and then there was a hand, Ben's hand, in front of her face, and a sound of impact, wet, and Alice looked up and there was a web-spear, a lance of hardened silk, stopped a foot from where her head had been, and it had stopped because it had gone through Ben's palm, punched clean through the meat of his open hand, deflected just enough off the bones of it to miss her skull and bury its point in the rock beside her ear.

Ben's hand was pinned to the air on the end of the spear, dripping.

"... what," Alice whispered.

"HYPER BEAM." Alice felt it before she saw it, the air sucking in toward Maddy, the light gathering, and then a beam of white-gold fury tore out of her and across the whole chamber, and it was the biggest thing Alice had seen any of them do, bigger than the one on the door, it would have ended anything. It should have ended anything. The woman wasn't there. She'd moved.

At the last possible instant she'd flung herself sideways and the beam went past her and blew a crater into the far wall, rock vaporizing, the whole room flashing white, and the woman rolled up to her feet on the far side, intact, and Maddy- Alice turned and Maddy had dropped to one knee, the spear-tip dipping to the floor, her face slack and grey, gasping, emptied out, and Alice understood that the big beam had cost Maddy everything, that she was hollow now, defenseless, a sitting duck, and the woman was already turning back toward them.

Maddy got the test tube to her mouth and drank, gulping it, the green going down, dragging herself back from the edge. Alice stood up off her knees. Her mana was—she could feel it—halfway, maybe less, the Triple Jet had been expensive and she'd been spraying needles the whole time, her well was going dry, but she had enough, she had enough for one big thing, and one big thing was what this needed.

"Back up," she said.

"Both of you, get back, get to the wall. Ben. Maddy." They didn't hear her. Her voice was frail and weak.

"BACK THE FUCK UP—" And there it was, the real one, the first true one, ripped out of her under the worst pressure of her life, fuck, and she didn't even notice she'd said it but somewhere behind her she heard them move out of the way, Ben and Maddy rushing behind her. Alice slammed the baton down toward the floor.

"Whirlpool." The whole chamber became water. It rose up out of nowhere, out of the stone, a churning rushing volume of it that filled the room to the height of their chests in a single second, Maddy and Ben on high rocks behind her, her own feet standing on top of the water, and at the center of it, under the woman, the floor opened into a spinning funnel, a real whirlpool, dragging, and it caught the woman and hauled her down into itself, and the water that wasn't funnel turned into blades.

Razor sheets of water carved at the woman from every side as she fought to climb out, throwing webs that the water tore apart as fast as she spun them, slashing, relentless, and Alice stood braced in the middle of her own storm with the baton out and held it, held it, she held it so bad, pouring her dwindling mana into keeping the water alive.

"VOLT TOSS." Maddy's spear spun out across the flood and the woman wrenched aside and it grazed her, grazed her face, hollow, too hollow, but it lit her up, full seconds of electricity arcing through her, and the water, the water Alice was holding everywhere, carried the current, amplified it, every droplet a conductor, and the woman convulsed in the funnel with the light dancing all over the surface of the flood, and Alice felt it in her own legs, a tingle through the water, and held on. The woman screamed.

The red pulse came again, bigger, and the whirlpool blew apart.

It detonated outward, the water flung to the walls, and web came with it, web everywhere, erupting from the woman in a sphere, and it took all three of them at once and slammed them back and stuck them, Alice's arms pinned to the cold wet rock, the baton trapped against her chest, Maddy beside her caught the same way, Ben on her other side webbed flat to the wall, all three of them stuck like the cocoons, like the people, like the people, and Alice's panic spiked white.

The woman stood in the wrecked flooded chamber holding her own face with one hand. Red ran between her fingers, dripped off her chin, real blood, dark. Her four eyes had gone wild. And around her, web was gathering, twisting, hardening into spears, a dozen of them, pointing inward at the three pinned bodies on the wall, and Alice thought, with a strange flat clarity through the terror, this is it, this is how the green-eyed girl— Ben cut himself free.

His good hand had the wax knife and the wax knife went through the webbing holding him like the webbing was nothing, no resistance, the same way it went through everything, and he dropped off the wall to the flooded floor and his bad hand was a ruin and his arm was bleeding again and he didn't look at it. He looked at Maddy.

"Hyper Beam her when you can," he said. And he went at the woman. Straight at her, close, into the spears, where a knife had to be, and Alice wanted to scream at him to stop, the woman was forming a dozen lances aimed right at his chest, and he was running right into them. His good hand came up and the wax knife swept forward and Alice braced for the crescent, the arc, the thing she'd seen, the thing she'd know would be worthless. The wax came up out of the ground instead.

It surged up out of the flooded floor under the woman, behind where she'd braced for a frontal slash, a thick rope of yellow wax that wrapped her legs and climbed, fast, sealing around her shins and her knees and up to her stomach, gluing her down into the rock, and the woman's eyes went wide, all four, because she'd read him wrong, she'd watched for the arc and he'd made something new, something that came from below, and she was stuck.

"NOW MADDY," Ben screamed. Maddy was already glowing. The web spears holding her had loosened when the woman's focus snapped to her trapped legs, and Maddy had torn one arm free, and the beam was building from the tip of Bolt, the air dragging in, and Alice shut her eyes from how bright the light was.

"HYPER BEAM." It hit the woman point-blank instanty. From the spear to the woman. Fzzzzt. The whole room went white, a flash of pure white, no shapes in it, just light and a sound that wasn't a sound, a pressure, and Alice's webbing burned away and she dropped to the wet floor on her hands and knees in the white, blind, and then the white drained out of the world and the chamber came back, dripping, scorched, the threads all burned down, the crystals dark. But the woman was still standing. She'd lost an arm.

Where one of her pale arms had been there was nothing now, gone at the shoulder, and she held the place where it had been with her remaining hand, and dark red poured out of her. She stood in the smoking center of the ruined room and looked at the three of them. Ben on his feet swaying, his hand destroyed, his arm sheeting blood; Maddy on her knees emptied out again; Alice soaked and shaking on all fours. Her four eyes were full of something Alice could read even now, even from here, and it stopped her cold.

Rage, sure. And under the rage, all the way through it, the same thing that had been in the scream from the start. The grief. The pain. Please stop coming. You'll only die. The woman turned, and dragged herself toward a crack in the far wall, and was gone into the dark. Nobody moved.

For a long time nobody moved, the three of them frozen in the wreckage with their weapons half-up, waiting for her to come back, breathing, dripping, and she didn't come back, and the dungeon was quiet, and the quiet stretched, and stretched, and after a few minutes Alice's panel chimed. Softly this time. The flowers came back, pale and tentative, one of them opening at the corner. [Alice. The primary threat has withdrawn.] [The space is stabilizing.] [Dungeon cleared.] [You did well.] Then, after a bit.

[D-Rank Dungeon cleared: +3 Levels!] [Great job, Alice!] Alice sat all the way down in the shallow cold water and put her face in her wet hands.