Pearl steadily leads us through the maze of straight lines, the terrifying tedium broken up only by the regular leech volleys and the stain creeping up the wall to replenish itself. My throat feels like a well after a decade long drought, and though my muscles burn with use, it hasn’t turned into pain just yet. Clutter seems… okay… for now. Sure, he can’t talk and run at the same time any more, but he’s still alive and keeping the pace.

  “Just two more turns.” Pearl mumbles to herself. “Stupid stain keeps regenerating itself. How’s Clutter doing?”

  I glance over my shoulder. “There’s eight-ish feet. Not much left at all.”

  She grimaces. “Barely any distance to work with. I really hope this does something, or else we’re going to have to find a way to get the leeches to fire way faster.”

  “Clutter already tried that by summoning and unsummoning his Class Card over and over again. Can’t trigger them more than once every thirty seconds.” I say with a shake of my head. “If there’s nothing at the end of the path, we’ll have to think of some way to trap the stain so it doesn’t chase us around the city.”

  At the moment, that feels like a very difficult task. I bet the stain wouldn’t be able to get into the tower, so we could lure it away for a little while at a time, but… it’s not preferable. The world turns left as I silently dodge out of the way of another volley, and Clutter jumps a second later. At some point he stopped listening to me, but I have no idea how many miles back that was.

  “One more.” Pearl says tensely. “This one’s a straight shot. Either something happens really soon, or we teleport back to the tower.”

  She doesn’t have to tell me. I look down at my holster and summon a five-Worth skeletal coin for each of my spells, but don’t load them with any specifics just yet. Hopefully I won’t need any of them, though previous experience says these three won’t be anywhere near enough. I signal to Clutter with one finger to let him know to be ready, and he nods silently as his face shifts to concentration.

  “Just a few more feet. Thirty… ten… now!” Pearl taps both of the arrow-circles at the same time, and the magic shifts. “We’re done! The map accepted the pattern we put in, and now we’re actually running through the real hallways again!”

  The stain in my awareness and Clutter panting up a storm begs to differ that anything’s changed at all. “New developments, Pearl! Are there any notifications or new things on the map?!”

  She rapidly taps on my Class Card as the sounds of the stain grow exponentially louder. Like it shifted from nails on a chalkboard to scraping a jet engine down an erupting volcano.

  “I’m looking, but I don’t see anything that’s obviously different. All the tabs that were greyed out are still greyed out, the quest still says ‘prove yourself’, and the only difference is that we’re back to the normal map.” She relays as quickly as her voice will let her. “I’m sure that we finished the grid, though. So… something should’ve happened!”

  A grimace splits my lips as my mind races. “Check the map. Are we still in the same place, or did we get teleported somewhere else?”

  Pearl narrows her eyes at the map, then barks out a humorless laugh. “There’s a break in our path that’s not even an inch long. So we definitely teleported, but no more than a few miles at most. If even that.”

  “That’ll be the bit of hallway that the quest kept repeating on us. God damn it.” I hiss as I feel my awareness scanning the area. “Look for any gouges, scratches, lines–anything that’s even a little out of place. I refuse to believe we’re just supposed to outrun this thing until the leeches can consume enough of it.”

  Clutter gasps, pulling my attention to him. “Illumisia?” He wheezes, then goes right back to panting.

  I shake my head. “Even if we call her in, it doesn’t make sense. We did everything the quest could’ve expected us to do; there should be something here that shows us how to actually get rid of the stain. If there isn’t… then these side quests are just designed to kill whatever group finds them first.”

  His eyes widen, and he swallows around a dry lump in his throat. “What if… hggh… not chasing us?”

  “No. Impossible.” Pearl states flatly. “I can feel it’s magic. The thing is a sword aimed directly at both of your hearts–it won’t stop until both of you are dead. So don’t think like that.”

  Clutter nods, a newfound small glimmer of relief in his eyes almost instantly snuffed out by the pain of running at the speed of desperation for over an hour straight. I want to assure him that we’re going to be fine, but honestly, I’m about five minutes away from throwing down a relocation coin in this hallway and screwing off back to the tower.

  The only thing keeping me here is a damn guarantee I can’t even prove; that this quest is fair. That every aspect of it was created without the thought that a Worth class would ever touch it. Noland and Ursula alluded to completing some quests without the system screwing them over, so there’s a little bit of a precedent for this being the truth. But right now, with my muscles screaming from constant use and no obvious solutions at hand, it’s hard to see how this is possible. Hell, our only possibility for escape comes from a spell the vast majority of people don’t have access to–how’s that fair to them?

  “Were we supposed to get some item from the plastic paindne to help with this? Did we just… completely miss it when we ran, even with two people’s awareness scanning the room?”

  Pearl raises an eyebrow. “I think you already answered that question.”

  “Shit.” I hiss through my teeth. “So we’ve got nothing. Even if some random bullshit pops out of nowhere to save us, it means we’ve got to avoid every side objective because they aren’t meant to be completed. Alright, one more idea each, and then I’m taking us back to the tower–Pearl, what’ve you got?”

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  “Nothing.” She says flatly. “Not with the cards we have right now. Clutter? How about you?”

  Clutter shakes his head. So that’s a no from him, too, which leaves my adrenaline-shot brain to come up with the only idea. The two things that come to mind are ‘phase’ and ‘hexagons’; though I can’t really think of any way they’ll come into play. There really should’ve been… something… that happened when we completed the pattern. I just can’t come up with anything at all.

  I sigh in defeat and motion at Clutter. “Then that’s three blanks. We’re going back.”

  Before I latch onto my coins in the tower, I hurl a relocation as far as possible down the hallway. It sails through the smoky magic of the city without changing a single thing, and I switch my focus to teleporting us to the tower. Admitting defeat feels horrible. But I just can’t think of anything else that’d help us now–not without access to the other parts of our Class Cards.

  Flickers of connection strain between us and my coins. Must be the magic in the air, since there’s a little resistance between me and the coins. Even more between the coin connected to Illumisia–but it feels possible. Not like when I tried to bring Fleur over here. But that moment of resistance… that moment where my spell doesn’t come with a single thought… it makes me hesitate. I grasp my hand around the intangible connection, and take another feel at it.

  The spell doesn’t feel… far. It’s something else. Almost like a weight between me and my spell–but only for a little bit. I turn, my awareness hyper focused on the sensation of my spell, and realize what’s creating that sensation; the stain. There’s nothing destroying my spell, but there’s an area of… weight… around it. Almost like the stain is actually a three-dimensional thing, but it only reveals itself where it squishes against the ground.

  It shouldn’t make a difference. But… it feels wrong. Like I’m seeing the stain in two existences at once–the one my spell feels, and the one we’re actually standing in. All it does is make me more sure that the solution has something to do with phased objects–because that’s how we found our entrance–but I just have no idea what I’m supposed to do with that knowledge.

  …Unless… hrm. If it’s actually a three-dimensional object, then with how it’s only staining a circle on the floor right now, there’s space to both sides of it–and above it. If one of us had super speed, there’s a chance we’d be able to zip around it. Or maybe if I’d been paying a little more attention, then I’d have figured out the timing between when it slides up the wall. Making an obvious space for us to get around it.

  I shake my head and summon another relocation coin. There’s really no risk to checking, so I huck it as close to the ceiling as I can. It flips through the air, tumbling over and over again as it soars right over the stain–and scratches just barely touch the bottom of it. My spell starts to leak out, and if I give it a few more seconds, it’ll be gone.

  “Keep running Clutter!” I order as I latch onto the coin that’s behind the stain. “If it turns around, just keep running!”

  He nods vigorously. I take a deep breath and trigger the rapidly decaying relocation. The world shudders, and after a brief moment of resistance, my feet slam down on the other side of the stain. Extremely shallow scratches litter the floor and some parts of the walls, but aside from that, there’s very little damage. I skid to a stop before I can take another step towards the…

  Instead of the stain, there’s a massive mound of plastic gliding over the floor towards Clutter. Teeth grow from every visible part of the thing, pulsating in and out of the sickly mass like slow-motion jigsaw blades. But… it’s there. It’s real. I was right. And I still have absolutely no goddamn clue how we’re supposed to stop it.

  Pearl stares at the thing right alongside me with a contemplative frown. “Should we… run after it? Because if it manages to catch Clutter, it’ll come right back for us.”

  “Why didn't it turn around for us first?”

  “I dunno. Momentum?” She offers with a shrug.

  I nod slowly as I start running again. “If it going up a wall was supposed to be giving us an opening, it makes sense that it wouldn’t instantly turn around and chew us into mush. So there has to be something back here–something behind it–that can help the people who’re still meant to be chased.”

  Pearl hums in thought as I chase down the plastic mass. Before she can say anything, I remove the primed five-Worth skeletal projectile from my holster and input a simple command; last long enough to reach the plastic, be as big as half the hallway, and put everything else into speed and power.

  She narrows her eyes at me as I let it fly. “Do you think that’s going to–”

  Plastic and teeth fly in every direction as the mound detonates. Shrill screeches and clattering impacts echo from everywhere as the teeth scrape against the edges of the hallway, while the plastic splatters wetly against everything else. I blink in utter surprise and end my projectile before it can hit Clutter in the aftermath.

  “Uh…” I trail off as Clutter appears through the rain of filth, an utterly bewildered expression plastered on his exerted face. “Wow.”

  He nods in wide-eyed agreement. “How’d you…”

  I shrug and hold out my hands in confusion. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “I do.” Pearl says quietly. “That thing… the outline of it existed in our world, and the rest of it was in phase. So when you actually observed it, the outline shifted into phase and the rest of it came into reality. Exposing the extremely squishy innards for your spell to obliterate.”

  “Okay.” I say. It’s as good of an explanation as any of us’ll be coming up with any time soon. “I could’ve done that at absolutely any point in the last hour.”

  Pearl nods slowly. “I think so.”

  Clutter laughs, then collapses to the ground in a panting heap. “We did it in the wrong order.”

  “Seems like it.” I chuckle in exhausted sympathy. “Could’ve saved ourselves a lot of terrified running if we just killed the thing before we took all the twists and turns.”

  “My lungs feel like I swallowed a bunch of dust devils.” He groans and raises his Class Card, then grimaces and rolls out of the way of a volley of leeches. “Oh, I can see my map again. Cool.”

  I step out of the path of the leeches, then bend down to see. Sure enough, his map isn’t greyed out any more. And if I’m right, it stopped being greyed out the second we started being chased by the stain. He smiles weakly at me, then sends his Class Card away and lets his arms flop against the ground. I dismiss my own, and Pearl shifts to a more comfortable position with her legs kicking over my shoulder.

  “Think that counts as proving ourselves, Clutter?”

  He snorts. “I really hope the quest thinks so.”

  As if on cue, my Class Card informs me that I’ve got a new notification. From how Clutter’s eyes light up, he just got one too. I hand him a relocation coin that he accepts, then tosses down the hall to land somewhere close to the first one I threw.

  “That means we’re going back to the tower first, right?” His voice quivers with hope and exhaustion.

  I give him one very sincere nod of confirmation.