Something insane I found out today. Radiation is simply the bleeding of energy into an objects surroundings. I thought it only referred to the toxic waste that poisons the environment and creates superheroes. Well I got to use Visionary Chronicler to help Jeremy Phisher, a phantasmologist and we started measuring the radiation the ‘Spirit Manifestations’ were putting off.

  It is common knowledge that spirits interfere with tech. It just didn’t cross our minds to ask why human spirits don’t interfere. Turns out when you shove a bunch of items to empower them, they do. Humans are now literally incapable of building large scale technology again. What’s more, some humans have a bigger area of interference. The Captain has two sigils at level three each and his area is slightly less than mine, as I have one sigil at five and the other at two. Tomorrow we’ll get to measure dad, looking forward to seeing how that works.

  Day 96, Owen Landers

  Bella shivered in her bed. It was much more comfortable now than when she had first arrived. Silas had discovered that he could make a mat similar to those fancy bamboo mattresses, but out of bone. He had covered it in fur and it made for a relatively comfortable bed.

  She wished she could fall asleep, then she could wake up in a few hours and her sigils purification would be complete. As it was, Bella felt cold and was showing symptoms of a high fever. Her arms and legs ached and worst of all, her motivation was completely sapped. She couldn’t sleep and couldn’t work.

  Glancing across the room, she saw that Sammy had fallen asleep. While she was jealous of her daughter’s ability to sleep through anything, she was grateful that Sammy was getting some rest. Sammy would sleep until she was rested too. Bella had refrained from purchasing the biotech, meaning her daughter had conditioned herself to sleep through alarms.

  It had been a risk not to get her the tech, children with it were impossible to kidnap and always had the police and hospital on call. However, they lived in a small town, knew their neighbors, and had decided to prioritize Sammy’s mental health in the absence of the common demerits. Now she felt like a bad mother for withholding it. How was she supposed to know they would be chased into another world?

  Before she could go into a negative spiral, she focused on the other people huddling in the cave. Batu and Aron were worse off than Bella. She watched them in concern as Aron incessantly scratched at his exposed skin while Batu sat in a corner rocking back and forth with a vacant expression. Neither appeared to be distressed to the point of self harm, but it could easily get that far in the nine days they had left before their sigils were purified. She made a mental note to keep watch over them when she felt better.

  She closed her eyes. Bella didn’t sleep, but she did drift off into a state of torpor. Aware but not focused. A scream tore her out of her oblivion. What was going on? Her memories went back to a time two months ago when Sammy was being threatened by a group of dragonkin. The fatigue did not lift, but Bella pushed through. In one roll, she picked up her old war club in her only hand. Nothing had survived their cooperative attack on the monsters, her chainsword, armor, and most importantly hr prosthetic arm were gone.

  Her panic subsided when her eyes fell on Sammy’s sleeping form. She scanned the rest of the room. Aron and Batu were by Silas’s bed. Lehka and Mandy were looking with concern at the door from beside the pile of sigils. The scream came again this time it was filled with just as much pain as fear.

  Bella looked at the short doorway with dread. They had designed it to be too short for the larger beasts to squeeze through and create a choke point for the ones who could. Now it was working against them. Bella knew she should exit and help, but how exactly was she going to crawl out with her weapon while missing an arm?

  Her indecision cost her. There was a loud screech reminiscent of a parrot being squeezed by a child. The noise petered out, then started up again, though a bit more gravely this time. This repeated several times, each time it became less monstrous and more human.

  Bella glanced at the two women with her. Their worry had turned into terror. Whatever was outside, wasn’t far from the front door. Batu and Aron were sweating buckets and trembling, and Bella wasn’t even sure they had processed that there was something outside. Sammy somehow slept through all of this.

  “What should we do,” Lehka asked.

  “We should barricade the entrance,” Bella stumbled over to the rock that had been set aside specifically to plug the hole.

  “We can’t just leave Mia and Rekha outside, they will die,” Lehka protested.

  There was no way the two women were alive. Bella was not an optimist, but her husband had been more capable than both of them put together. Connor had still only lasted a few minutes.

  As if to disprove her, Rekha’s voice filtered through the hole. There was something very wrong with it, “Hello. Hello. Come out. Come out, yummy friends.”

  The voice was definitely Rekha’s, but all the vowels were exaggerated. It was also said with an uncomfortable amount of excitement, as if the woman was on some really happy drugs. Then there were the words, nothing about them was natural. Yummy friends? Had Rekha joined the monsters?

  “OK, yes, we push the stone,” Lehka said.

  To Bella’s chagrin, the skinny Indian woman was able to exert more force than her. Overtaxing a sigil also appeared to take all the stats one had earned with it. Most of Bella’s sigil levels were in Greater Thermal Cultivator, which would be yet another problem if she needed to fight.

  For a moment she considered waking Sammy. That would be an act of desperation. Sammy would be in a similar state to Bella, but in a child’s body. Also, without Silas, there was no way to escape from their hideout.

  The choice to create an easily defendable, subterranean bunker had seemed like such a great idea. Silas had lacked his portals when they had made it, back then the possibility of being cornered was always present. Hell, it had even happened once. But then she had let the easy mobility Silas provided make her lazy. Bella should have at least made a back door.

  “Come on out. Come on out. I have a treat, we want to meet,” Rekha chirped again.

  The woman’s sing song voice was muffled by the large rock shoved into the doorway. A large beam of bone was wedged between the far wall and the stone. Bella remembered Sammy telling her how a human bone could bear several tons of weight, so long as it was coming from above. She just hoped Sammy’s science teacher knew what she was talking about.

  “What do we do now?” Lehka asked. Her fear had drastically receded when the wedge was put in place.

  “We wait for Silas,” Bella answered, “Once he is back, they can’t stop us from just leaving.”

  Unfortunately, she had no idea how long that would be. Could they hold out for a few hours? Likely, depending on what was out there. So long as it did not have any of the more esoteric abilities they would be fine.

  Sammy muttered something in her sleep. Bella looked over at her with concern, they would get out of this. They had to.

  No one responded to Rekha’s creepy words, so it was with great clarity that Bella heard something sliding through the passage. It wasn’t a long tunnel, only about a meter, but it was also short. Larger creatures wouldn’t be able to enter at all. It was this feature that had allowed her to nearly kill a Dragonkin Lesser Fighter when it had invaded.

  Whatever was crawling down the tunnel started scratching at the stone, “Let me in, let me in, move the rock, I want to talk”

  Lehka glanced at Bella, “Should we let her in?”

  “Hell no,” Bella hissed. Whatever was scraping along the stone did not sound like nails. Well, not fingernails. It reminded her of those times she had asked Connor to sharpen her kitchen knives. That didn’t mean they couldn’t talk to whatever was out there, “If you want to speak, you can do it from outside.”

  There was a brief pause, then Rekha answered, “Can I come in, I can’t come in. Jikininki will not thank me,” Then the voice shifted from happy to a whine, “Jikininki will not thank me. He will eat me.”

  Bella glanced at Lehka. Both of their faces were pale, whoever or whatever was out there was insane and terrified of something worse. The commotion finally woke Sammy up, but she only stared in confusion at the entryway. Bella only took a moment to make sure she wasn’t going to panic.

  “Who are you talking about? Who is going to eat you?” Bella probed.

  Instead of answering the creature muttered, “Can’t come in. Can’t come in. Let me in. I CAN COME IN!”

  Bella took a step back. Batu and Aron got to their feet, each had grabbed a javelin. No one was in good shape, but everyone got ready to fight.

  The creature on the other side wheezed, then started crying. Then in Rekha’s voice, normal, but shaky, she wheezed out, “There’s a sphinx out here,” then she broke down into tears, “It’s in my head. It’s in our head.”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Bella froze. She had explained how dangerous monsters worked, and sphinxes were an ambiguous danger. They hadn’t adapted their mental assaults to hunt humans, and they had killed every single one that had shown itself. With time to understand humans, they could be incredibly dangerous. They appeared to be facing one such creature.

  Silas had mentioned being approached in a dream. It had spoken with chirps instead of words, even now it had a cadence not dissimilar to a parrot's. Wait, dreams? Bella’s head whipped around just in time to watch Sammy kick the wooden pole out of place.

  Her daughter turned towards Bella, eyes vacant and a Cheshire smile plastered across her face, “Can’t come in. Can’t come in…I am in.”

  Before anyone had recovered from the new variable, the large stone was pushed inward. On the ground was Rekha, her eyes just as vacant as Sammy’s. Crouched above her prone form was a sphinx. It used its skull to shove the now unbraced stone aside.

  Bella had no time to react. The sphinx was among them an instant later, spreading its wings to shove them all against the wall. It was much smaller than the previous few sphinxes that Bella had seen, those had the bodies of a lion and a jaguar. This one was about the size of a panther, with jet black fur and feathers. Its human head was dark skinned and female with a snarl that showed off sharp teeth.

  Normally, this thing would have been dead the moment it entered. Two of them should have been enough to take it down in normal circumstances. However, even weakened, the five of them should be enough. At least that was what Bella thought up until Sammy walked up to the sphinx and lay down before it.

  Bella froze and the monster placed a paw on her daughter’s neck. Sammy looked Bella in the eyes, then in synchrony with Rekha said, “Do as I say. Subdue the others. If you wish to stay a mother.”

  She gritted her teeth, but she was nothing if not dedicated to Sammy. On a scale between the entire world and Sammy, Bella would choose Sammy. The lives of herself and those here weren’t even a real cost as long as it gave Sammy a chance at survival.

  “Don’t do this,” Lehka whimpered.

  Bella didn’t want to, Lehka was a nice girl, but she wasn’t Bella’s girl. As soon as she shimmied out from beneath the wing, something pressed in on her mind. She took a step towards Lehka and the presence gained weight.

  Glancing back at the sphinx, she met its slitted eyes. It was smirking at her, tail twitching back and forth like it was seeing a particularly tasty bird. She was the bird. Bella took another step and the presence increased.

  The feeling wasn’t painful, in fact, her resolve was growing. Restraining Lekha was the right thing to do. The issue was, it wasn’t truly hers. Like a worm boring into her psyche, the sphinx’s desires filled her mind. Every action that she took that opposed her desires and followed its, brought her closer to being a thrall. No wonder it used dreams.

  Bella would normally have no issue resisting the pressure, she was certain most people could. Unfortunately, the sphinx had something far more valuable than her own desires and morals. At least until she took another step.

  The desire to save Sammy was partially supplanted by the desire to obey the monster. It created a unique situation where the compulsion to obey was too weak to truly dominate, while the value of Sammy’s life had been comparatively lowered. Bella would have been horrified if she wasn’t having her brain messed with, but the two competing directives made room for impotent rage.

  With a very un-catlike squawk, the sphinx jumped to the side as a war club came down on it. Bella might have been weakened, but she was still a woman holding a weapon lined with sharpened obsidian blades. The room was a bit too small to be swinging around a club, which gave the sphinx enough time to move.

  Bella still managed to hit a wing. Bone cracked at the point of impact and trails of red ran down the vanes of the feathers. The wings were black making the actual damage difficult to see. She didn’t care.

  Swinging again, Bella started screaming like a mad woman, “You stupid cat! You think you can…” whack, this time she got it on the hind leg, “come in and mess with my head. I will kill your damned ass!”

  Normally she would have rushed to get Sammy out of the way and placed herself between the sphinx and her daughter. Sammy had been woken up by the claw sliding from below her jaw up the side of her cheek, barely missing an eye, before finally ending just above her temple. Bella was concerned but it was currently suppressed by the foreign influence in her mind.

  The sphinx hissed, trying to take back control. Bella felt the pressure on her mind multiply, but unfortunately for the monster, its problems had multiplied. Aron and Batu shoved their short spears at it. Lehka tried to help, but tripped over Sammy’s prone form. However, the most surprising assault came from Rehka. The Indian woman pounced on the sphinx, nearly getting stabbed by Batu. She had no weapon but that didn’t stop her from getting a hand on the sphinx’s head and shoving a finger into its eye.

  The same rage that burned in Rehka filled Bella. While Rehka clung to the main body, Bella went to work on the closest wing. In her experience, sphinxes tended to be on the weaker side of monsters in their size category. Sure they were stronger than the little Asian dragons, she would put them at a slightly higher level than a rubber monkey. In other words, it stood no chance against four very angry sigil enhanced people in an enclosed environment.

  This hyper fixation ended up being their downfall. Bella reared back to swing again, this time the wing would be cut off. It gave her a kind of savage pleasure to think about hurting it. The war club struck something on the backswing, she thought it was the wall, but the weapon stuck there.

  Glancing back she saw a dragonkin holding the weapon’s head in its hand. Her time in this hellish landscape had killed her hesitation. Releasing the war club, Bella snatched a knife from her hip, cursing her missing hand. She thrust the knife at the dragonkin’s heart. The point stuck in the bone plate covering its torso, then snapped.

  Bella gritted her teeth, bringing up her injured arm to stop the counter strike. It didn’t work. A tail wrapped around her ankle, pulling her off balance just before its other fist crashed into Bella’s shoulder. She toppled back, rolling into the middle of the conflict with the sphinx.

  The fighting paused. Batu and Aron robotically turned to look at the dragonkin fighter. Rehka kept clawing at the sphinx, but without support, the monster quickly threw her off and placed a paw on her throat. It made a yowling hiss. All the pressure on Bella’s mind vanished as the sphinx cemented its hold on Rehka.

  Sammy sighed in relief and the fear for her safety reasserted itself. Bella rolled over, placing herself between the two monsters and her daughter. Not that it did much, this room was designed to be relatively comfortable for three people. With six people and two monsters, it was quite cramped.

  “Don’t worry Sammy, we’ll make it out of this,” Bella tried to comfort her.

  Sammy’s response was interrupted by Rehka’s scream. Her back arched and tears ran down the side of her face. Then she went still. For a moment Bella thought the woman had died, her eyes were unfocused and glassy.

  The dragonkin made a chuffing noise. Silas had often postulated that this was likely a kind of speech. Today that was proven correct.

  “The master wills you to follow him fast. Yes very fast. Those behind will be burned to ash,” the sphinx spoke through Rehka.

  For some reason assuming the monsters were sentient was far less frightening than knowing they were. It wasn’t just the dragonkin, sphinxes too, and god only knew how many others. Bella shuffled back, stopping when her heel made contact with Sammy’s leg.

  Contrary to her last experience, the dragonkin did not attack. Bella was sure she was misreading its emotion, but it looked curious. Like a boy flipping over rocks to find interesting bugs. Without anymore posturing, the creature left the hideout, followed by the sphinx which hissed at them on its way out. Cat hisses coming from a human face were far less intimidating than it likely assumed.

  “W-what do we do?” Aron stammered.

  Mandy rocked back and forth on the floor, arms wrapped around her legs. Lehka had one arm slung over the girl’s shoulder, trying to keep her from panicking. Sammy was crying while pressing a hand against the cut on her face. They had no way to bandage the wound, and while infection wasn’t a concern, it would scar. Assuming it was given time to heal.

  Batu was staring at Rehka, who still had that blank, doll-like expression. She had gotten to her feet, but done nothing else. Not even a jab with the butt of Batu’s spear got any reaction.

  “I don’t know,” Bella had been in this position before. Silas had shown up and taken care of the problem from the outside. Could that happen again, yes, but Silas could be gone for hours. The dragonkin could cook them in minutes. Unfortunately, if there was anything she was certain of, the dragonkin would kill them, “We can’t go outside.”

  “Then what do we do, they said they would turn us to ash,” Lehka asked.

  Bella checked the remaining time until her sigil was purified. Three hours and twenty minutes. She could guarantee that Silas would be back by the time that number hit zero, if only because he would be curious about the after effects. If she had her sigil, then so would Sammy, and she would gladly sacrifice the others to save her. They could just superheat the room before the dragonkin could.

  “You will not die. No, no, you won’t die if you come outside,” Rekha cooed. It was freaky, but she wasn’t doing anything. Bell still made sure that she was between Sammy and the woman.

  “Should we stab her first?” Batu asked.

  Bella was ashamed to say she almost said yes, “No, but knock her out.”

  Batu nodded. He shuffled behind Rehka. The woman didn’t resist as Batu reached around her neck and squeezed. Bella had honestly thought that trick was something only people in movies did. She knew she didn’t have long to come up with a plan. They didn’t have any way to dig out, at least not fast enough.

  Her eyes fell on the four bone barrels of water. Water took a ridiculously long time to heat. Better yet, the whole hideout was sloped to let liquids drain through the door. How long this would buy, Bella was unsure, but draining the fluid once heated would buy them a good amount of time.

  “Move the water barrels to the door,” Bella ordered. She would have helped, but she would have been useless with only one hand.

  Aron and Batu struggled to lift the fifty gallon drum. Eventually, they resorted to rolling it to the doorway before standing it back up. It wasn’t a moment too soon. Flames filled the tunnel out, several tongues of fire even made it around the edges of the barrel.

  Bella knew from experience that the flames were hot, but not to the point of instantly boiling water. The temperature of the room did rise, but far more slowly than she had feared. Unfortunately, there was one thing she did not take into account. Bone quickly became brittle when subjected to intense heat.

  The first barrel broke, flooding the hallway. There was a hiss of liquid hitting something hot, then a hiss from an angry dragonkin.

  “Quick switch it out before they start it up again,” Bella ordered.

  Aron and Batu quickly complied, however, the fire did not start up again. Bella and the others glanced uncertainly at each other. They should have started up again, unless that threat was an empty one.

  “Do you think they gave up,” Aron asked.

  “No, they would be fools to. We killed a third of their group over the last few months,” Bella answered while hoping her assumption was wrong. If death wasn’t the goal, what could they possibly want the group alive for? An image from a sci-fi horror movie came to mind. Silas had said that their leader could implant dragonkin into other monsters like some kind of parasitic organism.

  “Where’s that teleporting lunatic when you need him?” Batu muttered, mirroring Bella’s thoughts exactly.

  They fell into an uneasy silence, the only noise was the clattering of something outside. Bella frowned, where had she heard that noise before? She shook her head, trying to clear it, the residue of the sphinx’s intrusion was still muddying her thought processes.

  Something large smashed into the barrel of water. Unlike the fire, it shattered the bone container instantly, dumping the liquid out. The now empty barrel was easily shoved aside by the centi-snake. That’s where she heard that noise. By centi-snake standards, this was a baby. By earth standards, it would have eclipsed most anacondas.

  Bella tried to stab it. She succeeded, but the scales were tough. The broken blade bit, then was ripped from her grip by the serpent's inertia. It went up the wall over the ceiling and latched onto Sammy.

  “No,” Bella screamed as she jumped at the monster.

  It ignored her. Sammy screamed, instinctively trying to use Greater Thermal Cultivator to no effect. Bella landed on the creature, but with no weapon, it was down to the power she could exert with a single arm. There were few creatures that would lose that contest.

  The centi snake ignored her as it scuttled back out of the hideout, dragging Sammy along with it. Bella tried to hold on, but the tunnel out wasn’t wide enough. She was scraped off as soon as it exited. That didn’t mean she stopped. As the tail passed by, Bella latched on with a death grip. There was no way she would let her daughter face the dragonkin alone.

  A brief time in darkness as she was dragged through the tunnel was followed by the purple light of this hell like realm. She tried to get to her feet, but she wasn’t entirely sure what to do when she got to her feet. Unfortunately, she never got the chance. Claws wrapped around her neck and hefted her off the ground.

  Bella found herself staring into the snakelike eyes of the biggest dragonkin she had ever seen. There was one other difference. This one was a dark purple instead of red. Bella felt despair, she knew there was no way to survive this.

  A smile crossed the monster’s face. It kicked the sphinx, which was curled up licking its wounds. It whined, but did not retaliate. Instead, Rekha crawled outside. Evidently, people didn’t stay unconscious for very long.

  “Jikininki has an answer he seeks,” Rehka rasped, “An answer he does want. Where is the one Nimrod’s slave hunts?”

  Bella blinked. Was this all a way to catch Silas? She was distracted by the centi snake depositing Sammy by the other dragonkin. The creature curled up protectively around the sphinx. She hadn’t realized that they could control other animals.

  The dragonkin chief shook her. Bella yelped as the claws punctured her neck, “I don’t know. He left, I don’t know when he’ll return.”

  The chief glanced at the sphinx which made several hissing noises. After a moment of thought the dragonkin barked something at the sphinx. That bark was quickly translated by Rehka.

  “Bait you will be. Bait to catch Jikininki‘s enemy.”