Second Genesis

’Fuck me.’

Grey pulled on every fiber of his being to fight against his instinct to curl into a ball and die. As his feet and lower body fell into the flames, he swung down on the edge of where he had seen the furnace to be with all his might.

From an outsider’s perspective, it looked as though he had given up on saving his own life for the sake of doling out a worthless, small bit of pain to a creature that wouldn’t even feel it.

But Grey knew better.

The gravity inside the cabin kept shifting. At first he thought it was just the cabin just moving in relation to itself. After all, the cabin itself was moving on the outside. All the hands holding it up had to do was tilt and shift the angle around a bit and it would feel like gravity had shifted magically.

But then Grey had felt the gravity increase. And then the witch had slammed the shutters closed for some reason.

At first, Grey thought it just didn’t want him to successfully escape. The door and windows were obvious weak points. If he leapt out of one of them, it would have to find a way to swallow him again.

However... what if there was another reason? Maybe the witch didn’t want him to see that the world wasn’t shifting outside.

Therein lay another question, though. Why would the witch care about either?

When Grey got to that point in his thoughts, he instead asked another question instead of finding an answer to it...

Where were the witch’s arms?

They had definitely come out of the windows to prop the cabin up earlier, but all Grey could see in here was the furnace. There wasn’t even any furniture, let alone a pair of arms sticking out windows.

This only left Grey more confused until the witch spoke. Its voice had come right from the furnace.

That was when Grey realized that the entire cabin came to an abrupt and sudden stop at the furnace. It almost looked like the cabin was half the size it should have been.

One by one, everything linked together.

The Wicked Forest Witch wasn’t just hiding somewhere manipulating things. The Wicked Forest Witch was the cabin itself, and every one of her important bits was behind this furnace.

And if Grey was lucky... every one of those important bits was tied to this sparkling ruby gem he had seen earlier.

"Please be a video game. Please be a video game, dammit!"

Grey roared as the pain seared through his nerves.

There was a sudden BANG! that was quickly followed by the sound of shattering glass and a screech.

Grey fell right through the furnace just as the flames went out.

He collapsed onto a cold ground, his shoulder buzzing with pain as Ray’s long sword clanged to the ground next to him.

Smoke billowed from Grey’s Nexis Suit, or rather the one he had stolen from Fitz. It definitely looked like it had seen better days, and his skin beneath was probably a blistering red by now, but he had survived.

"Ha... ha..." Grey released a low chuckle.

"You... dare..."

"Fuck me." Grey replied almost too quickly, wanting to roll his eyes and shed tears at the same time, but he managed to roll over and pick up his sword to face whatever was coming.

But when he finally did face the witch, the threat he was expecting wasn’t there.

He saw an old naked lady.

"Ew."

The woman—if she could still be called that in her current state—had countless mechanical parts and tubes sticking out of her, especially from her jaw. What expressions or features she had once had were hardly distinguishable.

The only real standout feature she had remaining were the blazing flames that made up her eyes, the only part of her that made Grey think that she might still be a danger.

"Some clothes, lady. They’d do you some good."

The jaw of the Wicked Forest Witch unhinged until she could probably swallow her own head in a single bite. She screeched, and the mechanical gears on the wall behind her turned and reshaped themselves.

They formed into mini soldiers who lunged forward, but Grey’s lip twitched.

Was this what gamers called the second phase of a battle? But these minions were half as strong as the Skrill, and that was several level ups ago to Grey.

Ignoring the pain in his legs, Grey took a step forward and swung.

He didn’t have time for this. Burns got worse the longer you let them fester without treatment.

Two heads flew into the air and he instantly closed in on the Wicked Witch.

"WAI—!"

Grey thrust the long sword right through her open jaw, slicing up and through her head.

He leapt backward as an extra measure of caution, then exhaled in relief when it seemed that no follow-up attack was coming.

—

[VICTORY: Grey Temolt]

—

Grey grinned ear to ear. "I better get some rewards for this."

After he finished clearing the Skrill Instance, Grey thought he’d get a new Loot Box for every ruin he cleared. Unfortunately, that hadn’t happened. He left them all with either trash Common Boxes that quite literally gave him garbage, or nothing at all.

What Grey didn’t know was that this was due to Caldrin’s manipulation in some part.

While Caldrin couldn’t influence things too heavily, he could delay or divert boxes to the wrong location. He couldn’t veer them completely off course, but he could hide them in hard-to-find locations within the ruin so that Grey would just assume they didn’t show up.

And this time was no different.

Grey stood waiting around for his rewards, but after a full half minute, his expression went dark.

He opened up his status screen and clicked through to his Quests.

—

Operation: Second Wind of the Mechanical Jaw Lineage

Quest Rank: Rare

Mission Type: Retrieval

Objective: Reclaim...

—

’Oh, I see. I’m supposed to find the Ancestral Tome. So that means it’s hidden somewhere?’

Grey began looking.

Caldrin hadn’t realized just yet that a single line in a Quest’s textbox was about to screw him over big time.