I turned. The walls melted around Oni, the environment itself reconfiguring to Karl’s wishes. He molded it, the same way I’d carved an apartment out of my subspace—only he’d had a hell of a lot more practice at it than I had. A shimmer spread across the walls, every surface on which we stood growing as watery as the sewer channel running through the dungeon.
“Hold onto something!” I screamed. “Find the exit!”
Karl’s voice came from everywhere at once. “There is no exit!” the demon screamed, his voice pitched with triumph. “This is my world, bitches! I control the horizontal and the vertical! Do not adjust your set!”
Christina stumbled against me, then jumped into the air as the ground beneath us erupted into a fractal mass of spikes. They spread across the floor, covering walls which melted like butter. Stalactites hung from the ceiling, spewing jets of liquid fire as the prison around us began to collapse.
Christina held me aloft. Mareth did the same with Maddie, cradling her as the succubus flapped her wings to stay above the spikes. Oni wasn’t so lucky. The big man broke wall after wall, his sides pierced by razor-sharp needles.
“I’m so sorry, Luke,” Christina sobbed, looking at the devastation all around her. “We shouldn’t have come here. This was such a mistake…”
“Fuck that!” I growled. “Bring me toward Karl! Then you grab Oni and get the fuck out of here!”
Christina’s eyebrows drew together. “How?” she asked, looking around the Salvador Dali nightmare Karl had just turned his subspace into. “You heard Karl—he shut the only exit. There’s no way out of here!”
“He’s lying,” I said. “His subspace is registered to the dormitories, just like mine. Which means there’s an exit that synchronized to local Academy time!” In order to snap Christina out of it, I did the one thing certain to recenter her—I gave her a hearty slap on her firm, round ass. “We just have to find it!”
She giggled. “Shit, you’re right!” She gauged the distance between us and Karl. The demon had carved a plateau out of the melting landscape, almost like the sparring islands in the Wrath Arena. “You sure you can beat him one more time?”
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” I told her. “Only the fish like to say stupid shit before they get shot!”
With a laugh, Christina launched me. My wings unfurled, covering the rest of the distance as the world fell away beneath us. What had been a simple dungeon was now a grand, open pit filled with lava. Only a few boulders made of glitched chunks from the former dungeon—a cell door here, a sewer line there—remained, giving Oni and Mareth something to perch on.
I landed on the largest plateau, slamming Karl to the ground. We rolled, stopping inches from a hot plume of lava. Heat rolled over my skin, nearly baking me in my robes.
“You just don’t give up, do you?” Karl sputtered, struggling to rise. “I’ll just have to collapse this entire subspace, then! Crush you like a bug - AAAAHHHHH!”
I grabbed his neck and twisted, shoving him face first into the lava. It was the same move he’d done to me when this was still a sewer, only back then I’d gotten a faceful of gross water. This burnt Karl’s features clean off. His body twitched spasmodically as the pain infiltrated his body, the front of his neck and chest bursting into flames from the heat.
“You’ll do no such thing,” I said, trusting he still had the means to hear me. “I wonder how long it would take you to reform yourself if I burnt you down to cinders, Karl? Bet that would keep you down a hell of a long time compared to a tendril in the brain…”
As if summoned by the words, my demonic tendrils reformed. I scooped Karl up with them, tipping him upside down and hanging him over the lava. The tendrils wrapped around him until he was completely immobilized, then I hung him on a crag of rock overlooking the plateau. The top of his head was mere inches away from the churning surface of the lava. His head caught flame, burnt to a crisp, then reformed—only to touch the lava again and burn anew.
“Luke!” Christina’s voice called to me. I looked, and saw our group arrayed on the far side of the chamber. Between two of the melted monuments that had once been wings of the prison, an arch stood made of much sterner stuff. Beneath it was a simple wooden door, the kind of thing you could pass every day for a week and never think much about.
The exit, I thought. Got to be…
I took off like a fucking rocket, soaring through the subspace. All around us, the last few structures collapsed into lava, melting away like a dropped scoop of ice cream. The tendrils around Karl’s body held him over the churning maelstrom of death, the only thing keeping his body whole.
I landed next to the portal and planted a kiss on Christina’s lips. “You found it,” I growled, giving her ass a squeeze. “Good girl.”
“Hey, I helped too!” Mareth cried. “Squeeze my butt, too!”
“Later,” I said with a laugh. “After we get out of here. And give Oni some medical attention.”
“Luke!” Karl’s voice echoed across the subspace. “Well done! You are truly a formidable opponent! I look forward to competing with you—”
Christina blew a lock of blonde hair out of her face and pivoted on a heel. “Eat shit, asshole!” she yelled, tossing a nail-shard with the accuracy of a sniper rifle. It cut through the tendril suspending Karl, sending the entire mass he’d been tied up in falling to the lava below. Karl shrieked in mingled pain and horror as he sank into the sizzling lava, struggling to
