(A/N: Content Warning: Graphic Violence. See bottom of chapter notes for more details if you may want to avoid that content.)
"I just come by to run you over
I just come by to see you quiver
You can come, you can slip inside, babe
Killer eyes and a burnin' heart, babe"
—"Pink Steam" from Rather Ripped by Sonic Youth
In about every fight—especially any spar—he'd been in, Max started by waiting. Watching, keeping his attention on his opponent and waiting to react to the weakness they revealed. Staring into Eleos's darkening eyes, though, ate at his patience far too much for him to last more than a few breaths. It didn't take more than one deep breath after he brought his tail up in front of him until he dashed forward.
Eleos didn't move to counter, but Max didn't take that as an opening. Too much like bait. Instead, he fired a thunder towards it—he couldn't. The charge he tossed its way connected with him instead of the sky, making it a thunder-bolt instead. A weak one, at that.
The charmander hardly reacted to the attack, not even enough electricity to make its muscles spasm. Max fired another shot, but it was even weaker—at best a strong thunder-shock—and Eleos gave even less of a reaction. It stood still and watched with a disinterested smirk. "What is the matter, hero? Where has your strength gone?" it taunted.
The taunt didn't have time to even finish before Max barreled towards Eleos, at first assuming only rage blocked his vision (even though it was stars and darkness rather than blood-red). Whatever he thought he thought his plan was, a flat paw-strike in the center of his chest knocked it out of him, as well as his air.
He staggered back in disbelief, gasping in what little he could. At some point before he could notice, a scaled leg swept his paws out from under him and left him sprawled along the grass. He glared up at Eleos with curiosity he couldn't repress.
Eleos grew an even wider smirk and proudly declared, "I know kung-fu." The mind-melting rage got rid of that curiosity. Max leapt up to his hindpaws, ignoring the burning in his lungs and the stars taking over his vision. To at least mitigate them, he hid behind his tail in his usual defensive position and waited. "You asked if I'd been practicing in this form?" Max nodded by deepening her sneer. "I've found the study of martial arts to be most productive—as well as therapeutic."
"I'm sure kicking your ass will be just as therapeutic," Max growled. When it giggled in response, Max decided to launch the worst shock he ever; he barely forced out enough electricity to make static. "You know what, sure." His tail drifted back as he took a more human stance. "Wanna fight like this? Let's do it."
A bit of disappointment broke into Eleos's expression. "Well, I was hoping to attempt using my flame as well," it mumbled. "But, if you insist." At once, the flame on its tail extinguished with naught but smoke to mark its departure.
Luckily, Max was far too furious to care about the unsettling sight of a charmander extinguishing its tail flame. He leapt forward and threw his hindpaw around to slam into Eleos's chest, but found himself slamming into its palm instead. It dug its claws into his hindpaw and latched its other paw into his back, using his own momentum to throw him over itself and into the ground.
A lungful of air and spit heaved out of him. He knew his eyes were open but barely saw more than a void of darkness around him. Every tendon, nerve, and muscle begged him to stay down, but he felt Eleos standing proud over him. He didn't know what to aim for, but let fate decide.
Max shoved himself up and spun around with a clenched paw prepared to break against whatever he could hit—and hit it did. From the malleable crunch, he could roughly guess he'd hit its nose. The force of the hit knocked him backwards, but he barely managed to stay standing. He hadn't managed a full breath yet, but he'd gotten a hit in and stayed standing. In his mind, they were basically even.
Until a scaled leg swept under his and sent him careening to the ground yet again, then slammed down onto his chest before he could even think of retaliation. It landed right where Eleos's first hit had. The new hit combined with the pain of the nearly-formed bruise and pressed his back into the ground enough to worsen the pain of being slammed down twice.
Despite that, Max still tried to push it off. He brought his right forepaw up to it first, but barely managed to hold it up, so he employed his other as well. Despite having nothing to show for it, the exertion set fire to his already smoldering lungs. It hurt to breathe, to push, to keep his eyes open—even if they couldn't see anything—but most of all, the pain of complete, utter, helpless defeat shattered his soul.
As he kept failing to push any force at all, an ache in the back of his throat and a sting in his eyes joined the cacophony of pain. He knew he was crying, but refused to let it distract him. Not that he had a chance to ignore it when he felt claws digging into his chest and hoisting him up by his fur.
At least the removed weight let him breathe a bit easier, if still not enough. "Do you honestly believe yourself still capable of her—"
A blast of water tossed it away and left Max to fall to his own weight. Before he hit the ground, he felt a cool chest and scaled arms catch and cradle him. "That's enough!" Cori cried. "Leave him alone!" Arms embracing him while screams pierced his ears brought a nauseating wave of memories. Their scales shifted from cold to warm, and even though he couldn't see, he could swear their arms had turned orange.
The familiar ache of a sob burst out of his throat in a series of coughs. As Cori lowered him to the ground, Max tried to tug himself back up. He screwed his eyes shut in furious determination, but that only managed to drain the remaining energy he already didn't have. The burning in his lungs, the ache in his chest, the tickle of the grass, the soak of tears and the inferno of injured pride all faded. He fought against unconsciousness, but it only left him fading further.
For one terrifying moment, he wondered if this was his end until the warm comfort of nothing swept his worries away.
"Deep in love you need no other
Deep in love your lonely lover"
"—a fucking idiot?" pierced his eardrums. It hurt, but Max was just glad to still be alive. Now, he just had to wonder where he was. He didn't feel any grass, but maybe that was because he couldn't feel yet. Probing the ground with a paw, though, confirmed there wasn't any grass. "You could have killed him!" That didn't sound like Cori. Was it… "You better be glad you didn't, or I would've killed you." Yeah, definitely Neb.
"W-well, but," Cori, he could've known that even if he was reading rather than listening. "M-Max did agree to the—"
"Cori," Neb interrupted. "Of course Max agreed to it. If he was in a better condition, I'd be calling him an idiot, too." Max's lip pulled up into half a snarl, though a throb in his chest tempered his objections. He just needed a distraction, so he returned to figuring out where he was.
Home, probably. Neb and Cori sounded slightly far off, but even though Neb was clearly talking to Eleos, it hadn't said a word to reveal its location. "I am a fool, yes," it said, and Max could feel the breath from its speech. "I had hoped to induce a forced realization of his physical limits in a way he would respond to, but I should have realized that imagining a solution amicable to him would inevitably be idioti—"
Max leapt up to slam a fist down the asshole's throat, but teeth blocked its passage. His target offered no resistance when his weight slammed into it, and he didn't wait to throw another punch with his next paw. Eleos's face dulled into a target that Max barely recognized as he started marking every new hit with a feral bark.
All his anger twisted into a formless void of rage that he couldn't comprehend beyond the feeling of his teeth grinding against each other and his fists slamming into flesh and bones. Whatever reason he had for the attack left him with the first strike—only attacking mattered. When screams threatened to distract him, he tried to drown them out with his own. He kept hitting, hitting, hitting without any chance of a thought breaking through.
Far off, miles away, he vaguely made out a blank face with resigned eyes. It seemed wrong, so he tried to punch it right, but that started feeling off, too. Smacks followed smacks followed squelches followed snaps that suddenly started ringing in his ears, bringing back the screams as his voice stopped drowning them out.
The face drew a bit closer, and he realized one of the eyes had swollen shut. A strike of terror ripped into him. Before he could interrogate it, he threw another punch to try and smash it away. Instead, he felt the crack of his knuckles hitting bone and couldn't tell if the crack had come from him or Eleos.
He did realize, however, the terror had sprung from Eleos. Particularly, the sight of its face. Not shattered (pokémon were quite durable, after all), but varying levels of fractured and broken. Its teeth spread and splintered along its jaw with more than a few gaps and cracks. Trails of blood dripped over discolored scales. Blood. Splashes of red splattered over Max's paws.
Max fell back off Eleos, stumbling back. His eyes trained on his paws, but he could only see Eleos's vacant, resigned eyes. The eye that had swollen shut. Eleos hadn't made a sound other than the impacts of Max's strikes, but he still vividly remembered a charmander's screams.
"Yes, I would say I deserved that," Eleos said.
Max froze in place. He couldn't bear to look away from his paws, but slight movement in his periphery filled his vision with its shattered face. Warm streaks ran down his cheeks and onto his paws. Tears, but his eyes stayed glued to Eleos. "P-pikapi… Pi-p-p-p-p...Pi," he squeaked. He needed to apologize—whether Eleos needed to hear it or not, Max needed to apologize—but any word beyond babbles fled his maw.
"Max?" he heard Neb ask, but the sight absorbed him far too much for him to respond to her. "Are you in there?"
Eleos raised a paw to her. Its jaw snapped open, now only held up by skin as its crooked teeth straightened, and its cracked teeth healed. Despair's burden in Max's chest lessened as the missing teeth flew back to their place, and the swollen eye deflated and opened. The weight in Max's chest lightened as it healed its battered face in front of him, the snaps, cracks and pops that should've horrified and sickened him merely tickled his ears.
Still, the wet chill on his paws stole his breath. More than seeing Eleos heal was helping him, but he couldn't think about it enough to figure that out. It brought a paw up to its jaw and snapped it back into place, then said, "I am fine. Are you feeling better?"
Max only whimpered and curled his tail around himself. His paws clutched his tail, ignoring the stickiness that action spread. His fists ached and stung. Tears blurred his vision.
"It's all right," Neb cooed, barely a whisper. "Are you there?" The sounds bounced around in his mind, taking a moment to register as words, and even longer to decipher their meaning. Max finally nodded, unsure if it had been a minute or millennia. "I'm going to clean you up, all right?" He let himself keep nodding; it was easier than trying to understand her and answer honestly. She spoke some more, but he didn't bother making it out.
A furry paw grabbed his own and dabbed cold, wet cloth on it. When he looked down at it, he saw that room he'd woken up in months ago. Empty except for them. A safe, cozy place that wrenched him to pieces with the sight of his bloody paws. He'd done it again.
The vision burned away when he felt Cori's paw tap his shoulder. He started looking over to them when they threw their arms around him and squeezed him into a hug. "Are you okay? Max?" they whimpered.
Max did his best to answer by whimpering in agreement. His terror and pain had been sucked away (by Eleos, he assumed) but left nothing behind. He couldn't figure out what he felt other than the touch of Neb and Cori. Cori shifted just enough that he could see Neb working on his paw. Mostly clean, she kept dabbing at specks of red that spread when she pulled away the rag. He idly felt the pain with every touch and breathed a sigh of relief.
It felt right that he hadn't gotten out of it unscathed.
Neb hovered some gauze onto his knuckles and wrapped them with tape, cutting into him with a shattering familiarity. Eleos, Mandy, even his old partner's faces all swirled together in a vision of his paws brutalizing them.
"I-I did it again," he sobbed. Cori squeezed him tighter, which he needed when Eleos's translation impaled him with a spike of guilt.
"Were you scared?" Neb asked. Max shook his head. "Angry?" His wince was agreement enough. Her nods filled the periphery of his vision, and he felt her paws put down the newly bandaged one and pick up the other. "Did you want us to hate you for this? Like last time?" He shook his head. She paused for a moment. "Why did you then?"
Max gasped, which caused an embarrassing sniffle that confirmed he was still crying. "B-be… I'm… it was—I just," he stammered, but suddenly went quiet. Eleos translated his babbles, and he knew exactly how to answer. "Because I'm a monster."
Neb looked up at his eyes while Cori held him tighter. Her gaze pulled his in; he couldn't look away. She finished up his second paw and started dabbing the few drips that made it onto his tail. "It doesn't hurt monsters to hurt," she said. He shrank away, but his eyes remained captive to hers. "You got mad, and you lashed out…," she glanced back at Eleos, "a lot. Now, you regret it."
"Do note that my battery was not without very good reason," Eleos said, making Neb roll her eyes.
Swallowing her objections to that, she went on to say, "I saw your eyes." Max felt his blood chill further. "You're still in the midst of a sort of relapse." A whimper caught in his throat and grew into a sob. "You faded for most of it, didn't you?" Despite it all, he managed a nod, and she responded with one of her own.
A towel floated over to them and wrapped around him (and Cori, for convenience), and then, she wrapped herself around them both. "You're lucky it's a devil," Neb cooed. "Not that it makes what you did more acceptable—" she shot Eleos a glare before it could argue the point, "—But at least it's already healed up." Even with all the warmth around him, Max shivered. He saw himself hurting her, Cori, Jake, Mandy, even Amphy so clearly in his mind that he had to wonder which he'd attacked minutes ago.
"You won't do it again," Neb stated. Max narrowed his eyes at her and sneered. "You have a good heart, and it's hurting." He rolled his eyes. "And it will hurt every time you think about doing this again." Her words smacked him and discharged his sneer.
His eyes finally dropped out of her grasp, and right into another. Even if it had fully healed, Max could only see the disfigured wound that had been Eleos's face. More tears rushed in as if to hide the painful sight, but not enough were left to fully protect him. Eleos took a step forward. Max tried to scurry away, but didn't have the energy to break out of the imprisoning embrace.
It stopped after the step and held out a paw. "I wish to make amends," it said.
Max recoiled as much as his restricted position let him. His head shook, and Cori squeezed him tighter; he felt the same amount of control over both. "I-I… but I," he stuttered, stopping when his voice cracked. No amount of deep breaths gave him enough strength, though, so he shook his head again and pressed on. "I c-can't hurt you again."
A warm, scaled paw landed on his shoulder and made him squeak out a squeal. "Then you will not," Eleos stated.
Those words, the touch, the hugs, the towel, the advice all swirled in his mind. His head started shaking again, and he shook it harder when he noticed. Every act of kindness and mercy fought in his mind for claim over which was most absurd. Each stood in staunch opposition of any sense of right and wrong ingrained in him.
"Stop," he whimpered. "Stop, stop, stop! Stop it!" He repeated, getting louder and louder. "STOP!" Neb flinched away, but Cori squeezed him tighter. "Get mad at me! Hate me! What's wrong with y'all!" Each word dripped with dread while empty tear ducts strained to make more. The moment felt familiar, but the sentiment refused to leave him. "Are you just going to coddle me until I kill you?"
"No," Neb answered, taking back the place she'd flinched away from. "We're going to catch you when you fall." Her paw went to halt the rebuttal forming on his lips. "So long as you keep trying. If you ever stop," she shrugged with a wry grin, "I suppose we'll figure out a way to make you start trying again."
His eyes ached, tears he couldn't make begging to drown him. "You need us," Cori whispered without a trace of their usual hesitation. "I don't want you to be alone again." Max looked down to see their own tears flooding their eyes. They hadn't sounded this certain since… "I saw it when you screamed at me." Max winced—their thoughts had synced with his, evidently. "You looked so desperate." They looked up at his eyes, saying more in silence than words could; his reflection in their eyes looked back at him.
Max's mouth hung open, but no words came. He couldn't think of any, couldn't bear to say any. A swallowed sob forced his mouth shut and made him curl into the surrounding embrace. He couldn't. It couldn't make sense. He had no idea what he needed, but knew that this was wrong. He needed something—anything else, but he couldn't think of a single alternative.
The Dungeon flitted through his mind. The temptation to return had hit him many times before, but this felt different. Instead of the usual need to rip his emotions, his awareness out of himself, he remembered that sickening lurch in his stomach. The world twisting and changing all around him, his body trying to twist and corrupt with it, but staying utterly the same.
His face, so blocky and harsh, overlaid on top of his hideous, bulky tail, and the towel around his body made it feel so off. In the years since she'd become a pokémon, she'd never felt her body was especially wrong. It felt wrong, but she couldn't remember a time her body hadn't felt wrong. It felt foreign in a way so familiar that she'd never noticed—or, more accurately, hadn't noticed for a very long time.
That floor that had grabbed hold of her, covered her, pulled her in went from horrifying to envious. If only she could join the Dungeon in its horrid, twisting form. Yet, at the same time, she didn't want to abandon her body. She wanted to inhabit it, inhabit herself, but wished she could find a version of herself that wasn't so… wrong.
"Open up your arms to me girl
Let me feel your wild heartbeat, girl"
At some point, Max had fallen asleep. The time hadn't passed in his mind, though, the same lost, twisting thoughts rending his mind brought him from the sleeping day to the waking night. The vibrant, tumultuous landscape of incomprehensible thoughts snapped into darkness fleeing from a warm glow. It took him a moment to realize he'd opened his eyes, and another to be sure.
What the dim light reached, Max recognized as the place he'd started to call home. When he wondered where the light came from, he felt Eleos's embrace. Despite its warmth, he felt a chill. It wasn't a conscious thought to retreat from it. He had to and did so as quickly and quietly as he could.
His hindpaws brought him to his door. With a clutch of his scarf, he walked through. The Dungeon had been pulling him for the past few days, and now, he was too exhausted to resist. All around him, the night—trees, stars, dirt, the moon, grass and the sky—blended into a slurry identical to what he'd dreamt moments ago. Waking up in his room again wouldn't have surprised him much at all.
That pull, now that he was finally following it, felt like a long lost friend. He felt it walk alongside him, crunching the ground under his paws as they went forward. It took him along like a guide that needed no words, no signals, no force or coercion beside certainty that his every step brought him closer to peace, closer to comfort, closer to home.
The earth shifted. Max turned to see the interruption, certain that someone had invaded their space. Only the night filled his vision. The pull walking with him echoed his sense, though. He stopped to listen for it and fell into awe. Every blade of grass shifting, every tree that creaked, every gust of wind that pushed them, and every little fly and ant that fed on them, the beetle digging back underground to hide all surrounded him. He'd known of it before. Now, he felt it. All around him.
Yet, that sense of intrusion gained no solid form. It hung behind just as strong, but he couldn't find it. As he went forward, he let this awareness fill him. The grass, dirt he felt underneath him moved aside as it had before, and now he could feel the imprints it left just as clearly. His tracks faded, but forever changed the course of what they touched. The path of one becomes a trail after enough repetition and time.
This would have all made sense to him before. Then, however, it had been abstract. A thought experiment. Around him, but apart from him. Now, it was a part of him, and he was part of it. The path before him and the path behind him were equally certain: he'd already made the choice; now, he had to understand it.
Yet, that invading force behind him felt different. Outside of his decision, outside of the system, a force acting without instead of alongside him. It had a draw that he feared. It watched. It followed. It waited. With every step, he grew more certain it would meet him at his destination. Even acting against him, he could see the path it followed. It followed a path he knew quite well, in fact.
His.
The Dungeon grew closer, and with it, his meeting with the aberration. As he approached the threshold, he felt the force take form. A speck drew closer and surrounded itself in flesh, bones, a simulacra of life. Max recognized it even before the fire lit behind it.
"Max," Eleos said. "Why have you come here."
"Because I had to," Max answered. The answer came so easily that he said it before he thought it. "It's… calling me." Yet, as he spoke, he felt its pull separate from him. It waited before him still, but he felt it relent in its demand. When he turned to face Eleos, it remained patient in its wait.
Eleos, for its part, didn't dismiss him out of paw. It stopped for a moment, mulling his words over. "Is this not the pull of Dungeons you are familiar with?" it asked.
Max stopped to think. It made the most sense, and maybe it was, but it had a completely new character to it. It felt like a guide to follow instead of an impulse to resist. "No," he mumbled, shaking his head. "It's different. I don't know how to explain it."
Eleos hummed for a moment, then asked, "Could this be because of your novel condition?" The pull behind Max seemed for a moment less appealing.
As if it noticed, though, he felt the wind around him reminding him of what else it brought. "Maybe," he said, shaking his head again. "But I feel different." He looked at the world around him, inviting Eleos to do the same. Another memory floated into his awareness. "Right before I blacked out last time, you kept me lucid for a while."
Looking up, he saw Eleos nod and went on, "When the instincts had more control, I felt like I could see more. It helped me fight, but I'm feeling it again." He paused to breathe in the night air. "It feels… like I'm a part of something." His mouth twisted into a frown. The feeling was more than that, but he couldn't find a better way to describe it.
At least Eleos seemed to grasp the general sentiment. "But why come to this Dungeon?" it asked. Max paused, again at a loss for any explanation better than— "Simply because you have to?" it wondered aloud, then chuckled. "Though I've come to predict their directions, scarcely can I truly inhabit the mind of pokémon. I can feel as they do, follow the lines of their desires. Begrudgingly, I could say I've come to understand them.
"The human mind, however?" it laughed and shook its head. "Never does it cease to baffle me." Max felt a shade of embarrassment, then looked away. "Though, perhaps you are an enigma even among humans."
Max found the pull much more appealing now. Just not for self discovery reasons this time. "Are you going to try and stop me, then?" he grumbled.
Eleos shook its head and approached, and that spark Max had begun to feel around it lit once more. "If you must do this, then you will," it said. "I've failed to stop you once before." It winked at him, and Max rolled his eyes. "I merely wish to ensure your safety."
A breath Max hadn't realized he was holding let itself out. "Thank you," he said.
They seemed to agree, but Eleos hadn't come to his side yet. It gave him a pointed look and asked, "Should I intervene in the event you begin to lose yourself?"
Another detail Max hadn't quite considered yet. It felt best to tell it yes, but his gut told him he didn't need to worry. When the question repeated in his mind, he shook his head. "I think… I need to get a little lost," he said.
Eleos gave him a harsh stare, but it carried more concern than objection. Max nodded, and it nodded in kind. "As you wish," Eleos said, then gave him a little grin. "What Neb doesn't know won't hurt her, yes?" A chuckle wiggled out of Max—where did a wannabe destroyer of Earth find a sense of humor? It walked up beside him and offered a scaled paw. "Shall we?"
As he looked down to give it serious thought, Max saw his paw already wrapping around Eleos's. The warm, familiar embrace brought comfort, but a hint of guilt stowed away as well. The bandages on his fists were still fresh. "I'm sorry," he mumbled.
Eleos squeezed his paw and looked at him. "I am aware," it said, "and I forgive you." An objection tangled in his chest until another squeeze from its paw pulled the knot loose.
Max took a breath, looked up, and they stepped towards the Dungeon's entrance together. The certainty in his chest replaced the usual knot of trepidation that came from approaching one. A light squeeze and twist in his stomach let him know they'd crossed over the threshold and entered, the sprinkling of nausea oddly comforting.
After one step inside, Max felt the world around him widen. That same awareness surrounded him, but with less noise of random life, he felt a deeper focus. Along with the push and pull of life all around, he felt a much deeper pulsing and twisting—identical to the turn of his stomach. The path shifted and twisted ever so slightly as branches scattered slightly, most retreating, but some persisting. All Dungeons shifted and spiraled into themselves, mazes of constant change, and usually Max barely had enough visual to see more than a clearing at a time.
Now, though, he felt it beat, pulse with life and followed its flow. His paws brought him along without needing to ask permission. As they stepped deeper, Max felt the Dungeon expand around them, as if spreading out to welcome him home. "Can you feel that?" Max whispered, afraid he'd disperse the spread with too loud a sound.
"The Dungeon?" Eleos asked. Max nodded, so it tilted its head to glance up at the arches of trees blocking the sky. "I have some connection to them, I suppose." Max could practically hear the memories playing in its mind as it reminisced. "I could reach into them, encourage their shifting. They seem to recognize my being, but now?" It shook its head. "It feels as if they only greet me begrudgingly."
Max only responded with a mournful hum. This sense, he wished he could share it with someone. After only a single turn, he breathed in the air of another threshold crossed.
"You are experiencing quite a bit more?" Eleos asked.
"Yes," Max breathlessly gasped. "It's like I can see farther than I can, but it's more than just seeing." He took in another deep breath as they continued forward. A stray thought struck him, so he absently asked, "Do you think they're alive?"
Eleos's paw stiffened. "Sometimes, I fear they are," it confessed. Max looked over to see its eyes following the grass. "When I reached into them, spurred them on," a shiver tickled through it, "Thinking back, it felt as if I tortured them." In an attempt to comfort it, Max squeezed its paw and brought his other to rub it. "They do not think, not as far as I can tell." Eleos reached its paw out into the air. "However, when I reached in, I'm sure I felt a heart."
The paw in Max's grasp shifted slightly. Its form dissipated slightly into a cloudy image of itself before struggling to reassert itself. Max resisted the urge to squeeze it tighter for fear of how it might reassert itself if his paw got in its way. Walking along, she could feel its remorse as much as she felt the pulse of life beneath her paws. "Maybe they'll forgive you?" she offered, though not at all confident in the idea herself.
Eleos paused for a moment and forced its form solid again, then put an amused smile on. "I suppose forgiveness is a gift of the heart, yes?" it mused. It looked down at its free paw and thought for a moment before reaching into its chest as if its flesh was a cloud, and Max realized (with a gag) it essentially was. Its paw dragged its heart out, the arteries dragging along like spaghetti falling down to its plate while a fork picked up a meatball the noodles had wrapped itself around.
"I am still yet to grow used to having one, you know," Eleos mumbled. Max tried to look away to avoid vomiting, but frustratingly, that cursed awareness made the visual stay perfectly clear. A horrifying squelch brought an audible retch out of him. "Are you not feeling well? Has the Dungeon become too much?"
Max brought a paw to his mouth as his throat seized again, but he luckily only had to swallow air. "That… was horrific," he coughed. Eleos tilted its head for a moment, and Max used the paw covering his mouth to slap his forehead in frustration.
"Is this why you would not cut into my skull?" Eleos asked.
"Yes!" Max screamed. With the scream, all the anger turned to laughs as he looked at Eleos's expression of confusion. After a while, it nodded along in understanding that only gave Max more giggles to fight off. The nauseous sight grew further still from him as they stepped over another threshold that lurched his stomach, briefly reminding him of a cart dropping far into a dip before momentum dragged it up another hill. "Roller coaster," he mumbled.
"Hm?" Eleos hummed.
Max shook his head, "Nothing. Just a memory."
Eleos offered a light smile. "Are more returning?"
The thought wasn't his favorite, but Max didn't completely dismiss it as they pressed on. "I guess," he mumbled. His focus returned to the Dungeon, though. The pulse felt somehow deeper. For a moment, he thought it must be stronger as they went down, but the intensity hadn't changed at all. He focused on it as best he could and realized he felt it within himself. His heart hadn't synced up to it, yet felt attached nonetheless. He could only shake his head in disbelief.
"You were right about the heartbeat," he sighed. Eleos looked over for an explanation, but Max didn't stop to give one. They ventured deeper into the Dungeon. Max found each threshold to a deeper floor with increasing ease. By the time they got to the fifth, he could already feel the next.
Already, the pulse of the Dungeon's life felt stronger than his own, so much so that he had to focus for a minute to feel his own. With only one step, he could feel the final threshold calling out to him, but since he'd grown so attuned to the Dungeon, he struggled to tell if that was an outside force or his own thoughts. All the distortions and mimicries of a forest around them filled his awareness at once, and that made it hard to think at all, much less consider if the thoughts were his own.
Despite the overwhelming senses, though, he pressed on (if only because deciding to stop would take processing power he didn't have at his disposal). That pull from earlier had grown to feel like ropes puppeting each of his limbs. He walked, but were they his steps? A groan rumbled out of him that he barely noticed. Luckily, someone else did.
"Max?" Eleos asked. When Max didn't respond, it pulled him back. "Max, are you all right?"
"Ugh," Max grumbled. "No." While he didn't have the energy to follow it, he still felt the need to go deeper tugging at him. Standing still felt wrong, dangerous.
"Should we leave?" Eleos asked. Max felt a no try to leap out of his throat, but he choked it down. This need ripped his body towards that final threshold, but his mind was bursting at the seams. How much more of this could he take? He argued with himself intensely enough that Eleos could see it playing out on his face. "Unsure?"
Max paused to take a breath and nodded. "Yeah, I need—," he started, but caught himself. "Something needs me to go deeper. But I don't know if I can." He glanced over to the threshold that, despite feeling inches away, hadn't even entered their sight-line yet. For the first time that night, a chill of uncertainty and fear ran down his spine. "Or should."
Eleos pulled his attention back by squeezing his paw and pulling him towards itself. "I am here if you need me," it said. Max took a breath and smiled. Right. He didn't need to do this alone.
Before he could move on, though, he realized what he'd forgotten. "Kachu!" he swore. "How are we supposed to get out?"
"Not to worry," Eleos said. It reached a paw into its lower abdomen and pulled out Max's badge. "I came prepared."
Max stared at his defiled (if clean, fortunately) badge and sighed. "I'm going to have Cori waterpulse that thing for an hour straight before I touch it again," he said, then looked up to Eleos. "And you're holding it the whole time." Shaking his head, he took a moment to steel himself. With no idea why he felt the need to do this, he could only hope it would make things better… or, at the very least, not too much worse.
It started to overwhelm him again, but Eleos gave his paw another comforting squeeze. "Thanks," he sighed. With another deep breath, he started forward. The motion itself felt easier than standing still, the pull of the threshold growing with every step. Its pulses grew to thumps pounding in his head. More than hearing, he felt them in his skull, as if trying to break out. The throbbing hammered him to the point he couldn't see, hear, feel anything. He didn't even notice they'd made it to the threshold until they stepped through it.
Max felt himself begin to drown. The entire Dungeon surrounded him. The minor distortions of diminishing paths from previous floors now spiraled into long, perilous, sprawling scars in the land that crossed over the same physical spaces, yet never touched—tearing into his mind with every impossible plot of grass, sand, rot, and dust. All while the pulse slammed through him, now fighting to take over his heartbeat.
He yanked his paw from Eleos's to grab at his heart, feeling its beat falter against the onslaught. His vision started to fail him, but not an inch of the Dungeon left his awareness. Every speck stabbed into his mind. If there had been any life, he was sure he'd feel it burrowing into him.
Yet, as he felt himself fading, as Eleos grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and started the call for the badge to take them back, the deepest depths of this Dungeon's floor wailed in their own agony. For a moment, he thought the threshold they'd just passed had wound into itself with more impossible geometry, but no. It felt heavier, brighter. If they were in the Dungeon's heart, then the next threshold had to be its mouth.
As the badge flashed and pulled them out of the Dungeon, Max heard the pulses for what they really were.
Screams of agony.
"Sweet lips, flowers and cream
Deep in love, surrender pink steam"
(CW: Max physically beats Eleos to a rather gruesome pulp. If that is upsetting, stop reading after Eleos explains its reason to Neb and search for the phrase, "The weight in Max's chest lightened as it healed its battered"
A/N: Hey, y'all. Okay, I know I said I wasn't gonna do these, but I've gotten over 200 views on this thing, and I just wanted to say thanks for reading. I'm glad this is reaching as many people as it is, and I hope y'all like it so far. I've even gotten a few favorites! No reviews, but it's admittedly kinda early in the game for that kinda thing. This is the first project of this scale I've ever really committed to (and actually gotten far into), and I'm honestly really proud of it. Already, I have more chapters written for this than I've written for anything else.
So, yeah. Thanks for reading! Feel free to let me know what you think at any time, and I hope you enjoy. See ya next week!)
