As I stared at the cracked glass eye bead in my palm, a skittering sound from above made me look up.

My blood froze when I looked up.

A car-sized spider constructed entirely of paperclips was descending from the ceiling on a thick strand of interwoven metal. Its eight legs, each comprised of thousands of staples and paperclips linked together, moved with mechanical clicking as it lowered itself toward us. Where a real spider would have eyes, this monstrosity had what looked like tiny receipt printers, each one spitting out short strips of paper receipts.

"No," I whispered, stuffing the eye bead back into my pocket and scrambling to my feet as the spider descended, its grotesque body gleaming under a thousand halogen lamps. "No, you can't have them! Screw off!"

The paperclip spider paid no attention to my protests. It continued its descent until it hovered just above the bodies of my fallen friends. With horrifying twitching, it began to extend its front legs toward Nessy's lifeless form.

I lunged forward, grabbing the bent shotgun from the floor. "Get away from her!" I swung the damaged weapon like a club, aiming for the nearest leg.

The spider paused, its receipt-printer eyes whirring as they focused on me. Then, without warning, its back seemed to explode open, releasing thousands of smaller paperclip spiders, each one about the size of my hand. They rained down around me, hitting the floor with metallic clinks before scuttling toward me with alarming speed.

I swung wildly at the approaching swarm, managing to crush a few with the shotgun and my boots, but there were too many. They leapt at me from all angles, their tiny paperclip legs sharp as needles as they latched onto my clothing, my arms, my face. I staggered backward, crying out in pain as their metal limbs pierced my skin firing staples at me.

While I was distracted by the smaller spiders, the massive construct continued its grim work. With vile efficiency, it wrapped Nessy's body in a cocoon of paperclips, lifting her from the floor. I watched in horror as it did the same to Krysanthea, then to each of the Strand sisters, securing them in metallic shrouds.

"Stop!" I cried, still batting desperately at the smaller spiders crawling over me. "They're mine! My pack! You can't take them!"

The giant spider ignored me, continuing to cocoon my friends' bodies. Once it had secured all five of them, it began to retract its strand, ascending back toward the ceiling with its macabre cargo.

I tried to follow, to somehow reach the retreating spider, but the swarm of smaller arachnids overwhelmed me. They forced me to the ground, their combined weight pressing me against the cold tile floor, stapling my clothes and fingers to the tiles. I could only watch in despair as the car-sized spider disappeared into a vent in the ceiling, taking with it the last physical connection I had to my friends.

Eventually, the smaller spiders retreated, skittering away into the darkness of nearby shelves. I lay on the floor, bleeding from hundreds of small puncture wounds, staring at the ceiling where my friends' bodies had disappeared.

I was completely alone.

No Nessy with her nose to guide us. No Krysanthea with her raptor strength and supportive care. No Strand sisters with their prad instincts and knowledge of this damned place.

Just me. A human from another dimension, lost in the infinite, labyrinthine expanse of a sentient shopping center that defied all logic and reason.

With considerable effort, I freed myself from the staples. I pulled myself to my feet, wincing as the wounds from the paper clip spiders stung with every movement. Blood trickled down my arms and face, dripping onto the already stained floor. I looked around at the empty aisle, at the bloodstains where my friends had fallen, now the only evidence they had ever existed.

What now? Where could I possibly go? The Superstore stretched in all directions, an endless maze with no exit that I could perceive.

Without Nessy's magic nose, I had no way to navigate its infinite departments, no way to find the soul fragments, no way to get back to our RV. I didn't even know how to get back to Bedshire as we'd made far too many turns during our run to get away from the Magnet Lynx.

"STATS," I snarled once again.

| Name: Alec Benoit Foster

| Species: Linear Human (Liminal Soul) | Level: 3 | Core Affinity: Reconstitution | Health: 82/100% | Reconstitution: 67/100% | Strength: 14 | Agility: 4 | Dexterity: 12 | Vitality: 36 | Charisma: 9 | Foresight: 2 | Intelligence: 37 | Wisdom: 30

| Skills: [Reconstitution], [Pack Leader], [Depictomancy], [Syntropic Fusion]

| Domain: Fort Pack LV 3 | Pack Members: Alec Foster (Leader)

The Fort Pack and my own lonely name stabbed at my heart. My pack was gone. The bond broken.

Or was it?

I closed my eyes, focusing inward on that sensation of liminal expansion of self. If I was truly a tree of Alec-ness, with branches extending beyond the confines of simple linear existence, perhaps I could use that to figure out where to go next.

I concentrated, pushing my consciousness outward, feeling it branch and multiply. In my mind's eye, I became not just one Alec standing in a bloody aisle, but a hundred, a thousand, a million Alecs, each one perceiving reality from a slightly different angle, each one catching glimpses of threads and connections invisible to normal sight.

I opened my eyes—not just the two physical ones on my face, but countless invisible eyes spread across my branching consciousness. The world around me remained the same, and yet not the same.

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Overlaid on the physical reality of the Superstore, I perceive… something.

Off-colored threads, barely visible but there, converging into a single line that led away from me.

I started walking, following the faint line.

Bulwichu. It had to be… the RV. The domain, the one thing that still remained from my pack.

With renewed purpose, I followed the crystalline thread, leaving behind the bloodstained aisle and the memory of my friends' final moments. Each step was painful, both physically from the spider bites and emotionally from the weight of my loss, but I forced myself forward, clinging to the only direction I had.

I didn't heal the spider bites fully with Reconstitution, distracting myself with the stinging pain.

The thread led me through a wild array of shelves—past shelves stocked with absurd products, through aisles that defied spatial logic, down escalators that branched like gargantuan trees and sometimes moved in multiple directions at once. Several times I lost sight of the thread, only to recover the connection by pushing my perception outward again, branching my awareness to catch glimpses of its faint glow.

Hours passed, or perhaps days—time had little meaning in the Superstore's endless expanse that didn't make a distinction between day and night.

Eventually I repaired my festering, scabbed cuts with Reconstitution, but the awful memory of the lynx's attack, of watching my friends die one by one, remained fresh and raw, haunting me and refusing to let go.

Something vital snapped within me as I walked on and on, feeling dead, empty inside and… yet I was still alive, still moving forward across the endless shopping terrain.

At times freakish things tried to attack me, but each time I was able to get away thanks to Reconstitution fixing what otherwise would have been mortal wounds.

At times I crossed through the "Management Employees Only" doors, Nessy's blue vest and name tag allowing me to open the dimensional gates between departments.

Over the days, I completely lost track of how many times I reconstituted, snacking on Bulwichu's glass fruit that I discovered within Nessy's backpack on my back. I used the fruits to chase away hunger, tiredness and death with Reconstitution.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of dying and coming back and walking, I rounded a corner and spotted it—our silver Airstream RV, parked incongruously in the middle of an aisle labeled "Vehicular Storage Solutions."

Bulwichu's crystalline form was visible through the windows, her branches seeming to droop without the presence of Nessy to tend her.

I approached slowly, afraid that this might be some cruel illusion created by the store to torment me further. But as I drew closer, the connection strengthened, the thread between me and the tree glowing more brightly. This was real.

Our domain had survived, even if its inhabitants had not.

With trembling hands, I reached for the door handle. It turned easily under my touch, and I stepped inside.

Officer Lavros was there.

"Alec!" She jumped up from the leather couch, aquamarine eyes wide, copper-orange tail wagging. "You're back! Oh thank Slayer!"

She stared at my distraught expression and blood-stained, ragged outfit and blue vest for a moment, the smile sliding off her face.

"Are you okay?" She asked.

"I'm… alive," I answered simply.

"Alec… Where are the others…?" she began, glancing through the RV's window.

"Dead," I answered. "They're all dead."

The fox girl choked, sliding onto the couch and burying her face in her hands.

I walked to Bulwichu and stared at the slime-tree branch now fully connected to it, shimmering with emerald leaves.

The bulbees pulsed with blue and dark violet.

"Fix this… please." I said. "You have to fix this. You're our domain. You… are us, our hope, our friendship… our vibes, the heart of our pack!"

I taped the remnants of the watch and compass and beads one by one to the crystal tree using the duct tape that was sitting on the metal and glass-root floor next to the tree, left there by Nessy.

The bulbees pulsed back with red, gold and silver.

"The bracelet accelerates," I said. "The compass directs. The watch rewinds time. Absorb their powers, add them to your own… amplify and magnify them. Rewind time. Lead me back to my friends! Help me find a way… a path forward that can stop the Magnet Lynx from killing them all… please!"

The bulbees pulsed back with red, gold and silver, but there was no other response. The tree did not reply to me, for it had no mouth.

With a heavy sigh, I slid down against the trunk, feeling the weight of my grief and despair crushing me. I reached into Nessy's backpack, dug inside it and somehow pulled out her phone. My fingers trembled as I typed in the login password—my birthday.

Of course that's what she would use.

The phone unlocked, revealing a home screen wallpaper of the three of us—Nessy, Kristi and me—sitting by the campfire outside the RV, enjoying our bacon. We looked happy, oblivious to what fate would bring.

I flipped through her photo gallery, each image like a knife to my heart.

There were hundreds of pictures, many taken secretly while I hadn't been looking—me drawing, me sleeping, me talking to Kristi. Others were the selfies we'd taken together for 'vibes', her fluffy face pressed against mine, both of us grinning wildly, us licking Kristi. There were the photos of all of us—our makeshift family that had been ripped away in mere seconds.

Tears spilled down my cheeks as I swiped through each memory, each captured moment that would never come again.

"Alec? Do you know a way out of here? A way back home to Ferguson?" Officer Lavros asked, breaking the silence. Her voice was small, fragile with shock. She was young, about my age, likely recently made an officer.

I looked up at her, blinking away tears. "No," I admitted. "I don't."

She moved to sit beside me, her fox tail curling around her legs. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I should have been there with you all. Maybe I could have done something."

"You would have died too," I said, the bluntness of my words making her flinch. "The Magnet Lynx... she killed them all in seconds. There was nothing anyone could have done."

"What happened exactly?" she asked, her ears lowering in sorrow.

I told her everything—from our job interviews, to Nessy's coffee insanity, to my time loops, to our journey to Bedshire, to Nessy waking up, to our fateful encounter with the Magnetic Lynx. As I spoke, the images played again in my mind with terrible clarity—Nessy falling, the raptors charging, the metal monster's emotionless execution of them all, the spiders that took the bodies into the ceiling.

"They were so brave," Lavros said, her voice cracking. "Even at the end."

"They were," I agreed, looking back at the phone screen where Nessy's smiling face beamed up at me.

We sat in silence for a while, two survivors adrift in an endless retail nightmare.

Eventually, Lavros reached out and placed her paw on my shoulder. I turned to her, and without thinking, pulled her into a hug. We clung to each other—two strangers united by shared loss and the desperate need for something to hold onto.

"What do we do?" she asked against my shoulder.

"I don't know," I admitted. "I just... I… just… I don't know. I'm hoping that… our domain can grow a new watch artifact… maybe somehow rewind all of this."

"All of it?" She asked.

"All of it," I said, gritting my teeth. "Maybe it can rewind me back to when I first put on the watch?"

"Um. If you go back to the moment when you put on the watch, won't the lynx just kill them all again?" The fox asked.

I opened and closed my mouth. Then I minimised the gallery of Nessy-taken photos and spotted a note folder on the home screen.

"Alec, read me!!!" it was called.

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