Returning to my body, I let time run its course once more. Andalon was huddled by my leg, looking up at me with worry, gazing fearfully at the darkness all around us.

I turned to Heggy and Suisei. Heggy was about to reach for the doorknob when I gently grabbed her forearm.

She turned to face me, making me wince as the light from her hazmat suit's helmet beamed directly into my eyes.

"What is it, Genneth?" she asked, in a hushed voice.

I looked her and Suisei in the eyes. "There have been some developments."

"Do tell," Dr. Horosha said.

"The ghost of Mr. Kosuke Himichi—the famous mangaka—has manifested to me. I have this feeling that something within me—something within him—is trying to reach out and tell me something. The fungus has been interfering with my mind-world abilities, I'm pretty much certain that that's because it doesn't want me to receive this message. Oh, and there was a kaiju involved."

"A kaiju?" Heggy asked.

"A big monster that stands on two legs and terrorizes the city of Noyoko, like in the movie Beast."

Heggy stared at me, wobbling side to side slightly, utterly overwhelmed. She let out a long sigh. "Dr. Howle, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were pullin' my leg."

Suisei stared at me in shock. "This is extraordinary information, Dr. Howle. Excellent work." He struggled to contain his emotion. Hope buffeted against a thick coating of fear and despondency. He looked me in the eyes. "No matter what, you must uncover whatever secrets the fungus is trying to keep from you."

I nodded. "I intend to."

Heggy stared at us, and then turned to face the door—the one door in this dark hallway that had any light coming out from behind it. She eyed it warily.

"Now I'm thinkin' that maybe it might not be the best idea to open this door, 'specially if there's gonna be a kaiju or a fungus monster or something waiting for us on the other side."

Reaching out, I held Heggy's hand in mine. "It's like I told Andalon," I said, briefly glancing down at the little mix, "we have to be brave."

Heggy stared at where I'd looked. "A-Andalon… she's here?"

I nodded.

Heggy brought her hand to her head and made a hat-tipping motion. "It's an honor to meet you, little lady. You keep on truckin' now, y'hear?"

"What is truckin'?" Andalon asked, shyly.

"I'll tell you later." I stared at the doorknob. "Now, c'mon," I said, "let's see what's behind this door."

"You wanna do the honors?" Heggy asked me.

"I might as well," I said, as I reached for the doorknob and pulled the door open.

The hallway's darkness suddenly flooded with light. For a moment, I wondered if I'd been yanked into another mind-world, but the continued absence of any feeling in my legs and my hazmat suit's humid unpleasantness told me that this was very much real.

When I'd opened the door, I'd been expecting that it would take us into a new world, or perhaps to another time.

It seemed like it had been the latter.

Heggy, Suisei, and I found ourselves standing in an old Ward room, in the same style and design as Room 268. Only this one was active and full, and there wasn't a console in sight.

A mix of soldiers and townsfolk lay on the spring-stuffed mattresses and off-white sheets of the room's iron-framed beds, wearing clothes that were older than old fashioned. The fabrics were simple and pleated, with machine-sewed stitching clearly visible on their thick seams. There were bayoneted rifles scattered about the room. Some had been laid against the walls at bedsides of beds, while others were tightly held by the militiamen keeping guard by the glass-paned double doors in the foyer on the other side of the room.

None of the nurses, doctors, or patients seemed to notice us.

Heggy pointed to one of the nearby rifles, her eyes wide with shock. "That's a Vestkiss 13," she muttered. "Those haven't been manufactured for over two-hundred years…"

Unexpectedly, one of the nurses shrieked in terror and froze in her tracks. The fluid-filled metal bowl in her arms held on to its momentum and kept going, tumbling from her grasp. The bowl clattered on the tile, spilling bloodied water onto the floor.

The nurse dropped to her knees.

"Bethica!" another nurse shouted, darting to the fallen nurse's side.

As she knelt down at Bethica's side, she glanced down at the spill and then briskly made the Bond-sign.

Suddenly, Suisei reached out and grabbed my arm. I glanced back at him to see a look of shock on his face. He spoke to me in a hushed voice. "Use your wyrmsight, now." There was urgency in his words.

Complying, I thickened my wyrmsight just in time to see a familiar weave of blue and gold power blossom in front of the second nurse as she outstretched her hand and made the bloody water leap off the floor and gather back inside the metal bowl. And she did it all as if it was as simple and ordinary as any other action.

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"Whatever's the matter?" the second nurse asked.

Bethica answered the question by pointing her finger right at us.

"There, there! Three figures—they were right there! Demons, I swear! Green demons." Bethica fell to her knees with a shudder.

"Were there," the other nurse asked. "Where did they go?"

Bethica stared at her hands. "I… I don't know. They just… disappeared."

It was only then that I noticed a twinkling in the windows. Curious, I walked up to one of them and looked out.

I gasped.

It was night out, and there were stars in the sky. The city skyline was unrecognizable. No high rises. No glistening spires of glass and steel. Just brick and stone; row-houses and steeples.

"Are we in the past?" I muttered.

I turned around. "Heg—"

But Drs. Marteneiss and Horosha had simply disappeared.

Looking at where we'd been standing, I saw that there'd been a door behind us, one that opened onto an ominous darkness.

"It ate them, Mr. Genneth!" Andalon said, scrunching up against me in fright. "It ate them!"

"Then it will have to eat us, too," I muttered.

I ran into the darkness. The light coming from the room behind me vanished the instant I passed through the doorway.

As I stepped out into the hallway, not only did I look over my shoulder to see a door opening onto an empty one-patient room, shrouded in darkness, the rest of the hallway around me had completely changed. Though there was a door behind me, that was the only contiguity. Everything else was different. When we'd stepped into that (alternate?) past, we'd stepped out of a perfectly straight hallway. But now, I stood right next to a corner. The rest of the hallway beyond that was also different, with overturned tables and chairs standing by empty vending machines in a recessed area along the wall.

Heggy and Suisei were nowhere in sight. I called out their names, looking left and right.

"Heggy?! Suisei?!"

I got no response.

Andalon tugged on my arm. "Please, Mr. Genneth. We need to get out of here." She shook her head, eyes closed. "It's not safe."

"Even if it isn't, I—"

"—It's doing something to me, Mr. Genneth. It's like… it feels like it's doin' this to my face." At the word this, Andalon ran her fingers over her cheeks, as if someone was tugging spiderwebs across her face.

I pursed my lips. "What does that mean?"

She shook her head. "I'm not sure. I can feel doors openin' in my head. I think I'm rememberin' things, but… they're scary."

The darkness really was mucking up everything.

"Well, more knowledge is always useful," I said, trying to give it a positive spin. "What have you remembered?"

Suddenly, waves of radiance shot through her pale skin and azure hair.

"Clouds of stars and dust so big and shiny, they seem to go on forever." Her expression dimmed. "Pretty orbs being," she gulped, "…swallowed up."

"Orbs?"

She stamped her foot twice and pointed to the floor. "This thing, only from far away."

"Do you mean… worlds?"

Her eyes glowed softly.

After a moment's hesitation, she nodded.

Angel's Breath…

By that point, I should have been hyperventilating or something, but I guess breathing wasn't a concern of mine any longer.

So, it wasn't just stars that were at risk. Worlds were, too. I wanted to ask Andalon if that meant being literally swallowed up, or if it was just a metaphor, but that would mean having to explain figurative language right now, and I wasn't in the mood, to say the least.

"I have to find my friends, Andalon. I'm not leaving without them."

Despite her protestations, we trod onwards, around the corner I'd appeared beside. Beyond it, the dark hallway rounded in another corner. Yet another wave of dizziness struck me.

"I think my effort to return to Mr. Himichi's memories might have finally gone through," I said.

As I best I could, I braced myself to get flung into the mind-world once more.

"Whatta we do until you go back?" Andalon asked.

I looked down the hallway. "We do the only thing we can do, Andalon: we keep moving forward."

Traveling through this strange place was nerve-wracking to the extreme. The darkness made it difficult to see what was up ahead. I was constantly on edge, worried that something would leap out at us. We made slow progress, trekking through the darkness, until, seemingly out of nowhere, the next swath of darkness to part up ahead revealed a pair of double doors.

"I want to say these will take us into the lobby, or out of this place altogether," I said, "but I honestly have no clue."

"You… you gotta be brave," Andalon said, looking up at me. I nodded as I smiled. "Thank you, Andalon, I know."

As I opened the doors, my body went numb as the Thin World yanked me back into its grasp, and, for once, I was thankful for it—at least until I remembered what was waiting for me on the other side.

Fudge…

It was kind of like loading a save file for a video game I'd been playing, except it was real and not turn-based in the slightest.

I was back in my giant pangolin body, with Andalon and Mr. Himichi on my back, and Geoffrey and Yuta at my sides. We were fending off our attackers, beating them into the <Deep Pit> Geoffrey had opened up with a spell.

We'd picked up nearly right where we'd left off.

Yuta was quickly mastering his new pacted weapon ability, deftly controlling four whirling kana while also wielding what remained of his kanakatana like a dagger.

"Genneth," Mr. Himichi yelled. "Run!"

The ground shook as the tide of darkness erupted from the <Deep Pit>. The liquid spilled onto the street, splitting apart into wave after wave of myriad monsters. Geoffrey and Yuta hacked into the creatures with their weapons, but this time, the beasts' bodies split down the middle and moved around the oncoming blades before merging back together on the other side. The creatures started gathering around me, battering away at my <Holy Aura> from all sides.

The blow proved to be too much for the barrier. A pure, high tone rang out as my protective energy shell finally gave out. My <Holy Aura> exploded, its many fragments disintegrating into motes of light. The blast knocked everyone back. Yuta and the creatures tumbled across the street while Geoffrey got knocked out of the sky. He skidded back along the street, impacting it back-first. The pavement ripped feathers off Geoffrey's hummingbird wings.

Desperate and running low on spell-slots, I started firing off more <Smites>, only to flinch and look up as a bestial roar split through the slightly starry night.

The kaiju!

It had appeared from out of nowhere, standing across from us, on the other side of the tide of monsters. Though it was still flickering like a weakened signal, this time, it was anything but motionless.

Yuta and Geoffrey looked up in awe at the magnificent creature.

Raising one of its colossal feet, the kaiju started taking a step toward us.

You would have thought that the tide of monsters would have run away from the towering behemoth, but they didn't. The liquid and its ever-shifting creatures turned away from us, spilling and leaping toward the kaiju. They gathered like living puddles at the kaiju's taloned feet, striking at it as if stirred by wind. Every attack wiped away a thin trail of the kaiju's foot, but the giant would not be deterred.

"Run!" I yelled.

Yuta and Geoffrey followed me as I ran away from the kaiju's other foot, which was slowly lowering onto the street ahead.

Boom.

Cracks shot through the pavement as the giant completed its step. The surrounding skyscrapers shuddered in place. Windows shattered, raining glass down from high overhead.

As I ran, I looked back to see streams of twitching mirages spew up from the ground where the kaiju had stepped.

The kaiju's shadow grew longer as it bent down, reaching toward us.

Toward me.

And then I ran into a car. The whole world spun as I tumbled forward. I heard Mr. Himichi scream, and felt the pressure of an impossibly large hand clasping my body, g-forces pulling at me like I was flying along an Expressway's onramp.

And then everything went black.

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