I rested my claws on the door to Staff Lounge 3, begging for mercy. "Please, Heggy, don't do this. Just let me out, please."

Dr. Marteneiss was not amused, and the scowl on her face attested to it. "You lied to us, Genneth."

"Yes," I said, "and how many ways and times do I have to say I'm sorry before you believe that I mean it?"

As now, I was up to twenty-four and a half times.

"And remember what I said yesterday," I added. "I was ready to come clean to everyone! It was you and Vernon who told me to keep up the charade!"

She glowered at me from behind her PPE's plastic visor. "Don't you dare say his name!"

Heggy's eyes were bloodshot. She was coughing. The slight wrinkles on her face were more pronounced than ever. The normally brawny blonde looked like she'd lost a dozen pounds overnight. Then again, all of WeElMed's surviving staff did—wyrms and transformees like myself notwithstanding.

The Green Death and the horrors it brought was like a curb-stomping. It ran us into the ground, pinned us there, and crushed us to a pulp.

"Heggy, please, don't do this!"

But, as much as I hated to say it, I couldn't blame her for how she felt.

"You ate him, Genneth."

"For the record, I also ate Lt. Colonel Kaplan," I said. "Well, part of him."

She just stared as I lowered my head in shame.

In hindsight, it probably wasn't in my best interest to have confessed to my other murder.

"Listen, Genneth," Heggy said, waving her finger at me from the other side of the glass-windowed door, "right now, I've got a lot of very angry soldiers who want your head on a pike. Honestly, I'd consider giving it to them if everything wasn't currently so fucking FUBAR. Too much is happening right now, and the rest of us just need some time to figure things out. Until then, stay here."

"But—"

"It's as much for your safety as it is for ours!" Heggy said.

"Safety?" I said, at the edge of outrage. "None of us are safe! Gosh darn it, Heggy," I pointed a claw down at the lounge's vinyl floor, "one-third of the triune Godhead lies dead in the earth beneath our feet!"

"You don't have feet anymore, Genneth," she said, flatly.

"Kléothag the Hallowed Beast was murdered by the Green Death. It destroyed Him, just like it's going to destroy us. I saw it with my own two eyes, Heggy! He warned us to run!"

I'll be honest, I was frantically short on ideas of how to "run" from the Green Death, but I was keeping my eyes peeled, just in case.

"You saw it through Mr. Himichi's dreams, right?" Heggy said. "With the fuckin'… kaiju?"

Going by the look on Heggy's face, it was anyone's guess as to whether or not she believed me.

"Yes, and it's true!" I said. "The Hallowed Beat is the earth itself! You know all those ancient tales about how pagan witches and oracles got messages from the Hallowed Beast as they slept? Well, guess what, it was real! It was all real! The moon is made of fire serpents, and they were the basis for Mr. Himichi's wyrms!"

I spent a second thinking about how insane that all sounded. The Genneth of two weeks ago certainly wouldn't have believed it.

"I'm not crazy, Heggy! Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but, I swear, it's all real!"

Heggy flattened her brow. "I thought the wyrms were at risk of being taken over by Norms? Now, you're telling me that they're fire serpents from the Moon?"

"No, the wyrms were inspired by the urubi, which are different."

"Oh really?"

"Yes, the urubi are these fiery snake things that turned into the Moon!"

It was still dark out, so the window off to the side gave a clear view of the gibbous Moon overhead, past the silhouettes of wyrms drifting through the spore-clouded sky.

Considering I was now like 90% sure that the Godsdial in the Riscolts was a piece of the Hallowed Beat's protruding jaw, or something, I had a feeling that if someone went to the moon and dug down, deep, they might just find the bones of Kléothag's urubi pets.

Still, every time I opened my mouth, I felt worse.

"Gosh… I really do sound like a nutcase, don't I?"

"Yes, you do," she said. "Genneth… I meant this in the nicest possible way, but… I think you've gone off the deep end. Sure, I'll give you credit where credit's due: just because you're turnin' into a wyrm, it doesn't mean you're turnin' into a demon, but… it sure as heck doesn't mean you're gonna stay sane, either."

"You've seen what I can do, Heggy! That guide drake was melting, and, with Andalon's help, I stopped it!" I thumped my hand on my chest. "I can control zombies and the infected! And when I channel greater &alon's power, I can even turn away the darkness itself!"

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Behind her visor, a tear trickled down Heggy's cheek. She coughed. "Please, Genneth," she shook her head, "just stop. You're raving. The staff is fuckin' terrified of you. Half the patients think you're a demon out to steal their souls, and every one of Vernon's troops who hasn't lost their memories of the man to the fungus want you worse than dead."

I know I'd screwed up, but this was making me angry.

"What do you want me to say?" I asked. "I already told you, then and now, that I wasn't okay with keeping my condition a secret anymore. I wanted to come clean, but you two were against it—and now look where that's gotten us!"

Heggy slammed her fist on the door, rattling the glass pane in its frame.

"You ate my fucking brother, Howle! How's that supposed to make me feel, huh!?"

I clenched my big, three-clawed hands.

"I'm not going to try to excuse away what I did, or say that it was right," I said. "It goes without saying that I hate myself for it, but right now, I don't have the luxury to waste time wallowing in misery. None of us do! We can figure out who gets punished and how much later. Right now, you need to let me out of here, because I have work to do. We all do! There's Verune. There's the darkness. The Hallowed Beast has given us a command, Heggy. We have to do something!"

"Dammit man, Vernon was trying to do somethin'!" Heggy said. "It might not have been the right thing, but it sure as hell came from the right place. He was tryin' to make amends! He was down there, with us, in the thick of it, and he deserved better than the end you gave him!"

I swallowed hard. "I know." I sighed. "Vernon's spirit should be appearing to me any minute now. I know for a fact that his soul is uploading into me. In my Main Menu, I've got crystals for all the souls I've gathered, and the one containing his soul is filling up as we speak. I've got a doppleganger on hand waiting outside of a lakeside cabin afterlife I've prepared for him, complete with some fishing equipment. We'll talk. I'll get him in touch with you as soon as I can."

Tears twinkled in Dr. Marteneiss' eyes. "I… I just—…" but she shook her head and backed away. "I'm sorry, I can't deal with this right now. Genneth, you're not the only person in the world, you know, you fuckin' asshole."

"Heggy!" I yelled.

But she stormed off.

"Fudge."

It had been maybe an hour or two since… well, since I'd eaten General Vernon Marteneiss' still-living body.

All things considered, my punishment was more lenient than I'd thought it would be. Working together, Heggy and several nurses had managed to hoist me onto one of the hospital beds, and kept me bound to it, even as the bed's metal frame creaked and groaned as my body's transformation progressed, spurred as Vernon's biomass was assimilated into my own.

Had I been a cruel person, I could have used my psychokinetic powers to send the nurses flying into the walls and tear away the bindings. But I didn't.

I didn't want to hurt anyone.

Even if my time as a doctor had finally come to an end, the call to do no harm would always guide my actions, even when I fell short.

I didn't resist as they wheeled me to Staff Lounge 3, elevator ride and all. I didn't put up a fight, not even as my transformation ripped open my plastic hazmat suit ripped and left my sleeves and leggings dangling over the sides of the bed.

Not even as they rolled the bed into the lounge and locked me inside.

Considering she'd just lost her brother, I had to commend Heggy for her quick thinking and resourcefulness. It's not like she had my wyrmly ability to speed up her thoughts to the point that her perception of time slowed to a crawl.

No, she had to think on her feet.

I wish I could do that.

Even now, my scruples were the only thing stopping me from breaking free of my confinement. I didn't want anyone else to die, least of all at my hands. Breaking out like that would have meant putting people in my way—in harm's way—so, I wouldn't break out, if only to avoid making things worse.

Heggy knew that, and she had no qualms about using it against me.

In all honesty, I think I deserved it.

I felt bad for having killed Vernon. I know that's obvious by now, but I need to be said, regardless. If I could go back in time and stop myself from doing it, I would, but… I couldn't. And yet, it wasn't like how I'd killed Lt. Colonel Kaplan. Even if there was a part of me that wanted to keel over and bawl my eyes out, I couldn't let myself do that. By this point, that would be just plain irresponsible of me.

There was too much at stake.

I'd spent the better part of the last week and a half stumbling from one crisis to the next. Nalfar's Syndrome. The pandemic. My transformation into a wyrm. The pending invasion of Hell. Zombies. Time travel. Whole other worlds. And yet all that paled in comparison to the latest revelation.

I'd watched God—in the form of Kléothag, the Hallowed Beast—fight against an evil I could scarcely comprehend, and lose.

It's not every day that the literal earth itself screams at you to run for your life. It sort of put things into perspective for me. What were a world's problems—let alone my problems—compared to threats that made even gods tremble?

That's not to say that I didn't deserve punishment for my actions. Rather… in the grand scheme of things, what would that accomplish? How would that end Heggy's grief, or bring justice to those who were lost? That's why punishments for wrongdoing needed to wait till this crisis' end before they could be meted out. These weren't easy questions to answer, and everyone needed time and space to properly deliberate them—and right now, we had neither.

Really, it was terrifying how little I actually had to work with right now? How the fudge were we supposed to "run away?" What was the point of saving souls and being a Keeper of Paradise if it was only a matter of time before the darkness devoured us all? Truth be told, I was too frightened to feel guilty. Before, I might not have been able to stop the end of the world, but at least I could have used my skills and know-how to save souls and bring them peace in the aftermath of their lives. It was my contribution to the fight against the forces of darkness. But this? What could I do to stop this?

I'd turned to Mr. Himichi for help, but he was as overwhelmed by the recent developments as I was. Honestly, it was a miracle he'd managed to deal with it as well as he had. He'd asked me to give him the ability and permission to access everything I knew about or had done with Andalon so that he could puzzle over it, and I'd happily granted that request.

"I need to figure things out," he'd said. "Please, leave me be for the time being. I… I'll tell you when I'm ready."

At first, I'd been in a panic over the fact that the Time Wyrms of his manga Catamander Brave seemed to have been inspired by Kléothag and the urubi. I'd asked Mr. Himichi if Andalon's wyrms were the Norms of Lassedile faith, or if the urubi were the Norms, or if the urubi were the wyrms, and all he could do was sigh and apologize.

"I'm sorry, Genneth," he'd said. "I don't know. I feel as if we're caught up in the middle of a game of telephone, with the messages mutating as they pass from person to person. We might never be able to know what they'll become. But, I'll be damned if I won't try to probe the mystery."

I'd offered to help him, but he was resolutely opposed to that. "No, this is something I need to do myself," he said. "I don't want to weigh you down with my troubles and their half-baked conclusions."

"I… I understand," I'd told him, and he'd thanked me.

"I just have one question," I'd said.

"Yes?"

"What should I do?"

"Find a way to leave this world, I suppose," he'd said.

"How do I do that?" I'd asked.

"Your guess is as good as mine."

Both then and now, I sighed.

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