Volume 1, Chapter 35: Sunken Cost Fallacy Metro Station (Patreon)

As I created a new hand for Bri, I watched the others making their preparations.

Khufu was untangling my rope from around himself after using it to drag the mine cart from the entrance chamber, taking care not to let it touch the tracks even for a moment. Sitting on a large boulder, he worked slowly now, breathing deeply. His movements were calm and measured, as though he were conserving every drop of energy he had left after what the previous task had demanded of him.

Sophie was still wedging flowers between the support beams and the wall.

“Hey, that tickles, um!” Bri’s form split for a moment into two almost separate flames, then three, before returning to her usual spherical shape as I finished creating the palm.

“Everything, um… okay?” she asked, her colors briefly losing some of their saturation. Gray smoke puffed from the fiery brows dancing above her eyes.

“I feel like something is different with my ability. It’s harder for me to keep the lines in exactly the shape I want.”

“Is that, um… my fault?” she asked as I began painting one of her fingers, dragging several lines of sizzling fire through the air behind my own. One of them shifted and began to vibrate like a plucked string.

“I don’t think so,” I replied, moving on to the next fingers.

At the edge of my vision, I caught Sophie finishing the flower traps and heading toward Nicky, who was stuffing herself as agreed. Sophie stopped beside her, said something I couldn’t hear from where I stood, then began arranging flowers across her body.

They immediately started to grow. Their petals flattened and wrapped around Nicky’s arms and chest, while one climbed upward on vine-like tendrils until it settled around her neck. It coiled around her, making Nicky’s eyes widen, but instead of choking her, it must have tightened gently, because she relaxed almost immediately. The flower then spread its petals over her head, forming something like a helmet.

“Maybe you should, um… ask your Daimon? I talk to mine a lot. I like, um… knowing how many Achievement Points and how much Essence I have. When I see the numbers going up, my fire burns even faster!”

As Bri spoke, the line I was drawing vibrated again while I formed her third finger.

“Maybe you’re right. By the way, how many points do you have?”

“Mhm.” She hummed and smiled so widely that sparks began shooting from her in every direction, some of them landing on my hand and burning me.

Luckily, I was starting to get used to the sensation. The pain no longer made me automatically jerk my hand away. It only made me clench my teeth.

“I have seventy-two standardized Essence points and twelve Achievement Points!” she answered without the slightest tremor in her voice, swelling in size and taking on even brighter colors.

“Twelve? I only have ten.”

“I got a lot for the first million dreamers watching me in their dreams, and then when that number went up, um… to five!”

“You have five million Comites?”

“Exactly 5,130,408 right now!”

“People seriously have nothing better to do. The world—no, sorry—the worlds are ending, and instead of looking for solutions on their own side, they lie around spying on us. Fucking freeloaders.”

My response made her shrink slightly, her colors darkening again.

I was just finishing her thumb when it literally moved before my eyes. I took a deep breath and consulted the crystal inside my head.

[Soulmark interference detected: Identity]

[Soulmark interference detected: Animation]

“What the fuck?” I whispered to myself, wondering why those concepts, interpreted by my soul in tandem with the Daimon, weren’t represented by the same fiery color as everything concerning my path so far.

“What happened, um?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I replied, not wanting to worry her. At the same time I remembered that it’s how I felt about the magic soon after Daimon implementation—those colors then seemed all like possibilities.

“Done,” I added, finishing the shape in the air and ending Pyrography.

I stepped away from Bri and waved my hand through the air several times to cool the minor burns I had picked up.

As I looked around, I saw that Sophie was now armoring Khufu’Ri. He stood perfectly still, allowing the flowers to wrap their petals around him from almost every direction.

The blonde woman, meanwhile, was moving more slowly and with less precision. In her case—because so far, every one of her movements had been perfectly controlled—that had to mean her Psyche was already beginning to interfere with her body. She was probably getting dizzy.

“I’m taking the rope,” I told Khufu’Ri, who was gathering himself to lift the cart we had dragged here and, just as we had planned, place it on the tracks.

As I approached, I tossed him a crowbar with several feet of bandages tied to it, forming one long cord.

“You know what to do, right?”

“May your mind remain forever cunning, my friend. May Ra’s providence never set me against you,” he replied, closing his eyes slightly and giving me a single calm nod. “I understand my task—though understanding does nothing to lessen what I must demand of my muscles.”

“This is practically the final stretch, Khufu,” I told him, giving him a thumbs-up and slinging the coil of rope over my shoulder.

“Then let us not waste what remains of it.”

As I turned away, he was getting back to his feet and wrapping his tail around one leg, shaking off the dust that had settled over him.

I walked over to the second-to-last set of supports in the corridor, where Sophie had deliberately left out her flowers, and began threading the rope behind them and across the passage, starting at roughly chest height so there would still be enough room underneath for the mine cart to roll downhill.

Moving from one support to the next, Eli wove something resembling a net—most of it was overhead with just a few cords strung at the ankle level. After tying off the final end of the rope, I stood in front of his creation with my hands on my hips.

“You make a pretty shitty spider,” I judged his handiwork.

“It will work, and that’s what matters.”

“I know. Looks solid. You did a great job.” After offering him that little bit of encouragement, I took another look down the tunnel, slipped off my backpack, and pulled out the knife made from the jaw of a Cave Viperdile—whatever the hell that was.

I tossed the bag back on and glanced at my staff, which was leaning against the wall.

Khufu had just positioned the cart at the top of the slope, carefully assisted by Nicky, who was armored in flowers just like him. They made sure the wheels settled properly onto the rails—and the moment they did, the creature’s snapping iron jaws came alive, desperately trying to bite whichever one of them came within reach.

While Nicky pinned it to the ground from one side, putting her full weight into it, the lion began loading the prepared boulders into the cart to weigh it down.

Once that was done, he wedged the crowbar between one of the wooden sleepers beneath the rails and the front of the cart, taking care not to let the thing bite his hand off. That locked it in place and kept it from rolling downhill.

The two of them backed away from the creature while carefully stretching out the bandage cord, leaving its other end draped over a rocky protrusion sticking from the wall.

One pull on that end should release the contraption toward us whenever it became necessary.

Eli crouched beside the rails and ran two fingers along them almost all the way toward the bend. “At this angle it'll reach the end. Just keep the rails clear. Anything substantial between the cart and the target will bleed momentum.”

“Just remember to clear your ropes off the ground,” I told him.

“I’ll remember,” he replied with a grimace.

Sophie sat not far from me with her hands resting in her lap, clutching the folds of her coat.

Her forehead was creased, and sweat ran down her skin. Even in that condition, though, it seemed to me that she didn’t smell particularly bad. If anything, the scent was almost appealing—probably another result of the genetic manipulation involved in creating her.

I decided to ask about that at the first opportunity. I was curious how an Earth that apparently had no access to television, and probably no computers either, had somehow developed an advanced genetic program.

“The traps are all, um… set,” Bri said, floating closer to me. “I’d like to make it very clear,” she added, and for a moment the tunnel brightened not only from the luminous gases rushing through the crystals, but also from her intensified flames, “that I don’t like, um… the fact that we’re planning to hurt those poor creatures.”

“Bri, darling,” Nicky began, slowly biting into another piece of lizard. She was chewing with such reluctance now that it was obvious she was stuffed to the brim. “We’re not planning to attack or kill them. We’re protecting ourselves in case their reaction to us entering the chamber is aggression. Newton’s third law apparently applies to contact between species on an alien planet just as well as it does to interactions between two physical bodies.”

“Um… I don’t understand.”

“Interactions always go both ways. If you jump forward out of a boat, you push the boat backward, for example. If they push against us, we retreat and respond with force of our own.” She walked over to Sophie and offered her a hand to help her stand. “Now we need to find out whether everything we’ve spent the last several dozen minutes preparing is actually going to be useful or not.”

“And that’s, um… my part, right?” Bri shrank slightly, her flames dimming. She was definitely afraid of the task we had assigned her.

“Yes, my dear,” I replied. “Don’t worry. I promise that if, for whatever reason, you can’t fly out of there on your own, I’ll personally reach in and give you a helping hand.” I raised my hand toward her, showing her that I would be there to support her.

Her fiery lips puckered in response, her colors deepening into vivid reds, while the tongues of flame that served as her hair began dancing with renewed intensity.

After my declaration, I felt Khufu’s enormous paw settle on my shoulder. I didn’t turn toward him. I kept my eyes on Bri instead, because she clearly needed that.

“Sunken Cost Fallacy Metro Station,” I began, finally glancing around as Bri’s face disappeared into her flames and, as I assumed, reappeared on the opposite side of her spherical form. “Now announcing readiness for departure. Right, Bri?”

“Mhm,” she hummed, then lowered herself without another word, flying beneath the ropes I had strung near the ceiling and heading toward the chamber from which we could still hear the croaking toad and the pickaxe-frogs hammering at the walls.

Our entire group followed her and took position against the wall beside the bend leading into the chamber.

“Brigid’s flame has dimmed beneath the weight of the bones of duty,” Khufu observed in a whisper as my partner in misery drifted calmly into the chamber where the work was still going on.

The toad occupying the center of the room noticed her immediately. The candles trapped inside its eye sockets shifted the way pupils might have, sliding toward the source of the new movement, and the creature’s entire massive metal body followed. It moved one leg after another, splashing water that steamed under the tremendous heat radiating from it.

“Good… um… morning,” Bri said timidly. Her colors dimmed, and her whole form shrank noticeably with fear. “I come, um… how do I put this… in peace?” Her voice trembled.

Something inside the toad’s belly visibly boiled over, because the fire venting from the slit running along its throat and chest burst outward in tongues of flame, making the water hiss violently. The amphibian reacted by leaning forward to smother the flare. A moment later, however, it raised the upper half of its body out of the small pool and aimed both candles toward Bri.

Then it opened its mouth wide.

A steel tongue shot out for only an instant, fast as lightning, made—unless I was mistaken, because I barely had time to see it—of concentric telescoping rings sliding over one another.

The tongue struck the ceiling of the cave and caused a small tremor.

That was enough to interrupt the tool-frogs working along the walls. All of them landed on their limbs and turned the pickaxe heads that served as their faces toward the toad.

“Well, um… I guess that’s it for peaceful negotiations…” Bri said as she began retreating toward us.

The toad croaked again, belching black smoke filled with glowing sparks into the air, and the sound sent vibrations through the entire chamber.

It was so loud that every one of us waiting around the corner instinctively covered our ears. Khufu was the exception. He simply flattened his ears and tucked them into his mane.

Bri had no ears to cover, but the force of the sound blew her flames backward toward us for a moment along with two streams of white smoke, hiding the terrified eyes on her face.

Then all the frogs charged after my companion as she flew toward us.