At the far end of the slime village, Ethel, Ragnorre, fully-untransformed Nyx, Lark, and Hue healed, lingered, and pondered. Ragnorre rocked on her heels, still just happy to be here, and the lantern in her hand rocked with her.

Gently, Nyx took Ethel by the hand and walked a few steps away from the group. Did anyone care? Now that the bigger commotion was over, apparently not—Lark and Hue were murmuring about something, and if they could have that privacy, why not these two too.

“Ethel, you swear you’re okay with being down here?”

She pursed her lips and nodded.

“Are you even in your right mind?”

“Look at it this way,” said Ethel. “If I was that lucid when Urrich attacked us, surely I’m lucid now.”

It took a while for Nyx to concede, “Good point, I...guess.”

“Hey,” Ethel added, “why don’t we get Ragnorre to...to say anything?”

“Ragnorre!” Nyx suddenly cried out. “Tell us something about yourself!”

“Um,” said Hue, raising a hand, “I was actually hoping to—”

“ME!!” chirped Ragnorre. She leaped and the lantern nearly flipped out of her grasp. Hue frowned, but Lark gave him a reassuring it’s-okay gesture.

Ragnorre went on to kinda-sorta explain, “I’m not human! Not anymore! And I can do this.” She held up one fist and glitched it around, shifting it from side to side, drenching it in afterimages and, as a pièce de résistance, making it straight-up disappear.

“Woah,” said Ethel, literally. The rest were less dramatically startled, but startled regardless.

“See?” said Nyx once Ragnorre glithced her hand back on and began idly flexing. “She’s some kind of demony thing.”

“Nope,” Ragnorre butted in. “I’m not a demon. I still feel pretty human.”

“That’s not proof of anything,” said Nyx, “I feel human all the time. Okay, everyone, here’s my story. I was human, too, before a demon lord turned me. Now I’m a homunculus, meaning I can transform. Doesn’t sound that far off from your powers, does it?”

“Nnnope,” said Ragnorre. “You can’t do this.” Suddenly her whole body was pixellated...an oddly stomach-churning thing to see in real life.

Admittedly, Nyx could not do that. It would take decades of training to contort their body into translucent, perfectly square, paper-thin chunklets. “That’s not my point,” they said. “I’m saying you could maybe be a different sort of homunculus.”

“I was kidnapped by a bunch of demons,” Ragnorre mused. “Big ones, like bigger than this dungeon.”

“See?”

Hue and Ethel wandered over to Ragnorre’s still-blocky body and looked her over like professors. They poked at the pixels, only to find that their fingers went through.

Lark tried hard not to show any interest, but finally she caved and asked, “So does this have any...cool applications in battle?”

The boxer unpixellated and transposed her large intestine half a meter away from her stomach. Lark came closer and peered at the intestine, around it, and noticed that even though it didn’t bleed, it continued to move food, move blood...

“Oh! ...Oh...”

Nyx figured they might as well finish their re-introduction. They coughed and said, “Yeah, so Lark and Ethel already know this, but, I’m a demon lord, I mean no harm, I’m only here to kill monsters and defend my best friend’s life on the side. Killing that slime wraith and eating its soul felt, frankly, really good. So I wouldn’t mind doing that again for the party.”

Ethel pitched in, “I can vouch for their basic moral goodness.”

“Aw,” said Nyx. The offer struck them as weird yet genuine.

“Speaking of demons—the attack both me and Ragnorre were in earlier. It should’ve been between me and the other demon, but...she leaped in and saved me.”

Truth be told, they weren’t totally convinced Ragnorre had saved Nyx from Urrich. Unless he was in some inescapable void—which, honestly, was possible—his vengeance was just delayed. If nothing else, though, Ragnorre had bought them time. Nyx really couldn’t thank her enough for that.

“So what I’m saying is thanks,” they told Ragnorre.

“I WANNA BE THE STRONGEST!” she screamed.

“Never mind,” Nyx almost said, but didn’t end up saying. Everyone else gave Ragnorre a watery smile. A current of fear ran through them all, a mutual acknowledgement that they were all just glad this wild, intestine-transposing dog was currently on their side.

“...Is it my turn?” said Hue.

“Sure,” they all said.

“I guess I’ll go,” said Lark.

“Eh, okay,” they all said.