Once more into the breach, I thought, as the chill of the misty ruins slid down my back again.

With a round of nods, we headed straight for Abyground, while trying to avoid any skeletons loitering around. We still ran into a couple of groups, but they didn’t pose too much of an issue anymore. We were good enough to deal with them as a team now.

“You know… We’re leaving behind quite the mess, aren’t we?” Frank pointed out as we moved on from the last pile of bones that had tried attacking us. “Since they don’t despawn, won’t the devs notice?”

I frowned and glanced back.

“Can’t really help it, I guess…”

“We’re going to kill the boss anyway, aren’t we?” Casey reminded us. “Specifically so it leaves behind its corpse rather than despawning. They are definitely going to notice that.”

“Oh, right… Well, shit. We really suck at being discreet, don’t we? First the whole supernova and now leaving corpses at the scene of our crimes…” Frank trailed off as he noticed Casey sinking into herself. “But it’s fine! We just need to quickly beat up octodad and then get out and nobody will know a thing!”

“Right…”

“Sure, I guess…”

Frank deflated a little at our lackluster reactions.

I couldn’t help it. I had a bad feeling that things wouldn’t be so simple. Stupid dream… It still felt like I was just dancing to the tunes of some greater power, whatever was giving me these dreams.

In fact… wasn’t that dream the very reason why we were here to begin with? I had been curious about it, and so Frank and I had decided to go exploring Abyground… and that was when I’d probably caught the virus and then subsequently spread it around. And now we were back here to stop the virus and fulfill the prophetic dream. All caused by the dream in the first place.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I never had that dream, I wouldn’t have come here and the virus would have never spread. The stupid dream had baited me!

I grit my teeth at that realization.

“You okay…?” Casey asked, eyeing my frown and grimace.

“I just realized that all of this is only happening because of the dream,” I gritted out. “If I’d never had the dream, we would have never come here with Frank, and I would have never become a carrier of the virus.”

Casey blinked in shock.

“Oh shit! You’re right! What the hell? Is this some kind of time loop nonsense? No, what’s it called? Bootstrap paradox?”

“That’s… kind of unsettling,” Casey admitted.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’m not sure how I feel about it anymore… I think I’ll just ignore the next dream I have. If there is a next dream. I’ll just deal with it whenever it does happen.”

“Sounds good. Man, that’s still such bullshit. The prophecy being the cause of itself is my least favorite trope, ugh,” Frank grumbled and I didn’t disagree.

One more group of skeletons later and we reached the ruined city’s gate and entered the withered forest beyond. It didn’t take us long before we reached the little cliff overlooking the bubble.

“Whoa… Right, yeah. I can see the cinematic angle you were talking about,” Casey said as her wide eyes took in the view. “It’s quite something.”

“Yeah, I know, right?”

“You didn’t look at any screenshots of this place?” I asked.

Casey shook her head. “Didn’t have time for it. I was researching the devs… and then learning magic with Wi and Elyssa.”

Right.

“Fair enough.”

The three of us continued down the cliff overlooking Abyground, marveling at the sight. From there, it didn’t take long for us to reach the bubble.

“Right, so… What’s the plan? How are we going to catch one of the zombies? We kind of got wrecked last time we were here… and that was with my avatar.”

I pursed my lips, trying to come up with a plan.

“I can just use this from afar,” Casey suggested as she replaced the conduit with the divine crystal on her staff. “No need to get close.”

“Well, yes. But they will probably try to dodge your shots,” I argued. “They are really fast. Faster than me…”

Casey frowned and let out a contemplative hum.

“Well, I can just make the blast bigger,” she finally decided with a shrug. “Not as big as… what I did on the mountain, but big enough so they can’t dodge it.”

“Alright then! The two of us will guard you in case something goes wrong!” Frank enthusiastically cheered.

The three of us exchanged a nod and stepped closer to the bubble. We grabbed the water-breathing potions strapped to our potion belts, uncorked the vials, and poured it inside our–

?!

I nearly choked on the utterly vile concoction hitting my tongue. It tasted like rotten fish chunks submerged in heaps of salt sprinkled with pure capsaicin. All somehow in a liquid form.

My entire body tensed and I forced myself to just swallow all of it without thinking about the taste too much.

Once it all went down, I had trouble not puking it all out right away. I ended up coughing my throat dry, kneeling on the ground, while tears streamed down my face.

I wiped my eyes with my shaky hand and looked up to see my companions in a similar state to me.

“What the fuuuuuck?!” Frank choked out. “That was disgusting! How can my avatar drink that with a straight face?! Holy shit, I’m so glad that you can’t taste things in VR.”

“I… I think this is the same as what happened to me,” Casey said between her coughs.

“What do you mean?”

“The same as… my world eating souls. The devs didn’t really think about what these potions would taste like… because taste doesn’t exist for the avatars. But they have to taste like something, so…”

“Ahh, shit… The world filled in the blanks, you mean?” Frank concluded as he began to stand up again while wiping the tears off his eyes.

“Yeah…”

In hindsight, the healing potions were also disgusting, so I should have known these ones wouldn’t be any better. Well, at least we knew now.

Now that I thought about it, it also explained why NPCs were never seen using any potions. They just couldn’t stand the horrid taste.

“There is… no way I can drink this mid-battle to refresh the potion’s duration, though,” I declared.

“Ugh, you’re right… Fuck! Do we need to speedrun the boss on top of everything else?” Frank grumbled.

He was right. This mission was starting to seem more and more impossible. Were we really meant to take on the boss now?

“Well, nothing for it,” Casey said, finally having recovered herself. “We shouldn’t waste the potions now that we drank them. Let’s go in.”

I grimaced but nodded.

The three of us touched the bubble and pushed our way through inside it.

My instincts made me hold my breath as soon as we entered it. The buoyancy and wetness surrounding me told me that if I breathed in the water, I would drown. Looking at my friends, they seemed to be having the same problem.

Of course, intellectually, I knew that we had drunk the water-breathing potions and we should be fine… probably. And even if the potions hadn’t worked for some reason, we could easily exit the bubble to save ourselves from drowning, but…

I closed my eyes, clenched my fists, and against all of my instincts screaming at me, I breathed in the water through my nose. Once again, my lizard brain began to panic, thinking I was drowning, but I forced myself to keep at it, filling my lungs with water.

It was the weirdest sensation. My lungs felt heavier than they should because of all the water in them, but I wasn’t drowning. My lungs managed to get oxygen out of the water despite not being built for it.

‘Okay, that feels’– I tried saying but I choked on water for a moment and without any sound coming out.

Right. Underwater. Even if we could breathe, it didn’t mean we could speak.

Frank and Casey had a bewildered and mildly disturbed expression themselves, but they also seemed to have taken their first breath.

The three of us looked at each other in discomfort and with some trepidation, Casey motioned to the bubble’s edge before walking out herself. Frank and I followed.

Once outside, I tried speaking, only to choke on water that was still in my lungs. Again.

Once I coughed all the water out, a light gust of wind blew by and made me shiver. I instinctively shook myself off, flinging water everywhere, making my friends squawk.

“Oh, uh, sorry…” I mumbled as my cheeks dyed red.

I proceeded to wring my tail and ears to dry myself while Casey did the same. Frank didn’t have fur, so he dried off much faster than us, although his clothes were still soaked.

Once we were acceptably dry, we looked at each other in defeat.

“So, anyway… That sucked,” Frank declared. “These potions are a friggin’ scam, man…”

“They… technically work… but, uh, yeah…” Casey admitted.

I agreed. Even if it allowed us to survive underwater, it was incredibly uncomfortable and didn’t even let us speak. We didn’t have a chat function like in the game either. Not to mention, the difficulty of moving underwater didn’t go away with the potions, so it would just be way harder to beat the boss like that.

And in fact…

I sighed. “I’m pretty sure we fought the boss while the bubble was filled with air in my dream…”

“Well, shit. So, what? Are we supposed to speedrun all the way to the boss, beat it, and loot whatever we need from it all in under an hour? Dammit, why is this getting harder and harder?!”

I grimaced but couldn’t help but agree. I was honestly starting to doubt whether we should even try at this point. It was dangerous, difficult, and the odds seemed to be completely stacked against us. We didn’t even know whether the boss would have the cure we were looking for! Wasn’t there a better way to help the people still infected with the plague? We could use the divine crystal with the staff to cover the whole planet again…

No. No way. We couldn’t do that. All these thousands of deaths were enough.

“We can do it. We have to,” Casey said, her tone resolute. “And we don’t necessarily need to do it all in under an hour either. We can drink… those things again and enter the bubble while it’s still filled with water, make our way to the boss, and wait for it to change to air before fighting it.”

“We would need to avoid the zombies though,” I pointed out, ignoring my internal complaints about the ‘drinking those things again’ part of the plan. “There’s no way we could beat any of them while underwater.”

She grimaced.

“You’re right… Ugh, how can we do this…?”

“Ok, hold on!” Frank cut in. “Aren’t we forgetting something? We’re here to try curing one of the zombies, aren’t we? Let’s just start with that and maybe we can figure out something along the way!”

The two of us glanced at him and then looked inside the bubble with a frown.

“After it turns into air, I guess,” Frank clarified. “In the meantime, we can… uhh… go check out that new mini-dungeon that’s supposed to be around here?”

I raised an eyebrow and he shrugged.

“Work on our teamwork and stuff, you know? It’s gonna be like a rite of passage.” He eyed my ears. “And we could probably make a campfire to better dry off and whatnot.”

I mulled over it for a moment, then locked eyes with Casey, and after a moment, both of us nodded.

“Sure. Let’s go check it out while we wait.”

It felt wrong to keep delaying things when there were people turning into zombies back on Earth, but us getting killed by Abyground’s zombies because we were reckless and engaged them underwater wouldn’t accomplish anything.

With that, we walked around the bubble-covered city, looking for the spot the wiki had mentioned. We passed by some rocks and gatherable herbs and made our way to the run-down cottage near the cliff surrounding Abyground.

“It’s this, right?” Frank asked, eyeing the rotten wood and half-broken door to the building.

“Yeah, there should be a hidden trapdoor somewhere inside there,” I agreed and opened the door. I immediately staggered back as the stench of death and saltwater hit me.

“Oh, Jesus! What the hell?!” Frank exclaimed while Casey just made a disgusted sound.

I grimaced as I held my nose.

“It is an undead-themed dungeon…”

“Ugh, right… No sense of smell inside the game… This is gonna be a theme, isn’t it? Like the potions. Like the feeling of using the teleport flowers…” Frank grouched.

I sighed.

“Yeah, probably.” I looked around and spotted a dead tree that must have fallen from the top of the cliff down here. “How about we make a campfire to dry ourselves off while the hut gets ventilated?” I suggested.

My companions nodded and we headed for the fallen tree.

I couldn’t help but feel a bit anxious about constantly going off track, however.