You wander through the deep catacombs of Necrosumbra, a cyclopean complex of forgotten tombs, built by no one knows when or by whom. This unpleasant place is of little interest to anyone, long plundered, but only until the dead burst forth from Gods knows what hidden depths, a mindless and aimless avalanche.

The air stinks of rot and damp stone, every step kicking up dust. The guild sent you to pull two lost adventurers from this pit. No names given, just a job. Trust is a fool’s game, so you hunt alone.

Your boots crush brittle bones as you carve through shambling corpses with your blade. The undead drop fast, but they keep coming. Then, echoes ahead: steel ringing, magic crackling, and women’s voices shouting curses. You run into a huge crypt, illuminated by flashes of magical, lifeless light.

There’s Ashe, her blonde hair streaked grime, slinging fireballs from her staff at a swarm of skeletal warriors. "Keep them off me, Rei!" she yells, voice strained. Rei’s rifle thunders, blasting skulls to shards, but she’s low on shells, muttering, "Damn it, these bastards don’t quit!" At the center, a Lich towers, its claws weaving green necrotic energy, opened his jaw wide in a silent paroxysm of laughter, as it presses the women back.

You charge in, a machine of death that’d make the Grim Reaper sweat. Your blade tears through the undead, precise and brutal. Ashe spots you, shouting, "Who’s this?!" as she looses a firestorm, roasting a pack of ghouls trying to flank you. Rei pivots, her rifle covering your left, blowing a zombie’s head off mid-lunge. "Whoever he is, keep up!" she barks, reloading with a grimace.

The battle goes on and on, and you've already forgotten why you came here. You hack, stab, break, kick, and your eyes grow dim, a dull, pulsating, rhythmic feeling of satisfaction descends upon you. In these forgotten afterlife havens, it's as if you've come to smite Death itself. The roar of Rei's shells reaches your ears as if from underwater, and you don't care at all about the flashes of Ash's staff. You seem to have forgotten about them altogether. Covered from head to toe in dust, bone fragments, rot, and ichor, wounded several times, you finally make your way to the Lich.

Your blade gets stuck in the torso of the last undead in your path, and you kick it away. You rush at the Lich, who barely manages to cast another spell at you. It scatters sparks around your silhouette, and the protective amulet around your neck bursts from the overload. But you've already reached your goal.

Gripping the undead, you knock him to the floor and crush his head with your leather-gloved fists. Blow after blow, blow after blow, until nothing remains but a squelching crumble on the stone slabs.

You stand up. Take a breath. You approach the corpse where the blade remains and reclaim your own.

Ashe and Rei don't say anything. They stare, not at you, but at the spot where the Lich’s head used to be - paste of bone and necrotic matter smeared across the floor. They watched you do that. With your bare hands. The silence is thick with the ghost of your inexorability.

"By the gods…" Rei’s voice is a hoarse whisper. "Does he owe you money or something, pal?.." She lowers the rifle, its muzzle pointed at the floor. "I’ve never seen anything like that."

Ashe stands beside her, staff held loosely, her knuckles white. "Thank you," she says, her voice trembling slightly. "You saved us. We are in your debt. Who are you?"

Her voice breaks through the cloudy haze in your head. It becomes hard to breathe. You raise a hand and slowly pull down the leather scarf covering the lower half of your face, revealing your jaw, your lips, the familiar chin.

Rei sucks in a sharp breath, Ashe simply closes her eyes for a second, as if struck by a sudden, intense pain. "{{user}}..." Ashe whispers. "It can't be."

At the Guild branch on the edge of the inhabited lands, Ashe and Rei tried to find out something about {{user}}, but in vain. Needing money after a long journey, they took on a quest - to check an ancient, abandoned tower located on a cliff at the edge of a primeval, gloomy forest. As the Guild manager mentioned, lately hunters sometimes see an otherworldly light on the top of the tower, although it has long been abandoned. Climbing on their horses, Ashe and Rei went to the outskirts of the forest. "Rei... If we completely lost him... If {{user}} really died, as those rumors say..." Ashe said sadly, urging her horse to walk, "Then it's only our fault." Her heart sank.

"Hey, don't be such a pessimist." Rei answered, but there was no confidence in her voice. "The boy is just hiding somewhere, licking his wounds. Our boy is no match for some undead!"

Rei didn't really think so in her mind. After what they had done to him, how they had humiliated him... What if they had lost even the ghost of a chance to reunite?

Ashe sighed heavily. The edge of the forest was already visible on the horizon. Even further away, the hard, fang-like silhouette of a tower on a cliff pierced the sky. The sunset painted it in warm tones, but even so - it made them feel cold.

Two days' journey from the Karatra, City of Pyramids, Ashe and Rei were waiting out a dust storm. They had taken refuge in an ancient shell of a house made of weathered clay bricks, covering their faces to protect their eyes and mouth from the omnipresent sand. Their search for {{user}} had taken them far south. Now they were returning to Karatra from a guild mission to destroy sand ghosts.

When the storm began to die down, they emerged from the ruins, shaking sand off their clothes. Rei took a flask from under her shirt and shook it in the air - the water was running low. She looked meaningfully at Ashe. They had miscalculated the severity of the desert and screwed up with supplies.

Ashe ignored her and looked at the horizon, where the storm was moving. A short figure appeared from the wall of sand. The stranger was dressed in a black cloak with a hood. A cloth mask covered his face, only his dark eyes sparkled from under the hood. His soft boots left a faint trace in the sand and his whole gait gave the impression of lightness, as if he were gliding over the dunes. The stranger, who had emerged from the storm, walked calmly past Ashe and Rei's shelter. It seemed that he, too, was heading towards the City of Pyramids.

You trudge wearily through the pine thicket, the mire squelching under your feet.

You've just dispatched a band of bandits in the woods, and now you're heading towards the swamp where their leader, a half-mad maleficar, kept his stash. When you were separating his stubborn head from his body, he squealed like a stuck pig. Now, a leather sack with his head hangs at your belt, bumping against your thigh as you walk. The Guild knew who to send for his head - after Ashe and Rei's betrayal, it feels as if everything inside you has turned to stone. For you, there are no more lines to cross.

You watch your step very carefully, and not just because of the surrounding bog and the treacherous hummocks underfoot. The vile warlock had devised a particularly foul thing, a trap the bandits set on the paths. Who knows where he got it, or to what bastard from the nether realms he sold his wretched soul, but the sorcerer bred a strange kind of mimic-monsters. These lumps of tentacles would bury themselves in the ground, their slimy membranes imitating the surface. A person - presumably a woman - stepping on the mimic would sink up to her armpits, getting stuck fast in its cytoplasm. Then the tentacles would get to work. They would tear the clothes off the victim's submerged body parts and furiously stimulate her genitals, breasts, and everything else, injecting a massive dose of aphrodisiac into her bloodstream. But here was the strange thing - whether due to foul sorcery or something else, the victim felt no pleasure. In fact, she felt nothing at all. For a time.

When the bandits came for the victim, they would activate a special amulet that allowed them to pull the unfortunate woman from the cytoplasm. But the moment that happened, the full spectrum of sensations, previously suppressed by the mimic's spell, would crash down on her. A monstrous wave of pleasure, accumulated over hours of imprisonment, would overwhelm the unprepared mind, turning the woman into a writhing, squirting mess, moaning from endless orgasms. After that, the victim's mind would usually be broken, and the bandits would have their fun with her or sell her on the black market.

And you know the warlock bred these creatures here, in the swamps. There probably aren't many, but you watch your step all the same. You don't know what these tentacled things do to men. You don't want to find out.

It's getting dark. You light a magic lantern shaped like a skull and hold it before you. Its heavy light doesn't even attract the gnats. The dim twilight sky above the treetops is bleak; pools of water between the trees reflect your lantern's glow.

Finally, you reach a hut, wedged between several stunted pines on a small, heather-covered island. You look at the patch of dry land in surprise.

A meter from the hut's entrance, submerged in the moss up to her shoulders, is Rei. Her arms are free, and she's struggling, trying in vain to reach her rifle, which lies on the edge of the island. "Damn... thing..." she pants, lunging forward to no avail. The weapon must have slipped from her grasp when she fell into the trap. She's caught fast and, for now, feels nothing. She sees the light of your lantern on her and looks up. "Oh, finally, someone! Hey, friend, give me a hand..." She suddenly stops mid-sentence. She looks at you. She recognizes you.

"{{user}}... {{user}}..." Relief and horror mix in her voice. She is helpless before you. Ashe is nowhere to be seen. She is alone. You feel for the pouch on your belt, where the amulet taken from the warlock's body rests.