The warmth of the Philippine sun, the heavy scent of church incense, and the comforting touch of Marcel's hand vanished in a sickening, instantaneous flash.
The illusion shattered.
There was no sidewalk. There was no Sunday Mass. My peaceful life as Roxanne Albatross in 2025 was nothing more than a cruel, dying hallucination conjured by a brain desperately suffocating from blood loss. The priest's sermon about dying once was a mockery, because I hadn't escaped. I hadn't woken up.
I snapped back into the brutal, agonizing reality of the Caria Mines.
I was alive, but barely. Gasping for air, I realized I wasn't at the bottom of the gold ravine anymore. I was trapped inside a dark, secluded side-cave, entirely cut off from the main shafts. I couldn't move a single muscle. A thick, dense cocoon of translucent bio slime was tightly wrapped around my entire frame, pinning my remaining right arm to my side and tilting my body completely upside down.
The moment my consciousness fully returned, the sheer, unmitigated weight of my injuries hit me like a physical wave. My torso was a shredded, burning mess. The massive, horizontal claw wound across my stomach… the one that had left my intestines trampled… was still there, crudely sealed and held together only by the numbing, sticky pressure of the slime cocoon.
I tried to flex my spine, to call upon the violent, comforting heat of my magic to burn through the trap. Nothing happened. The bio slime wrapping me was pulsing with a strange, localized anti-mana frequency. My reservoir ring was cold. I could not use my Blood Manipulation. My prosthetic left arm was entirely gone, leaving nothing but a raw, aching stump, and my shotgun was nowhere to be found. I was completely powerless, suspended like cattle in a slaughterhouse.
Through the heavy, dripping silence of the secluded cave, a faint blue-green light pulsed from the shadows.
I forced my lone, jade-green eye upward, straining against the upside-down distortion of my vision. There, standing on the opposite side of the cavern, was the silhouette of the monster wearing my face.
The Guardian of the Ravine. The 18-year-old girl with the striking brown hair and the organic, pulsing slime bodysuit. Her twin jade-green eyes gleamed through the dark, staring directly at my inverted, helpless form. She hadn't finished me off in the ravine. She had dragged me here, keeping me alive for a purpose far worse than death.
The girl approached me slowly, her bare feet making an eerie, wet squelching sound against the damp stone floor as her organic slime bodysuit rippled in the dim light. She stopped just a few inches from my upside-down, suspended face. She didn't look triumphant or mocking anymore; instead, she wore a deeply discerning, intense look, her twin jade-green eyes scanning my features with a mix of confusion and building frustration.
"You winged demon, speak up. Tell me what you are, and why you carry that aura. Speak, or I will peel you apart." she commanded, her voice echoing sharply in pure, elegant Alatist.
Instead of executing me on the spot, she was demanding answers. Realizing that my life was hanging by a single, fraying thread, I tried to answer. I strained my jaw, fighting the suffocating pressure of the slime cocoon, and opened my mouth wide.
I didn't utter a word. Instead, I let her look inside. I showed her the jagged, hollow space behind my teeth… proving to her that I had no tongue and was completely mute.
The girl's eyes narrowed, her face contorting into an annoyed, cold expression.
"A mute puppet, useless. Well, I guess I will just kill you after all."
She raised her right hand, the blue-green bio slime instantly hardening into long, razor-sharp calcified claws. She drew her arm back, aiming directly for my exposed throat, ready to tear my jugular apart.
I needed to act fast. My Blood Manipulation was completely suppressed by the cocoon, but my core racial traits weren't bound by mana. In a sudden wave of sheer, adrenaline-fueled panic, I realized my Shapeshifting ability was still active. I reached deep into my genetic memory, pulling up the stolen DNA of Oksana, the ruthless drug lord I had assassinated days ago.
[Analyzing genetic data... 100% match found in blood reservoir. Commencing Morphological Shift.]
My flesh violently rippled and shifted. In an instant, my vocal cords morphed, and a fully formed human tongue materialized inside my mouth. Before her claws could slice my throat, Oksana's deep, panicked voice erupted from my lips:
[Visual confirmation: 100% accuracy. Heart rate, scent, and vocal cords successfully calibrated. Successfully shapeshifted into Oksana Petrivna]
"STOP! Stop! Please, don't kill me!" I said with Oksana's voice.
The claws stopped a mere fraction of an inch from my skin. The sharp wind from her strike whistled past my ears. The girl froze, lowering her hand just an inch, her eyes widening in absolute shock as she witnessed my sudden facial mutation.
"I told you, you could speak, a shapeshifter... interesting. Now tell me the truth, demon. Who are you? What is your real name?" she said, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous purr as she leaned closer.
The panic inside my chest erupted into a wild, racing storm. I couldn't tell her my executioner alias, and I couldn't tell her I was Roxanne. Blending Oksana's voice with the terror running through my veins, I blurted out the first cover name I could form:
"I'm Eirene Rynd! I'm a bounty hunter! I was contracted and sent down here by the Capital Knights Bureau Association! Please, I was just following a mission profile!"
The word Rynd left my lips and seemed to hang in the freezing air of the cave like a physical weight.
The girl completely froze. The calcified slime claws raised near my throat trembled slightly, then slowly, organically dissolved back into the translucent bodysuit. The cold, murderous arrogance completely drained from her face, leaving her looking utterly stunned. She stared at me, her twin jade-green eyes locked onto mine, searching my features with a sudden, desperate intensity.
"You girl… do you... happen to be a slime?"
"No! No, not a slime! I'm a human being! A real human being!" I cried out in a panicked, cracking voice, Oksana's stolen vocal cords vibrating with raw terror.
The girl stepped back a single pace. When she spoke again, the sharp, elite Alatist accent didn't carry the cold, discerning weight of a lethal executioner anymore. Her voice shifted into a gentle, vulnerable, almost sisterly tone that sent a violent shock straight to my core.
"Are you... related to Linera Rynd? The silver-haired girl?"
I froze on the spot, my inverted body completely paralyzing inside the tight slime cocoon. Hearing my mother's name spoken aloud in this desolate, godforsaken abyss made six years of buried, agonizing memories instantly circulate through my mind. Linera Rynd. The woman I had descended into this hellhole to avenge.
The girl looked down at her own pulsing, organic hands, her expression a mix of awe and profound realization.
"Bio slimes have an innate, hive-mind ability, we can sense when our siblings are dying, when our bloodline is in true peril. The bio slimes you slaughtered ruthlessly on the upper mineshafts... They were my family. I felt them die. But seeing a human being like you, trapped and bleeding out... the way my core reacted when you were dying in the ravine... that was no joke. It was the exact same resonance."
She stepped forward again, leaning in close until our faces were inches apart. Her twin jade-green eyes… the exact same rare, piercing hue as my own… welled with a strange, bioluminescent moisture. She looked at me, shedding every ounce of her monstrous persona, and spoke the unthinkable truth:
"Are you actually my sister? My name... my Master called me the ultimate creation... but the human memories inside me say my name is Evelyn."
The world seemed to stop spinning. Evelyn. My unborn baby sister. The one I thought had died inside our mother six years ago during the catastrophic mining breach. She hadn't died. The parasite had taken them both, gestating her, growing her into the Guardian of the Ravine, raising her to protect the very hive-mind that had ruined our family.
My sister was alive. And I had just spent the last hour trying to rip her heart out.
"Oh shit. Another mindfuck Eirene." Plasma said through my thoughts
The upside-down world of the secluded cave blurred as a violent cascade of memories rushed through my mind, triggered by the reference to that name.
I was dragged backward in time, six years ago, to the meat shop that always smelled of cold iron and sawdust. I remembered being twelve years old, my hands too small for the heavy cleavers, watching our radiant mother, Linera Rynd, whose silver hair and striking crimson eyes were unforgettable despite her exhaustion. I remembered her slow, rhythmic movements because of her heavy pregnancy. I remembered my older sister, Elicia, who was sixteen at the time and already a master of divine regeneration, pressing her ear against our mother's swollen womb.
"
I remembered the absolute heartbreak of grabbing her skirts that evening, crying because she was a retired Capital Knight, pregnant, and leaving for Caria. She had knelt down, wiping my tears, promising she would be back in a week to settle one last debt so we could live without shadows.
A week had passed. Then came the heavy, metallic knock on the door. Three grim soldiers stood there, delivering the cold report that shattered our lives. They told us our mother was found in the mines, unrecognizable. There was no mention of the baby. There was no mention of Evelyn. They told us there was nothing left to bury.
And now, hanging upside down in the suffocating dark of the fourth tier, the truth slammed into me with the force of a kinetic shockwave.
The unborn sister we had named in our cozy shop… the sister I thought had been destroyed before she could ever breathe… was standing right in front of me. The shock of it tore through my chest, completely shattering the hardened persona of the bounty hunter. Hot, heavy tears welled in my eyes, where eyes of Oksana, spilling backward across my temples.
"Evelyn… Is that... is that really you?" choked out, Oksana's stolen voice cracking with raw, unfiltered emotion as I stared at her face.
Looking at her closely now, the family resemblance was undeniable. She truly resembled a Rynd. Those striking jade-green eyes weren't a parasite's curse, they were inherited directly from our father, the exact same rare hue passed down to me and our brother Elias. Her jawline, her brow, her facial structure… she looked nearly identical to me because she was my flesh and blood.
Hearing my voice break, Evelyn's gaze softened completely. The terrifying Guardian of the Ravine vanished, leaving behind a vulnerable child searching for her family.
"Yes, Eirene... it's me, I know you wouldn't recognize me right now. I'm only six years old... but bio slimes tend to age their hosts so fast. I grew into this body within years... a half-human, half-slime hybrid, trapped down here in the dark."
Evelyn whispered, a tear of bioluminescent moisture slipping down her cheek. She didn't hesitate anymore. Evelyn stepped forward and threw her arms around my suspended, helpless form. She hugged me tightly, pressing her chest right against the thick, pulsing slime cocoon that bound me.
Even through the cold, gelatinous layer of the trap, I could feel the rhythmic, desperate thumping of her core. It wasn't the terrifying heartbeat of a monster anymore… it was the frantic, loving heartbeat of my little sister, holding onto the family she had only ever known through fragmented, stolen memories.