Chapter 10: Beating Bad Luck With Bad Luck

 

Jessica Leap-Boing! along the narrow path carved through the Maze Hell’s lava lake, her tiny flaming form a streak of light against the molten orange glow. She didn’t look back. She couldn’t. The last words of the shifting mural echoed in her mind like a curse she couldn’t shake: “Master… I want to kill the gods.”

She didn’t know why her thoughts kept drifting back to that line. Maybe it was the raw emotion behind it, the grief, the rage, the terrible determination. Maybe it was the way those words had seemed to hang in the air long after the text faded. Or maybe it was something else entirely, something she couldn’t name.

Whatever the reason, she let her mind wander through the questions the mural had planted.

‘Who is Red?’

That was the heart of it, wasn’t it? The red-haired man in dark robes was the main character of that ancient story. But who was he really? A dragon? A god? An angel? Or something else entirely?

‘And who was the woman they took from him?’

The mural had been clear about that much, someone had been taken. Someone Red loved. The gods, or whoever ‘they’ were, had taken her away; dead or alive, and had given nonsense reasons. Lies, Red had called them. Justifications for cruelty. The little one. The egg. He called it ‘the only lovely thing left to remind me of her.

‘So… does that mean the egg is their offspring? Their unborn child?’

It made a terrible kind of sense. Two beings, dragons maybe, given the egg, in love, producing an heir. And then something happened. Someone took the mother away. Left the father alone with an egg that should have been a symbol of their love.

The next question snagged on something sharp.

‘Then why did the egg look like a cage? Why did it seem like something was trapped inside, struggling to be free, instead of just… developing naturally? Growing until it was ready to hatch?’

She turned the problem over in her mind, examining it from every angle. It felt important. It felt personal, though she couldn’t say why.

‘Was Red keeping the offspring contained? Or was someone else? The way the egg glowed, the way that light seemed to want to escape… that wasn’t normal. That wasn’t how eggs work.’

The more she thought, the more her mental processes heated up. Literally. A faint sizzling…! sound began to echo in her awareness, the telltale sign of her borrowed locust brain overheating from cognitive overload.

‘Sigh…’ She gave up with a mental groan. ‘Thinking like a professor was never my thing. Let’s just leave that for la—’

SPLASH!

Her [Spark Instinct] screamed.

She didn’t think. She leaped. Her body shot upward, wings buzzing frantically, just as a jet of molten lava erupted from below and slammed into the exact spot she’d been occupying. The stone path sizzled and melted on contact, a chunk of it dissolving into the churning lake below.

‘SHIT!’ The curse was pure reflex. She’d forgotten. In her deep thoughts and mural mysteries, she’d almost forgotten where she was. The lava. The snakes. The hundreds of snakes waiting to turn her into a light snack.

Her instincts flared again as she landed back on the path, a different section now, farther ahead. Another lava jet shot upward, missing her by inches as she twisted mid-air.

‘I can’t even have a moment of peace, can I?’ The thought was laced with weary irritation. ‘Just one moment. One single, solitary moment to think without something trying to kill me. Is that too much to ask?’

The answer, apparently, was yes.

She ran. Her legs became pistons, her wings stabilizers, her entire existence a frantic blur of motion along the narrow stone ribbon. Ahead, through the shimmering heat haze, she saw it, a destination. A small patch of land on the far side of the lava lake. She couldn’t make out details from this distance, couldn’t see what waited there, but it was land. Solid, non-molten, non-snake-infested land.

‘At least I can set foot on something that isn’t surrounded by hell on both sides.’

The thought was barely formed when her [Spark Instinct] detected movements, more slithering sounds, more vipers, drawn by the chase, joining the pursuit. They were gaining. Not as fast as the ninja mushrooms, nothing would ever be as terrifyingly fast as those exploding bastards, but fast enough. Too fast.

‘Don’t tell me these snakes are like those ninja mushrooms.’ The memory of exploding fungi made her shudder. ‘Please don’t let them be ninja snakes. I cannot handle ninja snakes.’

WHOOSH!

A Lava Viper erupted from the molten rock directly ahead, jaws wide, fangs dripping with flaming venom. It had anticipated her path, launched itself in a perfect intercept arc.

Jessica’s instincts flared, but not fast enough.

She flew upward, dodging the initial strike, but the viper’s tail whipped around in a follow-up attack she had anticipated, but got caught mid-evasion by a strange pressure, slamming her back down onto the stone path with bone-jarring force.

<< SPECIES POSSESSED: CAVE LOCUST [HP/82%] (-20) –> [HP/62%] >>

‘SHIT! SHIT!!’ Twenty percent. Twenty percent of her hard-earned, carefully maintained, precious HP, gone in a two-sided attack from both the viper and slowly returning gravity. Her flames guttered, dimmed, then roared back with the fury of pure indignation.

‘My HP! My beautiful, fully charged, I-just-got-it-back HP! You scaled bastards! You overgrown salamanders! You—’ The lament was reflexive, almost comical in its timing. But beneath the complaint was genuine fear. Sixty-two percent. That was dangerously close to the red zone. Dangerously close to the grey fog and the fading vision and the cold embrace of nothing.

She scrambled upright and launched herself forward with renewed, desperate speed.

****

 

More attacks came like a torrent.

Jessica leaped, barely, desperately, as two sets of fangs snapped shut on the space she’d occupied a heartbeat before. The chomp-chomp echoed behind her like the world’s most terrifying percussion. She hit the path hard, skidding, her legs scrambling for purchase as lava breath shot through the air above her, multiple streams intersecting in a deadly crossfire that would have reduced her to ash.

‘Ohhh, I bless the day I gained this innate ability.’ The thought was pure, heartfelt gratitude. Without [Spark Instinct], she would have been dead ten times over in the last minute alone.

But fate, as always, was listening.

And fate, as always, had other plans.

In the distance ahead, movement caught her eye, not the slithering of individual vipers, but a mass. A writhing, crawling carpet of scaled bodies, pouring onto the path from both sides of the lava lake. They were everywhere. Dozens. Hundreds. Blocking the way forward completely, their molten forms stacking and coiling until the path disappeared beneath a living, hungry tide.

Behind her, the pursuit grew louder. She didn’t need to look. Her [Spark Instinct] painted the picture clearly, more vipers, closing fast, cutting off retreat.

She was in the middle.

The perfect center.

The filling in a very hot, very hungry snake sandwich.

‘Roasted Cave Locust dessert,’ she thought, the words flat with dark humor. ‘Served fresh. With a side of existential dread.’

“FLAMING HELL!!!” The scream wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even despair. It was fury. Pure, incandescent, soul-deep fury at a universe that had apparently decided her purpose was to be perpetually hunted.

“I CURSE THE DAY I WAS REINCARNATED IN THIS BASTARD OF A DUNGEON, DAMNIT!!!”

She huffed. Puffed. Her flames roared with her rage, blazing brighter than they had since she’d first ignited this locust body.

“I’VE HAD ENOUGH!!”

The words were a declaration. A manifesto. A line drawn in the metaphorical sand.

“Enough of running! Enough of hiding! Enough of surviving!” Her mental voice rose to a fever pitch. “If fate wants to bite me with bad luck from all sides, I’ll return the favor a HUNDRED FOLD! I’ll bite BACK!”

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She launched herself forward.

Not away from the vipers. Toward them.

“I’ll BEAT my bad luck!! I’ll become the monster that even FATE fears! So COME AT ME, YOU BURNING WORMS!”

“AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!”

For the first time since her reincarnation, Jessica charged into danger instead of away from it.

 

Hisss!!

The first viper lunged. Jessica didn’t dodge, she met it, landing squarely on its forehead in a move that surprised the snake as much as it surprised her. For one split second, predator and prey shared a moment of mutual confusion.

Then the viper shook its head violently, trying to dislodge the tiny, burning thing that had somehow become above it instead of inside it.

In that moment of shaking, another viper struck, aiming for the locust, hitting its own kind instead. Fangs sank into scaled neck. Venom pumped into molten blood. The bitten viper recoiled, hissing in fury and pain.

Jessica was already gone.

She had leaped from the first viper’s head to the second’s back, her tiny claws digging into scales that should have been too hot to touch. And then she burned.

Not the slow, gentle burn of nutrient absorption. A blaze. A conflagration. A hungry, roaring fire that engulfed the viper from head to tail.

Hisss!!!

The sound was different now, not aggressive, but panicked. The viper thrashed, trying to escape flames that clung like a second skin. It should have been resistant. It was a lava viper, born of molten rock, immune to heat that would kill lesser creatures.

But this wasn’t ordinary fire.

This fire drained.

The viper felt it, a sucking, pulling sensation, as if its very life force was being drawn out through its scales. It thrashed harder, but the flames only burned brighter, hotter, hungrier. So bright that the other vipers around it had to look away, their primitive eyes overwhelmed by the sudden glare.

For a moment, there was silence. Only the bubbling of lava below and the sizzle-crackle of something burning above.

Thud..!

The viper’s body hit the path. Its once-molten skin, so similar to the lava around them, was now charred black. Cracked. Empty. The flames still licked at its corpse, consuming what remained, but the creature within was gone. Drained. Used.

And from the heart of those flames, a tiny figure emerged.

It walked slowly, deliberately, stepping out of the fire like a miniature sun descending to earth. Its body blazed with light, flames wreathing every segment, every limb, every antenna. It landed on the path and stood there, surrounded on all sides by vipers who had, for the first time, stopped their advance.

It was the cave locust. Once [Level 2] now [Level 3]

The vipers stared. Hesitated. Something in their primitive brains registered that this prey was different. This prey was dangerous.

Jessica stared back, her compound eyes taking in every scaled body, every flickering tongue, every molten fang.

‘Come.’ The thought was calm. Cold. The focused stillness of a pro gamer entering the zone.

‘I still have some fire left to cook.’

Without any more words, she lunged at them.

 

Hisss!!

The vipers lunged too.

A torrent of lava breath filled the air, multiple streams, all aimed at the tiny flaming target. Jessica’s [Spark Instinct] screamed, and she moved, twisting between attacks, dodging by hairbreadths that would have made a lesser creature weep.

But there were too many. Too much liquid fire. Some caught her.

<< SPECIES POSSESSED: CAVE LOCUST [HP/88%] (-10) –> [HP/78%] >>

<< SPECIES POSSESSED: CAVE LOCUST [HP/78%] (-14) –> [HP/64%] >>

<< SPECIES POSSESSED: CAVE LOCUST [HP/64%] (-4) –> [HP/60%] >>

The notifications scrolled, ignored. Poison burned in her veins, [Flaming Poison], the system called it, a toxin that should have crippled her, slowed her, ended her.

Her flames roared hotter. The poison sizzled, evaporated, burned away by sheer force of will. ‘Not today.’

Hisss!!