Chapter 141

Chapter 141

Thats probably for the best. Taking some time apart. The younger version of me answered. I did a double-take. Was my voice really that subdued and robotic?

What? Daphne asked, her warm disposition unsettled.

There was a notebook in my bedside table. Its gone.

Maybe Ellison was being nosy? Daphne tried.

He shook his head. Nope. As far as I can tell, its no longer in the house. Did you take it?

I didnt even know you had a journal.

I dont. It was mostly a series of half-formed thoughts and plans for the future. Some documentation of the trial. And post-therapy notes. Since you didnt answer, Ill ask again. Did you take it?

Daphne breathed a heavy sigh. God, youre an ass.

Were done. I rose from the table and slid the book into a backpack.

Wait, Matt

With all the legal shit, we shouldnt be talking anyway. Different camps and whatnot.

Daphne stood to her feet, placing her palms flat on the table. Weve been friends for years

During which, youve tried to drive wedges between me and my family, followed me around, and repeatedly violated my privacy. Id say the friendship has run its course.

I winced at the harshness of the scene. It wasnt that Daphne was a bad person back then. The good always outweighed the bad. But the bad was too substantial to ignore. She was obsessive. I think, if her father had ever been willing to get her tested, she would have easily been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Our friendship started normally, if a bit awkwardly, with our parents constantly bringing us along for lunches and dinners thinly disguised as business meetings.

It was uncommon back then for me to have a friend my age, and as such, I thought that our relationship was normal. The irregularities a more social person would have picked out went entirely over my head. Daphne seemed to always be available and never flaked. She was interested in me, and being an adolescent with very little idea of who I was, we shared that interest. There was some frictionshe wanted to invest far more time into our relationship than I did, and had trouble identifying social cues or subtle indicators that I was ready for our interactions to come to a close.

It was only after a few years that the veneer cracked enough to reveal the reality beneath.

In reality, Daphne didnt always have time for me. She just chose to prioritize me over anything else, sometimes to serious detriment.

She got angry and standoffish if I didnt spend enough time with her.Visit no(v)eLb(i)n.com for the best novel reading experience

Some of my personal items, including anything Id so much as scrawled in began to disappear sporadically.

And it wasnt so much that she had trouble identifying social cues, more accurate that she intentionally ignored them.

Its common for people with BPD to develop a strong fixation on an individual. That fixation can be romantic, or as it was for us, platonic. Occasionally, it works out well enough. Often it doesnt. What it came down to was that Daphne had boundary issues, while I had boundaries in bulk. Even if our history hadnt been recently complicated, it was a terrible fit.

Matt, stop. Daphne called out to the younger version of myself. In my memory, shed sounded angrier. Hearing it again, she just sounded sad. Are you going to tell?

The inevitable question, and the one thing Daphne cared about more than me. Her secrets.

Depends. He shot Daphne a bland look. You planning on making this difficult?

No, Daphne said quietly.

The recording cut out suddenly.

I reached over and scanned backwards, replaying the last few seconds. It stopped at the same point.

Panic welled up, and I crushed it ruthlessly before it could overwhelm me. This was par for the course. If Id thought far enough ahead to make a recording, I must have also known the lithid screwing with it was a real possibility. Which meant, if Id done this right, it should be possible to piece together my plan from the inventory and Talia alone.

As I continued cataloguing my inventory, the panic slowly faded. That was a good sign. was far harder to handle before the integration. Still, I hadnt attained the integration until I was already in the dungeon. The decision to use it wasnt the strange part. What seemed off was that Id waited until entering the dungeon to use it.

It served as my first indicator that something was wrong. Maybe that was intentional.











The arrows made perfect sense. A viable way to use the Spider Matriarchs toxin at range. They were longer than a standard arrow, with a hammerhead glass tip that contained a green liquid. There was flavor text that indicated this was an ideal projectile to use on a slime, meant to be shot in its path, rather than directly at it.

I was already wearing the amulet, which hopefully stacked with my armor.

But the last two acquisitions had me entirely at a loss. What kind of fucking plan was this? Trying the Matriarchs toxin on the lithid made senseit was sourced from a trial boss, and likely packed significantly more punch than anything you could grab on the open market. Yet, the seemed like an utter waste. It specifically denoted that it was only effective on low-level creatures or NPCs, unless imbibed voluntarily.

And I had no idea how Id intended to get a psychic monster to willingly drink poison.

The goblin confit waswell, a disturbing introduction to confit. Supposedly a troll delicacy, it was created by force-feeding goblins an excess of sweet berries for months until they expired from the strain, then slow-cooking cooking them in gilded truffle goat butter.

WhichI mean, what the fuck. I sure as hell wasnt going to eat it.

Maybe the intention was to trick the lithid into eating the confit laced with poison, but again, it being able to read my thoughts made that a tall order with questionable returns, considering that the poisons effects lasted less than ten minutes.

A groggy growl reverberated in my mind.

Talia?

Talias voice was drowsy, only slightly more lucid than before. What a terrible dream where are we?

A flash of movement from the corridor caught my eye. I scurried out of the spotlight, unsure if itd even make a difference. It wasnt a dream. Were on the fifth floor of the adaptive dungeon. The lithid is screwing with our minds. Breaking out of the initial delusion was the first barrier.

Ill shred it to pieces, Talia hissed.

Youll get your chance. Are you coherent enough to fight?

One by one, small shadows emerged from the darkness. Humanoid silhouettes around half my height. Smiling white teeth glittered in the dark. They all held short blades that looked strangely domestic, more like something out of a kitchen knife block than a fantasy equivalent.

Oh yes. Talia answered, her voice so raw with spite, I couldnt help but wonder what the lithid had shown her.

Then get ready. I drew and threw it directly into the center of the advancing shadows.