You wouldn’t see them, not unless they wanted you to. Even I had trouble tracking them through the dungeon’s map overlay. The stealth effect they carried wasn’t just visual. It was behavioural, instinctive. A passive aura that urged eyes to slide off them, brains to edit them out. You didn’t want to notice a Mom-did-go.

  You wanted to pretend they weren’t there.

  One of them, her pantsuit ripped clean along the shoulder, exposing raw stitched sinew; knelt beside a tree, head cocked. Her face was angular, lips drawn too tight like skin pulled over cracked porcelain. Her stretched arm rested across the bark, her clawed fingers twitching like they were testing a piano’s keys.

  Waiting.

  Another clung to the underside of a twisted maple like a predator bat, arms folded in under her large fake boobs. Inspired by my idea of a trophy wife stereotype. Her back flexed once, the joints creaking as though they were made of folding chairs. Then she stilled. The shadows around her seemed to pulse, making it impossible to tell where she ended and the branches began.

  The last two Windigo-Moms lurked at the edges of the treeline. They stood unnaturally tall, almost joining with the shadows of the trees. I was impressed with how they turned out. They were taller than any human should be.

  The third Mom looked like a PTA president from a nightmare. Her face, stretched into a permanent frown, was framed by a lopsided blonde bob cut that twitched with every movement as if it had a mind of its own. She wore the tattered remains of a once-pristine pantsuit, smeared with soot and fluids, and carried herself like she was about to demand the manager of reality itself. Her hands — no, claws — were long and shaking with fury like she was moments away from writing a very strongly worded letter in blood.

  The last Windigo-Mom had a softness to her but not the comforting kind. Her flannel pyjama top was shredded and stained, hanging off her skeletal frame like a drooping banner of surrender. Her longer-than-normal breasts flopped out of the top, discoloured dagger-like nipples showing, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Her once-cozy house slippers slapped quietly on the grass, but the stillness of her gaze was anything but maternal. Her grin was far too wide, a warped mask of domestic disappointment. As if she was going to say, to me, “I love you but…” She looked like she wanted to offer you a warm casserole… and then bake you inside it. Her arms hung slack at her sides, fingers twitching with anticipation.

  They all moved with a predatory hush; not sneaking, but waiting. Their shadows flickered wrong beneath them like they were cast by overhead fluorescent lights in a school hallway that never turned off.

  The bear’s breathing echoed too loudly in their ears. It didn’t belong here. And in their cold, fractured logic, that meant only one thing. It needed to go. Bookbite let out a low whistle as he perched on the edge of the warped filing cabinet, claws curled over the metal like he was about to start narrating a true crime show.

  "Yeesh," he muttered, tilting his head at the pyjama-clad horror. "She looks like she hasn't slept since the PTA bake sale got cancelled back in '87."

  I winced. "That one’s definitely the kind of mom who yells at retail workers."

  Bookbite cackled. "And the other one? Prime 'I-need-to-speak-to-the-core’s-manager' energy. Chloe, you made monsters that haunt homeowner associations."

  "I wasn’t trying to," I muttered. "They just sort of... formed that way."

  He nudged my elbow with a claw. "Don't sweat it. Honestly, it’s kind of beautiful. Who knew pure trauma could be so thematically consistent?"

  I snorted despite myself. "Thanks, I guess?"

  "Hey, I once got mauled by a haunted squirrel. This is classier."

  “Now that is a story that should be posted to the internet, with a title like Florida-Goblin…”

  Just then, the four of them fanned out in near-perfect formation. Not a sound. Not a single leaf was disturbed.

  Only their eyes gave them away. Pale, cloudy things like they’d seen too many wrong things and decided to forget them all. One blinked sideways, like a reptile. Another’s eyes stayed wide, unblinking, as her lips moved in silent rehearsal. They weren’t just monsters. My monsters. And they were waiting.

  Waiting for the bear to stumble just a little further. Waiting for the poison to dig deeper. Waiting for the moment it would stop looking like a threat and start looking like meat. Their hunger was part of their programming. But their cruelty? Or is this my cruelty? Am I becoming like those mean girls?

  I shivered, fingers tightening at the console. “They’re not real moms.”

  “Duh,” he muttered. “They’re better.”

  The bear lurched again, closer to the tree roots. The moment hung on a thread. The Mom-did-go didn’t move. But they were already preparing to strike.

  Stolen story; please report.

  The bear moved with a staggering, desperate determination, each step a wet squelch that trailed thick, viscous green fluid from the raw, ragged meat of its haunches. Poison still pulsed like venom through its engorged veins from the bee trap’s strike. My trap. The void’s twisted energy inside it was working overtime. A nauseating churn like tar being boiled alive under immense pressure, threatening to burst from its skin.

  It should have been healing, the void knitting bone and flesh. But it wasn’t. Instead, its back leg twitched violently, a sickening, uncontrolled spasm. The poison had turned the flesh a grotesque, bruised black, swelling and pulsing like a rotten fruit about to burst. Every ounce of void energy that surged to repair the damage simply fizzled against the pure, burning toxicity my trap pumped in. The two effects clashed, and I could see it in real time. The steam became a furious, boiling mist carrying the stench of burned flesh and something metallic, like hot blood.

  The bear threw its head back, its jaw unhinging in a way no natural creature's should, and let out a scream that wasn't just pain and confusion, but a ragged, bubbling shriek ripped from a tortured throat, spraying a fine mist of blackish fluid.

  Bookbite whistled low beside me, a sound swallowed by the raw noise of the bear's agony. “You ever see a goblin try to hold a sneeze after eating pepperbread? Yeah. That, but like, if the pepper bread was made of ground glass and their face was peeling off.”

  Then, without a sound, they struck, the air tearing open around them. All four Mom-did-go launched themselves from their hiding spots with inhuman precision, moving with a speed that blurred my reality. I hadn’t seen anything move like that, but we aren’t back on Earth. On Mors, levels and tiers mattered.

  “Here come the PTA,” Bookbite muttered, his eyes wide saucers reflecting the unnatural speed of the assault.

  I felt the sickening surge of movement before I saw the full horror. Razor nails, long and black and impossibly sharp, didn’t just slash across the bear’s hind leg; they opened it in a chaotic, synchronized ambush, tearing through hide, muscle, and sinew. The wound wasn’t just deep, it was a gaping, shredded ruin from which the thick, black, void-tainted blood immediately began to pump, a dark geyser staining the ground. The creature buckled with a roar that choked on the sudden influx of pain and blood, but it was no easy prey. It spun, teeth flashing, a terrifying maw of jagged points, and in a single terrible, wet motion, it ripped the arm off one of the Moms. Not cleanly severed, but torn free at the shoulder joint, a sound like wet canvas ripping, leaving behind a bloody, steaming stump and a dangling ruin of torn flesh and green tar.

  She didn’t scream. Her face remained a mask of unnatural calm, devoid of pain. Didn’t flinch. The Windigo-Mom’s face twisted with a hunger that went beyond food. I felt like it was primal, ravenous, and wrong in ways that made my skin crawl. Her eyes, once shaped like a person’s, had sunken deep into her skull, glowing faintly with a pale, feverish light, as if burning from a need that could never be satisfied. Her lips had split at the corners, cracked and peeling back far too wide, exposing rows of narrow, uneven teeth like a smile torn open with glass.

  The skin around her mouth twitched, jerking in tiny spasms, as if every part of her was clenching to keep from lunging. Her nostrils flared, scenting blood in the air, and drooled. I could watch as the spit was thick, black, and oozed. It pooled at the edges of her grin before falling in slow strands to the grass below. It wasn't just hunger for flesh. It was a hunger for punishment, for order, for revenge on everything that didn’t fit into her picture-perfect world.

  This wasn’t someone trying to eat.

  It was something trying to correct.

  She bit back. Her jaw distended far too wide, cracking audibly, her teeth elongating into needle-sharp points. She lunged at the bear’s throat in a blind frenzy, a living weapon driven by programming, maybe? She was trailing dark fluid from her fresh wound.

  But the bear was ready.

  The bear reared up on two legs, looming massive and grotesque, blood dripping in thick ropes from its ruined leg and maw. It bellowed a sound like a thunderclap directly in her face, a wave of black static and raw void energy pulsing out around it. An aura debuff that felt like being hit by a physical wave of filth. The Mom-did-go twitched mid-lunge, her legs buckling as if snapped, her form stuttering and flickering with void interference, like a corrupt video feed.

  Then the bear brought both massive, blood-smeared paws down like concrete sledgehammers onto her chest.

  CRUNCH.

  I felt the impact resonate in my chest, a sickening echo. Saw her body splinter inward, a horrifying collapse of bone and tissue. Limbs twisting at impossible angles as blood, guts and bones, thick and red and reeking of life force, spilled out in place of blood, pooling on the ground around her. She spasmed once, a grotesque, twitching mess, tried to crawl with ruined limbs…

  And the bear devoured her.

  It didn't just bite; it ripped her open with a terrible, wet tearing sound, burying its face in the ruin of her chest cavity and eating what was left with ravenous, animalistic hunger. Teeth smeared with dripping, corrupted mana and the thick, green void fluid. Its eyes were wild with a terrifying, predatory madness. Its body shuddered violently as it absorbed the ruined meat and raw mana, a horrifying communion of corrupted predator and prey.

  Then, like a parasite claiming a new, damaged host, it stabilized. Healing. Just a little, the gaping wound on its leg beginning to sluggishly close around clotted green goo.

  I staggered back from the interface, bile rising in my throat.

  A flicker of power surged into me; experience points, stolen from my monster’s death, a grim inheritance. Dungeon law. Resources recycled, life-consuming death. But it didn’t feel like victory. It felt like being complicit in something vile.

  It felt like murder.

  Like my fault.

  “I shouldn’t have—” My voice cracked, thin and reedy in the face of the carnage. “I should have called them back—”

  Bookbite, for once, didn’t interrupt with a quip. Just nodded slowly, his usual smug grin replaced by a grim set to his jaw. “You could have. But you didn’t. And now you’ve got something better than regret.”

  “What?” The word was a raw rasp.

  He leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the blood-soaked ground and the twitching remains. “A target.”