“Uncle Roger…” the man repeated my own words at me. Each word was punctuated by the clicking of his pen, the ballpoint tip going in and out of the plastic socket. He seemed to want to savor the words, rolling them on his tongue to see how they tasted in his mouth.

  He was a good deal shorter than me but, with my stature, most people tend to be. I loomed over him, taking a couple long strides that brought me into striking range while he kept muttering his own name.

  “It’s been a long time since someone called me by that name,” the man said. “A mighty long time… almost makes one forget the sound of it, you know?”

  I shrugged. “You said you wanted to kill me? Let’s get on with it, then. I want to see you try.”

  “What’s the hurry?” asked Roger, “I should be the one in a hurry, if anyone had to be, not you.” He paused, looking around with slow, jerking movements.

  He picked up a tablet from a table close to him and began to tap on it with the back of his pen, putting enough pressure to make the pen click every time, sending the ballpoint tip up and down the hollow casing.

  “You come from outside of this… wretched place, don’t you? The bitch of a witch didn’t wake up, fortunately. So you are a stranger to how things are in here. Heorest by now would have been dying to know what you know, hoping that perhaps you could help him escape this prison. Such a fool, he was. Not with the bitch watching, no, nobody who was born here can leave. But why even try to escape the artificial gilded cage he was put in? For a taste of the outside? It’s not at all better than it is here, is it?”

  I frowned, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “This place. It’s not all there is, is it? There is an outside, beyond the edges of the trodden paths, where no man nor monster can survive. You come from there. Tell me, is it better, or is it more of the same?”

  “I’d say it’s better,” I said, “what is the purpose of this?”

  “You’d lie, then,” said Roger, convinced that I wasn’t being cooperative. “This place we put them, we did them a favor! And yet they tried to escape time and time again, forced us to manipulate them from up close in the later iterations.”

  “David?” Liff’s voice, coming from behind, made me turn around for a split second. A mistake.

  I intercepted a knife aimed at my torso, blocking the incoming limb with my arm and punching Roger in the gut. There was a crunching sound as my strength was enough to break one of his ribs, and his dirty lab coat began to stain red where the skin was ruptured by the violence of the impact.

  Roger regained his composure, as if nothing had happened. He clicked his pen again, and we found ourselves staring at each other from a distance.

  “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” asked the man. After a while he had to hold himself upright with his hands on a table, but it didn’t seem to faze him. “Even after the asshole found out about the experiment, he could have kept living in his gilded cage, just as one of us rather than one of them. We offered him to join us, and you know what he did? He refused, gathered arms and men and marched on us here. But at the time he had no idea that I also was one of the researchers.”

  Roger laughed. “He thought I was one of them!”

  His howls of laughter were like nails on glass, sharp and evil. Liff, behind me, shivered in quiet sobs.

  “What face he made when he arrived here, and I killed him! Roger, he kept repeating, I don’t understand, I don’t understand!” His face twisted into a mocking grin, “of course you don’t. For all of your smarts, you were a fool. And now you’re dead. Just like this land. Just like your people.”

  I walked up to him, step after step, slowly as not to spook him away. “It was all just an experiment, then? The monsters, this place. Was it all just a twisted prison you put them in, like lab rats?”

  I was going to strike him, decisively, end the fight in one swift stroke. My anger was such that I was going to kill him without mercy as soon as I got close enough. Roger saw me, but lost as he was in his own insanity, he didn’t seem to care.

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  “HAHAHA,” Roger howled, “the monsters? What did I just tell you? It was either be one of us, or one of them!”

  I paused. I had thought that by us he meant the researchers, and that by them he meant the people of the village but…

  “You understand now,” he said as recognition dawned on my face. With a tap on his tablet, he unleashed a wave of monsters on me, but instead of defending I lunged at him.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but no words formed–I was faster than him. He gurgled something, mouth full of blood, before looking down at his chest where my arm was buried half its length in his flesh.

  “Just like Heorest couldn’t stop me,” he muttered in my ear, lifting himself up and making my arm sink even deeper in him, “neither can you. Liff will be brought back to the village and the last stage of the experiment will resume.”

  His eyes rolled into his head, and he died. I exploded into motion, and within seconds the room was clear of all the monsters before they could touch even a single hair of Liff’s head. She had stopped holding the dead body of her grandpa Heorest and was now looking around the room with a confused expression, lost halfway between grieving and struggling to come to grips with what she had heard of the conversation.

  The rest of the room was dead. Whatever devices had come alive when Roger had been here were dark again, but we found the pantry in one of the nearby rooms and had a nutritious meal. Liff was looking much better, although her cheeks were sunken and her eyes were puffy from all the crying.

  We explored more rooms. I wish we hadn't. We found bodies, of both villagers and researchers, all dead and in various states of decomposition. They all appeared to have died at around the same time, but different conditions in the various rooms meant that the bodies were sometimes still fresh while at other times opening a door released clouds upon clouds of flies in our face.

  The manner of death was evident: the very same monsters that kept attacking us at random intervals. Not a threat for me and my magic, but lethal for the unaugmented humans that lived here. Some of them had tried to defend themselves with blades and impromptu instruments, others with some sort of guns, but eventually the bullets ran out.

  I found it strange that, save for those I killed, there were no monster bodies around. I don’t think the people here were so weak as to be unable to kill even just one. Then, Roger’s words began to echo in my mind, and I started to look for clues.

  “Stop,” I said suddenly, holding out a hand so quickly that Liff didn’t have time to actually stop and slammed into it.

  With the same arm I circled around her and pulled her back, slowly turning around until I faced the main room with all the smashed up computers. I had heard no noise, but a hunch told me that there was something dangerous there.

  Indeed, what I saw proved that I was right. Always trust the gut in these situations, for it can see and sense more than the conscious mind. My eyes widened as said conscious mind caught up with the rest of my tensing body, which was already preparing for yet another fight.

  Standing in the middle of the room, still holding his goddamn clicking pen, stood Roger. His chest was still caved in, a large gaping hole oozing viscous blood and viscera into a rapidly spreading stain in his white coat. He stood like a puppet on taut stings, as if fighting against gravity but not with the power of his own body. Then he started to convulse, changing before my very eyes, turning into something half-man and half-monster, an abomination of fur and bone and sinew.

  It reminded me of the abominations in the biolab, but it also reminded me of the mutated wolf monsters that infested this floor. It was something utterly unholy, a middle ground of man, wolf and abomination.

  He laughed, howled in laughter. It was so sinister as to be inhuman, but at the same time it was unmistakably the very same howls of laughter I heard coming from Roger’s very mouth a while earlier. This was the same man, the same… being.

  “What the fuck are you?” I yelled from the apparent safety of the room we were in. Silently behind me I directed Liff to go hide somewhere, while I blocked the whole frame of the door with my height and width.

  “I’m Roger,” laughed the thing. It convulsed again, growing more fur and sprouting bones in its back. I cracked my own bones, working to loosen my back a little. I was True Silver, but old age was stronger, and I felt weak after fighting so many monsters. They had been easy to defeat individually, but after a while they got to me.

  “You don’t look like Roger,” I taunted the creature, walking towards it. There was no escape, only fighting, and I was done running anyway.

  “Well, that Roger might be dead,” snarled the thing before howling again. “Not my fault he was an idiot. He did not see the moment I became more than just a monster. He thought he could keep using me to stress out those poor people of the village. Ahhh,” it moaned, writing in the thought of some pleasure only it knew about. “What a stupid man. His fear and confusion when I killed him and had my pack maul and eat all his friends… it was the best nourishment. But with him dead,”

  Suddenly the monster locked eyes with Liff, even though there was a wall between the two. It knew where the girl was, and it was hungry.

  “She’s the best next thing. Her fear, her despair. Then you arrived, and ruined everything. If I kill you without waking that other bitch up… she shouldn't be able to hear us with all the computers destroyed. Yes. I will kill you, then put Liff back in the village, and the cycle will continue.”