Terry lost complete track of the world as pain wracked his body. It was like that agony closed around him, and he was just a tidy speck of sanity adrift on an endless, stormy sea of suffering. There wasn't anything like time on that sea. It might have been minutes. It might have been years. Terry also discovered that he was in no way cut out to be a guru or sage. He didn't survive it by finding inner peace or harmonizing with galactic consciousness. There was none of that transcending the pain bullshit. Pain was pain, and it fucking hurt. No, Terry endured by tapping into his seemingly bottomless ability to get and stay pissed off.

Nor was he shy about sharing his exact thoughts regarding the experience with the universe-at-large. He told the powers-that-be, at great length, exactly how much he hated them. He followed that up by saying that every single last one of them needed a swift kick to the crotch. After further consideration, he added that they deserved gangrene of the sphincter. Then, just to be extra spiteful, he cursed them to have their to-go orders be wrong. Forever. He also made sure to throw out the word cockwomble repeatedly. Terry wasn't actually sure what a cockwomble was. He'd just read it in a book and took from context that it was an insult. That seemed like a good enough reason to use it.

Nor did he reserve his wrath for cosmic beings that he was quite certain had screwed him over. He screamed about how the stupidly pretty people who, if his intuitions were correct, had done something to summon him to Chinese Period Drama Hell. He didn't think it was a spell. That was more of a trope that turned up in medieval anime settings. But they might have made some kind of formation or performed a ritual. He was pretty sure those things were in cultivation books. Once he got done talking shit about them, he moved on to Chinese Period Drama Hell and its grab-bag of tropes that spanned genres and even media types. He wasn't quite as vocal about that because he had managed to use those tropes to his advantage here and there.

Once he'd gotten all of that off his chest, he noticed that the pain was finally starting to recede. It wasn't gone, yet, but he was able to start paying a little attention to things other than the pain and being angry. For example, he was aware that he was sprawled on a stone floor in a very uncomfortable position. Either that, or he'd been left to lie there for so long that it was becoming uncomfortable. Would Kelima have just left him to suffer? He thought she probably would have. For some reason, she had been pretty out of sorts right before they went into the boss room. Maybe if she had just calmed down like he told her to, she could have explained what the issue was.

It took a while before Terry realized he wasn't actually in pain anymore. It was just that the memory of that pain was so sharp and intense that he was still reacting like he was in pain. He still waited a few more minutes before he even tried to move. Pain could be sneaky. Sometimes, it pretended to go away, just to come back later. Like those irritating political pollsters who called and called and called, no matter how many times you told them to fuck off and take a swim in a river of raw sewage. When the pain didn't return, Terry finally sat up and looked around. Or, he tried to look around. Where he'd expected to see the boss room, all he saw was a thick haze of something that looked sort of like smoke.

"What the crap is this nonsense?" he demanded of the space immediately around him.

The dungeon room declined to provide him any answers. That was a bit disappointing. So much other random shit had happened to him that he thought the dungeon might actually talk. But, much like painless healing potions, that would have been cool. So, naturally, it didn't happen. Of course, that left him mostly blind in this haze-filled room. He didn't want to go wandering around in the haze. If he accidentally stumbled into the stairs that would take him to the next floor, the dungeon might permanently separate him from Kelima. As much as she irritated him, he didn't want her dead. And getting separated would be a death sentence for her.

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"Kelima!" he shouted.

The silence that followed made him wonder if she had wandered off somewhere and accidentally kicked off the separation. No, he thought. She activated that stupid symbol in the ruins. That was the potential trigger for the lost sidekick trope. It would be weird if we got separated in here after I jumped into the hole to save her. Rather, it would be weird in this particular dungeon, since she can't get out on her own. If she could, then I'd have to be worried about getting teleported to some hell-floor where everything was made of poison and lava. Just as he was starting to get a little worried, he heard a voice.

"Terry?"

"No, I'm the dungeon. I'm going to send killer butterflies to get you next."

"So, not dead, huh?"

"Why would I be dead?"

"You didn't see yourself spewing smoke like an overactive chimney. Or hear yourself cursing, well, everyone really. By the way, you've got a lot of pent-up anger."

"Thanks for that insight," said Terry, getting to his feet and moving in the direction of her voice. "Where are you?"

"I'm in the tunnel outside the… Um… What did you call it? Boss room?"

"Yeah. Boss room. Okay, just keep talking so I can find you."

"Talk about what?" asked Kelima.

"I don't know. Just pick something."

"In that case, I'm going to write a book. It'll be for children. It's going to have a brave female adventurer. She's going to have to face off with Terry the Mud Goblin. You know how terrible those mud goblins are. They eat children and pollute everything they get near—" Kelima stopped when Terry emerged from the haze enough to shoot her a look.

"Mud goblin, is it?"

"Oh, I'm definitely not talking about you. The name thing is just a coincidence."

"Uh-huh," grumbled Terry.

He stepped past her and into the corridor. She'd set up her blankets on the floor out there. He eyed them suspiciously.

"How long was I in there like that?"

"No idea," said Kelima. "Twenty-four hours, maybe. It's not like we've got the sun in here."

"I guess that's fair," said Terry. "It never occurred to you to drag me out here?"

"Not when you had that stuff coming out of you," she said, gesturing at the haze that was staying oddly confined to the boss room. "Then, I had no way of knowing if it stopped. I just figured you'd come out on your own, eventually."

"So, you what? Just slept out here the whole time?"

"At first, yeah. Then, I went back and looked for any source stones we didn't grab. I found some. You still hadn't come out, so I absorbed those for a while. But, here," she said, digging into a pocket and handing him a handful of the stones.

"You don't want them?" asked Terry.

"You said to stop if I felt pressure on my core. I did. So, I stopped."

Terry just stared at her.

"What?" demanded Kelima.

"Sorry. I just assumed you'd keep absorbing them out of spite."

She leveled a flat look at him.

"Don't kid yourself. I was tempted, but not tempted enough to hurt myself."

"Smart."

Terry reached out and stored the source stones in his storage ring, which made him smile. That smile was immediately wiped away when other-Terry chimed in.

You know, the farther we go, the more I think that she might be smarter than you. Because you absolutely would have kept absorbing them out of spite.

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