[SWAMP 1]

This time, the very moment he’s aware, he’s ready.

Masaru rolls up and plants his feet into mud with the knife-sharp gaze of a survivor.

“So then…” he coughs as he tries to understand where he is. “Where is he?”

He’s found himself in a swamp: a deep, far-away swamp that exists just at the water table. His feet, already caked in mud, squelch in their smooth brown pits of soil and water.

Sunlight struggles through the leaves and branches above, providing pockets of unusually shady flora – in fact it feels like shadows and light have pronounced effects here: the lights are lighter, and the darks are darker.

Swirls of harmless gnats coast through the roots of sunlight, as a squadron of dragonflies pick off biting nuisances like mosquitos, drawn up by Masaru’s arrival.

Masaru’s deadly gaze softens a bit as he watches a mosquito scan along the side of his arm before a dragonfly snaps it up the second it gets too close.

There’s something charmed about this place, and as much as he refuses to admit it to himself, it’s actually a little comfortable.

He exerts himself and pulls his feet up to the dryer path next to him, buffeted on all sides by tall, jagged cypress trees, each covered with a different masterwork arrangement of mosses and ferns.

After a moment of consideration, Masaru takes off his shoes, giving yet another distasteful look to his briefcase, enveloped in the mud where he woke up.

“Well… alright then,” he says before starting down one of the many tangling paths along The Swamp.

It’s leisurely, unusually enjoyable travel. The soft shin-height grasses curl pliantly under his feet, giving him a stress-free carpet to ponder across in relative silence.

“So, a Knight, and a… Myself,” he says out loud, now perfectly comfortable with the idea of talking to himself so long as “The Enemy” isn’t around. “I… died, and now I’m here… what is here…?”

He stops again to look around, and he realizes just how big this place is. The trees are dense enough to block out the sun’s position: in fact, he’s not sure if it’s dawn, daytime, or dusk.

Stopping at a particularly hospitable-looking tree, he leans against the trunk and closes his eyes.

“How?” he whispers to himself, “how?!”

Then, he sees something strange again: that weird blue sliver in his closed eyes.

“The hell?” he mumbles, lurching forward and crossing his arms as he tightens his eyelids.

Yes, there’s something to that blue wriggling… it’s not some kind of phantasmal worm, in fact, it almost looks like… letters.

“The… hell?!” he repeats, this time really focusing hard on what his closed eyes are somehow seeing. He tries tightening his eyes into the lids, loosening them up, and moving his pupils around to see if something else needs to be done. It doesn’t gain any definition, in fact the more he tries, the looser the symbols become.

“Dammit,” he sighs, opening his eyes and placing his hands on his hips. “What is this world? What’s happened to me?”

“Hell, probably,” a familiar voice comes from nearby.

He swings around to face a connecting path.

It’s the foreign lady, still with her rifle, and still looking like her soul’s being emptied out from the inside.

“O-oh, hello!” he greets, doing his best to put on a smile, though it ends up looking a little creepy. He fumbles in for his business card holder and pulls out the one of the better Masaru. “Abe Masaru, administration and marketing department fo-” he catches himself as he sees the premium gloss over the beautiful storm-cloud colored card. Flinching, he puts the other one back like some kind of wild, biting snake, and takes up his correct card. “I’m… this is me,” he says, handing her the card.

He bows… and then bows again as she looks him over. He’s sure she already thinks he’s a complete idiot.

She takes the card, glances at it like spam mail, and just slides it into her pants pocket. He’s sure he’s just seeing things, but she looks a little less colorful to him. The bandages on her face are clean, as if her body’s reset the same way his had, but she seems a little less than the last time he saw her.

Must be the lighting, he thinks.

“Thank you,” she says. “I’m Valerie Beaumont. I’m… well, I was a tourist here. Wanted to see the cats.”

He smirks at her reasoning as he looks her over in the moment of calm. She’s exceptionally good looking. He’s not the kind of fellow that “prefers” foreign women, per se, but there’s no doubt that she strikes that aesthetic balance between cute and sexy that seems to elude most appearances.

“Ah, yes. We do have a lot of cats here…” he says “here” and lets it trail off. He realizes how ridiculous it is, talking about his home when they’re in some kind of exotic and swamp like this.

She turns her head away, down another path. Masaru’s eyes alight with surprise as her blond hair passes through a patch of sunlight, and the angle of her chin as her face looks off instills such beauty into the atmosphere that it feels more akin to a painting than a trip to Hell.

The kind of girl a perfect Masaru could catch, he muses bitterly to himself.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mister Abe,” she says, her eyes still turned down to another path. “I suppose it’s this way.”

She starts forward with her bolt-action hunting rifle at a relaxed carry. Masaru keeps pace behind her. He feels kind of pathetic to not be taking the lead, but he truly has no idea how all of this works.

They walk for a few minutes in silence, an orbit of dragonflies protecting them from mosquitos as they execute dazzling displays of aerial speed and precision.

“Have you… been here long?” he asks, glancing over some Venus flytraps.

She offers him a quick glance that tells him she’s not quite sure how to answer that.

“In Hell, I mean. You seem to know what you’re doing, somewhat.”

Valerie’s gaze, a little duller than before, turns back to the trail. “I don’t know. It’s just the same thing, over and over… or The Lobby.”

Masaru raises a brow. “The Lobby?”

“That’s not the way to go. I have to at least know why this is happening before I lose my soul,” she says with a calm tone.

“I see…” He says before clearing his throat. “You speak very well for a foreigner,” he adds.

She says nothing, but Masaru can see the small, almost microscopic wince on her face.

“Thank you,” she says simply. “I’m surprised we haven’t found it yet.”

“Found what?” he asks.

She squints down the trail, and suddenly her little blond brow wedges up. Only now does he notice the cool-looking tattoo of four dots under her left wrist. “No. There it is,” she says.

The two step forward a bit, folding under some low-hanging branches to see outward.

Before them is a brown water lake with a small island in the very center of it.

Just by seeing it, Masaru’s spine jumps along its musculature.

The lake… it’s wrong.

His eyes widen as he pulls his gaze slowly along the surface.

Nothing is happening in the lake: there’s no clear signs of life under that opaque surface… but he knows.

“The Enemy,” he whispers.

Her gaze, regarding the lake like someone might to a resting cobra, nods. “That’s a good name for it,” she says.

“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” he asks.

She nods, her blue eyes travelling along each slow, silent wave that laps at the shore. “I think so. It feels the same, no matter what form it kills you with.”

Masaru peers up along the surface of the water to the little island. There’s a shack there, and there’s simply no telling what’s inside. Only issue with finding out, of course, is that there’s no way for them to get to the island without swimming.

“Well, I suppose we’re not going that way,” Masaru says.

She shakes her head. “Yeah. It’s just giving us an easy way out. Obvious bait.”

He nods. “Let’s keep away from it. Further we get from The Enemy, the better.”

“Agreed,” she says, nodding down another path. “Let’s try this way,” she says. “I found a nice cabin once with some great supplies.”

He follows her, but the chill in Masaru’s spine doesn’t go away as they gain distance from the lake. In fact, it feels like the moment they saw the lake, it was over.

At the very corner of his hearing, somewhere far away, he picks up something that sounds like a door slamming into its frame.

Masaru fights back the tremors as he looks back one last time to the sun: it’s setting… a bit faster than what feels is normal.

Valerie leads him along the way as the dragonflies and mosquitos abruptly retire for the day, and their world flushes with kilometers-long formations of gold-lit fireflies and the croaking of a thousand frogs.

“Hmm, kind of nice,” Masaru says. In fact, he’d already feel relaxed around her if it weren’t for the steady, growing dread crawling up his neck like the claws of some unknowable, bright-eyed predator.

She only nods with a confirming hum before spotting it out down the way. “Look,” she says with a motion forward.

He does as she says and focuses his gaze. Some of the fireflies aren’t moving in the darkness… in fact, they seem more like windows!

Masaru gets a little ahead of himself.