“Ya know what? I’m gonna do it,” Reysha said, after Apexus and Aclysia landed next to her.

“Do what?” Apexus asked.

“Complain.” The tiger girl ran a hand through her red hair. She had picked up the habit over the past few days to keep her hair from matting. Thanks to her particular species, it was a minor issue for her but it was still something she had to counteract if she wanted to look the sexy variety of feral. “And I don’t mean that imma whine about not having soap for the third day in a row. We should have taken one of those bandits and interrogated them about where the fuck we are. This sure as fuck ain’t the place of learning the spider-flower-angel sold us.”

“Must you demean venerable Veramas down in such a fashion?”

“I would call he-she-it something else, but when I use the P word, you get fucking pissed in a non-fun way.”

“And you WILL refrain from such heretical utterances.”

“Veramas did look like a Parasyte though,” Apexus said. That earned him an open-mouthed, shocked stare from his darling angel. Hurting her made his insides contract. It was also the truth. More importantly, it was a truth he was incredibly curious about. While he pondered how to go further with the topic, Reysha just jumped straight in. The tiger girl was in a ranting mood.

“Their head was a fucking flower and insect legs jutted out all over it. If that doesn’t sound like an Infestation, I don’t know what does,” the redhead said.

“Cease.”

“What? You know any other beings that look like that?”

“Stop.”

“Why? Why should I stop? Why do you get this fucking angry about relating that creepy, emotionless insect doll to the creepy, devouring Parasy-“

“BECAUSE I’M AN ANGEL, REYSHA!” Aclysia screamed at the Rogue. “There is nothing – nothing – that I wish to see destroyed more than those filthy, disgusting creatures, drawing the lifeforce out of the sacred world tree that our gods formed over the millennia. To insinuate that angels have any resemblance to them, to suggest that we could be them, it makes my soul crawl.”

“Can nothing good ever come from something bad?” Reysha drilled deeper.

“That’s not what I…” Aclysia made a frustrated noise.

Crossing her arms, the redhead stood her ground in the face of the annoyed angel. “You know, this happens every time I poke at something you really hate to talk about,” the tiger girl pointed out. “You get frustrated and lose yourself in points that you cannot defend because you’re way too smart to admit when you’re arguing from pure fucking emotion.”

“It’s not just something bad,” Aclysia mumbled and scratched her arms. The entire discussion made her skin itch, as if the topic laid under her skin and desired to break out. “They are the worst entities to be ever conceived by reality. What the gods made to defend us against them were twisted into demons and even they are preferable to the heinous skittering beyond the Hellroots. I’m not ready to face the possibility of the first angels being related to the Parasytes… or what would lay beyond that.”

“You better get fucking ready,” Reysha told her. “Because I want to resolve that question.”

“So do I,” Apexus confessed. He hadn’t had the heart to pursue the topic with the same vigour, but he didn’t want to hide his true intentions either.

Aclysia took a trembling breath and forcefully removed her scratching fingers from her arms. “If it must be that way, I shall try…”

Taking her in his arms, the slime whispered to his beloved metal fairy, “We must all face our weaknesses.”

“Right…” Aclysia nodded.

“Right.” Reysha made a wide sweeping gesture at the surroundings. “Which brings me to the original complaint I wanted to make: WHERE THE FUCK ARE WE?!”

They had been wandering around the continent for four days now. They hadn’t walked in any definitive direction, not that they had a particularly good grasp of where what was either. Aclysia had memorized the path of the sun in relation to the compass integrated into the vanished ship, which gave them a rough idea of the cardinal directions. Otherwise, everything was exploration and scouting. As far as landmarks went, they only knew that the east had the most hills, the north got marshy, and the west was treeless flatland. They were currently in the third of that list of environments.

There were also small ruins strewn around everywhere. Most of them weren’t even worthy of being shelter. A pillar covered in vines here , a toppled stone ceiling there - the civilization that had carved the marble and mixed the concrete had fallen a long, long time ago. It was a new experience for Apexus, to see the remains of a fallen society. It was also fairly dull. After the initial novelty wore off, the slime thought of it as basically the same as an abandoned anthill, just at a larger scale. Time moved on, people died, and so did their cultures.

“We should have just grabbed one of those random-ass bandits and slapped the information out of them,” the tiger girl stated. “Chasing any one of them down would have been so easy. Now they’re somewhere and we’re just looking in random directions.”

“You really are annoyed today,” Apexus noted.

“All walking and no hygiene make Reysha a stabby girl,” the redhead hissed, her tail whipping around dangerously. “I fucking reek. The water is muddy, the ground turned my nice, red shoes into a shitty brown and everything is crunching all the time!” To prove her point, she stomped around for a little bit, causing several of the small items covering the ground to break under her weight. Although there were no trees around, the flatlands were scattered in bushes and tumbleweed, scattering seeds, small leaves, and branches all around. “And if I see any more yellow, I will puke.”

“You will have to close your eyes then,” Apexus said.

“HAH!” Reysha laughed. “Nice try, big guy, to make me… OY, what the fu- HAHAHAAHAAAA, NO! STOP!“

There were two reliable ways to deal with a cranky Reysha. One was to fuck her silly, but that wasn’t really an option right now. The next best thing was to assault her in a friendly fashion and tickle her silly. That humanoids had the capacity to get tickled in the first place never ceased to amaze Apexus. Neither did the jovial sound Reysha produced when he did it to her.

Eventually, Reysha was laughing so much her legs gave in. Apexus took that as his signal to stop and lifted her on his shoulder. With one quivering tiger girl and a brooding angel by his side, the slime kept walking.

“Phew…” the redhead let out a long breath, finally calming down. “So?”

“You’re right,” Apexus told her.

“Oh, that’s nice. I’m not right all that often,” the redhead wiggled a little bit and grimaced. Knocking on Apexus’ back, she added, “Can you carry me in a way that doesn’t have me hanging upside down?”

The humanoid slime obliged without any words on the matter. Soon she sat on his shoulders and looked over the landscape. Apexus continued the conversation. “You’re regularly right when it comes to pure practicality,” he told her. “You’re just impatient.”

“And mean,” Aclysia pouted.

“Sure sounds like me.” The redhead grinned, feet drumming softly against Apexus’ chest. “Sorry if I came on a bit strong there.”

“You came on very strong,” Apexus said. “But you’re not wrong. It would have been advantageous to grab one of the bandits. All of them are avoiding us now and finding them would take a lot of effort.”

“What’s the plan then, firm leader?”

“Firm?”

“I wanted to say wobbly,” Reysha explained, hitting one of his muscles with a more intense tap of her heel, “but that ain’t the case anymore.”

“I see,” Apexus said, only to confirm that his curiosity was satisfied. “We go west.”

“Why there?”

“We came from the southeast, which means that direction is out. If there was any nearby land to the east, the message left behind by whatever god made the Long Way would have pointed us towards it instead.”

“What about north?”

“Do you want to move towards the swamp?”

“Awww, did ya learn about rhetorical questions?”

“Yes.”

“Nice,” Reysha massaged Apexus’ scalp of regrown hair. “Next imma teach ya how to properly use sarcasm and then I can nourish ya in the ways of the sass.”

“Could you not corrupt darling with your sharply tongued ways, vixen?” Aclysia pleaded.

“Vixen?” Reysha blinked at her companion. “If you want to insult me, you’ll either have to do better or worse, bubble butt. That’s just so barely intellectual that I find it funny.”

“I don’t want to insult you… not if I am being proper,” Aclysia sighed, playing with the tip of her own hair. “I’m not content with our current situation. I simply cannot handle stress as well as you two can and the addition of… further questions weighs on my mind.”

“…yeah… yeah, sorry,” Reysha was serious in her apology now. “I shouldn’t get so pissy with you two. Gods know that you dragged me out of a lot of shit.”

“We have each other to help us overcome our flaws,” Apexus stated, “or to counteract them where we can’t.” The slime looked off into the distance. “I still cannot tell you what I should have done with those bandits. I do not like any answers that come to me when I ask myself what would be correct to do. Can killing a sapient being ever be justified?”

“Yes.”

“Affirmative.”

Both Apexus and Reysha looked at the metal fairy. They weren’t stunned, nor surprised to any degree that made them question if their companion had been stealthily replaced. Such a clear answer was rare from her, especially on topics like this. “Could you elaborate?” Apexus asked.

“If the parameter of your question is merely ‘sapient’, then this would include demons,” the metal fairy said, hovering over a thorny bush in her path. “Demons, necessary as they are to ward off the worse threat, individually are a blight on the worlds they touch. You have killed a demon while we were separated. Does its demise haunt you?”

Apexus thought back to the Skinwalker. The demon’s body, expanded with each human hide it added to its own, had been devoured whole by Apexus, and its skin, ironically, now served as Apexus’ own outer layer. “I’m not sure that creature was sapient… it was a thing with a limited grasp on language.” The slime shook his head. “I see your point though. The Deathhound is sapient and so is Jolene.”

“Jolene,” Aclysia spoke the word slowly and looked up. “An example that even angels can deserve death.”

“Whaddaya mean?” Reysha asked.

“I don’t think she was born a demon,” Aclysia explained. “When Apotho sent one of his abominations to find me and Reysha, it turned almost benevolent once it thought that I may fall from grace. It had a veneration for the concept of a fallen angel that I connect to the veneration it had for its... empress.” Shaking her head, the metal fairy added, “It is a mere hunch.”

“I like your hunches. You’re a genius,” Apexus told her.

‘As long as she doesn’t have to question her personal orthodoxy,’ Reysha kept that thought to herself. She had done enough damage to Aclysia’s sanity for the day and she knew that.

For her part, the metal fairy tried to repress her blush and stayed on topic. “Ignoring your overexaggerated flattery, if you can agree that demons deserve death, including the sapient ones, and that even angels can fall, then the question becomes not: ‘do sapient beings ever deserve to be killed?’ but ‘can a humanoid ever become as immoral as a demon?’”

“But can’t humans redeem themselves?” Reysha asked.

“Considering the amount of convincing I engaged in to make you certain that you yourself are worthy of an attempt, my answer should be self-evident.”

“Right, I am a thing.”

“You’re more than a thing, you’re an insolent annoyance that I love.”

“D’awww, now that’s an insult that touches me deeply.”

Apexus let out the sigh of the century, interrupting any other banter that was going on. “I’m more confused than before,” he admitted.

“How so?”

“If humanoids can redeem themselves, so can demons, correct?”

Aclysia tilted her head quizzically. “Exceedingly unlikely.”

“Who am I to know who is the rare exception?” Apexus voiced his doubts. “Maybe this one demon will go on in their otherwise eternal life and carve out of the Hellroots a domain in which they fight back the Parasytes in a manner that leaves them purely benevolent.”

“You’ll never know,” Reysha told them. “Ya just gotta do what ya think is right.”

“…Then I could do nothing right now,” Apexus whispered after a moment of pondering.

“Well… seems like we took your brain for another spin at least,” Reysha joked.

Knowing not what further good could come from this discussion, Apexus chuckled.