Ria walked through the door and entered the tunnel. Not a single soul in sight. The spirits words though haunted her still; she soon put them to the back of her mind and concentrated at the task at hand. She’d grown up. Back, in the outside world, she used to get distracted easily and hesitate a lot. The sewer helped sharpen her instincts and grind away everything unneeded form her character.

With a renewed mindset, she walked through the tunnel and into the open chamber beyond. Torches similarly lit up around her upon her emergence. The tombstones tiling a path on the dirt floor read the same words as before under torchlight. And when she stopped at the foot of the circular platform, the backstabbing man she had saved once again stood on the other side. There were no surprises and wouldn’t be any either. The man might have managed to dupe her the last time, but he had nothing on her this time.

“Nice and easy,” she mumbled as the man called her from the other side of the platform. He played his act and she played her part. They talked and he acted social and friendly. Ria eased up to give him a false sense of victory and make him comfortable, and he soon came to stand on the platform just a few steps from her. She similarly played along, agreeing to his comments as much as she needed too, and waited.

She noticed small changes in the way he talked and moved his hands, but nothing big enough to warrant her vigilance.

“Why would you cover such a magnificent bosom? It’s like you knew you would be meeting someone soon.” He said, giving her a smile.

‘Does he know?’ she thought. ‘No, that’s not possible.’

Taking a deep breath she got ready to act. It was time. She faked a smile and stepped onto the platform.

I hope the actor in me won’t betray me to the enemy. And that’s just what happened. The man must have noticed something because he hid his hands behind his back- possibly to use his ability and hide the glow from her eyes. But he didn’t let his confusion or rather vigilance show on his face. To Ria he looked very at ease; even though deep down she knew he was getting ready to attack. So she stopped a few feet away from him, giving herself just enough room to be able to notice his actions and attack without losing her chance.

The stalemate didn’t continue for long. The man broke the silence. “I’m Raj.” He said slowly lifting his arm with his palm facing away from her. If Ria was still oblivious to his ability then she wouldn’t have seen anything odd with him coming to her for a handshake. This time she knew the slight glow radiating his hand was not because of torchlight, but a ball of fire which he would unleash at her within the next couple of seconds. And just like she thought, like a typical villain he said ‘sorry’ raising his hand to her chest height and flipping his palm towards her.

His lips curled up and eyes squinted in joy, but what he thought was a sure shot win became his last magical act. Ria dodged to his left and as the fireball whirled past her head, she pulled her knife –whose handle was already sticking up- out for her jeans front pocket, slid to a stop at his feet, stabbed the knife into his liver and tore a long gash across his abdomen. As he stumbled backward stupefied at the sudden turn of events, Ria pulled the knife out of his body and stabbed it into his heart.

Once again there were no surprises from him or hesitation from her. She swiftly attacked and ended him- right there and then. They stood in such close proximity to each other that the man –Raj- got no chance to stop her once she started moving.

By the time Raj hit the floor he was a dead man. He fell awkwardly, spurting blood all over the platform. There was nothing gracious about his death. Well, Death isn’t supposed to be gracious in the first place. It’s either swift or drawn out. If its comes swift then neither the person nor their family suffers much; but if it drags on for months and years, then death really challenges the emotions and morality of everyone connected.

At least she didn’t make him suffer.

The gate to the Goblins room appeared with Raj’s death. Ria didn’t forget to rob the corpse of the essentials like pants and boots, before leaving the room, dragging his body behind.

Yes, she took the corpse. This was a part of her plan. A method she had come up with to challenge the Croc. She was hoping that returning its stash of food -The man named Raj- would calm it down and help her with the mission.

Well, that was the gist of her plan. Now, whether her plan would work or she’d have to tussle with the croc in the sewer tunnel, time would tell. For now, she still had another living-breathing matter to take care of.

The goblin was pacing up and down in the room when she stepped inside. Her sight released his anxiousness but the bloody corpse she dragged into the room made him frown. She did have a plan B –in case the corpse couldn’t be brought to the next floor- but everything worked out nicely for her and she sighed in relief.

“That’s some next level of pervasive shit. Can’t say me hasn’t seen that one before. Though, me didn’t think you would fall that low.” he said puckering his lips and flaring his nostrils as if disgusted by the sight. “Tell me, does its tool even work?”

She didn’t indulge him. Rather pulled the stretch of vine she’d bound around her waist and tied one of its ends to the hilt of her knife. Under the goblins watchful gaze she next directly went to his chair, pulled it behind him and pushed him to the seat.

“Me bones are very soft - please be gentle.” He said standing up. Ria, however, stabbed her knife into the center of his chest, starting him back to the chair. Next, she made brisk work and tied him to the very chair using the vine. She bound his arms to the armrest, looped the vine around his chest a couple of times, then made a loop around his neck and pulled the vine from under the seat to tie his feet - so that excessive kicking would pull the vine around his neck, suffocating him. Finally, she pulled her knife from its chest and tied the two ends together, fixing him motionless to the chair.

When she stepped back to look at her artwork, the goblin was tied such that he couldn’t even get his ass off the chair's seat, much less move about on it. His eyes were about to pop from the pressure at his neck, but his struggle only made her happier.

“Me don’t care . . . what you are thinking,” he wheezed out the words, clearly in anguish. “. . . but this is not going to help your case. Binding me . . . won’t help you escape. Me is also a . . . a prisoner of this place. Just like you. Me asks you to stop your foolishness . . . and . . . let me go. Or” he said gritting his teeth, “or I won’t give you your next task.”

Finished saying his piece, he stopped talking and started staring instead. With both of them quiet, only the sound of him struggling on the chair and the fire crackling in the fireplace filled the room for the next few minutes, creating a different kind of mental pressure. Ria hoped he would beg to be untied so she could laugh at him, but he did no such thing. He was one tough nut to crack. He didn’t voice a sound nor speak or even blink, only stared. He was challenging her. Unfortunate as it might be, Ria decided to move along.

Next, she tried to hack his limbs, but her actions failed to produce any result. She stabbed him once or twice in the heart and the brain, but the wounds would close before she even got to look at them.

“You really are half immortal aren’t you?

The goblin finally smiled and worded, “Me . . . told . . . you.”

“Alright, I have just one more thing to try.” She said walking toward the dinner table and coming back with a fork.

“Sure . . . give it . . . your best shot - Bitch.” He said and snorted.

Smiling, she pried his jaw open and kept it as such by jamming the fork inside. Once done, she shook the grim of her hands and nodded at her work. The goblin looked splendid, gagging now at them. Under his watch, she pulled out the glass full of his cum from under his chair and tilted it to him.

“Now be a good boy and chug it down, will you?”

His eyes ran wild inside his socket; fear finally started getting under his skin. He made unrecognizable noise while Ria emptied the contents of the glass into his mouth. And then she waited.

Just like before, his transformation started right after the last drop of the dirty white goo entered his stomach. She started attacking his body at the first signs of change. Unlike before, his skin darkened first. But the wounds didn’t appear until his skin darkened completely and his eyes turned blood red. His skin became awful hard to cut, however, and his growing strength really tested her tenacity, but she pestered through.

While the goblins conscious remained stable his body remained immortal, but the moment his conscious waned and his eyes turned red, the first wound she made at his arm spurted out blood.

Ria picked up from there and directly went for revenge. Her hands shook violently the first time she cut into the goblins skin, but her hesitation disappeared like snowflakes does under burning fire when Nicky’s face passed by her mind. With renewed determination, she tried to hack his limbs and make him beg for death just like Nicky, but she had to abandon the hate when his growing strength put a damper to her plans. After a minute of trying to sever his arm, she gave up. The cut simply wouldn’t hold. Moreover, the vines didn’t sound too good either. Understanding that she might have miss-judged the creature’s strength, Ria went directly for his heart.

“Sorry Nicky . . .” she mumbled working through the muscles of his chest. “I won’t be able to put him through the same misery you went through. But I’ll get him for sure. I promise.”

A single stab wasn’t enough to shear through its growing muscles. She had to cut a hole in its chest to reach the heart before the growing muscles could fill the gap. But just when the giant beating heart came into her sight, the vine snapped and her heart skipped a beat along with it. She steeled forth. The tip of her knife pressed onto his heart, she screamed and pushed with all her might, but the knife refused to puncture the beating muscle. Pain shot from her arms and Agony burned through her mind. The beating heart grew further and further from her knife as she was pulled from the arms and lifted from the ground.

“NO!” she floundered to escape the creature's grip while it stood up from the chair snapping free from the vine.

She was raised to its face level and their eyes met for the third time. Waves of amusement churned inside its deep red eyes. It roared at her in excitement, throwing a mix of slimy spittle and snot at her face. Its grip tightened around her biceps, pressing the bone and making her hiss in pain. It snorted and pulled its arm backward –to throw her at the wall- and she scuttled to grab a hold of something - anything. Her fingers gripped around something warm and trembling, but the strength behind its throw was such that her hanger itself was torn from its position, and she flew through the air spinning uncontrollably like a kite forced by high winds.

She gasped at the sight of the wooden wall quickly coming toward her and tried to shield her head, but the collision happened before she could do anything about it. Her sight blacked right after. Her pain, thoughts, the sight, the room and light, the goblin, and everything in between disappeared –as if cutoff. She fell to the floor spurting blood from her head, knocked out cold.

She woke up again in the darkness thinking she had died again, but then her vision returned in fuzzy fragments, bringing along a headache of unbearable proportions. As if the darkness was keeping her safe, its removal by firelight brought a ringing which filled her ears, accentuating the pulsating hurt –which as she located- originating from the back of her head. Forcing open her eyes allowed her to make sight of her location. She was still in the goblin's room- an assumption made after considering the bits and pieces she saw fallen or standing here and there.

A sense of urgency forced Ria to her feet, but with a feeling of ants crawling in her entire body and no sense of balance, she faltered back to the floor moments later. Abated by pain and weakness, She groaned in defeat hitting her hands on the floor, splashing them in some viscous liquid- probably her blood- and saw a figure sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room over a pool of red. At first, the figure worried her making her hold her breath, but then its motionlessness relieved her and she sighed; though she didn’t take her eyes off the body.

A touch at the back of her head told her about the reason for the pain and the blood.

“Hopefully, it’s not a cracked skull . . . I don’t think I would be up and about so easily if it was that. Not that I can do anything about it in here. If only I had taken the fruit.” She sighed, feeling pretty worn down.

The door leading to the Croc’s den silently stood to the right wall at the foot of which lay her knife. That was the place where she had died. And it was time to make a decision again. She had only made plans about the backstabbing man and the goblin, and both situations hadn’t taken long to swirl out of her control. Because the man hadn’t been strong enough, he wasn’t able to change the result much, but the goblin had almost sunk its teeth into her neck. She could have died - again.

Hence the urgency forcing her to think of something to deal with the croc, or at least, take care of her wounds before walking through the door. There was still a stage left after the croc‘s den, and Ria had a feeling the real guardian of the garden would be making an entrance during her visit. She wasn’t sure what she would do about that.

“But how to close the wounds . . . if only I had taken a fruit . . . wait,” she looked at the goblin and her eyes glittered with hope. “THE GEM . . . He might have the gem. But if he didn’t have one . . . No, no-no, I have to try and see for myself.”

She picked up her knife and hurriedly crawled to the Goblins body, which no longer looked like a creature of chaos, and turned him over. His eyes were no longer red but they were wide open and dilated, reminding Ria of the corpse she had first woken up with. The Goblins body might have reverted back to his previous scrawny self but the hole in his chest still remained gaping and empty, missing the heart.

To her surprise, she found it lying near the wall she was flung toward, indicating that it was she who had ripped it out of the creature’s chest and killed him.

“How did that happen?” she mumbled and clicked her tongue. “Focus girl. Focus. Don’t think about useless stuff and find the gem.”

She held the knives edge above the goblins bloodied chest and paused, took a deep breath, exhaled, and made a box cut across his chest to remove the thin layer of skin and muscles. She retched at the sight of his internal organs and globules of fat, but steeled her heart and struggled through. She explored his whole body form his brain to his balls but didn’t found the gem anywhere. She was hoping to find the gem, hoping her conjecture about the relationship between starlight and healing was right, hoping she would be able to absorb the starlight from the gem somehow, and hoping that it would heal her head wound. Yes, she had too many hopes. And it wouldn’t be a surprise if one or none of her hopes came true. But to hope for the best was all she could do in her circumstance. Because Ria would be committing suicide if she went to the Croc’s den without healing first - Corpse or no corpse.

Her arms and hands were completely drenched in the goblin's blood by the time she retired away from the mess which was once a proper body. She didn’t find the gem. The goblin didn’t have it. She went through so much trouble for nothing. “What now?” she said, resting with her back on the wall. She tried to rub her face but her blood-covered hands made her groan first then scream. She was in real deep trouble. No gem meant no healing, which possibly meant death.

Ria was under a lot of pressure. The pressure of her safety alone was one thing, but the promise she had made to the garden spirit also wore her down. She was yet to keep a single promise with anyone. Be it Nicky or herself, she hadn’t been completely truthful to anyone.

“I don’t want to break another promise.” But there was nothing she could do about her situation. She had tried and would still try to force through the Croc’s den. It’s not that she had absolutely no chance of making through the next stage, but her chances were very slim. She was too weak and had lost too much blood. If it wasn’t for her restructured body, she wouldn’t even be breathing right now.

“Doesn’t matter,” saying so, she looked up from her hands and her eyes fell on the heart lying near her feet. It was the only organ of the goblin's body she hadn’t checked. She silently stared at the pineapple sized organ for a few minutes before she made up her mind. “Might as well do it,” she said, picked up the heart, tore into it with her knife, and found the gem shining inside.

It was not bigger than the size of an almond and held a marginal amount of starlight inside compared to the fruit or even the plant monsters core. Though there was some dissatisfaction on Ria’s face, at least she found the gem. She held her emotions in check though couldn’t help and released a smirk. Now she could proceed to find a way to absorb the starlight inside without having to eat the gem literally.

The thought to break the gem was abandoned easily and so was the idea to cook it on the fire. Having not much information to begin with, Ria decided to engulf the gem and deal with the consequences later.

Ria doused it with wine and cleaned it with table cloth and engulfed it. She crossed her fingers and hoped for the best. Not a second later, warmth grew from her stomach and spread through her body. It didn’t heal her rather freely roamed inside. Its intensity slowly decreased. And as it did, faint light streamed out of her pores. The starlight was dissipating. She could feel it.

“No, no-no, don’t go. Please, please, please heal my head. Please!”

She begged it to heal her head wound and the energy coercing through her body listened. The warmth which was distributed through her whole body started flowing toward her head, slowly warming it. An itch grew from the wound urging her to scratch, but she held back. A few minutes later, her head stopped itching and the starlight ran out. The touch of her trembling hand told her that the wound had stopped bleeding and had mended significantly.

That wasn’t all. The energy also refreshed her mind and cleared her thoughts. She was still tired but in a much better condition otherwise. She looked at the man’s corpse she had dragged from the grave and thought about checking whether his heart also had a gem or not, but decided against it.

Finally done with the goblin and his schemes, she dragged the man’s corpse and passed through the door, leaving behind a messed up room, some bad memories, and her fear.