"...Probably not. It's in my bones, the darkness. And that includes the skull. You're fixing the damage but the poison remains. My soul's probably worse for the wear too."

Ame rolls off her slime and sleepily crawls over to his sleeping bag.

"How long did it take to gut your original priorities, the first time?" Ame asks as she reaches for him, hesitating at the last second. "My healing Skill is basically mind over flesh," she explains. "It's called Axiom of Physicality. It lets me ignore the limits of my body for as long as my willpower holds out. Truly ignore, not just delay. It needs direct physical contact to work on anyone else, to repair the damage the dhar was and is doing to your brain. But I can poke your foot, if you'd rather I not pet you."

"I wasn't - keeping a journal or anything. It's been... A year? I think. Around a year."

He pauses for a while.

"I only really stepped up the dark magic in the last three months. I did very little at first, but since I made crow sentries everything started seeming like - dark magic is the answer to this problem."

Pause again.

"That sounds like a very powerful Skill."

That wasn't a no, so Ame goes ahead and runs a hand through his hair as she kicks the corruption out of his head.
(She's entirely nude as she does this, glistening in the moonlight from her lube slime's slime lube.)

"It is. It opens up a lot of options," she says idly.

He honestly barely notices. Well, he notices, but the pulse of lust spirals off into a chain of anger and self-recrimination instead.

"I used to think that all we had to do was follow the rules. Be smart, be sensible, and everything would turn out okay. That - most people can just be okay. But... It's all fucked up. Dark magic. Bandits and stupid religions and slave traders in the less civilized places and- Wars over incredibly stupid things. Me being stupid and selfish and shitty in the same ways that other people make me mad by being. Congenital diseases. Stupid petty social drama that can ruin lives despite being stupid and petty. Old age. Makes me so angry. And also just- It feels pointless. A steel wall to climb covered in oil. Poisonous oil. And thorns."

"With hecklers at the bottom," Ame adds, nodding. "Mocking you for trying, sabotaging you, and then calling it inevitable when their own actions, or lack of action, cause you to fail."

Ame continues petting and healing.

He shifts away from the head patting and shuts his eyes.

"So how do you keep doing things."

Ame sits back.

"I don't know. I guess I never had a chance to feel betrayed. The wall, or if I'm honest, the small part of that wall that's about sex, was the first thing I saw. The first thing I cared about at all. It's existence is why I started doing things in the first place."

"Maybe I'll feel better with time but that sounds fake right now. I should try to sleep."

Yep.

Ame returns to her lube slime and snoozes until morning.

When Bys wakes up she realizes nobody set a watch. So she stays up peering into the darkness by moonlight until sunrise, when everyone else wakes up a bit more.

Ame glimpses her being up, smiles, and sleeps a little more deeply until morning.

Once Theodore is awake, Ame dismisses her summon, wipes herself down with water from their shiny new infinite water source, and pulls Bys into a lazy kiss before dressing and equipping.

Ame helps pack up the camp, and takes point on getting Theodore up and cooperative. They're not keeping him tied up anymore, but they still haven't extracted an actual agreement to their plan from him yet.

"Are you up to showing us where those ruins are?" Ame asks him. "I want to get a look at them in case there's something... in case there's something."

He takes a few deep breaths before answering, "Fine, whatever."

"We forgot to set a watch last night. I did put up my usual tripwire circle but that's not really enough. Ame, you, Bys, and I will need to trade off proper watches when we camp in future." She glances at Theodore. "Just saying."

"Yeah, something like that," Ame agrees.

Ame considers holding Theodore's hand. He seems, undecided, on how he feels about her touching him, and if it really took him weeks or even months to go crazy she probably doesn't need to keep healing him constantly.

She takes his hand. If he holds it, he holds it. If he pulls free, he pulls free. "Let's go."

He pulls free, and then starts stomping back into the woods. It still feels intensely creepy. The fire never spread that far, even though it didn't rain it seems to be quietly smoldering in the south, not quite fully out. He gets within sight of the ruined village, then uses it as a landmark for another twenty minutes hiking off-trail.

Eventually they come to a small clearing where saplings and grass are stubbornly piercing through thick slabs of foundation stone. This place looks like it was a forbidding concrete structure once, now crumbling. The stone is large, smooth pieces with that concrete-y look, and small bits of rust stick out of the walls here and there. It seems like it was a fairly major place, with an outer wall and defensive towers enclosing most of a city block's worth of ruins. It almost looks like some of the oldest and worst-maintained warehouses of Brockton Bay, in a few places, though there's something not quite the same about it. Plants crawl over much of the surface.

"Here we are. Weird ruins. There's a lot more underground."

"Thank you, Theodore," Ame tells him, sincere.

But most of her attention is on the weirdly familiar and out of place architecture. She walks up to one of the broken pillars, running her fingers over the material, and yeah, it is concrete.

"Do you know anything about what this place was like when the Witch of Spacetime was alive?" Ame asks.

"No idea. I think she was... I want to say five Demon Lords ago? So this place is very old."

That isn't a lot of Demon Lords... but it is kind of a lot of Demon Lords.

Also, the Witch of Spacetime built a modern concrete bunker decades, maybe centuries before Earth Bet invented concrete.

Ame makes a mental note to think about the implications of that later. She casts her hovering-light spell and leads the way inside.

It sure looks like a concrete bunker down here. There's a long series of mysterious dark concrete rooms with dirt or pools of water and long-faded paint or markings, half-crumbling walls, and animal nests. Then there's a surprisingly intact concrete staircase leading down- The first level down is in much better shape, and Theodore quickly leads them to the center.

"This is the vault, near as I can tell. Or something like that. The books are inside."

...The inscription over the large, half-shut steel door... Is in English.

Inner Sanctum - high security area - beyond this point hypertwist rapid deployment is available - intruders will be teleported into magma

Ame stares at the inscription, not yet noticing it is in English because, "You've been through here? And not been even slightly teleported into magma?"

"Uh, no? I mean, yes, I've been though here a lot."

It doesn't sound like he's lying. But she'll still make an 'after you' gesture before following him in.

Then she notices that the warning is in English.

Which, makes no sense. Who was the warning for if none of the locals can read it? That... could also have implications.

He shrugs and goes in.

The facilities here are in much better shape. There's even the fossilized remains of what was once carpet, and recognizable furniture. He leads them into a library and indicates one shelf with intact books spread on it. "Preservation magic on that one's still intact. I can't read most of it, though."

...There is indeed a lot of stuff on dark magic. Also summoning, rituals, teleportation, and what looks like a series of diaries - "My Struggle", volumes 1 through 9. In a few different languages, English the most common.

There's a lot more down her than just this library, but it's as good a place to start as any.

Is the teleportation book in the local language 'cause if it is Ame is (figuratively) throwing it at Elizabeth.

For herself, Ame pulls the first diary volume off the shelf carefully and cracks it open.