Chapter 99 — Y5: Reflection Pool

You know, you’ve been keeping me shockingly well sated these past few weeks.  I’m more than happy to keep it up, but are you sure --

-- h-huh.  You’re still good to go?

…Really?

That’s -- no, I mean, it’s great!  Don’t get me wrong, that’s amazing, but I’d have thought that you’d need a few days off by now, that’s all.

Let’s do the sex!

F-fuck you’re getting good at that.  Mmmmph~  Some of those muscles haven’t been properly sore for months.

Want some more?

…Yeah, that’s a good point.  Alright.  Storytime it is.

So!  The Reflection Pool.  This was a particularly problematic problem hex.  Unlike the First Tentacle Beast, we couldn’t just, you know, blow it up with firepower.  …Which was really quite annoying, as not dealing with it would leave a source of infinitely-respawning enemies once the Evil God of Chastity and Purity showed up.

Cheap evil clones of whoever and whatever we brought to the fight.  Easy to defeat, sure, but they just don’t stop coming.

The Reflection Pool was --

…No, actually, it wasn't mirror reflective at all, evil mirror clones or otherwise.  It was a simple looking lake of liquid in a rather poorly lit hex.  It almost looked like it was in the bottom of a cave.  The liquid itself was, very clearly, not water; it was a dark, vivid, opaque purple.  If it was put in a cup and poured out, it would have shown that its viscosity was similar to that of molasses.  It did not like moving quickly, or separating from itself.

Or separating from, uh, anything it touched, really.

Seriously; one of our allies poked the purple goo with a stick.  They tried to pull the stick back out of it, but, uh.

…No.

They lost.

The pool won.

The stick was yanked out of their hands, went underneath, and was gone forevermore.

It’s sticky.

Which actually, in a way, brings us to our goal.  We needed to empty the Reflection Pool before the Evil God of Chastity and Purity showed up.

There were just, ah… a few… problems, with that.

For example, if you’re not careful, you can absolutely fall into the pool and never come out of it again.

Seriously.  According to Alchemical Corruption Twelve, if that happens, the person just vanishes.  Even emptying the pool out later will not reveal the person in question.

We talked to Mini about it before going, and she admitted that things were that way in the video game because Dignity had no idea what would happen to the person.  Even Takeo had no real information from his loop knowledge.  If anyone had fallen in across his loops, it was never when he was around, and he couldn't tell the pool grabbing people apart from all the other vanishing students.

Seriously.  The fifth landmass ate Land Grab students in ways even the fourth landmass didn't.  Even in normal runs of Alchemical Corruption Twelve, the protagonists are basically the only people active, and there's a smattering of very rare fifth landmass random encounters that are implied to be former students.  Things were better than that on this loop because of the Kingdom using the fourth landmass explosion as an excuse to heavily police people going to the fifth landmass, but still!

Now, to get back to the original point, and to summarize:  Don't fall into the Reflection Pool.

This combines rather poorly with how sticky the liquid is.

Remember the saga of the stick?  Yeah, the same thing can absolutely happen with things like buckets or bowls, or other ‘convenient liquid containers’.  Sumiko made us a contraption to use for safely attempting it, but it was big and heavy and a massive pain to set up.

…The contraption gathered us enough to give to Sumiko to do mad science at, but the setup vanished the moment the time slot ticked over.

Which was just.

Great.

Ugh.

So, we couldn’t just carry it out.  And trying to boil it out…

…Frankly, uh.

We didn’t want to risk it.

Best case scenario?  Assuming we even could produce enough heat to boil an entire lake of a questionable purple slime?

It evaporates and nothing happens!

That would be great.

Worst, and, frankly, much more likely scenario?

It evaporates and turns into purple goo gas that will float, invisible, through the air until somebody breathes in the aerosolized corruption goo.

We tried a few more longshot ideas, but ultimately, there was no way around doing the normal way to empty the pool.

If you just gently poke it -- or, alternatively, spit in it or feed some of your hair into it -- then some of the pool's large but finite supply of goo congeals into a goo version of 'you'.  A goopy, highly corrupt and depraved version of ‘you’.

Unlike the generic goo people that it spams for the final fight, the goo clones have a special trick.  They can outright ignore basically any attack that somebody other than its progenitor inflicts on it, and if its progenitor leaves the hex before defeating it, it will just find its way back into the pool.

It also can't be removed from the hex while it's alive.  One of our first tests involved trapping a clone to drag it out of the hex, to experiment on it.  When we tried moving it across the boundary of the hex, it just stopped, like we were trying to push and pull it through an unbreakable invisible wall.

We did eventually get it through, but only by having the person who it was a clone of slam the box so hard that it killed the goo clone.  Which, uh, sure, we had the inert goo, but we already had a lot.  So there was no way to get a live clone out to Sumiko's lab, meaning we'd spent an entire time slot getting even less corruption goo than the scooper contraption had gathered for us.

Hrmph.

So.  With that not working, that then left us with the ‘proper’ way of disposing of this sludge.

Clone fights!

So.  After you summon a clone, you isolate yourself with it from anybody else -- as while others can’t damage the clone, the clone can certainly damage them.

Well.

‘Damage’.

It’s more like getting dosed with materialized MISSY corruption stat corruptness.

The purple goop likes to -- stick, for lack of a better term, on anybody who touches it.  And on anyone touched by the goo clones.  If you’re not that corrupt, then it’s -- mostly fine?  It makes the skin a bit more sensitive, maybe gives you some kind of lewd trait… whatever.  In Alchemical Corruption Twelve, the go-to tactic is to save one character at perfect purity, and then use them to tank, like, three quarters of the pool as they go to maxed corruption stat.  More if you somehow made them good enough at combat to defeat them, instead of absorb them.

The remaining quarter can be much more easily split up amongst your characters.

That wasn’t an option for us, obviously.

But the basics of it was still the same.  Summon a clone, guide it away from the pool into an isolated area, and defeat or absorb it.

With me, Zaylee, and Jessica, it really wasn’t that hard.

…To start with, at least.

Jessica could just blast her clones with beams of love and justice, which was always hilarious.  Zaylee had her doubleganger, which confused the fuck out of any clones of her the pool created.  And I had my magic and alchemical creations.

When in doubt, use explosives!

When the explosives are not enough, use more explosives!

Repeat until victory.

Things were going pretty smoothly until the pool was about halfway empty; we had it under control, we had developed a good rhythm, and we were manipulating the time slot system to help us get this done quickly.

And then things went downhill.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Argenta had done -- something, to the fifth landmass.  She made the landmass as a whole less, uh, stable?  Like… making a tightly knit square into something much looser, with small, and widening, holes all across it.  Making it easier for things to just -- slip through, when they’re pushed.

Technically we should have emptied the pool out over the course of a month or two.  That’s what we could do in Alchemical Corruption Twelve -- but we had every reason to do it quickly if we could, which we were, and we didn't know there was anything abnormal going on.

So we pushed and nearly emptied it in a single day.

Combined with the instability of the fifth landmass…

…Yeah.

We fought in shifts, cycling positions.  One person fighting their clones, one person as backup, one person resting. The emergency backup couldn't damage the fighter's clone, but they could interfere, and 'damage immunity' didn't include immunity to shoves and explosions putting them off balance.  And if things got really bad, then the rester and all the helpers could jump in too to bail out the fighter and backup.

That was the plan.

It was a good plan.

I liked that plan.

I didn’t even come up with that plan, Zaylee came up with that plan, and I still like that plan.

And that plan was ruined when something like fifty-plus goo clones came out of the pool at the same time.

Clearly the rules, whatever they were, were no longer applicable.

Or if they were, they were being rather selective in what applied.

Each of the three of us had around one and a half dozen clones charging us all at once, and a few scattered individuals were clones of random members of our entourage; notably, two were actually clones of Mini, who squeaked in surprise before darting to hide behind Jessica's back.

Things quickly got… messy.

Jessica could blast her clones with her laser beams of love and justice; that was fairly easy for her to do.  But those things take a few moments to charge up the big beams, and the big beams are not friendly fire safe.  Not here in MISSY, anyway.  She could absolutely hit somebody by accident with those things.

So instead, she was busy flying around back and forth, trying to find angles to safely aim her love beams in ways that would hit her clones and not anyone on our side.

Zaylee, interestingly, was having the easiest time of it all.  She had adapted very well by that point to having two bodies, and with two sets of eyes, she had twice the normal perspective on the battlefield.  With that awareness and her ninja skills, she was able to reposition really fast and smoothly, and avoid getting dragged down.

She was only slowly whittling down her goo clones, but she was managing it well.

As for the random-soldier clones, those were ironically the hardest to deal with.  They were mixed in with the goo clones of me, my sister, and Zaylee, and that made it really hard for the originals to get at them.  Which meant they got in the way of me and the other two heavy hitters!  All the soldiers could really do was use their polearms, shields, and desperate brute force to try shoving the goo clones back and keeping breathing room for the rest of us.

A few of them got tagged with corruption goo, but nothing was major enough to require hospitalization or retirement.  They just got nicer tits or a bigger cock.  Fair trade, really.

As for me --

-- well, I was managing it… well enough.

The first rule of fighting while seriously outnumbered is:  Don’t.

No, seriously.  Just don’t.  If you have more than one opponent, isolate one, take them out.  Then isolate another, take them out.  Do not fight more than one at a time.

I was not a magical girl nor a trained assassin with two bodies, so I was following that rule almost religiously.

Yes, I did have magic.

And explosives.

And I did use them, but mostly as distractions; to keep the swarm of clones from surrounding us.  I did kill a few of them with that, but those were silver linings.  Not the goal, not by far.

So, you know, we had a proper response to the chaos that was going on around us!  Dodge, dodge, dear goddess above dodge, and sometimes hit something.

Things were fine!

…Ish!

……K…kinda.

…

Okay so things were fucked.

We were surrounded by enemies that most of us couldn’t harm, outnumbered like twenty to one for those of us that could actually damage them, and we couldn’t let ourselves be even touched by them.

Eh?

Oh, uh.

…Well, we ‘won’ by surviving to fight another day!

…Y-yeah.

Jessica took one look at the entire thing, announced that we were retreating, and so we did.  We needed out of that hex, and the entire fight was a horrible marathon running battle to the border.

We were hoping the hex would return to normal after we left, and we could finish afterwards.

Except, uh.

While leaving the hex did work -- the clones couldn’t follow us -- the hex didn't reset like it should've.  The time slot ticked over, the clones were still there.  All bunched up against the invisible walls of the hexagon, staring at us as we waited in the neighboring hex.

We left the hex alone for a full day and came back.

The clones were still there.

It was rather worrying, to say the least.

Thankfully, with the Reflection Pool hex so close to the starter hex, just going back home to rest and think wasn't an issue.  We gave the inert corruption goo to Sumiko to poke at with mad science and her shard, then spent the rest of the month helping scout the fifth landmass.

It was the second to last day of the first month that Sumiko sent a runner with a milk-stained letter, saying that she'd made a breakthrough on making a goo-proof suit!

And, naturally, she wanted me to come to her lab to be her guinea pig for trying on the prototype.

Well, we say ‘guinea pig’.  In reality, we knew it would work.  She could test it with ease using shard simulations; it was less of an ‘experiment’ and more of a ‘perfected procedure’.

I walked into her lab on the day of the ‘experiment’, and saw that her lab had been, shockingly, cleaned up.  The regular mess of tables, bubbling vats, and weirdly shaped knick-nacks that I was constantly warned to ‘not touch’ were all shoved to the sides of the room.  This left a shocking amount of empty space, most of which was used for a rather large vat.

The vat in question was filled with something that similar to, but not exactly the same as, the corruption goo from the reflection pool.  It used the inert go we brought her as a core ingredient, though!

I know because one of the first things Sumiko said when I entered the room was, with a mad-science grin, “The suit will be goo-proof because it’s made from the goo!”

Not exactly an encouraging first take on things, but I can confirm that the suit worked perfectly.

Hm?  Oh.

Hehehe, yes.  You could say that I kept the suit.

In fact, you could say that I’m ‘wearing’ it right now~