[The illness had swarmed up their lungs, choking them in a liquid stranglehold, and they’d fallen agains the wall with a pinkish smear spoiling the rock at their back. Everything had dimmed and faded, the rotten pink of the voided world fading to water, pure and clear. The Immortal Cell disassembled, the world finally skewed back into some semblance of balance, and as for the awful hacking cough that coiled in their stomach?

It still plagues them when dark eyes flick open on the sandy shore of an unrecognizable beach. The tenuous reality of the place, the dreamlike cast to their surroundings, seems to hardly bother them at all; this may very well be another hallucinatory scenario, conjured either by the black jackal or the great oily black hulk of Judgment, but regardless, they’ve no choice but to press through it and end up where they may on the other side. And so they pick themself up slowly, steadily, taking only a moment to reassert their balance before they set off, trotting across the stretch of white sand at a brisk pace. The reddish cloth of their cloak flaps about their heels as they start to scale the rocky crags at the island’s edge, eyeing the skeletal remnants of the wrecked boat bobbing in the seafoam. Carefully, carefully, the Drifter begins to slide down to the very edge of the cliff, one claw-like, gloved hand catching at the rock for purchase.

They’re poised at the end when the spasm seizes them, clipping at their lungs and staggering their breath. The Drifter doubles over abruptly, shoulders convulsing. A wet spatter of something the consistency of blood sprays across the black rock, painting it violent pink. The fluid hums faintly as it makes contact with the stone, dissolving in a fizzle of black sparks not long after it puddles there.

They’re losing their balance. If this goes on, they may very well plummet into the sea.

And they don’t very well agree with water.]

The thumping pulse of a foreign beat is an unfamiliar sensation, even for a drifter well-accustomed to the stranger creatures of the world. No citizen or beast has ever impeded their capacity to dash before, hampering their movements to precise steps across checkered ground to match a pulsing, ethereal beat.

The nice thing is that they still have a sword, and they can still use it. The hard light blade solidifies in a streak of cyan in their hands, and they cleave the first of the slimes cleanly in two with one swift arc. When another two wobble up to take the first’s place, they receive the same fate, curt and direct. The mantle about their face makes it difficult to discern their emotion, but the twin points of black of their eyes are locked in grim resolve.

The Boogieman has set himself up as a foe to be struck down, and they will address him accordingly. One of the slimes goes down in a chopping blur of bright blue, and then another, and then another.

They will fall. Every last one of them.