In which I sort of become a leader and leave my readers with something of a cliffhanger

Well, it was Sorel who finally persuaded me to ease up on Ev and Aleandra. I wasn’t really going to have them fuck each other to death, but they certainly looked at me with something like fear when I finally allowed them to come up for air. “A little respect. That’s all I want. Got it?” I asked. They both nodded silently in reply. Everyone, even Sorel, then kept their distance from me. They all looked at me, as if waiting for me to take charge. I took a deep breath and tried to get things back to normal as much as possible.

“Look, we have two options in front of us. We can either go up to the surface and try to figure out what happened to me. Or we can keep looking for this Heart of Darkness thingy. Truth be told, I’m feeling better than I have in years, so I suppose I could wait on the trip to the surface. Everyone with me?”

Silence. Sorel nodded. They were clearly all afraid of me. This was not good. “Look,” I said. “I know I’ve changed a lot, and I have this crazy power. But I promise I won’t use it on you guys anymore. I may look like a sexy angel, but I’m still Quinn inside.”

“That’s what we’re afraid of,” Qual said. I gave him a look, but true to my word, I did not order him to chop his own dick off. See what a good omnipotent being I am?

Well, compared with some of the other horrors we faced, the dungeon we were now in seemed like child’s play. Ev gave me his short sword for use as a weapon, but I was still effectively unarmored, wearing nothing more than the simple tunic that Aleandra had loaned Golem before. Not that I minded. With my ability to heal instantly, I approached combat with a recklessness I never had before. Even a bite I got from a poisonous snake did not affect me in the slightest. It appears that whatever magic turned Sorel and me into babes also was determined that nothing should mar our beauty…ever. I had always dreamed of one day advancing to godhood from my exploits. Well, now I was as close as I could have dared imagine, but immortality was not exactly what I would have hoped.

At last, we found a teleport room. It took a while to figure the controls out. It sent us all over the dungeon—twice—and it nearly collapsed the boiling lake above on us before we got the thing to work properly. When we did, it took us directly to our target, the resting place of the Heart of Darkness. And I wound up having to make the biggest choice of my life.