Deep within the ruin, the darkness had teeth.
Those who had fled in the opposite were learning that truth one scream at a time.
Far behind them, in a region where broken stairways intersected with warped buildings that leaned at impossible angles, corpses littered the ground. Bodies that had once been neighbors, were now nothing more than torn husks scattered across cracked stone.
A bony creature stood among them.
It was tall and skeletal with its limbs elongated and wrong and its joints bending at angles no human anatomy would allow. One arm had fused into a rough bone staff, grown directly from its forearm like a grotesque mutation.
A man lay beneath it, pinned.
"Ahhhhhh!" He screamed but that did nothing to slow the inevitable.
The creature raised its bone staff and brought it down.
Once...
The skull cracked.
Twice...
The skull caved.
On the third strike, the man's screams ended abruptly as his head split open and grey matter spilled onto the ground in a wet splatter. The creature crouched, and plunged its clawed fingers into the ruined skull.
It ate the man's brain and around it, others of its kind joined the feast, gnawing and tearing, crunching bone and flesh alike.
The ruin echoed with wet sounds.
...
Elsewhere, Harlan and the dozen people who had followed him were still running.
They let out heavy breaths as footsteps slapped desperately against the ground. Warped corridors twisted endlessly ahead of them. The ruin here looked different... It was narrower and more claustrophobic, with walls that throbbed.
Behind them, scrapping and clicking sounds rang out.
The creatures were closing in.
"They're gaining!" someone cried.
Harlan glanced back and noticed they were too close.
His mind raced and then, he made a decision.
A man named Tom, one of the neighborhood fathers, stumbled. Just for a moment. His foot caught on uneven stone.
Harlan turned and kicked him.
Tom flew forward, crashing onto the ground.
"What—?!" Tom screamed as he rolled.
The creatures were on him instantly.
Many bony hands grabbed his legs, his arms. Teeth sank in. His screams became high-pitched, then incoherent, then cut short as something tore into his throat.
The pursuing creatures slowed since they were busy feasting and the rest escaped.
They burst through a collapsed archway and into a new section of the ruin, slamming into a wide, open chamber littered with broken stone columns. The scraping sounds faded behind them and silence fell.
"What the hell was that?!" someone yelled.
They turned on Harlan.
"You killed him!" a woman screamed. "You just got Tom killed!"
Harlan wheeled around with a flushed face and veins bulging in his neck. "It was a necessary sacrifice! Or we'd all be dead!"
"That wasn't your call!" another shouted.
A child's voice cut through the shouting.
"Daddy is bad."
Harlan froze.
His ten-year-old daughter stood behind him, clutching her brother's hand with wet eyes.
She looked at him like she didn't recognize him anymore.
Harlan's teeth ground together. "You should be thanking me," he snapped. "I saved you!"
Someone spat on the ground. "I regret not following West."
That name hit harder than any accusation.
"They probably made it out by now," another muttered bitterly.
The words ate at Harlan causing him to stand in place for many seconds.
They group decided to rest now that they were not being chased.
The chamber was unnaturally quiet. No scraping. No growls. Just the distant shifting of the ruin itself.
Harlan tried to regain control.
"I promise," he stated while forcing confidence into his voice, "I'll get you all out."
A man asked quietly, "What's the plan?"
Harlan opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
Before he could answer—
A wet pop echoed.
A woman collapsed.
Her head had burst...
Blood sprayed outward, painting the floor and nearby walls in red. Her body crumpled, twitching.
Everyone screamed.
"What—what's happening?!"
Another pop.
A man's skull exploded mid-sentence causing fragments to fly like shrapnel.
Then another.
And another.
People dropped like flies with bodies hitting the ground in rapid succession as invisible force crushed their heads from the inside out.
Harlan grabbed his wife's arm. "Run! Run!"
They fled, screaming.
The remaining survivors scattered in blind panic, sprinting through warped corridors as heads continued to burst behind them.
However, it suddenly stopped.
The pressure vanished and silence returned after they had fled that particular area.
Now, only three remained besides Harlan's wife and their two children.
Harlan's wife collapsed to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. She looked up at him through tears, eyes filled with accusation.
"I saw you," she whispered. "When you threw the stone."
Her voice broke.
"If we die down here… it's on you."
Harlan grabbed her shoulders. "We won't die," he insisted desperately. "I promise. I'll protect you."
"You should be ashamed of yourself... you jeopardised the life of your wife and children for your pride..." While she reprimanded him with teary eyes, something moved above them.
A shadow detached itself from the ceiling and dropped down.
It was too late by the time anyone noticed.
"Guughhh!"
A spike like limbs shot through Harlan's back, protruding straight through his chest and causing him to cough out blood onto his wife's face.
Harlan eyes bulged as he gasped in pain while his wife screamed.
The creature yanked him upward effortlessly, lifting him off the ground as he coughed blood with his fingers twitching uselessly.
It happened to be an arachnid like creature.
Its body was the size of a small car with eight bladed legs unfolding. Its carapace glowed faintly orange and veins pulsed beneath its translucent shell.
It spat and a thick, glowing orange web exploded outward, wrapping around Harlan's wife and children in an instant, cocooning them completely.
They screamed but couldn't set themselves loose.
The other two tried to flee...
The creature turned and swung once.
Its leg sliced clean through both their waists.
Their upper halves slid forward before toppling causing intestines to spill onto the floor.
The creature didn't even pause for a second.
It swallowed Harlan whole and then the other two halves.
Finally, it lifted the cocoon containing Harlan's wife and children and dragged them back up into the darkness above.
•••
•••
West came back to consciousness in pieces.
First, the suffocating tightness of stone inches from his face, made it difficult to breathe. His chest barely expanded to accommodate the intake of oxygen.
Before he could fully come to his senses, a dry scraping noise, like bones being dragged across rock, rang out.
His eyes snapped open and darkness was the first thing that hit him.
Not total darkness... but the kind that pressed close, narrow and claustrophobic. He was still wedged inside the crack in the wall with his body bent awkwardly, shoulders scraped raw and one knee drawn tight to his chest.
His head instinctively turned towards the source of the sound and then he spotted it...
At the opposite end of the crack... there was a bony creature.
Its skull-like face pushed forward with empty eye sockets glowing faintly as it tried to crawl through. Its body was wrong with too many protrusions jutting out of its spine and shoulders, making it impossible for it to squeeze through the narrow space.
Every time it pushed, the protrusions got caught in between the tight space.
It hissed, scrapped and struggled.
West's sleepy expression vanished...
If that thing got through, he was dead.
He immediately tried to back away—
The bone scraped against rock again as it tried to move forward, causing flakes of stone to fall into the crack. Its clawed fingers reached through, scraping the stone where his foot had been moments ago.
West knew he couldn't go back the same way he came because of this thing blocking the only way back...
He turned his head slowly, peering deeper into the darkness beyond him. The space narrowed further, twisting like a vein through stone. It looked barely passable.
But it was his only option.
West sucked in a breath and began to move.
He crawled bit by bit...
Stone bit into his palms and elbows as he forced his body forward, inch by inch. The crack narrowed so much that pain shot through his shoulders. He had to exhale fully just to slide through certain sections.
Behind him, the bony creature shrieked in frustration with its claws striking stone again and again.
West didn't look back.
He crawled and crawled until... he saw light.
He burst out of the crack and collapsed forward, coughing with his palms slamming into unfamiliar ground.
He rolled instinctively, scrambling away from the opening—
But fortunately, nothing followed him.
West lay there for a moment with his chest heaving and then slowly pushed himself up.
He froze when he realized that he was in a completely different place.
A cavern of sorts...
The space was so large that he couldn't see the far end. The ceiling rippled like frozen waves, layered and curved in unnatural patterns, as if reality itself had once flowed and then solidified mid-motion.
From the ground erupted enormous roots, thicker than tree trunks, twisting and coiling across the floor and up the walls. Growing from those roots were strange bird like plants with petal-feathers instead of leaves. They fluttered gently, opening and closing as if breathing.
The air felt… clean.
Unnaturally clean, clear and light... unlike the oppressive heaviness of the other sections of the ruin.
West took a careful step forward.
The bird-like plants flapped more rapidly in response to his presence, emitting faint chiming sounds, like glass tapping softly.
All of a sudden...
A notification slid into his vision.
> [ Awakening Complete ]
[ Congratulations — You Have Successfully Awakened ]
[ Tier: 1 ]