Chương 21: Far Away From Home

Her paws kept moving through the haze. She tried once to stop, and the thought went down into her legs and never arrived. They lifted and set down, lifted and set down, carrying her on at the same even pace. Her ears went flat, then flatter. Her tail lashed once and gave up. The haze thickened the further she went, curling up past her ankles, then her knees, cold and wet against her fur in a way that had nothing to do with water. It coated the back of her tongue and stayed there. She knew this one.

The smell of a rat dead long enough that even she wouldn't touch it. She swallowed against it and it didn't help. The hum had changed too. It wasn't enticing anymore. It had stopped being a sound in her ears at all, and what was left sat low in her chest, a slow heavy thud, one beat for every step she took toward it. Thick as it had gotten down here, the haze had a color to it now, and it wasn't the dark she knew.

The masked man's shadow had swallowed light whole, clean and total, black the way a closed eye was black. This was purple, deep and heavy with it, and looking straight at it turned her stomach. That was the thing that finally did it, stronger than the fear had been, stronger than the hunger that had been fighting her the whole way down. Her stomach simply refused to go any closer to it, and turned her whole body away before the rest of her had finished deciding anything. This time her legs turned with her.

Getting back out took everything than getting in had. Every step away from that stinking purple dark felt like walking uphill through mud, her own body still leaning toward it even as she forced it the other way, some deep animal want dragging its heels the whole retreat. By the time the haze thinned back down to her ankles she was breathing hard, legs trembling underneath her. More worn out than she'd been since the day she first outran her own old body. [SYSTEM] Dungeon Call: Resisted.

Skill Acquired: Stubborn Resolve Resists compulsion at significant cost. Efficacy scales with willpower. She didn't have the strength left to feel proud of it. Every stretch of tunnel between here and the entrance was already stitched into her, scent trails and turns and the particular cold of certain stretches of wall, and her paws found the way back without asking much of the rest of her.

She ended up curled against the stone where the cave had sealed shut behind her, the same spot the evening light had disappeared from what felt like a very long day ago. It didn't smell like anything worth worrying about. It smelled like the last place she'd been before all of this, which right now was close enough to comfort. She let her eyes close before she'd decided to let them. Her body could have made her go further, if she'd let it. She was fairly sure of that.

But she hadn't let it, and now, this worn out from just getting back out, she had no interest in finding out whether she could do that fight twice in one day. Something itched. She came up out of sleep before she understood why, one back leg already kicking at something small and cool clinging to her fur. Another patch of it sat wet against her shoulder, another along her tail, tiny and slick and multiplying faster than she could scrape any single spot clean.

Slime, but nothing like the low dim puddled shapes she'd been eating. Dozens of pieces of one instead, no bigger than raindrops, crawling loose across her fur in every direction at once. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. She scrambled up, shaking hard, flinging most of it free in a spray that spattered wet against the stone, and only then did she notice the light.

The stone that had sealed the entrance shut was gone entirely, no trace of it left anywhere along the wall. Just an open black mouth where solid rock had been. Night air poured through it, cold and real, smelling like actual outside for the first time in what had to be a full day and night down here. And past it, filling the whole clearing beyond the entrance, the ground itself seemed to be moving. Slimes. Hundreds of them, small and dim and glistening.

They poured out of the opening in a steady, endless current, or poured in, she couldn't tell which from here, bouncing low over each other in a mass with no single direction she could make sense of. More of them than she'd killed in her entire life, crammed into one narrow stretch of night. None of them paid her the slightest attention as she stood there covered in their smaller, faster cousins, trying to work out what she'd just woken up into. She didn't know what to do about any of it.

She stared at the mass of them a long moment, some old part of her running the numbers the way it always did whenever something small and edible sat within reach. That many slimes in one place was a meal she'd never finish, more food than she'd know what to do with, and every part of that calculation should have had her moving toward the swarm instead of away from it. The small slick things crawling on her fur had already decided how she felt about slimes tonight, and hunger lost the argument to sheer irritation.

What she did know was that three more of the small slick things had already found their way back onto her fur while she stood there thinking, one working its way toward her ear. That decided things faster than any plan could have. She shook herself hard enough to knock the last of them loose, actual bodies flung wet against the stone this time rather than just a spray, and shoved past the edge of the swarm before anything else could climb back on.

She made straight for the stream she remembered from the day before, the one that had never quite left her senses even through everything since. The water ran just as cold as she remembered. She drank from it first, long enough to settle the dry ache still sitting in the back of her throat from everything the haze had put there. Then she got to work on the rest of it. Licking hard at every patch the little things had touched. Paw dragged wet across her face and behind her ears.

Tongue working through her fur until the last of the slick residue finally came loose, swallowed down along with everything else her own washing had picked up. Whatever was happening back at that cave, swarm or exodus or something else entirely, she'd stopped caring about it somewhere around the third slick patch she'd had to scrub out of her own fur. Annoying was annoying, and right now that mattered a great deal more than any mystery.

She got up and started walking, shaking the last of the water from her paws, and filed one thing away next to everything else this whole day had taught her. No more caves that smelled that inviting, ever again. Whatever waited past the next warm, dry, promising-looking hole in the ground, she'd earned the right to be suspicious of it first and curious about it never. The beam over the flue had never once tried to trap her, never filled itself with rot or hummed with something that wanted her closer.

It had just been warm, every single morning, without asking anything of her in return. She missed it in a way she hadn't let herself miss much of anything since this whole day had started, a plain, physical want for a spot of sun-warmed wood that had never once needed her to be careful of it. She kept walking regardless, in whatever direction her paws had settled on, because missing a place had never once been the same thing as knowing how to get back to it. At some point the trees simply stopped.

She didn't notice the exact moment it happened, only that she was walking through open grass now instead of forest, the ground soft and unbroken all the way out to wherever it finally met the sky. The moon hung fuller here than it had anywhere under the canopy. It spilled pale light across the grass, silvering the whole field, almost too pretty for a night that had gone the way this one had.

Something moved low through the grass ahead of her, quick and pale, and instinct had her after it before the rest of her caught up. She lost that one to a burrow she couldn't fit into. She lost the next one to its own sharp turn at full speed, and the one after that simply outlasted her interest before she outlasted its stamina. Each miss barely slowed her down. There was always another shape breaking cover somewhere nearby, another quick pale thing worth chasing, and for a while the chasing itself was enough.

It stopped being enough somewhere around the fourth or fifth try. She sat down in the grass, breathing hard, watching one more pale shape vanish into the dark without bothering to give chase this time. The moon kept doing what the moon did, beautiful and indifferent, lighting up a field with nobody in it to share the sight with. Just grass, and moonlight, and the small, quick things she simply couldn't catch. She lay down instead, chin resting on her paws, and let the moon have her full attention for a while.