Chương 21: The Wanderer of the Tunnels

Lloyd continued through the foul tunnel. He had become so saturated with the disgusting smell of these corridors and the green mass that at some point he simply stopped noticing it. His nose had given up — or surrendered, which in this case amounted to the same thing. His jacket was hopelessly ruined, his trousers crackled with every step from the drying sludge, his sneakers had long since become two squelching containers.

Every step came with a damp, unpleasant sound he had almost grown used to — almost, but not entirely. He kept wandering through the labyrinth of this dungeon, which resembled a sprawling sewer system far more than anything heroic. Green crystals lit up ahead and went dark behind him, illuminating exactly as much space as needed — and not a metre more. Silence pressed in from every side, broken only by the squelch of his own footsteps and the occasional drip of water somewhere in the walls.

Sometimes the tunnel narrowed, forcing him to duck, and then damp strands of something dark caught on his hood. Sometimes it widened into small rounded chambers where the sludge sat especially thick and still, like small stagnant ponds, and the surface rippled faintly from his own footsteps, spreading in concentric circles to the very edges.

The walls were the same everywhere — slimy, dark green, coated in the same film as everything else in this place, swollen in places with bubbles that burst at the slightest touch with a quiet, unpleasant sound. Thoughts drifted on their own, without much order — which was just as well, since thinking about anything other than the filth around him helped distract him, at least a little.

"I wonder — was this really once a person, or a monster created by the dungeon itself? And what even is this dungeon? Who's behind all of this? Maybe the same one who created the X system?" Suddenly something fell behind him. Lloyd spun around sharply, knife raised — but behind him was only the familiar dark tunnel. The same greenish half-light, the same slimy walls, the same emptiness. His heart pounded somewhere in his throat.

He stood like that for a few seconds, staring into the darkness beyond the crystal light, expecting to see movement. A drop of water, probably. Or a piece of something had broken off the ceiling and landed in the sludge somewhere nearby. Nothing happened.

Once it became clear that nothing was about to leap out, Lloyd slowly lowered the knife and continued on — though his heart kept beating a little faster than normal for several more minutes, and he kept glancing back over his shoulder, peering into the darkness behind him.

"But if that really was once a living person, how did he end up here? He looked far too horrifying, which means he's been here a long time. But then how could he even have gotten here in the first place? Isn't each dungeon supposed to be its own separate, closed space?" The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Lloyd exhaled heavily.

The sound of his sigh dissolved into the dense, motionless air of the tunnel without leaving so much as an echo behind — as though the air here was too thick even for sound.

"I thought this worked differently somehow... Something like the gates from those stories I used to read." He scratched the back of his head, smearing another portion of dried green mass into his hair. He no longer had the energy to react to it with his old disgust.

"Well. I hope that's how it actually works." The tunnel stretched on — one turn, then another, a narrow passage where the two walls came together especially close. Lloyd squeezed through sideways, trying not to brush against the walls more than necessary, though that was almost impossible — the slimy surface stuck to his jacket with every contact, leaving fresh dark stains.

The sludge in this section came almost up to his knee, noticeably heavier than usual, denser, with dark flecks whose nature Lloyd preferred not to investigate. Overhead the tunnel was cracked in places — thin, branching fissures, like tree roots that had grown down through the concrete from somewhere above, from that world which now felt impossibly far away. Time felt strange here.

Lloyd had long since lost track of the minutes — his phone stayed silent in his pocket, he hadn't turned the screen on in a while, wary of wasting the battery on trivial things. The tunnel seemed to exist outside the normal flow of time, caught in its own closed rhythm of drips and squelches. And then he heard a squelching sound ahead. Measured. Rhythmic. As though someone — or something — was walking through the sludge straight toward him, step by step, unhurried but never stopping either.

The sound came from the darkness further down the tunnel, from where the greenish light hadn't yet pushed back the gloom. Lloyd froze. He gripped the knife with both hands, aimed it into the darkness ahead. His breathing grew nearly silent — he tried to breathe as quietly as possible, as though that might somehow change anything. The squelching drew closer — slowly, inevitably, with a kind of frightening regularity, like a metronome no one had set and which, it seemed, would never stop. One. Squelch. Two. Squelch.

The sound grew louder with every second, and along with it grew that same cold, tugging feeling in his stomach that Lloyd was beginning to recognise as the sign of something genuinely bad. And then an unpleasant thought struck him.

"Wait. Why aren't the crystals reacting to it?" He glanced at the tunnel ceiling ahead. The crystal that should have lit up at the approach of anything at all — stayed silent. Dark. Completely dark, there, where the sound was coming from. Not a flicker of green light, not a hint that the system of this place had noticed the approach of something living — or something that had once been living.

The darkness up ahead seemed denser than everywhere else — as though the light simply couldn't reach it, refused to go there. Lloyd murmured quietly, not taking his eyes off the darkness, his voice wavering: — Don't tell me they only react to peo... He didn't manage to finish. Because the thing slowly approaching him through the darkness had already stepped into the light.