Chương 38: A Meter from Death

An explosion erupted right next to Lloyd. It was the shockwave from another blow, the monster slamming its massive, rotting arm down into the ground beside him, gouging a deep furrow into the stone floor and sending up a fountain of green slime and rock fragments. The creature had once again failed to land a proper hit on Lloyd.

But Lloyd, in turn, had found no way to deal it any real damage either, forced instead to keep frantically dodging between blows in this cramped, suffocating space where every sound echoed and amplified off the rusted gates around him. Lloyd kept successfully dodging the attacks, but his strength was running out, and he could feel it draining away faster with every passing second.

His legs trembled, his lungs burned with every breath thick with the stench of decay, and his vision kept darkening at the edges, clouding over with murky black spots through which the dim green light of the crystals looked even more ghostly than before, as if reality itself were beginning to blur and warp from sheer exhaustion.

"It's a miracle I've survived this long" raced through his mind as he leapt back from another blow, barely keeping his footing, feeling a sharp pain sear through his shin as he landed wrong on the uneven stone. And then, as another strike crashed down beside him, throwing up a spray of green slime and stone dust that settled across his shoulders in fine droplets, he finally noticed something. All of the arms the monster had used to attack now lay motionless on the ground.

It seemed that after so many strikes, its enormous, rotted limbs could no longer lift themselves, collapsing into shapeless heaps among the rubble, from which green slime kept slowly oozing, spreading into dark pools across the floor and forming a thin film that shimmered in the flickering light. Lloyd's eyes lit up.

"This is my only chance" He glanced at the monster, an entire mass of deformed, fused bodies oozing thick green slime that ran down in glistening rivulets. The green crystal above, casting its sickly, dim light over the creature, made its silhouette look even more horrifying, even more unnatural — every shadow thrown by that light seemed alive, breathing, crawling across the uneven surface of the corpse mound, as if the darkness itself here possessed a will of its own.

Lloyd muttered, barely able to raise his voice above a whisper, his voice cracking with exhaustion: — Now or never... He drew a full breath of air thick with rot and damp stone, and bolted forward at full speed straight toward the monster, feeling every step send a sharp jolt of pain through his exhausted muscles, his heart pounding so hard it felt ready to burst from his chest, the sound echoing dully in his ears.

It felt to Lloyd like he might collapse right there mid-run — he had nothing left, his legs kept buckling, his breath tearing out of his chest in ragged, uneven gasps. But he kept running, leaping over the monster's massive, motionless arms, skidding across the layer of slime coating the floor, nearly losing his balance with every step on that treacherously slick surface, feeling cold slime splash up from beneath his boots with every stride.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. And then he was right in front of the creature, feeling a fresh wave of nausea rise in his throat from the stench radiating off it, his eyes watering from the acrid, suffocating reek.

Without hesitation, he began climbing the ten-meter mountain of corpses, digging his fingers into outcrops of fused, rotting flesh, feeling beneath his fingers a soft, yielding mass that threatened to tear apart under his weight at any moment. The bodies stretched out their green, deformed limbs, trying to stop him, grabbing at his clothes, his legs, leaving sticky, cold trails on his skin that reeked of the same nauseating decay.

But they seemed to have even less strength left in them than Lloyd himself — exhausted, drained, holding on by nothing but sheer desperation and a blind will to survive. And the bodies were so fragile that some of the limbs tore right out of the mass entirely as they tried to hold him back, flying off with a sickening crack and slapping onto the floor far below, leaving behind damp, faintly steaming trails in the dim light.

Lloyd was already halfway up, fingers numb with cold and fatigue as he grabbed at another outcrop, when that same rotted, twisted arm he'd seen before emerged from the mass of bodies.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, he's got another one of those" It seized Lloyd around the torso, gripping him so hard that for a moment the breath was knocked clean out of him, white sparks flashing across his vision from the sudden pain. Luckily, the arm wasn't quite solid enough to crush him instantly — the flesh beneath gave way under the pressure, soft and yielding, almost gelatinous, like an overripe fruit. And Lloyd was just starting to feel a flicker of relief at that — but it didn't last.

Suddenly, something dark began to emerge from the middle of the corpse mound, widening, spreading wider with every second, accompanied by the quiet, wet tearing of flesh. Bodies split apart and peeled away to either side, revealing what had been hidden inside that monstrous mass, and green slime came pouring out of the opening rift in a thick, foul torrent, drowning everything around it in a fresh wave of stench. It was a mouth.

A vast, colossal mouth, and peering into its depths revealed nothing but a bottomless, impenetrable darkness, while rusted swords and broken spears jutted out in place of teeth, embedded in the rotting flesh in jagged, uneven rows, glinting faintly in the green light of the crystals and giving off a sharp, metallic smell of old blood mixed with decay that made Lloyd's knees buckle involuntarily. Lloyd murmured, barely audible, feeling fear seize his entire body in an icy grip: — You've got to be kidding me...

The arm dragged him relentlessly toward this mockery of a mouth, toward this gaping maw, into whose depths it was impossible to make out anything except an impenetrable, all-consuming void, radiating a cold that had nothing to do with the ordinary cold of the dungeon — a cold that seemed to sink not into his skin, but straight into his soul.

Somewhere inside that mouth came a low, guttural hum, like the breathing of the abyss itself, and with every inch he was dragged closer, the sound grew louder, swallowing every other thought except one — simple, and terrifying in its sheer obviousness.

And then Lloyd's body was just a meter away from being swallowed whole by the ten-meter monster, and in that final moment his entire world narrowed down to a single sensation — the relentlessly approaching, absolute darkness inside that monstrous maw, ready to consume him without a trace.