"And the bait is running!" The Great I chided, settling in for the show. "Look at him go! Foxy McSpeedster is trying to outrun this Juggernaut of Doom! Is it bravery? Stupidity? Or just excellent cardio developed from a regimen of constant, crippling terror since his first days in the forest, built up over time? Whatever the case, the monarch fragment seems quite interested in its new chew toy. Get the stick, boy!"
The world for Shirou was reduced to a frantic, repeating cycle of eating crystal rocks filled with faint light and the ragged, burning pain spreading all over his pathetic body as the sound of his own breathing filled his senses. Every thundering footstep that echoed behind him was another blow against his sanity, a promise of imminent, violent annihilation as the drums of a large creature continued to follow close behind.
The crystal dust flowing in his stomach and veins was a high-octane fuel that pushed his body far beyond its limits as it continued to destroy and reforge it, but it did nothing for the screaming, animalistic terror in his mind.
He ran, his fox-like agility being the only thing keeping him alive in the twisting maze of tunnels. He deliberately scraped his shoulder against a rock wall, leaving a smear of blood and fur — a clear scent marker.
He kicked loose stones, their clatter a deliberate invitation to keep his oppressor's interest. He had to keep its attention, and he was trying to treat this monster like a giant cat. He had to be the most interesting thing in the mountain at this very moment. It was the only thing he could think of to buy the rest of the time they needed, while his sputtering brain might come up with something useful to guarantee his own survival. Not likely though. I need my own entertainment too.
A grinding roar echoed from behind, and the floor twenty feet ahead of him suddenly buckled. Shirou's eyes widened. He threw himself into a slide, feeling a wave of searing heat wash over his back as a pillar of molten stone erupted from the ground where he would have been, punching a hole through the cavern ceiling and fusing to the rock above. It wasn't just chasing him; it was toying with him as it seemed to plan his destruction, trying to box him in as several similar pillars erupted at opposite sides and collided above him in the middle of a leap to the ground as hot glass rained on his head. Shirou actively brushed it off as his clothes and hair smoldered almost instantly, along with blistering flesh that soon healed into new calluses all over his body. It's an ugly sight, and this freak doesn't need any help there in that department.
He scrambled back to his feet, his heart hammering against his ribs. He dodged that just barely. He had to be faster. As he rounded another bend, he saw the telltale bulge in the rock floor ahead. This time, as a pillar of obsidian shot upwards, he launched himself towards it, using the rising, jagged rock as a springboard to propel himself deeper into the tunnel.
He burst out of the narrow passage and back into the cavern of the starry sky. He didn't give pause. He sprinted across the floor, past the half-eaten carcasses of the worms they had slain, and only managed to grab a chink of flesh in passing, and forced it down his throat. Behind him, the stony horror emerged, its crimson molten eyes burning with malevolent light.
Its presence sent a wave of panic through the cavern's actual inhabitants. The constellation of lights above began to move, descending on their glistening threads of slime, as a frenzied swarm of wriggling flesh swam down, teeth wide open. Dozens of the giant glow-worms plunged from the ceiling, their luminous bodies a river of angry light, homing in on the intruder.
They slammed into the creature's molten hide. For a moment, Shirou felt a wild surge of hope. But the hope turned to ash, just like the monsters that hope represented. The worms, creatures of soft flesh and mucus, were instantly boiled and incinerated upon contact with the horror's volcanic body. Their dying shrieks were brief and pathetic, their bodies boiling, popping, and turning to charcoal. Their slime trails evaporated in a sizzle. Soon their odor of death filled the cavern with the smell of burnt sugar, along with cooked pork or prawns. The starry sky above, which boasted thousands of stars, blinked out in a matter of seconds, leaving only a few hundred lights still visible, which stood still as if they were light fixtures held in place.
The horror of molten rock didn't even seem to notice the attacks, as if it were just standing calmly in the rain outside. It stomped through the fading, dying lights, among the charged corpses that crunched under it every step. Even if one landed on its face to block its vision with a small shack, the spasming, boiling flesh bag rolled off. It moved forward barely impeded. The monster's eyes still set and locked on Shirou, never truly leaving its gaze.
Using the momentary distraction, Shirou gained a precious few hundred feet, diving into the tunnel that led back the way they had come — the tunnel their own hands and their enslaved Dwellers had carved.
"Almost there!" The Great I cheered. "He's heading back to the first cave! But what's the plan, Foxy? The Dweller-slaves have been unceremoniously pulped, so you can't use them as a shield." The Great I paused as the boy's desperate, frantic thoughts coalesced into a beautiful, terrible idea. "Oh! Oh, I see! He's not just running. He's going to lead the big bad rock monster upstairs to play with the other monsters! The lowly dogs! It's a classic strategy: let the villains and beast fight amongst themselves! The enemy of my enemy can go and kill themselves. Hahaha. This is going to be spectacularly messy! Ah, the mentality of the weak at its finest."
The tunnel changed. It was no longer that unknown maze but a path back into familiar space. He saw it ahead: the jagged, man-made opening they had celebrated breaking through what felt like a lifetime ago. With a final, desperate burst of speed, Shirou launched himself through the hole. He was inside the long, straight passage now, the one carved by the Dwellers and all of them together. He sprinted, his lungs on fire, his legs screaming. Then, a sudden, terrifying silence fell. The thunderous, ground-shaking footsteps that had been as steady as a drumbeat behind him stopped.
Shirou skidded to a halt, his entire body trembling, shaking like a sapling in the wind as he was listening. For one heart-stopping second, there was nothing but the ragged sound of his own breathing.
Then, a faint orange light began to pulse at the far end of the tunnel behind him. The hairs on the back of his neck started to raise as he remembered how those things kind of resembled a dragon from fiction stories and panicked, thinking that it might let out a breath of fire to swallow him in this tunnel.
Shirou was able to find a little bit of energy again and started to once again slowly back up down the corridor of the tunnel.
Then it started once again: the slow, deliberate drum of the monster's steps began, and with each step, the light intensified. The rock walls around him began to glow, the temperature skyrocketing. The tunnel was quickly turning into a furnace, a forge. Shirou felt the hair on his arms singe, his skin blistering under the wave of incandescent heat that was rolling towards him. He was being cooked alive.
With a cry of pain and desperation, he fumbled for another pouch of crystal dust, swallowing it down in a single, dry gulp. The surge of energy was a shock to his system; a cool fire from within fought against the external inferno. His body started to mend itself once more as he slowly regained the energy.
So, he ran. He ran with a speed he didn't know he possessed. His body slowly let off a light of its own. He became a faint blue-white blur against the blazing orange of the tunnel.
He burst out of the exit, tumbling onto the familiar area that had the remains of their old campsite and quickly looked around. The thought of diving into the rushing waters passed his mind, but he quickly thought otherwise and continued to run.
For a moment, Shirou felt a sense of nostalgia just as a wave of superheated air blasted his back. The ground shook, and he rolled like a leaf in a storm from the blast. In a dazed state, he looked back.
The entire wall where the tunnel entrance had been was now glowing a bright, molten orange. The rock was no longer solid; it rippled like liquid. From that glowing curtain, the head of the stone dragon emerged, not breaking through the rock, but phasing through it as if it were a waterfall of pure magma.
Shirou didn't wait to see the rest of it. He scrambled to his feet, his mind screaming a single, frantic objective: the surface. He turned and sprinted across the familiar, dusty floor, his destination the faint bluish-white light escaping down the gaping hole at the far end of the cavern. Shirou could see it, the entrance to the first cavern. He had to make it. He had to make it to the surface.
Once he was through, finally on the other side of his destination, Shirou stared, his mind reeling, before his senses returned. His lungs burned as he pushed himself to his feet, stumbling on the uneven ground.
He was back. The familiar crystal formations, the central meeting stone where they had debated their very survival — it was all as they had left it.
It seemed that the soldiers still had not descended into the cavern yet and were still waiting for them to act first. Who was Shirou not to give them what they wanted?
Across a hundred yards of open cavern, his goal was in sight: the dark, gaping hole left by the giant snake. A silver light descended from above. It must be nightfall in the world above.
Shirou believed he had a head start. That the fool had a chance, more than a snowball's chance in Hell. But behind him, the sound of sizzling, liquid rock was coalescing. There he saw it once again, the crimson light from the horror's eyes intensifying as its full bulk began to push its way through the molten gate it had created.
The illusion of a liquid wall lasted only a second. With a sound like the world cracking in half, the Horror abandoned all subtlety and shattered the entire section of the cavern wall.
An explosion of superheated rock and razor-sharp shrapnel erupted outwards, turning the air into a deadly storm of dust and molten debris. The shockwave lifted Shirou off his feet, throwing him a dozen yards across the cavern floor.
The entire mountain groaned under the force of the impact, a deep, seismic shudder that undoubtedly shook the very surface above, a sudden, violent earthquake announcing its presence to the soldiers waiting patiently for a starving rat to emerge from a hole now starting to swarm like a panicked hornet's nest that was disturbed.
The explosion sent him tumbling, like a tossed-aside rag doll, through a thick, choking cloud of dust and pulverized rock. He hit the ground hard, the impact knocking the wind from him, but instinct took over. Instead of trying to stand, he continued to roll, using the momentum to carry him towards the sound of running water.
He slid down a short, slick bank and plunged into the shallows of the underground stream, the frigid water a shocking balm on his scorched skin. He submerged himself, hidden from sight, just as the first of the heavy debris rained down where he had landed.
Lying perfectly still in the knee-deep water, shrouded by the dust cloud, he waited. A blind cave fish, startled by the commotion, bumped absently against his chest before darting away, a moment of mundane life in the midst of apocalyptic chaos.
Peeking over the bank, Shirou watched as the dust cloud began to settle. The stone horror of a dragon stood in the center of the cavern, its molten crimson eyes sweeping the area, searching for the toy that had disturbed it.
Finding nothing, it took a ponderous step forward, its immense form moving directly under the gaping, night sky-filled hole of the snake's burrow, and waited.
"FIGHT!" The Great I roared, my voice thundering. "Energy blasts versus a lesser natural mad god! High-tech soldiers versus a subterranean nightmare! Who will win? Who will lose? Who cares! It's chaos! It's destruction! It's exactly what this story needed! Popcorn, anyone? Let's get the ball rolling!"
High above, on the grassy plains, the world had turned to chaos. The seismic shock wave from the dragon's entrance had knocked the perimeter guards to the ground. Now, as they scrambled back to their positions, they stared down into the snake burrow with wide, disbelieving eyes. The thing below was not one of the vermin they had been ordered to contain. It was a dragon of rock and fire, a thing of nightmares from the pits of Hell that stared back up at them with eyes like twin embers of a dying sun.
The first to react were the sentries positioned in the trees, the unit's snipers. On instinct, they leveled their long-barreled energy rifles. Blue-white lances of pure energy, designed to punch through fortified armor, slammed into the creature's obsidian and molten hide. The impacts were spectacular, exploding in brilliant flashes of light and sending spiderwebs of cracks across its stone form.
The Horror, which had been patiently waiting for its toy to re-emerge, tilted its head at the cracks in its form, which were quickly mended as if there was no attack. The fired bolts of energy had merely annoyed it.
The dragon looked up and roared. It seemed to take in a breath and opened its maw once again as a geyser of molten rock and superheated gas erupted from its throat, a pillar of incandescent fury that shot up through the hundred-foot-wide opening. The sentries and the trees they were perched in vanished, consumed by a volcanic firestorm.
That was it. That was the signal for the party to start. Every soldier ringing the perimeter opened fire. Several others sent signal flares into the sky to signal their distress back to the main base, while a lone soldier ran to reach the comms system to give a direct report.
A storm of energy bolts rained down into the cavern, a torrent of blue, white, and red plasma that turned the space into a lethal light show. Beams ricocheted off the Horror's hide, blasting massive crystal formations into shimmering dust and gouging fiery furrows in the cavern walls.
The cavern became a kill box of ricocheting energy and exploding crystals of magic stone. Beams that missed or skipped off the creature's hide slammed into the dense clusters of blue crystals lining the walls.
But the crystals didn't just shatter; they detonated. Each impact triggered a violent, explosive release of stored energy, sending out concussive waves and showers of incandescent, razor-sharp shrapnel.
The precious resource was dwindling by the second. Several of these secondary explosions blasted against the dragon's flank, not powerful enough to pierce its hide, but the concussive force and stinging shrapnel were like a thousand hornets' stings. The annoyance it felt turned to rage.
Its molten core flared with impossible heat, and it threw back its head, unleashing a roar that was the sound of a mountain breaking apart. It was a shriek of friction that grated on the soul of the listener, a promise of imminent destruction.
The time for games was over. It slammed its colossal, clawed hands into the sheer rock wall of the cavern, not finding a ledge for itself; it started making one.
Stone shattered and vaporized under the impact, the creature's immense heat turning the rock face to slag around its grip. With a heave that sent tremors through the entire cavern, the stone avatar of this dragon of destruction began to climb.
"Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and military men!" The Great I chuckled, thoroughly amused by the turn of events. "But while the grunts on the ground deal with the immediate crisis, what of their glorious leader? Let's take a quick peek behind the curtain, shall we? I'm sure he's handling this with his usual stoic competence."
In his command tent, Captain Valerius was, in fact, about to do just that. The seismic jolt had sent his meticulously organized maps sliding to the floor, spilling a cup of hot tea across a detailed schematic of the cavern entrance.
"Echo team is ready for deployment on your command, sir," Lieutenant Kaelen was saying, having just entered the tent. "We'll be inside the cavern within the hour."
"Excellent," Valerius said, dabbing at the tea stain with a grimace of annoyance. "Tell them to prepare for..."
He was cut off as the ground shook again, more violently this time, and the air was filled with the deafening crackle of sustained energy-weapon fire. Kaelen stumbled, catching himself on the central table. "Sir! What was that?!"
Before Valerius could answer, a frantic voice crackled over the comms unit. "Contact! Contact! Unknown hostile, massive, subspecies of what appears to be an earth dragon! Repeat. We are engaged in heavy fire! It's climbing out of the hole!"
Valerius and Kaelen exchanged a look of pure, unadulterated shock. The Captain grabbed the comms receiver. "All units, concentrate fire! Full power! Keep it in the mine! Do not let it reach the surface!"
"Sir, our orders..." Kaelen began, his face paling.
"Our orders were to secure a mine, Lieutenant, not to be devoured by a national-level disaster!" Valerius snarled, his composure shattering. "Get the heavy ordinance teams ready! I want every anti-armor weapon we have aimed at that hole, now!"
"Oh, this is beautiful!" The Great I howled with laughter, wiping a non-existent tear of mirth from my mask where my eye should be. "Panic! Confusion! Spilled tea! A walking volcano has just gate-crashed into their neat little siege! All their plans are turning to ash! Ah, what an exquisite meal of despair and fear. Now, back to the main event!"
The battle raging in and around the cavern had devolved into a scene of apocalyptic fury. On the surface, soldiers scrambled for cover as the ground itself turned against them. Pillars of molten rock, extensions of the Horror's rage, punched through the grassy plains without warning, forcing firing teams to scatter and reform. "Magma and earth spouts! Watch your feet and footing!" a grizzled sergeant bellowed, his voice barely audible over the roar of the monster and the crackle of plasma fire.
"Hold the line! Concentrate fire on the head and feet! Don't let it get a solid grip!" Below, the beast was doing just that. It shrugged off energy blasts that would have vaporized a tank, each impact barely registering as more than a fleeting, incandescent splash against its molten hide.
Its colossal claws, superheated and glowing, burrowed into the wall, melting the solid rock into a slag that cooled and hardened around its grip. Molten stone dripped from its body, setting the very air on fire as it continued its slow, relentless ascent directly into the heart of a hurricane of plasma fire.
The soldiers above fought with desperate courage, but they were not just fighting a monster; they were fighting the spirit of the mountain itself. Good luck men. Hahaha.
Looks like the plan of our little freak seemed to have worked out well. I wonder if he is still alive in this mess of his?
In the heart of that glorious chaos, a small, dust-covered figure slipped from the frigid water of the stream.
"And the bait makes his escape." The Great I whispered, as the narrator guiding his audience's eye should. "Leaving the monster and the soldiers to sort out their differences. Smart boy! Never stick around for the cleanup! It's the only sensible thing to do."
While every eye, both above and below, was locked on the titanic struggle in the cavern's center, no one was watching the edges where the shadows were the darkest.
Shirou, his body aching, his mind numb and buzzing with adrenaline from the excitement and several bodily injuries, crawled from the stream. He stayed low, a shadow amongst the shadows, his movements masked by the constant explosions and the thunderous roar of the battle.
As he crawled on the ground, his fingers brushed against loose crystal fragments and stones; he instinctively swept them into his pouches, pockets, and a few into his mouth. His body started to mend again, and every resource mattered. On his way, he grabbed any and all he could get his little hands on without getting himself seen or weighed down.
The freak slipped back towards the wall that the dragon had demolished, towards the dark, gaping tunnel that led back into the maze under the mountain.
The lure had worked. The bait had been taken. The trap was sprung, and his part in it was over.
He now had an easy way to follow back towards where this disaster had first found them when it emerged. Shirou just had to follow its tracks and path of destruction back. Back to his friends and classmates. He owed some idiot a good punch to the face. Ah, the little things that motivate you to do the impossible.
It would have been better if Shirou, my savior, had died an agonizing death, but I can still get a snack out of this. It is only something to look forward to, I guess.
Shirou was trying to get his thoughts back in order. Survival was now the only imperative not just for himself, but for all of them. He thought of Katy's terrified face as she was dragged away, of Pat's shouted promise to find him, of Ms. Linz's agonized cry. And once again, with a surge of cold fury, he thought of Kent Adler's smug, terrified face and the promise he had made to himself. Shirou just couldn't keep him out of his head. The boy might be in love. The love of loathing others. Hahaha.
Shirou had to get back. He had to keep all of his promises.
The fight reached a fever pitch. Valerius, now outside his tent, roared commands, directing a desperate, concentrated barrage of fire into the hole. The dragon, enraged, slammed a colossal, stony arm onto the surface.
A heavy weapons team, dug in at the crater's edge, saw the shadow fall over them. "For the King and country!" their sergeant roared, his voice a desperate cry as their anti-armor cannon fired a brilliant lance of white-hot plasma.
The beam struck the descending fist and vaporized against it harmlessly. The impact obliterated the cannon, the soldiers, and the mechanics, too. Steel and flesh were pulverized into a single, expanding cloud of shrapnel and vaporized viscera of a red mist, which was instantly incinerated into a puff of black smoke by the creature's immense heat. It was pulling itself, inch by agonizing inch, out of its prison and onto the plains.
Its head had already broken through and was now resting on the surface, with another arm latching on as this devil of the deep dragged itself out of the abyss and lifted its mouth open, and its own beam of fire and ash erupted from its mouth, destroying a greater part of the camp and those caught in the blast.
"And here we reach the climax of our little scene!" The Great I announced, my voice full of theatrical flair. "The unstoppable force meets the terrified, but very well-armed, object! Will the soldiers' firepower be enough to push the beast back? Or will the mountain itself rise up to consume them? What will become of our little hero, now consumed again in the dark? We'll find out... eventually." Hahahaha! Yes, I let out a long, satisfied chuckle. "But for now, I think I'll leave you all hanging. This is far too much fun to resolve all at once. Hahahha! Please, feed me more."