The darkness of the tomb was a physical weight against the lungs of Lifeless. He lay on the cold granite floor for a time that had no name. Seconds bled into hours. Hours dissolved into a singular, agonizing stretch of existence.
The hunger was no longer a sharp pain. It had evolved into a dull, hollow roar that consumed his very thoughts. His stomach felt like it was folding in on itself, a vacuum of acid and desperation.
He knew that if he stayed by the entrance, he would wither into a husk. The drip of water was not enough. The rotting meat of the elk was gone. He had to move. He had to find a way out or a way to survive.
Lifeless pushed himself up. His muscles felt like dry straw. He reached for his sword, but as he lifted the blade, a sickening realization hit him. The hilt was slick with a strange, corrosive slime that had dripped from the ceiling during his sleep. He watched in horror as the steel began to flake away.
The metal was brittle, eaten through by a prehistoric acidity unique to these deep veins of the earth. He tried to swing it against a stone to test the edge, and the blade shattered into a dozen useless shards.
He stood in the absolute blackness, holding nothing but a hilt of ruined iron. He was truly alone. He had no steel to shield him. He had no friend to guard his back. He had only his hands and the burning void in his gut.
He began to crawl. He felt his way along the damp walls, moving deeper into the throat of the mountain. The air changed. It became warmer, thick with the scent of ozone and ancient musk. After a mile of lightless navigation, the tunnel opened.
Lifeless blinked as a dim, phosphorescent glow met his eyes. He stepped into a cavern so vast it could have swallowed a city. The ceiling was a canopy of glowing fungi that cast a sickly violet light over a subterranean ecosystem. But the beauty was a mask for a nightmare.
Below him, the floor of the cavern was a teeming hive of death. He saw mammoths, but they were not the beasts of the surface. These were tusked titans of meat and matted fur, their eyes glowing with a feral, red hunger. They were the apex grazers of the dark, but they were not the only occupants.
Moving through the shadows were the synaptic myriads.
These were larger than any he had faced with Norris. Their carapaces were jagged, pulsing with a bio-luminescent rhythm that signaled their intent. And everywhere else, the lesser monsters skittered, a thousand needle-teeth clicking in the gloom.
His first fight began when a group of three monsters caught his scent. They were lithe, reptilian things with six legs and tongues that flicked out like whips. They saw a weak, starving boy. They saw a meal.
Lifeless did not have a sword. As the first monster leaped, he realized he had to change his entire philosophy of combat. He stepped into the strike. He caught the monster by its throat with his left hand. The skin felt like wet leather.
He balled his right hand into a fist and drove it into the snout of the beast.
The impact sent a jolt of pain up his arm. He was weak, but the desperation gave him a frantic strength. He punched again. And again. He did not stop until the skull of the monster caved in under his knuckles. He did not wait for the other two.
He ran at them. He tackled the second, pinning it to the floor. He hammered his fists into its ribs until he heard the snap of bone.
The third monster bit into his shoulder, its teeth sinking deep into his trapezius.
Lifeless let out a guttural scream. He reached back, grabbed the monster by its head, and slammed it against the jagged floor until it stopped moving.
He stood over the three corpses, panting, his hands covered in black blood. He did not hesitate. He tore into the meat of the monsters with his bare hands. It was bitter and cold, but it was fuel.
Days passed in a cycle of carnage. Lifeless could not leave the cavern, so he became a part of its food chain.
He hunted the small things to stay alive, but the constant combat began to transform him. Because he had no sword, he had to use his entire body as a weapon.
He learned to strike with his elbows. He learned to drive his knees into the soft underbellies of the beasts.
The weight of his own body began to shift. The fat melted away, replaced by corded, functional muscle.
His shoulders broadened. His grip became like iron clamps. He was training in the most brutal school ever devised. Every mistake resulted in a new scar. Every victory resulted in a meal.
But the mammoths and the myriads were the true tests.
He encountered his first synaptic myriad near a pool of stagnant water. The creature was ten feet long, its armor reflecting the violet light of the fungi. It sensed him and immediately hardened its skin. The obsidian plates turned into a substance that looked like polished diamond.
Lifeless knew he could not break that armor with a punch. He had to be smarter. He circled the beast.
The myriad lunged, its massive pincers snapping inches from his waist. Lifeless moved with a grace born of a hundred smaller fights. He waited for the moment the creature extended its neck to strike.
In that split second, the myriad had to soften its joints to move. Lifeless dived under the mandibles.
He delivered a double-handed strike to the joint of the front leg. He felt the exoskeleton crack. The myriad shrieked, a sound that rattled his teeth. It tried to spin, but Lifeless was already on its back. He found the small gap where the head met the torso. He drove his fingers into the soft tissue, tearing at the nerves.
The myriad thrashed, its body turning into diamond and back again in a frantic attempt to eject him. Lifeless held on with a grim tenacity. He pounded his fists into the same spot, over and over, until the internal structures of the beast collapsed.
The victory cost him. He walked away with a bruised rib and a deep gash on his leg, but he was stronger. He was becoming a predator.
The middle of the month brought the greatest trial. He found himself cornered by a mammoth and a pack of synaptic myriads. They had tracked him to a narrow ledge overlooking a drop into the abyss. The mammoth charged first, its tusks leveled like lances.
Lifeless leaped onto the tusk of the beast, using the momentum to swing himself onto its head. He began to pummel the skull of the mammoth, his fists falling like hammers. But the synaptic myriads were closing in. One of them launched its barbed tongue, catching Lifeless by his right arm.
He felt the diamond-hard teeth of the myriad close around his bicep. The pain was an explosion of white light. He tried to pull away, but the myriad was anchored to the floor. The mammoth tossed its head at the same time.
The tension was too much for human flesh to bear.
Lifeless felt the bone snap. He felt the tendons tear. With a sickening spray of red, his right arm was ripped from his shoulder.
He fell from the head of the mammoth, hitting the ledge with a bone-jarring thud. He looked at the stump of his shoulder. The blood was gushing out, a crimson river that threatened to take his life in minutes.
The world began to spin. The mammoths and the myriads moved in for the kill. They saw a broken prey. They saw the end of the man who had been haunting their tunnels.
Lifeless looked at the abyss.
He looked at his missing limb. A dark, cold laughter bubbled up in his chest. He was not going to die like this. He was not going to let these things win.
He used his remaining hand to grab a handful of the glowing fungi from the wall. He stuffed the caustic, burning plant into the open wound of his shoulder.
The pain was beyond anything he had ever known. It was the sound of a thousand suns screaming. The chemical burn of the fungi cauterized the wound, the searing heat stopping the flow of blood.
He stood up. He had one arm. He was covered in his own gore. He was starving. He was alone.
"Is that all you have?" he hissed, his voice a rasp of pure malice.
The mammoth charged again. Lifeless did not dodge this time. He stepped into the path of the beast. He used his feet to plant himself against the stone. As the mammoth reached him, he used his one remaining hand to grab the base of its tusk. He channeled every ounce of the training, every bit of the muscle he had grown in the dark.
He flipped the mammoth.
The thousand-pound beast was hoisted into the air by the sheer, impossible strength of a man who had nothing left to lose. The mammoth crashed into the pack of myriads, crushing them under its weight.
Lifeless did not stop. He threw himself into the pile of meat and armor. He was a demon. He used his feet to stomp through the diamond carapaces. He used his one hand to rip the eyes from the mammoth. He fought with a savagery that made the monsters of the dark recoil. He bit, he kicked, he headbutted. He was no longer human. He was the manifest of the cave itself.
When the dust settled, he stood alone in a field of corpses. The ledge was a lake of black and red. He was missing an arm, but he felt a power growing in his chest that was deeper than the red current. It was the power of the survivor. It was the strength of the man who had looked at the mountain and told it to move.
He sat down amidst the ruins of his enemies. He reached out with his left hand and took a piece of the mammoth meat. He ate in the silence of the violet light. He was trapped. He was broken. He was deformed.
But as he looked into the darkness of the deeper tunnels, his one eye burned with a light that the cave had never seen before. He was not going to stay in this hole. He was going to grow.
He was going to evolve. And when he finally found the way out, the world above would realize that the boy who went into the mountain was never coming back. Only the God of the Deep remained.