To Elias, combat wasn't a collision of brute force; it was a choreography of wills. Every clash of iron, every minute shift of weight, carried a hidden cadence—a unique, terrible rhythm belonging only to that exact second. A duel was a violent dance. The fighter who dictated the tempo, who caught the threads of the enemy's momentum and yanked, ruled the stage. To lead this lethal waltz was to hold the keys to life and death, but controlling the tempo is a luxury for men with weapons.
Adrien twisted his torso, the creature's leg whistling past his ribs close enough to raise goosebumps. He wanted to strike back—the instinct burned in his chest—but a bare-knuckle punch against a nightmare like this was suicide. The thing was sickeningly strong.
He lunged to the side, his boots skidding across the grit on the floor. Vaulting over a terminal console, he slammed his palm onto the manual override switch. He didn't look back, but he heard the sickening crunch of steel buckling behind him as the creature's limb pulverised the console he had occupied a heartbeat prior.'I did my part,' Adrien thought, his lungs screaming for air as he scrambled away. 'The switch is down. Vera, please tell me you're alive to link the grid.'
Vera, however, was currently breathing in the scent of her own imminent death.
Minutes earlier, right after the heavy thrum of the emergency power cut out, a metallic scratching had echoed from the ceiling. Then, a low hiss, as a small, multi-legged silhouette slid out of the ventilation shaft, dropping onto the floor with a wet thud. An arachnid-like thing, all twitching joints and needle-thin mandibles.
'Damn it,' Vera cursed silently. Her knuckles went white around the grip of her sidearm.
'Can't shoot, as the blast will bring the whole pack down on me.'
She didn't hesitate. As she holstered the gun and drew her hatchet, the weight of the steel a cold comfort in her palm. She lunged forward, raising the blade to split the thing in two before it could scuttle into the shadows, but her boot caught on a loose cable, and the floor rushed up to meet her.
Before her hatchet could split the skull of the arachnid, its thorax ballooned like a sickening blister. It opened its mandibles and unleashed an ear-piercing, metallic shriek.The sound scraped against the inside of Vera's skull. Then, it died, as the creature's carcass rapidly dissolved, melting into a foul-smelling smoke and a puddle of black, tar-like residue, but the silence that followed lasted only a heartbeat.It started as a low murmur—a vibration through the floorboards. Then it rose, a horrific crescendo of skittering, clicking legs, and the guttural roars of an entire pack waking up. They knew exactly where she was, and hiding no longer mattered.Vera ditched the hatchet, her white-knuckled grip locking onto her shotgun. Above her, the ventilation shaft rattled. The skittering inside the metal duct sounded like hail on a tin roof. Without hesitating, she pulled a Molotov cocktail from her vest, struck the flint, and shoved the burning bottle straight up into the vent.
A sheet of fire roared through the ductwork, followed by agonised screeches.But before she could breathe, something massive slammed into the room's main door. The metal screamed, buckling inward and tearing a hinge clean off the wall. Vera staggered back, her boots catching on debris. Another brutal impact followed, and the heavy door groaned, hanging by a single thread of twisted steel.
Through the widening gap, a tide of smaller arachnids began to pour in like black water gushing through a broken dam. Vera lit her second—and final—Molotov, hurling it directly into the breach. The bottle shattered, unleashing a wall of roaring inferno. The blinding light cast long, frantic shadows as the front line of the horde burned alive, their high-pitched squeals filling the air.
That's the last of the fire, Vera thought, sweat stinging her eyes. 'Adrien, flip the damn switch.'
The fire was a deterrent, but it was also a death trap. Thick, choking smoke filled the small room, and the flames were already licking up the peeling paint toward the ceiling. Then, the burning door frame exploded inward.
A massive arachnid, its armoured shell blackened by the fire, burst into the room.Vera didn't think. She raised the shotgun, and the weapon roared in anger. The heavy slug slammed into the monster's centre mass, blowing it backwards. She pumped the action, chambers clearing with a sharp clack-clack, and fired again, turning its head into a spray of dark fluid.
The creature collapsed, but as its body hit the floor, it dissolved instantly. The resulting explosion of thick, oily smoke and tar smothered a massive section of the defensive fire. The protective barrier was gone. Through the smoking gap, a flood of twitching legs and gnashing jaws poured into the room.
Driven by pure panic, Vera unclipped the couple of potato masher grenades from her belt. She pulled the pins and hurled them into the mass of monsters.
The twin explosions shook the room, blowing arachnid limbs into the air and tearing the horde apart. But it was an empty victory. The thunderous blasts didn't scare them off—it was a dinner bell, echoing through the corridors and drawing every nightmare in the facility straight to her position.
Vera managed to shove three shells into the tube of her shotgun before the floor began to carpet with movement. A tidal wave of smaller arachnids, each barely the size of a dinner plate, swarmed through the smoke. She pulled the trigger blindly. The blast tore a crater into the front line, but the gun clicked dry a second later.
Dropping the heavy weapon, she ripped her pistol from its holster. She fired until the slide locked back, but it was like trying to shoot the ocean. There were too many. Within seconds, the scuttling mass hit her boots. They climbed up her trousers, their needle-like legs snagging on the fabric of her gear, dragging a wave of cold, clicking terror up her legs.
"Get off! Get the hell off me!" Vera screamed.She flailed wildly, stomping her boots into a crunching pulp of chitin and fluid. She swung her hatchet in blind, desperate arcs, but the sheer volume of the swarm was overwhelming. Above her, the last glowing embers in the ventilation shaft vanished, smothered entirely by the black tide of bodies pouring out of the ceiling.
Then came the teeth; sharp, venomous mandibles pierced the gaps in her armour. White-hot agony flared across her thighs, her waist, her shoulders. Her body was wracked with violent tremors as the venom hit her bloodstream. Meanwhile, her vision was filled with critical-injury and poison alerts as her vision began to blur and swim. She was drowning in them.
Through the haze of pain and the dark curtain closing in on her eyes, a sharp, metallic ping cut through the noise.
On the nearby wall console, a single green indicator light began to blink, accompanied by the shrill, deafening screech of a system alarm.
'Finally.' The thought barely formed through the fog in her brain. 'Adrien, you magnificent bastard, you did it.'Tearing her legs through the crushing weight of the arachnid spawns clinging to her flesh, Vera threw her entire weight forward, lunging blindly toward the console.
Adrien drove his boot, slamming down onto the broken shard of a blade embedded in the creature's face. The monster unleashed a screech so violently loud that the sound waves felt like a physical blow, threatening to rupture Adrien's eardrums.Using the thrashing monster as a springboard, Adrien launched himself backwards toward the exit and sprinted out of the room.
"Professor! Show me the way!"
Lovegrove's spectral form surged forward, a pale beacon cutting through the gloom of the corridor. Adrien pushed his legs to follow, but a sudden, violent coughing fit seized his chest. His knees buckled, slamming hard against the grating of the floor. He screamed inwardly, his throat burning.
'Goddamn it. Not now. Why does this debuff have to hit me right now?'
"Young man, pull yourself up!" Lovegrove's voice echoed with ghostly panic.
The paralytic stutter of the debuff held Adrien frozen just a second too long, completely erasing the precious lead he had fought to gain. Behind him, the heavy scraping of chitin against metal signalled the monster dragging its bulk out of the room. It loomed over him, casting a massive shadow.As the creature's limb whipped back for a lethal strike, the ceiling overhead groaned.
Suddenly, in the dark corridor devoid of any speck of light for millennia, the overhead bulbs erupted with life, flooding the corridor with blinding illumination. The raw glare was pure poison to the horde. Several tubes sputtered violently, showering the hallway in white-hot sparks before blowing out entirely, but the remaining lights held strong.The effect was instantaneous and horrific.
The smaller arachnids caught in the hallway dissolved, their flesh sizzling and liquefying into foul smoke and bubbling goo the moment the light kissed them. The larger variants shrieked in agony, their shells blistering and cracking under the radiant beams, but they held out longer before sharing the same gruesome fate.
The corridor drowned in a deafening chorus of dying screams.
Yet, the alpha abomination towering over Adrien refused to die. Black smoke rose from its scarred carapace, and its flesh bubbled painfully under the light, but it held its ground. Weakened and burning, its multi-faceted eyes remained locked onto Adrien. In its primal, agonising rage, it knew exactly who was responsible for this light—and it was determined to tear him apart before it burned to ash.
"Vera did it! The lass actually did it!" Lovegrove cried out, his voice rich with relief as he watched the alpha abomination freeze, paralysed and hissing under the sudden glare of the ceiling lights.
The blinding light bought Adrien the precious seconds he needed. The paralytic stutter of the debuff finally snapped, freeing his limbs. He scrambled to his feet and sprinted down the corridor, hard on the heels of Lovegrove's guiding form.But the victory was cut brutally short.
A violent tremor slammed into the facility, a localised earthquake that rattled the bulkheads and threw Adrien off balance mid-stride. Before he could recover his footing, the overhead lights died. Pitch blackness swallowed the corridor once again, and then the world was rendered asunder.
An impossible sensation gripped Adrien's chest as, for a moment, gravity abruptly disappeared. His boots left the floor, leaving him weightless, drifting helplessly in the absolute dark. A split second later, a massive, unseen shockwave thundered through the corridor. The pressure wave hit him like a concrete wall, squeezing the air from his lungs and choking out his ability to breathe.
Through the sudden vacuum, a horrific, unearthly screech tore through the darkness.
Adrien flailed, twisting his body toward the sound, and in that frozen microsecond, horror struck him to his core.
Lovegrove's spectral form was violently imploding, ripped to shreds by the unseen force before Adrien's very eyes. The ghost's shimmering form fractured into a dozen agonising pieces before dissolving into nothingness.A raw, ragged scream tore from Adrien's throat—a sound so hollow and twisted by terror that he didn't even recognise it as his own.
"LOVEGROVE!"
Had Adrien possessed the sight to look beyond his own hallway, he would have realised Lovegrove was not an isolated tragedy.
Elsewhere in the dungeon, the ghost of Gavrilo was passing the long hours in his usual manner. Even in death, he carried himself with a stiff, dignified posture—though at the moment, he was busy crossing his eyes and pulling mocking faces at the Centaur Warden just to kill time. Suddenly, Gavrilo stiffened as the air around him rippled, and before the spirit could even register the wrongness, an invisible pulse tore through the chamber. Gavrilo let out a sharp, agonising shriek as his ethereal form fractured and ripped apart into jagged shards of light, vanishing into the dark.
Elsewhere, Princess Jefimiya was nursemaid to her own wounded pride. She had finally reined in her initial shock and decided to approach Adrien and Vera once more. But by the time she had drifted back to their last known coordinates, the duo had already pushed forward into the next zone. Left behind in the empty corridors, she had just begun to sulk when the air grew suffocatingly dense.
The pulse struck her next, and with a high-pitched scream of pure agony tore from her throat as the pressure wave turned her royal silhouette inside out. Within a heartbeat, the blast dissolved her completely, and not a single particle remained. Not a wisp of mist, not a shadow.Across the entire dungeon, the ghosts were being wiped clean from existence.