It was a thing of horrific, glossy beauty. Its shell was an eerie descent purple-black, like a oil slick. Its head was all mandibles, two curved, serrated hooks that clicked together with a sound like snapping scissors. It had no visible eyes. It paused, sensing the warmth of him, the vibration of his breath.
Lu's fear was cold, sharp. This wasn't the drowning horror of the leeches. This was the sharp, pointy reality of being eaten alive in pieces.
He acted before he could think. The spear, lighter than air in his new hands, lanced out. It wasn't a skilled thrust. It was a panicked poke. He aimed for the center of the clicking horror.
The crystal tip hit the glossy shell and skittered off with a screech, sparking blue light. The beetle was knocked onto its back, legs writhing. It righted itself with unsettling speed, unharmed, and charged.
Resistant to blunt force. Piercing. Aim for the mouth.
The skittering was a crescendo now. From above, a tide of gleaming shells poured around the curve of the stairs. From below, another dark wave was rising.
He was the meat in a chitinous sandwich.
Adrenaline, cleaner and hotter than he'd ever known it, flooded his hollow veins. He didn't have strength to fight a hundred. He had one path: up.
He turned and ran. Not the lumbering, desperate slog from the water chamber. This was a sprint. His new legs pumped, driving him up the steps two at a time. The armor didn't hinder him; it felt like a second skin. The wind of his own motion whistled in his ears.
The beetles were fast. Unbelievably fast. The lead ones from above were upon him. He didn't stop to fight. He swung the spear like a staff, a wild, horizontal sweep. The crystal shaft connected with a cluster of three beetles, sending them clattering against the wall. He didn't wait to see if they were damaged. He jumped over the ones scrambling at his feet, his footing perilous on the slick stone.
A searing pain shot through his calf. He glanced down. A beetle had latched on, its mandibles buried in the meat of his leg, just above the boot line of his ruined sweatpants. He cried out and stabbed down instinctively, not at the shell, but at the clicking head where it met his flesh.
The crystal tip sank in with a wet pop. The beetle's legs spasmed and went still. He kicked it off, a smear of iridescent goo and his own blood left on the stairs.
{One. Only nine hundred ninety-nine to go. A thrilling pace. You'll be a pincushion by step four hundred.}
He couldn't spare the breath to curse it. They were everywhere. On the walls, dropping from the ceiling. He was a moving feast in a tunnel of hunger. He batted, he kicked, he stabbed in frantic, inefficient motions. Each sting of mandibles was a bolt of white-hot agony—a bite on his forearm, a slash across his ribs where the armor didn't cover.
But he was moving. And he was seeing it—a change in the light ahead. Not the blue of his spear, but a dull, gray, diffuse glow. The exit.
Fifty steps. A beetle landed on his shoulder, mandibles aiming for his neck. He dropped the spear, grabbed the thing with his bare hand—its shell was shockingly hot—and ripped it away, throwing it down the stairs behind him. The pain in his hand was immediate and fierce; the edges of its shell were razor sharp. He snatched the spear back up.
Forty steps. The swarm was a living carpet now. He couldn't avoid stepping on them. Their crushed bodies popped under his boots, releasing a smell of burnt copper and rotten nuts.
Thirty steps. The gray light was an archway. A simple, rough-hewn stone arch, beyond which he could see nothing but the light.
Twenty steps. A beetle fastened onto his hip. Another on his thigh. The pain was a fire. He was a man running through a cloud of hornets made of knives.
Ten steps. He could see the arch's details. There were markings. Not words. Symbols. They looked like stylized brooms, like things being swept away.
Five steps.
With a final, guttural roar, Lu Yan threw himself forward, not up the last steps, but in a desperate dive through the archway.
He tumbled onto hard-packed earth, rolling in a cloud of dust. The skittering, clicking nightmare sound stopped as if severed by a blade.
He lay there, gasping, covered in dust, blood, and beetle ichor. The bites on his body screamed. But they were silent. No pursuit.
He pushed himself up, turning to look back.
The archway was there, a hole in a massive, moss-covered stone wall that seemed to stretch endlessly in both directions. Through it, he could see the top of the stairs, swarming with beetles. But not a single one crossed the threshold. They massed at the arch, their mandibles clicking in furious unison, a choir of frustrated hunger, but they would not pass the symbols carved into the stone.
{The Midden Gate. The Ward of Disposal. What passes through it may not return. They are programmed to respect the boundary. You are, for the moment, refuse that has been successfully taken out.}
Lu collapsed onto his back, staring up at a sky he had never seen.
It was not blue. It was a perpetual, twilight gray, streaked with slow, viscous clouds the color of bruises. There was no sun, no moon, no stars. Just the sourceless, depressing gray luminescence that seemed to emanate from the air itself. The air was cold, and carried a scent of damp earth, iron, and something else… a faint, acrid tang like ozone after a storm.
He was in a field of sorts. The ground was hard, grayish soil, dotted with ugly, thorny shrubs and clumps of brittle, gray grass. In the distance, twisted, leafless trees formed a skeletal forest. The wall he had exited from curved away, a monstrous barrier of fitted stone, vanishing into the gloom.
This was the world. This bleak, colorless, oppressive landscape.
The relief of escape evaporated, replaced by a despair so profound it made the beetle bites feel insignificant. He had traded a dungeon of monsters for a world of… this.
{Welcome to the Gloomwald Fringe, Host. The backside of the continent. The drained latrine of creation. This is where they dump the things nobody wants to think about. Including, now, you.}
Lu closed his eyes. The phantom voices of his parents were gone. The constant hum of his computers was gone. The familiar, hated confines of his apartment were gone. There was only the ache of his wounds, the chill of the alien air, the mocking voice in his head, and the vast, terrible emptiness inside him.
He had never felt so alone.
But then, a new sensation. A warmth in his hand. He looked down. The Gloomwater Spear was glowing slightly brighter. And as he watched, a flicker of text appeared in his vision, different from the System's voice.
> Biomass Processed. Essence Extracted.
> Host Vitality Below 65%. Initiating Minor Healing Synthesis.
> Converting [Carrion-Beetle Ichor] & [Latent Gloomwater Energy]…
A gentle, cooling sensation began to spread from his palm where he held the spear, up his arm, and throughout his body. The fiery pain of the beetle bites dulled, then faded to an itch. He watched, stunned, as the bleeding gashes on his leg and arm visibly knit together, leaving only pink, new scars.