CHAPTER 21

  What's That Smell?

  The sewers didn't just take him. They devoured him. One moment Bash was falling. The next, he was chest deep in shit. A black pit so vile it resembled a billionaire's karma tank. The filth went beyond smell. It was chemical warfare. His eyes burned and his skin itched where the muck seeped through his clothes. Even his overlay flickered, the system itself choking on the toxicity.

  “Perfect,” he muttered, spitting out something foul. “Pretty sure I turned off the Scratch-n-Sniff setting.”

  He hauled himself onto a ledge slick with moss. Each step created a sucking noise. Slime clung to him and seeped into every seam of his gear.

  Bracing for what came next, he imagined the Count's dead body wedged grotesquely where it had landed. Instead the impact site was clean, nothing remaining but faint streaks in the grime, long uneven gouges trailing off into darkness.

  He crouched, fingers hovering over the marks. The gouges bit into the stone itself, not just the filth covering it.

  “That's comforting,” Bash said to no one. “Nothing screams fun more than monsters and guaranteed therapy.”

  The tunnel ahead was a medieval horror show. Low ceilings forced him into a permanent hunch, rivulets of brown water dripped from stone arches while rats ran and chittered along the walls, too many to count.

  Forward was the only direction. So, he pushed ahead trying not to think about what oozed between his toes. The drag marks he followed stretched on, winding through the tunnel, occasionally smeared where the body had caught on debris.

  His mind kept circling back to before the fall. He'd strangled a man. Not quickly. Not cleanly. He'd taken his time, watched the life drain out, felt their pulse flutter and fade under his fingers. No more rage-induced assassinations he told himself. “Next time, I'll let the guy plead his case. Maybe a closing argument before I turn them into a discount hamburger.”

  The vow echoed hollow in the tunnel. He'd promised the same thing before. And yet here he was, pretending he meant it. Even worse, he should feel something. Guilt maybe? Or at the very least remorse. The normal human reactions to murdering someone with your bare hands.

  But when he poked at the empty space where his conscience should be, he found only a vague sense of relief and mild annoyance at having to dispose of the evidence.

  Maybe I was always this person. Maybe it just took dying and waking up in this hell to find out. The thought was worse than the smell.

  Somewhere between the spirals of existential dread, he realized he'd been marching forward blindly. For all he knew, the thing that took the body was waiting to make him dessert.

  “Well done, Bash. A-plus for tactical awareness. Maybe you should just staple a bullseye to your ass and start charging admission.”

  He hesitated and half-turned, tempted to retreat. But the thought gnawed at him. If he bailed, some poor soul might stumble onto his murder, and the whole carefully constructed escape plan would blow up, and not in the fun, fireball way.

  Yeah. Can't just let this turd float. Slowing, Bash scanned the tunnel, his Investigator skill highlighting several bone fragments scattered in the muck.

  He was stepping carefully around the mess when the drag marks ended.

  Count Richard lay sprawled across a raised platform. What was left of him, anyway. His chest cavity was cracked open, ribs jutting outward like broken fingers, organs missing or half-devoured. Bite marks covered what remained of his torso, small and jagged, layered over each other in overlapping crescents. The only thing intact was his face, still frozen in that final expression of shock. Eyes wide. Mouth open mid-scream.

  Bash stood there, waiting for the horror to kick in. He stared at the mutilated corpse of the man he'd murdered and felt nothing. Just a flat, empty acknowledgment that this was a thing that had happened.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  What the hell is wrong with me? He should say something. An apology. A confession. Something to mark the occasion of standing over his victim's half-eaten remains.

  “You deserved worse,” he said quietly. “For what you did to my friend. To all of them.”

  It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even an accusation. Just a statement of fact.

  His gaze drifted away from the gruesome scene, to the platform, and the mud below.

  Fresh tracks. Clawed and clustered. Definitely not rats, unless the rats had been hitting the gym. The tracks circled the platform. Overlapped by the dozen, maybe more.

  “Great,” he grumbled, wiping grime from his arms. “Seriously, this day can’t get any shittier.”

  I shouldn't have fucking said that. Bash thought, shuttering. Goosebumps ran down his arms and legs, and that lizard part of his brain suddenly knew he was being watched.

  Peering into the tunnel ahead, nothing moved. Just my imagination, he lied to himself, backing towards the entrance, gaze flicking between the shadows.

  The quiet broke all at once. Grunts and snarls rose from the dark, echoing off the slick walls in a wave of guttural noise. The sound came from everywhere, bouncing through the tunnels until he couldn't tell which direction was safe.

  Bash cursed. Straightening, he braced himself. The emptiness dropped away, and in its place came something louder. Not fear exactly. But close.

  The first wave didn't charge in. It unfolded. A chorus of screeches ricocheted down the tunnel. Shadows jittered and coalesced, looming large on the walls and ceiling before resolving into a dozen knobby-looking goblins.

  Bash relaxed at the sight. Just some good old-fashioned trash mobs, right out of a design doc. Guilt-free slaughter of routine evil was precisely what the doctor ordered.

  A wolfish grin spread across his face as he cracked his knuckles and rolled his neck. “You little assholes had me all worked up. I thought for sure it was going to be a Deathclaw.”

  The goblins hobbled forward, stubby legs carrying them slower than a mob of toddlers. Bash was done waiting. He charged straight in, meeting them past the halfway mark, brass knuckles connecting with the first goblin's skull with a meaty thwack that echoed down the tunnel. Green-black ichor sprayed across its startled friends.

  He spun on his heel, elbow crashing into another with a satisfying crack. The creature pinwheeled before it pancaked into the slimy wall and slid down into the muck. “Two down, ten to go. Collect all twelve for the free food poisoning.”

  A third goblin shrieked and leaped. He ducked low, let the creature sail over his head, then snapped upright and double-punched it in the spine. Bone folded. The goblin crunched against the tunnel ceiling, its shriek cut.

  Something sharp raked across his back. He spun, more surprised than hurt, and found a fourth goblin clinging to him like a demented backpack. Its claws had opened three shallow cuts through his armor. Not deep. But enough to remind him he wasn't invincible down here.

  The cuts burned. Not the clean pain of a blade, but something fouler. Goblin claws weren't exactly sanitized. He could already feel his immune system screaming about contamination.

  “Great!” he screamed. “What's next, digital dysentery?!”

  He reached back, grabbed it by the head, and slammed it face-first into the wall. Once. Twice. Until it turned to paste and stopped moving.

  Another trio tried to come at him from the side. He grabbed one by either side of its head and yanked it down, cracking its skull open with his knee. The impact was so hard he half-expected treats to come tumbling out.

  The other two hesitated. Their last mistake. He swung the now-corpse in a wide arc, bowling them both into the sewage. All three sank with a splash. Marching forward, he planted his boot on one of the squirming goblins and shoved it under the sludge until only bubbles remained.

  The remaining goblins froze, their cartoonish eyes gone wide. Almost cute in the grossest possible way.

  He didn't wait for them to decide whether to run or keep fighting. He blurred into motion, fists cracking forward faster than thought. Brass spikes punched through throats and caved in skulls. The tunnel filled with shrieks, each one snuffed out instantly by breaking bone.

  Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Each kill was another click on a broken metronome. Goblin bits and blood splattered across walls and ceiling, mixing with waste to create a soup of green, black, and red.

  You're enjoying this. The thought surfaced unbidden. He pushed it down and kept killing.

  The two remaining goblins smartened up and made a break for the shadows. He was faster. He lunged, snagged one by the ankle, yanked it back just as the other tripped and faceplanted. He grabbed them both by the scruff and clanged their heads together with a resonance that would have put a cathedral bell to shame. Both goblins went limp, drifting away in the current.

  The system chimed with forced cheer.

  He stared at the quest marker. “Yeah, no.” He shook his head, flicking goblin blood from his knuckles. “No way in hell am I killing two hundred of these things. First exit I find, I'm ditching this clusterfuck.”

  He checked one of the bodies out of habit. The goblin's pockets contained three teeth, a button, and what might have been a dried eyeball. He left everything where it was. Pressing forward, Bash moved faster, scanning the walls for grates or ladders or anything that looked like a way out. The tunnel stretched ahead, dark and dripping, until it curved, then split, then curved again. The ceiling lifted gradually, the cramped horror show giving way to something almost navigable.

  Then he heard it. A whimper. Soft. Human. Coming from somewhere ahead. He slowed. The sound came again. A sob and a plea.

  “Please... someone...”