BOOK 2

  CHAPTER 1

  Run Away

  The cave was wrong.

  Bash couldn't explain it better than that. The walls were too smooth. The air too still. Every step echoed longer than it should.

  “This is a bad idea.” Shai floated beside him, her form casting just enough light to see by. “The architectural patterns here indicate this place was sealed and forgotten.”

  “Good.” Bash cracked his neck.

  “Bash, I'm serious. This area isn't on any map, and there aren’t any quest markers or loot tables. Whatever's down here, the developers didn't expect the players to find.”

  “Or they hid it.” He grinned back at her. “Maybe some secret quest, or another dev room.”

  Shai's expression flickered. “That's not how it works.”

  “Sure, it is.” He gestured at the darkness ahead. “Classic setup. There's treasure down here for sure.”

  Shai said nothing. Just stared at him with a disappointed look as they walked deeper.

  The cave narrowed before opening into a larger chamber. Bash couldn't see the ceiling. Couldn't see the far walls. Just shadows pressing in from all sides, held back only by Shai's faint glow.

  The hair on the back of his neck started to rise. His Prediction skill stirred. Not the sharp warning of an incoming attack, but a hum at the base of his skull that told him something was very, very wrong.

  Shai's voice dropped to a whisper. “We should leave.”

  The hum became a flood. Warnings piled on top of warnings, overlapping, contradicting. Move. Don't move. Run. Fight. Hide. His body locked up, caught between too many commands. But underneath all of them was the same message. You are fucked.

  Something shifted up ahead. Not movement, exactly. More like the darkness rearranging itself. As if the absence of light had intent.

  Two points of pale luminescence opened in the black. Too far apart to be eyes. Unless whatever owned them was very, very large.

  Shai's light flickered and died. For one eternal moment, Bash stood in absolute black, those twin lights the only thing visible. They didn't blink. Didn't waver. Just watched.

  Then a deep, guttural roar tore through the cavern. Primal, ancient, and very pissed off.

  Oh, Bash thought. This was a bad idea.

  ***

  Bash ran. The tunnel stretched ahead, jagged and uneven, lit only by the faint glow of Shai flickering beside him. And behind him, the darkness followed.

  “Left tunnel ahead,” Shai called out. “It narrows. Might slow it down.”

  He took the left. The walls closed in as described, scraping his shoulders as he squeezed through. For three glorious seconds, he thought it had worked.

  Stone exploded behind him. The creature didn't bother with the narrow passage. It just went through the damn walls.

  “NEW PLAN!” Bash screamed, bursting out of the tunnel into another chamber. His Prediction skill was useless. It kept firing warnings for attacks that couldn’t possibly happen, overwhelming him with inputs.

  Something clipped his back. The impact lifted him off his feet and sent him tumbling across the stone floor. He rolled, came up running, and didn't look back. How long can this thing chase me?

  Apparently, for as long as it wanted. By the fifth minute, Bash spotted a gap in the cavern wall. Narrow. Dark. Just big enough for a human to squeeze through. Not big enough for whatever was behind him.

  He dove for it. The gap led to another tunnel, this one twisting sharply downward. He half-ran, half-slid, putting distance between himself and whatever followed. The roars faded behind him. The footsteps grew distant. He burst out into a small chamber and collapsed against the wall, gasping.

  Nothing but the sound of his own ragged breathing and the drip of water somewhere in the dark. “I think...” He sucked in air. “I think we lost it.”

  Shai appeared once more, her light dim and flickering. “Bash, I don't think we should stop.”

  “Just... give me a second.” He bent over, hands on his knees. His lungs burned. His legs trembled. But he was alive. He'd escaped.

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  One minute passed. Two. Still nothing happened.

  Bash let out a shaky laugh. “See? We're fine. That thing was fast, but it's not smart. Probably wandered off to find something else to play with…”

  The wall behind him exploded. He didn't even have enough time to scream as he was yanked backwards.

  It wasn't even trying anymore. It would let him get ahead, let him think he'd found an escape route, then appear from a new angle. Maybe a side tunnel. Maybe dropping from the ceiling. Maybe just materializing from shadows right in front of him. It was playing with him.

  “Shai.” He gasped the word between ragged breaths. “Distract it. Do something!”

  Shai's form blazed bright. Brighter than Bash had ever seen her. She shot out a beam of golden light, strobing in patterns designed to overload visual processing.

  The attempt didn't even slow the thing down. It moved straight through her projection like she was made of fog and kept coming.

  The blow caught Bash across the chest and launched him into the nearest wall. He hit hard enough to crack stone. Or maybe that was his ribs. Hard to tell anymore.

  Bash had stopped counting impacts. His body was covered in bruises, and his armor hung off him in ribbons. At some point, he'd lost a boot. He couldn't remember when.

  His mouth tasted like copper. His vision kept flickering at the edges. Not Shai's light. Just his brain threatening to check out from the pain. This is how I die, he thought. Beaten to death in a cave by something that doesn't even have a name.

  The creature caught him again and simply plucked him up into the air. Those not-eyes studied him with something that might have been curiosity.

  Bash dangled in its grip, too exhausted to struggle. “Listen,” he wheezed. “I think we got off on the wrong foot here. I'm sure we can work something out. Maybe a payment plan? I've got some nice loot back at camp.”

  It threw him into the ceiling. He bounced off, spun twice, and hit the floor on his back. Some of the rock broke off and shattered next to his head. “Okay.” He coughed blood. “So bribes won't work.”

  Bash triggered Reflex Surge for the third time and continued to run. Each activation had bought him maybe ten seconds of enhanced speed and reaction time. But it also drained stamina he didn't have to spare.

  The creature had adapted to that, too. It waited out the surges now, hanging back just enough to let him exhaust himself, then closing in when the skill faded.

  It's learning, Bash realized. It's learning how I fight. That was terrifying. That was absolutely terrifying.

  He stumbled around another corner and found himself in a dead end. Smooth walls. No exits. No, no, no! He spun.

  The creature filled the tunnel behind him, blocking any escape. It moved forward slowly now. Savoring the moment.

  Bash backed up until his shoulders hit the wall. The creature hadn't dealt any single massive blow. Just dozens of smaller ones. Death by accumulation.

  But he could sense that was about to change. He could see it in the way the creature shifted its weight. Playtime was over. If I'm going to die, I might as well die annoying.

  He filled his lungs with what air they could still hold.

  “I SAID NO SOLICITING, YOU FOUL BEAST!”

  The reply came in violence. One moment, he was against the wall, screaming defiance. The next he was airborne, spinning through the cavern like a rag doll.

  He hit the floor. The stone was cold and wet and very hard. Bounced. Hit a wall. The impact rattled his teeth loose. He swallowed one, choked on another. Bounced again. Each impact painted the stone red. He could see it happening in the strobing moments when his eyes worked, his own blood splashing in wild arcs across the ancient rock.

  The creature caught him. Threw him again. He felt his left arm snap, the bone punching through skin, a white spike in his peripheral vision. Caught him. Threw him. His head connected with something solid, and the world went sideways, all sound replaced by a high-pitched whine.

  It was systematic now. Rhythmic. An artist at work, using him to decorate the walls. Bash lost track of the impacts. Lost track of everything except the pain and the spinning and the wet sounds of his blood hitting stone.

  Finally, mercifully, it stopped. He lay in a crumpled heap, staring at nothing. Couldn't move. Couldn't feel anything below his neck, which was probably a blessing.

  “Thanks, game.” Bash wheezed. “Super helpful.”

  The air vibrated. Static filled the darkness. Bash watched it happen from somewhere outside himself. Watched the splinters of his bones merge and realign, bound by filaments humming with energy. Watched muscles and tendons stretch across his exposed skeleton like time-lapse footage of healing. Watched skin crawl over the mess, knitting itself together above an emerald lattice of veins and arteries.

  For one brief moment, he wasn't flesh at all. He was symbols and code. A save file being restored. Bash was made whole, but every nerve ending still sang with the memory of pain that was no longer there.

  “I hope this doesn't count as fast travel.”

  Everything went black.

  ***

  Bash woke up feeling like he'd been run over. Then reversed over. Then parked on. Whatever the hell he'd found down here had treated him like a chew toy.

  He'd survived. Technically. Rewind had reversed the worst of it. That last minute of being used as a brush to make cave art, his blood the medium and the walls the canvas.

  But everything before that? Fifteen minutes of getting systematically dismantled? Those bruises and cuts were still very much present. He rolled over and groaned.

  Shai rematerialized beside him, and with her came light, her arms crossed, head tilted as she looked down at him. “Wow, Bash. I totally thought you had him. So close.”

  “Please, shut up.”

  She crouched down to his level, voice almost sincere. “I mean it. Really inspiring stuff. The way you bounced off that wall? Poetry.”

  Bash didn’t answer. Standing hurt. Everything hurt. He looked around the cavern and saw his blood still painted across the floor in wide, artistic smears. His armor, the new set he'd just bought, hung off him in shredded ribbons.

  “God damn it.” He plucked at a dangling piece of chest plate. “Why do I even bother buying gear?”

  Shai said nothing. Just stared at him.

  “Seriously, what? You wouldn't know what it's like having to deal with functional armor. Whatever the hell you're wearing would never work in real life.”

  Shai looked down at her Victorian death metal aesthetic, black armor, all sharp angles, dramatically impractical, and scoffed. “You don't understand fashion.”

  She blinked out, and the cavern went black.

  “Wait!?” . . . No reply.

  “Shai, I can't see!” . . . Silence.

  “SHAI, PLEASE COME BACK!”