Julien had been moving for what felt like another hour, though without a sun, a clock, or any reliable sense of time beyond the slow, mechanical rhythm of his own crawling, he'd stopped trusting his estimates. He only knew that the hunger notice hadn't faded. If anything, it had crept upward while he wasn't looking, a small, insistent number sitting at the edge of his awareness like an itch he had no hands to scratch.
[Hunger: 22%]
He didn't know what happened at a hundred. He had a fairly strong suspicion he didn't want to find out.
The soil around him had grown looser as he moved, riddled with thin, fibrous threads he didn't immediately recognize. Roots, he realized, once his Vibration Sense caught the shape of them properly, a tangled little network spreading out from somewhere above, reaching down through the packed earth like the fingers of something patient and slow. It was, as far as he could tell, the first thing in this entire waking nightmare that actually resembled food. He allowed himself a small, cautious flicker of hope. It felt foreign after a day like this one, almost unearned.
The first attempt was, strictly speaking, dirt.
He hadn't meant it to be. Without eyes, without any real sense of where his own mouth even began relative to the thing he was aiming at, he'd overshot by a fraction and come away with a mouthful of plain, undifferentiated soil instead.
[Unsuitable Material.]
"Groundbreaking," Julien muttered, in the private, mouthless way he'd already grown used to complaining. "Really. Never would have guessed."
The second attempt found something with actual texture, fibrous and faintly bitter, a taste his body seemed to register somewhere adjacent to the concept of chewing, though he had no jaw, no tongue, nothing that should have made the sensation possible at all. He decided not to examine that too closely. There were only so many existential crises he could afford in one day.
[Nutritional Value: Low.]
[Hunger: 22% → 20%]
Two percent, for all that effort. He worked through three more roots with the grim, joyless efficiency of a man doing his taxes, tracking each thin strand by feel, biting down, waiting for the flat little notice to confirm what he already suspected, that it wasn't nearly enough. The number crawled down one grudging point at a time, until it finally settled somewhere in the low teens.
[Nutritional Value: Low.]
[Hunger: 13% → 12%]
One point. Julien stared at the notice with the particular fury of a man being cheated by a vending machine that had taken his money and given him nothing but the sound of a spring failing to release.
Fantastic. At this rate I'll starve to death slowly enough to really savor it.
Roots, he was beginning to understand, weren't food so much as a way of postponing the problem, buying himself a percentage point here and there while the real hunger, whatever that turned out to mean for a creature like him, kept accumulating somewhere underneath. Whatever his body actually needed, it wasn't fiber. He filed the thought away with the small, growing pile of things he now understood about himself that he'd never wanted to know.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
He was midway through debating whether a sixth root was worth the effort, whether one more percentage point justified the ten minutes of searching it would probably cost him, when the Vibration Sense caught something new, and every other thought in his head went quiet at once.
Something small. Smaller than the vole had been, smaller than him even, moving in short, quick bursts through the soil two meters off to his left, pausing, then darting again, in a pattern that read less like fleeing and more like hunting. It moved with purpose, doubling back on itself once, correcting course, the unmistakable rhythm of something following a scent trail rather than simply wandering.
Food, he thought, and the word arrived sharper and hungrier than the notice hovering at the edge of his mind had any right to make him. Something in him, some instinct that felt older than his own memories, leaned toward the signal the way a compass needle finds north.
He closed the distance, slow and deliberate, every contraction calculated to disturb as little soil as possible, which, given how loudly he suspected he'd been announcing himself for the last several hours, probably wasn't much. He had one skill, one stat that mattered, and exactly one plan: get close, land the hit, let the numbers do the rest. It had worked once. He told himself, with more confidence than he actually felt, that it would work again.
Three body lengths away, the shape stopped moving entirely.
Julien froze. He sent out another pulse, careful, narrow, focusing the way he was slowly learning he could, and the picture that came back rearranged everything he thought he understood. This creature wasn't small because it was harmless. It was low, lean, built long and close to the ground, and it had gone still with the specific, coiled patience of something that had already found what it was looking for and was simply waiting for the right moment to take it.
It wasn't looking toward Julien at all.
There was something else in the tunnel beyond it, smaller still, skittering in short panicked bursts, making no effort at all to hide the noise it left behind. And Julien understood, all at once, with the particular clarity of a man who has just realized he misread the entire situation, that he wasn't watching a meal wander toward him. He was watching an ambush, one that had nothing to do with him, one he had almost walked straight through the middle of without ever noticing it was there.
Predator.
He went still. The tunnel, which for hours had felt like a small, private, miserable strip of dirt and roots and nothing else, suddenly felt a great deal larger, and considerably more occupied, than he'd let himself believe. He had spent the last few hours thinking of this place as empty except for whatever unlucky thing happened to cross his path. It had never once occurred to him that he might be the one crossing someone else's.
He was still absorbing that, still recalibrating everything he thought he'd learned about his own place in this dark, dirt-choked world, when the second signal reached him.
Not from ahead. From behind. Small, deliberate, just beyond the edge of his senses, moving with the same careful, unhurried patience he'd been using himself only moments before, the kind of movement that wasn't trying to close distance quickly so much as trying not to be noticed at all.
Then a third, off to the side, closing.
Julien's understanding of the last two minutes collapsed and rebuilt itself in an instant, and what it rebuilt into was considerably worse. The coiled predator ahead of him wasn't hunting the smaller thing skittering in the tunnel beyond it, or wasn't only hunting it. It had gone still because it, too, had sensed something closing in from behind. Something patient. Something that had been tracking them both, quietly, methodically, for longer than Julien wanted to think about.
He wasn't looking at a meal.
He was standing in the middle of a hunting ground with three separate signals converging on his position, and for the first time since he'd woken up blind in the dark, Julien understood, with total and sickening clarity, that he might not be anywhere near the top of the list of things about to get eaten tonight.