Time was running out.
According to his memories and calculations, the patrolmen stationed on the surface entered the Level Two cell blocks to distribute food and check the chains every few hours. Between picking the lock, fighting the Prowler, and spending the last who-knows-how-long punching solid rock, Tristan’s window was rapidly closing.
Soon, a guard was going to walk up to his cell, look through the bars, and see nothing but an empty cot and a broken lock.
He had to move. If he wasn’t able to slip out before they triggered the alarm, he would just have to use their routine checkup as his literal escape ticket. A tutorial-tier Stray wouldn’t give the heavily armed surface guards much trouble, but a Fallen beast dragged up from Level Three?
That would force them to break formation, panic, and call for backup.
During that bloody chaos, Tristan would make his exit.
Unfortunately, that meant he actually had to play bait for a Fallen. He had to aggro it, outrun it, and survive the ascent back to the surface. It was a terrifying gamble, but with his newly acquired Hardness concept resting in his mind, he had a single, desperate safety net.
Now, he just had to find Level Three.
He eventually found what he was looking for: a massive, jagged fissure in the cavern floor that sloped aggressively downward. A biting, freezing draft blew up from the depths, carrying with it the metallic, suffocating scent of raw, unrefined essence.
Taking a deep breath to steady his racing heart, Tristan stepped into the dark and began his descent.
The journey down felt like an eternity, his bandaged calf screaming in protest with every step. As he ventured deeper into the earth, the entire environment drastically shifted. The suffocating, stagnant air of the upper caves gave way to a biting, damp cold. The space opened up, becoming so cavernous that even if he had a torch, the light would have completely failed to reach the ceiling.
Instead of man-made fire, the jagged walls down here were lined with veins of raw, faintly luminescent ores that cast a sickly blue glow over the uneven stone. Small puddles of freezing water had formed beneath massive dripstones, and thick, pale vines and sickly moss clung to the damp walls.
Welcome to Level Three.
Tristan crept forward, his boots squelching softly against the moss. He debated how exactly he was going to get a monster’s attention without instantly dying. Throw a rock? Yell?
’Hmm perhaps not the smartest idea’
As it turned out, he didn’t need to try at all.
A wet, tearing sound echoed from a small clearing just ahead. Tristan pressed his back against a cluster of glowing ores and peeked around the corner.
Crouched over the mutilated corpse of a Prowler was a Mutant.
It was a Fallen-class parasitic fungus, a horrific monstrosity that hijacked a host and aggressively weaponized its biology. Given its roughly bipedal shape and the ragged scraps of Verneuil prison uniform clinging to its bloated torso, this one had clearly claimed a human.
But it would be a severe insult to humanity to call it human-like. The parasite had violently terraformed the host. Half of the man’s head had been entirely replaced by a pulsing, bulbous fungal cap. The skin was rotting and sloughing off in wet chunks, and the limbs had been broken and re-fused into abnormally long, disproportionate weapons.
As Tristan watched, the Mutant paused its meal. The fungal cap twitched.
It slowly turned its half-rotted face toward the glowing ores. It locked eyes, rather, locked its singular, milky human eye, directly on Tristan.
’Should I be happy or terrified’
It didn’t roar. Instead, the Mutant casually reached down, grabbed one of the dead Prowler’s thick, double-jointed legs, and violently ripped it clean off the corpse with a sickening crunch.
It hefted the massive, bloody limb over its shoulder like a makeshift club and let out a wet, gurgling hiss.
Tristan looked down at the eight-inch Prowler’s Claw dagger in his hand, then back up at the massive, severed Prowler leg the Mutant was holding. He snuck a disgusted look at his own weapon, trying desperately not to draw comparisons.
The Mutant sprinted forward.
Despite its rotting, unbalanced frame, it crossed the distance with terrifying speed. Tristan barely had time to react before the creature swung the severed leg like a baseball bat.
Tristan dove forward, rolling awkwardly over his injured calf. The heavy, clawed limb whistled through the exact space his neck had occupied a fraction of a second prior, smashing into the glowing ores with enough force to shatter solid rock. Shrapnel rained down on Tristan’s back.
If that had connected, it would have cleanly beheaded him.
He didn’t bother being stealthy anymore. He ran as fast as his wounded leg could carry him, the wet, heavy footsteps of the Mutant thundering just a few paces behind him.
He was nearing the entrance of the tunnel, the steep upward slope leading back to Level One finally coming into view, when the entire cavern suddenly shook.
A deep, localized earthquake rattled Tristan to his bones. Dust and loose moss rained down from the ceiling.
A terrible, sinking feeling dropped into his stomach.
’Please please please’
Tristan could vaguely sense the mutant behind him, not sure how it hadn’t caught up to him yet he kept running.
Desperate, Tristan forcefully squeezed a drop of his meager essence down through his pathways, flooding his legs with energy. The strain on his empty core felt like swallowing glass, but his speed instantly doubled.
He shot past a jagged section of the cavern wall just as it exploded outward.
A massive shower of stone, dust, and crushed ore blasted into the tunnel. Emerging from the fresh crater was a nightmare of razor-sharp angles and grinding stone. It was a Vein Eater.
Another Fallen-class creature.
"I really can’t tell if I’m lucky or not!" screamed Tristan as he glanced behind him.
It was a massive serpentine beast, its body composed entirely of dense, jagged crystals and compressed rock. As its name implied, it sustained itself by eating raw ores and digesting solid stone. But what the name completely failed to mention was that it was highly territorial, incredibly aggressive, and hunted absolutely anything it deemed prey.
Which unfortunately seemed to be Tristan at the moment.
The Vein Eater let out a deafening, metallic screech, its crystalline jaws unhinging as it stared down the narrow tunnel, right at the sprinting Tristan, and the enraged Mutant charging right behind him.