Since returning to this life, I’d learned my lessons.

“Hold here,” I said, leaving Arus’ reluctant hands to hold my flesh together as I stapled up the last of my gruesome injuries.

For someone who was fine with blowing giant insects to bits and violently whack them with wrenches, the Ruskel didn’t seem too comfortable around blood and wounds.

Not that he said anything as I wrapped myself up in self-disinfecting bandages. A syringe filled with knock-off STIM later, and I could feel the fog resting over my mind began to ease up.

Some of it, though other worries were taking its place.

Barely a day on this planet, and I’d gone through a good chunk out of whatever medical supplies I’d prepared. Hopefully, Jenna had more.

“Now what?” Arus groused, meticulously wiping the blood from his fingers as he looked over at me. “How do you intend to get us out of this situation.”

I’d just leaned back against the tunnel wall, cross-legged and breathing deeply. Which was fortunate, as my first instinct had been to strangle the Ruskel otherwise.

Without my interface, it was hard to tell how messy my mental state was getting, but I was still forced to draw another few breaths before responding. Just to keep myself from yelling that he was the reason we were down there.

Too petty. Wouldn’t achieve anything. Keep your calm, Yamien.

“You’re the earth expert,” I shortly said, eyes closed as I tried to will my pounding headache away. Treated or not, my injuries were still bad, and with the adrenaline fading, merely keeping myself upright was turning into a chore.

I couldn’t let my mind become muddled as well.

“What are the odds you can find us a way out of here?”

My question silenced the Ruskel for a while.

Not that I couldn’t hear him as he kept pacing back and forth, inspecting the tunnel walls with shifting taps and scraping sounds. Neither helped with my attempted meditation, but I still left him to it.

We did need to find a way out of there, and with the current state of my interface, I’d be near useless in that endeavor.

“It’s strange…” Arus began after a while, having finally sat down against the tunnel wall as well. Just that he was facing it, staring at the rock with great intensity.

I let my one eye slide open.

“What is?”

“These tunnels,” the Ruskel hummed, scratching his hairy face with sooty gloves. “Here, the rock is telling me to go left, but if I go left, the ¨rock instead tell me to go right. It’s a mess.”

I just stared at the hunched up Ruskel for a moment.

“And what did you expect a tunnel to tell you?”

“Aishe,” the Ruskel hissed, clicking his tongue at me. “Your simplistic human mind wouldn’t understand.”

“Yet here you are, struggling to understand as well…” I huffed. My mid-healing had only gotten so far beneath Arus’ constant muttering, and now, if the Ruskel was going to be snarky with me, I was only a slip of judgment away from turning violent.

He was the reason we were down here; I had risked my life to save his; and between a pounding headache a shitty situation, I simply didn’t possess the mental space to be the bigger man.

If I’d known how to get out of there, I would’ve left the Ruskel behind without hesitation. Now, however, opaque goggles turned my way.

“Fine, human-boy, what do you think created these tunnels?”

“Geological activity,” I said with more confidence than I should’ve possessed. I was only quoting what my UI had told me.

“Some — maybe most, even — yes.” Arus nodded. “Others have been dug, and a few…who knows? But any tunnel that was dug, was created through volcanic activity, or through wind and water erosion, you’d expect there to be a direction, no? For said tunnel to lead somewhere, be it further into the ground, or towards an exit.

“These tunnels, however, lack that. They are like the mad scribblings someone put down to hide their notes.”

I looked towards a stone wall that seemed no different from any other I’d seen. What notes? I almost asked, but instead settled for the more urgent, “Then how do we get out of here?”

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“We wait for the sonars up above to be activated…” Arus slowly began, and the silence that followed said just as much.

Two of the drills, if not all three, had been destroyed, and there was no telling how the situation looked with the rest of the Ruskel company either. Getting those sonars up and running could take anywhere between hours and weeks.

If they ever got up.

“Or we take our chances down here,” I filled as I tiredly got to my feet. “As long as we keep aiming up, things can’t get any worse, at least.”

On the contrary, if I got my interface to start working again, things would only get easier. Which would have been impossible if my glasses really had gotten damaged by those earlier explosions.

But then, a crystal-clear message had briefly appeared before my eyes. You want me to Harvest those insects, don’t you? I thought as I looked down at my UI.

Flexing my wrist, a sharp needle slid out of the graft. Nearly a foot long and barely thick enough to support itself, I almost feared it would snap apart from just moving my arm.

Months of work had gone into getting this upgrade to work, and I had yet to test it out. Something didn’t seem too pleased about that fact.

Twenty-three bullets, a jagged knife, and a feeling that I once more was getting pushed down some sinister path.

All I could do was keep moving forward.

𐫰 𐫰 𐫰

Trying to move towards the surface within those winding tunnels proved easier said than done. Whenever it felt like we were making progress, the path would suddenly make an abrupt turn back into darkness, loop into a place where we’d already been, or simply disappear into a dead end.

Had I not known any better, I would have said that something was keeping us down there.

For better or worse, finding those insects was at least easier than finding our way out, and Arus proved to be more than just dead weight.

𐫰 𐫰 𐫰

“None of this makes any sense,” the Ruskel complained, limping ahead of me like a living disco ball. “At this rate, it’ll be faster digging our way out of here rather than—ARGH!”

Never allowed to finish his sentence, Arus was knocked to the floor as a heavy body dropped down from the ceiling, landing straight onto his back.

The hissing and spitting thing was nearly as big as the Ruskel himself, and now, several sharp pincers kept snapping at the back of his head.

Before it could get hold of something softer than armor clad hands, however, I’d staggered over to impale it with my knife.

Although my strength was at an all-time low, I was at least getting better at disposing of these insects.

My blade found a gap in the chitin at its neck, twisted around, and snapped it apart.

“Why me?” my whimpering Ruskel companion complained as the weight disappeared from his back. “Why do these fuckers keep attacking me?” Painstakingly, the living disco ball pulled himself back to his feet, illuminating our surroundings with the sharp floodlights embedded into his armor.

Yeah, it’s really a mystery…

“Who knows?” I shrugged; the harvesting needle already extended as I now plunged it into the twitching insectile body. “Maybe they prefer the taste of Ruskels over humans?”

“Wouldn’t be the first,” Arus sniffled as he stepped over to kick his latest assailant’s severed head. I could’ve told him to save his strength, but it would’ve been pointless. Neither of us had any left.

We’d been stalking these tunnels for hours now, fending off dozens of different variants of these insects — this one had extra pincers and an arachnid structure to its body, which, thinking about it, was probably what had allowed it to cling to the ceiling.

Both me and Arus were exhausted, and the ugly insect’s head barely rolled a meter from the Ruskel’s weak kick. It did pull a groan from the man himself, though.

I’d been too slow during the last attack, and the segmented insect had left him with a constant limp. I’d hoped he would walk it off, but instead, it only seemed to be getting worse.

No matter how much I wished to reach the surface, we couldn’t go on like this. I was down to thirteen bullets, Arus could barely walk, and my reaction times were only getting slower.

Still, as I saw that blurry message flicker over my vision:

97% #¤)” ga╨he■ed…

followed by a pounding headache, some part of me urgently wanted to keep pushing forward. Although I wasn’t sure what I was gathering — something was there, I just couldn’t access it without my interface — that percentage had steadily been moving towards 100.

‘Soon, you’ll find the answer…’ a voice in the back of my mind kept whispering, but every time it did, every time one of those hazy messages flickered across my eyes, my headache would only intensify.

I let the harvesting needle slide back into my UI as the insectile body began to wither away before my eyes.

Yeah, I’m certainly gathering something, all right…

One part of me was eager to find out what, another dreaded it, yet as of that moment, it was the voice of reason that took over.

“Put that down, would you?” I tiredly called out to my Ruskel companion. He’d just picked up the double-pincered head to now raise it above his head in another of his revenge ceremonies. “We need to find some place to rest. We can’t keep going like…”

With a powerful grunt, Arus flung the head down the dark tunnel.

“This.” I finished with a sigh. Though, the weariness I’d been feeling only lasted a moment.

Arus staggered backwards, falling onto his bum as he failed to catch himself. Not from the force of the throw, however, but from the looming silhouette that’d just shifted within the shadows up ahead.

Something moving deeper inside the tunnel, and then, an armored leg stepped forward into the floodlights, effortlessly impaling the ugly head that lay there upon the floor.

Shortly after, a face — familiar yet at the same time not — followed. My first instinct was that one of those larger, truck-sized insects from outside had found us. But no, this one was even bigger, riddled with mean chitinous growths that jutted out of its body.

No matter what it was, I never hesitated before raising my gun towards it, firing five bullets straight into its face.

The thundering recoil was deafening within the narrow tunnel, yet thanks to it, I was confident each bullet hit even without the interface to assist my aim.

Just that, rather than fell the behemoth, they just ricocheted off the chitinous growths that covered its head. They didn’t even scratch the monster. At most, they only made it angrier.

Now, its maw opened to a ferocious roar that caused my ears to pop and pebbles to shake loose from the ceiling.

Well, shit…