Chapter Sixteen.

Fire filled the tunnels.

Fear fought a losing battle with exhaustion as the third consecutive day of my chase dragged on. Yesterday one of the now hundreds of hunter groups flooding the caverns around me had stumbled on my weakness by summoning a wall of flame to block an escape route. They'd wasted no time telling the others as I'd instinctively recoiled from the mass of magical fire and diverted our course—the latest in a line of increasingly severe mistakes.

Now fire was everywhere. I could feel the net tightening around me like a noose as tunnel after tunnel burned and my enemies herded me along. With the worm as my transport, I was faster than the individual groups but there were just so many of them. The only saving grace I had so far was the one direction they couldn't close off yet—down.

With a resounding crash, we broke through the ceiling of a small cave, plummeting down several meters and thudding into the floor. Steam rose from the worm's outer carapace as we vented heat building up in our cells, the constant frantic pace literally cooking us from within.

We exited the worm and spread out, the [Blightlings] collapsing with exhaustion and me not far behind—my black essence nearly boiling from continuous strain. They all looked emaciated; [Manavore] was enough to sustain us normally but it just couldn’t keep up with how much energy it took to maintain our frantic pace.

"We can't… keep doing this…"

I nodded defeatedly at Skritter's gasping words. But what else can we do?

Looking at the worm's body beside us revealed a horrific tableau of pockmarked craters and scars, the results of our disastrous attempts to fight the hunters directly. There's just too many.

In a one-on-one fight, my group was stronger than any of the individual teams we'd come across. The [Blightlings] were surprisingly powerful compared to the average person and magic was an incredible force multiplier for me. But it wasn’t enough.

Veris had been right (again) when he told me magic wouldn’t be as easy against others as it was against the Bane. The stronger a person was—a.k.a. the more magic they had—the more I had to use in order to affect them with [Law]. I’d actually run myself pretty low during that first… confrontation…

My mind shied away from the memories that sprung up at the errant thoughts. I could still hear the woman screaming whenever I held still, my body trembling subconsciously. My shapeshifting gradually drifted out of control and I stubbornly kept my vision focused on the floor instead of my slowly transforming hands. Human hands. I don’t have human hands. I don’t. I—

A weight ‘plopped’ in my lap, startling me. Looking down I found Theo’s armored form staring up at me, with (if you interpreted it very loosely) a comforting smile on his face.

“Is ok Boss, not your fault. We stick together, yes?”

I hugged the little monster as tight as I could without hurting him.

“Yeah, we do. Thanks, bud.”

Abruptly I was the center of a dogpile as my other minions grew jealous and clamoured for attention. Laughing, I grew a few extra arms so they could each get a hug, though I think they were a little disappointed that they didn’t get one individually.

Our break was interrupted by the sound of shouts coming from the hole we’d bored into the cavern and I couldn’t help but sigh exhaustedly as I ordered us back moving again. We’d barely left when another blast of fire poured out of the hole we’d made, a wave of heat washing over us as we retreated into another tunnel.

Cave walls rushed by as I pushed us as fast as we could go. The problem we ran into was that we had no idea exactly where we were going. Tunnels branched and looped with no rhyme or reason, dead ends came up out of nowhere and forced us to continually backtrack. Every time this happened I could feel our pursuers drawing closer, and my dwindling mana reserves meant I couldn’t afford to use my aura to scout ahead more than a brief pulse every few minutes.

All the while, we kept heading down.

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Another hour passed before I felt something change in the passage ahead with an aura pulse. That was the only warning we got before explosions thundered through the tunnel and blasted the worm back against the wall. With a cheer, over a dozen hunters charged into view, having used magic to camouflage themselves from our approach. Recovering from the blast, I was preparing to fight a desperate retreat when an ominous groan came from the rock walls around us.

Both sides froze, and I saw varying degrees of alarm appearing on the faces of our would-be ambushers as the sounds grew thunderous and sharp cracks filled the air. Then the tunnel collapsed.

The floor vanished from underneath us with the walls and ceiling quickly following suit as we all found ourselves plummeting in an avalanche of stone into a colossal empty space. Tumbling and smashing against huge boulders, I had us curl up defensively to try and limit the damage. We fell for almost twenty seconds—which was more than enough time for me to panic if there would be anything left of us from such a fall—before hitting water with a deafening series of crashes.

Briefly stunned by the impact, I found us floating in the water about five meters beneath the surface. The water was pitch black, the only light source was a faint glow from the moss on fragments of the tunnel still around me. Echoes of colliding rock continued as the boulders rapidly sank out of my vision, not even Skritter’s senses enough to pierce the murky depths. Then it was quiet.

Unease wormed its way into my thoughts. Sound travels better through water, so I should have been able to hear the rocks hitting the bottom. Unless it was really deep.

I’d just managed to convince myself to get us moving again when light flared close by, startling me into stillness again. Looking for the source, I found the survivors of my ambush team, and they were in rough shape. I counted seven of them still alive in the water, most activating some kind of flare that lit the water around them. Several were still struggling to reach the surface, and I watched a man who looked badly hurt trying desperately to reach for air.

As his struggles grew weaker, I found myself staring dispassionately. Should I help him? He had just tried to kill me and was part of a group hunting me for days. The darker part of me, the endless hunger of the [Blight Pit], felt nothing but satisfaction watching him die. Dead food doesn’t struggle. The woman’s screams started playing through my mind again and why won't she just SHUT UP—

Without another thought, I powered us towards the man, the worm’s bulk twisting its way through the water with surprising ease. Opening its mouth, we scooped him up and swallowed him whole. I pulled back the blackened fluid we composed inside the worm to form a small bubble of air around him, where he coughed and sputtered weakly for a moment before passing out.

I’m NOT a monster, damn it.

A sense of… I’ll call it ‘bemused incredulity’ came through the link from my minions as they observed our new passenger.

"Oh shut up. We'll take him close to the others and spit him out, then he'll be their problem." I said irritably.

The only response was a collective mental shrug, basically "whatever you say, boss!". I grumbled quietly as we angled up to the floating survivors, fondly remembering the days where my minions obeyed orders without background commentary. But before we could start moving I froze as every instinct in me screamed to hold still.

Casting out with my senses I couldn't see more than thirty meters away in the murky water. Flecks of dust and debris swirled aimlessly, disturbed by the avalanche and faintly illuminated by the lights of the ambush team. Confused by my instincts, I was about to risk spreading out my aura when I caught movement at the edge of my vision.

The particles swirling around shifted, a spreading wave getting pulled off to the side and out of view. My mind struggled to comprehend what was happening until it dawned on me with a spark of fear.

That was a wake. Something big just swam by in the dark.

Holding absolutely still, I waited— trying to catch a glimpse of what was stalking us. My instincts might be ruthless bastards about humanity, but when it came to identifying threats they had a great record.

Shafts of light started to pierce the dark water around us and I realized with alarm that some of the survivors had changed their flares into something like a flashlight, shining into the water to look either for their missing comrades or for me. No no no, turn it off, you idiots!

An errant beam of light passed within a meter of my face and I feared the reflective glow of the dirty water would give me away. But instead, it found something else. From the dark below us came a dim reflection, blurred by the distance. I wasn’t sure what it was until the reflection moved and a second one appeared, tracking the lights while floating deep below.

Eyes. Immense eyes nearly as big as the head of my worm. They slid back soundlessly into the dark water and out of sight as I watched, completely disappearing in seconds. Paralyzed with fear I frantically eyed every swirl of dust, trying to catch any sign of movement. When it finally came I barely even had time to blink before it was over.

A sinuous mass of teeth and dark, leathery skin flashed by me so quickly the wake pulled the entire worm along with it. Massive jaws snapped at the edge of my tumbling vision and abruptly the light was gone. In a single bite, the entire ambush team vanished and the creature disappeared back into the depths, leaving the one I’d rescued as the only survivor and us alone in the water once again.

Oh shit.