Everything. Everything flickered through Ru Meng’s mind as he cast himself deeper into darkness’ embrace. His own life, his dying father, his buried uncle. Water, blood and mud. Fire and steel.
Every twist and turn in the shadows was a fleeting quiver of a candle flame, infinitesimal instances blended together into a pool of molten wax. But his body knew what to do. His legs were light as the wind and his feet sure and firm as an arrow. His mind remembered every turn he made, as if on instinct, and an extensive map slowly sprawled out in his memory. Even in his hurry, he suppressed his breathing and softened his steps; formless shade with the presence of a ghost.
The two knives were weightless in his hands, enchanted with the Spell of Metalworking and honed to a fine edge by the Spell of Sharpening. His eyes scanned his surroundings, half-expecting rats to leap at him from every corner. A lonely orb of light hovered by his side, casting long shadows across the cavernous ceilings and bumpy earth, painting monsters across every surface.
His fears came to life. A black shadow detached itself from the darkness and launched itself toward him from behind. Ru Meng turned around and jumped backward. He threw the skinning knife at the creature. It accelerated in the air and buried itself into the creature all the way to the hilt, pinning it to the rock wall.
Ru Meng brought the orb of light toward his assailant to get a better look. Hideous snarling rattled and a small blazing fireball rushed at him. Ru Meng crouched down while letting fly the other knife in his hand. There was a pathetic yelp, followed by silence. Ru Meng walked forward and recognized the familiar and ugly little head rolling on the ground. A hellrat. He looked back at where the fireball had landed. A small puddle of burning black goo. His left hand ached.
Hellrats? Here? Ru Meng quickly retrieved his knives and prepared for a nasty fight. These pests always traveled in packs. But why were they so far up in the caves? Just a few weeks ago, they had had to travel several hours on foot to encounter any sort of Abyss creature. Was it because of the Darktide?
Every four years, the influence of the Abyss would climb towards a peak, empowering the creatures that spewed forth from its darkness, causing them to become more aggressive and venture further up in the caves where all the humans lived. It was a disaster of nightmarish proportions. That one dark night, four years ago, he was pressed together in a crowd of whimpering women and crying babes, alone in a sea of strangers. His father had been dragged away to help fight off the hordes of monsters. The lights had been snuffed out, which was to say that they existed in a formless prison filled only with the crunching of bones, the screams of the injured and soon-to-be dead, and their own horrid imagination. For what could have been days, Ru Meng had sat frozen on the damp floor, drenched in the smell of mud and filth, believing his father was dead, that everyone around him was dead and that therefore, he was dead as well. Only the occasional insect that tickled his toes as it crawled across his feet or the cool water dripping from the cave’s ceiling reminded him that he was alive. He could never forget the pure joy and relief he felt when his father’s tattered and broken figure kneeled down beside him and took him in his arms.
His father! In his panic and hurry, Ru Meng had forgotten the whole purpose of his expedition. All of a sudden, the adrenaline from the chase drained from every corner of his body like a cold, receding tide. Ru Meng felt soreness in every muscle across his body, even in places he didn’t think he had muscles to hurt. His left hand throbbed like a heart— a gross, swollen and misshapen heart. The bandage he had applied earlier had come undone. Ru Meng tightened the bandages as well as he could and tried to figure out what to do next. His father was still sick, dying, waiting for him to return and there was a group of bandits probably searching those same tunnels for him. What would he do if they came across his father before he did? How was he supposed to get his father now? What about the medicine?
Ru Meng tried to think, but he couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that there were more hellrats nearby. He could hear a distant but familiar screech from a nearby tunnel. The hellrat’s companions, no doubt. Trembling from the muscle pain, Ru Meng quickly tidied up himself and turned to another tunnel, hoping to find someplace safe so he could rest and come up with a plan. Suddenly, there was another scream. A human scream. It came from the same direction the hellrats' screeching had come from.
Ru Meng stopped in his tracks. Slowly, he turned and ran toward the source of the screaming.
A spindly old woman yelped as she tore a hellrat off of her arm, along with pieces of her sleeve and a small chunk of her wrinkly skin. She threw it to the ground and stomped it as hard as she could with the heel of her foot, leaving the Abyssal beast writhing and whimpering in the earth. She cursed over and over as she fought, with words so obscene Ru Meng hardly even understood what she was saying.
A tall but scrawny young girl stood beside her, clumsily batting at the hellrats with an oil lamp in her hand while constantly stopping to put out the small fires the damned creatures were starting as they latched onto her clothes with their blazing bodies.
The two of them were putting up a good fight against the hellrat pack with no weapons, but it was only a matter of time until they were overwhelmed by the hellrats, with their sharp claws and fiery spit.
Ru Meng paused for a moment in the shadows. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His left hand was trembling. The fear had never left him, Ru Meng realized when he looked at the ugly hellrats, but things were different now. He knew what he had to do. Ru Meng opened his eyes and counted the creatures, wiping his knives clean on his shirt as he prepared. The skinning knife was shorter and more slender than the carving knife, but both knives looked oversized in the hands of a ten-year-old. There were nine of them.
“Mo.Yi.Chü.Ke, Zak.Tin.Yün.Mo. Han.Lok.Kam.Sam, Yün.Mat.Tong.Tin,” Ru Meng cast the only two enchantments he knew on his knives and felt the weight of the metal lift from his hands.
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There was a flash of metal as a knife punctured the eye of a hellrat that had gotten uncomfortably close to the old woman’s jugular. The creature shrieked and crumpled to the ground, where it writhed in pain. Several of the other hellrats immediately looked around cautiously with their eyestalk. The woman and the girl were equally as surprised, but were still too busy protecting themselves to wonder what was happening.
A scrawny hand holding a large carving knife swung out of the shadows, decapitating a hellrat and maiming another in a single stroke. The girl flinched as the blade missed her own face with inches to spare. Back on the other side, the skinning knife removed itself from the dead hellrat and turned its aim to the rest of them. The three hellrats scrabbling over the old woman’s clothes detached themselves and scampered about, trying to avoid being skewered by the knife.
The remaining four turned on their new threat, hissing menacingly at the young boy who had thinned their numbers. Even the maimed hellrat had righted itself on its remaining front limb and looked poised to pounce.
One of the hellrats started gurgling, black flammable ooze rising from behind its throat when—
“Mo.Yi.Chü.Ke, Zak.Tin.Yün.Mo!” muttered Ru Meng under his breath as he waved his left hand.
The rusty metal lamp in the young girl’s hand wrenched free from her grip and smashed into the hellrat. The ball of black ooze burst into flames in its mouth as it was sent careening into one of its companions.
At the same time, Ru Meng leaped at the injured hellrat, batting its companion away with his left hand. The hellrat tried to dodge out of the way, but its missing leg slowed it down. Ru Meng chopped the beast in half with a well-placed swing. Meanwhile, the skinning knife had turned one more hellrat into a pincushion.
The surviving hellrats gathered together as a group, watching Ru Meng and the hovering knife and lamp warily from a distance. Ru Meng sliced his bandages open and cast them aside. They had caught on fire when he knocked the hellrat aside. He crouched slightly and waited for the hellrats’ next move. The old woman and young girl moved behind Ru Meng.
The hellrats paused to look at each other with the hideous eye on the end of their necks and started screeching at Ru Meng. Low gurgles came from their throats and five fireballs shot straight at him. Ru Meng stepped out of the way and brought the oil lamp in front of him to shield himself. The only fireball that had remained on target shattered into a sheet of flames that engulfed the surface of the lamp, sending sparks flying everywhere into the air. Ru Meng opened his eyes and found that all five hellrats were missing from where they had been.
The young girl screamed and Ru Meng looked down to see the hellrats sinking their claws into his pants. Ru Meng slammed the still-burning oil lamp into two of the beasts, knocking them to the ground. A sharp, stinging pain shot down his shoulder. A hellrat had made it all the way up his back and was biting into him with its fangs. Ru Meng tried wildly to tear it off his shoulder, but all it got him were a few more bites and scratches on his left hand. He stabbed a hellrat through its neck and pulled another one off his waist, but the one on his shoulder was still stubbornly attached.
Ru Meng felt another surge of pain as the fiend tore out another piece of flesh with its teeth. Panic was starting to set in, closing in on every direction like the endless walls of these caves. What if he lost? The hellrats would chew on his body for hours, tear every piece of meat off his bones as he lay there helplessly, a worthless, witness to his own murder. Even worse still was his father, who would have to wait there for someone to save him, wait in vain and in agony and no one would come. Ru Meng pressed his fingernails into his palm and forced himself to push the dark thoughts aside.
He punted one of the hellrats into the distance and threw himself to the ground shoulder-first. There was a sickening squelch as the hellrat was crushed under Ru Meng’s weight. Ru Meng turned around and pulled the knife across its throat for good measure. Warm blood splashed against his cheeks.
The few remaining hellrats hissed and scampered into the darkness.
Ru Meng stood there in silence, watching the hellrats to make sure that they had run off for good. The scratch marks on his back were searing hot and his heart was beating so hard he thought his ribs would break at any moment.
Ru Meng turned back to check on the young girl and the old woman, only to find the young girl’s face frozen in horror and fear. Her eyes watched him cautiously, darting between his eyes and the knife in his hand constantly; her lips trembled and her body was turned away from him. Ru Meng saw himself reflected in her eyes like his father when he thrust his sword into his uncle’s throat. Stricken by a sudden inexplicable sense of panic, he moved forward, trying to form the words to explain that he wasn’t a danger to them.
The young girl flinched. Cold seized his heart. Ru Meng stopped in his tracks and stared at his hands, chafed and blood-stained from his skirmish with the hellrats. He wondered what he looked like to the two of them. A fear he had never felt before, a fear he couldn’t explain, started to take root in his heart, spreading its grubby tendrils everywhere.
A pair of warm, clammy hands suddenly seized Ru Meng by his ankle, snapping him back to his senses.
“O, thank you for saving us, sir. We have no means of repaying the incredible favor you have done us in saving our worthless, wretched lives,” cried the old woman, prostrating herself while wailing so loudly Ru Meng was worried the hellrats might return.
Ru Meng was taken aback by the old woman’s passionate show of gratitude. His ears turned slightly red as he hastily helped the woman back on her feet, fumbling to remember the words you use when you speak to another person, “N-n-n-no, worries. A-and please, don’t call me ‘sir’, I—”
The old woman who had been crying just a moment ago suddenly broke into a beaming smile as she interrupted him, “Very well, young hero, I won’t call you sir. I must say, we are so incredibly lucky to have come across you today. I was certain we were dead right then. Can you believe it? Hellrats? Here? Ah—”
The woman grabbed the young girl by the shoulders and forced her into a bow. The girl still seemed apprehensive, but she clutched the woman by her arm as she muttered an apology.
“This is my granddaughter, Yu Ning. I am so sorry for her behavior. We are truly very grateful for your help. May I ask where you’re heading, young hero? Perhaps we can be of help somehow,” said the old woman.
Ru Meng, who had so far been drowning under the old woman’s unceasing barrage of words, had finally been given a small moment of respite. He stuttered a little, but eventually managed to mumble something about going to the Nameless Town.
“You don’t know the way, young hero?” the old woman leaned forward and asked quizzically, her beady little black eyes looking Ru Meng up and down as if she couldn’t understand how it was possible for someone to not know their way to the Nameless Town.
Ru Meng blushed a little, in part out of embarrassment at his own ignorance, in part because he wasn’t used to being praised. He looked away slightly and nodded.
“Well, no worries, we live on the outskirts— we can show you the way there!” said the old woman cheerfully as she flashed a smile at Ru Meng.
Ru Meng replied with an awkward smile. Even he himself had not realized that the tension had faded from his shoulders.