Ria was hated by the Goblin, but helped by the croc and cared by the garden elf: she had to constantly remind herself to not completely believe their words, but not to neglect them either. Though some of them were nice to her, they weren’t her friends. She didn’t know whether their affection was a ruse or not. Being subjected to this kind of mental friction was hard on her, but it did a nice job of keeping her worried and focused.

The mounds weren’t far from the dining table. The light from her torch revealed the route and the past associated with it. Broken pieces of white bones littered the whole floor: some were mere splinters of their previous size and others crunched loudly under her weight. The sounds made her cringe but they didn’t slow her down. However, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t terrified. The crocs words had her on the toes. Knowing that something lurked inside the shadows emerging from the mounds kept her wary of her surroundings. She even reverted back to prowling with her back arching and chest almost parallel to the white floor.

The rattler –as the Croc called it- had stolen its last stash of food. She had an inkling of its identity. But she hoped for her thoughts to remain a work of her imagination and not something true. Her task bound her to fight and defeat the thing, after all. Although her primary objective was to retrieve the Croc’s stolen food stash but having just come from facing a zombie that acted with relentlessness, she held no false hope of being spared from the fight. But she was ill-equipped. She had her torch gripped in her left hand, and in her other hand, she clenched her knife. Her clothes were tattered and she was barefoot. Not really the ideal equipment to fight with a zombie’s successor.

A few minutes later she was in front of the mounds. Their number had increased since the last time she’d seen them. There had only been as many as a palm-full of peas scattered sporadically. Now the conical shapes jutted out of the ground at every few meters. Either a massacre had happened on this stage in the time being or this was a completely different place. A large number of bone shards covered the whole floor in a layer of white. The sharper pieces of which did try to poke her sole but her feet had grown tough enough to strive through them. The floor gave her a sensation akin to walking on rocky terrain.

“If only I hadn’t lost my shoes.” There was nothing she could do about it.

She did hesitate at the boundary of the new mound valley. The whole thing just didn’t feel right to her. But she carried onwards, however. Her torch fire ruffled beside her, the light illuminating old and grayed ribcages, cracked bones and broken skull on her path. Shadows grew and disappeared with her. Silence followed quietly. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears. Every breath she took was loud and sharp. Bone crunching sound followed her every step. To her surprise, the deeper she went, the wider the valley got. It hadn’t looked so large from the outside.

“Should I go back?” She said looking over her shoulder. However, she soon came to understand that she had underestimated the sewer. There wasn’t an exit behind her. Hundreds of mounds crossed the path behind her. The entrance was nowhere to be seen. Had she really walked so deep into the valley of mounds? She really hadn’t, but the sight was also true. As for how she could distinguish the number of mounds in the darkness where the only source of light was her torch? The air itself was faintly radiating, creating a hue of illumination strong enough to make the mounds distinguishable. It was no surprise that she decided to head-on.

Is there no exit? Or will one appear upon the rattlers defeat?

As of now, no otherworldly being had tried to stop her descent and this knowledge had her on the edge. She knew the sewer liked to play with its contenders. She liked calling herself a contender because the word gave her hope; it made her think that -slim as it might be- she still had a chance to survive. But she didn’t enjoy the restlessness her surrounding permeated. She could almost feel something watching her from the shadows- keeping its eyes on her. This was one very demanding thought. It expended her focus at a much rapid rate than she felt secure with.

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And to her surprise she easily found the crocs stash lying in the center of an open area with a ring of bone mounds surrounding it. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the mounds weren’t small. They were ten-foot tall at an average and equally wide. There were many which were easily triple that size and some which were even smaller than her. To find an open area in this place was a sign of trouble on its own, but to find her objective lying defenselessly along with it, only added to the complexity. The stash even looked completely neglected- like the entity which had stolen it hadn’t done so out of necessity but order.

“Is that it?” She gawked from the boundary of the circular space. But before she could make up her mind, about what to do next, something –a dark shadow, a shape- moved in the distance with a heavy rattling sound.

“I knew it!” she said. “How could it be that simple?”

Clenching her knife tightly, she waited for her stealthy neighbor to come out into the light but no matter how long she waited it refused to act before her. It really tested her patience. She was already tapping her feet in anxiousness and when it refused to act before her, she stopped waiting and went for the stash.

I’ll deal with it when it comes.

It was a giant leap from her side. There were no exits. There was no place to run or hide. No one would come to help her. She was alone, on her own. And she decided to fight without hesitation. Growing closer to the stash she plunged her torch deep into the ground and dropped her sack of torches beside the stash. She immediately lit another torch and opened the stash to see what it contained.

It held an unconscious naked man with his hands tied behind his back to his feet.

Oh, No. The Croc’s food stash… of course…

And to her horror, he was alive.

Then the sound came again. Something rolled away from her left to right behind her with the sound of bones grinding against each other. Her back tingled as a shiver passed down her spine. She was waiting for it but it still managed to surprise her. As she wheeled on her heels and stood up facing the direction it had went toward, something rattled behind her. She only managed to see bones tumbling down a mound. Breathing deeply she gulped and exhaled. The unfortunate crunching sound followed her- Distracting her. She stood on the balls of her feet, giving her just enough lean in her posture to allow her to roll forward or dash away in an emergency.

Something rattled again to her right. It was getting stupid now. “Just come out and fight me.” Angry and anxious as she was, she still looked and just as she turned, something grunted from her left. She didn’t think and rolled forward. A gust of wind ruffled her hair and something small fell to her direct right.

“Fuck…” a groan leaked out of her mouth as the sharp bones on the ground rubbed against her almost bare back and shoulders. As she came to a stop something tightly held her ankle and pulled. The pull hadn’t been strong, but it had come at a bad time. She fell back to the floor with her arms spread forward. Bones crunched to her right, at a distance. Something rattled. She scrambled up by pushing on her free leg, dragging the other behind. Whatever had held her ankle tugged a few more time before letting go. She inadvertently looked down and saw something the size of an apple roll away into the shadows. Her imagination was coming back to haunt her. She saw a white skeleton hand, limped away using the index and middle fingers as legs. She hiccupped as she heard something running toward her from behind.

She raised her torch and slashed with her knife just in time to catch her assailant in the ribs. Something whirled past the left side of her face as the torch brought her assailant into the light. It was hard. It was light. It was a skeleton- a structure made of bare-bones which moved away from her after being struck down.

“Holy shit, it’s -really a- skeleton!” She scooted away from it, rolling on the ground, as the skeleton disappeared to her left and into the darkness. She had dropped her torch in surprise and currently, it lay there on the ground burning but with resistance. It had run away, but she could hear its bones rattling nearby. It wasn’t far though it constantly kept changing its position. Using the darkness as a cover, it moved about. It didn’t strike her out from the front. No. It played hide and seek with her.