It was hard. Walking was. Each step filled with pain, bones clicking, gashes bleeding. A small trail in the making from the bigger stain. The burns were still aching from weeks ago… But healing… only slowly…

In these moments recalling the past usually helped. Clinging to something that happened forever ago. It would ease the burden at least for a little, give some sort of strength. But now they were just blurs. A shade of what they seemed so long ago. Days turned into moments or even worse… blurred out so much, they are no longer to recognise. The headache didn’t stop, it seemed it will never do.

This scared. Not even the headache, not the unending pain. Memories. Those that make men in what they are.

Fear. Fear that someone who used to be loved and cared for, someone who liked to tell a joke, someone who belonged… was dying. Replaced by someone with almost no humanity, remorse or care.

Tears flowed, like a gash in the cheek.

Sound echoed through the labyrinth, thin broken and ever so painful. The same sound that echoed in the mind, mixing with the whispers at the edge, deafening them little by little, until one broke through.

‘The sea… Ocean… Lies in the lock… Truth… hide… Break… Free the world…’

________

With a slight push, the gears moved, shifting the giant slabs of stone to sides, revealing a small room with a black trapdoor.

He leaned on the door, shaking. Glaring at his trembling hands, he wanted to curse but vomit came out instead.

“Not again…”- he grumbled, wiping vomit and blood off his chin, clenching his fists.

The day he finally was able to discern objects with his left eye, he had to go out and get bitten by freaking spider. And all’s good and well if the spider wasn’t half a meter tall and its jaws didn’t bite through whatever was left of his green leather jerkin. The black one turned into rags.

As if feeling the weakness of its owner the box started rattle, serpents screaming to be freed, hissing for the lid to shift just a little, to see the outside just for a moment.

He took a deep breath a touched a side of his face near his eyes, where the skin was scarred and an eyelid was missing.

‘All it took was to just close the lid…’- he smirked.

*Hissssss*

As if taken away from his thoughts, he quickly grabbed the tiny box in his pocket.

“Silence!”- and the hissing stopped with a tiny bark just at the end of it, so did the rattle.

Sighing, he braced himself, trying to walk straight without wobbling or falling.

He swallowed… often.

Opening the trapdoor proven to be harder than it seemed at first. Puking took away almost all his strength so the little rock fell quite often, until it fell right, actually leaving the space open.

That didn’t make him particularly intrigued or happy. Nothing at this point really did. But let’s say that this point in its essence made him especially unimpressed and discouraged.

Ladders.

Ladders mean heights. Mean climbing either up or down. And this one in particular was going down… With no lights.

One thing descending down to the place that you know, another going down into the darkness.

“Of all things… Really?”- he said, wiping his nose. Little red on his wrist.

Looking at the opening he could barely fit himself through. Sighing and on the verge of crying he looked through his last sack for any glass or anything that could break.

______

After gulping down what’s left of the potion, he tossed the glass bottle aside. Checking his pockets he had that crystal ball secured in one of the pockets in his jerkin and a couple of tiny potions stored away in the pockets of his pants.

“Here goes nothing.”- he said as he dropped the sack into the unknown.

Silence.

Nothing.

Bam? Nah, nothing again.

Sighing deeply and dispirited to do anything, he slowly started to climb down.

Placing his left foot down, then right, then left hand and then right, all while shaking. He felt the cold touch of iron, the old rust ripping into his palms, the heaviness of his body and of course crippling headache.

As the darkness was embracing him further, the light soon became a round in the sky like the sun, progressively becoming smaller. The tiny spot seemed smaller and smaller the lower he was descending. It was as if he was moving down the giant spearhead, walls waiting to crush him.

He placed his left foot and the iron clanked, the bar collapsing and falling down with his sense of balance. Hands, not ready for a sudden increase of the burden, betrayed him slipping off. Rust one last time scraping them. His body went backwards hitting the wall with his back and head, then down, body strained, with every muscle stiffened in shock.

He screamed in panic at first but then moments later grumbled in pain. His right leg was caught on the bar, while his back was still pressing against the wall. In that moment he was really happy that he was never able to do splits.

_______

When the light was as small as the stars in the night sky, the paranoia was finally starting to kick in.

By this point his shakes were happening not only due to venom in his system, but also because of the fatigue and fear. Fear that he would slip up again and had to go through this all over again and being tired didn’t particularly help him either. But saying that, he wasn’t as much as afraid of his body being tired, granted he could heal anything and had stamina constantly replaced, due to his condition, as he was afraid of being accustomed to this monotonous movement. He was afraid of boredom. The moment he will see this action as a routine, he will lose the edge. And if anything ‘out of norm’ happens he won’t be able to react to it in time if react to it at all.

The negative thoughts were not helping it either. Whining was fine. ‘When will this stop?’ ‘Why am I doing this?’ But the real devil was in the creeping ideas that this is a trap or that this labyrinth simply leads nowhere.

Here in darkness imagination, doubt, ambiguity and hopelessness start to really work their magic.

A slight unconscious scrape of cloth on the side and he was already expecting something hop at him.

A slight trick of mind – shade dancing on the edge of his visions, fed by his imagination, unsettling him even further.

A slight whisper in his ear from nothing, a whisper that he always could hear but strangely different this time. Then the scream.

Even though it was dark all around him, he knew he was unconscious, he didn’t feel the pain, he didn’t feel the coldness of iron, nor could he smell the stuffy air. All he could feel is his own body falling, endlessly, through the loop of events, places, times, seconds, moments. Until he reached it.

_____

By luck, by chance or by divine intervention my conscious was ripped out of the limbo, forcing my eyes to open but seeing nothing that can be or could be discerned.

Blurs screaming, blurs shining, blurs flying, blurs running, blurs falling. Colours mixing. Indigo on the ocean of grey. Liquid fell on me and on the blur I was lying on. It wasn’t not long, but maybe it was. It was forever, briefly till I saw the green blurs, flying. Like birds, soaring giant seas and rivers of grey and purple and red. Like cold whispers silently telling me warm nothings.

‘Curse…Ash to rot…Night to sun…Circle…The moon… Seek the ocean…’

____

The first thing I felt was the cold and then it was the stink. When I opened my eyes I saw the sky. Greyish red of Semerian sunsets. Something I for once enjoyed to watch. Semerian skies rarely shown different colours mixed in with its eternal grey.

I tried to stand up. The response I got was horrible pain all across my body. I tried to look down, but all I could see was someone’s split scull staring at me. This plain shocked me and in my aversion I tried to move again which proved to be successful, before pain hit me again. With an outcry I went down to the mud.

At least now I could see my body. My grey shirt turned crimson and I wasn’t sure whether that was my blood or the blood of that man. It didn’t hurt, at least not as much as my legs did. Them facing directions they should not kind of does that. I looked to my sides. My left arm was twisted, the right one had a cut, but I could move it and it could move me. I needed anything that could move me.

I took a deep breath, then coughed… badly. My chest hurt a lot. Taking deep breaths was a mistake and I was wasting time here coughing, asking for attention. I read somewhere that after battles appear looters and they don’t like anyone whom is still alive.

Crawling on your back among corpses on the battlefield was not something I ever thought I would experience or want to experience. Staining yourself with other people’s blood mixed with dirt mixed with feces mixed with little pieces of rotting flesh. But that was the least of my concerns.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The idea that I had to go back to that place to that village, seeing those people that would kill me in cold blood scared me. I didn’t want to go through that. I wanted to run away and make a peaceful living or go and learn magic and find a way to get back home.

“Ey! Look here! That one is alive !”- a shout so far it is almost impossible to hear.

I looked around in panic there was no one around me… yet. I increased my pace. I thought of straightening my legs and then crawling on fours (or threes), but just looking at them made want to barf. In the end I settled for just turning around and crawling on my stomach that would make it a little bit faster.

Easily said than done.

Moving to the sides, moved my legs shifted them a little, and when I finally turned to my stomach my knees responded with an unsettling crack, I clenched my teeth and screamed in my shoulder.

This way crawling became easier and much faster but also a lot more painful, anyway speed was the priority here.

I saw corpses of the villagers and some people from nearby hamlets, hair golden stained with blood and mood and skin white even before they died. The soldiers weren’t different either except there were a lot less of their corpses lying around and they actually had armour and shields. Underneath they were all Semerians.

That’s it. Both citizens of one country, just foolish men joining on the insurrection against their local vassal or count, I wasn’t sure. But I was definitely sure that Uncle Rohg or Lim or Seb weren’t sure why they joined or why all of this started. To them it was something to do besides feeding pigs and growing potatoes.

Lost in my thought, my hand slipped under me, spinning me to the side. I hit my head onto something, I wasn’t sure but I felt blood coming down before I passed out.

___

The sound of hooves hitting mud, a sound that is familiar to me after so many days spend on the field. Beside me men moaning, all in injuries, with visible damage to them both physical and moral. Above, a starless night with a giant moon peeking from the horizon. The time for Moon Dances or so Rohg told me. When men and women come and dance around a fire, praising the tree and the sentinel for great harvest or asking for a better next year.

Better next year… I hope.

____

I was looking at the fire. Flickering dancing playing telling, doing fire things. I thought about past. About mother and father, my friends, my hobbies, everything.

Fire flickered.

Sudden scream of a man beside me snapped me out of my melancholy, bringing me back and almost giving me a freaking heart attack. I think his name was Tet. Like Ted but with a ‘t’ at the end. I met him only moments before battle started. He seemed nice enough guy. He was a carpenter and liked to make wooden soldiers for his son. He told us how funny it was he became one himself. Now he was crying.

To be honest I was about to join him, until I heard a woman’s voice.

“You’re young. How old are you?”

I tried to speak but only quiet hissing came out.

“If it’s me, I’m 14… What about you?”- I wasn’t sure whom she was addressing and it was a bit hard to talk.

“Hah, I’m going to be 28 this winter. You know for someone we found with a pike sticking out of his head, you speak… normal. You can tie sentences together. Maybe it’s because you’re young. Anyway it’s rare.”- she rattled cheerfully. Even Tet quieten down, though there was a guy somewhere coughing horribly.

“Not really. I wasn’t… hit by a pike… man. Man in purple… indigo. His flash hit me…”- I whispered back, clarifying things.

“Bloody hell.”- she said with a sadness in her voice.

“What’s wrong?”- even I was surprised at my tone there, my voice almost silent.

She sighed.

“You got hit by a Soulripper or a mage. Whatever you want to call it. Sometimes people survive their attacks and gain abilities. Like better healing or superior strength or speed. Men become a touch faster a touch stronger and some even claim to see the magic itself or alter their destiny cutting through the bark of the tree. You can be like them child… A great hero.”- she said, trying to encourage me. Her tone spoke it all though. I will die.

Later I would learn that sometimes, something like 1 in 10000 a person hit by a death spell would live to see the next day but only 1 in 10000 out of those people can actually survive and live on as that ‘hero’. The first week is what counts. If you can live through it, you’ll live. If you don’t, well you don’t.

I was always found it ironic how one of the easiest killing spells can prove to be a great source of power. What actually happens is your body gets charged with foreign magic, exceeding the capacity of the magic pool inside of you. It’s like overcharging a battery. But then with those whom survive they say that ‘their soul’ adjusts to the new magic or takes it in or something. Different men tell different stories especially when it comes to magic.

But at that time I didn’t know any of that.

After hearing her story I simply smiled.

“Thank you” – I said, straining my voice so that it came out as clean as possible.

Strangely I didn’t cough and as other men asked her and she continued to speak, I started to feel dizzy slowly trailing off into the land of dreams until everything around me was black and I could hear nothing.

*ding*

____

He woke up choking on his own vomit, which he found quite invigorating. His back was sore, but not broken. He didn’t fall that long then. He tried to stand up, snapping something at his feet. Standing up ultimately turned out to be a failure as the footing was not stable at all, dragging him to the side.

*rattle*

When he landed face down on the floor, with loud groan, a small glowing yellow ball came out of his pocket, dimly illuminating the dark room.

“Isn’t this great… A pile of bones… Mmmm…” – he said with a deadpan expression, once he stood up, staring at what was his former bed.

The room was relatively small and had large tubes/pipes coming out of walls and ceiling. He figured this was something like a cemetery or dump for this place. He thought it to be strange that there were no real piles of corpses in this place, blaming it all on monsters ‘recycling’, but hey he was wrong after all.

Rubbing his eyes and wiping the ‘honour’ off his mouth, he picked the small glass (at least it felt like it) ball, partially giving up on why was it glowing, and used it as a small lantern to find his luggage.

Once all business was done and bag was found, he turned around and located the door.

This door didn’t look special in any way. Same as all the other normal ‘next stage’ sort of doors.

With a push, gears clicked and slabs moved.

He gripped his axe, engravings on it melted by the serpent’s acid blood, ready to attack any time.

What he saw shocked him and at the same time made him a little happy.

Neon lights on the ceiling, drawing weird futuristic shapes, circles, squares, triangles. Screens, some broken, some still operating, showing strange symbols and numbers. Computers with keyboards smashed in, yet further out towards the middle, some managed to look relatively pristine. It wasn’t just that, there were also other ‘gadgets’ and some strange looking contraptions placed around the room. A few were even bolted to the floor.

The room was huge, probably the biggest he’s been in this whole dungeon labyrinth place thing, with the exceptions of probably being the ‘mushroom forest’. Though saying it’s a room is a bit of an understatement it was a hall.

But the most peculiar thing was the man standing in the middle of the room. All but the area around him lit by the neon lighting. He was standing there shrouded in the dark. Facing me, but looking down, staring at the white laminate. Clad in black armour, with sharp angles coming out from his side as horns and a giant iron claw of a hand, reflecting the acid green lights of the screens. The man looked very ominous if not plain demonic. Again ‘man’.

His claw twitched mechanically, fingers moving into fist all but the index finger.

It then rose, with the finger pointing at me.

__________________

Author's Note ;P

__________________

Well here we go chapter 10. Story is progressing. If there are any mistakes pls point out. It's fucking 12 o'clock and im about to die. Next chapter again in max 5 days. Cheers!