It activated [Echoes of Oblivion], making the human stiffen on its back, and lowered its chest, cautiously stalking forward, driven by both curiosity and confusion.
The door it was looking for was about a hundred and twenty feet ahead.
The strange, very vaguely humanoid creature hanging from the ceiling, was about eighty feet away from both of them. So it stalked forward, ears and antennae all focused towards the ceiling, and the thing that was clinging to it.
The closer it got, the more clear the image that the vibrations gave it, and the more confused the wolf got.
It was a human. Its organs and limbs were roughly placed the same, just of different proportions, and the biggest giveaway was that it was wearing human coverings around one shoulder and its crotch, shredded and torn and little more than rags, but still there.
It was just…
Not quite right.
Its limbs and fingers were ridiculously long. Its arms were about as long as its entire body from toes to head. Its foot bones were squished together at the start, and flared out unevenly the further they got from the ankle, and its toes were multiple times as beefy and long as a normal human’s. Its tendons were so thick that the wolf wondered how it was possible for this this thing to not be a giant ball of muscle, and was in fact, somehow, absolutely skeletal.
Though considering it lived in a sewer without much food, that made sense in a way.
The distance closed, and the wolf very cautiously punched the stone, wary of drawing its attention, but hungry to see more details about the oddity it stumbled upon.
Every few feet of distance drew more bizarre details to the wolf’s attention.
Its ears were huge. Its face was disturbingly elongated and flat with a gigantic, crooked mouth. Its eyes were just straight up missing. The skin felt… very wrinkly and aged, like an elder human’s, but not quite attached anywhere, loose around its form, and oddly thick. Its hair was there, matted, wild, and heavy, hanging down a foot off its perch.
Its teeth were pointed and jagged, with just a couple crusher teeth still remaining near its jaw. Said jawbone was also very malformed, half of it seemingly lumpy and twice as thick as its other side, and it tapered down to an almost sharp point. Its neck was a bit too long.
In fact, its spine was strange in general. It was more formed for an animal than a human, the head pointed forward rather than downwards, and it was ridiculously thick, almost a third of its body’s width.
The closer it got, the more it noticed all the big and small parts of this thing that were wrong.
And the more it felt its instincts push back against its desire to move forward.
It didn’t feel like when that metal-headed dead human rushed to them.
This was a more subtle, nagging sensation, like it was getting close to something dangerous rather than pure death, even if it had no idea how its instincts decided that this creature was a genuine threat.
But it trusted them, so with the utmost caution, it stalked underneath it, ready to activate [Bloodrush] and make a run for it if something happened.
And something did happen, in the form of a rodent on the other side of the tunnel, finding some kind of cockroach and charging it with one of its usual shrill screeches.
The wolf became statue still, its attention splitting between curiously feeling the bizarre way the humanoid creature hung onto the ceiling pipes to quickly and near-silently shuffle across the ceiling, and the bridge just ahead of it that would take it to the other side of the tunnel.
It slowly and carefully moved towards the bridge, making sure it didn’t kick some random trash in its path and draw attention, and doing its best to observe the scene going on at the other side of the tunnel, just ten feet away.
As it crossed the bridge and stepped off onto stone again, it turned its full attention to the human-like creature, slowing its pace, too damn curious to just leave yet.
The rat was preoccupied with shredding the cockroach to bits, and the wolf felt the humanoid move itself to be hanging over it, positioning itself into an… almost ball-like shape.
A strange, barely audible whistling sound suddenly came out of the creature’s lips, a soft sound that undulated with varying tones, almost like a soothing song.
It actually sounded quite nice.
It didn’t seem to bother the rat, nor have any real effect on it, but the humanoid tilted its head around in strange, erratic ways for a few short seconds, as if it was trying to catch some sound with its ears.
The wolf was really curious as to how this thing hunted, so it stopped entirely, despite the door it had been looking for the entire time being just a couple dozen feet away.
It was no less tense than before, ready to bolt and barrel through the rusty door should the need arise, but for the moment, it was stationary, all its attention focused on the extremely careful way the humanoid seemed to unfurl itself.
Its back legs’ toes had hooked around the ceiling pipes, and the creature slowly let go of the pipes with its arms, curling them into its chest as its torso hung down, and its legs unfurled, ten feet of elongated, skeletal human-like physique hanging over the rodent in the tunnel, the humanoid’s size almost making the space feel cramped.
It slowly extended one of its ridiculously long arms to hover over the rodent chewing through the cockroach, and the wolf quickly calculated the distance, realizing what was going to happen.
Or so it thought.
It was expecting the creature to grasp onto the rat and calmly crush it to death before eating.
Instead, the lethargic humanoid’s hand darted down to pluck the rat off the floor, and in the blink of an eye, brought the shrieking rodent to its mouth, head first, crushing half of it to paste and ripping off half of its body with such speed that the sound of violently tearing flesh and fur filled the tunnel.
Enough for the human to hear it.
It barely had a millisecond to realize what she was about to do when she extended her hand out of the shadows in its direction, and by then, it was too late, a surge of mana filling the tunnel.
All three inhabitants of the tunnel froze.
The wolf simply sat still, hoping to go unnoticed, the humanoid creature stopped chewing and started tilting its head in strange ways, and the human was so unimaginably terrified, that the wolf could feel her heartbeat thump into its ribcage through the mucus and fur, her horror so immense it choked out the scent of the sewer around them.
The human buried her face deeper into its fur, thankfully, muting her deep, terrified breaths into the inky mist of nothingness that veiled them.
A long, tense moment stretched in the silent tunnel as the wolf waited with baited breath.
And much to its immense relief, the creature seemed to lose interest in the mana surge after a couple seconds, returning back to its gored meal.
It resumed its pace, hurried but careful, tense, and as the creature was slowly left behind, the wolf felt it curl back up against the ceiling, idly hanging there.
The distance made it breathe a little easier, and then it finally came up to the door it was looking for.
Getting through the door without making a racket and triggering the creature behind them into action, was an exercise in patience.
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It had to glue its side and left arm to the door’s rusty hinges, and carefully cut through the door’s lock with precise cuts to make sure nothing fell on the floor, then hurriedly open the damn thing in the most awkward position it had ever been forced in.
And with that done, it dropped back on all fours, and turned to the cubic staircase just before it.
It took half an hour of careful steps, occasionally clinging to the wall, and constantly checking that the creature behind them hadn’t moved, but eventually, the wolf finally walked the last few rusty steps and turned to the right, its claws sinking through the grated metal floor beneath it as it entered the room it had been looking for.
The smell was horrific. It was an absurdly potent miasma of chemicals, death, human waste, all mixing together into something that burned its nostrils with each breath. It could taste the air.
It could smell this from down the tunnel, but it hadn’t expected the smell to be so much worse just from climbing up a staircase and going through a door.
It growled in annoyance and yanked its claws out of the floor before blunting them, then deactivated [Echoes Of Oblivion] and opened its eyes to observe the softly glowing room, bits of moss clinging to the smooth stone support pillars and the walls.
It was a simple circular room, about four hundred feet wide and a bit over a hundred feet tall, half of which were full of churning sewer waters. There were various pipes and holes along the walls, tilted upwards and downwards, throwing trash and waste into the muck, and a simple but mercifully sturdy metal bridge cut the room into two equal parts.
There were three gigantic metal doors at around the water’s level, ones that it knew from experience were meant to open to allow waste to rush through to the canals. Considering how the room wasn’t filled to the brim with waste and water, they were still functional.
Beyond the door on the other side and a bit to the left, buried into the wall, was one of those pipes the humans used to pump smoke and such out of their factories, a particularly large one. And these usually pumped the smoke out into the open air. Which meant a clear exit out of here.
It tapped its knuckles on the bridge a few times, but it felt more than solid enough to carry them both without much issue. It was grated, but the metal was only rusted on the surface, and the grate was thick.
It hesitated to walk on the metal due to how difficult it was to properly feel the wider vibrations around it when it was touching such a bouncy material, but one quick glance around the semi-illuminated room convinced it there was nothing really around for it to be wary of.
So with great joy, it picked up speed, half-running across the bridge, catching glimpses of the churning waters below through the railing on the side, occasionally glancing down to see the oddly disgusting and simultaneously beautiful sight of trash being consumed by softly glowing little grains of something. It looked like the glowing moss in color, but it was just… liquid.
The water’s height was rather close to the bridge itself, maybe ten feet, so maybe if it wasn’t saddled with the human, it might have been able to hop onto a stone pillar and dip its fingertips into the water to better observe the tiny motes of light.
The trickling of water was also oddly calming, and all in all, it felt like the depths of the human nest were almost congratulating it on finding a way out.
Shortly after thinking that, however, something changed.
As it continued its quick trot across the bridge, a light tingling sensation, something it couldn’t quite place, started bothering it. It was like the brush of something against its mind, a faint huff of air at the back of its neck from something that shouldn’t be there, like there was something watching it.
Its trot slowed, and the wolf lifted its head above the railing, craning its head around the room, even glancing behind it, all of its antennae writhing against the metal below its feet.
There was movement in the water all around the room, either from pipes adding more to the little pool of filth or just random bits being moved around by the almost circular current, but beyond that? Nothing.
It turned around, mentally dismissing the sensation, resuming its walk and pointing its snout down to watch the pretty water.
A dark shape moved into the corner of its line of sight, barely visible through the murky, glowing depths, and it barely had the time to process that the shape seemed to be changing as it moved, before it twisted.
It didn’t have any time to react beyond stiffening in surprise.
A green-black blur as thick as the human burst out of the waters and slammed into the bridge from the side with a sharp crack, the bent railing smashing into its side as the entire portion of bridge they were standing on detached with a metallic screech.
It spun through the air, its eyes barely catching a glimpse of a mass of crumpled metal hitting the water, and a blurry mass sinking back into the murk, and then its chest slammed into the water and it was wreathed in chemicals and filth in an instant, sinking.
The human struggled and choked on its back as the wolf tried to tightly close its eyes and nostrils to prevent the burning chemicals from entering its body, wildly swinging with its hands to try and reorient itself, breach to the surface, the human nothing but dead weight on its back.
It hurriedly detached the human without any regard for conserving its mucus, for both their sake, and used [Pack Hunter]’s awareness to grab onto her arm and tug her up for a brief moment as the churning waters almost turned her upside down.
It wasn’t sure if she could make it to the surface, nor stay there, but it didn’t have a second to even think about that when it was certain that something was in the water, and wanted them in its stomach.
That impact had knocked the breath out of its lungs, so despite its body’s Endurance allowing it to hold its breath for ages at this point, there was no breath to hold. It had to get up to the surface.
Its hands and paws pushed and brushed aside mucous filth, human waste, rotten fabrics and who knew what else as it poured all of its strength into catapulting itself up, the thick waters making it feel twice as heavy as usual, human weight combined.
The worst part was suddenly being stripped of all its senses. It couldn’t hear much of anything, its eyes had to stay shut, its nose would smell nothing but the acrid stench of chemicals, and its antennae-
As it breached the surface, finally, gasping in a giant breath and whipping its head around, it focused on its antennae as it swept its hands through the water to stay afloat.
The sensations were muted at best, and far too generally directed, but it could feel two sensations, a beating tempo of movements that disturbed the water far more than anything else.
The human, still under the water, struggling to get up with one arm only.
And something far larger, quickly speeding towards her. It didn’t have much time to make a decision, before circumstance made its decision for it.
It could just swim away, claw up the wall and go on to escape. A somewhat guaranteed path to survival.
And survival was all it had known until now. It hadn’t known companionship, it hadn’t known play. It hadn’t known the feeling of a heart beating in sync with its own as they rested, the feeling of having a pack, however bizarre and small it might be. And the wolf enjoyed all of those things, didn’t think it would ever gain them back if it lost them.
So… in truth, it couldn’t just swim away.
It took a deep breath, allowing the mana-cells to deal with any chemical poisons it might suck into its throat, and dove back into the murk.