Once my SC had gone underground, the first thing I did was bring up my map to see where Floss’ moving carnival was this time. I wasn’t surprised to see it had moved from the previous spot. According to the map, the carnival was now south-west of my current position. More than that, it didn’t seem that far away now.
Just as long as Floss doesn’t relocate it again just to fuck with me.
Out of interest, I checked the countdown timer to the Second Trial and saw that there was less than four hours left for players to reach it. The timer didn’t bother me anymore. I had it firmly in my head that I wasn’t going to reach the Trial in time. My only focus now was on destroying Herbie Floss, and hopefully impressing the show runners enough that they would let me and the rest of the Damned & Dangerous party continue on with the game.
I mean, I was a rising star now, right? That had to count for something.
As I struck out across the wasteland, I noticed things had changed once more, as if the AI was getting bored with the same scenery all the time.
The landscape had shifted into something that looked like a twisted homage to the darker side of the 80s, the kind of place where neon lights met nightmares. The once barren wasteland now looked like a corrupted version of an arcade or a nightclub left to rot under a blood-red sky.
Towering structures loomed in the distance, their exteriors glowing with pulsating neon colors—hot pinks, electric blues, and sickly greens—but the lights flickered in and out like they were struggling to stay alive, casting ominous shadows over everything. Some of the buildings resembled old video game cabinets, their surfaces covered in graffiti and static-filled screens displaying glitchy, distorted images of old arcade games. Faces, pixelated and cracked, watched from the screens as if they were trapped inside, their distorted voices whispering broken lines of dialogue from games long forgotten.
The ground was uneven and cracked, as if the earth itself had been torn apart by massive claws. Jagged ridges of metallic debris jutted out at strange angles, some of it twisted into the shape of old cassette tapes and vinyl records, their surfaces warped and melted as if they’d been left too close to the sun.
New mobs appeared too. The first ones I saw were called Cassette Fiends. These low-level mobs skittered across the cracked ground on all fours, their bodies made entirely of unraveling cassette tape. Their heads were distorted versions of boomboxes, with cracked speakers for faces. They emitted eerie, garbled music from the tape loops embedded in their flesh, the songs broken and warping as if they were being fast-forwarded and rewound at random. They’d attack by launching jagged shards of magnetic tape, which could slice through flesh like razors or wrap around your limbs to restrict movement. If you got too close, they’d explode in a burst of screeching static, temporarily deafening you.
Despite being low level, the Cassette Fiends were a handful, especially as there were so many of them. They sliced me good in places, but I managed to kill them all by activating my Nikes and running rings around them, stomping most of them into the ground, crushing their speaker heads.
Thanks to that, I leveled up the Nikes, which meant I was able to use them twice per hour now, with a reduced cool down period of thirty minutes.
As I carried on toward the carnival, other mobs attacked as well, from the sky and the ground. It was as if the AI or the showrunners were trying to make things as difficult as possible for me on my journey to kill Floss.
It occurred to me then that maybe the showrunners didn’t want Floss dead. He was a long standing menace who could always be relied upon to cause havoc and create drama among the players, and to the showrunners, that probably made him gold.
Hellstar or not, Floss’ reign as the mad clown was soon to be over, as far as I was concerned. The bastard had had his time spilling blood under the crimson sky of Infernum.
Now it was my turn.
“What’s that, Kadey-boy? Now it’s your turn? I don’t think so, sport.”
Floss. The bastard’s voice was inside my head.
“Get the fuck out of my head, Floss,” I growled.
“I just popped in to say hello, and to let you know how much I enjoyed our little tête-à-tête on the television show. I think we both know who came out on top.”
His laughter bounced off the inside of my skull, making me grit my teeth and squeeze my eyes shut as if in pain.
“Just stay right where you are, Floss. I’m on my way.”
“Glad to hear it, Kade. I’m getting bored with torturing your friends. I’m not sure they will even stay alive long to see you die.”
Bastard. He was trying to fuck with me, grind away at my resolve.
“They’ll stay alive, Floss,” I ground out. “You know why?”
“Why sport? Do enlighten me.”
“Because they know I don’t give up, and because they know I’m coming to save them.”
Floss laughed like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
“Oh, sport, that’s so pathetically cute of you to say so. But we’ll see how that faith in you holds up when I raise my game and unleash my little sugar monsters upon your friends. The nasty things they do… oh, it makes my heart go all aflutter.”
“Fuck you, Floss! You leave them alone!”
“Bye bye, sport. Be seeing you soon. Not sure if your friends will, though.”
“Floss? Floss! Fuck!”
He was gone, his presence no longer lingering like a specter in my mind.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Fuck this,” I gritted out through clenched teeth. “I need to close some distance quick.”
Activating my Nikes, I began to speed across the landscape, going even faster than before thanks to the level up earlier. All I could think about was gaining as much ground as possible so I could get closer to Floss’ carnival.
The world around me was a blur of neon lights and jagged shapes, distorted by the speed at which I was moving. My Nikes hummed beneath me, propelling me faster and faster, the adrenaline surging in my veins as I tore through Limbo’s tortured landscape. The terrain changed rapidly—cracked wasteland gave way to flickering roads that resembled half-forgotten streets in ghostly suburbia.
Everything was just a rush of motion, my focus singular—get to Floss. End this.
But then, something unfamiliar caught my eye ahead—a massive, crimson expanse that stretched endlessly across the horizon. I couldn’t make out what it was at first, just that it was huge, and it was coming up fast. I couldn’t slow down in time. The terrain shifted so quickly that before I knew it, I was in mid-stride, running straight into it.
My feet hit the surface with a wet, sickening splash. Instantly, the ground beneath me gave way, and I plunged into the crimson mass.
A cold, sticky liquid engulfed me, pulling me down with its dense, syrupy grip. My body fought against the drag, but it was no use. It wasn’t water. It was thicker—heavier.
The smell hit me next—coppery, metallic, and unmistakable.
Blood.
I stopped running as the realization set in. The expanse wasn’t some strange lake or river—it was a massive lake of blood.
I struggled to keep my balance as the liquid rose higher and higher until it reached my chest, then my neck. My hands clawed at the thick surface, trying to push against it, but it was too thick, too suffocating.
Panic threatened to grip me, but I forced it down, breathing slowly. I could still feel the faint hum of the Nikes, but they were useless in this sludge. I had to stop and think. The blood was pulling me in deeper, the weight of it pressing against me like a slow, deliberate drag into oblivion.
“Dammit,” I muttered, looking around frantically. The shoreline, if there even was one, was too far off to see. The only thing I could see was the endless expanse of blood, stretching in every direction.
I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. This was probably the showrunners trying to slow me down, maybe even stop me altogether.
“You’ll have to try harder than that, you bastards!”
I started swimming, which wasn’t easy in a lake full of blood. Thanks to my increased strength though, I was able to swim through the viscous liquid.
But I had swam barely a few meters when something grabbed my leg and pulled me under, plunging me into darkness.
My mouth filled up with coppery blood as I writhed and thrashed within the viscous liquid, unable to see anything.
As I felt myself get pulled down deeper and deeper, panic started to take over as I feared I was going to drown in this crimson mess. My mouth opened reflexively as if my body was trying to get air, but the movement only allowed the slimy blood to pour down my throat and into my lungs.
If I didn’t do something fast, I was going to drown.
Despite being blind, I could still see my HUD somehow. It glowed against the dark crimson of the blood, and I quickly searched my inventory until I found what I was looking for.
A knife, one of the ones I took from the kitchen in the high school during the First Trial.
With the knife now in my hand, I blindly slashed at whatever was holding my ankle, probably slashing my own leg in the process. But I felt nothing with all the adrenaline flowing through me, and even if I did cut myself, I didn’t care. I just had to free myself at any cost.
Soon I felt the blade of the knife hit against something firm, so I started sawing, hoping it wasn’t my own damn leg. Whatever was holding me reacted by pulling tighter, which actually made it easier for the knife to cut through.
At some point I felt a release of tension as I floated freely in the mass of blood. Wasting no more time, I dropped the knife and swam what I hoped was upward.
After what felt like an eternity, I broke the surface, gasping and spluttering.
I still couldn’t see the shore anywhere, but there was a large rock jutting out of the crimson lake, so I swam for it. A minute later, I exhaustively pulled myself up onto the rock and lay there, gasping. Then I coughed and vomited up the lake blood that had found its way into my stomach.
“Jesus fuck…” I wretched until the last of the blood was out of me.
Then I shifted my gaze out toward the center of the lake. A mass of bubbles were now breaking on the roiling surface.
“Oh shit,” I gasped.
Something was coming. Probably whatever had grabbed me and pulled me under.
Standing up on the slippery rock, I looked around for the shore, soon spotting it. But it was at least a hundred meters away. If I dived back in now, whatever monster was in the lake would no doubt grab me and pull me under again, and I didn’t think I’d be able to fight underblood a second time.
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m gonna have to fight this thing, whatever the hell it is.”
The blood’s surface became more and more turbulent, bubbles rapidly rising to the surface like a cauldron set to boil. The lake churned violently now, dark red waves sloshing against the rock I stood on, making the already slippery surface even more treacherous.
I clenched my fists, my heart pounding as I braced for whatever monstrosity was about to emerge. The stench of blood and rot was thick in the air, making my stomach churn all over again. The center of the lake started to froth wildly, massive bubbles forming, bursting with wet, sickening pops.
Something big was stirring beneath.
Suddenly, the surface of the lake exploded, sending geysers of blood shooting into the air. The roar that followed was guttural and wet, like the sound of a thousand dying beasts in unison. From the center of the disturbance, a massive creature burst forth.
At first, it looked like a giant mound of flesh, but then the details began to take shape. The monster’s body was grotesque—a heaving, pulsating mass of multiple conjoined bodies, their skin slick with blood, writhing and moving in a sickening, synchronized rhythm.
Each of the creature’s “bodies” seemed to melt into one another, forming an amorphous, nightmarish whole. Faces twisted in agony jutted out from the flesh at odd angles, their mouths gaping open in eternal, soundless screams, eyes rolling wildly in every direction.
It was titanic, at least twenty feet tall, and its lower half was still submerged in the blood, its massive bulk churning the lake with each movement. A dozen or more disjointed arms sprouted from the mass, some humanoid, others twisted beyond recognition, clawing and reaching in every direction, as if seeking something to tear apart.
At the center of the beast, a huge, gaping maw opened wide, a spiral of jagged teeth grinding together, slick with blood and saliva, oozing a sickly glow that radiated a hellish crimson light.
Its eyes—hundreds of them—were scattered across its body, flickering open and closed randomly, all glowing with a dull, orange-red hue like dying embers. Some were human, others were beastly, but all of them were trained on me now. The creature’s entire mass undulated, constantly shifting, never settling into a single form.
But the worst part was the sound. The creature let out a deep, gurgling wail—a sound that seemed to reverberate from within its very core, shaking the air around me. It wasn’t just a physical roar; it was a psychic scream, a cacophony of voices from every soul trapped within the creature’s mass. The voices cried out in pain, rage, despair, each one overlapping the next until it became an overwhelming wall of noise.
I stumbled back, nearly slipping off the rock, as the creature fully emerged from the lake, its immense form towering over me. It began moving toward me with terrifying speed, its arms reaching out, eager to drag me back into the blood-soaked abyss.
“Fuck me,” I muttered under my breath, my body frozen for a moment by the sheer horror of the thing.
Sanguinary Mass - Level 27
You couldn’t watch where you were going, could you? You had to run right into this thing’s lair. Well, now you’re about to pay the price for your hastiness. This thing wants your body and soul to add to its amorphous mass… and it will probably get both.