Chapter 115: Dark Patch

“Ughhh,” groans Hunter as he stirs awake.

“About time you woke up,” says a familiar voice, and Hunter glances beside him to see Forest sitting up against a stone wall.

“Oh, Forest…” Hunter brings a hand to his neck, where a lingering pain spurs from. “What happened?”

“No idea, but one moment we were at the exit, and the next thing I know, I’m waking up here.”

As Hunter looks around, he realizes they are in a small room with stone walls. A television is mounted on one wall, showing a black screen with a white loading circle. The circle was spinning over and over without slowing down. Delta and Scar were also in the room, and Scar was awake.

“Scar, can you wake her up now?” asks Forest as Hunter takes a look at his watch.

Ten people are still alive, but I was out for a few hours.

43:16:12… 11… 10…

After letting out a long groaning sigh, Hunter asks Forest, “You got any water left?”

“I do, and so do you,” he replies, Scar trying to shake Delta awake in the background.

Confused by what Forest means, Hunter looks at him with raised eyebrows, and Forest follows up, “All of our water canteens were refilled while we were out. Couldn’t tell you how.”

Hearing that, Hunter reaches out for his backpack slumped on the wall beside him, grabs his canteen, and shakes it. Hearing the swish of liquid inside, Hunter quickly screws off the lid and takes a long sip, the water quenching his dry tongue and throat.

“Careful, I know you’re thirsty, but we don’t know what will happen from here on out. Don’t drink too much,” says Forest, and Hunter lowers the canteen from his face.

“Where are we?” he asks, wiping his mouth and closing the canteen.

“I don’t know. I’ve felt around the walls, and there’s no exit. Scar used that orasi power of his and saw some weird particles, but we don’t know anything else besides that,” answers Forest.

Delta was now awake, rubbing her eyes as a bedhead made some of her hair awkwardly stick out.

Delta exchanged looks between Forest and Hunter before asking, “What are you two looking at?”

“Nothing, you just have a bedhead,” replied Hunter, not caring much, but Delta certainly cared.

She felt around her hair in a frenzy, quickly determined the bedhead’s location, and seized her canteen. Opening it, she poured an excessive amount of water into the palm of her hand and then poured some water on her hair before pressing her hand down on top of the bedhead.

Keeping her hand placed there, she barks, “Stop staring!”

Following that statement, Scar, Forest, and Hunter exchange looks, and Hunter stifles a chuckle, causing Forest to do the same. Scar, though, just appears annoyed… like he’s done with everything. As Hunter transitions his chuckle into a fake coughing fit, he scrounges through his bag for the apple he hasn’t eaten yet.

But before he could find it, the monitor turned white and split into four quadrants. Each of the four was designated a quadrant, and some details about each were listed alongside their body silhouettes. Hunter’s data was in the bottom left quadrant.

An AI-generated male voice then spoke.

“Delta, rank 22. Hunter, rank 17. Scar, rank 13. Forest, rank 16. Welcome to the final test.”

That sentence sits with everybody as Hunter asks, “Was the maze not the final test??”

Forest sighs, “Guess not. Maybe finding the exit to the maze was required to get here.”

The one-note voice then went on to explain the existence of the trials and how the trials were created to find the best people for society. It then informed Scar, Hunter, Delta, and Forest that if they made one mistake, they’d probably die during this last test, leaving them all anxious as a series of hatches opened simultaneously along the room's perimeter.

The monitor then displayed a birds-eye view of the room they were standing in. Forest quickly discovered that each hatch belonged to an individual person. However, four hatches were already closed. The hatches that belong to Sky, Ember, Faith, and Code.

“So they found this place way before us? Why didn’t they say anything?” asked Delta.

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“I’m not so sure they found it… considering how we got here. The maze could’ve just been a distraction to separate us or something,” replies Forest, and Hunter glances at Scar, who has been quiet since waking up Delta.

“Scar, what do you think?” asks Hunter, genuinely curious about his insight.

“There’s not a doubt in my mind that we found the exit to the maze. Everything after that is kind of a blur, though. Forest could be right that we managed to qualify for this 'final test' by finding the exit. Still, the fact that we lost sight of the others through the map model after a certain point leads me to believe that Zeris must have intervened. Why? I have no idea, but considering their hatches are the only ones locked, I think they’ve already been here, wherever here is.”

Scar steps toward his hatch and resumes, “I already distinguished that the particles I saw were partly from Zeris, but somebody else's signature iris was mixed in with his. We know Ace has special powers, so it might be his trace. It could also be somebody else’s; it’s hard to know for sure. However, the only way to find out is to begin this final test. The voice just told us that if we wait here until the countdown ends, we’ll die, and Forest said there is no exit, so this is our only option.”

Climbing inside, Scar says before disappearing into the hatch, “I wish you all the best.”

And just like that, Scar is gone, the echoes of him descending the rungs growing quieter.

“He’s right,” says Forest, dragging Hunter’s attention back to him.

“It’s our only option…” he continues, raising his hand to Hunter.

Hunter takes his hand, and they reel each other in for a quick hug before separating to their hatches.

“See you on the other side,” says Hunter, climbing inside his hatch.

“Yeah, see you then,” he repeats with a grin, and they both begin scaling down their ladders.

“Hey! What about me? What am I supposed to do?!” Delta shouts a few seconds later.

“Figure it out!” Forest shouts back up his hatch, and Hunter snickers.

Forest’s POV

As I reached the bottom, I arrived in a small room lit by a torch standing upright in each corner. Not wasting any time, I stepped up toward the chute across from me, set myself down inside, and my body plunged into darkness.

The ride down the chute was not pleasant. Sharp, violent turns threw my body against the sides of the slide several times. There were a few times I even thought I had been swung out of the chute, just to be yanked back in the other direction a few seconds later.

And as if the chute had decided it had chewed me up enough, I was then swiftly spat out at the bottom without warning, resulting in my butt painfully reuniting with the solid ground again.

Allowing my breathing to calm down, I slowly stood up, wrapped my bag around me, and began looking around.

I was inside a dim hallway with white concrete walls on either side. The hallway was wide, and the ceiling lights leading down the hallway were spaced out from one another, causing certain areas between the lights to appear very dark. Looking behind me at the chute, the exit I had popped out of a moment ago was surrounded by an identical concrete white wall pattern as the walls from the hallway.

Seeing this, I could only assume that where I had just come from was a one-way trip, and it was clear that there was little to no chance of climbing back up the rocky, pitch-black whirlwind I had just experienced. Veering my gaze back on what lies ahead, I start walking down the hallway, vigilantly traversing through the darker patches and keeping my eyes peeled on everything that may be a trap.

After walking for only about a minute down this long hallway, I noticed no available turns that could be made. And as that thought came to mind, I heard a loud ‘CA-CLUNK’ followed by a sizzling rattle behind me.

My guard immediately goes up, and I reach behind my back for the axe I brought while turning around, doing both actions swiftly.

Slowly creeping back toward where I just came from, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary… until I stepped toward a darker patch and heard the dink of my axe connecting with something metal. Because the ceiling lights were spread out, the areas where the light did not reach left areas almost entirely pitch black.

So, as my axe made contact with the black metal bars, I noticed that the bars were practically camouflaged with the brief dark patch where the lights from the ceiling did not reach.

Grasping one of the bars, I mutter, “No going back now… good thing I brought everything with me.”

As I turned back around and resumed onward, a sudden pressing thought leaked into my consciousness as I approached the next dark patch.

I didn’t detect that trap at all. It's hard to tell if those bars were meant to fall after I walked through, but if they were supposed to activate on a timed release… I would've been stuck in that hallway. Also, I wonder where the others ended up…

Quickly hopping through the next dark patch, I was now highly suspicious of every spot I couldn’t visually see.

Like the monitor said… one mistake and I could die. If I were to step on spikes or ignorantly walk into a false bottom, that’s it for me. I can’t relax for even a moment…

The long hallway ended after another minute of walking, this minute feeling much longer than the last, as I approached a four-way intersection. I could go straight, left, or right, and each hallway looked the same as the one I had just walked down, and there weren’t any indications of which path was best to take. As I pondered which one to take by briefly inspecting each option, I caught sight of something.

Looking down the left path, for only a split second, I saw the eyes of a shadowy figure peeking out from the end of the hallway. My eyes glued to the left path, I questioned whether I had just hallucinated that image to help myself make a quicker decision, but it… it looked so real.

As I forcibly dragged my attention to the path going straight, I quickly shot a side eye down the left path one more time, and this time, I was sure of it.

I saw the same shadowy figure peeking out from the edge of the wall. It wasn’t my imagination; what I saw just now was real. And also... the shadow was closer this time around. Much, much closer.

It was close enough to where I could see the outline of its terrifying, piercing white eyes glaring at me. And while sweat began to bead down my forehead as I came to accept what I had just seen, the ceiling lights abruptly dimmed to a severe degree.

With darkness creeping toward me on all sides, my mind was suddenly overrun with a single, demanding thought…

Run!