The sound of his own rapidly beating heart and the heavy thunking sound the lieutenant’s power-armoured feet made while running down the corridor filled Thomel’s ears.

They’d been running nonstop for what felt like hours and his legs were burning in agony.

Hearing the quick-reacting hunter screeching to a halt, Thomel glanced up and watched as an entire horde of the humanoid creatures rushed at them in unison.

Opening fire with their beamer, the hunter focused on their legs, burning away all the ligaments and nerves the creatures needed to move properly.

While they started to fall to the ground, Thomel brought his beamer up as well and began to finish off the incapacitated creatures.

It didn’t even faze them, they just scrambled forward, desperately trying to reach their attackers.

The hunter had to back up a couple of feet because of how fast they were moving.

Swinging his beamer from monster to monster, Thomel dispatched the last horse-headed creature. Its arms outstretched in one horrific last attempt to reach them.

Together Thomel and the other hunter spent a few seconds blasting apart the remaining corpses and ensuring they were all properly dead, before moving on again.

Thomel almost tripped on one of the rends he’d made in the floor but he barely managed to regain his footing and keep sprinting.

He’d been wondering why for the most part it was only a single or perhaps two creatures that would attack at any one time.

Now that they’d just encountered a fifteen-strong group he felt like he had his answer.

At first, he’d thought the creatures were just hunting them down but now he was wondering if perhaps they were acting more like scouts.

The third team hadn’t been annihilated by these dredges, they’d been wiped out by the so-called abomination.

These humanoid creatures could just be here mainly to find and delay them, while the abomination, or abominations located and dealt with each unprepared team.

He was terrified, he felt even more frightened than when he encountered the eldrich horror disguised as a pink rabbit.

Something about coming here with forty other hunters and now possibly being one of the only two left triggered a primordial fear in his brain.

The group mentality wasn’t working out, there wasn’t safety in numbers, or at least there wasn’t enough safety.

Staying as close to the wall as possible, they dashed around a corner, coming face to face with another horde of the emasculated creatures.

Focusing fire, they once again took out their legs and then dealt with the significantly slowed monsters as they tried to crawl towards them.

Walking forward and stepping over the smouldering corpses, as well as avoiding the large wounds they’d carved into the floor. The duo turned around to watch as the lieutenant stalked around the corner they’d just cleared, looking uneasily back the way they’d come.

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In the brief silence that followed, just before they continued to run again, Thomel heard a grating sound.

Like someone had stabbed a knife into the wall and was dragging it across the concrete surface, dulling the blade and making a horrendous noise comparable to scrapping a blackboard.

For a split second it made Thomel feel like he was a child back in that run-down school he’d wasted his youth in.

The lieutenant’s yell brought him out of his nostalgic state and he snapped back around to look over at their tyrannical leader.

Thomel watched as the lieutenant opened fire on some unseen threat, before turning tail and running towards him and the other hunter.

This unseen threat quickly became a seen one when it rounded the corner they’d just passed and came into view.

The words the lone surviving hunter of team three said came back to him in that moment. ‘It was a giant mass of pulsating organs and rippling muscle, with giant clumps of fat all over it.’

The description didn’t do it justice. It was like a ginormous clump of minced meat had gained sentence, the insides of countless animals turned into their outsides and bloated with gases and needless fat.

Wilting tendrils with burst pustules and what looked like maggots wriggling inside of them, reached out towards the remnants of team one. The shadows cast from them were prancing and dancing in the suddenly less-than-pure light.

Eyes, milky white and unfocused, idly rolled around and became subsumed within the flesh, appearing and disappearing like waves on a beach.

Its teeth functioned in much the same way as its eyes, bursting out of the maroon-coloured meat of the abomination, just to be covered back up by more rolls of twisted flesh.

Thomel took in all of these details in the time it took for him to open his mouth and let out a sharp scream.

The worst detail he’d uncovered though was that he couldn’t see any signs of damage, whatever the lieutenant had done wasn’t anywhere close to being good enough to hurt this thing.

Despite facing a creature so obviously beyond himself, his Hunter Hunter boon failed to activate.

But the last vestiges of his adrenaline flooded into his body, providing him with the surplus of energy he needed to sprint as hard as he could away from the abomination.

He heard his fellow hunter fire and spared a second to glance beside himself, rather than shooting at the abomination though, they were shooting at the ceiling.

Copying their actions, Thomel joined in, lifting his gun up as he was running and firing into the concrete ceiling.

All three of them were running close together so it didn’t take long for the lieutenant to figure out what they were doing and join in as well.

With three firing at the roof, it collapsed in a matter of seconds, the sound of flesh splattering greeted their ears and a heavy dust cloud shot past them. Thomel even felt the vibrations as he was running, it was like a miniature earthquake.

They were all so preoccupied with having just survived and defeated that hideous abomination, that they ran around an intersection blindly.

Slamming into the lieutenant and pummeling him onto the ground, one of the bone-heads opened its maw and went straight for his throat.

Its teeth cracked on the enchanted steel and moments later it flew up into the air, its chest caved in from the lieutenant's punch.

Crashing onto the ground clumsily, it tried to right itself but was bathed in the duel beams of Thomel and the other hunter.

Grunting, the lieutenant got back up, raising his hand to stop them from continuing to run, he panted out. ”We’re almost at the exit, we’re taking things slow now in case of guards.”

Nodding their heads, the two hunters walked in front of the lieutenant, taking point as he once again protected the rear.

Another two humanoid monsters rushed them when they came to an intersection but for the most part, the journey back was calm and slow.

Thomel got the feeling that it was just the calm before the storm. A brief respite before waves of danger once again began to crash into them.

And he couldn’t help but feel that the biggest danger, was the person right behind him.