I was rolling along the curving tunnel wall as a giant Worm of shit, wet wipes, and hardened grease followed behind, each motion pulling it forward producing an echoing squelch. Aside from the fact that it was a massive log of crap that had a large maw able to produce a suction-like pull of anything in front of it, the stench it produced was a weapon of its own.
Bee was holding on to my shoulders with her wings out behind her, as my longboard flew down through the dark smelly sewers that I was only able to navigate thanks to my Transition Lenses.
“Beetle-Moth Sting!” she exclaimed and a strange segmented tail like the body of a centipede covered in fuzzy hair grew from her lower back. It swiveled around and fired a jet of greyish-green acid back at our enormous pursuer, most of it hitting the side of its head, while the rest landed on the ground in front of it and ate its way through the stone.
A loud gurgling roar came from the turd beast, and its powerful voice shook the tunnel with enough force that several stones popped out of place from the curved ceiling. As large filth-crusted bricks rained down on us, I had to swerve to avoid impact.
Panda was sitting on the top of my head, yelling out warnings and directions, while holding my Sewer Map in his fingerless hands. Normally, my head was reserved for Lordie, but he was currently confined to the Transport Cage sitting in my suit’s front-pocket, as punishment for luring us into a Boss fight.
“There! Go down the left side-tunnel!” Panda yelled, right as I hopped over a giant rat that’d been splattered by a ceiling brick.
[RESPECTFUL!] praised the mouth at the front of the board incoherently.
At first I couldn’t see what he was talking about, but as the Shit Worm kept up its pursuit and the segments of the large tunnel rolled by, I spotted a very small hole in the left wall coming in hot.
“Hold on!” I told them, while steering the longboard towards it, sacrificing velocity in exchange for maneuverability, as even the reality-defying board couldn’t just change directions on a dime, while moving over 80 miles an hour.
“It’s getting closer!” Bee yelled, tossing a Beetle Bomb into the mouth of the foul beast.
The resultant explosion was swallowed up by whatever kind of digestive system it had, but it still roared indignantly and made the tunnel tremble.
Only a few more yards separated us from the smaller tunnel entrance and I could feel the overbearing presence of the worm as it closed the distance.
Then, with another quick adjustment of the board’s wheels, I was through. The Shit Worm slammed into the hole, trying to follow us, but it was too big to fit through.
“Don’t slow down!” Panda yelled, as we zoomed down through the much narrower tunnel.
“Where are we going?” Bee asked, while doing her best not to clip her wings into the walls.
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“There’s another, much bigger tunnel up ahead that we’re heading towards,” he told her, turning around to show her the map.
“Looks like we’re about to hit one of those square rooms again,” she commented.
Moments later, the narrow tunnel shot us out into just such a room, but I didn’t slow down to take it in, instead flying right above a filth pond in the center and into another big tunnel.
A loud crash of stones and splashing water came from behind us.
Bee looked back and yelped.
“The Worm found us already!”
“How the hell is it tracking us!?” I wondered.
“There should be a hole in the floor of the tunnel coming up!” Panda announced.
“A what?” I managed to ask, just as we came around a bend and saw a bunch of panicked-looking giant rats standing on the precipice of a massive hole, where the floor was just gone.
“I don’t think I can jump that,” I said. “But maybe I can go along the ceiling upside-down. It’s gonna be risky though!”
“You’re not jumping it,” Panda said. “We’re going into the hole!”
“What??” I asked, just as the Shit Worm coiled itself up like a spring and shot forward, nearly catching us with its maw as it chomped down.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck!!” I cursed, as its foul stench filled my nostrils anew.
Bee threw another Beetle Bomb at it, but it just bounced off the side of its body, before exploding ineffectually.
“Alright, hole it is!” I said and leapt off from the ground, sailing over the heads of the rats. Several of them took the leap of faith as well, which was understandable, since certain foul-smelling death was hot on our tail.
“Wooooh!!” Bee exclaimed as we began falling. She collapsed her wings, committing us fully to reaching terminal velocity and as a result we quickly picked up a ton of speed.
Somehow, despite being nearly horizontal as I fell, the longboard still stuck to the soles of my Schmonic Boots.
Rats fell down alongside us, tumbling through the air with fear in their beady little eyes. One of them was unlucky enough to get too close to the rocky dirt walls of the massive hole and its speed turned it into a red smear.
“Oh crap!” Panda said, looking up.
I twisted my neck back to see what he’d seen, only to immediately regret it as I realized that the enormous Shit Worm was following us down. Its girth was so massive that there was hardly any space between its body and the walls. Given its mass and speed, this meant that every brush it had against the sides of the hole tore off large chunks of its disgusting body, quickly shaving it down. Still, it seemed to be very much alive and eager to devour us.
Then a light at the bottom of the impressively-long hole came up to meet us. Bee immediately engaged her wings, sending us on an angled trajectory forward, so we wouldn’t be crushed by the Worm as it landed.
As soon as we flew down into the new tunnel that met us, the World Boss came down on the cement floor with a deafening and crunchy splat. Brown wet wipes covered in crystalized fat was flung everywhere.
All the rats that’d fallen with us were turned into indistinguishable smears upon landing, but we managed to mostly redirect our downward velocity into forward momentum, although Bee had quite a strained look on her face from holding on to me, while using her wings as a glider.
Then the deflated tube of turds roared.
“It’s still alive!?” I yelled. “How is that possible!?”
“Don’t worry about that!” Panda urged. “Just keep going!”
The map in his hands had gone dark, as though no longer functional.
“Look for a service door or something!” he told Bee and I.
Prompted by his request, I finally started to take in our surroundings. There were lights all along the walls and metal tracks running along the floor.
We clearly weren’t in the sewers anymore.
No.
We were somewhere far worse.
An ear-splittingly-loud friendly-sounding female voice echoed down through the tunnel.
[まもなく、あなたたちを飲み込みます。ご注意ください。]
We had found our way into the underground metro…