Quota 0/270 - Only 3 Days Left

"What do you think you're doing, little buddy?"

It was clearly a monster, but Victor didn't perceive it as dangerous. With its disproportionately short legs for its body and overly large red eyes for its face, the creature didn't seem very threatening.

It resembled more a large insect, about fifty centimeters tall, scuttling on its hind legs than a monster. It had been caught trying to open one of the bags Victor had left in the entrance, without any success.

"Can you give me any information about this thing?"

Of course, host ! It's a Hoarding Bug !

"Excuse me ?"

Hoarding is the compulsive urge to accumulate things.

"I know that, but why do you call this thing a bug ?"

Because that's what they are called !

"Even if it's not a bug ?"

Of course, host !

"My inner voice must really be blind and dumb," was Victor's only conclusion. The system continued in its mechanical voice.

The Hoarding Bug is a pacifist monster that only becomes aggressive if you touch the objects in its nest.

"So if we don't bother it, it'll leave us alone ?"

Not really, host...

Victor wasn't listening to the system's voice anymore as the creature had left the entrance hall. It hadn't managed to open the bag, so it had left with it. Victor could hear the sound of its little steps echoing in the living room.

‘Did that little shit just steal one of our bags ?’ Victor wondered.

He knew the answer, but the system didn't grasp the rhetoric in his question.

Of course, host !

When Olivia returned to the entrance hall, she found Victor with a ghastly expression on his face.

"What happened, Victor ?"

He murmured his reply while grabbing the shovel at his feet.

"Call the others and grab your shovels. We are going to war."

Within seconds, the other squad members rushed into the entrance hall. None of them had noticed that a bag was missing from the pile. They looked at Victor with apprehension and seriousness.

But he simply walked into the living room without saying a word. The thief had stayed near the crime scene. It looked at Victor and the others who had followed him with its legs up as if it were proclaiming its innocence.

But the loot was sticking out from behind its back.

Victor raised his shovel high before shouting heroically as he approached the tough fight that lay ahead.

"AVENGERS!"

The pitiful creature responded to the provocation with its own cry:

"YIPPEE!!!"

Victor charged at his enemy and brought his shovel down on its head.

CLING

Instead of a cry of pain, Victor heard a buzzing sound. The noise of the collision was metallic, and the creature seemed unharmed after Victor's attack.

It stood up on its hind legs and extended its wings. It had grown from a few dozen centimeters tall to over one and a half meters. It now moved towards Victor with a menacing air, who had stepped back a few paces after striking it.

Olivia had already fired several shots at the creature with no success. Shirley had launched forward to help Victor with her shovel in hand. The man stayed back, ready to intervene to save one of his teammates.

The no longer quite pacifist Hoarding Bug advanced dangerously towards Victor, who sidestepped.

The creature continued for nearly a meter straight before turning towards Victor. It charged him again, and once more Victor dodged as if it were a bull in a bullfight.

Olivia had stopped shooting because she saw that her bullets had no effect, but Shirley had managed to get close enough to strike the creature with her shovel.

CLANG

Another metallic sound echoed through the room. The monster, fixated on Victor, turned abruptly toward Shirley.

But as the creature prepared to attack its new target,

CLING

the metallic sound rang out once again.

Victor had struck it with another shovel blow. As it turned towards Victor,

CLANG

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the creature fell to the ground.

It lay there, motionless.

CLING

CLING

CLING

'Just to be sure,' Victor thought before retrieving the bag. The man, who until then had stayed at the back of the room, moved forward to try lifting the body of the creature. As the body lifted from the ground, a cold wind blew inside the house. The man immediately stopped his movement and placed the creature's corpse back on the ground.

We might be the first to have killed one of these monsters. We've discovered a new rule: you can't take their corpse to sell to the company without angering the other inhabitants. However, they don't seem to care that we killed one of their own. Let's go back to searching, I still haven't found any signs of a secret passage."

After everyone had left the room, Victor lay down next to the creature's corpse to rest.

It had been a stressful moment, but he had managed to stay calm throughout the fight. The shock of what he had done only hit him after his anger had subsided. He had killed the adorable creature with his shovel just because it had stolen a bag containing four of the items they had found.

He opened it to see what was inside, and in fact, there weren't even four items.

There was the plastic duck worth 4 and the hairbrush worth 8.

He had killed this cute creature for a total of 12.

'Money makes people do crazy things, like killing Hoarding Bugs,' Victor thought sadly of his own actions.

'Next time, I'll give it the duck or the least valuable item so it can play with it,' he swore to himself as he got up.

The rest of the morning passed without incident.

The man had given everyone military rations and cereal bars before they departed. Victor was nibbling on one of these, bored.

He hadn't done anything for over thirty minutes because he had already scanned all the objects in the house. He was waiting with his back to the front door, ready to start moving the bags out at the first sign of trouble.

Shirley was beside him while Olivia stayed with the man. Her task was to protect him while he checked every wall of the house. This allowed the man to focus on finding the secret passage to explore the tunnels beneath the house.

But after more than an hour of searching, he returned to the entrance hall with Olivia.

"The access to the tunnels must be from the outside. We'll need to look for a hatch on the rest of the property to find the entrance," he explained to the rest of the team.

There were only three bags to take back to the car, one of which contained just a single item.

"Victor and Olivia, you take the left side along the fence and we'll take the right. We should meet halfway and will sweep the rest of the property in a line."

After giving these instructions, Victor and Olivia headed towards the forest. The vegetation was supposed to be dense in the center of the forest, but it wasn't on the periphery.

They spread out by about ten meters to cover as much ground as possible while making sure not to miss anything and began to sweep the area.

They continued on their way until they ran into the man and Shirley.

Neither group had found the entrance to the tunnels.

They had walked for several kilometers and could no longer even see the house.

The area they were in was like a meadow with grass nearly a meter high. Olivia's flamethrower seemed a bit too radical, so the man took a drone and a remote control out of his bag.

The drone took off with a soft whir of its propellers and flew above their heads. It wouldn't see the ground due to the tall grass, but from the air, the situation was different. The trap door would stand out from above as a small clearing where the grass couldn't grow. The man could easily spot it because he had equipped his drone with a high-performance camera.

About ten minutes passed in silence before the man recalled his drone. After packing it away, they continued on their way.

The man hadn't found the trap door. There was only one place left they hadn't searched: the heart of the forest.

This time, all four of them stayed together. They had heard the sound of a monster from within the forest that morning and didn't want to take the risk of splitting up, even if it meant taking more time.

The forest was quiet. Victor could only hear the rustling of leaves and the whistling of the wind.

After several minutes of searching and venturing deeper into the forest, Victor found what they had been looking for.

In the middle of a clearing stood a metal trap door, reflecting the few rays of sunlight that managed to penetrate through the treetops.

Victor signaled to Olivia, who was a few meters away from him.

"I found it !"

The trap door had no lock, and Victor opened it using the handle on its surface.

It led to a staircase descending straight into the darkness. The man and Olivia left everything they deemed superfluous at the top of the ladder. Olivia only took her assault rifle and a few magazines, while the man took only a watch and a bag with some lock-picking tools.

They all descended together into the bowels of the earth.

Victor tried to check the time on his phone to see how long they had been walking, but the screen refused to light up.

He turned to the mysterious man who always seemed to know more than the others.

"Electronic devices won't work in the tunnels."

The man pulled out three watches from his pocket and distributed them to each team member.

Victor was surprised by such specific rules but strapped the watch to his wrist.

14:32

'We have the whole afternoon to explore,' Victor thought as he bumped into a door.

He had once again gotten lost in his thoughts and hadn't noticed they had reached the bottom of the stairs.

In front of them stood a steel door.

It showed no signs of aging, as if it had been installed in recent months.

Despite being hundreds of meters below the ground, the door before them glowed. Victor placed his palm on its cold surface and began to hear a heartbeat.

It was his own. But to the regular beats of his heart were added erratic, irregular, and unknown pulsations.

Victor didn't know where they were coming from, but he knew that this was no ordinary door.

Before them lay the boundary between two worlds.

And they were not welcome.

The door was secured with a mechanical helical lock, a system used by banks to secure their vaults, but it was the first time Victor had seen one.

The man approached the mechanism and began pulling out an array of various items from his bag.

After taking a deep breath, he started picking the lock.

It took him about ten minutes to overcome the mechanism, a feat that would have been impossible without his deep knowledge of its workings.

He put all his items back in his bag before gripping the helices with all his might. The door opened very slowly with a muffled sound. The man's muscles tightened under the effort, but the metal behemoth opened.

They could all now see the thickness of the door. It was over a meter wide and must have weighed more than a ton.

They entered a vast room. As a faint smell of decay assaulted Victor, a loud sound echoed behind them.

The door had magically closed. They could now see that this side of the door bore some injuries.

There were bite marks and scratches that remained superficial but also more worrying scars.

The bottom left of the door had been torn away over thirty centimeters, and something had struck the reinforced steel, bending it over forty centimeters.

Yet the lock had not been touched.

As if the things waiting in the shadows wanted them to enter.

To enter, never to be able to leave again.