My feet hit the shattered remains of an elevator, nearly causing me to stumble. I regained my balance with little effort, unclipping myself from the harness as I cast a look around.

The deep shaft dropped into what seemed to be some kind of ancient maintenance closet, with workstations and pieces of pipe scattered around here and there. A thick layer of dust covered everything. Thick pipes and control stations covered the walls, looking as if great worms were stapled into the sides of the room.

Hope descended first, so she already waited for me with her rifle in a neutral stance. She leaned against the wall, a cautious eye on the only door into the room. “How’d it go?” The mask muffled her voice, making it a bit harder to understand her.

“I’m glad to be back on the ground,” I said as I checked myself over, making sure everything was still in its place. Once I was sure my gear was all good, I started up a mental map, keeping track of where we were in comparison to our exit.

Hope pushed off the ancient table she leaned on, heading for the door. It creaked and groaned, dust shaking off of the ancient metal as she forced it open. “Let’s go.”

I followed her out of the maintenance room into a tunnel. It looked to be an ancient subway of some kind based on the rusted and tattered rails going up and down the length of it. Rubble covered almost everything from the several points where the ceiling of the ancient structure had failed over the long years of abandonment.

Out here wasn’t as dusty with several fresh tracks. Most of them looked to be simply from rats and other vermin, with a few looking like larger creatures of the dark. There were also odd dimples everywhere, little pinpricks of scattered debris. There were a few human-looking prints in the dust, though most were faded as though no one had come through here in a long time.

I glanced back down at the human tracks. Why hadn’t they checked out the maintenance room? An answer revealed itself easily as I checked back the way we came. The door to the maintenance room had been covered in bricks at some point, blending in with the walls of the subway tunnel as part of a clever camouflage. Maybe the Inquisitor did it to hide the entrance? Somehow, the thought of him hauling down bricks to hide the door was incredibly funny to me.

Hope sighed deeply, the sound coming across just as muffled as her voice. “Um, which way?”

“I thought you knew?” I glanced up at the woman curiously, catching her expression as she looked down the dark tunnel. The light of her flashlight caught the ambient dust in the air, making the place look almost foggy. Her eyebrows were knit together in what looked to be solid confusion, but there were subtle hints of something else there. Fear, maybe? It was hard to tell through the mask.

“Look, I’m good at many things. Navigating the Underground and its infinite darkness is not one of them.” She paused, eyeing me speculatively. “You know how to get around or are we just going to stumble through the tunnels hoping to find our destination?”

I looked up and down the tunnel, adding everything I could see to my mental map. “Maybe.”

Stepping in front of her so my front was mostly out of view, I swiftly summoned Crow’s Celestial Compass. In a flash- err, in a crawl of shadows, the masterfully crafted device appeared in my hand. I clicked it open, idly watching the gears and red crystals as they worked to an unknown rhythm.

Four lines of crimson, visible as if glowing yet not giving off any light into their surroundings, appeared over the top of the compass, allowing me to center myself. We dropped in a mile to the west of the safe house's suspected area, meaning we needed to go east. Unfortunately, nothing could ever be easy. The subway tunnel ran almost straight from north to south.

Maybe the Hostile Harbor feature could help guide me to our destination? Or maybe it would lead me to a ghoul or mutant nest… probably shouldn’t risk it, at least not until we got closer to our destination. Who knows, it might not even work at all.

I banished the compass back into the shadows, doing a one-eighty back towards the south. “This way.”

I could feel Hope’s almost hollow eyes on me as I walked past her quieter than a mouse. She fell in behind me shortly after. “If you say so.”

We walked the length of the subway tunnel, going about a quarter of a mile before our first chance to break east came up. A collapse in the tunnel revealed a natural-looking cave on the left side of the subway.

I motioned to the collapse. “We need to go eastish.”

“Chek.” Hope walked faster, taking point as we approached the side with our rifles raised. I mentally toggled on Dexterity, feeling that familiar sense of wrongness as everything slowed down slightly. It was like the entire world was moving through molasses, with me being the only exception. My movements still weren’t perfectly getting across, adding to my growing unease. It felt like I was a warm knife wading through the molasses compared to everything else though.

The dilated time allowed me to take in more details as my mind gained the freedom to wander about the slowed world. The rubble in the tunnel had been shifted by something at some point, the larger chunks of rubble off to the sides of the place. There were also signs of drag marks everywhere, disturbing the scattered rocks and fallen bricks. Barely visible crimson splotches looked fairly recent, some in the shape of a pawed foot.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There were also those weird spots all around, as if someone slammed a pickaxe into the rubble. They looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't say why.

Hope’s light flashed over the area, showing the cave to be slightly larger than the subway it broke off from. It was long enough for her light to not reach the other end, though the bowed shape of the tunnel didn’t help anything. Oddly, the cave was extremely rough, with striations that resembled some of the places I saw back in Sunderland. I mentally drew it onto my map as her boots clicked on loose bricks.

As soon as I followed her into the cave, my nose picked up a rotten scent somehow getting through the mask’s filters. I nearly gagged as it hit me full force, with the scent only growing stronger as we progressed. It held a slight sterilization to it that burned slightly. Up ahead, Hope froze as her light panned around the angle of the bowed part.

I had way too much time to analyze everything as my brain worked faster than the world around it. To take in the details as Hope’s shoulders arched up and her rifle slowly snapped into place. To see her fingers tense in preparation. To hear the slow shouted warning. "Con-ta-ct, fr-on-t!"

I was only a few steps behind her, so I followed her lead as I also raised my rifle up. Just before I could reach her, the first shot rang out, the world moving slow enough I could barely track the bullet's distortion of the air as it sped by. The slowed time caused her automatic rifle to turn semi-auto to me, each shot with a significant gap between it.

And then I was there, rifle raised, and seeing what she saw. The odd cave ended in a disgusting mound of flesh. Everything from small mole-like creatures to humans dangled about, sucked dry of all their nutrients, and placed amongst rubble as if to make a shield around a nest of gore and skittering clicks.

A disgustingly massive spider sat in the middle of the nest, half slumped over with part of its grotesque head blown off from Hope’s rounds. And still Hope fired into the gore-coated corpse, guaranteeing its death as the body twitched with malicious intent. It was like a snake, crawling to us even without half its brain's mental functions.

My eyes were drawn elsewhere as I let go of my rifle with one hand and reached for my pocket. My hands moved too slow for my liking as my brain kept up its ‘normal’ pace, processing everything with a body too caught in time to react. And yet I didn’t let go of the rifle, using the warped time to process everything.

There were other bodies all around the nest- no, the spider’s den. They weren’t sucked dry like the others. They were still alive and wriggling. There were humans moaning and groaning, rats squeaking, and moles grunting as they thrashed in the webs. The still-living creatures caught in the webs were coated in gore and bloated near beyond recognition. Some of them were choking on rotten, half-liquid meat, as if the spider fed them chunks of its prey.

My hand finally entered one of my pockets, wrapping around a bottle. My other finally released the rifle, time speeding back up, and reached for a lighter. The slow thudding of Hope’s rifle returned to normal as she fired away into the nest, finishing off whatever malevolent energy allowed the spider to keep moving out of the den. It was halfway to us, blocking parts of the den at the end of the cave with its massive body.

My hands finally moved in time with my mind as I worked to light the Molotov, my eyes never leaving the ‘living’ creatures in the webs. I recognized the spider, or at least its species: A Pervider. Horror stories were sung about them amongst the poor and downtrodden, and I had heard a fair many amongst the people in the Ryu Shipping Yard. About how occasionally one would break out onto the surface, and suicide was a better decision than being caught.

Just as the tattered shirt of the Molotov caught flame, the ‘living’ creatures all throughout the den thrashed harder, some even falling from the webs that held them as if they could sense the fire. Warped blobs started to move underneath their skin, causing the skin to tense and stretch like rubber as the creatures screamed in agony. And it wasn’t just one. Thousands of blobs moved throughout them.

One man’s ‘jaw’ moved as the skin finally stretched too much and popped like a pimple, revealing a gore and pus-covered baby spider. Its awful gaze, pure loathing for the living hidden behind its beady eyes, seemed to reach me and Hope even as we were far off.

That scene wasn’t an isolated incident as more and more, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, broke free of their hosts splattering fresh gore amongst the den. For a moment, a small moment, I could smell agony. It turned visceral, burning my nose as spiders crawled from throats, ceasing the ability to scream and cry.

The Molotov was in mid-air before I even realized I threw it.

I watched, hesitation freezing me my eyes shifted to the grown Pervider. More accurately, to the liquid dripping from its arm-sized fangs. I grabbed my rifle loosely, Dexterity activating once again as the world slowed down. I used the time to think, to think about the pros and cons. And then I moved, greed winning over the rational part of my mind insisting this was a terrible idea.

As I passed Hope, the Molotov shattered inside the den. It was a bit off-center, but that didn’t matter as the flames splattered everywhere, catching the gore and web-covered place on fire almost immediately. The fire spread instantaneously, the webs acting as the perfect conduit for the purifying red. Enough screeches for a chorus filled in the air, followed by near-silent sighs of relief. The screams of the living stopped even as the young Perviders' continued.

A small voice, so light it might’ve been nonexistent, whispered, “Thank you.”

I reached the larger spider’s corpse, carefully blocking Hope’s view as I summoned the canteen and held it under the Pervider’s massive fangs. A single drop of venom fell into it, and that was all I needed.

Just as I banished the canteen, Insight's chilly phantom pain arced up my side, stabbing deep beneath my ribs. It continued out of my chest and through my hand. I grabbed my rifle once more, the slightest touch all I needed as the world slowed. My head pounded, the warping perspective on time finally getting to me with dull spikes of pain.

I forced my body to back up as I tried to figure out what caused Insight to flash. The Pervider, some demented manifestation of fucked willpower, managed to sweep one of its spear-like legs toward me. The blood-covered limb’s trajectory was in line with my dodge, causing me a moment of panic as I watched in slow motion.

My eyes drifted to its blown apart head, the lower part of it with its mouth and fangs all that remained- no, that wasn’t right. A single, beady eye remained. It was filled with the clouds of death, and yet pure, unholy hatred managed to wrangle back the death clouds as it met my eyes.

This wasn’t just hatred, I realized as I met its demonic gaze. This was pure loathing of my entire existence. It was evil incarnate, praying for my demise even as it spitefully tried to bring me down with it. It didn't even need a brain, the seething hatred causing enough of a reaction in of itself.

Hope yelled, her words slowly reaching me, “W-a-t-c-h—“

Three things happened almost instantaneously. One, I flared Cold-Blooded to calm myself and think. Two, the spider’s obese body lunged impossibly forward to catch me. And three, I brought my rifle into position.