Week Two of my time as a hunter came around and I found myself within a sewer. Like a big sewer, like one of those sewers that seems more like an underground subway system with water running through it.
There were rats, big rats. Huge Rats. These things were the size of dogs and I’m not talking about small dogs either. These rodents were the size of saint bernards and they were right ornery bastards.
I ended up wandering into a whole nest of them. Which meant I ended up running from a whole bunch of them.
At least until I got chased into a dead end. Then I had to fight them, using my trusty cricket bat, because assault rifles and magic swords were expensive and I’d wanted to avoid wasting money before I knew if this hunter thing was going to work out.
*****
I leapt and tumbled over and around the massive furry bodies. Deftly avoiding their sharp teeth and thick scaly tails. Using any openings I spotted to cave some skulls in and thin their numbers.
I’d almost gotten it down to something manageable when the ratking, the head of the nest, came. If the others were as big as dogs, this one was as big as a bear. He, well she, since all ratkings are actually female, came screeching at me. Claws out.
She tried to tackle me and I just barely managed to dance out of the way. She whipped about her tail cracking the bricks that lined the sewer as she swung it about.
I somehow managed to get on top of her, which was just the right position for me to deliver a blow that splattered her thoughts and concerns for her kin and had it oozing out of the orifices of her head.
With that fight done with it was time to do what hunters do. First I took pictures of my quarry, and collected their essence stones, then I headed back to the nest,(which took a while), and ransacked the nest in search of loot.
Managing to find some bits of useful looking scrap and an axe. Which was a particularly fortuitous find since my cricket bat just broke during that last fight.
*****
Ah, if it seems I might be a tad used to this, or good at it, that's not really the case. This was just a bit of serendipitous and an issue of differing standards of difficulty.
Whether its strength or coordination, or knowing what to do when it seems that someone's trying to eat you, its not that I’m actually any good when it comes to those things.
Rather its just that I’ve come from a place that’s much, much worse.
*****
I left the sewers and took my first deep breath in a long time. It wasn’t that great, the air outside was still choked with icy mist, dust, and a certain something that burned with each inhalation.
The outer wastes were anarchic and dangerous. It was place filled with magic mutated beasts, ravenous undead and dangerous and mysterious entities. The skylines were a motley mixture of medieval castles and modern twenty-second century towers.
Like some mad time traveller had taken the present and the past for this world and then smashed them together. Now that I think of it, even the inner-territories, the inside, was a bit like this.
The society was distinctly modern in feeling, with its internet and cellphones and television and running water. Then you’d blink and find that it all lay on the bones a very brutal, feudalistic way of doing things. A primaeval civilization.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
A civilization that still had guilds and kings and slaves or rather indentured contractors, who were pretty much slaves. A civilization that still believed in multiple-partner marriages. Ending feuds by massacring families and bloody sacrifice.
There were cars and tech for sure, but most traffic was horse drawn.There were guns, yes, but the sheer durability of your average undead made it more cost effective to use swords, arrows, or magic.
Everything was just chaotic and run down enough for one to imagine that the whole world while more or less orderly was at best, at the level of a third world country at war in terms of security.
Gangs and factions ruled the streets. The Mayors ruled the gangs and factions. The lords ruled the Mayors and the Kings ruled the lords. Going on in an endless chain of war and death, with the threat of the Dread Lords being the only thing that kept (barely kept) humanity from turning on itself like snake trying to eat its own tails.
*****
In short this world wasn’t the best of worlds and compared to my original world it was fairly hellish. On the other hand compared to the world I was just drawn I’d call it paradise. Mortal strife is a pale shadow of what I came from.
If it weren’t for the fact that I’m at least eighty-five to ninety percent sure, that I was alive when I torn from my real world, I’d say it was hell.
The actual hell. I’m not talking about a place with lava and red dudes with horns. Even that would have been better. I’m talking about a conceptual hell, the one everyone fears, no matter ‘what’ they believe in.
A place of darkness and fear.
A place of endless suffering and horror.
A place of endless pain and madness.
A place of laughter and weeping.
That place where unlucky protagonists go to when stories end with ‘and they were never heard from again’. A bad place, where only bad things happen. A place where death would be a mercy, except everything there lives forever.
Even while its being slowly digested, broken down and defecated. A place where existence was just an endless slog of trying to move forwards and not get ground into nothing again.
Thus I can’t help laughing when I consider the ‘terrors’ of the highwayman and the ravenous beast. Even the horrors that I can sense roaming this land are nothing, compared to what I’ve witnessed and been inflicted with.
So please don’t think I’m taking this world lightly. I’m really not. It’s just that I know firsthand that things could be much, much, worse. I know just how bad things can be, I've experienced it, mind, body and soul, and every single aspect of my being has thus adapted accordingly.