Talia and Gerhart heard the knight’s gauntleted fists frantically thumping against the layer of rotten wood and dirt separating them from their pursuer. They also heard him shouting in the hopes of an ally being close.

But when it became clear that the knight wouldn’t be able to even get a hand through the collapsed opening and the darkness showed no signs of letting up, Talia and Gerhart noticed how much they had grown.

The damp, cool, and soft dirt scraped against their hips, shoulders, chests, legs, and arms as they crawled their way through the tunnel. The darkness enhanced the earthy scent of the tunnel and the sensation of barely being able to squeeze through the earth.

Ritzy, Talia, and Gerhart had made the tunnel when they were younger, mostly just for the sake of it. But it had been one of the times all three of them had agreed on something. It would be a waste to make the tunnel so short it only barely went past the town wall.

Of course, since it was a lot more work digging the tunnel than they had first expected, they didn’t burrow all the way to the forest as they had initially planned. Instead, it only went a couple of meters beyond the wall.

But those meters felt painfully long when Talia and Gerhart were crawling through the tunnel for the first time in ages. They were both a lot bigger, taller, and longer than they had been back then, so they should have reached the other end pretty quickly. Talia even had the bone club in front of her that she shoved forward both to clear the path and check how far they had left to crawl.

However, without any light and the walls of the tunnel pressing against them as if it was shrinking, it felt like neither time nor the two of them could move any slower.

Talia even felt like the tunnel was so narrow and tight that it was pressing on her chest. She was already straining due to her wounds, the fight with the knights, and the sneaky sprint through town. But the seemingly shrinking tunnel only made it worse.

“Calm down.”

Gerhart’s voice was surprisingly calm and steady, despite sounding subdued due to the tunnel. But he probably knew that if Talia wasn’t calm, he had to be.

“Fuck off, Gerhart.

“Close your eyes if it helps. But you need to get a move on. You’ve been stuck in the same place for too long.”

“...”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Talia didn’t say anything, but she listened to Gerhart. Closing her eyes didn’t really do much to help her. If anything, it only made things worse since she couldn’t even tell if they were open or closed because of how dark it was.

But she took a deep breath, and to spite Gerhart since he had claimed she hadn’t moved at all, she began inching her way forward again. Gerhart’s nagging presence behind her and the breathing she hadn’t noticed because her own beating heart drowned it out also helped push her forward until her club finally met resistance.

“I think we’re here,” she whispered to Gerhart to let him know why she stopped.

“Already?”

“Piss off. It feels like I’ve crawled the same distance girls run when you try to confess.”

“Hah! You mean I should do like you and tie them down so they can’t run?”

“Hey, if it works, it works.”

“Yeah, yeah. Stop blabbing and get us out of here. We need to get moving as quickly as possible before the knights send someone out to catch us.”

Talia didn’t respond since she was busy using the bone club to try and smash open the way out.

The tunnel’s exit was a gentle slope to make it easy for someone crawling on their stomach to leave. So, it should have been a pretty straightforward matter of forcing open the most likely rotten wood and dirt-covered lid just by shoving the club forward with enough strength.

But the only responses Talia got to her repeated attempts were soft thumps and an increasingly aching arm. Her arms were already tired from fending off the knights and the wounds that got her. She had then also used those same arms, heavy, injured, and bruised, to crawl, drag, and push herself forward through the tunnel.

Repeatedly trying to steer and push the heft bone club with enough force upward to try and break through the lid had Talia’s arms turning into lead-heavy earthworms, one at a time.

Talia tried and tried again, ignoring her arms, screaming at her to stop. But with not even a hint of success in sight, her grunts of strenuous effort turned into crying groans of deepening panic.

If she couldn’t get the lid open, they would be stuck inside the tunnel, the dark, small, narrow, tight, shrinking tunnel, for who knows how long. Their only hope was Ritzy somehow guessing that they would try and escape the town through a tunnel they made several years ago and coming to meet them, then hearing her bone club thumping against the lid. Or, more likely, their screams for help barely penetrating the oppressively thick blanket of earth separating their graves and freedom.

“Man, I know you’re a girl and all, but you’re pretty weak if you can’t even get open a single lid. Like, it’s wood, rotten wood. How hard can it be?”

Gerhart’s timely voice just barely pulled Talia out of a downward spiral of disaster thoughts about how they were buried alive.

Talia didn’t say anything in response. But Gerhart didn’t need to hear her say anything to know that Talia hadn’t despaired. The short silence, empty of any thumps, grunts, or groans, told Gerhart anything he needed to know.

And when Talia got back to work, her bone club hitting the tunnel exit in a cold-blooded frenzy, Talia completely silent all the while, Gerhart smiled a little. Not that it was visible in the pitch-black darkness of the tunnel.