91. Record Broken

A second sharp jolt nearly knocked the tablet from his hands. Isaac’s eyes shifted sideways, and his gaze met the singular, piercing stare of the Abyss creature. At some point, its eyeball had turned to face him, unmoving and unblinking. Its smoky body swirled around it, dissipating and expanding into a larger and larger area, slowly filling the confined space. The eye didn’t look away.

Isaac’s grip on the tablet tightened and he swallowed. He could feel the weight of a growing chill cloak the train car, could see the stretching tendrils of smoke crawling up the walls like spindly legs creeping up a web in his peripheral vision.

The sounds of the subway, usually so constant, were muffled, his mind too preoccupied to process them. The inky darkness sprawled closer.

In a snap second decision, he lifted the tablet up to his ear.

“Hey, Lilith?”

It took every ounce of control he had to keep his voice steady. He resisted the urge to look over at the creature again, instead directing his gaze to rest casually in front of him. From the corner of his eye, he could see the smoke slow down. Swallowing, he continued speaking, mind whirring.

Isaac released a sigh, doing his best to make it sound as annoyed and natural as it could be.

“Another update? I’m still doing the other ones.”

He could still feel the eye watching him. He kept talking.

“Yeah, I’m on the subway right now.” Isaac paused and cleared his throat, considering, but finally continued, albeit a bit more hesitantly than he intended.

“The ride’s been really long. Are you doing maintenance on the tunnels or something?”

The smoke stopped. Even though every fiber of his being wanted to keep going, Isaac forced himself to wait and allow the silence to linger for a little longer. It would look too suspicious if he kept talking nonstop, he repeated to himself.

Isaac forced another sigh out, and his own eyes remained fixed to the window at the same stone tunnel walls, eternally passing by.

“There was nothing wrong with them,” he said with an exasperated tone. He pressed the tablet a little closer, tilting it up more to keep the black screen obscured. Was that necessary? Was that too obvious? “Look, if you’re gonna do this, could you at least send a notice or something next time? You know how annoying it is to be stuck on this damn train for so long?”

A second sudden jolt rocked the train car. Isaac grit his teeth, his head throbbing with the sharp motion.

And then, all at once, the chill seemed to vanish.

The warmth returned to his fingers, and Isaac vaguely wondered when they’d gotten so cold, how he hadn’t noticed earlier. The main focus of his attention, however, was on the brief flash of gold that had lit up his peripheral vision. He pressed the tablet closer, wondering if he’d imagined it.

The train began to slow down.

In jerking, abrupt up and down movements, the subway pulled itself up to the silver line station, the first station after Chrowall City, the station it should’ve passed a long time ago.

Isaac jumped to his feet, one hand gripping the tablet and the other grabbing the cake box, and stepped out the moment the doors slid open. He didn’t turn his head to look at the Abyss creature, didn’t dare stare in its direction, to react, even as he felt its gaze boring into his back.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

It wasn’t until the train doors closed and it pulled away from the station that he finally lowered the tablet and slumped against one of the pillars.

Exhaling, he rubbed his forehead and stared down at the tablet screen. He tapped the button. It lit up with a golden glow.

“What the fuck was that,” he muttered under his breath.

Unease roiled in his stomach like undulating waves. He glanced around the empty station, identical to every other one in the Underside, no distinguishing markers or people in sight.

He double checked the tablet screen, and the flashing words, [CURRENT LOCATION: SOLONELL CITY], were the only things keeping him somewhat grounded.

He turned and began to head towards the station exit. He needed to find someone, to verify that this really was Solonell City and what had happened had been nothing more than a temporary hiccup. Make sure he wasn’t going crazy.

Isaac picked up speed until he was nearly running up the stairs. When he finally stepped out, he was greeted by a familiar deep red sky, a distant, crooked skyline of mismatched buildings, and winding, spiraling streets.

Some of the tension drained from his muscles, but the rest remained tightly coiled. He walked determinedly forward, striding down the street, eyes darting around for any signs of life. His hands remained wrapped securely around the cake box, and after a second of consideration, he placed the tablet back into his jacket pocket.

His footsteps seemed to echo loudly around the buildings. Solonell City was never the most busy of the realms, especially not near the subway station, which was usually quieter in every realm, but it was still unnerving. Maybe it was because he had just spent so long in Chrowall, but in Isaac’s mind, a city should never be so empty, so hollow.

Isaac turned down a corner, or the closest thing to a corner that there could be in Solonell City. Logically he knew not much time had passed since he’d first stepped into the realm, but time felt like it was stretching. The silence had gone on for too long.

Up ahead, a small section of tall skyscrapers cast long shadows over the road. Isaac had always thought they looked like unofficial gates, separating the area around the station with the rest of the city. Mortimer’s shop, Rosalinde, Igor—all of them lived beyond that unspoken boundary.

Walking a little faster, Isaac hurried past sleek, modern buildings that looked like they could’ve come straight out of Chrowall City’s downtown. One building in particular was covered entirely with reflective glass windows, which, combined with its height, made it blend almost entirely into the flat sky. Only the bottom half of the building, which reflected the grey of its neighboring constructions and the black streets, created a clear sense of presence.

A flash of scarlet made Isaac pause.

There wasn’t supposed to be red so low to the ground.

In the mirror-like windows, a faint line of liquid ran along a reflected concrete road. Isaac’s eyes slowly darted to an alleyway caught between tall, sharp buildings. He stared down the long, narrow alley, its end too dark to make out from where he stood.

The throbbing in his head returned. A voice that sounded like his own rang in his mind, telling him to turn away and leave even as his eyes remained fixed on that red stream.

Isaac took a deep breath. He turned, forcing himself to step forward, crossing the border into the alleyway proper in long strides. The surrounding walls seemed to press in on him as he walked, at once guiding him forward yet also pushing him away.

Finally, the other end of the alleyway became visible. A thin strip of red sky connected the two sides of the pseudo block. Around him, the windows seemed to gleam even without any light.

Isaac’s eyes drifted downwards, falling from the fiery sky to the grey of the buildings, the darker colors of the road, and then landing on red again.

The box fell from his hands.

In the three years following that initial one of the System’s implementation, not a single death had occurred in the Underside, Lilith had said once. They’d been sitting in the parlor, staring out the window at the rising golden lights and chatting away after a particularly long day.

Her voice had been filled with pride—warmth, even—and it was the first time Isaac had really looked at Lilith as something more than a fickle, bored god. The fact that the Underside, a place where violence had once been so common and reckless, could now boast such a record was, she said, her greatest achievement. And even though he’d known even less about the Underside and its history back then, he’d believed it.

She had continued sipping her tea and hadn’t mentioned it again, probably hadn’t felt she needed to. It had simply become a fact of the new Underside. Neither she nor Isaac had thought that it would stop being the case.

After all, they couldn’t have known that four years after the System’s initial implementation, death would once again touch the Underside.