A human face

Leaning on his long blade as a crutch, Aegon began what might have been the slowest, most agonizing trek of his life, through darkness so thick he could barely make out the fingers of his outstretched hand.

The space at the bottom of the cage was far larger than it had appeared from above, and far more labyrinthine.

Huge stone walls stretched into the darkness, seemingly without end.

The ground was uneven. Beneath the thick silt lay broken stones, rotten wood, and other hard objects he neither dared nor wished to think about.

He had to probe before every step. His injured left leg offered almost no support on the slippery mud; he relied entirely on his right leg and arms, along with the long blade driven deep into the muck as a third point of support.

The cold damp seeped into everything. His already soaked clothes clung to his skin, steadily stealing what little body heat he had left.

Aegon shivered uncontrollably. Every breath sent out a faint cloud of white mist that vanished into the colder air.

There was barely any light.

Only an occasional patch of sickly green moss clung to the walls, giving off a faint glow.

That hazy, dim light barely outlined nearby objects, only making the darkness farther away seem more sinister.

He had tried feeling around for his fire-starting kit-fortunately, although the leather pouch was soaked, the tinder and flint inside still seemed barely usable.

But his heart sank as he looked around. Everywhere he could see, there was nothing but wet silt, slick stones, and scattered wood fragments steeped in shallow water, rotting for who knew how many years. He could find nothing to burn, not even a slightly dry piece of firewood.

In this subterranean abyss, even the most primitive flame had become a luxury beyond his reach.

Aegon could only grope his way through the gloom by that pitiful glow.

The golden dot on the system map blinked steadily somewhere ahead, giving him his only clear direction.

But he dared not take a straight path. He had to keep as close as possible to the relatively firm ground along the walls, well away from those pitch-black holes.

Those holes looked like festering wounds on some enormous beast, silently gaping open. The wind blowing from them carried a deeper chill and an indescribable rank odor, like the lair of some creature.

He did not know whether it was a hallucination brought on by severe injury and loss of body heat, or some ominous "gift" of his excessively high spirit stat.

Aegon kept feeling that beyond the corner of his eye, in the absolute darkness untouched by the glowing moss-especially in the shadows around those holes-"something" denser than the darkness itself occasionally flashed past.

There was no sound, no discernible shape, only a pure "presence" brimming with malice, like a cold gaze licking over his spine.

Whenever he stopped abruptly and turned as fast as he could through the searing pain, holding his blade across his body as his violet eyes fixed on the place where he had sensed something amiss...

There was nothing there, only ancient darkness and deathly silence.

Sometimes silence was more unnerving than any sound.

Apart from his own stifled breathing, his heartbeat, the tapping of his wooden staff, and the rustle of clothing as he moved, there was no sign of any living thing in that vast underground space.

There was no heavy breathing from Henry, no low-voiced warning from Carl, no moans or cries from other survivors. Even the eerie howling wind from beneath the abyss, faintly audible before, could no longer be heard here.

There was only a heavy silence that swallowed everything.

"Fucking hell..." Aegon muttered, for he no longer knew how many times.

He cursed the eerie surroundings and his wretched condition, but also that sense of being watched, which followed him like a shadow yet had no tangible source.

He felt as though he had fallen into the digestive chamber of some ancient beast and was being slowly, silently digested.

He had no idea how long he had been crawling along at this pace. Time had lost all meaning here. Only the mounting exhaustion and pain, and the cold that grew harder and harder to shake, reminded him that his life was slipping away.

He moved mechanically toward the golden dot while trying to widen his search, his eyes passing over every shadow that looked like a mound, hoping to find Henry's bulky body propped behind it, or Carl's lean figure crouched there.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Only stone, mud, standing water, and more scattered bones so old they had long since melded with the muck, their original shapes barely distinguishable.

As his search continued to turn up nothing and his strength dwindled, an ominous foreboding grew ever stronger in his heart.

Henry, that earnest fat man, and Carl, that slippery veteran who could always be counted on when it mattered...

Maybe they had fallen farther away, somewhere he had yet to search?

Maybe they were injured and unconscious?

He forced himself to think of the better possibilities, but the "things" that the system warning had said were "within arm's reach," and the eeriness seeping through the deathly silence around him, made any real optimism impossible.

Just as exhaustion and worry began to scatter his thoughts, and he drew his gaze back from yet another empty patch of shadow to continue onward, he suddenly felt something strange beneath his foot.

It was neither hard rubble nor soft, rotten silt, but a kind of... sticky slickness.

At the same moment, an intensely familiar smell-one he never wanted to encounter here-surged into his nose, half-numb from the cold.

The smell of rust.

The thick, unmistakable metallic reek of fresh blood!

Aegon went rigid. Every wandering thought was blasted away in an instant.

He jerked his head down, instinctively tightening his grip on the hilt. His muscles tensed, and he no longer cared that the movement pulled at his wounds.

By the dim, sickly green light cast by a small, thicker patch of glowing moss on the nearby rock wall, he saw what lay beneath his feet.

It was a sizable pool of dark liquid that had yet to soak fully into the mud, its viscous surface gleaming an ominous dark red in the faint light.

Blood, without a doubt. And scattered along the edge of that pool were a few... things.

Several severed fingers, their skin ashen, black mud packed beneath their nails.

A scrap with bits of flesh and skin still attached, its shape suggesting it might have been part of a foot.

And... half a human face.

The face lay on its side, half submerged in the blood, half exposed to the sickly green glow.

Its eye was wide with terror, its pupil already dilated, utterly lifeless yet frozen with the incomparable horror of its final moment.

The cheek muscles were contorted, the mouth stretched open at an impossible angle, as though trying to scream, only to remain forever frozen in that silent instant.

Aegon recognized that face.

Even distorted by absolute terror, he remembered it.

It was Old Buck, the slippery old mercenary who had stirred up trouble aboard the ship, then been made an example of by Crow's Eye when they landed at the ruins!