Soulless Soul

Chapter 70: Beneath the Mud

Sky shook his head and sent his Soul Clone out to explore the labyrinth ahead, hoping that its ability to phase through walls would let it sense any lurking dangers before they could get to him.

Sky kept himself close to the side of the corridor he’d entered, braced against the damp stone, as he carefully tuned in to the senses that his creation had lent him. Down here, there was no use relying on his own eyesight; he needed the detachment, the multi-faceted perception of an entity that could see through stone.

Already the sickly light filtering down through the trees was washing from a dull charcoal towards a bruised purple, the day’s reprieve quickly running out.

He did not want to think about what might happen if he was caught inside the labyrinth when the Savage Beasts emerged. To be trapped in a narrow corridor with a half-dozen carriage-sized arachnids racing up the walls either side, unable to run or retreat, was a fate that would drain his spiritual energy in a matter of minutes.

His Soul Clone did not encounter any obstacles right away, slipping past the first few hundred yards of labyrinth with nothing but the occasional swat of spectral fingers against pressure plates, loose floorboards or the faintest hint of warm exhalations from sleeping predators. The corridor was empty save for the distant drip, drip of water echoing from the high ridges overhead.

At times it would rise up and out to survey the labyrinth below, giving Sky the option to choose one route over another, but from this height the twisting corridors reminded him most of a broken circuit board, carved directly from the bones of the earth. A madness, a chaos of jagged lines and impossibly tight turns, all designed to confuse and disorient a runner. Sky would observe the turns ahead through the clone’s eyes, commit them to memory, before recalling its presence to his side.

Other times his creation would simply run ahead, phasing through walls and searching for alternate exits that would remain hidden to any ordinary man. These were the labyrinth’s trickiest. A wide dead-end that would waste hours of an ordinary Common’s time was only a minor hindrance to an ethereal scout. A jagged passage could be inspected for stability, verifying if the blocked off chamber beyond was actually a trap or not.

Even with these advantages, navigating the labyrinth was not as easy as one might think. The corridors had an almost impossible geometry, stretching and contracting depending on which way one approached them. The air grew heavier with each step Sky took, and not only in terms of pressure.

Sky found himself doubling back often as he searched for shortcuts past particularly nasty dead ends, or narrow corridors that simply refused to lead anywhere useful. More than once he found a path that seemed viable to the higher scout’s view, only for it to terminate in an exposed chasm or mass of calcified roots that his Blood Blade would take too long to clear.

Each setback cost precious minutes, and the slowly darkening sky had taken on a more ominous tone of deep, bruised purple.

Sky had once had to backtrack nearly an entire kilometer before finding an alternative to a collapsed passage, its masonry choked with tons of rubble that had fallen from the ceiling above. He remembered how his boots had squelched unpleasantly in the mire as he worked his way back, his thoughts tightening into knots of anxiety.

Still, everything was working out reasonably well. He’d not fallen for a single trap, nor had he cross-referenced the travel routes of any large predators. Once he understood the patterns within the labyrinth’s design, even the unpredictable turns made sense.

It was all so smooth, in fact, that Sky found himself forgetting about the dangers surrounding him. The tension in his muscles, the readiness in his stance as he’d first entered the tunnels, had eased out to be replaced with the slow, steady thump of his heartbeat. As Sky moved forward he found himself relaxing, his breathing shifting from short, measured exhales to a slow ambling walk.

He even had time to spare to observe the labyrinth’s interior as he walked, noting features he hadn’t even taken in during his first rush of panic. It was a habit, a coping mechanism he’d developed during the early years of his travels. A way to observe and catalog while his body automatically adjusted to the punishing effort of running.

The stone and mud walls of the labyrinth were an odd combination, reinforced with odd bands of what looked like rebar, but that were instead thick, gnarled roots that burrowed deep down into the earth. Strange cracks and crevices marred the surface of the stone, disappearing into the earth as if something beneath wanted to hide. The thick mud was veined with an iridescent sheen of oil that acted like lenses, refracting the dim light in unnatural ways.

But it was the bones that caught Sky’s eye.

They were everywhere, woven into the very foundation of the labyrinth, acting as strange reinforcements within the mud walls. Small bits of bone, fragile and dry, would snap beneath his boots as he walked, buried within the thick goop. Others were massive, the remains of some unknown leviathan that had once filled the labyrinth with its body.

Massive ribcages that rivaled the beams of a ship frame formed natural alcoves within the stone, the hollowed husks sheltering pockets of particularly dense gray fog.

Every few steps sent a fresh crack echoing through the corridors as the remains beneath his feet were crushed by the pressure of his weight.

It was all very unsettling, the sheer volume of remains.

Very unsettling, but Sky had stopped noticing it after a while. The longer he walked, the more the silence of the labyrinth lulled him into a false sense of security. It was understandable really, because everything had been going so well.

Sky was doing well. He’d escaped certain death with nothing more than a few bruises, and had bested an apex predator with nothing but a well-placed strike. He was outsmarting a trap that could have killed him ten times over, and he barely even had to try.

Sky had prepared well for this moment. He’d done everything a sane adventurer would do in his position in order to ensure survival.

He had his Soul-Clone to scout ahead, his Danger-Sense warned him of approaching threats, and he had the experience to know when to take risks.

Sky was checking blind-spots, keeping track of his spiritual energy and staying light on his feet. If anything, he was being too careful, holding himself back from running a little faster in case of pursuit.

Something went wrong, somewhere along the way. The line between caution and arrogance was razor-thin in the Dungeon, and Sky had unknowingly walked across it.

I’ve got this, the mantra whispered in his mind, smoothing the rough edges of anxiety with a familiar touch of denial. He was Sky, anti-hero if there ever was one, and this labyrinth was nothing more than a nuisance. All it did was keep him from his goal, nothing more.

It was a dangerous thing to think, but Sky was only human. He was prone to the same sins of arrogance as any other Awakened that had seen a long string of victories.

Humans tended to be that way. They forgot, when things went well, that the Dungeon rarely ever played fair. That it made traps not because it wanted to, but because it had to in order to function.

That was why Sky was caught so easily by the trap ahead. The mud directly in front of him rippled, vanishing into the soft ground right where his footfall would have sent it flying into the air.

His instincts screamed, and Sky’s Danger-Sense flared in a hot, searing wave of panic that nearly shut down his thought process entirely.

Sky’s muscles tightened, shifting his center of gravity backwards as his legs tried to pull out of the way, but not fast enough. The margin of error in the lower sectors of the labyrinth was measured in milliseconds, and Sky had wasted precious ones in thought.

BOOM!

A fountain of sludge, bone and rock exploded upwards around him, blinding him with its sudden force. Sky barely had the presence of mind to twist away as he heard the rush of the beast’s movement, the sound of its eight legs slapping against the stone floor of the corridors.

Sky stumbled backward, trying to pull himself out of the way. The thick mud that carpeted the floor of the maze was slick and hard to get a grip on, but his muscles tensed in preparation to leap aside if he needed to.

A massive spider emerged from the earth before him, rising up slowly but with terrifying grace. It did not come from above or behind, but from within the very earth Sky had trusted to keep him safe. The creature’s chitinous body was the same dark color as the walls around it, save for the iridescent sheen that gave it away. Eight long legs fanned out from its core, anchoring it to the ground as it dug into the stone floor with scythe-like movements.

Sky’s muscles tensed as twin orbs of sickly yellow flame locked onto him from within the creature’s head.

Then it lunged.

Sky’s eyes narrowed as the beast’s front limbs shot forwards, locking on to his throat and chest.

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