Chapter 68: Journey To Hell
The dark lasted exactly long enough for me to realize it was not darkness.
Darkness is what remains when light leaves.
Then it ended.
Desert.
Heat arrived immediately as a presence rather than a temperature. Different from the volcano.
Sand stretched to every horizon. No rock formations. No ruins. No vegetation. Nothing to interrupt the monotony. Just an endless expanse of flat desert, as though someone had started designing a world, lost interest halfway through, and submitted it anyway.
The sky was overcast.
I stood in it.
The system flickered.
[Welcome, Host.]
[You have been relocated.]
[This is not a drill. I repeat this is not a drill.]
[The Hell Begins.]
"Welcome"
Huh! A person.
He was sitting on a rock.
He was holding a book. Reading it with the focused attention of someone who had been reading for a while and had reached a section they found genuinely interesting.
He looked maybe fourteen.
Dark hair. Unremarkable clothes. The kind of face that belonged to someone who had made a deliberate decision to look like someone you would not remember.
He turned a page.
I looked at him.
He did not look up.
"You made me wait too long," he said, to the book. "That is impolite."
"I was not aware we had an appointment," I said.
He closed the book.
Looked up.
His eyes had no color I recognized, the kind of color that had not consulted nature about the available options.
"Let this game begin," he said.
A smile appeared around his face.
It was the most specifically terrible smile I had seen since Luna.
Luna’s smile had at least been communicating amusement. This one was communicating something that did not have a clean category.
I opened my mouth.
Every bone in my body cracked.
The sound reached my ears before the pain did.
The sound tore out of me—half broken,
Then the pain arrived.
I was on the sand before I realized I had fallen.
The body’s entire vocabulary of suffering speaking at once.
My jaw locked. The tendons in my hands pulled taut until the fingers curled inward and would not open.
Something in my chest gave way not my heart, something near it, my lungs stopped working.
On the ground with my cheek against the hot grit, unable to move anything.
I could hear him walking toward me.
Even footsteps. No hurry.
He crouched down.
I could see his shoes. Ordinary shoes.
"You lasted longer than the last one," he said. Conversationally. The tone of someone making an observation that was not particularly interesting to them.
I tried to say something.
My throat produced no sound.
He reached out and placed two fingers against my temple.
There was no word for the sensation. Every nerve ending in the human body fired at once, without exception and without the body’s usual mercy of unconsciousness.
He had removed that mercy. Located and extracted it, and left behind only the raw fact of what was happening. Pain ceased to be an event and became the entire structure of existence.
Time lost meaning. Thought followed shortly after.
I heard myself make a sound I did not recognize.
Not a scream. Too broken for that.
His face above mine was perfectly still.
But something around his eyes shifted. The expression of someone who had expected satisfaction and found something else.
He looked, for just a moment,
His hand passed through my chest without resistance.
No wound or blood.
That should have been impossible.
He touched my heart.
His fingers closed around my heart.
I felt it.
And then another.
He tilted his head.
"Found it."
"Huh,"
He clenched his hand.
The world shattered.
My heartbeat vanished.
[Process: Resetting the world Begins]
***
[Day 1 — Wasted]
[Day 2]
[Objective: Survive the day.]
[Reward: Continued existence.]
[The higher beings welcome you to your new entertainment format.]
[Oh, also your skills have been blocked.]
[If you do not survive you may experience something the higher beings are describing as, and I am quoting directly here, hell today.]
[Good luck.]
***
AHHH—
I was standing.
Both facts were surprising given the last thing I remembered, which was my neck and the specific finality of the sound it had made.
Same desert. Same sky.
Different in one specific way.
I checked my mana.
The Ether Authority did not respond.
I reached for the All Elements affinity.
Nothing.
Hell’s Fire. Vector Authority. Aether Step. Sanguine Pulse. Crimson Veil.
All of them were there in the way that things were there when they were behind a locked door.
I stood in the sand
Skills: blocked.
Mana access: blocked.
Body: functional, which was more than could be said for the body at the end of Day 1.
Weapons: none.
Supplies: none.
Information: minimal.
Threat level: unknown but the general atmosphere strongly suggested high.
Then the ground moved.
The movement of sand as if a very large thing was moving through it below the surface, the ripple running outward from a central point. Fast.
Toward me.
[New Quest: Sandworm.]
Sandworm, I thought. Of course.
The wave of disturbed sand was forty meters wide and moving at a speed of fucking supercar.
The unmana-reinforced body I currently had access to found alarming.
I ran.
Not toward anything. Away, specifically away, because the horizon was uniform in every direction and the worm was in one direction and the other directions were therefore statistically preferable.
The sand under my feet was the loose kind.
The body is working hard and the ground is not cooperating.
I ran.
And Ran.
The worm surfaced.
I did not stop to look at it directly because the peripheral information was sufficient.
Large.
The word large was doing enormous work in that sentence.
The head that broke the surface was wide enough that I could not have stood at one side and seen the other without the width becoming an argument against it.
I ran faster.
My lungs had opinions.
My lungs could express their opinions after I had addressed the more immediate priority.
The worm submerged.
I knew because the surface ripple changed, it was settling from the breach, then reforming thirty meters ahead and to the right. It had gone under. It was circling.
Circling. The circle wasn’t random. The distance between each pass was shrinking.
It is herding me, I thought, between breaths that were costing considerably more than they should. It knows the terrain and I do not and it is using that.
I changed direction.
Perpendicular to the new ripple lines. If it was trying to cut off the direction I was going, perpendicular was the least predictable response to the cut.
The sand ahead of me erupted.
I jumped left.
The head passed close enough that the displacement of air from the motion pushed me sideways and I went into the sand on my hands and knees and came up already running because the alternative was not coming up.
My hands were bleeding.
The desert did not care.
I ran.
The worm was behind me.
I could feel it through the sand under my feet, the vibration of its movement transmitting through the ground in the specific rhythm that moved continuously rather than in bursts.
It was not faster than me at a sprint.
The question was how long I could sprint.
The answer, given the sand and the heat and the absence of mana and the situation...
My legs started to give up.
The muscles became less reliable than they had been at the thirty minute and continuing the trend.
The worm was still behind me.
It was waiting for me to slow down.
Fine, I thought. We are doing this.
I stopped running and turned around.
The worm surfaced.
It was, up close, very large. The head alone was wide enough to cast a shadow I could have stood in. The mouth at the front of it was open.
It looked at me.
I had no mana. I had no weapons. I had sand, heat, two bleeding hands, legs that had been filing complaints.
I picked up a rock.
A medium rock,
I threw it at the worm’s face.
The rock hit.
The worm was not visibly affected.
I threw another one.
Also not visibly affected.
"Right," I said.
I threw a third one.
At the end my legs stopped and I went down in the sand and did not immediately get up, which was when the worm made the decision I had been delaying.
"Okay," I said, face in the sand, "I see."
The shadow fell over me.
I looked up at it.
"Sixty minutes," I said. "You are going to have to do better than sixty-minutes if you want me to stop being annoyed about this."
The worm did not respond to this.
What it did was bring the full weight of its head down.
AHHH—
[Day 2 wasted]***
"Stop. I said stop this."
"This is necessary for his future."
"All of you are destroying his world."
"It’s simply his fate."
