BELOW: CRAWL 02 (Patreon)

The silence is the worst part.

The dark is the dark. It stays dark, always. It never changes, only if I actively paint it in my crimson. It has to be a choice that I make, not something that ever shifts. 

But the silence? That breaks all the time. Every time that I move, I break it. No matter how quiet I am, no matter how hard I try to keep that silence intact, it shatters, loud or quiet, with every footstep, every crawl, every change I make in my body. I cannot advance without the sound, and that makes it worse than the dark, because the dark is there no matter what. I get used to it. 

But advancing means making noise, and so when I pause, or stutter, or shift, the even and consistent sounds of my progress forward break. The quiet comes back, and with it the fear. Fear that I’ll be heard, fear that I’m missing something, fear that there’s something out there in the dark that will move only when I do, that masks its approach with my own sounds. Then, when I get the courage to get moving again, when I manage to mask those thoughts with the need to keep going, I inevitably stumble, and have to stop, and the silence comes back.

Anything could be hiding in it. Anything could be hunting me, watching me, tracking me. Home could be following behind me and if they’re capable of even the mildest form of stealth, I wouldn’t hear them. 

I didn’t think, at the time, about how much noise I was making, back in that tunnel. How much being inside that tiny, cramped space made the sound bounce around, the chewing of rock and the sizzling of acids melding together into a perpetual hum that I never even realized I got used to. It’s amazing what you can learn to miss.

The silence makes me wonder if I should spend my SIN. I’m almost at the threshold, almost going to be forced to transform myself into something new unless I start keeping SIN from accumulating into a single mass inside me. Which is a lot of effort. Which I have to spare, considering how there’s like nothing to do as I travel, but… well. I’m not sure if I should.

If I reach the threshold, I transform. Become something new. Something birthed from my actions and the SIN I’ve accumulated. And I do need to do it sometime.

But it’s like the silence. The thoughts come, and then the will to push forward happens instead. I’ve spent too long without spending any SIN, trapped inside the stone, and now I’m paranoid about spending any at all. 

I check my total.

SIN: 146

Five points away from evolution. It’s kind of crazy, actually. It should be so much higher than it is, but I’ve sort of gotten used to not breathing. It’s become almost… easy. The pain isn’t enough to concern me anymore. 

Crazy what the mind can adjust to. What the human brain can transform into, given enough time. 

The silence is back. I stopped walking for a bit, lost in thought. Now I have to break it again. 

I’ve found other claw marks in the time since I started going in this direction. I followed them for a while, and eventually found a puddle of blood, looking partially lapped up. The trail got even easier to follow then, bits of red that the predator didn’t manage to lick itself clean of painting a direction for me to move in. Down one tunnel, up a wall almost vertically into another one, then into a cavern, just large enough to hold a few other entrances. No bigger than a house, really, but large enough that it feels like I’m falling into it, my newfound agoraphobia trying to drown me in that “open space”. 

Then down another tunnel. 

I wonder, what other biomes are there here in hell? What other places are there to see? Or is it all just… this? Tunnels through too-soft stone, forever and ever, enough of it to fit a hundred billion souls, or whatever the fuck that the message said when I first arrived in this place. A whole world of pitch dark and tunnels, like all of existence is made up of pathways and stone. 

I wonder if this is how maggots feel. Writhing through a corpse. I wonder if that’s what BELOW is, just the leftover rot of mankind rotting our way through something horrific that doesn’t even know we’re there. 

Down another tunnel. A left turn. A right turn. A left. Another left, this one going down again. Then up. 

I’ve been following a trail. An almost clear trail, one that if I can follow, can be followed by someone else. I wonder if I should deviate from it, now, move past it and out into one of the other tunnels, but… how long would I go without ever seeing another marker? Another person? Another anything? How long alone in the dark. 

Move, and I break the silence. Follow the trail and I put myself in danger of being found, or of finding something. Give and take. Ups and downs. Possibilities.

And there are going to be more possibilities if I breach the threshold. If I evolve into the next level of SIN.

But then it wouldn’t be me min-maxing, would it? Wouldn’t be the clearest, strongest, most dramatic possibility, where every single aspect of myself is fully maximised, where every part of my character sheet is put to the absolute peak before I go forward. 

I remember to breathe. 

+1 SIN

SIN: 147

Closer again. Another step. 

Ah. The breathing messed up my rhythm. I stopped walking. Which means the silence is here again, fought back only by the breathing I’m still doing, the needles in my lungs, keeping me comfortable with their company. 

I stop it. 

Total quiet. 

Or… it should be. It should be, but it isn’t.

There’s an echo.

Not close, not within reach, but coming back to me up the tunnel I was just in, tracking through the dark to find me. To tell me that there’s something ahead.

Something other than being alone. 

I start walking again, my pace faster but not as fast as it should be.. 

I grew back wrong.

Regeneration returns everything to how it’s “supposed” to be, eventually, but eventually is the key word there. I have functional legs, so now the tingle of healing is nearly null, making me think that, so long as they still function like legs, I can rely on them healing back. Beyond that, though? Apparently, the standard it returns me to isn’t quite as high as I’d like it to be.

On wobbly knees and a slightly off-center set of hips, I trot towards the echo, the closest I can come to running. 

It doesn’t take long to find it. Sound, in these tunnels, will happily travel a ways, but never all that far. Within a few twists and turns and no more, as if muted over time by the structure of BELOW. All that means right now is that I end up turning a corner to muffled sounds of struggle, only to find myself suddenly right before a full-on cluster-fuck. 

It’s not just two monsters. It’s one monster against a dozen more. 

I recognize one of them by its claw marks, long, sharp-jointed legs lashing out like the blades of a preying mantis to leave recognizable scratches in the walls and in the flesh of its opponents. Its body is a deep maroon, like an old scab, but its surface is sleek, long furs pointed backwards like needles. I watch them as the long muzzle of the demon gnaws its way inside one of its enemies, the direction the needles are facing making it nearly impossible to remove without ripping out the rest of the area around it. 

In retaliation, a shield, topped with a series of ragged spikes, slams into the beast’s side, like a toddler attacking an adult. There’s a pulse of impact, of force, that shoves the beast back in spite of the size difference, and it screeches in fury as half of the torso it was just rooting around in comes out with it, made into a mane of flesh by its needle-fur. It retaliates, but two more of the fighters strike it first, stopping its paw-hands and the dagger-like claws in them from hitting anything but their raised blades.

They remind me of legionnaires.

Of the original twelve I can count, only eight of them remain standing, each of them equipped with scuffed shields marked by the demon’s claws and a simple blade. Bone handles and black stone shrapnel blend to make something better than a club, more for slashing than bludegoning, and the resulting blades lash out at the beast as it leaps and skitters, its too-many joints making it disturbingly agile. 

Each of the twelve seems different, but only on examination. They march in unison, their stomping steps like drumbeats in a song. They wear, or have as their skin, armor, like beetle shells wrapped in leather, though it seems to offer little protection from the demon they face. 

Their shields come up, their blades come down, their eyes glow in the pitch darkness and the almost-black demon they fight flies about the chamber, moving just as easily along the z axis as the y and x. 

It opens its mouth, dribbling blood from its mane of stolen flesh onto its teeth, and lets out a hiss. Like a cat turned inside out, too wet, too throaty, and too much like words to sound natural.

“Huuuuuuungryyyyy!” it hisses, and darts forward to another victim. 

The fight is chaotic, messy, faster than I can keep up with. But for all their losses, the beast is getting pushed back, kept mostly to one end of the chamber they’re in. It’s just a cave, no different than any other, save for the marks of battle and the corpses.

Except they’re not corpses, are they? So long as their fellows win, their states are temporary. They can afford to have their guts torn free and their heads ripped off their necks because so long as the beast dies, they’ll have the time and space to recover. 

War without death. 

The hell-legionaries keep moving, coordinating their assaults, eerily silent. The beast hisses, yowls, groans in a way that sounds uncomfortably aroused by the violence, tearing into every weak spot its too-long limbs can reach. 

And none of them notice little old me. Little crippled me. Little malformed, broken, too-weak me. 

There’s a bit of a drop to enter the cave. With my current state, I don’t think I could manage to run away very quickly. It would be a massive risk to fall in there, to slip in amongst the bodies and take some spoils. Those swords, for one thing, and maybe a shield if I can carry it, and my fill of flesh.

I giggle, in the dark, though it comes out with no sound. I haven’t inhaled any air in a while. 

My thoughts are that of a worm, I think. Where to slither, and what to scavenge with my weak little jaws. 

A worm in the bowels, watching monsters kill each other.

I could also leave. 

One of the legionaries steps forward a bit too far, and the beast stabs over the lip of its shield to piece directly through its collarbone, deep into its chest cavity. But the soldier fights on, wrapping its arms around the limb impaling it and digging its feet in, holding the monster in place for a moment longer. 

Two more of the sword-wielders step forward and cut, and the tendons of the beast’s arm make a twang sound as they’re torn apart. The arm goes limp past its second elbow, and it roars, mouth open wide enough to swallow me whole, the sound like a snake fucked a yowling, howling dog. It whips its arm out, launching the impaled devil so hard into a cave wall that their spine liquifies on impact, armor or no. 

“HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTE,” it says. Or something like it. 

It won’t be able to hold them off forever. 

Could I trust these soldiers to guide me somewhere? To keep me safe? To be able to speak to me?

Is seeing this enough? Is it enough to just be here, to acknowledge that there are others, and then to slink back into the dark?

Another inaudible giggle, which feels like a convulsion with empty lungs. 

TITLE GAINEDONE OF THE BREATHLESS (COMMON)In spite of the presence of breathable air, the SINner has decided to willingly forgo respiration for over a month during their time BELOW.+1 TYRANNY+1 DESIRE+5% SIN intake from Breath

Giggle. 

I should probably cut that habit before it starts to annoy me.

But what timing! I wonder if something sees me, if it was just circumstance that grants me my second title right as I come to a threshold of choice. And to have an effect that seems so counter-productive to the accomplishment that brought it! That’s funny. 

As if this place is telling me how viable my path is. How easy it would be to isolate myself, to just endure the Stillness and the quiet, breathless pain.

The beast yowls once more, making more almost-words with the sounds, its mouth partially choked off by the way a sword has torn its muzzle apart into nearly three pieces. Its newfound second jaw flaps wetly, no longer capable of helping it bite and tear, and it has only one arm remaining. 

Across from it, the last four legionaries march forward, wounded, bleeding, themselves mutilated, but close to victory. 

I slip into the cave, sliding down the stone dip to touch down amidst the broken bodies of the fallen.

There’s no dust to pad my fall or make sound. Just the slickness of the blood splattered all around and the quiet of stone that always seems to have just the right amount of friction for movement, and no more.

The beast screams. 

The soldiers advance. 

It tears the head off one of its last four opponents when their shield dips a bit too far, taking the top of their cranium for its own, and has its guts torn open in retaliation. It retreats, slowed by the slopping mess of its own intestines spilling out and getting in its way. 

The last three soldiers advance. 

The beast shrieks its defiance, its rage, its hunger, the desire for violence in the sound so palpable it hurts to listen to. 

Two soldiers step forward.

The third one tumbles forward as the back of their knee dissolves, crippling the limb in a moment. 

The legionnaire speaks for the first time since I’ve seen them, a clicking cascade of syllables and insectile noises, but it’s too late. As one of the others turns their head to see what’s wrong, just barely tilting their line of sight, the beast moves.

It throws its intestines at the soldiers like so much wet chaff, blinding them both with a wet spray of organs and blood. They both take a step back, disturbing silence still unbroken, but the beast has stomped down on the fallen one, crushing them beneath the shield they manage to raise up and then get pulped beneath. 

One of the last two legionaries swings wildly, cutting into the guts, wrapping them around their blade and yanking– 

But there’s too much loose material, it’s not enough. Instead, the sword gets caught, and the beast yowls, breathless from the agony but refusing to stop trying to kill. It yanks its own guts, dragging the warrior into their companion, knocking them both off balance.

The full weight of the bear-sized monster comes down on both its enemies and its own guts, making a disgusting slurry of flesh on the ground.

And then it keeps going. 

Methodically, pushing through its own pain, the beast digs into its guts, gnaws into the mess, slams its paws down on the mess over and over and over until it’s just a slurry, until the soldiers beneath the mess have stopped moving.

Only then does it stop. Only then does it slow the slightest bit. 

Only then does it look at me.

I am crouched over one of the fallen, my maw as wide open as it can go as I take fistfuls of flesh from their wounds into myself.

+15 SIN

+15 SIN

+8 SIN

It is not the first body I have dug into since it wrapped up the fight. 

It growls at me, low and quiet, and I stare back at it.

It’s fast. Could crush me in a single move. Could lean on me too hard and turn me to paste. 

But its mouth is fucked. Its guts turned to sludge and still slipping out of the gaping hole of its stomach. One arm incapacitated. 

And there is so much meat. 

But, just to be certain, I have the second part of my plan. Specifically the part where, a few seconds ago, I gave up on evolution, gave up on escape, gave up on the soldiers and whatever must command them and whatever that might mean.

I won’t go to a Home. Not a second time. Not as weak as I am. 

That plan. 

The plan where I decided to burn most of my SIN on one massive gamble while I was eating.

-135 SIN

+9 DESIRE

SIN: 50

I keep eating, not looking at the beast. I keep my gaze low, my posture subservient, animalistic.

One of the fallen stirs, trying to wriggle away or get to their sword. Before the beast can do more than turn its head and growl, I have walked over to them on all fours, opening my Suffering Stomach.

They don’t scream as their chest cavity dissolves. Their spine was broken, I think, and their arm torn off. The remaining arm isn’t fast enough to stop me, though it tries to grab at me until the chest muscles melt into ooze. 

 Their eyes, blank and white, stay locked on me as I lift that ooze to my Broken Gullet, taking fistfuls of their molten flesh into me.

+15 SIN

I scavenge from the living, worm-like in my hunger. 

And whether it was my gamble or not, the beast doesn’t take me apart right away. 

We both eat for a while, the only sounds in the cavern the slight shifting of perpetually-wounded SINners and the chewing of malformed, broken mouths. 

I eat of three of the twelve legionaries. The rest I simply keep incapacitated as the beast chews, pulling the mess of its intestine-goop back into its stomach cavity, awkwardly working around its torn-open face to swallow chunk after chunk of the fallen. It heals, faster than I can, doing in a few hours what would take me days, and every time it looks like its meal might be interrupted to have to re-break one of the soldiers, I am there, ready to serve. 

It makes its way across the cavern, its eyes never leaving me, deep and dead like a shark’s eyes. 

Eventually, there isn’t enough left of the legionaries to be worried about them getting put back together any time soon. 

I notice that most of them got their heads eaten, swallowed off their bodies and into the demon’s guts, and I wonder if that’s where they’ll wake up. Like Saranda did. Is there an amount of harm one can do to a head where the SINner will regenerate from another piece instead? Or is that forever, down in its gut?

It turns to me.

Its jaws are repaired. Its limbs, healed, back to full functionality. No more weakness in it as it stares at me with those dead eyes.

For a moment, the silence comes back. 

It’s still the worst part. The part I’m most afraid of.

Worse even than the eyes staring at me as I ate.

I check my SIN total.

SIN: 84

Seventy-two SIN from three bodies. From three victims. Worth days, maybe weeks of breathing. So much easier than any other method I can think of. 

I raise a hand. 

The beast stares at me, demonic, horrific, a mess of ink-black needles painted by the miniscule amounts of blood that are perpetually trapped between them. Clawed, monstrous, its silhouette larger than a van and perfectly able to add me to its tally of victims.

It takes a tremendous amount of will. Of focus. Of fear. But I know the process, now, and it is easier to grasp that oil-slick inside my soul than when I first tried it.

Trembling with the effort, I make a single point of SIN slip away from the viscous pool in my center. I run it up my shoulder, down my arm, out to the tip of a finger. 

It tries to slip away. Tries to follow the “gravity” that makes this sensation feel like trying to drag oil uphill.

I don’t let it.

A drop of SIN escapes my skin, gracing the air with the horrific nature of that which BELOW grants us all.

The silence breaks as the beast steps forward.