BELOW: CRAWL 09 (Patreon)

My eyes meet with the thing on the other side of the pool. 

A scavenger, like me. Weak, like me. I don’t think it’s a ghoul, or perhaps not my specific type, but it’s not a wretch, its face stretched and made too slender to fit the pattern of “recognizably human”.

The pitch black holes of its eyes, large enough I could fit a fist in them, lock onto me at the same time that I hear its loud slurping. 

My skill is screaming at me, blocking things out and then bringing them back with no clear pattern why. I feel like I’m having a seizure, and I’m frozen in panic. 

The stretched-face thing stares at me a while, and then dips its too-wide mouth back into the pool, going back to drinking. 

Lust’s Blinders pushes my awareness around, trying to make me forget the other scavenger and then reminding me of them forcefully seemingly at random. 

I want an opportunity to earn an impressive title without an overwhelming amount of danger that’s within a few hours of walking from my current location.

That’s what I activated my skill with. That’s what it still feels weirdly frozen on, like I’ve become obsessed without realizing it and am unable to break away from. Which means that everything I can currently see, all of the things that I understand and can lock onto, could earn me another title, one of those stronger modifications. And the opportunities here…

It would be worth it if only I could drink from that pool, I think. How many different SINners have bled into that? How much SIN would that offer me?

The gap-faced thing disappears from my awareness as my attention is pushed, forcibly, back towards battle. Whatever opportunity there was there, it’s faded. 

Never have I felt more like a slave. Never have I felt more disoriented, my ability to understand or even perceive the world around me flashing like a strobe light behind my eyes. 

And I could run away.

I crawl out of my hole and start crawling, worm-like, towards the battle. 

On the way, I dip in and out of pools of blood, drinking when I can spare the attention to force myself to remember they exist. SIN fills me, notifications flashing past, but I ignore them, pushing forward blindly, until–

A foot slams down beside my head, almost crushing my skull. It’s digitigrade, malformed, skin stretched too taut and bursting from it as it moves. 

I lift myself up and slam myself down on it, wrapping my Broken Gullet around the whole limb and sawing my head back. The jagged edges of my WOUND dig into the SINners leg, and I hear a scream of pain from above me, followed by a crack.

Half its leg goes down my Gullet as the demon falls over, most of its skull turned to sludge from some kind of impact that I don’t have the energy to look up and see. I’ve already turned, blinding myself to everything but what my skill tells me.

No risk, no reward. 

I am a scavenger worm. Watch me crawl. 

Things step on me, breaking bones and bruising flesh, but my Desire overrides them. I keep throwing myself through the red water that rises ankle-high amongst the combatants, skirting the very edges of the battle rather than diving all the way in. Still, there are so many bodies that there’s no chance I won’t be hit, that I won’t be trampled. 

I drink the red rather than drown, and keep dragging myself forward.

Someone gets wise, and I feel a spear of some sort stab into me, and it burns. 

I turn, my skill flickering long enough to let me see what’s hurting me, and I stare.

It’s metal! Real metal, cold, colder than anything, cold enough to burn, and I roil, ripping out parts of my own stomach to tear myself free of it.

On instinct, I open my Suffering Stomach, flooding the blood around me with digestive acid. I hear screams, but I don’t stick around to see if I’ve gotten my attacker. I’m moving again, biting at the fallen, tearing into them like a shark into whalefall. Most of the combatants are large, larger than me, but here, near the back-line, it’s not always a sign of a higher gate than Thaumiel, I think. WOUNDS designed to make them bulky and useful, threshold-evolutions that have turned the SINners into good beasts of burden, maybe. Or maybe I’m projecting, because fuck off, idiot, stay focused. 

Something kicks me, hard enough to lift me out of the blood a bit. I let out a gasp that comes out like a high-pitched gurgle from my Broken Gullet, but someone sees me or hears me, and suddenly someone has grabbed me and hoisted me up.

I’m forced onto my feet, and I see the SINner who kicked me. Their face is twisted into a snarl, a single goat-eye from deep inside their skull glaring as they open their mouth to yell something.

I throw myself into the person holding me, using the leverage to kick out in front of me and knock my attacker back. It also knocks me and the person holding me back even further, making us tumble into the red. 

Dislocating a shoulder, I scramble out of their grip, turning through the pitch-red mud of the battle and crawling away as fast as I can.

The stalagmites are kept as bastions by the fighters, areas where they can stand a bit above the blood and thus have steadier footing. The space between the stalagmites, though, is a sea of churning bodies and screaming pain, constantly tearing into each other. Neither is safe, and even at the far edge of the cavern as I am, there’s so many people.

I keep crawling, biting on the fallen and on the unlucky upright alike. Whenever someone notices me, or I think that they notice me, I throw myself away. I feel my skill pulling my attention left and right, narrowing my focus. I think, without my skill burning out the rest of my mind, I would be very much completely overwhelmed. Maybe actually mad. I hear sounds that I don’t recognize, that aren’t screams or claws or blades (or even the occasional gunshot, and is that a gunshot?), and they make my head hurt like I’ve been kicked in it. 

Crawl. Bite. Spit. Drench the blood around me in acid and drink of the parts that have been lost.

I think I make it ten whole minutes before my luck runs out. 

Something hits me in the head hard enough that my vision blinks out for a second. I lose track of who and where I am long enough that a foot or hoof or blunt claw steps down on my arm, breaking several of the bones. 

I throw myself to one side, and get unlucky enough to get kicked in the head again, this time by something that lands on me afterwards and puts weight on my skull. Something creaks and cracks, and I slash blindly up at the leg with a clawed hand. Only to find that I can’t break the skin, can’t even bruise it, and–

THRESHOLD OF DAMNATION REACHED

BLOOD IS POWER

POWER IS EXISTENCE

YOU–

Oh fuck off. 

I flush SIN into somewhere, then grab the movement and keep it spinning, twirling, changing, even though I can’t really afford the distraction. And then the foot lifts, and blood flows back to my brain through bits of broken skull, and I realize that I’ve lost a chunk of my leg below the knee, and what’s left of my jaw was shattered by the foot stepping on me, and–

I want to leave

My awareness narrows. Pain fades, stops distracting me as I unleash the dregs of my Suffering Stomach all around and start crawling my way where my vision points me. 

Forward. My skill keeps me from panicking, keeps me from seeing anything distracting, keeps the screaming and strange words and symbols that I catch glimpses of or which slip through my Blinders. Forward. 

I overextended, maybe. Worth it, though, so long as I escape. So long as I make it back out, more than worth it. 

Something explodes, and the ensuing flood of blood and bits washes over me and coats my senses entirely. 

My senses lose coherence, my skill trying to direct my attention but not having enough attention to direct anywhere. Everything is a wash in fever-hot liquid, and I can’t tell what’s other bodies and what’s severed pieces in the muck. 

I instinctively try to breathe, even with all my training, and inhale blood into my lungs instead. 

And then I hit a rock, or maybe just a tough-enough thing, and I tumble and crash and roll down a hill, down towards–

Off a cliff, landing in a pool that isn’t deep enough and which shatters at least one of my bones as I land. My mind goes away for a moment, replaced by a flash of not-white and then the black of nothingness, and then I’m back, more concussed than before. 

I vomit blood and grab at anything, anything I can use to come up, to stop drowning–

Something sharp bites my hand, yanking me violently out of the blood and severing the limb at the wrist. 

I try to scream, but blood in my lungs makes that hard. The hand is gone, and I think I hear something gulp, but there’s still so much noise that my hearing never fully healed back. 

Focus.

Fuck it, this feels worth it. 

I unleash my risk-it-all trump card, continuing my trend of stupid, desperate, high-reward gambles. 

I want to escape to somewhere safe where I will have at least two hours to recover without anything finding me.

COST OF SIN: 67

Works for me. 

I shut everything down, listen to the skill, and crawl.

____________________________________________________________________

The skill ends abruptly, and I feel my body go slack as I suddenly lose the ability to instinctively just do things. My awareness falls apart, scattered to the winds and then vanishing as my truest Desire asserts itself.

Fuck, I just want to rest for a second.

Without the skill semi-puppeteering me, the weakness floods back in. The pain becomes loud again. It’s not gone while I’m using Lust’s Blinders active effect, but it does go into the background a bit, and without it for so long, I realize just how much I’ve been suffering all along. 

It sucks. 

I start laughing, finding the act difficult while missing a lung. 

Worth it. 

I escaped. So it’s worth it. 

I made it all the way to the threshold of Thaumiel and back again. My core feels overfull, unused to holding this much SIN, and I can’t help but giggle to myself more at the sensation. 

Alright. If the skill worked, then I need to take inventory. I have an hour, maybe two. I can’t sleep, and my conscious mind is pretty wiped out from using Lust’s Blinders for so long, so I can’t really do anything active now either. 

Focus. 

One of my legs is missing just above the knee, just like one of my hands is gone past the wrist. The other arm is all present, though a bit out of order: bones jut out from it at all angles, shattered into fragments and then pushed to the surface to make the whole thing look borderline blended. 

All my limbs have bones broken or fractured, though the arm is the worst, shortly followed by my knee on the side that still has a knee. My head feels like it’s the wrong shape, squished all out of form by getting crushed and stepped on, barely connected to the spine, while my ribs are half gone, turned to shrapnel-pulp that grinds against my organs and leaks out of the gaping chunks of my torso still missing. 

That could’ve gone way worse. I made it out intact enough to make it out, and that’s what counts. 

I press my body into a little ball, one limb at a time, compressing everything inwards so that all the parts of me that are leaking are doing so mostly towards my insides. Which is where the blood is supposed to be. 

Then, I check my notifications. 

SUFFERING ENDURED

TITLE GAINED

MULTIPLE TITLES GAINED

“ONE WHO FOLLOWS STUPIDITY”Common Title

Alright. Good start. Fuck you too, system.

“BEHOLDER OF THE HEIGHTS”Common Title

“BLIND FOOL AMONGST FOOLS”Harsh Title

“SURVIVOR OF A LESSER FIGHT PIT”Common Title

Lesser fight pit? Oh fuck you. Absolutely the fuck not. No. No way in–

Well, I was going to think “no way in hell”, but. Yeah. Alright, sure. Fuck it. Why not. That was a lesser fight pit. A tiny, minimal, borderline unbothersome little thing. The thousands on thousands fighting in a formless war which seemed to have no sides that I could track, who slaughtered and devoured and fought each other with tools and weapons and techniques I don’t even understand, one of which exploded my eyes when I looked at it, was a lesser fight pit. 

Ignoring the unrelenting terror that elicits in me, I drown it out by reading the details of the titles. 

“ONE WHO FOLLOWS STUPIDITY”Common TitleIn spite of their explicit awareness of the foolishness of the decision before them, this SINner has strode forward, pursuing their own incomprehending idiocy over the blessings of common sense. Entering a trap with no plan of escape, facing a beast whose skill and might eclipses one’s own, erasing crucial information from one’s mind for no good reason, all these and more are the least of this SINner’s stupidities, and the likes of which earned them this Title.

“BEHOLDER OF THE HEIGHTS”Common TitleA SINner has glimpsed the heights to which they might one day climb. Having borne witness to the horrors of their older and more vile fellow, they know now the fate of all who strive deep BELOW.

“BLIND FOOL AMONGST FOOLS”Harsh TitleBearing a full mind and open senses, and then casting them all aside, is an impressive feat. Trusting oneself entirely to machinations beyond them, chance, or the powers they believe their own, earns the mad their own Title.

“SURVIVOR OF A LESSER FIGHT PIT”Common TitleMore than half of those who enter a “fight pit” remain there until they go Still. More than half of the remaining become fodder and food for the ongoing slaughters. This SINner is neither category.

Great. Some of those even had personality to them. I’m starting to think that the System’s hatred of me (and maybe all SINners) extends down to its descriptions as well. Fuck it, obviously it does. 

I’m laughing because it’s easier than hurting. 

I ignore the bonuses from the titles for now. I can’t equip any of them yet anyways, not until I can remove the current title (which I haven’t been using to its full extent). It’s fine. I need to figure out what I spent my SIN on. 

I wonder how long I was in that fight pit for. It took, what, ten-ish minutes before I took my first serious hit? Couldn’t have been more than twice that before I drowned in the red after. 

And yet, the notifications don’t lie. 

DESIRE +10

CONSUMPTION +5

COWARDICE +6

VIOLENCE +3

Not all of that is from burning SIN, I think. Just like my Tyranny stat grew when I dedicated myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if my ongoing crazy actions pushed or “trained” my Aspects further. But some of that most certainly is from taking that blinding amount of SIN I was drinking and chewing my way through and diverting it away from making me go past my threshold in the middle of that cluster-fuck. 

I’m still laughing, I notice. I think I just didn’t stop. Things being funny is better than them being scary, right?

I’m so used to the pain that it almost doesn’t even register. Except almost doesn’t quite mean anything, does it? It just means “almost”. It means that I still feel everything, overwhelmingly, and the memory of how I crippled myself and threw myself blindly into my stupidest decisions yet is so loud that it’s trying to crawl out of the holes and cracks punched into my skull. 

It worked. It was worth it. I risked everything for a stupid fucking plan that, worst case scenario, would have cost me a long fucking time of suffering, like a long time, or maybe just turned me to goddamn paste amidst the magic artillery or whatever the fuck. And it was worth it, because I got away. 

And I can handle the hurting. It gets better with time, and it literally can’t stop me. And if I never made it back to Laroia or the beast, then she knows everything I did and had a method to keep alive and that’s–

And that’s an excuse.

But I can’t be weak. And if I’m not willing to abandon her now, when I’ve only just started feeling tied to her at all, then I’ll never be able to abandon her, and she’ll hold me back. And I have to be stronger.

I have eternity, in theory, to break hell. But hell also has eternity to break me, and it has had a lot more practice at its purpose than I have at mine. In practice, I only have until I can’t take it any more. 

And that won’t be forever from now. It might be soon.

So. A little suicidal murder-suicide mega-gambling never killed nobody.

Because nobody can die down BELOW.

SIN: 147

Almost enough to pop right back up to a threshold. Just a few more hours of breathing.

But I’m not strong enough yet. 

And I have so very many wounds to work with right now.