BELOW: CRAWL 14 (Patreon)

The beast makes no mention of what it’s done to me, nor did I expect it to. The first time it goes back to hunting while I’m mobile, I follow along alone, keeping the others back. I’m weakened, and I don’t want to give it an excuse by disappointing it with my fellow meal-bags nearby. 

My main focus, then, is a three-parter. Priority one is following along the beast to prove I’m useful, useful enough to buy some patience and some time for my skill and my newfound companions. Priority two is continuing to train my stats, while holding onto and adding to a reserve to feed the beast. Priority three? 

Get strong enough to kill the Cult Bitch. Masked Father. 

It’s selfish. It’s stupid, too. I could probably just run. Could probably just move forward, get out of this place, wander for another few months or years until I’m so far away I never have to worry about him or the Home ever again. I don’t need Samir in my life, if he exists then someone else can exist that I could become friends with, that I could learn to trust like that. In terms of practicality, there’s very little advantage to fighting against this guy.

But not no practicality. 

And I am a selfish worm. 

I don’t want to lose Samir. I don’t like thinking that other people are suffering because of my choices, at the hands of someone I hate. I like having a friend.

And I don’t want to lose myself to this place. I won’t let it break me. I’ll bend. I already have, as much as I fucking hate it, as much as it rends my soul, but I will not let it break me, and…

And if I run away, and leave it all behind, that would be breaking something in me. That would break some part of myself. The part of me that doesn’t want to lose myself, that doesn’t want to retreat, that wants to do the stupid, selfish, self-centered thing that is fighting to break hell itself.

That shit’s a long way away. Maybe an eternity away. 

The Cult Bitch isn’t nearly so far. 

GHOGIEL. The higher gate, the one that stands beyond THAUMIEL, where I am. 

I’m going to reach it. I’m going to get stronger than him, and take him apart. 

I’m going to take him apart. 

The beast stalks forward, long limbs making easy strides as it contorts itself through the tunnels. I slither behind it, along the ground, my legs and ribs and shoulders and gut, all moving far too strangely for it to be called walking. Far too strangely for it to be anything natural. But still, the skill is powerful, though not nearly as nice as Lust’s Blinders.

If I had to guess, it has to do with my behaviors. The system seems to reward acting SINfully, and acting SINfully in very specific ways. My Desire is what I’ve pursued most actively, what I’ve defined myself by, so the options for it were stronger, and had to do with, for example, Hate The Masses, something explicitly designed to face down social groups like the cult I was trapped in. It’s designed around me. Same with Consumption– I often go from gorging myself to starving, for long, long periods, and the skill options reflected that. It’s not just stats, it’s more… active. Personalized. 

That’s the whole reason I haven’t put that last point into my Violence aspect, after all. Almost ten whole points worth of upgrades for it all came from when I was in that tunnel, gutless, limbless, just digging. I’m pretty sure that any upgrades I get will have to do with that digging. 

I don’t want my Violence to be something so banal. 

Yeah, it would be useful. Yeah, it would offer me options for mobility, for building up the little cave I’m hiding myself and my allies in (my victims, part of me thinks). But I need my Violence to be something more drastic. More powerful. More… well, Violent. 

So I’ve kept that one Aspect at 17, all this time, even though it would probably really help me to upgrade it and get a skill. 

The planned order is straightforward. I’m going to put some more points into Desire, push it towards 40, and see if that gets me a second skill. In the meantime, I’ll prove my utility to the beast further, protecting my “friends” and getting more resources so I can have some stored away to feed it. 

I have, after my time meditating and healing, 52 points of SIN in my core, ready for use. All that I could manage in a week or so, which isn’t much but it isn’t nothing, either. Thirty or so of those points are floating around in the central tar-slick at my core, while the rest of it I keep in constant movement orbiting around it, held back so the beast hopefully can’t sense it and I can keep practicing my GNOSIS. 

The more I can contribute to the beast’s violence, the more my potential Violence Aspect skill will be something I can use for more than just digging. 

I skitter along the wall, up to the ceiling, my skin grabbing hold of the stone, my Ossified Jigsaw letting me use my bones as improvised, insect-like legs, sometimes poking out of the flesh to better grab an anchorhold and slipping back under painlessly. 

Skitter skitter, crawl and slither, along the roof I patter and pitter.

Huh. When was the last time I made a poem? That’s cute. I should do more of those. 

The beast walks, traveling slowly but surely until we emerge back in its hunting cave. 

I think I know where this is relative to the fight pit. This cave is closer, obviously, which is good, but it is in the same direction as the fight pit, which is not so good. There are probably plenty of other caves out there, other fight pits and hunting grounds, but that tells me that, in theory, the fight pit is in the direction of the Home.

Slowly, I’m building a map. On one end of it, the Home, with the tunnels where I met my “benefactor” and where I was stored away. Between that and where I am, there’s the tunnel I made, the beast’s hunting cave, and between that and the Home, the fight pit, though I don’t know if it’s a higher or lower level, or if it’s “north” or “south”, etc. 

But I’m building it, slowly, and maybe someday it’ll be useful. I’m not sure if my memory’s gotten magically better, if my Desire Aspect has something to do with it, but I think I can remember more than I used to. All I have to do is think of the idea, and it comes back into my mind, fresh and whole. 

I think it is due to the Aspect. Just like I can break things more easily now, can dig more easily and have jaws that tear things apart so much better, can take more damage than before without breaking, my mind’s been altered by an Aspect of this place. 

Skitter and crawl over them all, hidden up in the dirt. Break the stone, slither with bone, fall down on the prey below.

That one wasn’t as good. I can do better. 

I fall from the roof of the tunnel down onto the thing the beast is fighting. 

The beast is a predator. It’s hasn’t designed itself as a frontline fighter or as a true warrior, it’s a thing of spontaneous action, ambush, overwhelming force. So usually, it goes after things weaker than it is. 

This is no exception, but it’s putting up a fight. 

It looks more like a person than I expected we’d find. Not entirely, but it walks on two legs, and has arms coming from its shoulders. Six of them, some taking the place of where a head would be, the faceless thing having no visible mouth, eyes, or much of anything else besides a blob of muscle. 

I land on its back as the beast claws at it, tearing off one of its arms as I land to keep another one busy. 

Immediately I dumb my Suffering Stomach’s contents onto it, eliciting a shrill whistle of a scream as it spasms and tries to throw me off. One of its remaining five hands grabs at me, strong enough to crush me in its palm, but Ossified Jigsaw lets me unravel my bones to slip out of its grip, falling onto another arm with my Broken Gullet wide open and biting down hard. 

I’m nowhere near strong enough to defeat this thing, and now that I’m physically touching it, Slithering Worm is no longer active since it’s aware of me. I can, at most, distract it and cause harm.

That gives the beast the opening it needs to stab its muzzle into its prey, digging into the clump of muscle-mass of its upper torso like a dog digging into a dirt field. That high-pitched shriek comes again, and the SINner swings its arms at the more dangerous target.

The impact sounds like someone beating a ceremonial drum, and I hear some of the beast’s ribs shatter from the impact. The next punch comes down in sequence, almost like a practiced move, and knocks my symbiotic monster aside like it weighs next to nothing. 

But as it’s being tossed aside, the beast’s claws catch on its prey, ripping out a chunk of muscle and making the arm that hit it go limp. This thing might be much stronger than either of us, but it’s not as fast as the beast, and its skin doesn’t hold up against its WOUND. The jagged, too-long blades easily slip through skin and tear the underlying tissue to ragged strips, and the blood of our prey splatters the tunnel. 

By this point, I throw myself backwards, falling entirely off of our target’s back. Instantly I can feel Slithering Worm come back into play, meaning this weird freak can only sense something if it’s touching it directly. I skitter up a wall, briefly slipping as the beast notices me before it refocuses, and I’m ready to drop down again.

It’s cheap and shitty, this sort of ambush predation, but I’m not fighting for honor, and I’m certainly not fighting as a warrior. 

I am a crawling worm, and the beast whose shadow hides me is on the hunt. I can add to the flesh on our table. There’s nothing else to consider right now.

From the ceiling, I drop another brief splash of stomach acid from my WOUND, taking advantage of the fact that the beast is still moving back in. The teakettle-whistle of the many armed SINner echoes way too loudly in the tunnel, but now that it’s down two of its six arms and has lost a solid chunk of its outer flesh to my acid, it’s looking a lot less intimidating. 

It looks even less intimidating when the beast disembowls it, then stabs its hands into the wound, pulling at muscle and guts as if to unravel it and turn it inside out. 

I don’t know if it uses something like Lust’s Blinders for itself, but the beast doesn’t ever seem to find things it can’t handle. Sometimes it’s been ambushed, yes, but usually, it’s the guaranteed winner for every fight I’ve seen it in except the first one. The many-armed SINner puts up a fight, even with the beast’s arms inside of it up to the elbows, but the beast just weathers the blows, diverting every impact by yanking or cutting at the muscle fibers inside its prey.

I fall from the roof onto our prey again, this time landing directly on the joint of one of its remaining limbs. With a mix of acid and the rip-tearing motion of my Broken Gullet, I dig down to the bone, even as it contorts itself to try and pry me off. 

The beast uses the opportunity to bite into another arm, digging into it with its too-sharp muzzle. 

I use that opportunity to finish severing the tendons of the arm I’m on.

The beast takes that opportunity to rip one of its arms out of our prey, letting its guts slide out as it uses the freed limb to pin down the SINner and knock it onto the floor.

Back and forth, back and forth.

And from there, most of what’s left is the eating. 

I take two limbs for myself. Two out of six, leaving the torso and legs alike for the beast’s consumption. There’s fresh bruises, some fractures from the glancing blows of our target, and it only makes it clearer how fucked I’d be if I fought anything alone. 

But here I am anyways. Victorious. The scavenger worm, symbiote to a beast, feeding richly.

Ever-Starving Beastling deactivates as I take bite after bite of my first meal in days.

+15 SIN

+3 SIN

+4 SIN

+6 SIN

SIN: 58

With the bonus from cannibalism, just one arm gets me almost thirty points of SIN. The equivalent of days of torturing myself by breathing, which is, genuinely, active torture. Being used to having needles in your lungs with every inhale doesn’t make it less painful, it just makes me used to it. All that torment for the equivalent of a few mouthfuls of a fellow sufferer. 

The other arm, larger, more intact, I keep to one side. 

I keep eating. 

+5 SIN

+2 SIN

+8 SIN

And the first half of the meal I’ve earned is gone. 

Meanwhile, the over-muscled target of our hunt lies excavated, all four of its other arms absent, both of its legs reduced to bones and tattered bits of skin and gristle. There’s barely enough there for me to recognize what it was, and what’s left wriggles impotently, muscles clenching and pulsing against nothing because all the rest has been eaten.

And the beast towers over me. 

I offer it my head, and feel the heat of its breath, the sharpness of its fangs, as it wraps itself around me. 

I like the beast. It’s really easy to talk with, and even easier to figure out. No complicated social niceties to figure out, no need to find a way to speak words or write. I failed to deliver enough SIN last time it saw me, so it took my arm, and would’ve taken flesh from my companions. I convinced it otherwise, and contributed to this hunt, but the message couldn’t be clearer.

“No second chances”. All it has to do is close its mouth for me to lose everything but the experience of digestion in its guts for… ever, maybe. 

SIN: 72

-70 SIN

I offer almost all I have. Well. Almost all that it knows that I have. 

Seventy points of SIN. For nothing. I’m paying it for the privilege of being here. Maybe next time, it’ll accept less, but I’d rather not risk it, seeing as it’s literally put my head in its maw, ready to bite down. 

For a moment, it just breathes. Loud and harsh, slow and steady, a huffing, hungry sound. It is a beast, after all. Perhaps, in this moment, the logic of symbiosis will fall secondary to the needs of the predator. 

But I don’t think it will. Desire tells me otherwise. I understand this emotionless, empty-eyed thing, far more than I should be able to. 33 Desire will do that, it would seem. 

It pulls away from me, offering not a word, not a gesture. One moment, I am a stray movement from being devoured, and the next, it is turning its back to me, returning to its den. 

I would exhale, but I don’t usually breathe mid-combat. Fuck it: just because I can, I take in a deep breath, accepting the pain, then sigh it back out. 

Lovely. 

It’s funny, to feel so empowered while in a powerless position. 

Except I’m not powerless. I know what it wants. I know what I can offer. I know what I’m gaining. I know that it won’t stop my growth, not for a good while yet. No doubts. No misunderstandings. Just something I can use, a razor’s edge I can balance on and glory at my own skill, no matter how badly my feet get cut. 

Until I fall, of course. But BELOW offers me a forever-downwards, so I will simply become great enough to never fall. Not until I break the razor beneath my heel.

+1 TYRANNY

Oh fuck off. 

I wrap myself around the limb I didn’t eat, securing it with my thighs and my Ossified Jigsaw ribcage, and turn onto my back. Slithering Worm doesn’t ever state I need to be in a specific state or position to use it, after all, not beyond being unseen. Feeling my spine move like a snake’s, my ribs like a centipede’s limbs, I take my catch back with me towards my nest, and the things I am growing within it.

And just as a quick fuck you to the beast, I re-absorb the SIN I was hiding in the orbit around my center.

+22 SIN

-15 SIN

+1 DESIRE

SIN: 9

Slow and steady until the next big gamble. 

Until I luck and murder and steal and sneak and scavenge my way into being strong enough to kill the man I want to kill, logic be damned. 

All according to plan. An unhinged, stupid, insane, delusional, self-destructive plan, sure. But that’s BELOW for you.