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008

Having nothing else to do but try and survive the tunnels, Marcus resorted to finding any other way to occupy his mind. Some of those ways would certainly be considered the playtime of a psychiatric patient, but it was the only way he could keep himself from completely breaking down.

He counted things. The steps he took, the number of light crystals on the wall, even just the amount of times he exhaled. His objective was to keep his focus going for as long as possible, that way the bleakness of it all didn't seem so bad.

After another seven-hundred-and-thirty-four steps, he could see an unnatural smudge at the far end of the tunnel. After another twenty-three, the smudge turned into a golf ball-sized blob. It wasn't until he reached eight-hundred-and-twelve steps did he recognize the shape as a very still Skulker.

Never had Marcus seen a sleeping Skulker before, he was shocked to think they did something other than trying to hunt him down for food. Knowing fully well that he was still covered in the blood of its own kind, most likely the easiest thing to wake it up, he pulled out his spear and poised it in front of his body.

Marcus slowly approached the dark outline, expecting to see the thing breathing steadily on its side. Yet this one was completely still, not even a twitching leg or grumbling stomach. The answer for such a strange behavior came with a sad visual.

The Skulker was already dead, its body was surrounded in its own blood, nearly dry after having been exposed long enough to the air. The scaly skin had shrunk considerably as well, making the head appear more wrinkled with its remaining teeth jutting out randomly. Rot had taken over one of the eyes completely and sprouted in random patches along the back too. Yellow and pink mushrooms sprouted from the more condensed parts of the mold, some nearly as big as his hand.

Marcus could smell the musty decay and felt his stifled gag reflex try to activate again. He had learned to suppress it whenever he ate raw meat and yet to fight meant the smell was pretty intense. It was unfortunate that he had to get closer just to walk around it, so he just plugged his nose, kept his eyes down, and went back to counting.

Smaller chunks of intestines and muscle were scattered about the floor, gray from aging in the dirt. Marcus assumed it lost a fight with another Skulker, but the damage didn't seem right. The monster seemed gutted, nothing took massive bites out of it or clawed at its face. There had been a few that Marcus encountered with long scars from fighting with their weirdly long front limbs and not a single mark was on this one.

Marcus started making the connection as to what happened, but he almost didn't wanna believe it. The idea that he managed to come all the way around to this point was almost rage inducing.

Yet fate was cruel, Marcus continued walking and saw outside of the circle of blood, human footprints trailing blood from the body.

'Goddamnit, this was the first Skulker I killed. I am right back where I started.'

Marcus had gotten too used to the disappointment of being in these caves, but this was starting to truly chip away at whatever sanity he had left.

'I'm willing to bet the hole it made to get to me is nearby too.' He thought while leaning against his spear for support.

It only took eighteen steps to find the crater; Marcus had seen dozens of them now. The skulkers would occasionally try to swallow him from above or below by spearheading the ground, expanding their maws, and pulling themselves toward him. Luckily their low-level intelligence made the escaping or killing much easier, they were as stealthy as a chainsaw.

Marcus took a couple of light crystals from the walls and dropped them into the hole. The drop was a barely one-story, and he could see nothing significant was down there. He just sighed and turned around. He was about to head back to the fork from earlier, seeing that there was still the left tunnel he hadn't tried yet, but something stopped him.

A faint howling, high in pitch with no means of stopping. It couldn't have been any of the underground creatures, as they only let out heavy grunts or tiny chirps. Marcus had almost forgotten the sounds of wind whistling.

He whipped back around to the pitfall, and knelt down to reach a hand inside. Sure enough, there was a tiny breeze moving across his fingers. In all the time he had trapped, never had Marcus felt the air move. It had always been stale and unmoving, adding to the suffocating sensation of being underground.

If this was a sign or indication of fate, Marcus didn't care too much to argue it. He dropped down his belongings and then followed behind it. He landed into a rather clumsy somersault at the bottom, but scrapes and bruises were not uncommon to him now.

He looked down both ends of the tunnel and saw one was well lit from the crystals, but the other turned black only after a few yards. He'd lose all sense of direction going that way, and it was just his luck that the wind blew again from that direction.

After counting a dozen deep breaths, he picked up his stuff and walked. He lost sight of his own hands and feet in a matter of minutes. He had to double check that the lights were still at his back, as he couldn't be sure that he had been turned around in the darkness.

When the lights of the tunnel behind him disappeared, Marcus was concerned with the sudden change in slope. Rather than going up and out, he was sliding downward. Nothing about the way this world worked had made sense to him. How was it he was feeling a breeze from further below and not from the surface?

It didn't matter though, as long as something changed, Marcus was willing to walk through the tunnel till it ended. After a few hundred more steps and a couple of stumbles, the gradient of the darkness started to lighten up.

He could see the soft glow of what seemed like more light crystals; Marcus picked up the pace. The last thing he wanted was to deal with Skulkers in the dark, they might have been slower when they crawled about, but he could have been walking straight into one's mouth or even a nest of them.

Marcus was panting once he got close enough and nearly keeled over. Once he realized there were no light crystals, the shock of the actual space made him almost fall over.

He had found himself in a widened cave that was perfectly levelled at the ground, and had a smooth dome-shape along the ceiling.

In the center was some kind of monument, but that wasn't what made him almost fall over, it was the perfectly rectangular hole cut out of the wall, leading to a starry night sky.