Begin hunting: II

BOOM! CRASH!!

A 2-meter-sized rat with an ant-like face and legs crumbled onto a tunnel wall, its head getting crushed before it could register it was getting attacked.

"Another one," he rummaged through its destroyed brain, finding a clean pebble-sized red crystal.

'I wonder why it's always clean,' He swallowed the crystal. Once it was inside his stomach, it began to dissolve quickly, its energy spreading to every corner of its body and returning to his chest, weirdly 'settling' in near his heart.

'That's the eleventh one,' he frowned. He had no clear answer for the reason why it was doing so on its own, so he went to another tunnel, looking for another tunnel boss.

So far he found that each of the monsters took a tunnel as their home, killing and eating anything moving inside, some attacked other tunnel bosses, killing the boss and getting stronger, before killing or getting killed by another tunnel boss.

Now that he was so deep in, he constantly heard howls echoing in the tunnels, finding sometimes two tunnel bosses killing each other while other tunnel bosses watched, waiting for the opportunity to steal the kill.

He would have called it weird if weren't for the fact that they were all weird, each of them a combination of some normal animals and critters.

He strolled through the place, feeling energetic as he consumed monster cores whenever he could, he felt stamina-less, more so than usual, unable to lose the energy with how short the fights he fought had been.

His pockets were full now unable to hold more crystals and he decided to just eat them, his real gain so far in total numbered 40 red crystals.

'40 man-sized monsters that could break into the surface at any moment and slaughter thousands of people, so why are they staying cooped up in these tiny tunnels?' he thought, as this was the only worry he had at this moment.

Boom!

Kicking the head of a cockroach-like rat to the ground, he stepped on top of its head like the bug it was, watching it squirm disgustingly with both the movement of a rat and cockroach.

CRUNCH!

'Disgusting,' He frowned heavily as the white buggy rat brain mixed with the dirty brown water, feeling utterly disgusted by it.

"I don't think I will ever be clean again," he spat, washing his boots in the brown water to get the mushy white brain from his boots. He completely ignored its body and monster crystal, going into another tunnel.

'I have been here for 3 hours already, should I just end it here and leave for the surface? But what about all these monsters?' he watched as another 2 tunnel bosses were fighting each other, these two about only 1 meter in size, one The rat-spider variety, the other a new monster.

He inspected the features of the new monster, finding it quite different from the mixed trend of all the monsters he saw, instead, it had four features from two different animals instead of just two.

'Rat torso with lizard scales, feline legs, lizard head, and a scorpion tail?' and as he expected the rat-spider monster was getting decimated.

The new monster stabbed its scorpion tail into the neck of the rat-spider, ending its life with a claw trike under its fleshy chin and into the target's brain.

'Elegant,' Nolan commented, watching the new monster try to avoid soiling its body with the blood of the rat-spider monster.

'Too bad you came across me,' he moved across the tunnel in an instant, his right arm extended backward, and he readied a fist to finish the fight in one strike.

To his surprise, the monster disappeared in a flash of light, reappearing a short distance away in another tunnel before running away from him.

'What... did it just teleport?' he bolted after it, running through the tunnels, completely ignoring the tunnel bosses who readied for a fight as they passed by them.

'I can't catch up to it,' he stated calmly, the new monster flashing farther away whenever he got close to it.

Running so fast his legs blurring, he navigated through the complete darkness, dodging and weaving the tunnel bosses and swerving and drifting as he came across tunnel intersections.

He breathed normally as he ran like a full speeding car, the teleporting monster just a meter away from him, no longer flashing.

It swerved into a tunnel, and he twisted his body in midair, landing his legs on the walls, and run on it, again twisting midair when the teleporting monster swerved into another tunnel, either landing on the floor or the tunnel walls, never decreasing his speed.

'This is kinda fun,' he smiled to himself, now only playing with the teleporting monster that was getting tired and no longer able to run like the beginning.

Swerving on another tunnel, this one was long, wide, and huge, its walls rubble in some places and completely okay in others.

Nolan looked at the straight tunnel he has been running in for half a minute now, running at almost 100km/h, yet it took 2 more minutes to reach its end.

'You won't get away that easily,' He run at full speed after the teleporting monster that was trying to reach the last stretch of the tunnel, using everything it had to run towards it.

Using the speed he accumulated, he launched himself like a cannonball, his two legs splitting the air like a bullet as he rocketed at tremendous speed toward the back of the teleporting monster.

BOOM! CRASHH!!

His double rocket kick completely obliterated and shattered the backside of the monster, but as a result, it was sent directly into the gaping 4o feet sized tunnel wall it was running to.

Nolan skidded on the rubble-filled floor, using his legs and hand to lower his insane speed with their friction.

He looked at the strange space before him, more bewildered than he has ever been.

It was hard to describe, layers and layers of leathery meat connected and intersected with each other, completely overtaking a huge cave system.

The leathery meat covered the cave from up to down, and the volume of the huge cave. Nolan looked in front of him, on the floor, he saw ripped leathery meat from some squirming leathery meat wall.

He walked to the crawling form of the monster he pulverized, half of its body missing as it crawled on its front paws toward the leathery meat wall.

He stepped on its neck, watching as it wined and clawed toward the meaty wall, not even looking at him.

'Why does it want to go there?' Nolan was tempted to let it crawl toward it, but his instincts were telling him staying here was too dangerous.

"Sorry, your end is here." Nolan formed his fingers into a straight line, stretched his right hand back, and came down on the back head of the teleporting monster, puncturing its skull with little skull damage aside from the penetration of the fingers.

Fishing for his prize, he extracted a fist-sized red crystal, the first he found of this size.

He instantly jumped 10 feet in the air, the ground he was standing on releasing leathery meat tentacles that began to drag the body in their midst, forming a new outgrowth of layers that connected to the other layers of meat.

'Time to get out of here.' landing on a meaty wall, he used it as a springboard, directly shooting for the entrance to the tunnel.

SWOOSH!!

Insanely long meaty tentacles emerged under the entrance, blocking the 40 feet tall thirty-wide tunnel entrance.

Nolan frowned, readying for a full-on attack, he punched the tentacle in front of him, yet instead of bursting, it only bent back a little before extensions emerged around it, trying to entangle Nolan.

Nolan caught one mid-air, using it as a swing, he aimed for a clear landing spot, doing a roll on the ground before standing up again, facing the huge tentacle walls that were entangling with each other forming a meaty wall.

'This is gonna be tricky,' Taking a deep breath, he readied himself for a running stance, taking one red crystal from his pocket and swallowing it, his dwindling energy now restored a little.

Releasing blue-colored breath from the sides of his mouth, he used everything he thought he had and more for one full punch, and his legs formed dents as they sprang toward the still-forming wall, his hands stretched back, an intense blue glow surrounding it, he punched hard.

"Take this if you can!" He shouted, extensions of meaty tentacles coming together in a spear formation with his blue glowing hand.

BOOM!!

He ripped through the meaty extensions and everything behind it, and his rocket launch continued unhindered as he passed a newly formed hole in the meat wall.

Skidding to a stop, he turned towards the opening of the tunnel, watching as the meaty wall reformed itself, not going past the entrance of the tunnel.

"I'll be back." Saying so, he runs from the tunnel, ready to go home after cleaning the sewers for the better half of the day.