Chapter 106. Go Be the Version of Yourself That Gets to Live
Catherine remembered the ground shuddering beneath her feet as they breached the seventh level, a deep, resonant groan that didn’t just vibrate through her boots, but through her very marrow.
It wasn’t the sound of shifting earth or failing masonry; it was a wet, grinding sound, like teeth gnashing together. It sounded like something ancient, something starved, waking up from a slumber that had lasted longer than human civilization itself.
Then, the world broke.
Jagged cracks split across the ceiling in branching patterns that looked disturbingly like lightning frozen in stone. But it wasn’t just stone that split.
The air itself seemed to tear open. Thin, glowing fissures, sickly bruised purple and arterial red, ripped through the space between one heartbeat and the next.
And from those wounds in reality, they came. They poured through in numbers that defied every law of biology and every tactical expectation Catherine had ever learned.
The chaos that followed came back to her now in fragmented, nauseating bursts of sensory overload.
"WATCH THE OVERHEAD!" Rowan’s scream had been raw, cut short by the thunderous crash of stone.
The ceiling hadn’t just fallen; it had exploded downward. Catherine remembered the wet thwack of debris hitting flesh, the sickening crunch of bone snapping like dry kindling as a section of the archway collapsed onto a stray construct.
"Wren, left! Twelve o’clock! Six o’clock! They’re everywhere!" Catherine had roared, but her own voice sounded distant, muffled by the sudden, impossible pressure in the air.
The atmosphere had turned thick and viscous, each breath feeling like she was inhaling liquid lead. The light bleeding from the fissures was wrong, a nauseating, ultraviolet glow that made her eyes burn and her stomach turn.
The creatures were nightmares given form. Some had familiar silhouettes, humanoid, perhaps, but they were twisted wrong.
Claws that were three feet too long, dripping with a black, corrosive ichor; eyes that multiplied along their faces in wet, blinking clusters; movements that didn’t flow but stuttered, as if they were skipping frames in reality, teleporting inches at a time.
"Fuck me... what are those things?" Aldric had bellowed. His voice, usually so full of bravado, had been edged with something Catherine had never heard before: genuine, unadulterated terror.
A massive, chitinous horror had torn through a fissure mere feet from them, its mandibles clicking with the sound of breaking glass. Wren’s arrows had been a blur of motion, each shot finding a socket or a joint with desperate precision, but for every one she felled, three more scrambled over the corpses of their own kind.
"Hold the line!" Catherine had screamed, her blade singing as it severed a limb that sprayed black ichor across her visor. "Back to back!"
"Don’t let them encircle us!"
Aldric had grabbed her shoulder, his grip bruising and desperate. "Catherine! We can’t hold this corridor!"
"We need to move or we’re going to get smothered alive!"
And they had fought. For what felt like hours, though she knew now it could only have been minutes, they had carved a circle of death around themselves.
The rhythm was instinctive, the deadly dance they had practiced until it was part of their souls. Aldric’s left-handed strikes were a revelation in the chaos; he would swing wide, catching creatures that Catherine couldn’t even see yet, his blade finding purchase in the soft tissue of their multiple necks while she covered his blind spots.
The air was filled with the metallic tang of blood, the wet tearing of flesh, and the relentless, grinding noise of steel meeting bone.
’We were fighting for our lives,’ Catherine thought, her mind reeling, ’but we weren’t fighting to survive...’
’We were fighting to delay the inevitable...’
Through the spray of blood and the screams of the dying, she remembered Mira. While the others fought with fury and desperation, Mira had gone unnaturally still.
Her blade wasn’t slashing wildly; it was moving in precise, economical arcs, each strike a silent death sentence. But her eyes, her pale, sharp eyes, weren’t focused on the monsters.
They were fixed on the fissures themselves.
It was Mira who first realized the true shape of what was happening.
"The rift’s origin point!" Mira’s voice tore through the cacophony, sharp as a blade.
She wasn’t shouting in panic; she was shouting with the terrifying clarity of someone who had seen the end of the world. "It’s not just a breach, Catherine... it’s a feeding ground!"
"It’s pulling things in from somewhere else with every heartbeat it stays open!"
"If we don’t get word to the surface about what’s actually happening down here, this won’t just be a dungeon collapse!
"It’ll be a plague that spreads beyond these walls!"
"Then we hold the line and we get everyone out together!" Catherine roared back.
Her lungs burned like she was swallowing molten glass. She swung her sword in a desperate arc, the blade connecting with something soft and wet, the neck of a shrieking horror, sending a spray of black ichor across her face.
"We push through! We find a way up together!"
"There is no ’together’ left, Catherine!"
The words cut through the roar of collapsing stone more effectively than any blade. Catherine spun, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, to find Aldric.
His breathing was ragged, each inhale punctuated by a wet, bubbling sound. A massive gash ran along his ribs, dark blood soaking through his armor and streaming down his thigh.
His left leg was bent at an unnatural angle, twisted by a fallen pillar, yet he was still swinging his sword with a ferocity that defied physics.
"Look around you, damn it!" Aldric spat, crimson frothing at the corners of his mouth. "The tunnels are sealing!"
"The exits are gone...!"
’We’re not making it out as a group! Not through this nightmare!"
"Then we fight until we do!" Catherine screamed, the denial tasting like copper in her mouth. "We fight until there’s nothing left to kill!"
"Catherine." Mira’s voice intervened. It wasn’t a suggestion; it was a command. "Look at the corridor behind you!"
"The structural integrity is failing... It’s going to seal completely in minutes!"
"You’re the fastest in the group...! You’re the only one who can outrun the collapse...!"
"Someone has to carry the warning back to the surface before the crown seals this place off forever!" Mira pointed at her. "It has to be you."
"I’m not leaving all of you!" Catherine grabbed Mira’s shoulder, her fingers digging into the leather. "I am your commander...!"
"I don’t abandon my unit!"
"You don’t have a choice." Aldric’s voice dropped to a low, terrible register.
The bravado was gone. The joking soldier she had trained with was dead; in his place stood something ancient and grim.
"This isn’t a debate, Catherine... This is an order! My order to the commander!"
He stepped forward, staggering despite the agony in his leg, and shoved her hard toward the narrow, crumbling passage that still offered a flickering hope of escape. "Get out...!"
"Run like your life depends on it, because it’s the only one that does!"
"Carry what you know back to the surface!"
"Make sure whatever these things are doesn’t reach the sun!"
"Aldric--" Catherine’s voice broke.
Her vision blurred as the reality of his words sank in. The screams of the twins, the wet tearing sounds of monsters closing in, the grinding of stone—it all became a distant hum beneath the roar of her own grief.
"I’ll come back for you...! All of you...!" Catherine clenched her fists. "I swear on my soul that I will come back and get you out of here!"
Aldric looked at her then. For one heartbeat, the chaos of the dungeon faded.
The blood, the gore, the bone-crushing weight of the collapsing ceiling—it all vanished. In his eyes, she saw the man who had laughed at her terrible jokes during training, the man who had promised to buy her an ale when they finally retired.
A ghost of that warm, teasing affection flickered across his face, even as he coughed up blood.
"I know you would, prodigy," he whispered, his voice cracking with a tenderness that hurt worse than any wound. "I know you would..."
"If there was time for that to matter." His grip tightened on his sword as another wave of shadows emerged from the purple fissures. "You were the best commander any of us could have asked for..."
"Don’t you dare waste that gift..."
"Don’t you dare die down here with the rest of us when you can still change everything!"
"Now! Go! Leave!"
His eyes hardened, the last spark of hope igniting into a desperate fury. "Go be the version of yourself that gets to live long enough to matter."
"RUN!"