The days quietly passed by inside the labyrinth, but here you did not hear silence. You heard the death screams of beasts echoing through the stone corridors. And the hard grunting sound of something that resembled a demon. No, it was Benny who had been on a killing spree.
On floors one through three, it was a daily occurrence. He was like a madman, running around each floor systematically, killing everything that seemed to move. Anything with a pulse. Anything that breathed.
While his former party members continued to push through the lower floors, deeper into the labyrinth's depths, Benny kept a steady pace on the upper levels. He made sure there was no stone left unchecked, no corner unsearched, until each of the monsters was killed or dying in agony. Methodical. Thorough. Relentless.
The next thing he did was insanity itself. He charged through the dimensional spaces from whence these monsters came. Through the rifts and portals that connected the labyrinth to other realms. There he also wreaked havoc, bringing his brand of violence to places beyond the stone halls.
From the rat kingdom, he made sure he burned and left his mark. Buildings set ablaze. Bodies displayed as warnings. Terror spread like wildfire through their sewers and warrens.
Although it was unknown to him consciously, he felt a kind of anger that didn't dissipate when killing these ratmen. A rage that fed on itself, growing stronger with each kill rather than being satisfied. He butchered them and hung their corpses from the trees in their underground gardens. He even infiltrated their walls, slipping past defenses that should have been impenetrable.
The first time he had returned to this place, he saw that the rat kingdom had withstood the war against the Four-on-Four Abominations. The conflict that his team had barely escaped from a few months ago.
At some point after his team had retreated out of the dimensional subspace of the rat kingdom, the war had continued to rage on. For a full month, the fighting persisted. The ratmen held their defenses with Queen Vermina Skittera herself joining the fray. Both leaders had exhausted their resources, bled their populations dry, and finally agreed to a truce. A temporary peace born of mutual exhaustion.
But now Benny, although clueless about all of this history, didn't care. He just followed what his heart desired, or rather what the thing in his chest that replaced his heart desired. The death of these ratmen and all that didn't resemble him. All that was different from a human being.
Benny was mad. He was insane. No, he had gone insane. There was a difference, and he had crossed that line somewhere in the darkness.
Yes, this was the missing part of his soul. His reason had been snuffed out of him when the fragment was torn away. And what was left was the primal instinct of a man stripped of civilization's veneer. And he utilized it to its full extent until everything was dyed red with blood. The floors. The walls. His hands.
He killed the rat people's children and made sure to throw their bodies out into the streets. Well, it was more like sewers for them, the underground passages they called home. Even with their intelligence, they still had some parts of their culture that didn't make them look civilized in a human sense. They were caught between beast and person, belonging fully to neither.
And for Benny, he abhorred such things. They disgusted him to his core in ways he couldn't articulate. And he was their murderer, their grim reaper, who had come to fetch their souls and savor their screams.
In this, he was delighted. He enjoyed every bit of their pleading, although he couldn't understand what these creatures were saying since they spoke in the ratmen tongue. The language was all chittering and squeaks to his ears.
But their gestures told him everything he needed to know. Their weeping squeals gave Benny the much-sought-after delight. The way they clutched at their young. The way they begged with their paws clasped together. The way their eyes went wide with terror when they saw him coming.
He was, in human terms, a serial killer who enjoyed the process. Not just the outcome, but every moment of the hunt. The stalking. The fear. The kill itself.
He also sometimes cooked them alive and ate them in front of their loved ones. Roasting them over fires while their families watched, bound and helpless. The smell of burning fur and flesh filled the air. Their screams provided the soundtrack to his meals.
The Ratmen Intolerance Division had tried to find and capture him. They sent their best trackers. Their most skilled warriors. Entire squads dedicated to hunting this human demon that had appeared in their midst.
But Benny was so good at hiding that even the most expert in the field of tracking couldn't find any trace of his passing. He moved like a ghost through their tunnels. Left no footprints. No scent trail. Nothing.
And if they did manage to find him, all of his pursuers died terrible deaths. It was as if he would show himself deliberately just to torture them. To make examples of those who dared to hunt him. Bodies were found later, mutilated in ways that sent messages even without words.
Every passing day inside the subspace was filled with screams and death. The rat kingdom lived in constant terror. Mothers kept their children hidden. Warriors patrolled in groups, never alone.
And Benny? He went back inside the labyrinth proper to enjoy his rest on the first floor. There he would whistle cheerfully and act normally as he scrubbed the dirt, grime, and monster blood off himself. Washing away the evidence of his crimes in a small pool of clean water different from his drinking hole.
He wasn't right in the head. And you might even begin to question what end these senseless murders constituted. Was this hunting? Was this simply killing an enemy? Or was this something else entirely? Something darker and more depraved?
Because whatever Benny was doing right now, it was clear that even by human standards, it was extreme. So extreme that you might even forget that he was killing monsters. Intelligent monsters with language, culture, families, and emotions. But monsters nonetheless.
And if given the chance, they might also have done the same to humans. They had raided the human kingdom before (the labyrinth) and had done worse than he had. They have taken slaves. And impregnated the women, it didn't matter whether it was a child or an adult they all looked the same to them. And they worst of all had enjoyed eating their prisoners alive while also screaming in pleas. The history between the species was written in blood on both sides.
So was it really all that bad when Benny was doing the world a favor by killing these beasts? By reducing their numbers and spreading fear through their ranks?
It was a question of morality, but from which angle should you ask it? Was it from the human perspective? From the ratmen perspective? From some objective cosmic viewpoint that saw all life as equal?
Because either way, it didn't sound good. Either Benny was a hero purging monsters from the world, or he was a monster himself wearing human skin. Either he was justified, or he was committing atrocities that would haunt any sane person's conscience.
But Benny didn't have that conscience anymore. It had been torn away with his soul fragment. What remained was something that delighted in the screams. Something that smiled while it worked.
And every night, when he returned to his safe haven on the first floor, he slept peacefully. No nightmares. No guilt. No second thoughts.
Just the satisfied rest of a predator after a successful hunt.
The labyrinth had created something new. Something it might come to regret later on.