Underground locked Cell
When I first regained consciousness, the only thing I noticed was how unreasonably cold it was. I instinctively reached for my blanket and, when my hand found nothing, I tossed and turned until I got annoyed enough to sit up and look for it.
I tried standing, expecting to step onto the wooden floor where the blanket should have fallen.
Instead, my feet touched cold stone.
That woke me up instantly.
'Cold, cold, cold,' I thought frantically, stumbling back onto the bed. Now that I noticed, it felt smaller… and far more worn-out than I remembered.
After recovering from the sudden cold shock, I stared into the dark and tried to figure out where I'd ended up this time.
'I really hope those guys haven't found me,' I thought, running my hands along the wall. 'I probably won't survive if they catch me again.'
I kept feeling around, trying to get some sense of my surroundings. I noticed that there were quite a few sharp stones on the floor as I stepped on a few of them, and let me tell you, they hurt.. a lot. For some reason, something called a "Leg Go" pops into my head from the experience of being stabbed in the foot. Why would anybody want to get something that stabs your feet for fun? Some people are weird like that, I guess.
After changing how I walked to not step on any more of the stones, I continued my mapping of my area. And from it all I could tell was that I was in a cramped room… maybe 1.8 meters wide, 2.4 meters long. One side was a set of iron bars, and as I felt around a bit more, I noticed a door lock location on the bars.
'A cell,' I sighed, carefully making my way back to the bed. 'Embarrassing… after spending so much time in these, you'd think I'd recognize one sooner.'
As I sat down, I tried thinking of ways to get out but kept coming up short. 'If those guys really did catch me again, I don't know if I could escape the same way again,' I thought nervously, especially with all their Awaken, let alone the other higher ranks.'
As I was in the cell, having a mini panic attack, the Nightmare Spell decided to send me a welcome.
[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial..]
It also decided to give me a quick overview of my situation. So basically, I'm in a prison of a town that gets attacked regularly by tides of nightmare creatures from the damage I could glean from the images shown to me.
'While it's nice to know those guys didn't catch me, a bit more information on my situation would have been helpful,' I grumble internally to the Nightmare Spell.
It seemed to have heard me as I started hearing some groaning coming from the direction of where the cell bars were.
I hoped whoever this guy was, wasn't drunk. The last guard I had, who drank, was quite brutal on us. Luckily, we didn't see him again after he killed too many of us during his drunken escapades. I bet he got quite the thrashing from that creepy scientist.
The noise I heard started to get closer. I also instantly noticed that some of the wall lights outside the cell started going on as a figure went past them. As I got up to see where the light was coming from and get a proper look at the guy, I thought he was going to check on the cell.
What I saw was definitely not a guard for sure, and something I hoped to never see again, but this time it was much worse.
"Oh no… oh spell no," I panically said while backing away from the cell bars, 'Why are these things here too'. That was a mistake since the thing seemed to have heard me and started quickly shuffling in my direction. As it got closer, I got a better look at it, and it was a monstrosity in every sense of the word.
The monstrosity looks vaguely human at first glance, but when it got closer, I noticed that its posture was strange since its back was hunched sharply forward, as if its spine was never meant to hold a human posture. Every step it takes is uneven, slow, and dragging like it's constantly fighting against the weight of its own warped body, but that didn't seem to deter it any.
As more and more lights got switched on after its charge, I got a better look and saw its body is covered in bulging boils, patches of rough scales, and uneven clumps of dark fur. But the truly scary part is its arms. It wasn't just thin, unnaturally so, and long, about 1.8 meters long, ending in fingers that stretch too far to be normal.
Long enough to reach me in the cell if I wasn't careful.
'Yeah, no… hopefully there is something here I can use to stop that thing,' I thought in a rush while it was shuffling in my direction. I used that time and the little amount of light from outside to look around the cell in hopes that something might help.
I looked in the direction of where I felt the sharp pebbles I stepped on earlier, and I saw some large, sharp slabs from the roof. 'If I use my shirt to hold the one end of it, it should be enough to create a knife,' I thought as I rushed to the stones.
I quickly managed to pick up 3 big ones from the bunch with some smaller rocks and rushed to the opposite end of the cell from the cell bars while also grabbing the small mattress in the hope it might distract the creature.
I quickly take off my shirt and press the end of the cell using the mattress to block its view of me while I try making my makeshift stone knife. From the feel of it, I won't have many uses for this, so I'd better make them count.
The creature finally reached the bars. It seemed to struggle to slow down and bumped heavily into the cell bars. It didn't make a sound at that, but stopped, just started to stare at me through the bars as if trying to understand what I was.
'This is really creepy,' I thought about using the mattress to try and block its gaze.
That definitely got a reaction.
One of its crooked, too-long arms slowly rose through the bars to try and reach me. One of its fingers brushed the mattress blocking its view, and even that tiny sound of fabric moving made my breath catch.
Then it grabbed the mattress.
Not gently.
The whole thing jerked forward so suddenly I almost yelped. The creature pulled it up against the bars and started tearing into it like it was checking if I was hiding inside.
Stuffing flew everywhere.
Great. There went my distraction.
Once it had shredded enough of it to realize there was no human inside, it shoved its right arm back through the gap, this time further. Its long fingers stretched across the floor, scraping around uselessly. Searching.
…Searching?
Why was it searching? I was literally right in front of it. The lights outside hadn't gone out, so why couldn't I see myself properly?
An idea popped into my head
'Wait… can it not see well?
I picked up one of the smaller stones and tossed it at the bars.
CLANG.
The creature froze.
Then its head snapped slowly, unnervingly, to the spot where the stone had fallen. It stared at it for a solid minute. Just… staring. Doing absolutely nothing else.
Then, as if giving up, it turned back to searching for me again.
'Okay. So it's attracted to sound, but its eyesight is basically nonexistent,' I thought, mentally filing that away as "important survival information."
'Maybe if I throw a few stones at the wall, it'll get distracted long enough for me to… do something.'
I didn't know what that "something" was yet, but anything was better than being grabbed.
'But that still doesn't fix the main problem,' I thought, staring at the bars. 'I'm trapped in this cell.'
Even if I did manage to hurt it somehow, what then? If it went berserk, I'd probably end up in worse shape than the mattress it just murdered.
'Ok, maybe before I do something stupid, I'll try to wait it out. It might get boring if I can't get myself,' I hoped in my mind.
------
30 minutes later
'Ok, this is not working.'
It seems to know I'm still in here and can't escape the cell, and has not stopped searching for me. I have dodged its hand more times than I could count, and it's slowly getting better at picking out my location as time goes on.
I need to do something before it actually catches me.
So I leaned my back against the wall and tried to think of a crazy plan as its arm sweeps past me again.
The idea forming in my head wasn't a plan so much as a desperate gamble. A hail mary, really. If I could get close enough that its arm couldn't swing properly inside the cell, then maybe, just maybe, I'd have a tiny opening to stab it before it realized where I was. But that plan relied on one thing: the creature staying confused long enough for me to move without getting myself instantly grabbed, crushed, or turned into a floor decoration. Which meant I needed to blind it, distract it, and pray the Nightmare Spell didn't decide to make things even worse.
Hopefully, with it injured and me away from harm, it would damage the bars enough that I could maybe slip through.
'And why would I want out of my cozy cell?' I question myself once again.
'Well, for one, I'm getting hungry and thirsty, and if I don't find some soon, it could lead to some issues depending on how long the Trial is,' I thought grimly.
'So let's execute the plan,' I quickly thought as I scooped up some of the dust and loose grit scattered on the floor. The cell was old enough that one good handful felt like I'd scraped the entire wall.
The creature let out a low, confused growl.
It was still searching.
Perfect.
I threw the dust not at it, but right in front of its face, letting the cloud blow into its eyes as it leaned forward.
The reaction was instant.
It jerked back, head twitching rapidly, claws clacking against the iron bars as it tried to shake the irritation away. Its vision wasn't great to begin with. Now, it was even more confused.
'Good… Now for step two.'
I tossed a few pebbles at the left wall.
CLANK!
The creature snapped toward it immediately, arm swinging blindly in that direction. Its whole upper body leaned sideways, stretching far enough that its ribs were suddenly exposed between the boils and scales.
That was my moment.
I rushed forward quietly, on the balls of my feet, avoiding the scattered stones and got close enough to feel the heat coming off its warped skin.
'Please let this work.'
I drove the sharp stone shard into the softest-looking patch I could find, right under the twisted ribcage.
It sank halfway.
The creature reared back with a shrill, warbling sound—something between a wolf's howl and someone gasping through broken lungs. Its arm flailed wildly, smashing into the wall and the cell bars, making so much noise I thought the whole place would collapse.
As it yanked its arm back, the crooked wrist slammed into my left arm before I could dodge completely.
Pain exploded through it.
'Yep. That's definitely going to bruise.'
My fingers went numb almost immediately. Great.
And to make things even better, the creature didn't seem hurt enough to stop. If anything, it looked even more determined now, like it had finally decided I was worth the effort. It started shuffling closer to the gap in the cell bars — which, thanks to all its thrashing, looked a lot bigger than before.
Then it suddenly stopped.
'I let out a tiny breath. Maybe it'll le...'
The creature snapped its head to the right.
And in the next instant, it was slammed across the hallway so hard the sound shook dust from the ceiling.
I didn't even see what hit it. It was too fast for my eyes to follow, too sudden for my mind to catch up.
But the feeling that hit me next..
Revulsion rolled through me so violently I almost gagged.
Terror followed, colder and heavier than anything I had ever known.
Something had arrived.
Something blasphemous that shouldn't exist.
The Awaken Tyrant has arrived