Cel stared down past the thrashing creature, past the torn flesh and pooling blood, into the stomach far below.
The glow was spreading. Rising.
Something hot and ancient stirred in those depths - corrosive fire that promised to turn everything in this throat to ash.
Red light painted the ribbed walls in hellish hues. The stench hit his nose - sharp, acrid, burning with each breath.
The smaller creature shrieked in rising panic. Its claws gouged frantically at the throat's walls, shredding flesh in its desperation to escape.
Heat flooded upward through the worm's body - not seeping, but rushing like water through a broken dam. The flesh around him began to cook. The organic walls steamed, moisture evaporating in seconds.
Instinct screamed at him before understanding caught up.
The worm was going to breathe fire.
And there was nowhere in this entire throat that would protect him from it.
The socket wouldn't save him. The walls offered no shelter. The teeth were his only exit - but the thrashing creature blocked the way, a whirlwind of claws between him and freedom.
Cel's mind raced through options with crystalline clarity.
He could try to slip past. Risk those claws tearing him apart while the molten breath rose behind him.
Or…
His gaze locked on the creature's stone-like back.
'Use it as a shield.' The thought arrived cold and certain.
The smaller creature was already dead - it just didn't know it yet. But its body could shield him. Give him a chance to survive the coming inferno.
But would its flesh hold against that heat?
Doubtful.
If he reinforced it though…
Cel threw himself out of the socket.
His feet hit the slick floor and he immediately launched forward - not toward the exit, but toward the thrashing nightmare between him and freedom.
The creature was a whirlwind of violence. Its claws tore at the throat's walls with mindless fury, ripping away chunks of flesh in sprays of blood. Its serpentine body coiled and writhed, every movement driven by pure animal panic as the red light grew brighter below.
Cel dove into that chaos.
A claw swept past his face - so close he felt the displaced air. He twisted, using momentum to drive his shoulder into the creature's side. The impact jarred through his already wounded body, but it gave him what he needed.
Contact.
His left hand slammed flat against the thing's stone-like back, and frost spread across its skin in a spreading wave.
It shrieked - metal dragged across bone - and whipped its entire body around with murderous intent. The thing that had been panicking about the worm was now focused on a new, immediate threat: whatever was touching it needed to die.
Its remaining claws found Cel's chest.
Four lines of white-hot agony opened from collarbone to ribs. Blood sprayed across both of them. The creature twisted in his grip like a serpent, trying to tear itself free, trying to reach his face with those needle-ringed teeth.
Cel grabbed it with his left arm and squeezed it against his body despite the pain.
He wasn't trying to restrain it completely - that would be impossible. The creature was too strong, too frenzied. But he could redirect it. Turn its ice-armored back toward the depths below while keeping his own body behind that frozen shield.
The creature's assault became even more vicious. Claws raked his arms, his shoulders, his jaw - anywhere they could reach. Each strike opened fresh wounds.
But Cel held on.
Held his living shield between himself and the approaching death.
The red light reached blinding intensity.
Heat slammed into the ice-armored back with the force of an avalanche. The frost cracked, shattered, reformed under his intent in rapid succession as impossible temperature met divine cold in explosive conflict.
But heat bled through anyway. The creature shrieked - not just fury now, but agony. The heat was cooking it from behind despite the frost, charring flesh the ice couldn't fully protect.
Cel's skin reddened, then blistered, then began to char under temperatures meant to melt stone.
His left arm, wrapped around the creature to anchor the ice against its back, suffered worst. With no frost between flesh and hide, the heat had direct access. The burn went deep, sustained, eating through skin with methodical cruelty.
Then the pressure wave hit.
They were launched from the worm's maw like stones from a catapult - hurled into the night sky with such violent force that Cel's vision went white. The creature's weight became meaningless. His grip broke and they tumbled through empty air, spinning, separated by sheer momentum.
The world spun in chaotic fragments - ash, moonlight, obsidian stones vomited from the worm's stomach alongside them. Massive fragments larger than his entire body flew through the air in a deadly storm, their razor edges catching silver light.
Cel's back slammed into ash-covered ground with bone-crushing force. The air exploded from his lungs. He rolled, tumbled, limbs flailing as momentum carried him across the wasteland.
Obsidian stones rained down around him.
One struck his leg - a glancing blow that sent fresh agony lancing through already burned flesh. Another whipped past his face, close enough to feel the heat of its passage, before it slammed into the ground somewhere behind him in his spin.
He hit the ground three more times during his uncontrolled tumble before finally stopping, sprawled face-down in ash that clung to his wounds like salt in open cuts.
For several heartbeats, he couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. His body simply refused to obey, overwhelmed by accumulated damage.
Then his lungs remembered their purpose.
Air rushed in - painful, burning, but real.
Cel pushed himself up slowly, ash cascading from his back in gray streams. The air was thick with it - choking clouds stirred up by the worm's breath and the rain of obsidian.
He blinked hard, trying to clear his vision.
Movement in the distance caught his attention.
The massive worm.
Still surfaced. Its enormous body writhed above ground, steam rising from its open maw where the molten breath had scorched even its own flesh. For a moment it remained there, coiled like a conqueror surveying its domain.
Then it began to sink.
Slowly at first, then faster. The ground opened beneath it - not violently, but as if the earth itself welcomed the creature home. Within seconds, nothing remained. Stone sealed behind it like water closing over a dropped pebble.
Gone.
Cel's gaze swept across the wasteland.
The destruction was absolute. Where the breath had touched, the ground was scorched black, cracked like dried clay. Obsidian stones littered the landscape - some still glowing faint red with residual heat, others already cooling to dull black. Ash drifted through the air in lazy spirals, settling over everything in a fresh gray shroud.
Then he saw it.
The smaller creature lay perhaps fifteen steps away, broken and steaming. Its body was shattered - body bent at an angle that shouldn't exist, its remaining arm twisted beneath its torso. Parts of its stone-like skin had cracked from extreme temperature shifts—frozen, then cooked, then frozen again.
But Cel's gaze didn't linger.
Movement behind the creature caught his attention - something massive shifting on the horizon.
His eyes traveled past the broken body, past the scattered obsidian, to what lay beyond.
Ice flooded his veins.
A wall of ash rose in the distance - impossibly tall, impossibly wide. Not drifting lazily like the settling dust around him, but spinning. Churning. A massive tornado of gray and black that devoured everything in its path, advancing across the wasteland with relentless purpose.
The sound reached him a heartbeat later - a low, hollow roar that seemed to come from the earth itself.
Cel spun around, scanning desperately for shelter.
Distant shapes jutted from the wasteland - ruins, their crumbling walls half-buried in ash. Ancient, crumbling, but they offered something better than standing exposed in the open.
He ran.
His enhanced legs launched him forward in powerful, uneven strides. Each step carried him farther than expected, his burned and clawed body protesting the abuse, but fear drove him harder than pain ever could.
The roar grew louder behind him. Closer.
Movement flickered in his peripheral vision.
Cel's head snapped sideways.
The smaller creature had risen.
Its shattered body dragged itself forward with impossible determination, stone-like skin cracked and bleeding, leaving a trail of dark ichor through the ash. But its eyeless head tracked him with perfect accuracy.
It was following him.
'You've got to be kidding me.'
The thing launched itself forward, its single arm clawing at the ground in desperate pulls, dragging its broken body in a lurching charge driven by pure animal rage.
The frost. The burns. Being used as a meat shield - the creature remembered. And it wanted revenge.
"Mindless bastard!" Cel snarled, pushing harder. "That's going to kill us both!"
But the creature didn't care. Didn't even glance at the approaching tornado. Its needle-ringed mouth opened in a shriek of pure fury, focused entirely on the one who had hurt it.
And that was Cel.
The ruins grew closer. Twenty steps. Fifteen.
Behind him, the creature was gaining. Its broken body moved with terrifying speed, driven by something beyond reason.
Ten steps.
The roar became deafening. Cel felt the air pressure change against his back, a physical force that pushed him forward even as it pulled ash into spiraling chaos around him.
Five steps.
Behind him, the creature lunged.
Cel threw himself forward in a desperate dive.
The creature's claws whistled past his head as he plunged through a gap in the crumbling wall, his shoulder slamming into ancient stone as he tumbled inside.
Then the ash storm hit.
The creature's silhouette vanished - consumed by the gray wall that crashed over the ruins like a wave. Its shriek cut off abruptly, swallowed by the hollow roar.
The world disappeared.
Cel's chest heaved, relief flooding through him.
But that relief was short-lived.
Ash poured through every gap in the broken walls, thick as water, choking and absolute. The ruins offered shelter but not sanctuary - wind howled through the structure's wounds, carrying stinging debris that tore at exposed skin.
Cel curled against the ground, arms wrapped over his head, trying to make himself as small as possible. Stone fragments and ash hammered against his back.
He pressed his face into the crook of his elbow, one hand cupped over his mouth and nose, breathing in short, desperate gasps. Even filtered, the air tasted of sulfur and ancient dust.
The roar consumed everything - thought, sensation, awareness. Just sound, pressure and the terrible fear that the walls around him might not hold, that the ruins might collapse and bury him alive in this dead world's fury.
Time became meaningless. Seconds stretched into minutes stretched into—
The stone beneath him cracked.
Cel's eyes snapped open just as the floor split apart directly below his chest.
He threw himself sideways, rolling across ash-covered stone as the ground gave way. His burned left arm screamed.
That broken, vengeful thing erupted from below in an explosion of ash and fury.
It burst through the widening crack - shattered body twisted at impossible angles, stone-like skin cracked and weeping dark ichor.
The eyeless head whipped toward him.
Its needle-ringed mouth opened in a shriek that cut through even the storm's roar.
Cel scrambled backward through swirling ash.
Silent Moon materialized in his left grip.
Four crescents ignited along the blade's length.
The creature lunged.