Dungeon logic. From every RPG, every roguelike. Descent equals progression, danger, reward. Ascent often leads to entrance, safety, weaker challenges. They don't put the starter zone after the boss room. He was, by all logical deduction, on a middle floor. Maybe even the first real challenge after a tutorial zone he'd somehow slept through.
"Up," he declared, more to himself. "We go up."
{A dazzling strategic deduction. 'Up.' Truly, Sun Tzu himself would weep at the genius. The sheer topological audacity.}
Ignoring the voice, Lu began to slog through the water towards the upward-sloping tunnel. His movement was a lumbering, laborious process. Each step required him to lift not just his leg, but what felt like half his body weight. The water provided slight buoyancy, but also drag. Yet, the absence of the cardiac pain was a potent, dizzying drug. He could move. Slowly, miserably, but under his own power, towards a goal.
He had taken exactly three steps from the spot where he'd awakened when the seemingly solid stone beneath his left foot simply ceased to exist.
It wasn't a trapdoor. It was a collapse. The weathered limestone, undermined by the constant water, gave way with a soft crunch. He dropped only about three feet, landing with a mighty splash and a grunt that was knocked from his lungs on a submerged rock.
The new chamber was smaller, tighter. The glowing algae here was sparse, sickly, casting long, dancing shadows that made the walls seem to breathe. The water was deeper, up to his mid-thigh now, and colder.
{Ah. Excellent. You've found the nursery.} The System's tone was one of morbid, delighted curiosity.
"Nursery?" Lu panted, pushing himself upright. "What, for bats? Fish?"
{For the Sanguisuga Obesus Atra, if you prefer the archaic taxonomical poetry. Common name: Gloomwater Blight-Leech. Average length: 0.9 to 1.2 meters. Primary diet: Adipose tissue and latent psycho-spiritual energy—the metaphysical equivalent of body fat and daydreams. They are ambush predators. Their hydrostatic muscular structure allows for short-range jet propulsion both through liquid and air. Their salivary secretion contains a potent anesthetic and a compound that temporarily liquefies lipid cells for easy suction. Folklore from the surface-dwellers suggests a mature swarm can reduce a full-grown plains bison to a skeletal structure clad in a loose sack of skin in under two hundred heartbeats. But please, continue to underestimate your environment. It streamlines the inevitable.}
A ripple in the water, thirty feet to his left. Not a natural ripple. It was a silent, cutting V of displacement, moving towards him faster than a striking snake. There was no sound of swimming. Just that terrible, silent arrowhead of water, slicing the surface.
Lu's primal hindbrain, long suppressed under layers of numbness and carbs, screamed a single command: RUN.
He turned and began a frantic, churning lumber towards the far end of the chamber. There, he could see a set of rough, natural stone stairs leading up and out of the black water. The distance was a gauntlet: one hundred meters of open water. For an athlete, a ten-second sprint. For him, it was the distance to the moon.
He heard it. A wet, rubbery thwip, like a rope being pulled taut and released. He glanced over his shoulder.
The creature was airborne. It was a slick, obsidian-black cylinder, thicker than his arm, segments pulsing with a vile internal rhythm. Its entire forward end was a circular maw, a blooming flower of concentric, needle-sharp teeth that gleamed wetly in the faint light. It had no eyes. It didn't need them. It was a guided missile of hunger, and he was the heat signature.
He couldn't dodge. He tried to twist, a futile gesture. The impact was like being struck by a well-thrown bowling ball. It drove the air from his lungs in a pained oof. Then, a second later, the pain arrived. A hot, piercing agony as those ringed teeth punched through the soaked fabric of his shirt and buried themselves deep in the flesh and fat of his upper back. A strange, pulling, draining sensation began instantly. It wasn't a sucking of blood; it was a siphoning of his very substance, a direct tap into the reservoirs of his body. A wave of dizzying, euphoric lightness immediately followed the pain, a sensation so alien and wrong it was terrifying.
He screamed, a raw, animal sound, and reached back, fingers scrabbling over his shoulder. The leech's body was coated in a thick, gelatinous mucus. His fingers slid off it uselessly, unable to gain any purchase. It was fused to him.
{The stairs,} the System's voice cut through the panic, now devoid of sarcasm, cold and flat as a surgeon's scalpel. {The stone is seeped with residual sanctuary magic from when this place was something other than a festering hole. A passive ward. One step onto the first stair, and the curse binding the creature to you breaks. It will die. It is, of course, an irrelevance. The statistical probability of you covering that distance under one attachment, let alone the multiple that will inevitably occur, is functionally zero. But it is a technically possible endpoint. A thought experiment.}
The words were a spark in the pitch-black oil of his terror. A concrete goal. A binary condition: STAIRS = LIFE. He stopped trying to pull the thing off. He stopped thinking about the pain, the horror, the impossible situation. He started walking.
Step. Drag. The leech pulsed, and with each pulse, a wave of that draining, lightening sensation washed through him. Step. Drag. His knees shrieked, his ankles protested, but the burden they carried was lessening, gram by terrible gram. The anchor on his back was also a ballast being emptied. He was a ship being scuttled to float again.
Ten meters. Twenty. He was moving faster now, a shambling, desperate jog. The water churned around his thighs. Tears of pain and sheer effort streamed down his face, mixing with the cold dungeon water. Thirty meters. He could see the stairs more clearly now. They were greenish, slick with a different kind of algae.
Then, a second thwip.
A new sun of agony ignited in the small of his back. He shrieked, his legs buckling. He fell to his knees in the water, the impact jarring his bones. The two draining points now created a sickening vortex of sensation. He was being hollowed out. In the still, black water before him, he saw his reflection, illuminated by the ghastly light. His face, always round, was… sagging. The flesh under his chin was loose. His eyes, wide with terror, stared back from deep, shadowed sockets. They looked hollow. Haunted.
No. Not like this. Not on my knees.
A sound erupted from his throat, a wordless roar of pure, undiluted will. It was the sound of a man choosing not to die. He planted his hands on the slimy stone bottom and pushed. He rose. His back was a universe of pain, a constellation of two sucking stars. He moved.
Forty meters. Fifty. His clothes began to billow around him, suddenly absurdly large. The sodden fabric of his t-shirt hung like a sail. Sixty meters.
{Twelve meters remaining,} the System intoned, its voice now holding a faint, incredulous note. {Biomass reduction: approximately 40%. Vital signs: erratic but persistent.}
Schlik. Thwip. THWIP!