Chapter 16 (Patreon)

“Bruce,”  Kassar’s voice boomed in his head.  “Start running!”

“What?!” Bruce yelped back, looking back and forth in the hallway just outside of the sanctuary.  The strange light illuminating the slate gray corridor was dimmer and a dark angry red.  Even without Kassar shouting at him, the entire tableau was beyond foreboding.

“Where should I go?” He asked, summoning his hammer to calm his nerves.  It wasn’t a clean and well crafted tool made of placid even light like the Phase Hammer he’d learned from Treekipp.  Instead it was bulkier with a larger head and a serrated point on the back that flickered with red light interspersed with flashes of purple electricity that crawled up and down the haft.

“Activate Eyes of the Void you fool,” Kassar hissed.  “Did I seriously send you chasing around your psyche for half a day for nothing?  They scented you the moment you stepped out of the sanctuary, and they’re coming for you as we dawdle.  If you don’t start moving, you won’t even have bones left for them to crack open for marrow.”

Bruce half closed his eyes, activating the ability.  A second later, the world filled with vibrant color as energy of all affinities painted a rainbow of nuance over every surface, but he didn’t have time to appreciate the splendor of his new perception.

To the left, a couple thousand feet away an angry vortex of energy and malice, pitch black in his new sight, was rumbling toward him.  Tendrils of power snaked out from the dark core, brushing against the walls of the Great Labyrinth and eating the latent energy that hung in the air there, leaving lines of gray and lifeless not-stone in their wake.

Bruce didn’t bother to ask which way or to inquire as to what he should be looking for.  Whatever the ball of devouring energy was, it gave off an aura that practically floored him.  If the shades were like candle flames of energy, it was a roaring furnace, spitting blistering heat and cooking the air until heat mirages danced over every surface.  He didn’t need to know its exact power levels or abilities to know that he was as outclassed as a deer staring into a pair of headlights.

He ran.  The crackling ball of energy gave chase, filling the maze with the sound of paper tearing as it rent the air in front of it.  Almost a dozen tentacles whipped and searched in front of it, stripping the life from the walls as they dug in and pulled the entity after him.

It was fast.  More than that, it was able to wrap its tentacles around corners in the Labyrinth and whip itself around them without losing any momentum.  Bruce was able to keep ahead of it, barely, by running full out, but as his bare feet slapped against the floor, he couldn’t help but feel like it was gaining on him.

“Screw this!” He shouted between a quick gasp of breath, “I’m heading back to the sanctuary.  We can think over our next steps there.”

He made to turn toward the room where Kassar had dragged him only for the big alien’s to thunder inside his head.

“It’s too late now boy!  The gluttony singularity has your scent!  Your only chance is to make it to a stairwell.  It won’t follow you up to the ninth floor.”

Bruce’s brain blanked for a second as a tentacle slammed into a wall behind him with enough force to shake the entire maze.  The scent of freshly cut grass filled the air, and a distant part of his brain noted that his senses simply couldn’t process the all-consuming terror that the rampaging monster brought with it.

“Then where do I go?” Bruce bleated, skidding and slamming a shoulder into the wall of a four way intersection.  “Eyes of the Void lets me see almost a mile in every direction, but I can’t find a stairwell anywhere.”

“Keep going,” Kassar growled.  “I think the next right will bring you to the corridor that passes by one of the stairwells.”

“You THINK,” Bruce shouted back, sweat beading on his forehead.  “I don’t THINK that the thing chasing me wants to eat my soul.  I KNOW it.  You’d better offer more assurance than just ‘thinking’ we are heading in the right direction.”

“The singularity will do more than just eat your soul,” Kassar replied, his voice distant and distracted.  “It’ll hollow you out and fill the husk with your hunger. A flickering vestige of your consciousness will remain as you-”

“What made you think this would be helpful?!” Bruce screamed, vision beginning to narrow as he pushed himself harder.  Behind him a tentacle made from dark, all consuming energy slipped around the edge of a corridor.  The ripping sound grew louder, and somehow he could feel it boring into his head making his eyes and teeth ache.

“I am encouraging you to run faster,” Kassar sniffed.  “Right now I am tapped into your senses and I’m trying to compare the area of the Great Labyrinth that we are running through with my memory.  The only problem is that I’ve been trapped in the sanctuary where my body expired for a couple thousand years.  Things have changed since then.”

Bruce made a right just as the constellation of energy rounded the corner behind him.  Eyes of the Void let him look at all 360 degrees of his surroundings, but after passing his perception over the singularity once and recoiling, he learned his lesson.

Just looking at the monster at close range ripped hungrily at his perception.  He vaguely perceived a mad wailing and gnashing of teeth and then the ability shorted out, leaving a splitting headache in his wake, causing Bruce to stumble slightly.

“Don’t look at it you fool!” Kassar yelled.  “You’re too weak. A gluttony singularity eats everything, including the energy you use to scan it.  If I wasn’t here to crash Eyes of the Void, it would have followed the psychic connection created by the ability into your mind and hollowed you out.”

The air tore behind Bruce, its echo causing his eyes to water as the smell of cut grass slammed into him with the force of a rampaging bull.  He staggered and then redoubled his effort, sprinting with every fiber of strength in his body.

Eyes of the Void flickered back into place and Bruce swore under his breath as it revealed a second singularity barreling in from the left.  He didn’t make the mistake of looking behind himself again.  Bruce didn’t need to.  He could feel the crackling ball of hunger and hate right on his heels as it barreled through the corridors of the maze.

His breath came in sharp gasps.  Bruce wasn’t actually sure if he could get tired in the Great Labyrinth.  After all, it wasn’t his body here, just a figment of his willpower.  Still, he could feel his focus beginning to waver as he put every ounce of his attention into putting one foot ahead of the other as rapidly as possible.

“Another right,” Kassar growled, his voice interrupting Bruce’s pensive thoughts.  “Then get ready to jump on my command.”

“What?” Bruce asked, feet slipping on the gray floor as he tore around the corner. “Why do I have to-”

“Jump!” Kassar interrupted.  “Now!”

Bruce jumped, the extra points in Body carrying him further than he expected.  Almost a second and a half later, his feet touched down again, his enhanced Agility allowing him to maintain the same rhythm without any interruption.

Barely two seconds after he had sprinted off, there was an explosion behind him, followed by the air being sucked backward toward the blast’s epicenter.  Bruce lowered his shoulder into the gale, pushing forward as the wind tried to rip him off his feet and toward the chasing monster.

He opened his mouth to say something, but Kassar spoke up before he had the chance.

“Five hundred feet ahead of you, there will be an illusory wall on your left, duck through it and you’ll find a stairwell to the next floor.  Hopefully once we’re there, you won’t have to deal with an immediate attack.  I can feel your power levels waning.  We need to find a place to rest.”

Bruce didn’t respond, instead focusing on Eyes of the Void.  He could feel the first gluttony singularity falling back behind him.  Whatever trap it had hit had left it slightly diminished, but it still felt like more than enough to easily handle him.  Of course, the idea of the trap made his blood run gold.  It felt like a fuel air bomb.  Strong enough to clear out an entire building.  Even with the enhancements his body had gone through since entering the maze, that would have been more than enough to evaporate him before he could even feel pain.

Ahead, he could barely detect the fake wall that Kassar had pointed out.  The Great Labyrinth was still alive with a prism of colors, the walls and floor a glimmering silver and the air itself filled with currents of a half dozen hues.  The illusion in question flickered between white and silver, a faint mirage of green coloring the air around it.

Without knowing what to look for, Bruce doubted that he would have been able to find the illusion, but with Kassar guiding his focus it was as plain as day.  Silently, he thanked the dead alien for forcing him to activate Eyes of the Void.  He didn’t know exactly how much more powerful the ability was than Scan, but it was obvious that the range and detail that it provided were on an entirely different level.

His skin tingled and a chill went through his body as Bruce stepped into the wall.  Almost immediately, the rest of the maze disappeared behind him, replaced by a new path ahead and the same flickering and slightly green wall behind him.  The presences of the two gluttony singularities disappeared, but Bruce didn’t let that slow him or dim his focus.

Up ahead was the welcome sight of a staircase, crafted from a material that looked like some sort of celestial ivory and glimmering with a mother of pearl aura.  Maybe the singularity could detect him in the hidden passage, maybe it couldn’t.  Either way, he wouldn’t rest until he was safely on another floor of the labyrinth.

As soon as his bare foot touched the bottom step, Bruce could feel the energy sapping out of him.  He would say it was his body coming down from the adrenaline rush of being chased, but he was pretty sure that his psychic avatar didn’t have adrenal glands.

Each step felt like someone was piling another layer of sandbags onto his back.  Bruce was able to manage the first six without too much trouble, but by the time he made it to step seven, he was completely enervated.  His vision swam as he tried to focus on the next step in front of him.  It felt like there was a grown man on shoulders, clutching onto him and dragging him back down to where the singularity would devour him.

He made it up the seventh step, but he could feel his heart beating in his ears.  Bruce knew that it was an illusion.  After all, he didn’t actually have a heart anymore.  Still, that didn’t stop his vision from narrowing and his breath from coming in short pained gasps.

The eight step is where it began to hurt.  He was beyond out of energy, and the second Bruce’s foot touched down on the ivory, pain shot through it.  Nerves aflame, he paused for a second, trying to stop his head from swimming and push aside the uncontrollable throbbing in his legs.

“Not to trouble you while you’re pushing through the dimensional barrier, but-” Kassar said distantly.

Below him, Bruce felt the illusory wall wink out of existence as a singularity’s tentacle ate the psychic energy that powered it.  The vortex of dark hunger and hatred pulled itself into the corridor, pausing for a second as it sniffed the air without anything a sane human would recognize as a nose.

This time, he managed to cut off Eyes of the Void before the monster could attack through it.  Bruce forced himself up another step, and the burning pain in his legs was joined by the feeling of ice and frostbite on his hands and face.

A quiet voice whispered that it was all too much.  He was only human after all.  His body was weak and frail, it could only be pushed so hard before things began to decay and break.  It wouldn’t be so bad to just lay down and let the steps rob him of everything he had, everything that made him who he was.

Bruce grit his teeth, eyes closed and streaming with tears that instantly froze, leaving trails of burning ice down his face.  His foot hit the tenth step.  Moving his body up was like dragging an anchor along the bottom of a lake.  Every inch was an exercise of herculean will and agony.

Then, something popped and he stumbled forward.

The pain was gone and he was on his hands and knees, the comforting gray not-stone floor of the maze staring back at him.

“There you go,” Kassar said cheerfully.  “The ninth floor.  That wasn’t so hard was it?  Now we only have eight more to go.  We’ll have you home in no time.”

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