The tunnels wound around another as I traveled upwards. The weak soil where I’d carved my hidey hole was no exception here. The earth was full of rifts and voids, scattered inconsistently across a network of roots and branches.

I couldn’t be entirely sure where I was in relation to where I’d been, but I had high hopes. If I was very lucky I might even have reached the bottom of the layer I’d fallen into with Garrett in the first place.

Either way, up was the only way out, so up I would go. The loose and hollow earth formed ample tunnels, leaving me the flexibility to take a few turns and leave the scent of ant territory behind me.

The dank air of the underground was familiar to me and brought old tricks back to the surface. I oriented myself by the weight of gravity, guided myself by touch, and kept watch not with my eyes but with my ears. What I could do about it with only one direction to flee in was another matter, but combat would be always be muddled in the dark. I was more than happy to take advantage of that.

The handful of times when I felt the tremblings of something approaching in the dark I riled myself up and jabbed wildly forward with my spear while hissing loudly. A risky strategy perhaps, but of the countless burrowing things beneath the earth not many were eager to press forward into a mess of pain whose source they could not perceive. Without sight to confirm me as a scrawny non-threat it was pathetically easy to present myself as far more intimidating than I really was.

Unfortunately that went both ways. The reach of my spear gave me an edge, because I could feel out their location without putting my own appendages at risk, but that was hardly an absolute protection. There were a handful of creatures whose feelers gave them the reach to match me with no need of tools. Even with the ability to bully my way through most I still spent plenty of time in costly backtracking and detour hunting.

Once I even had my spear yanked nearly clean out of my hands. After a quick tug of war I stopped resisting and used their own efforts to add momentum to a stab. That freed my spear with a pained squeak, and after a few follow-up jabs were met with panicked cries of alarm rather than retreat I beat a hasty retreat of my own. I may have wounded it, but it wouldn’t back down I wasn’t about to push the offensive. If it wanted the tunnel so bad it could have it.

It was a shit tunnel anyway.

I spent a good fifteen minutes crawling backwards down that shit tunnel before I could break off in another direction. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but stars was it annoying.

Still, it wasn’t long before I was back on my way. I took a sniff of my new path and got going when I failed to pick up anything too threatening. I still lead with the spear, sniffing just wasn’t a guarantee. No single sense was, but it was worse here. To put it quite simply, the earth here stank. Exactly where the fuck I was in relation to normal ground level was something I’d lost track of long ago, but the scents here were begining to offer some real clues.

Dirt was always some blend of mineral and organic matter, but the balance here trended heavily towards the latter as the canopy of the artificial jungle held up the debris tumbling down from the more natural jungle above. By my best guess that put me at maybe two layers down? Working through the detritus probably wouldn’t get me all the way out, there was an empty space right beneath the false surface, but if I was lucky that would be it.

Up through the dark, then more climbing, and then I could get out.

Well, I’d be where I was before Garrett chased me down here at least. I’d figure out where the fuck that was in its own due time. If I was right about how far I had left to go, then I could at least confirm that I had ample supplies for the full journey to the surface.

Unfortunately, as the crow flies estimates were even less useful underground than they were on the surface. Every time I managed to find a tunnel in the proper direction I was shortly stymied by some obstacle. Dead ends, the stink of mine gas, or the hissing chirps of some animal that just wouldn’t back down, it all frustrated my efforts the same.

That brought me to where I was, furiously stabbing and jabbing with both hands spread on my spear for every ounce of extra leverage I could scrounge up. It took my sweat and adrenaline, but I could fight this beast without putting myself at risk. In the open light of day even a rabid dog would know to close with its enemy, but down here there was no such clarity of information. I blindly lashed out at the beast and it blindly lashed out back with no ability to land a return blow.

The only thing they could hope to hit was my spear, which was admittedly something of an issue, but that was the limit of the risk unless they—

Air washed over my face as something leapt forward with the crunch of compacting dirt. I hopped backwards, yanking my spear back and jamming the back end into the dirt. The combined movement of my body and arm got the tip back far enough to drop down in front of the charging enemy and I felt the shaft quiver with shock between my legs as it brought that charge to a screaming halt.

Literally. With its squealing the beast finally dealt a blow to me, driving metaphorical claws through my ears where it had failed with its literal ones. I could feel the ache seeping from my ears through the rest of my skull.

I leveraged my spear out of the wound and kept backing up. Stars, wouldn’t this bastard shut up?!

At least it was backing up its annoying ass too. I’d finally cleared a passage up. All I needed was to give this fool some space and I could follow him in. Hopefully its idiot squealing didn’t draw any predators, a tangle of scavengers fighting over a carcass was the last thing I needed.

The squeal changed, gaining a new note. Was it finally going to shut up?

No, I realized with a chill. That wasn’t a change. It was an addition.

The choir grew, a dozen new voices adding chirps and squeaks to the chorus.

I turned and ran, scrambling down through the darkness, pursued by a dark thought. What if this section of tunnels wasn’t simply infested with persistent bastards?

The squealing grew louder as they passed their injured brother, rising in pitch and anger alike as they accelerated.

What if it was infested with a nest of them?

I pushed myself harder, pressing at the very limit of where panicked flight turned into a deadly tumble down the tunnel shaft. I seized every advantage I had to push that limit further. I abandoned climbing in favor of a controlled fall, dropping by as much as a dozen feet at a time and trusting to my low weight and Toughness to absorb the shock.

The screeching rage faded behind me, but I knew better than to trust in distance to protect me. I was running through the connecting tunnels now, places I’d criss-crossed in my search for a viable path up. My scent hung heavy in the air, and if I could detect it chances were so could they.

Stars, I needed a bath. My rags were valuable protection, but in the heat of the jungle beneath it hadn’t taken more than ten minutes to thoroughly douse them in my sweat. I wasn’t dealing with scent-blind humans anymore, these were creatures born in the black. If scent wasn’t their best sense, it was damn close.

Case in point: their chirps hadn’t stopped approaching. I was already beginning to feel the burn in my lungs, but they were still steadily approaching. The answer to this conundrum was as simple as it was unpleasant. If you couldn’t couldn’t run, if you couldn’t hide…

Then you had to fight.

I dialed back my pace, moving from wild sprint to gentle jog. The enemy would reach me one way or the other, no sense in being out of breath when they got here. I only needed to keep ahead long enough to find the best ambush spot.

Luckily my struggle to find a viable path up had forced me to pace out this section of tunnels pretty thoroughly by this point. Fully memorizing any sizeable course of the depths might be the work of a lifetime, but the general layout wasn’t something I’d forget over the course of a few hours.

I ran one hand along the wall as I moved, it would be important to ensure I didn’t miss a turn. The pause and release as the bumps and ridges of protruding roots caught my fingers formed a numbing vibration, but even the single point of reference was valuable navigational data.

That point dipped and disappeared as I crossed intersecting tunnels. I counted the paces as I skipped some voids while turning into others. It was a fairly rough gauge, but it would be enough to warn me if—

Ah, yes.

I doubled back, turning both hands to the wall. The chirping of my hunters had died down a bit over the last few minutes, almost as if they’d given up after all. The ever-shrinking optimistic bit of my brain piped up in support of that theory, only for it to be quickly smothered by a soft chirping.

I froze for a second, just long enough to realize the sound was neither alone nor still. Then I resumed my search with renewed intensity. The calls might be quieter, but they had an eerie familiarity. No longer the simple alarm of beasts nor the warning cries of the watchman, but the subtle communications of the wolf pack on the hunt.

Dammit, had I miscalculated? If I didn’t find the entrance soon I’d be fighting in the open. Insofar as the tunnels had such things, but the lack of even the simple chokepoint I remembered being right here was enough to lend a frantic edge to my movements.

I nearly fell into the tunnel when I found it. Damn thing was a bit lower than I remembered, I’d been slouching more when I first found it, maybe.

Didn’t matter, move move move.

I scrambled in, no longer needing to bother with a hand on the wall. It grew so narrow here that the tip of an ear could brush up on each side of the tunnel at once. That was the very reason this tunnel had come to mind. A narrow turn off leading to a dead end was exactly the place for a stand.

Well, a prepared escape route would be nice, but I’d been pressured for time.

The brush of dirt and roots fell away from my ears and I knew it was safe to stand up again. There was a little room here, with the narrow tunnel widening out into a hollowed out bulb of a dead end.

It was a safe wager that something had carved it out as a den at some point, but the scents were too old to be threatening. Certainly not in comparison to imminent attack.

And it was imminent. Pacing myself had been the right decision at the time, but when combined with the difficulty in pinning down the exact location of the tunnel it had eaten dangerously far into my lead. I had a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and I intended to use every second.

I reached into my dagger pouch first, drawing blade after blade and jamming them into the loose earth hilt first. It was a pathetically simple trap, but I placed each one with as much care as I could squeeze into the scant seconds I had. I went as far as to fall to my knees, embedding them at arm’s length into the tunnel. The narrow confines would funnel them into the blades, if I were so lucky.

That task left precious little time for anything else, just enough to dip my fingers into my alchemical pouch and confirm my last resort was ready before I fell back into a combat stance, one foot back, one forward, with my spear held at a high diagonal and ready to plunge downwards at the first hint of need.

The sharp chirps were starting to fade out as they drew closer, replaced with a soft snuffling and occasional soft squeak as they homed in on my trail. Their instincts for stealth were yet another worrying sign of intelligence, but far from sufficient to hide from me.

My ears flicked back and forth to better follow the sounds of their movements, but the soft earth absorbed sound in a way that the rough stone and warped wood of the warrens back home just didn’t. I could track them gathering, but their exact numbers eluded me.

I’d hazard a guess of at least four, going by their distribution. Four enemies, moving single file, I thought I could take care of. Much more and I was going to have problems.

The first snuffling snout began creeping up my tunnel. At first the faint sniffing was all that was audible, but that changed five feet in. The distinctive sound of scraping flesh was music to my ears, bringing a vicious grin to my face. No tunnel dweller would be even remotely harmed by a bit of scraping stone, but not only did it confirm they couldn’t attack two at a time, but…

A sharp squeal cut through the air as the first of my unfortunate pursuers reached the start of my trap. I’d only managed to wedge my daggers loosely in the dirt, but from the screaming and thrashing I heard it seemed that it was doing its best to make up for my failure with its own blind rage.

Shockingly, this failed to create good outcomes for it, it’s wild struggles only serving to impale it further. Still, there was only so much that a single blade could do. It may have driven the dagger to the hilt and widened that wound, but the vital organs were buried deeper than the dagger could reach without the precision of a thinking mind behind it.

I lunged forward, thrusting my spear forward with the full weight of my body behind it. It wasn’t much, but it had all the guidance that my trap daggers lacked. I homed in on the noises it had made in unthinking agony, aiming just a handful of inches above its source.

I barely had time to feel the smooth parting of flesh before the jolt of hitting bone. The shock traveled up my spear and through my arms to rattle my joints. The last aftershock vibrated through my jaw and clenched teeth as I returned my balance to my back leg, spread my hands along the haft for leverage, and spun the spear to the side.

It took a good wrench to free my spear from the bone, but I never let up on the forward pressure. The spear tip sliced open skin and ground against bone as I forced it to the right with just enough pressure that it would sink through any gaps it found.

My spear lost purchase as the skull curved away and the enemy took the opportunity to lunge at me. My spear skated off to the side and if I’d been really putting my weight behind it I would have followed it.

But I had my balance on the back leg, so it was all too easy to hop backward and let the fool creature slam to a halt on the next line of trap daggers.

Damn, this thing didn’t have many cranial weak spots. If it had eyes they had to be tiny. And that was a big if down here. Blind as a bat or sharp as an eagle, it was all the same to the lightless depths.

The creature screeched angrily and lurched backwards only to squeal again as something caught. Maybe it's lunge forward had gotten the first dagger flipped around. Whatever the case, the poor bastard didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

All the better for me. I stabbed it again, lightly jabbing out as I worked over its available surface in search of some vulnerable spot. I inflicted plenty of flesh wounds, but nothing deeper. At least it wasn’t a bug. It was rare to see one this big, but this dungeon was certainly capable of it. Even with soft flesh though, I doubted I’d land anything critical before— ah, there it was.

It had grabbed my spear with some sort of claw or pincer. I could only speculate on what the fuck it was, but it didn’t have the texture of skin and was about the face region. If I didn’t know better I’d have guessed mandibles.

The first time one of these had tried this trick I’d been caught off guard, but now I knew to let my grip loosen. It could jerk at my weapon all day long, but it would just slide between my fingers without throwing me off balance.

I prepared to do as I’d done before and use it’s own momentum to get the extra boost I needed for a deeper wound, only to feel a slight tremble under my soles as I was readjusting my feet.

I froze faster than conscious thought could allow, mind thrown back to memories all the more painful because they had no one to blame. I’d only lived through one quake in my life, but that had been more than enough to instill a reflexive fear of unstable earth. The tunnels had barely shifted, but even that was enough to send a cacophonic ripple of bursting joints and shattering wood through the disorganized honeycomb of salvaged wood and stolen nails that was the warrens.

The deaths didn’t end for days afterward. It claimed more lives than even Drakul’s failed war.

The thoughts flashed through my mind, but even so I’d dismissed the notion of a quake before they ended. I’d spent more time beneath the ground than on it and I knew burrowing when I felt it.

I set aside the attack on my trapped foe and stepped off to the right, leaning up to the wall and only keeping one hand on my spear for reference. I brought my ear up to the dirt and let the quivering earth translate to sound as my skull vibrated in time with the digging. Damn, its friends had been busy while I was distracted. There was already one a good third of the way to me, and a second on the other side if I didn’t miss my guess.

My traps might have worked better than expected, but the bastards weren’t patient enough to sit around waiting their turn.

Well, I’d just have to show them the consequences of their poor manners, wouldn’t I?