The screeching cascade of a thousand horrid voices echoed in unison, rising from the giant mushroom forest and reverberating all throughout the cavern. Listening to its ever increasing clamor as the raucous din drew ever closer, Matthew’s face paled. “Somethings not right. Somethings damn not right,” he warned Rebecca, as he grabbed her arm and began to draw her along the left edge of the cavern.

Sensing the tenseness in his voice, her heart leapt into the back of her throat and she rushed to keep up. “Wha.. what is it?” Glancing back over her shoulder, she didn’t see anything following them, but Matthew was running as if the devil was after them.

“There’s too damn many of them!” Stopping for a moment, Matthew spun around, yanked Rebecca forward hard enough that she thought her shoulder was going to dislocate, and then grabbed her up in both his arms and began to run while carrying her. “I’ve seen these things before, but never have I seen a lair as large as this, with such a putrid entrance leading into, or with even a fraction of the numbers that must be in here. For them to make such a racket in a place this size, there must be hundreds of them – if not more!”

Leaning tight against his chest, Rebecca wrapped both arms around his neck to help ease the burden of carrying her as Matthew blazed his way along the wall at the fastest speed he could possibly maintain. “What? Why?” Rebecca yelled into his ear, so he could hear her over the ever increasing cacophony of yells, screeches, and roars.

“Damned if I know,” Matthew answered, carefully controlling his breathing. “There’s a swarm of those bastards down here that I never would’ve expected. They shouldn’t have been here long enough to breed or reproduce, and the number we’ve killed in the school already seems to me like that should’ve been all that spawned in this area. Something damn odd is going on. Something I didn’t damnably account for once again!”

“Can’t you just splat them all like you did the ones in the ceiling of the auditorium?” Rebecca asked hopefully, starting to chew her lower lip ragged. The worry Matthew felt was thick and palpable, and it was unraveling Rebecca’s already frayed nerves even worse.

“You noticed that, huh?” Matthew tried to smile encouragingly, but all his face could produce was a half-frown at the moment.

“I don’t know what really happened exactly,” Rebecca admitted. “I just know that right as the fight started I got a whole swarm of experience and a ton of leaves and sap sprayed down from the ceiling all over the place. Since I didn’t do anything, I figured you must have and I got the experience from where you’re mentoring me.”

“I did,” Matthew said, stopping at the far corner where the east side of the cavern joined the southern side. “I killed the gibberlings in the roof so you wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the sheer number of them as they dropped down on top of you.”

Glancing back and forth from one side to the other, Rebecca swallowed down the fear in the back of her throat and asked, “Then can’t you just do something like that here again?”

“I don’t think so,” Matthew said, confirming what she already feared the most. “It drains my energy to use Hel’s blade. The bigger I try and shape it, the longer I swing it, the more mana I lose. If it was just me, I’d be fine in here, but I’m worried about them swarming in such numbers that I can’t keep you safe,” Matthew admitted. “You’re my woman. My companion now. I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he promised grimly.

“Then what are we going to do?” Listening to the endless din, it sounded as if the first of the gibberlings had just discovered that the entrance had been destroyed, as a loud frustrated storm of screeches echoed directly from the direction they had just traveled in.

As if he’d been waiting for that as a signal, Matthew took off again, barreling west, hugging close to the west wall now. “If I’m right, and let’s all pray that I am.” Matthew replied, once again focusing on keeping his breathing steady and rhythmic. “I’m hoping the damn things will be so pissed at the exit being sealed that they’ll all want to go and check it out for themselves. At least, I hope the majority of them do.”

As they ran, the endless echoing screech continued to get louder and louder from all around the entrance and Matthew nodded to himself in satisfaction. “It’s working I think,” he said, forcing a smile. “The dumb bastards figure we’re stuck in here. They’re busy throwing a shit fit back at the entrance and riling each other up. I figure we have one easy chance at this, and if we fail, things are going to get mighty damn complicated.”

“I’ll take the easy way please,” Rebecca said, trying to joke as she was clinging her arm’s tightly around Matthew’s neck. “So what’s the easy way?” She asked reluctantly. “And what’s the other way?”

“The easy way.” Matthew grunted, suddenly turning and starting to head in a northwesterly direction into the forest. As he neared the maze of interweaving vines, the ones directly in his path suddenly split open and fell to the side, precisely sliced by some invisible dark force which Rebecca couldn’t see.

“The easy way,” Matthew tried again, only to have to stop as he had to focus on clearing the way once more. “The…”

“Just give up and do whatever the hell you’re doing,” Rebecca yelped into his ear. “This seems a case of ‘show don’t tell’. I’ll find out when we do it, and hopefully I’ll never need to know what the complicated way was supposed to be!”

Simply nodding, Matthew gave up talking and focused solely on running, carrying Rebecca, and cutting the fastest path possible through the forest.

After what seemed like an eternity to Rebecca – but which couldn’t have been more than half an hour at the most – they suddenly erupted from the forest and into a huge clearing in the middle of the jungle. A massive pyramid of what Rebecca considered epic proportions loomed majestically in the air, with dozens of gibberlings jumping and hooting across it’s terraced sides.

“Kill!” Matthew commanded, as he suddenly lifted her high in the air and unceremoniously threw her behind him in one swift motion.

Hitting the ground, Rebecca bounced and rolled across the damp moss several times, before finally coming to a dazed stop. Looking down, her side was bleeding – she’d somehow managed to slice herself lightly in all the tumbling with the blade she was holding – but otherwise she more or less seemed fine. Forcing herself to get up, her eyes opened wide and she had to fight her first impulse to turn and run.

Dozens of gibberlings were crawling out from the top of the pyramid and leaping recklessly down the sides at breakneck speed as Matthew struggled to hack and slash his way up through them. Already a dozen creatures were scattered on either side of him and tumbling lifeless down towards the ground, but what seemed like an endless hoard was bubbling up out of the center, like lava slowly erupting from a volcano.

Tears of pure panic welling up in her eyes, Rebecca rushed forward as quickly as possible to close the distance between herself and Matthew. If the creatures managed to cut them off and separate them, she knew she wouldn’t last but mere moments under the sheer mass of their numbers. “I thought you said most of them would be busy at the entrance,” she yelled at his back, not the least bit concerned about steal or silence now.

“They are!” Matthew shouted back, as he clamped one iron fist around a gibberlings face and then flung it up and behind him. Dancing quickly to the side, Rebecca made certain to avoid the unfortunate creatures path as it crashed into the edge of one massive step, crumbled like an accordion, and then imitated a slinky as it toppled down the side.

Catching up, Rebecca rushed to the right side of Matthew – where the number of gibberlings seemed a little lesser – and yelled, “I’ll help clear this side!” Slashing and weaving, Rebecca struggled to keep up with Matthew as he carved his way up the side of the pyramid.

After several long moments of fighting, and after several deep, painful wounds that slowly bled her life out, Rebecca screamed at Matthew, “We’re not going to make it!” The problem, as it was becoming perfectly clear to her as they struggled fruitlessly up the side, was simply the fact that as they went further up the pyramid, the denser the gibberlings became.

When lava overflows, it trails several rivers down the side of the side of the volcano. It one were at the bottom, only a portion of the volcano would be covered in the lava, but as one moved up the side, the surface area would lesson and the rivers would get closer and closer, until finally there was a point where the earth was completely covered and only lava was visible. Rebecca felt like she was trying to climb up the side of that volcano, while hopelessly attempting to avoid the lava.

“We’re not,” Matthew agreed. “You are.” Suddenly stopping, he poured his energy into Hel’s scythe and released it in a wave of explosive death around him. Leaping to the right, he grabbed Rebecca hard by her left arm, yanked her up over his shoulder, and then spun in a quick circle before hurling her in a massive arc up over the heads of the gibberlings and out over the top of the pyramid.

Screaming incoherently, Rebecca flailed wildly as she was suddenly flipping end over end in a large arc out across the center of the pyramid. Instead of there being a roof, or a top to the pyramid, the sides opened up into a huge pit that descended into what seemed an endless depth to her as she struggled to try and stop her dizzying tumble to her doom at the bottom of it.

Time slowed to a crawl for Rebecca as absolute panic and pure adrenalin set in. Her own hair flapped wildly, trying to block her vision, so Rebecca tossed her sword uncaringly aside as she pulled it aside. Her mind raced to understand the situation. As much of a jerk as Matthew was, she couldn’t believe he would just toss her recklessly to her doom. There had to be some way out of this.

In what could have only been a brief instant, but which felt like an eternity to her, Rebecca tried to take everything in as she plummeted ever closer to the bottom. The sides of the pyramid were separated in an ant--like network of interconnecting tunnels, from which hordes of gibberlings stopped their rush out of long enough to watch her comet like self-destruction.

As she hurled ever closer to the bottom of the pyramid, Rebecca noticed piles of human bodies scattered carelessly across the ground, carpeting it in a layer of decaying students and teachers. Jutting up from the center of the floor was a tall blood red crystal that seemed to pulse and beat almost like a heart. From the moment she saw it, Rebecca realized she only had moments to act. Quickly rushing through a Dance of Striking, followed by a Dance of Avoidance, and then another Dance of Striking, she summersetted and twisted herself out into an arc which would put her….

SPLURGH!!

Blood erupted from Rebecca’s mouth as she miscalculated the distance and impaled herself down upon the crystal. A wave of absolute agony burst through her mind, overloading her senses as the crystal erupted through her back.

“I’m dead,” was her last thought as darkness washed over her and the world faded away.