“Wait,” Stephen said, blocking Sonja from entering the darkness beyond the arch with his boney arm. “I hear something.”

Sonja brought her ax up. I stepped toward them as quietly as I could and then thought how stupid it was for me to tiptoe after all the shouting we’d just done while crossing the bottomless pit behind us.

I peered into the darkness. Stephen’s torch only lit about fifteen feet into the room, but what I did see was just another hallway with a cobblestone floor and walls of gray stone bricks. I couldn’t hear what Stephen heard, but I did smell something like rotting fish.

“What do you hear?” I whispered.

Stephen listened a few more seconds, then whispered, “It’s like a… slurping sound.”

“Nothing good slurps,” Constantine murmured.

“Is this different from before?” I asked.

“Yes,” Stephen said. He turned to us. “Shall we?”

Sonja hefted Mourner and said, “Mace, stay to my left. The rest of you, standard attack order.”

I maneuvered myself to Sonja’s left side and drew my Ancestral Longsword. It felt reassuring in my hand, and its blade gave off an ethereal blue glow that didn’t exactly push back the darkness, but at least it gave me confidence. My heart started thumping. Was it Mace’s excitement or my fear? I didn’t know, but I thought it best to follow Mace’s instincts. I walked side-by-side with Sonja, both of us holding our torches high. Constantine and Stephen followed five feet behind.

We crept forward, watching the floor, walls, and ceiling for clues as to what was ahead. The rotten fish smell only worsened, and I began hearing the slurping that Stephen noticed. It was like someone sucking down soup. Or rather several somebodies.

I gripped my sword tighter.

About thirty feet into the corridor, Sonja and I stopped at the same time because I think we simultaneously found the source of the putrid smell. What I thought were stalactites hanging from the ceiling—and stalagmites jutting up from the floor—turned out to be dull yellow teeth. A toothy maw with a black and purple mouth filled the corridor as if the hallway had morphed into a Lovecraftian nightmare’s version of a hallway. More yellow teeth lined the thing’s gullet as far down as I could see. The rotting stench was so foul that I could taste it in the back of my throat.

“Krait’s beard,” Stephen said behind me, “it’s a tunnel worm. And it’s been dead for days.”

“You sure?” I said, staring warily at that creature’s blackened, sagging mouth. It looked and smelled dead, but I wasn’t going to take any chances in this place.

“Oh yeah,” he said, inspecting the monster with his torch. “If it were alive, it would be chomping on us.”

“If that thing’s dead,” I said, peering into the worm’s throat, “what’s making the slurping sounds?”

Sonja and I were on the same page. She came up next to me with a creased brow and held her torch up into the worm’s maw. Then she stepped inside the worm, her leather boots squishing in the worm’s decaying flesh.

“Sure you want to do that?” I asked, more out of disgust than fear.

She took another few steps. “I think I see…”

Purple worms about six feet long slithered toward us through the yellow teeth like eels in water. Each worm's head was a funnel mouth lined with teeth, like one of those horrifying lampreys. And they were fast!

Sonja let out a cry of disgust and chopped at the first worm to reach her. She cleaved the worm’s mouth-head from its body, but her ax got stuck in one of the dead tunnel worm’s teeth. Two more worms slithered toward her through the teeth on the right. She wouldn’t get Mourner out of the large tooth in time to defend herself.

I didn’t even have to think. Mace’s instincts took over, and I leaped into the putrefying worm. I sliced one worm in two with a downward swing of my Ancestral Longsword, then smoothly sliced the second worm’s head off just as it dove toward Sonja.

When I did that, my forearm itched, and I saw a pop-up with glowing green text:

Congratulations! You have dealt the killing blow on a baby tunnel worm! You have earned 15 XP toward your next Rank.

While glancing at my stat sheet, I failed to see the worm behind me. I didn’t know it was there until Constantine yelled a warning at the same moment that teeth plunged into the back of my exposed neck. The worm’s purple, slimy body wrapped itself around my torso like a python and squeezed. The air in my lungs burst out in a single gasp, and I couldn’t draw any more to scream. The worm slowly crushed my newly healed ribs.

But the pain only lasted a moment. A strange euphoria swept over me like I was experiencing the happiest memory of my life—the day I held newborn Jack for the first time—over and over again. I could feel the thing on my neck sucking the life out of me and squeezing my guts to pulp, but I didn’t care. I held my baby son, imagined myself teaching him how to throw a baseball, passing on to him my RPG addiction. Two ribs snapped in my chest, but hey, at least I was watching Star Wars (Episode IV!) for the first time with my nine-year-old son.

As I stood happily reliving my memories, I was vaguely aware of Constantine and Stephen pulling and stabbing at the worm killing me. The worm’s warm blood flowed down my neck and between my back and leather armor. The creature tightened its grip on my torso, but it tore its mouth away from my neck—a pain I wouldn’t feel until after the battle—and snapped at my friends. When it did that, the happy memories started fading, and agony began to retake center stage.

Mace’s survival instincts pushed back my happy memories. I clenched my teeth hard and looked down at the glistening worm still wrapped around me. Though it had coiled around my chest and abdomen, it had not pinned my arms to my sides. I grabbed the thing’s slimy tail, but it was like trying to hang onto a fish made of Jell-O. I eventually dug my fingers into its gooey flesh, got a decent grip, and pulled the tail away from my torso. As I did, the stats on my forearm glowed red:

Intelligence: 0 (-1 from Tunnel Worm Poison)

With an Intelligence of “0,” I didn’t know how I could still think of anything. But looking back, I wasn’t thinking of anything at all (hell, if I was thinking, I would’ve spent some Magic Points to cast “Healing Touch” on myself). Instead, I acted on Mace’s instinct, which told me I was dying and this worm monster was why. Any animal would try to get away from the thing killing it without over-analyzing the situation.

I had pulled the monster off my lower torso when I heard Stephen snarl some incomprehensible words. That nauseous feeling came upon me, followed by a searing pain on my neck that felt almost worse than the worm’s dagger teeth. I screamed and jerked away from Stephen, but as I did so, the worm’s body relaxed and fell off me.

I stumbled out of the tunnel worm’s mouth and landed on my hands and knees on the cobblestone floor. I gasped for breath, but every one was a spear into my lungs. Phlegm bubbled into my mouth. I didn’t know it was blood until I started spitting gobs of it onto the floor.

Constantine placed a hand on my neck, and I tried to jerk away from his touch. But he held firm, said some words, and a healing warmth took away the burning in my neck and stabbing pain in my chest. Blood stopped flooding my throat from my lungs, and I could breathe much better.

I spat out the last of the blood from the back of my throat and stood. I glanced at my stats and saw that my Intelligence was back to normal, and the “Tunnel Worm Poison” penalty was gone. I could swing my sword effortlessly again, and strategies to defeat the worms popped into my mind. But my Hit Points still glowed red:

Hit Points: 10/12

Damn, I thought, how low was I? Even with Constantine’s healing, I still wasn’t back to full health.

Sonja screamed curses behind me. I whirled around to see a baby worm wrapped around her torso. She held the glistening monster’s head with both hands, its toothy mouth snapping at her face. And it was getting closer.