Chapter 150: Parasites To Be Terminated
Following the tremor, they began their timer of ten minutes.
Ten minutes. That was all they had. Ten minutes until the beast's heart beat again and every corridor slammed shut, crushing them between walls of living stone.
The cohort stood in formation.
Huda was in the front, her wind carrying all three of them. Malik and Safira were at the back, his fire and her punches ready to blast them forth at incredible speeds.
They stood braced, waiting for the cycle of falling dust to reset.
The dust fell in its pattern.
Three seconds.
Seven seconds.
Ten seconds.
"Twelve! Brace!"
Huda blasted them off into the air, away from the platform they had been standing on.
The launch was violent, and Malik felt his stomach lurch as the ground dropped away beneath them.
The platform's gravity tried to drag them back. He could feel it pulling at his boots, a persistent, hungry force that wanted to suck them down and hold them in place.
But the force of their launch was too high for it to handle.
They tore free, soaring upward, and the platform shrank beneath them until it was swallowed by stone.
The cohort was high in the air now, tearing between massive corridors. Walls kept rising on either side of them, seemingly endless, their surfaces glistening with sweat.
They were so large that the three of them were nothing more than specks between them, tiny insects flying through the veins of a sleeping giant.
Big as they were, the three could resist their pull.
Huda's wind pushed against the gravity, keeping them aloft, keeping them moving.
But they knew it wouldn't last for long.
It didn't last long at all.
After the initial section, every wall became the size of a nation.
Some were vertical, stretching up into the haze. Others were horizontal, blocking their path like ceilings and floors. A few spiraled, twisting around themselves in ways that made Malik's head hurt, forcing the cohort into their gravity wells.
Expecting that, the cohort adapted.
They stopped fighting the gravity and started flowing with it, dropping when they needed to drop, rising when they needed to rise, using the pull of each wall to slingshot them toward the next.
It was staggering how vast this place was.
This monster, buried at the planet's heart, was larger than entire continents stacked atop each other.
A world inside another world.
The corridors stretched for miles, then tens of miles, then hundreds. The walls curved and twisted and folded, creating a maze that could swallow much, if not all, of Devil's Maw without them noticing.
Corridors shattered behind them from the sheer pressure of their force. The stone cracked and crumbled, chunks of rock tumbling through the air, and dust funneled around them like a tunnel, parting before their passage.
Every thirty-two seconds, they made a sharp turn into whatever corridor had opened up.
Huda navigated by instinct, following the pattern of the dust.
She never once hesitated or second-guessed.
She just turned, and they followed.
They kept doing that for nearly nine minutes, moving faster than ever before.
The wind howled around them, the fire blazed behind them, and the force of Safira's punches echoed through the corridors before them.
Six seconds later, the dust paused.
The beast held its breath.
Malik felt it, a sudden absence of movement.
Dust hung in the air, and the walls stopped their slow expansion and contraction.
Everything was frozen... waiting.
They were close.
He knew something was going to change.
This was the Abyss; things were never meant to be easy down here.
And sure enough—
HHRRRUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
The sound came from everywhere, a seismic inhale that vibrated through his bones.
Every wall around them began to move, repeating that same breath.
The walls had moved before their time.
It had all gone to Hell.
The beast had stopped following its... "rules."
The pattern was broken; there were no intervals anymore.
But once more, this seemed to be something the two had expected.
Because right at that moment, just before the beast could complete its tremble, they used up all their strength to blast forward.
Safira moved first.
It began with a twist in her core that rippled down her frame as her muscles coiled.
The veins on her legs tore apart, blood spraying into the air, then healed themselves in the same instant. Her center of gravity dropped, her body twisted, and then—
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
She punched Malik's fire once more.
But this time....
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
It was much too different.
The air shattered around them, releasing a repeating shockwave that ripped apart the corridor for miles on end.
Stone crumbled, dust exploded outward, and the force of the blast pushed them forward faster than they had ever moved.
At the same time, four titanic slabs of stone around them began to move.
They were massive; each one was the size of a city block, and they closed in from all sides, aiming to crush the cohort flat between them.
The walls ground together, stone against stone, and Malik could feel the pressure building as Rukh was being forced out of the space between them.
KKKRAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCK!
They escaped just before it could close.
Tens of slabs slammed one after another behind them with a sound like the end of the world, and the cohort barely shot through every gap, their bodies almost scraping against the stone.
But, close as it was, they were through.
Without any warning, they arrived on a landless section.
The corridor had opened up into a vast, empty space where there was no floor, no ceiling, and no walls, only a seemingly endless darkness and the distant pulse of the beast's heart.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
A wall came swinging from the side like a pendulum, far too massive to be moving that fast, its surface covered in spikes of black rock.
It was aimed directly at them, a killing blow from a creature that had finally noticed the parasites crawling through its veins.
Parasites that it was dead set on devouring.