Chapter 24: A Rat in a Maze
Simon lit his torch from the dying embers in the hearth and gazed into the rancid tunnel. The magic of the doors superimposing themselves into a place they should not be still hadn’t quite worn off for Simon, though the disgusting odor certainly had.
“This place is almost as bad as the goblins,” he complained to no one in particular.
Even breathing through his mouth, he had to fight off the urge to gag. This was one detail that had been left out of every fantasy novel and game he’d ever played: the past was gross, and the monsters that populated it were even grosser.
When he got out of this and was iseakied into a more appropriate fantasy world, he was definitely choosing anosmia for his character now that he knew what an OP advantage the lack of smell really was.
In the meantime, though, he didn’t let that stop him from seeing where this tunnel went. It turned out not to be very interesting. It was just a dismal tube that was eight or ten feet around and had a small footpath that was about a foot and a half wide on either side of the foul river that flowed between them.
The side passages that occasionally crossed were only half as wide, and Simon had very little interest in crawling down one of them unless he was forced to. This was already disgusting enough.
After ten minutes of uninterrupted boredom, Simon found himself yawning. If this place didn’t reek of shit, his immediate priority would be finding somewhere safe to take a nice long nap. The fighting hadn’t been any more strenuous than usual, but that fire spell had really taken it out of him for some reason. He wished for the millionth time that there was some kind of guide written for how this world’s broken-ass magic system actually worked because guessing was really taking a toll.
At least there was nothing that was bent on attacking him, he thought hopefully, until he remembered that the goblin level started off that way too. So far, he’d just seen a few sewer rats that had run away from him as soon as he’d gotten too close. The biggest hazard had been the trickles of filth that occasionally sprayed out of the small pipes that joined this one from the wall and the ceiling now and then.
It certainly seemed more dungeon-like than some of the other levels, but it would need monsters to complete the look. A giant crocodile seemed the most cliché choice, but he could see rat men or lizard people down here, too, so he stayed focused, looking for anything that didn’t belong. Things that didn’t belong showed up pretty quickly after that in the form of a corpse floating in the sewage. It was actually dead, though, and the only thing it did to Simon was to practically give him a heart attack, so he continued on. Around the curve, though, he saw that the tunnel ended in a large grate, and major passages went off to the left and right, forming a T-junction.