Chapter 59: How to NOT get in home after a long night in a manhole (3)
The tunnel felt smaller now, and it wasn’t just my imagination. Each breath seemed to consume the last traces of oxygen, and the remaining air came in dense, contaminated, saturated with the vapors of decades of rot compacted into stone.
The walls were sweating moisture, but there was something more — as if the old concrete was slowly giving back every secret it had absorbed over the years. The space between me and the rat was short, but the time between my heartbeats stretched out with cruelty.
Blood ran from the cut on my arm, hot and throbbing, mixing with the muck on the ground like spilled paint on a ruined canvas.
Behind me, Thalia tried to stay still, but her panic vibrated in the air like a muffled drum, pulsing right at the back of my neck. I felt it. All of it.
The creature still stared at me, and now there was a slight sway in its body — not nervous, but ready. An animal rhythm, instinctive, that comes right before the leap.
I had seen that before — not in rats, but in fighting dogs, in cornered men, in predators who had learned to love the blood more than the victory. The tunnel was the arena, and we were both at its center.
I needed a way out. But there was no way out. Only forward, and the rat.
The pickaxe, my usual companion, had been left behind — a tactical mistake, justified by the need to move light, to appear civilized in a city that only accepted appearance as currency. Now, the price of that choice was bleeding down my wrist.
"Think, Dante. Think."
[ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS]
→ Visibility: Low – light only from magical sparks