Chapter 67: A Daring Gamble

The chaser behind Kael seemed adamant on drawing blood, not even realizing that Kael was slowing down on purpose.

The man’s footsteps were loud and sloppy, the kind of pursuit fueled more by rage than sense.

He kept barking threats into the tunnel as if noise itself could make Kael trip. He gave him an opportunity to ’catch up’.

The pursuer took it greedily, closing the distance with the confidence of someone who thought he was cornering prey, not being led.

He never understood that the reason Kael was doing that wasn’t simply to bait him into following him, but because the next station was very close.

Kael could feel it in his bones more than his eyes, he remembered the layout, the way the air changed near the station, the faint draft that seeped through connecting corridors.

The minimap confirmed it: the next station’s outline was just ahead, a pale shape in the darkness. If Kael timed it right, he wouldn’t just escape. He would turn this tunnel into a weapon.

“Got you motherfucker! You’re going nowhere!” He said as he ran after Kael. His voice echoed off the tunnel walls, turning into a warped chorus of his own confidence. He sounded like a man already counting cores.

Kael didn’t respond. He didn’t waste breath on sarcasm or fear. He kept his breathing controlled, kept his pace just slow enough to feed the man’s certainty.

Only when Kael saw the lights on the next station alight; did he sprint as fast as he could while banging the crowbar against the steel tracks.

The station’s far glow painted the tunnel ahead in weak, sickly light, enough to make shapes visible, enough to make the darkness behind it seem even deeper by contrast.

Kael’s sudden acceleration was sharp and deliberate. His boots kicked gravel. The crowbar struck steel with brutal rhythm, the sound ringing through the rails like a dinner bell. The clangs weren’t random now. They were a call. And the fool behind him hadn’t realized it yet.

Just then, right before he could even enter the light of the station, Kael muttered.

“[Presence]”

The word left his mouth like a trigger being pulled.

Without any warning or notice, Kael simply became a non entity in the world, or at least in the eyes of the one chasing him.

The air around Kael didn’t change so much as it stopped acknowledging him. His senses dulled again, the tunnel turning gray at the edges, sound dropping away like someone had stuffed cotton into his ears.

But he didn’t slow. He pushed forward on muscle memory and grit, letting the rune’s cold invisibility swallow him.

The chaser stumbled mid-stride, not because he tripped, but because his brain hit an impossible gap.

He was sure he didn’t get to the station yet, he was still a few yards away, but at the same time, he was sure that Kael was ahead of him. The certainty didn’t vanish. It collided with absence and turned into panic.

Feeling like a trapped mouse, he thought that he couldn’t proceed any further without any guarantees.

The tunnel was dark spare for the far away light source, the ground was gravel and there was a grating sound that seemed to be growing louder.

It threaded through the darkness like a knife being dragged along metal, too heavy for rats, too consistent for loose debris shifting. The man’s breathing tightened. His bravado faltered, replaced by the primal discomfort of not being alone in a place that suddenly felt like a throat.

It couldn’t be goblins, they’re a bunch of low intelligence creatures and won’t make this much noise if they were about to hunt something.

They’ll stay in hiding and ambush a climber instead of announcing themselves. That logic tried to comfort him, tried to make sense of the sound, but it didn’t fit.

Even his fear knew that. Something about the scraping felt… big. Deliberate. Hungry without haste.

Though the sound was grating, it also didn’t feel like it belonged to any monster on this floor. They have yet to meet anything other than a goblin, so this must be some sort of sewage or a powerline that’s active.

The man clung to that explanation because it was the only one that didn’t end with him being eaten alive in the dark. He didn’t have Kael’s knowledge. He didn’t have Kael’s map. He had ignorance and a stone weapon, and ignorance was suddenly expensive.

The man wasn’t a third-rate villain or idiot. He was using his own logic against himself. He honestly and wholeheartedly believed that the first floor only had Goblins in it. And that thought didn’t make him a fool for following Kael; it made him a man who couldn’t judge how cruel the Tower could be.

The bigger problem was, Kael disappeared, the red climber he was chasing simply ceased to exist.

The tunnel ahead held only the faint station glow and the echo of Kael’s last clangs. Silence seeped back in between those echoes, thick and wet.

The man’s grip tightened on his weapon. His eyes strained, pupils widened, trying to pull detail out of the dark that wasn’t there.

A thought came to the man’s mind, he might have tripped and is using the dark as cover, he might get ambushed if he moved too fast.

That thought made him slow down, made him shift into caution the way people did when they realized the hunt could turn around.

So he slowly approached, making sure to keep his weapon ahead of him lest he gets attacked from somewhere he didn’t see. He took short steps, tested gravel before committing weight, listening hard for breath that wasn’t his own.

Just like that, something hit him square in the chest.

“Fuck!” he howled as he noticed that it was a piece of rock that’s usually used to fill train tracks.

The impact wasn’t lethal, but it stole breath and dignity in equal measure. The stone bounced off his chest and clattered underfoot. Pain flared, and rage surged to fill the space fear had left. The bastard was hitting him with rocks. In the dark. Like a child throwing tantrums.

“Keep trying bitch, I’ll fuck you up once I catch you!” angry and annoyed, the man cursed at Kael. He swung his weapon at the darkness reflexively, as if he could cut absence. His voice echoed, loud enough to wake anything listening. He didn’t realize he was doing Kael a favor. or better yet, providing a hungry beast a timely meal…

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