The creature below me was powerful. Its plot armor had jumped from the mid-thirties to seventy as it grew, and it was still climbing. Its name, which had been the man’s, was now blank. There was nothing at all in that section. The one trope I had been able to see, The Unseen Hand, was now gone. Not grayed out like its other tropes, gone. I could even see the spot on the red wallpaper where the trope hung there for a moment before the tropes were rearranged.

I didn’t have time to find an explanation for any of that behavior. I didn’t have time for anything.

The creature was going to swallow me up, and it was large enough that no matter which direction I swam, I would fall victim to its gaping maw.

But then I heard that little outboard motor again.

Cassie came in at the last moment before the creature swallowed me up, but she wasn’t going for a rescue. She dove right in on top of me and grabbed onto me as the monster snatched both of us from the water.

I had no idea what she was doing, and she didn’t have time to explain. She was doing the best she could to follow the instructions of her Soul Read trope, and apparently, that meant going down the monster’s gullet with me.

I expected to die at any moment. The creature had plenty of teeth, although they weren’t arranged like the mouth of any animal I had ever seen. Teeth grew randomly here and there, along with other random blood vessels and huge keratin deposits that didn’t seem to belong to anything.

And while I felt myself falling down the throat of the beast, grabbing onto anything I could to slow my descent to death, the creature never chewed. It never tried to crush us. What was more, I was still On-Screen. My Cutaway Death trope had not activated, and on the red wallpaper, I was merely listed as captured, as was Cassie.

Before I could slide too far down into the intestines of the ever-growing tumor that we found ourselves prey to, I managed to grab a hold of one of the giant teeth, one that seemed to grow from the middle of its mouth instead of the sides like normal. As the creature continued to unfold in time and space, its appearance looked less and less anatomically correct, if it ever was, and more like a cancer spreading.

I reached out and grabbed Cassie. We could climb to the surface, perhaps, although I didn’t know what good that would do. Once the monster swallowed in a belly full of water, we would no doubt be on our way to its digestive tract.

I couldn’t possibly know, because all I could see toward the creature’s belly was darkness, except for a few lights that still existed that had been in the cabin of the boat, which were still on.

“Here, climb up,” I said. “I can push you up to that row of teeth, and you can climb out.”

I didn’t know if it was realistic to say something like that, but we were On-Screen, so I might as well fill the moments with something productive. I almost managed to sound rugged.

“No,” Cassie said. As she looked up at me, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a grenade.

“Where did you get that?” I asked because I was stunned and I didn’t know what else to say.

“She had a whole box of them,” Cassie said casually.

We seemed to hang in the air. The creature must have kept its head above water, following an instruction from Carousel to ensure that Cassie and I could have this conversation without being drowned. Since the beast was unable to fully close its mouth because of its deformity, we had plenty of light. I had a clear view of Cassie as she tried to communicate something to me with her eyes.

What was she trying to say that she couldn’t?

She put the grenade pin in her mouth and pulled it out, but didn’t let the explosive trigger quite yet.

“When you get to the end,” she said, “you’ll finally understand the beginning.”

She spoke the words like they didn’t belong to her, like she was going on faith that her prophecy would make sense.

“Go!” she screamed.

“What?” I asked. “No, come with me. I think we can make it if we try.”

“Go,” she said again.

And then she wiggled free of my grasp and fell into the darkness below.

I took my moment to scream after her, confused, not knowing what I was supposed to do, but my instincts took over afterward, and I began to climb my way out of the beast’s mouth. By the time it dove back into the water, I was able to barely escape its grasp and swim to the surface.

First Blood had passed, and the creature began to swim away. All I could do was watch as suddenly the part of the tumor that must have been its stomach expanded rapidly, and red blood started to seep out into the water.

The creature, which had long since stopped looking like any sort of animal and had taken on the full appearance of a tumor, continued to swim, wounded, as fast as it could as it sank into the abyss.

For a moment, I was worried it might come back. Logically, it wouldn’t. First Blood was over, but it is natural to fear such a thing when adrift in the ocean.

I tried looking at my stats to check again if I had the dead status, but I didn’t. Cutaway Death never triggered, which meant that the animal wasn’t trying to kill us. It was trying to capture us, although Cassie had acted on whatever information was available to her and decided to change that.

As I floated in the water dozens of feet beneath the surface, I stared at the red wallpaper, and I figured out what Cassie had just done.

She had used her Undying Words trope to let loose one final prophecy, but to do that, she had to die.

“When you get to the end,” she had said, “you will finally understand the beginning.”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

That wasn’t just fortune cookie nonsense. What she had just done was something very powerful. She had ensured that I would make it to the end, and I knew it had worked because my plot armor now read fifty-three. It was a potent final gift that she had sacrificed her life for. If only I could know what it was she had foreseen in those final moments that led to that sacrifice, it might be worth it.

But even after I was done staring at the red wallpaper, I was left feeling a distinct power, a psychic power, moving over me that I couldn’t explain, and I knew in my soul that as generous as that boost in plot armor had been, it would likely not be enough.

I swam to the surface, and then, once I breathed in a few gulps of air, I started making my way toward the shore where the others were already gathering.

As I climbed up onto the beach, tired and strained, I turned around in the sand and stared back at the ocean. I wondered if the creature was dead or if it was still growing, a cancer spreading in the water.

Antoine approached me and lent me a hand to help me up. He seemed pretty shaken up. As I rose, I found my cameraman there, filming, along with my assistant, who stood right behind him. I figured at that point they probably deserved a raise.

–

We had a long time before we went On-Screen. Long enough that we could take Roxy’s private jet back to the city where my office was located. We were able to find accommodations, get showered, and changed before the next scene.

I was thankful for it. Whatever aura that monster had emitted was messing me up considerably, but in my gut, I felt like it wasn’t the creature alone that was wearing me down. I felt like Cassie’s final moments had done something to me. Maybe it was the effect of one of her tropes, but I felt a great weight that I couldn’t yet process.

What I could do, however, was investigate the tapes On-Screen to establish what had happened in the first movie.

I waited until the cameras were rolling, as we crowded into my office, and I had my assistant hook up all the necessary components to play that type of footage on my TV.

And we watched.

Nothing was surprising. I had seen the footage before, footage of an expedition heading out. The first two tapes explained this setup as the expedition began to face problems, with men falling ill from a mysterious sickness and others vanishing into the jungle never to be seen again. Standard stuff, really.

Still, the leader of that expedition, Vogler, wasn’t discouraged in the least, and he wasn’t the only one. Kimberly was in the footage. According to the story, she was Antoine Stone’s romantic interest, but more than that, she was a professional rival. She wanted to see the cradle herself, so she set out with Vogler, funded by Andrew Hughes, the eccentric billionaire.

It would be a doomed expedition, obviously, once they got close enough to the cradle, but not everyone died at first. No one was explaining things, but whoever the cameraman was continued to circle the encampment and show how many men were left each day. It would be fewer and fewer, of course, and the attitudes of the men would change. A darkness moved over them as two camps began to establish themselves, each suspecting the other of some unnamed treachery.

The footage was cut up and couldn’t explain everything, but it was truly unsettling to see the men grumble and give each other death stares next to footage of dead mules that could no longer help carry equipment, their throats having been slit during the night.

Wagons with their wheels destroyed, sabotaged more accurately. There was a building tension that leaked out of the screen.

Yes, that expedition was surely doomed, but at the end of the second tape, hope arrived in the form of Antoine, Michael, Bobby, Dina, Logan, and Andrew Hughes himself, who stayed isolated in his own wagon, nothing but a loud screaming voice in this footage. Lila evaded all recording.

The final of the three tapes was even more hectic as the cameraman made their way toward the ancient ruins, where the entrance to the sunken cradle had been hidden. They never actually went into the tunnel, but they filmed other people entering it.

Even Andrew was brought into the cradle, although he seemed to be inside some sort of chamber and had to be carried.

Bobby went in and came back out dazed and speechless, crying to leave.

The footage stopped there. It didn’t actually include the final explosion. How could it? It would never have made its way out of the tunnel if that had happened.

I didn’t know which of that footage Carousel wanted to establish, but we got it all played and it would get its choice. But more importantly, it would get our reaction to the horrors relayed on it.

The mysterious fourth tape container, which of course was empty, stayed on my mind, but when I tried to talk about it On-Screen, we went Off-Screen, so I figured Carousel didn’t want that part being mentioned. And while I didn’t know why that was, for some reason deep in the pit of my stomach, I felt a relief that I couldn’t explain.

“I didn’t realize these tapes were recovered,” Bobby said.

“That’s because we had to recover them,” Camden responded. “We found what was left of your little journey into the unknown. Even with all this, I still don’t understand what happened. Why were the men at each other’s throats like that?”

Bobby and Antoine looked at each other for a moment, and then Antoine said, “There was a feeling of distrust in the air. Men were tired, sick, wanting to go home, but afraid to lose their share of the loot. They kept their gold in the center of the camp so that everyone could keep an eye on it, and everyone did. They barely slept. I won’t deny that there was something otherworldly down in the cradle, but much of what you saw had nothing to do with that. Tensions were ready to boil over long before that thing called from the darkness.”

It had been a treasure hunting horror, so that made some sense.

“What exactly happened?” I asked. “When we got there, these ruins,” I said, pointing to the TV where we had seen footage of the ruins, “they were gone. The whole mountain had fallen down into the earth.”

“I blew up the tunnels,” Antoine said. “I barely escaped. The others weren’t so lucky. I had to make sure that whatever was down there stayed there. I told you that.”

We had learned that Carousel was largely okay with repetition. If we were redundant, it could cut out the extra footage. I didn’t know whether or not that would hurt us when it came to scoring, but I suspected that it wouldn’t. After all, the paragons often did this, and Roxy joined in our discussions, making sure that we got every line of dialogue just right.

It was hard to remember which information we only knew Off-Screen and which we had shown our characters learning, so we had to be thorough.

I noticed, though, that one person in particular hardly made a peep, and I wasn’t talking about my assistant or cameraman because they weren’t even in the room. It was Bobby who didn’t speak much. He sat in the back and looked shell-shocked, watching the footage, afraid of what might be on it.

What had he seen in the first movie that he was so afraid to see again?

We had just witnessed a multidimensional cancer grow, envelop a boat, and then chase us around, and yet he and Antoine both had enough fear left over to dread whatever might show up on the footage.

Had we even mourned Cassie properly? We needed to film some footage for that. Sure, Anna had screamed her name a few times toward the ocean, but that still felt like too little.

In the end, the last bit of our time On-Screen was spent by Roxy trying to get Antoine to write an affidavit saying that her husband was dead so that she could cash in on life insurance and inheritance.

To be honest, it was actually kind of funny and refreshing for things to become so petty and mundane all of a sudden.

“I’m not asking you to admit to murder. Just admit that you know for sure he’s dead and you were there when it happened,” Roxy said fiercely.

“The cops are already after me,” Antoine said.

“That’s all the better for me. It would make your affidavit more believable,” she said.

There had to be a trope at work somewhere in there, because I could feel my spirits lifting.

Off-Screen

I got to sleep that night. Nothing was going to interrupt me, and I got to think about what kind of creature I had just seen. Was it a man that had been cursed, or was it never a man at all? An interdimensional tumor was a terrifying enemy, but it had been introduced for First Blood. That was supposed to be our first interaction with the antagonist. I hated to think what would come later when it was all explained.

I had a distinct feeling that when I got to the end and learned the beginning, I was going to wish I hadn’t.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep