The stone walls of the rotting meeting hall seemed to hold their breath, absorbing all sound save for Devon's steady, cold heartbeat and the incessant, wet rustling of the horde before him. He was cornered. A simple geometric fact. His back was to a cold, unforgiving wall. Before him, an undulating sea of horror—the children of Mother Grave.
They weren't an army. They were a walking plague. Dozens of gaunt, withered figures of The Infected swayed in the front ranks, their stooped, frail postures belying the horror of the white, brain-like parasites pulsing in their chests, their pale tentacles dangling and dragging on the dusty floor. Among them crept other, worse things, shadows born from a mad god's imagination: creatures with too many joints, others with translucent skin revealing organs beating out of sync, and some that were just skittering masses of eyes and mouths. They didn't growl or roar. They merely issued a quiet symphony of suffering—a constant low moan, the wet clicking of ill-fitting limbs, and the gurgling of leaking internal fluids.
Devon raised the Magnum in his hand, its large, blue-steel barrel looking like a small black hole promising annihilation. He felt no cold spike of adrenaline or the familiar tremor of fear. The black ring on his finger was an ice dam, holding all such emotional tides at bay. All he felt was a profound annoyance, the cold, sharp irritation of a man whose busy schedule had just been interrupted by a truly disgusting pest problem.
'Hhh… what a hassle,' he thought, his analytical eyes scanning the horde, counting targets, estimating shot spread, and weighing the cost of ammunition. 'These Magnum rounds aren't infinite. Wasting them on this pathetic mob feels like a waste. Maybe I can…'
He took a step back, the heel of his boot scraping the stone behind him. He was ready to fire his first shot, ready to begin the exhausting dance of violence.
That was when a sound broke the tension.
KRRRRRRREEEEEEEAAAAAKKK… BAAAAM!
It wasn't the sound of an attack. It was the sound of the giant stone door behind the horde—the same door that had slammed shut moments ago—suddenly giving way on its own. Its ancient, rusted hinges had finally surrendered to physics and centuries of neglect, and one of the massive doors collapsed outward, striking the ground with a building-shaking boom, sending a thick cloud of dust into the air.
Silence fell.
Devon froze. The horde of monsters stopped moving, their grotesque heads and pulsing parasites turning in unison toward the now-gaping doorway, an impossible escape route to freedom. They seemed as confused as Devon was.
For one, infinite second, nothing moved. The world had glitched. An error in the cruel, cosmic script.
And then, Devon began to laugh.
It started as a suppressed snort, a barely audible chuckle. Then it grew, exploding from his gut into a raw, wild, and utterly uncontrolled belly laugh. He laughed so hard he had to lower his pistol, one hand clutching his shaking stomach. Tears began to stream down his cheeks, not from joy, but from the pure, unadulterated absurdity of the situation.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" he roared, his voice echoing in the silent hall, startling the monsters who now stared at him with visible confusion. "IDIOTS! YOU IDIOTS!"
He pointed at the horde with a finger that was trembling with laughter.
"You all… HAHAHA… you all swarmed me in here… and you didn't even check if the door was actually locked! LOCK THE DAMN DOOR NEXT TIME, YOU AMATEURS!"
He didn't wait for a reply. With a final burst of energy born from his mad glee, he turned and ran. He didn't run for the open door. That was too far. He ran sideways, along the wall, toward a high, arched window whose glass had long since shattered, leaving only a ragged stone frame.
As he ran, the horde finally snapped out of its confusion. With a unified chorus of groans and clicks, they scrambled after him, a tidal wave of rotting flesh and despair.
Devon leaped. He planted a foot on a fallen stone bench, launching himself into the air. He crashed through the empty window frame, landing in a roll on the damp weeds outside, absorbing the impact with an agility he hadn't possessed a year ago. He sprang to his feet without even looking back. He could hear the scrape of hundreds of limbs on stone as the horde tried to crawl out of the same window and the door.
He had seconds. He ran. With the giant egg still strapped to his back, weighing him down like a large, fragile sin, he sprinted across the ruined village, his boots pounding the cracked cobblestones.
Inside the meeting hall, Mother Grave moved for the first time. She was not angry. She was… intrigued. The ancient voice echoed again, this time only for herself.
"This child… he sings the song of Onyx, but his tune is off-key. So very off-key. There is such Maw-energy within him, a cold void that should have consumed him long ago, yet he wears it like a coat…"
She fell silent, as if tasting a new concept.
"After several hundred years of... stillness... perhaps it is time for a little stretch."
Then, the transformation began. It was not a fast process. It was a horror blooming in slow motion. The throne made of hundreds of tormented human bodies began to pulse. The faces frozen in eternal screams began to move, their mouths opening and closing in silence. The countless arms that formed the throne's structure began to pull inward, not releasing, but fusing.
There was a sickening crack of bone, thousands at once, like a forest collapsing. The flesh of the bodies began to melt, losing form, flowing like heated wax and merging with Mother Grave's giant mass. She was absorbing her creations, absorbing their suffering, converting it into fuel.
She began to stand. As she rose, her body, which had been a shapeless lump of flesh, began to stretch and reform. She grew, taller and taller, until her barely-formed head touched the high, wooden-beamed ceiling. She now stood erect, over five meters tall, a living tower of meat.
Her new body was a sight from the deepest hell. It was no longer a corpulent female figure; it was a pulsing column of raw flesh, covered in hundreds of writhing human faces, some partially emerged, others just an eye or a mouth whispering silent curses. Dozens of thick tentacles made of spliced muscle and spine writhed from her back and shoulders, whipping the air with a wet, hissing sound. Her once-featureless face had now hardened into a bestial mask, with a jaw that could unhinge to the width of her shoulders, filled with teeth made from human femur shards.
With a roar that tore at the stone foundations of the building, Mother Grave surged forward. She did not walk. She surged. She slammed into the back wall of the meeting hall, and the thousand-year-old stones exploded outward as if made of cardboard. She was in the open now, a newly erupted volcano of suffering. And she began to chase her prey.
In the distance, Devon could feel the vibrations of her thunderous footsteps. He glanced back. The sight of the Infected horde crawling out of the village was bad enough. But the sight of the transformed Mother Grave, now moving across the grasslands like a biological siege engine, was something else entirely.
"Okay, that's new," he said to himself, his voice slightly strained for the first time. "That's definitely going to leave a mark."
He kept running, turning occasionally to fire. The Magnum in his hand barked, each shot a deafening explosion.
BOOM!
One bullet hit an Infected in the chest. The white parasite exploded in a spray of rotten, iridescent fluid, and its host collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
BOOM!
Another took the head off a many-legged creature, atomizing it into a red mist.
He fired with cold precision, each bullet finding its mark. But there were too many. For every one that fell, three more seemed to crawl from the ground to take its place. He kept running, adrenaline finally beginning to pump—a response triggered not by fear, but by the pure, tactical need to survive.
'This is inefficient,' he thought, as he dodged a flesh tendril that suddenly lashed out from Mother Grave's closing mass, shattering a tree next to him into splinters. 'Ammo is limited. Speed is everything.'
KLIK.
The Magnum was empty. Six shots. Six monsters down. Hundreds still coming.
"Trash," he snarled, and without hesitation, he threw the now-useless Magnum behind him. It hit one of The Infected in the face with a satisfying thwack, but did nothing more.
The weight of the egg on his back now felt like an anchor. It was a week's worth of food, maybe more. It was a victory. But victory was useless if you were dead.
'Weight versus speed. Speed wins. Sorry, breakfast, lunch, and dinner,' he thought, a cold, brutal calculation.
While still running, he loosened his backpack straps. With one powerful motion, he shucked the pack from his back and hurled it behind him with all his strength. The giant egg flew through the air in a strange arc before landing in the densest part of the mob.
The pale blue shell shattered with a wet explosion. A human-sized yolk and thick, viscous albumen sprayed in all directions, coating dozens of monsters in a sticky goo. Some slipped and fell; others paused to try and lick the nutritious fluid off their comrades. It bought him a few seconds. It was all he needed.
Freed of the egg's weight, he ran faster. All he had left now was the Karabiner 98k rifle on his back—too slow for a running fight—his fedora, which was somehow still plastered to his head, and his clothes, which could barely be called that anymore.
He rocketed through the forest, a ragged black shadow pursued by the world's worst nightmare. Mother Grave was closing in, her earth-shaking roar making the leaves tremble on the trees. Her tentacles slashed behind him, felling silver birch trees as if they were weeds.
Devon leaped over a small ravine, landing awkwardly but keeping his momentum. He didn't look back anymore. He just ran. He was prey once again, but this time, he was an angry prey, a calculating prey, a prey who knew that as long as he kept running, he hadn't lost. The forest blurred around him, an endless green tunnel, and the only sounds in the world were his own pounding heart and the roar of the rotting death goddess behind him, getting closer with every trembling step.