It let its teeth cut at full capacity and yanked its head away, backing up a step. Thin strings of flesh and two thin strips of bone kept the arm connected, so it quickly jumped forward and bit down on the arm, twisting its head to break the bone, and yanked it away, snapping the thin strings of muscles and leaving behind a flat, bleeding surface. It quickly dropped the arm by its side, mildly concerned about how the human would stop the bleeding.

Surely she had something to fix the problem.

Before it could be concerned about blood loss, the human placed her functioning arm to the stump through panicked, gurgling breaths that barely held back screams of pain. Sparks filled the tunnel, making its unadjusted eyes snap shut, light bouncing around its retinas as it shook its head.

This time, she couldn’t hold back, letting out a long, guttural groan, her back arching, her neck tendons standing out under her skin like strained cables as her body jerked and heaved. Wheezing, harsh breaths were let out in rapid succession as blood dripped down from the stump, and with a determined snarl worthy of a wolf, the human activated the spark Skill again.

Before she could make any more sounds, the wolf darted forward and turned its leg to the side before it shoved its foreleg in her mouth just above its elbow, activating [Echoes of Oblivion] to devour the sound waves coming out of her throat. It wasn’t just grating to its sensitive ears, the wolf was mildly paranoid about someone or something hearing them.

It did not want to fight anything in a pipe.

It hadn’t considered the human’s bite, but besides hurting a bit, it didn’t do much, so it wasn’t concerned, instead trying to figure how to best get rid of the light swimming across its vision.

Light that had a couple of shades of yellow more than it remembered ever seeing, which meant the changes to its eyes' color spectrum was close to finishing.

Blinking rapidly did nothing to get rid of it though, and it couldn’t use its other leg to rub its eyes, unless it wished to put its entire weight on the human’s mouth and teeth, which it didn’t.

The majority of the human’s sounds were ‘eaten’ by the wolf’s Skill, but her hasty, wheezing breaths, intermingled with whimpers and groans, were still impossible to silence completely, escaping from her nostrils and through her chest, muffled.

It was also more than a little confused on why the human was using sparks on itself, so it bent forward to investigate, peering between her quivering hand and the stump with an awkward half-hop.

The stump was cooked black and much to its surprise, it wasn’t bleeding at all, even if its shape had changed, a far more uneven surface from before.

Actually, it shouldn’t be surprised. Burning the blood vessels would obviously seal them and stop the bleeding, but there was a certain detachment between the knowledge from its Skill and its own inherent naivete of the world.

The wolf still wanted to get going. It was getting rather tired of being stuck in one place or another. The human was still recuperating from the loss of one of her limbs however, so it grumbled and opted to wait a little, even if she wouldn't be doing any of the work. It yawned, only having gotten up from its sleep a couple minutes ago, and clacked its teeth shut, before turning to the infected limb it had discarded. The scent of fresh blood and burnt meat was making it hungry, even as it mixed with the cloying stench of infection and rot.

The human definitely had no use for the limb anymore...

It lifted its foreleg out from between the human’s clenched teeth, pleased that she was only panting and groaning now, and lifted the murky darkness from its leg to conserve mana, quickly trotting over to where it had dropped the sickly limb and snatching it up in its jaws.

Then it circled once, and sat down, placing the arm between its front paws to gnaw at it.

The taste was mostly the same, simply undercut by a slimy, tough texture, and an oddly chemical smell, all on the outer flesh. Pus just tasted like mucus, thankfully, so that was easily ignorable.

The human started making some strange sounds like hissing grunts again, and it clicked its teeth shut, before chuffing in acknowledgement. It wasn’t sure if she was trying to draw its attention, but might as well let her know it was ‘listening’.

Then it continued eating.

“Y-You… you are eating… pffttt… ahahaha…” She trailed off, her barking yips gradually combining with a long, drawn out groan, transitioning into coughs. “Sha-meless m-utt.” She muttered through her coughs, before continuing her slow, wheezing breaths.

Minutes passed by in relative silence, the quiet only interrupted by snapping bone and tearing flesh, until the wolf eventually finished the limb and licked up a stray finger it had missed.

It quickly chewed the appendage and swallowed, observing the human.

With its snack finished, and the human relatively quiet, it licked its chops and moved towards her, quickly finding a decent spot to bite on, before awkwardly shuffling until the human was side by side with the wolf.

This… wasn’t going to work. The pipes were too narrow to let the wolf face whatever was ahead while dragging the human. It shuffled around a bit more, struggling to find a decent position where it could use its eyes, before it promptly gave up, and returned to its previous position, back end facing towards the unknown.

The scrape of the human’s coverings against the rusty iron, including her metal-clad feet, were worryingly loud in the silence that surrounded them, but the wolf ignored it, as the scrape rattled the pipe a bit and allowed it to get a half-decent feel of the layout from [Tremor Sense].

The human gave it one of her boosts, and their trip towards the open-aired section of the pipes hastened, its confidence from the Perception boost helping just as much as the boost in speed.

Even with that and the rather steep downwards curve, it took a couple minutes to get to where they should be.

With one last, long drag, it let go of the human, lowering its head to brush against the bottom of the pipe, antennae flaring.

A foot or so behind it, all sensation in that direction just stopped, before the vibrations snaked around the cubic hole and continued. Twenty or so feet wide, with multiple pipes snaking through, and very, very deep.

It turned around, and with a mild sense of nervousness, stepped away from the comfortable grip of stone that held the pipe in place over an endless drop.

Not being able to see said endless drop, surprisingly, didn’t help all that much in quelling its nerves. It gingerly tapped with its foot, feeling the vibrations travel through the metal. Nails, metallic tubes were braced around the pipe, thin sheets of metal bracing, all relatively firm, but rusted and far too jittery for its liking.

It took a couple feet before it found a spot it knew was safe enough to cut a hole into without accidentally damaging the bracings, one that it was picturing as just large enough to stick its head out of the pipe and see if there was something outside that could help them reach the surface.

Actually cutting the hole was a lot more annoying than it had expected it would be, mostly due to the thickness of the pipe, but after a couple minutes of awkwardly tilting its head side to side and scraping its nails against the iron, it had a round, jagged hole to stick its head through. And a lot of small cuts on its gums, but it had grown used to it at this point.

The fact that the iron piece it cut out only hit something after a solid ten seconds of falling was almost as concerning as the sight of a hole that had no start or end, its head tilting up and down in disbelief.

They couldn’t have gone that far down… right? The pit was deep… and then they dropped a bit more, then they went up and then they went a little bit further down…

No, they didn’t really go down this much. There was no way. Was there?

Unless the surface above just tilted upwards in the direction they moved in, this didn’t make much sense. Either that, or the wolf hadn’t been paying enough attention.

The sight was almost reminiscent of the terrain around the burning rivers, just an endless expanse that faded out of sight. And its eyesight was better than then too, even if only a little bit, yet it still couldn’t see the top or bottom.

It swivelled its head. Pipes, some metal, some steel, some smelling faintly of lead, all rusting away, the metal rods supporting them so warped by rust they were almost deformed, lumpy, as if infected by tumors. Foul-smelling water tainted by something that smelled faintly like the rivers of fire, dripped down from the inscrutable expanse above, and slithered from one pipe to the next in a slow descent, the tapping of drops hitting metal the only sound in the foreboding silence, aside from the faint echo of the metal circle it cut out impacting things from below.

The only illumination in the entire hole was the odd, tiny mushroom clinging to a pipe, glowing a faint yellow-green, though for all it knew it could be glowing in any one of the colors that its eyes couldn’t quite perceive yet.

Seeing nothing that would help them, and with some instinctive part of itself squirming in discomfort over being suspended over such immense height, it carefully moved its head back through the hole, and turned to move deeper into the pipe, see if there was anything of note or alarm before it stumbled into it back end first.

“W-Wait. Hello? Don’t… don’t leave me here… please? Hello?” The human sounded out from the other side of the pipe, sounding oddly scared and pleading. Likely scared of the wolf just leaving her there to starve.

Some small part of it was pleased that it was starting to properly interpret emotion from the human's sounds.

The wolf gave her a short howlish bark in reply, which it suffused with a feeling of reassurement from [Logotexnia], before turning around and continuing to move down the pipe.

The human said nothing more, thankfully, and it stomped its feet a couple times with its nose brushing against the iron.

The pipe was surprisingly sturdy, so it wasn’t particularly worried about bringing the human over. Up ahead however, the pipe continued downwards, flanked by mostly stone, with the odd sensation of another pipe brushing past its senses. It didn’t want to go down, but it didn’t really see any other option. Even if it had no idea how deep this stupid pipe went.

With a faint grumble of annoyance, a vocal habit it had picked up by constantly being around a creature that needed sonic reassurance of its presence, it trotted back to the human, preparing itself for another long bout of boring dragging.

It was almost wishing that some annoying rodent would pop up already just to have something to toy with for a couple minutes.

She didn’t quite know what the hell the dog-shaped beast had been giving her to drink, but it was either some expensive potion or some extremely ‘high quality’ blood. Where it got the blood from, she also didn’t know.

What she did know was that that absurd boost she’d gained from the ‘Blood Drinker’ trait was the nail in the coffin that had sealed her decision. It had been as good a time as any to get rid of the arm, and she had, with grit and tenacity that would have at least gotten an approving nod by her father, were he around. Even if she fell asleep a couple minutes after.

The cauterized wound still hurt so goddamn much that she could only try and find other things to focus on, lest she make more noise than she already was making. She focused on the strange, tasteless caress of thick, misty smoke that had filled her mouth when the beast had put its leg in her mouth to bite on. She focused on the fact that they must have been travelling for at least a full day, and they just kept going down, and down, further and further from the surface, as if they were descending to the depths of hell itself.

Moving her focus from pain to anxiety wasn't the best trade-off, but it worked to some extent.

She used a bit more mana than could be justified to add a slight repulsion field to her iron greaves, just enough for them to float off the pipe, taking the short stops the beast frequently made to recuperate.

Part of her really wanted the beast to give her more of its 'super-blood', because the boost was slowly fading, like blood slowly leaving her body from an open wound, and she hated the feeling. The sensation of every Attribute getting a boost whenever it gave her the blood was like a punch to the senses, the crack of a whip, the rush of a drug, and a pleasant sensation that she felt like she could really use right now.

The beast unhooked its teeth from her shredded clothes, and walked away again, likely just scouting ahead, exactly as it had done all the other times.

But it went a lot further, until she could barely even hear its claws tapping away at the pipe.

And further, until only the faint echo of its steps caressed her ears.

And even that faded.

It didn’t make sense for it to leave her here after all the trouble it had gone through to help her, after the… the connection, the something that had built between them, she knew that, she knew that it didn’t make sense for it to just abandon her here.

But the beast never made sense. It rarely played to her expectations, and the thought made her chest tight and her guts coil into a ball of anxiety and stress.

A minute passed, each second stretching to infinity to become an hour.

Two minutes passed, only the whispers of her mind to keep her company.

And it whispered, mocking yet concerned and truthful, 'what if it never stops walking away and leaves you here to die and rot in a pipe where nobody can hear you scream and the chitters of rats creep ever closer as the pipe tightens around you and you can’t even crawl away-’

Oh, she knew this feeling.

She was panicking.

She breathed in stuttered gasps, feeling like a smithy press was crushing her ribcage, like her heart was being pulped in an icy fist, and she raised a hand to ground herself, her trembling hand pressing into uneven, wet rust.

The air was humid, too humid. Like water, like slime, like blood, and she couldn’t breathe.

Her next exhale came out in a sob.

“H-hello? Pl-Please! Please, please come back please come back, please come back, pleasecomebackpleasecomebackpleasecomeback…ease...ack...” She babbled, her voice lowering with every word, replaced by panting, wheezing exhales as the tunnel closed in around her.

Her hand remained at a constant distance, but her mind didn’t care, it knew that a vice of iron coiled around her, crushing her, and she couldn’t breathe, she opened her mouth to cry for it to come back, cry for help, and she couldn’t, she could only wheeze uselessly, as if her vocal cords simply didn’t exist, and she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t see, she couldn’t smell anything but the stabbing scent of iron, of copper, of blood and rot, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t see, shecouldn’tmoveshecouldn’tmoveshecouldn’t breatheshecouldn’tseeshecouldn’tmoveshecouldn’t breatheshecouldn’t seeshecouldn’tmoveshecouldn’tbreatheshecouldn’tseeshecouldn’tmoveshecouldn’tbreatheshecouldn’ts-

The steady pound of steps approached rapidly, a loud, reassuring bark echoing through the tunnel, snaking through the iron, vibrating in her bones.

She gasped in air, sharply, as deep as her lungs would allow, until something in her rib cage popped, and a sliver of sense returned to her frantic mind.

The freezing, lumpy press of iron receded against her skin, let go of her shoulders, lifted its steel boot from her ribs, just a little bit, just enough to recognize the rapid clinking of nails impacting iron.

Her mind swam and twisted, and her hand, already rubbed raw from trying to help the beast move her, finally bled, warm drops of liquid pooling in her scrambling, shaky palm as it pushed desperately against the constricting steel pressing into her. It tickled, running down her malnourished forearm as she wheezed in rapid, desperate breaths.

It was fine, it was coming back, it was fine, it was coming, it was fine, it wasn’t leaving her behind-

A snout nosed at her face covering with a concerned whine, and the iron bent away, just a bit, just a bit, just enough for her to let go of her grip and latch onto whatever furry part of the beast she could reach and yank it onto herself, feeling its chest and scrambling legs impact her collarbone and squirm against her chest as she curled her arm around its neck to grasp onto its opposite shoulder as she just…

Held it there, held it against her chest, burying her face into its fur, the scent of filth and wet dog being the single best thing that had ever graced her nostrils as she sobbed in relief.

It was back, it was fine. Everything was fine. She wasn’t alone, she wasn’t going to die without anyone to even know or care, she was fine, it was all okay, it was good, she was fine, and the dog, the beast, the monster, she didn’t care anymore, it could be a horrific abomination from the deepest depths of the void for all she gave a shit, she was just happy that it didn’t abandon her.

She let it grumble in confusion as she just held it with one arm, uncaring of its shuffling legs bruising her sternum, babbling thankful gibberish into its ribs, into its fur, frantically petting its back down to its head and tightening her hold whenever it tried to squirm out, until it stopped trying, until her burning lungs stopped spewing her panic into the rust-scented air.

Maybe later she would be embarrassed about her behavior, or would chastise herself for treating a dangerous beast like a hug pillow, but at the moment, she couldn’t care less.

-

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