007

007

Four weeks by Earth's standards had gone by, but without any sunlight or a clock, Marcus had no clue how much time he had already spent searching for an exit.

In that time, a lot had changed for him. The network of caverns were still his biggest obstacle, but he had finally figured out some better ways to survive the never ending hellscape.

He walked through the tunnels with much quieter steps now. He made sure that the treading with his makeshift socks didn't hit the stone too loudly.

He had made the odd pair of socks by wrapping the spongy scales of the big monsters he called 'Skulkers' around the base of his foot. They acted as decent padding with the skin of the tiny mole creatures he now named 'Scuttlers' holding it together around his ankles.

At a fork in the tunnels, Marcus stopped to inspect both options in front of him. He pulled out a rather odd looking staff in front of him to get a closer look. It was an upper arm bone of a Skulker that was sharpened to a crude spear point at one end, and packed with light crystals stabbed onto the other.

Neither wall had his markings, meaning he hadn't made it to this section of the tunnels yet. Marcus silently chuckled to himself and decided to go down the tunnel on the right. After the second week of "discovering" the undiscovered tunnels that never seemed to end, it lost the excitement.

There was hardly a method to his mad looking behavior at this point. He no longer thought too much about keeping mental track of the directions he came and went from. He just marked the tunnels during exploration; walked until he was back in a place he'd been to before; then started his hunt for food.

He had learned how to lure out the Skulkers with loud noises and he discovered killing them was relatively easy. They were bulking and had very powerful bites, but they had to aim their whole bodies in the directions they were going. If he dived under the head before it started scraping across the ground, he could jam some of the Skulker teeth he tied to his back through the bottom of the throat and bleed the monster to death.

As it turned out, the hulking beasts had very thick veins and lower intestines that could be dried as decent twine to hold his collection of body parts and spare meat. His whole body carried an assortment of poorly refined animal parts. Each one was either saved for eating, sleeping, or stabbing.

Originally he thought just the idea of killing these massive creatures was grotesque, but his hunger drove him to look back at the first Skulker he accidentally choked to death. It transformed from an unfortunate corpse he tore apart, to his only hope for staying alive.

Marcus cut chunks of the monster out, finding decent pieces he could squeeze most of the blood from and then eat it. All his mouth could feel was the sensation of chewing, not caring too much about the rich taste of iron. Before he even realized it, he had eaten quite a bit of the Skulker.

He nearly threw it up when he realized what had happened, but he forced it all down cause losing the meat was just gonna make him hungrier sooner.

Present day Marcus continued his long walk through the unexplored tunnel, estimating the remaining time before he'd stop and eat. He gave himself another twenty minutes, but having no reference for the passage time resulted in a break only after five minutes.

He dropped the sling off his shoulder and unravelled the two large Skulker skins that were his blanket and mattress. Despite having skinned the last Skulker over a week ago, the cold and damp caves left his new bed still moist with blood and never truly warm.

It didn't matter though, it was better than the rocks he tried laying on initially. The primal degradation left Marcus with very little care on how well he kept himself overall.

The messiness had gotten so bad to the point that his hands, arms, and face were stained heavily from the blood. He once caught a half glimpse of his reflection in a puddle, and he saw the eyes of a crazed animal staring back at him. He looked like a berserker from the old mythologies, minus the burly body and beard.

After the first few days in the tunnels, Marcus would occasionally scratch at his face, soon after he felt patches of hair growing from it. He had no idea how old this body was, but it definitely aged to some form of adulthood. Thinking about it gave him no hope of escaping or surviving, so he only gave his chin a few scratches and turned over to sleep.

Marcus dreamt of his old life of Earth again, remembering random pieces of his life he never thought too hard about until his situation changed. The random coffee shop he would visit about once a month; his upstairs neighbor who had the crying loud cat; his car not starting on his last day alive.

He jolted awake again, his body producing an odd mixture of his sweat with the residue of the bloody sleeping bag. He felt another tremor happening deep below him, not sure if it was a herd of Scuttlers fleeing or another Skulker trying to breach the walls of the nearby tunnels.

It didn't matter, any kind of sound made for trouble; so he packed up his things and made himself scarce.

'Krotosia, the beautiful world of dirt, death, and worms. I swear that bastard was lying to me just for the fun of it. This place is only hell with mutant rodents instead of brimstone and fire.'