FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 244: Chapter 244: Pure, Unfiltered Nightmare

It was what you call a graveyard. And it was a portrait of pure, unadulterated biological horror.

The cavern was easily the size of a football stadium, illuminated only by patches of sickly, pale-yellow bioluminescent mold clinging to the ceiling, and it was filled to the ceiling with rolling, jagged hills of bone and rotting carapace. Scattered across the vast floor were literal mountains of corpses.

Sol saw the half-melted, unrecognizable carcasses of Great Badgers, their stone-spiked fur dissolved to expose the rotting muscle beneath.

He saw the massive, skeletal remains of a four-armed ape…its ribcage curving upward like the arches of a ruined cathedral, picked absolutely clean of every ounce of flesh. Dozens of common Essence-Born beasts, ranging from giant serpents to four-winged birds, were piled haphazardly… picked completely clean of flesh and marrow.

There were also mountains of shattered crystal wings from decades of Dreadwing skirmishes, and, most disturbingly, hundreds of massive, mutated, half-formed ant carapaces. They were the failed experiments of the colony, the deformed soldiers and commanders that had been ruthlessly cannibalized and discarded by their own sisters.

The ambient heat of decomposition in this room was suffocating.

Crunch.

Sol froze entirely. He could swear that the sound hadn’t come from him.

Click. Scrape. Click.

Sol remained statued, his Golden Liquid core instantly flaring.

From behind a towering pile of ribs of deer-like creatures, a thermal signature flared into his vision. It was a faint, sickly yellow-orange.

A scavenger ant crawled into view. It was a specialized worker caste, roughly the size of a large wolf, but its body was pallid and almost translucent, lacking the heavy armor of the surface soldiers. Its mandibles were flat and serrated, designed for crushing bone rather than slicing flesh, and it dragged a bloated, acidic abdomen behind it.

It was entirely blind, its head lacking faceted eyes altogether. It navigated purely by scent and vibration, its long, pale antennae sweeping the air frantically.

Sol knew he couldn’t let it leave this room. If it caught his scent and released an alarm pheromone, the entire hive would instantly turn their attention from the surface war down into the tunnels.

But unfortunately, he didn’t have any way to cover his smell, at least not yet.

So, It had smelled him.

The scavenger paused, its antennae locking directly onto Sol’s position. Its mandibles parted, preparing to release a high-frequency chemical shriek to alert the hive.

Sol didn’t let it.

He moved with the terrifying, silent speed of an executioner. He didn’t use his spear… the obsidian blade would have scraped against the carapace and made a sound. He simply flooded his legs with pure Golden Liquid density and closed the thirty-foot gap in a single, blurring stride. He didn’t use the obsidian blade of his spear… slashing the thick chitin might make too much noise.

Before the scavenger could even twitch, Sol’s left hand shot out like a viper, clamping brutally around its mandibles and forcefully holding its mouth completely shut. Simultaneously, his right hand, hardened by his golden essence into a literal hammer of flesh and bone, struck the back of the ant’s pale head.

SQUELCH.

His fingers pierced the soft, unarmored chitin at the base of the skull, driving straight into its primitive brain cluster and crushing it instantly.

The giant insect convulsed violently in his grip, its legs kicking out, but Sol held it suspended in the air, his muscles locked like steel cables until the twitching completely stopped, dropping the rotting meat from its jaws.

Sol stood over it, his breathing shallow and controlled. He waited for ten agonizing seconds, listening for any shift in the ambient hum of the hive. Nothing.

He gently, silently lowered the massive corpse to the ground, pulling his bloody hand free and wiping the pale fluid on a nearby badger skull.

“Too close,” Sol muttered, his heart hammering against his ribs.

He quickly skirted the edge of the bone pit, slipping into another tunnel on the opposite side. The air here began to grow perceptibly warmer, the humidity spiking so drastically that condensation began to drip from the ceiling like a slow, toxic rain.

The next chamber he entered shattered his pragmatic, gamer-logic detachment, replacing it with pure, visceral, stomach-churning horror.

It was the abattoir. The larder.

But the colony didn’t just store dead meat. In the sweltering, damp heat of the subterranean depths, dead meat rotted too quickly. So, they kept it fresh.

Sol stared through his Crimson-Sight at a scene pulled straight from his worst nightmares. Hanging from the ceiling and plastered against the walls were dozens of massive beasts, completely encased in thick, glowing green cocoons of hardened acidic resin.

There were massive, multi-legged panthers, giant serpents, and even a few of the fierce, silver-backed Great Badgers.

And they were all glowing with bright red thermal signatures.

They’re alive, Sol realized, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead.

The ants hadn’t killed them. They had paralyzed them with a specialized, non-lethal neurotoxin, dragged them miles underground, and entombed them in resin, leaving only their mouths and spiracles exposed so they could breathe.

They were living pantries. As Sol watched in horrified silence, a pair of rusted-red worker ants scurried up the wall to a paralyzed, softly whimpering jaguar. Using their razor-sharp mandibles, they carefully, methodically sliced a chunk of fresh meat from the beast’s exposed flank. The jaguar’s eyes rolled back in agonizing, silent terror, unable to move a single muscle as the ants consumed it alive, piece by agonizing piece.

This was the brutal, unvarnished reality of the primitive world. It wasn’t an honorable duel between warriors; it was a slow, agonizing harvest in the dark.

Sol clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached. He forced himself to look away, hugging the shadows of the wall, moving with agonizing care to avoid the scurrying workers. He suppressed his aura to absolute zero, practically holding his breath as he slipped through the chamber of living horrors and ducked into the next descending corridor.

The heat was becoming oppressive. His dark leather armor clung to his skin, slick with sweat. The smell of pheromones had grown so thick it tasted metallic on his tongue.

He quickly crossed the nightmarish larder, eager to escape the suffocating smell of rot, and slipped into a tunnel on the opposite side.

This new corridor sloped deeper, and the atmosphere shifted again. The air grew significantly warmer, practically boiling with humidity. The walls here weren’t just packed earth; they were coated in a soft, pulsating, white organic webbing that felt sickeningly spongy under his boots.

He knew he was getting closer to the heart of the colony.

The tunnel widened, revealing another massive chamber. But this one wasn’t filled with the dead. It was filled with the unborn.

Sol crouched behind a thick, petrified root at the entrance and looked into the nursery.

If the larder had been disgusting, the nursery was pure, unfiltered nightmare.

Hanging from the ceiling and packed into thousands of hexagonal earthen cells along the walls were the eggs. They were massive, translucent, glowing pale-red sacs, each the size of a beer keg. But it wasn’t the eggs that made Sol’s skin crawl, it was what had hatched from them.