Shadows twisted and leapt across the narrow cave walls, cast by the frantic sputtering of a lone torch. In the dim, stifling passageway, a tall man clad in battered brown padded armor drove his iron longsword through a snarling goblin’s skull. The blade pierced clean through bone with a wet, splintering crunch, and the goblin collapsed in a lifeless heap, its crude sword and shield clattering noisily to the stone floor.
Without hesitation, a shorter figure swathed in a soot-stained black cloak rushed forward. His hood obscured his face, but the greedy gleam in his eyes was unmistakable. Kneeling beside the corpse, he rifled through the goblin’s bloodstained garments with deft, impatient fingers, the torch bobbing dangerously in his free hand.
“Damn it,” the cloaked man muttered, his voice taut with disappointment. “No keys. Not even a half-rotten purse.”
Behind him, the taller man—Ruben—shifted his grip on the blood-slicked sword and cleared his throat before asking, voice edged with wary irritation, “You do realize it’s madness to chase rumors this deep into the abandoned mines? All this for a single chest Gloomshade goblins might have dragged down here?”31Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡE7dUBRlq1k
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The cloaked man turned sharply, his hood casting his features into shadow. His voice was low, firm. “As long as you drank the potion I gave you, the miasma won't touch you. You've got three hours—plenty of time. So relax, Ruben.”31Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhqnD9qHdmB
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He turned back to the corpse, tugging loose its worn leather gloves and jamming them somewhere beneath the folds of his cloak. Stretching the torch ahead to peer deeper into the gloom, he continued with an almost feverish excitement, “I'm telling you—this isn't ordinary plunder. Something in that chest will be different. You heard the barmaid yourself: well protected noble caravans have been disappearing. Nobles don’t travel light. There's wealth down here. Real wealth.”
Ruben, still gripping his longsword tight, cast a wary glance into the thickening gloom. His voice was low but edged with unease.
“It’s not the miasma that concerns me, Maxwell. These goblins... they’re better armed than the usual filth we come across. I don’t like poking around this deep without a full party.” He shifted uncomfortably, stepping past his companion. “Especially without a healer at our backs.”
Maxwell—his dark cloak whispering as he walked—only chuckled in response, the sound dry and unbothered. “Come on. I brought enough potions and antidotes to stop a brewing plague. And if something nasty does show up?” He patted a bulging pouch on his hip. “We’ve got these.”
He grinned through the shadows.
“Invisibility potions. Not only that, these ones will supposedly heal you while you’re cloaked too. Cost me a fortune, but it’s worth it. Besides, why split the loot six ways when we can split it two?”
“How much were those potions?” Ruben asked with a huff, but he didn’t press further. His boots echoed along the stone floor as he led them deeper into the suffocating dark.
The mist, once a faint purple haze clinging to the stones, had thickened into a heavy, slithering fog. It coiled around their boots, crawled up their legs like living fingers. From somewhere beyond the tight cavern walls, the guttural grunts and moans of goblins echoed—distorted by the passageways into a chorus of feral hunger.
Up ahead, a battered wooden door clung to its last hinge, half-swallowed by a collapsed ceiling. Cracks spiderwebbed across the rotting wood. Through the gaps, faint torchlight flickered, revealing only rubble and ruin beyond.
Maxwell crept forward, craning his neck cautiously around the doorframe. In the corner of the cave, nestled among fallen stones, a single chest sat gleaming in the torchlight. It was an oddity—ornate, untouched by decay, with vivid gold markings that twisted around it like vines.
Maxwell turned back to Ruben, his voice little more than a hungry whisper. “I found something. Come on.”
Moving with the care of practiced thieves, they slipped past the door, boots silent on the rubble-strewn floor. The air grew colder. Heavy.
Maxwell knelt before the chest and, handing Ruben the torch, began meticulously searching it for traps. His breath hitched, barely containing the excitement blooming inside him. “I’ve never seen craftsmanship like this. There must be something... incredible inside.” His hands trembled slightly as he worked.
After a few tense moments, he leaned back and flashed a crooked smile and said, “Safe.”
He gave the lid an experimental tug, but it refused to budge. Frowning, he began inspecting the sides, his fingers tracing intricate gold inlays.
Dragons—wreathed in flame, tails interlocking in endless, mesmerizing loops.
Ruben stood watch a few paces away, scanning the darkness with his sword still drawn in one hand. After a moment, he muttered, “That emblem... it’s from Enos. The old kingdom. My father served there before it fell.”
There was a somber pause as he added, softer, “I used to see it on the banners... and on the palace guards’ shields.”
Maxwell’s eyes lit up with feral greed.
“So you’re saying... not just noble crap.” His grin widened.
“This could be royal treasure.”
“Exactly,” Ruben murmured, the first spark of excitement flickering through his guarded demeanor.
Maxwell resumed inspecting the chest, running gloved hands along its carvings.
Ruben, half-smiling despite himself, added, “There was a bakery just outside the castle walls. Run by a fox demi-human. She used to sneak me and my brother pastries whenever our father was off drilling with the knights.” His voice grew distant, almost mournful. “Haven’t tasted anything like them since.”
Maxwell grunted impatiently.
“Memory lane can wait. Bring the light over here. I can’t bloody see you cunt.”
“Sorry,” Ruben muttered, adjusting the torch and banishing the encroaching shadows. “That emblem just... brought it all back.”
Before Maxwell could turn back to the chest, a sudden, blinding pain tore through his left arm.31Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5ydMfUenjg
A wet, nauseating crunch filled the air.
Maxwell’s eyes widened in shock as he looked down—his elbow was simply gone, severed clean as if sheared by monstrous shears.
Blood sprayed violently from the gory stump, splattering across the rubble in heavy, rhythmic spurts. His scream split the stale cave air—a shrill, desperate cry that bounced wildly off the cold stone walls.
The chest he had been kneeling before now gaped open with obscene hunger.
From within, dagger-long teeth glistened, dripping thick, blackened saliva that hissed when it hit the ground.31Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnRdNgm8lZn
Its tongue—a mass of writhing, worm-like tendrils—twitched in anticipation.
Maxwell staggered back, clutching the remains of his arm.
He fumbled frantically under his cloak, trying to draw a weapon, but before he could even unsheath his dagger, the thing lunged—wooden body snapping open wider than any natural thing should—and clamped its jaws around his head with a sickening, bone-crushing crack.
Ruben watched in mute horror as his friend's headless body tumbled backward, blood erupting in wild jets from the ruin of his neck.
The body spasmed violently, arm and stump flailing like a broken marionette, before collapsing onto the blood-slick stones.
The chest—no longer pretending to be anything but a ravenous predator—twitched and shuddered as it gorged.
Chunks of flesh and splinters of bone were spat from its maw, raining across the ground with a wet slap. One of Maxwell’s fingers, still twitching, skittered across the floor like a dying insect.
The thing shifted its weight, the sound of wood scraping against the ruined stone floor and snapping joints groaning in the gloom. It turned its blood-soaked, gaping maw toward Ruben.
A jagged shard of terror lanced through him, but training overtook fear.
In a single fluid motion, he pointed his longsword and charged, thrusting the blade toward the heart of the beast.
With a deafening crack, his sword was snapped in half like a dry twig between it’s jagged blood soaked teeth.
Reeling, Ruben dropped the hilt and reached for his short sword, but something slithered out from under the chest. A glistening appendage, somewhere between a tentacle and a spider’s leg, coiled around his ankles.
With monstrous strength, it yanked him off his feet. His back slammed against the stone floor, knocking the air from his lungs. His vision blurred. His hands fumbled for purchase—but when he tried to push himself up, he saw—his legs.
Gone.
Nothing remained below the thigh but bloody, ragged stumps pumping out fountains of arterial blood.
Ruben gasped, the world tilting violently around him.
Pain unlike anything he had ever known screamed through his nerves, lighting his spine on fire. The thing closed in, lid snapping open and shut, maw slavering with black ichor.
Its tongue of vile tendrils—latched onto him, and dragging him closer.31Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUZOTC1jAH1
He kicked with what remained of his legs, he clawed, he screamed, but it was futile.
The creature’s jaws opened wide, exposing rows and rows of serrated, dripping teeth.
As the tendrils lifted him up, he glimpsed Maxwell’s ruined headless torso mutilated from within, already half-digested, bone poking through torn muscle.
A moment later, Ruben was engulfed by a wet, pulsating darkness.
Crunching, grinding, pulverizing.
Slick warmth washed over his body—his own blood—and the gnashing grew louder, reverberating through his hollowing chest cavity.
Ruben howled—a pitiful, broken sound, muffled deep within the beast’s gaping maw.
Each cry only escaped when the creature opened its blood-slick jaws momentarily between bites, like fleeting gasps of agony bleeding into the stagnant cave air.
The thing didn’t simply devour—it savored.
It chewed with deliberate, torturous slowness, grinding through bone and tendon as if relishing every fiber of flesh it peeled away.
The crunch of splintering ribs, the wet tear of muscles being shredded from the bone, echoed in grotesque harmony against the stone walls.
The grinding noise grew deafening, drowning out even Ruben’s hoarse, broken screams as his body was gradually unmade.
Blackness gnawed at the edges of his mind.
Each heartbeat grew slower, fainter, his limbs twitching with dying spasms as blood loss stole the warmth from his skin.
The world around him shrank, narrowed into a collapsing tunnel rimmed in crimson light.
On the ground nearby, the torch—still sputtering weakly—lay in a spreading pool of blood. The light reflected across the puddle, painting the walls with shifting, grotesque shadows.
One final gout of blood splashed against the torch.
The flames sputtered once… twice…
…then choked out completely.
The cavern room was swallowed in a suffocating, perfect darkness.
The chest sat silently once again in its corner.
Still.
Patient.
As if it had never moved at all.
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