The measure of a man is often taken in dark places where there are no eyes to see.

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 20:23:15]

  - Poisoned

  - Bleeding

  - Burning

  - Hypoxia

  HP: 428/600

  He'd been in this place for nearly four hours now, staring around this cavernous central area like a tourist walking down the middle of the road. He'd felt it trembling and heaving around him. Staring up, squinting toward where the ceiling vanished into darkness, Brom missed an extra squishy patch on the floor. His foot went out from under him, and he pitched backward. Windmilling his arms was no help, he thumped down solidly on the metal and just lay there for a moment, regretting his life. Brackish bilge water sloshed around him, filled with who knew what filth, the whole of the structure rocking gently. Yacht Sothoth must have returned to the deep now that it had consumed its meal, swimming in the cold waters of the harbor and producing this lulling motion.

  - Nausea

  Just because the condition was negated didn't mean Brom didn't feel like hurling. He rolled onto his hands and knees, feeling steel under his fingers and not the squirming bodies of the eel innards. "Sound off, who's not dead..." Hoarse laughter followed the quote, roaching his back a little to ease a bit of the tension out of it, then he straightened up. Stripping off his coat, he let the battered fabric slip from his fingers to the floor. The last forty-eight hours had been hell on his wardrobe.

  Slowly, he got to his feet, swaying softly with the motion of the deck below him, eyes straining in the low light. There was illumination in here, small yellow lights running along the spine, and of course, that deeper glow. He wasn't sure about heading that way just yet, the core of the beast was the sort of thing he'd expect to be incredibly guarded. Probably by the dungeon boss. Unless this was the dungeon boss and he was going to end up steering a ship raised from the ocean floor directly into its guts.

  The dungeon map was useless here, only showing where he currently was alongside the running timer.

  Survive huh? His gut told him he couldn't just stand here the whole twenty-four hours, well, twenty and change now, and wait for it to end. His brain instantly went back to the image of the squirming innards. That mass mob of lampreys and slime eels. He'd clearly seen them when he'd jumped in. Thankfully, they had been busy devouring the chunk of the CHYC that came with him first. Brom's mind went back to the boats that had been in the initial video he'd seen. Yacht Sothoth was a ship, at least on the surface, with a husk of steel. So, did that mean it was consuming other boats to repair something?

  Hello Player Brom Jones! Apparently, you've gotten yourself into quite the situation, and the Viewers would very much like to see how you solo this survival experience!

  Oh. Oh hell. The universe just had to kick him while he was fucking down. Now was not the time he'd have picked for a reunion with the System. Still, he tried to make some lemonade with the lemon grenade he'd just been handed. "It's you. Going to give me any helpful tips?"

  According to previous data, Player Brom Jones learns by doing, not by having things explained!

  "You petty piece of work, fine. I hope you end up as the software in the smart bidet of some unholy outer being." Brom didn't have the energy to worry about the audience or the System. As long as it didn't do any bullshit to make the situation worse, they could be peeping toms all they wanted. He had bigger fish to fry. If a person could even fry Yacht Sothoth.

  In the Jones household, Marcus had been the outdoorsy one. He'd been part of the Boy Scouts, getting his birdwatching badges and nature badges and fire starting badges, basically just fixating on nature. A healthy outlet and habit. Too bad Brom hadn't also been motivated like that. He vaguely remembered something about the rule of threes. Three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without air. Or did he have it wrong? Probably. Marcus wasn't here for him to ask either.

  His barbarian body was already doing so much for his survival, he vaguely remembered the hypoxia condition being negated when he'd been waking up. That meant that this was a low air environment, and he should be struggling with tasks and on the verge of passing out. Feeling incredibly weak and unsteady. The fact that he wasn't was hugely to his advantage. But how long would it last? Would he eventually reach a tipping point where the condition would begin to apply? What about dehydration and starvation? Would those also be taken care of? If that was the case... could he just stop eating and breathing?

  This place was the perfect testing ground to find out.

  The decking under his soles began to vibrate with that telltale sensation he remembered from the pier. The eel innards were coming. He pushed his dripping bangs out of his eyes and tried to catalogue where he was going. If they were coming from below, logically, he should go up, but what if he couldn't keep rising? There were steel catwalks above him, swaying slightly with the motion of the beast. They seemed to go every which way, connecting to different sections. It was better than nothing.

  He found an access ladder and jumped for the bottom rung, hands gripping in and feeling rusty steel flake and bite into his palms, extracting a blood price.

  - Disease

  HP: 427/600

  Every rung took another point of health from him, his palms were shredded before he got to the top of the section. He could barely see, navigating by the tiny lights in the tunnel wall, orienting by the direction of the more baleful glow of the core.

  HP: 420/600

  "Alright, if the core is deeper in, then the maw is in the opposite direction." For whatever reason, in Brom's head, the bow, or maw, meant the head of the ship, and the head meant the brain. Whatever was controlling this behemoth. Even if he was wrong, it was as good a place to start as any. Maybe he could escape the next time Yacht Sothoth opened its mouth for dinner.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 18:41:22]

  It was harder to get around than Brom had expected. The innards came in waves, peristaltic movement that was supposed to help flush the things the maw consumed further into the bowels and eventually down toward the core. That only reinforced that he wanted to be nowhere near it and whatever else was lurking around that core of heat and evil.

  As his senses had fully adjusted, apparently even his barbarian body had needed to calibrate those at least once, he'd finally been able to get a look at the insides of Yacht Sothoth. There were ribs of shining steel, rune-etched, and a grand vertebral column from which those ribs hung. They were coated with the squirming flesh, only peeping through in places, and the squirming flesh was slowly being coated with a new layer of steel. Like the slime secretions were hardening into it, plating itself inside to protect that flesh from harm. The rusty ladders, catwalks, and gangways seemed to all be built from the parts and pieces of the ships it consumed, decaying rapidly into the slurry that soaked the deck plates.

  The slurry was fresh with nutrients at first, but would grow stagnant and rotted, eventually sluiced backward toward the core, and new slurry would begin to gather as slime and other secretions dripped down the walls. Nothing went to waste. All things were pushed toward the core.

  There were doorways in the walls. Hatches that were tightly closed, like sphincters leading from the chambers of the stomach or valves protecting arterial passages. He hadn't been brave enough to poke his head in any of those, though he occasionally would spot one where light flickered beyond the narrow windows of glass. The System had mentioned he was soloing this. That meant any signs of life weren't going to come from other parties that were attempting this dungeon, but from things that were already dwelling in here. Maybe survivors from the boats it had consumed before the Event Dungeon had popped up. Maybe NPCs that were programmed to be here as obstacles for dungeon delvers. Mobs to be fought or useless hangers-on that would slow a group down and put them in danger.

  A thought occurred to him. There had to be others who'd grouped up and were undertaking this dungeon. How had they dealt with the cult? Just how many other people had been forced into signing with the CHYC? How many others hadn't survived being fed to Yacht Sothoth? He assumed there was no winning the fight with the cultists, not if this was stage four. He leaned on the railing, watching the innards surge below him, making this a dangerous section to be in. They'd rise soon, covering these catwalks and polishing them shiny with slime, carrying away anything of value.

  The catwalk between this section and the next had fallen away. The ladder that had once been vertical was now lying horizontal above him. There was nothing for it but to jump up and catch hold of one rusty rung, ignoring the burn in his already damaged palms. His own weight was nothing to him as he started to walk hand over hand, swinging like a monkey from rung to rung. He'd thought he could carry himself across it quickly, but had underestimated how slick with blood his palms would become.

  HP: 415/600

  Finally, it happened. As he passed from one rung to the next, there was enough blood left behind to condense into a single, shimmering bead. It clung to the rusty surface for a moment before the tension broke and gravity pulled it downward. It splashed against one of the writhing masses below, and suddenly the whole horde took notice. Several tendrils of them surged upward, licking around the rung he'd just come from, searching back along the rungs he'd left behind. More and more of them rose, their little lamprey mouths pulsing and shining like the tube of teeth they were.

  Brom swung to gain momentum and hurled himself forward, thudding against the broken catwalk and scrambling to get his legs out of the gulf below. He crouched there for a moment pressing his palms to his jeans to keep any more blood from attracting those sightless monsters. He'd half expected the rust and vibration created by his ungraceful dismount to have them lock on, but after a few searching moments, the innards moved on.

  So did Brom.

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 17:05:13]

  The Maw couldn't be reached. He'd noticed as he'd gone forward, there were fewer and fewer catwalks. That there'd been less plating on the walls and more flesh and innards. It was clear that the deeper sections had been prioritized with building resources, doubly clear that the innards were thick around the Maw to help carry the goods deeper into Yacht Sothoth's belly. Even more depressing, there didn't seem to be anything like a brain or, if there was, he had no access to it from this point below decks.

  "Fuck. Okay, time for Plan B."

  There was a Plan A?

  Brom flinched. He'd forgotten that self-checkout Satan was lurking over his shoulder with its gaggle of voyeurs, all paying for the pleasure of watching him get greased up and oily and crawl through some guts. "Yes. Considering this thing seems to be a living organism and is somewhat shark-like, I came forward hoping to find its brain or whatever neural control center it might have. Now I see it's probably more like a ship, and I need to be heading for the bridge, which means backtracking."

  He waited for the System to say something about how stupid he was. Surprisingly, there was nothing. Even that cruel, unfeeling mechanical mind realized that yes, all his thoughts had been logical. They were based on the information he had, which was very meager and wholly observation-based. Brom didn't know anything about this fucker until he saw it with his own eyes. Right now, his eyes were saying he needed to do a one-eighty and re-navigate back to his starting point.

  There was nothing to be done for it. "I hope this is the kind of entertainment you pay the big money for. Personally, to me, this feels like the shitty section of the horror movie. The part where there are tons of music stingers and jump scares, and no substance. If this is an action movie, I'd say you're within your rights to be requesting a refund."

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 16:55:42]