Suffering is a shared experience, suffering alone is a unique hell.

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 15:34:32]

  Retreading ground already covered was easier than forging a new path. He already knew where the soft spots were, where he would have trouble, and he was thinking ahead and problem-solving. It was so much easier to just follow behind the movement of the eely insides, like a fish finally swimming with the current rather than against it. Brom still had deep reservations about getting any closer to the glowing center of this horrorscape, but it wasn't optional anymore.

  He found himself taking comfort in his music, humming softly, brokenly. Mentally, it was like lighting a candle against the polar night, a small act of defiance. Now and again, he'd mutter a lyric or two, laughing at himself afterward. It was a good thing that nothing seemed to be listening, the innards too far ahead of him and Yacht Sothoth itself seemingly unaware. He was free to roam in the guts of the dark behemoth like a drop of ink lost in a gallon of water.

  "Does any man know where the love of god goes when the waves turn-" He paused his rendition of the classic folk song when a strange clattering noise reverberated down the ribs of the monster. Here he was much closer to the core, the temperature high enough to dry the slime in his hair to stiff peaks and send sweat dripping down his balls. The inner metal of the walls flexed softly, the sigils on it a litany that clawed at the mind if you looked too long. He'd reached what looked like a debris field, the end of where the innards pushed things and the start of the core's feasting zone.

  He made himself low on the catwalk, catching sight of identifiable wreckage from the boats in the harbor and the CHYC clubhouse. Brom was not the most tactical of persons, but he desperately wanted to live, and his mind was as sharp as it was going to get to fulfill that desire. Until he knew what the source of that rattling was, he was unwilling to move. Another rattle, flickering shapes swaying and dancing in the brilliant light, screened from view by heat and the maze-like web of walkways. Some might have called them non-Euclidean. Brom preferred to say they were fucking curved. Either way, his brain rebelled at the thought of following a spiral upside down and around.

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 14:44:41]

  His calves were cramping from the waiting, and he was starting to think his only choice was to climb down on the debris field. It seemed solid enough or, well, at least it wasn't going to end up trying to make him walk on the ceiling. That's when the rattling and clattering reached a crescendo, the shadows lurching violently, and the debris shuddered. It looked like something was burrowing. Steam rose along the wriggling lines, and then he spotted it.

  Chains.

  Burning chains of rust and wrath were snaking their way through massive chunks of debris. Then, suddenly, the slack snapped taut, and they were hauled back into that mess of spiral catwalks, the whole space bending out of the way to allow this feast. Possessed by curiosity, he crept forward, duckwalking slowly to stay low and hopefully not draw attention. With every step, the heat was rising, the air becoming uncomfortably damp and weighted with the taste of iron. Here, Yacht Sothoth was drawing to it the things that would strengthen it.

  He had to raise a hand against the brilliance as the core came into view.

  A mass of swirled iron, like a foreign moon with organic curves of flesh-like mimicry, glowed white hot. Waves of heat made the air distort, rippling like sound waves off the squirming metal mass. Those chains slipped from its surface, blending in until they moved, the links glimmering with molten birth metal before the sauna-damp air raised an instant rust coating on them. The ever-present rust that coated everything and made it palatable. That turned the combustion into absorption. Like how there was iron in blood to absorb oxygen, there was a rust coating everything to absorb whatever vital essence powered the dark behemoth.

  None of that was the worst, though. The worst was the fact that the air had a stomach-churning scent to it. Brom had grown a bit nose-blind to the rotting scents elsewhere in Yacht Sothoth's ruined form, to the scent of brine and old metal. Those weren't present here. Here it smelled like an industrial fire and, in a stomach-churning undercurrent of wrong, the sweet smell of roasting meat. Above the core, dripping a quenching liquid that evaporated in the heat, were the bodies of all those unfortunate enough to have been consumed.

  They were held high by the chains, far enough away that the blast furnace of the core didn't just immolate them. No, they were very slowly being rendered. Like beef in a smoker or a chicken in a roasting pan.

  His stomach flipped over, and that unholy meal he'd eaten took the Exorcist speed exit. At least he got good distance with the chunky stream.

  It was unfortunate then that the chains noticed him, rising like cobras to take stock of where this nutrient-rich rain of delight had suddenly come from. He stood, slowly taking one step back, then two, then his sneakers were hammering the metal of the catwalk as he turned and sprinted back the way he'd come. He could hear the chains shooting after him, bodies hissing and links rattling, and knew it was only a matter of moments before they caught him. With no other choice, he yanked open the next hatch he came to and slammed it shut behind him. He listened to the links thud against it, felt the metal shudder under the impact, and backed away from it.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  The light was dim and blue here, the tunnel into the flesh of the beast claustrophobic with more of that fleshly metal. But he had no choice. He couldn't go back through that door, and so he turned, wiped his mouth again, and tried to think of a way to mark the tunnels to show where he'd been. It was a straight shot right now, but what if it began branching? He didn't want to end up like that one poor cataphile from the viral spooky footage, running into oblivion, never to be seen again. Brom wanted to die in bed, surrounded by his cats. Or, if the universe wasn't going to allow him that, he wanted to go down swinging.

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 9:10:05]

  He'd settled for digging his fingers into the bulkheads, pinching and twisting the metal and leaving a little whirled design as a marker to indicate which way he'd gone. He'd even backtracked toward the door, wasting hours upon hours to make sure that the metal wasn't healing itself and stranding him. He was also spending plenty of time just plain lost. He'd caught himself going in circles no fewer than three times, somehow looping back to a starting point despite taking random numbers of lefts and rights. He'd think he was making good progress only to end up back in a section that possessed one of his whirled little marks. But finally, after at least three hours wasted, he was making progress.

  He had found stairs!

  They creaked under his weight, footsteps echoing into the spiraling darkness, but the higher he climbed, the more the surroundings looked like a ship and less like eldritch shark flesh. Then, suddenly, his map pinged. It was like wandering in the forest and your cellphone suddenly finding the most fleeting bar of signal. If Yacht Sothoth had been an actual ship, this would have been the crew quarters. "Not that I expect there to be crew. What kind of crew would something like this monster even have? Symbiotic parasites?" Like that fungus that took over ants and made them move how it wanted?

  Brom didn't like the sound of that at all. He'd played those games and hadn't really liked the implications of the monsters sobbing as they went about their murdering. After all, Benjamin's words were still burning hot in his brain. He'd been fed to this thing with the intent to somehow marry his power into Yacht Sothoth. Which implied that the beast had a way of stripping his skills out of him and absorbing them for themselves.

  He'd just reached the upper landing when a sound made him freeze. It was the sound of a hatch being undogged and opening. A moment later, light of a different kind flooded in, and suddenly he could smell the cold air of the harbor. Wait... had the creature come to the surface? For what purpose? Was the survival mission taking on a new phase? Like, now that he'd passed the twelve-hour mark, the difficulty was going to go up?

  A force suddenly tore through the air, a wall of invisible force that carried no sound, smashed into him, knocking him off balance. He hit the railing with a violent clang, a railing that had never been designed to stop anyone nearly as tall as Brom. He made a grab for the bar, missed, and found himself falling back down the shaft of the stairway. Much like falling out of the family tree, he seemed to hit everything on the way down.

  HP: 410/600

  HP: 405/600

  HP: 400/600

  HP: 395/600

  HP: 390/600

  Who knew how many feet he fell, but he slammed on his back at the bottom of the stairwell, staring upward through the center and feeling a lot like Marv from the holiday movie with all the traps.

  HP: 350/600

  Back in the bilge, he slowly got to his feet and rolled his neck, trying to realign his spine. That would absolutely have killed anyone else. It had shaved off sixty points of his health, which was like the average man three times over. Well, maybe more. After all, he didn't know how his body score reduced the damage he was taking.

  That looked very painful, Player Brom Jones. Did you learn anything from it?

  "I have learned that spite is a great painkiller. The moment I heard you, I didn't feel nearly as bad. I suppose I should look into rage as a self-sustaining resource."

  Rage is a unique Barbarian class skill that would have been helpful. You could have chosen it at level five, but it appears you didn't choose your second active skill. You know, we had a Tutorial for that?

  Brom looked back up the stairwell instead of responding. Down here in the rusty bowels, all the metal had returned to a state of bleak decay. The last fifteen feet of the stairway was gone, and the rusted metal looked so brittle that even if he had made that jump, he doubted it would have held long enough for him to haul himself up. "You know what, I'm done. I'm done playing by the rules of the maze."

  He walked around the edge of the room, running his hand along the wall. The action did two things for him, first confirming that the only door was rusted shut, and second, it showed him that one wall was much warmer than the other. That was the wall he punched through. His fists thudded against the metal, knuckles turning bloody, but the steel gave way. As he tore open a hole large enough to fit through, he felt the whole of Yacht Sothoth shudder.

  "Ha! You felt that, didn't you, you fucking fish bastard!" It had to feel like one of those sharp muscle pains deep inside. Or maybe the behemoth felt a tearing sensation. Either way, once Brom had pulled himself through, he began to look around, to scout a sense of direction. Yacht Sothoth pitched sharply, diving back down, it seemed, and he went skidding along the channel like a surfer riding a wave into the unknown darkness ahead.

  [Quest Stage Four: Survive the Beast 8:45:01]