++It is wise always to keep an ear on what happens in the sewers. Often, disturbances below forewarn of disaster above.++

  Chapter 43

  Reggie was trembling. He hadn’t known he could do that, had assumed his body was beyond such human reactions, but there he was with all his bones rattling and teeth chattering and mind racing at a million miles an hour while he desperately tried to tell himself everything would be okay.

  But would it? He wasn’t fucking healing, and his skin was already flaking from where the sun had scorched it. Stupid of him to push his luck staying out, idiot—

  Keep calm.

  “How?” Reggie snapped, which Sycily didn’t deserve.

  You will heal, she told him, calming his nerves instantly. A bit.

  “I’m not healing,” he spat.

  You were burned by the sun, it will take longer for your body to replenish. You’re pushing your Regeneration?

  “Yes,” he groaned, “it’s not doing anything.”

  It is, just wait. From injuries like this, caused by the sun, your body’s recovery is slowed by two orders of magnitude. A factor of one hundred. Pushing your Regeneration, you are currently restoring the damage approximately one hundred times faster than a normal human would.

  Which, in the scale of healing, wasn’t really a significant difference, not for a while. One hundred times normal. Reggie knew it took weeks for burns to repair themselves, at best. Months for the worst. The very worst never fixed at all, though he’d already confirmed his undead body could restore what would be permanent harm in humans when he regrew that foot.

  Months , though. Divided by one hundred that was what, half a day or moreat minimum?

  Reggie didn’t like the idea of staying in a sewer for half a day, and certainly not more than that. At the very least he didn’t need to worry about disease anymore, not as a corpse. The miasma here was probably thick enough that all his exposed burns would have infected him with balls-explode-disease ten times over by now if that weren’t the case.

  He started walking, hoping to pass the time, thinking about what to do next. Reggie did not like the sewers at all, but with no choice besides staying in them for the time being—until nightfall where he could more confidently emerge in darkness, at the very least—he decided to use his time as best as he could and commit some of their layout to memory. One did not flee from the police every few weeks for an entire childhood without learning the merits of planning one’s escape routes well ahead of time.

  “God, this place reeks,” he groaned, “what’s it even for?”

  It carries sewage out—

  “I know what it does, I’m asking why it needs to exist, people in Norvhan managed just fine without summoning shit demons from hell under the town.”

  People in Norvhan had to dispose of one or two thousand pounds of feces a day, this city is required to manage a thousand times as much.

  Reggie understood that, but he kept grumbling anyway. It was something to do. He kept to the walls and, at first, avoided the sections of sewer that were most…unhygenic. The general structure consisted of stone pavement placed alongside what was, ultimately, a river of liquefied shit. The river was warm, and bubbling, for some fucking reason, and the closer Reggie got to it the more he wanted to die, so he indeed kept to the fucking walls.

  “Why are they built so broad?” he asked. “So…wide, tall, why am I even able to walk around down here?”

  That is…an interesting question. I don’t seem to know.

  “How do you know things anyway?”

  I don’t know.

  Figured. Reggie still found himself gnawing at the problem of the sewer’s size, it seemed somehow important. Like—a giant monster jumped out of nowhere and dragged him into the shit river.

  Reggie opened his mouth to scream, which was very unfortunate given that the mouth in question was surrounded by air for only a brief moment more before everything around it became molten excrement.

  He tasted it. Funny tasting, shit was. Reggie wouldn’t have recommended the experience, and certainly not accidentally swallowing a bit as he did. That was somehow the least of his concerns though. The thing, whatever it was, hoisted Reggie back out of the shit and then threw him again. This time he’d gathered enough sense to transform as he flew.

  Good thing, because he hit a wall one moment later and sent cracks as long as his body running along the brick surface. Reggie landed in a heap, a pain flaring deep in his side. Something had popped at that impact, and it hadn’t been the stone.

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  He moved despite it, feeling whatever had gotten loose shift more inside him as he scrambled up and turned to face…

  A cockroach. Dear god.

  Reggie knew all about cockroaches. Knew they were to be avoided like nothing else. Apex predators in most of the places they showed up, the things were near-invulnerable and faster than speed itself.

  This one seemed small, at least. Maybe five feet long. Bigger than Reggie for sure, its body was far heavier and wider, but compared to the stories he’d heard he wondered if this might have been a baby.

  Either way, the baby in question started going low and Reggie realised a dash was coming.

  He managed to dive aside just before impact, which might well have saved him from being killed on the spot. Ten paces separated him from the cockroach but it shot past them almost faster than Reggie could react, then crunched into the wall hard enough that fragments of rock went flying out in all directions as if a cannon had shot it.

  Reggie fell as several chunks bigger than his fists smashed into him and threw him off-kilter. Even transformed, the impacts hurt. He rose fast, made to run, then paused. He couldn’t get away, not from that speed.

  “What Tier is it?”

  Tier 4.

  Same as a wolf spider then. So the question was, how much more powerful was Reggie than when he’d nothing-short-of-euthenized the one Ajoke was attacked by?

  Probably not by enough, but Reggie didn’t have any options here so the question was really just theoretical. He jumped towards the cockroach and denied it the distance needed to reach sprinting speed, landing right on its back as his claws scraped against the hard shell protecting it. Nothing. Maybe he scratched them, left a few marks, but he definitely didn’t cut through.

  Didn’t find much purchase either, as soon as the creature started moving fast Reggie was struggling just to hold on. He scrambled around and ended up grabbing an antenna on sheer instinct, gripping it tight, twisting it into his hand and using it for grip. It worked.

  And, apparently, hurt like hell. The cockroach screamed like Reggie was yanking some other appendage, and though its struggles became more intense still he had a solid grip on its antenna and used it well to hold himself in place.

  With one hand. With his other, claws extended, he started swinging down for the head.

  Heads tended to have thinner armour. Helmets didn’t provide as much protection as cuirasses, and apparently nature followed that general rule because the cockroach’s armour plating got a lot more fragile around the spots needed for mobility and flexing. Reggie actually saw blood after a few clean slashes.

  Not enough. The cockroach started running then, running stupidly fast. Reggie was smashed in the face by air as fast as a crossbow bolt and felt his grip on the antenna slipping. He’d just reinforced it with his other hand when they hit another wall.

  And this time Reggie was much closer to all the flying debris.

  Normal men would’ve been shredded, hell Reggie’s old Classless self probably would’ve been dismembered. Transformed and Toughened as he was, he still felt skin tearing open and soft tissues lacerated. His hand sprang open where it held the antenna, fingers suddenly ignoring his order to stay shut and letting him fall off the creature. The cockroach was on him fast.

  Once again, Reggie found himself comparing his own abilities to those of a more common individual. Most men, crushed beneath such a powerful creature, might have panicked. Reggie however kept his wits about him, and cunningly lured it into a false sense of security by allowing every bone below his hips to be shattered at once.

  The cockroach was not affected by his maneuver. It bore more weight down on Reggie and he used the two of his limbs that still had functioning skeletal structures to try and hold it up, failing utterly. Its teeth clamped down on his shoulder, blood oozing out.

  But while it was chewing, its face was right up close and within reach. Reggie jabbed a claw in each eye and twisted.

  A scream escaped the cockroach, higher-pitched than Reggie would’ve expected. It threw him almost accidentally, trying to leap back but getting its teeth all snagged on his meat. Reggie ended up doing a full rotation in the air before he landed, kept rolling and, after much deliberation, decided to settle on another roll for his motion’s end. He tried to stand and remembered his legs, healing a mere ten thousand times faster than normal, were still in about fifty times more pieces than they should’ve been, and had to make do with dragging himself as the cockroach charged again.

  This time he was too slow, and its shoulder clipped him as he went past. The cockroach detonated another wall, this time sending cracks running deep up into the ceiling. It also tore one of Reggie’s ruined legs clean off where it was caught in the impact.

  He didn’t stop sliding until another wall caught him, though fortunately Reggie didn’t hit this one hard enough to kill it. Or him. He stopped clumsily and groaned, tried to rise on a limb that wasn’t there anymore and managed only to force himself up onto his remaining heel.

  All as the cockroach turned, and prepared for another charge.

  Reggie had one leap in him before he went down again. When he went down, he’d take time to get up. A lot of time. Time that the cockroach would take less than to reach him. If he was down when it reached him, he’d not get up ever again. Didn’t matter how survivable he was now, a clean hit would liquefy him and there’d be no coming back from that.

  So he was very careful about exactly when he dived to the side.

  He managed it, cleared himself of the charge and was rewarded with only searing pain instead of agonizing pain as stony debris struck his back. Reggie ended up face-up and staring as the cockroach stumbled away from its point of impact, shaking itself and…no. Not shaking. The chamber was shaking around them, every bit of the sewer for a dozen yards in each direction.

  Shaking more by the moment.

  The cracks spread, thickened, then chunks of masonry started falling out. Reggie had a single moment to panic as he saw daylight poking in through the ceiling.

  After that, the ceiling itself became his new concern. It dropped down exactly like a yard-thick plane of rock suddenly bereft of its structural support, and through sheer, dumb luck the bulk of it landed right on top of the cockroach.

  Reggie was actually thrown back by the force of impact, rolling, jarring his stump, and finding even his vampiric nerves shot with agony by the combination of speed and just how fucked up the injured limb was. He’d have taken it all a dozen times over to see the sight of the cockroach beaten again, though. Falling slabs five or ten times his own body’s size came crashing down on it, striking so hard that they broke to pieces when it was cockroach carapace they impacted, or fractured the ground where it was that. Blood soon poked out from numerous wounds on the thing as more and more stone battered it. An avalanche localised entirely above that one creature.Then the big one came. Three feet thick, easily ten long and wide. The block of stone must’ve weighed tens of tons.

  It crashed down like God himself had taken a shit on the cockroach’s head and the head in question just caved in.