Chapter 331:fairly prepared.

Chapter 331: 331:fairly prepared.

Silver placed several route markers in an external pocket. His phone went into a protected pouch on his chest. The Portable Network Restoration Module sat beside it. The Emergency Survival Beacon was attached to another secure pocket.

The Mental Restoration Capsule remained inside his storage, but Silver moved it to the first position so he could retrieve it immediately.

Then came weapons. His sword, secure. His handgun,loaded. The suppressor, secure. He removed the magazine and checked it before reinserted it. He chambered a round. He placed two spare magazines where his left hand could easily reach them while the remaining ammunition stayed in storage.

Silver switched on the headlamp at its lowest setting. A narrow beam illuminated the queen’s passage. For the first time, he could see farther into it without relying on Spatial Sense.

The gouges were enormous. Some sections of stone had been torn away completely.

He walked toward the entrance and stopped just before crossing into the tunnel. The air smelled different like earth, and something sour. And beneath it, the unmistakable smell he’d begun associating with the parasitic worms.

Silver’s expression hardened.

This was their territory. He activated Spatial Sense.

[Spatial Sense Lv2 Activated.]

His awareness moved upward. The passage climbed steeply after several dozen meters, then curved. There was no immediate movement.

He expanded farther and still found nothing. He didn’t push to his maximum range, but deactivated the skill.

Silver checked his phone. He switched on the network restoration module briefly.

[Searching...]

[No External Signal Detected.]

He turned it off.

He looked upward. Somewhere between here and the surface was a point where that message would change; that was enough.

Silver took one final look behind him. He wasn’t planning to see this place again.

He faced the queen’s tunnel.

He thought about Ravenna. He wondered whether her emotions had stabilized further. He wondered whether she was already in Alpha Three. Whether she’d found Shawn. Whether she was still trying to organize a rescue. Whether she was sleeping at all.

Silver suspected the answer to the last one was probably no.

A faint smile appeared.

"Just give me a little longer, Ravenna. I only need to get high enough for this thing to find a signal, and then you can spend as long as you want yelling at me for staying behind."

The thought made the tunnel seem slightly less oppressive.

Silver drew his handgun, his other hand remaining free in case he needed the wall for balance.

Then he entered the cave. The incline became noticeable almost immediately. He moved carefully, placing each foot where the ground was most stable.

The headlamp illuminated enormous scratches ahead. Every few meters, he stopped and listened, then continued.

After twenty meters, he placed the first luminescent marker. A faint glow remained behind him.

Silver looked at it. His route back, hopefully unnecessary. He continued upward as the tunnel became steeper. He leaned forward slightly, his injured body complaining, but nothing failed.

His gun remained ready, his senses remained focused, and for the first time since waking, Silver knew exactly where he was going.

Up.

He didn’t know what waited between him and the surface. He didn’t know where the queen’s nest was. He didn’t know how many worms had survived the collapse. He didn’t know whether the route remained intact all the way through.

None of that changed the objective.

He looked toward the darkness above, then continued climbing.

Silver quickly discovered that following the queen’s route upward was far easier to decide on than it was to actually do it.

The first stretch had seemed promising. The tunnel was enormous compared to most of the passages he’d explored below, and the deep scratches carved into the walls made following the Rank Six creature almost effortless.

There was no need to wonder which direction the queen had gone whenever the passage divided because its enormous body had left marks everywhere.

Stone had been chipped away by its legs, packed earth had been compressed beneath its weight, and occasionally he found patches of dried secretion smeared against the walls where the creature had squeezed through tighter sections.

The problem was that the queen apparently had no understanding of the concept of travelling in a straight line.

Silver had spent almost an hour climbing before the passage abruptly levelled out, curved sharply toward the right, continued horizontally for several hundred meters and then began descending.

He stood at the beginning of the downward slope and stared at it for several seconds.

"You cannot be serious."

Silver looked behind himself as though another route might have magically appeared but nothing had changed.

He activated Spatial Sense.

[Spatial Sense Lv2 Activated.]

His awareness spread through the stone ahead, following the broad passage as it descended before eventually curving again beyond his comfortable detection range.

There were smaller tunnels nearby, but none looked promising enough to abandon the only route he knew connected to the upper portions of the worm colony.

Silver deactivated the skill and looked downhill again.

"I’ve spent the last two days trying to go up, and now I’m following something that wants to go down."

He considered turning around. Then remembered the collection of crosses he’d carved beside every dead end he’d already explored.

He sighed and continued.

The descent thankfully didn’t last long. After perhaps fifteen minutes, the tunnel flattened and then gradually began rising again.

His irritation faded slightly, although he was beginning to understand why estimating his actual progress toward the surface was almost impossible.

The queen wasn’t travelling according to human convenience. It was following tunnels; some had been created by the worms while others were natural formations.

Several had clearly been widened by the queen simply forcing its enormous body through spaces that had originally been much smaller.

Silver encountered one of those sections less than half an hour later.

The passage narrowed sharply.

He stopped as he looked at the deep gouges covering both walls and chunks of stone littering the floor.

The queen had apparently decided the tunnel wasn’t large enough and solved the problem through brute force.