Chapter 4: A Trail of Blood

Chapter 4: A Trail of Blood

The green glow of the chemical light stick was a pathetic shield against the all-consuming darkness. It painted the narrow passage in sickly hues, making the ancient stone sweat and the shadows writhe with imagined life. Every scrape of Leo’s body against the rock sounded like the skittering of unseen things. His knees and palms were raw, his field jacket torn. Pain was a constant, a dull throb in his head from the impact and a sharp, grinding ache in his shoulder. But it was nothing compared to the terror.

He pushed the memory of the chittering, fleeting shapes from his mind. He had to. He focused on a single, desperate hope: Thomas. Alive. Hurt, maybe, but alive on the other side of the rockfall. The cave-in might not have been total. There could be a gap. He could be calling for help.

As if summoned by the thought, a sound drifted from the darkness ahead.

It was faint, distorted by the labyrinthine acoustics of the cave. But it was unmistakable.

“...Leo...”

It was Thomas’s voice. A weak, strained whisper that cut through the silence and seized Leo’s heart with a grip of ice and fire.

“T!” Leo yelled, his voice cracking. “I hear you! I’m coming!”

He scrambled forward, his movements clumsy with a desperate urgency. The light stick, held in his teeth, cast frantic, dancing shadows. He was a man drowning, and that faint whisper was the surface.

As if in response to his surge of hope, the System’s ghostly green text flickered to life in his vision. The previous, mocking warnings were gone. In their place, a new, shockingly helpful interface appeared.

[BIOSIGNATURE DETECTED: THOMAS VANCE. TRACKING...]

A simple, pulsating green dot materialized in his vision, hovering in the air down the tunnel ahead. It was a waypoint. A goddamn video game waypoint, pointing directly to his brother.

For the first time since this nightmare began, the System felt less like a parasite and more like a tool. A lifeline. Maybe it wasn't malevolent. Maybe it was a stress-induced survival mechanism, his own brilliant mind creating a user interface to help him navigate the trauma. The thought was a comfort, a flimsy piece of scientific rationale he could cling to in this abyss of the impossible.

“Hold on, T! I’m almost there!” he shouted, his voice echoing back at him.

The passage twisted and narrowed, forcing him onto his belly. He crawled, the waypoint his only guide, the rock scraping his chest and back. The memory of his last conversation with Thomas played in his mind on a cruel loop. His own condescending smirk. His dismissal of the legends. “It’s called science.”

The guilt was a physical weight, heavier than the mountain above him. I did this, he thought. I dragged him here. I made him come. Every inch he crawled was an act of penance. He would find Thomas, get them both out, and he would spend the rest of his life making it up to him. He would listen to the elders. He would learn the stories. He would never, ever mock his brother’s faith again.

The whisper came again, closer now. “...Leo... hurts...”

The sound spurred him on. He pushed harder, ignoring the sharp rocks that tore at his clothes and skin. The waypoint pulsed faster, brighter. He was getting close. He could feel it. A frantic, brilliant hope surged through him, so powerful it almost made him sick. It burned away the fear, the pain, everything but the singular goal of reaching his brother.

He wriggled through a final, constricting section of the tunnel and tumbled out into a small, circular chamber. He pushed himself to his knees, panting, and held the light stick aloft.

The chamber was a dead end. The waypoint in his vision hovered, serene and steady, over a dark, jagged fissure in the rock wall at floor level.

“Thomas?” Leo called out, his voice trembling. The whisper was gone. There was no answer.

His gaze dropped from the waypoint to the floor in front of the fissure. Something was lying there, half-submerged in a dark, wet patch that stained the dusty ground. It was a familiar shape. Metal and plastic.

He crawled forward, his heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. He reached out a trembling hand and picked it up.

It was Thomas’s flashlight. A rugged, heavy-duty Maglite he’d had since he was a kid, a gift from their father. The lens was cracked and the metal casing was deeply dented, as if from a powerful grip. It was lying in a sticky, viscous pool. Leo brought his fingers to his nose. The coppery scent of blood filled his head, thick and undeniable.

His own blood ran cold. No.

He ripped his pack off his back and fumbled for his backup headlamp—a smaller, less powerful one, but it worked. He strapped it on and flicked the switch.

A beam of clean, white light flooded the chamber, revealing the scene in stark, clinical detail.

The pool of blood was larger than he thought. It wasn't a splash; it was a smear. Drag marks, scoured into the thick dust by fingernails and boot heels, led from the center of the chamber directly to the fissure. They were the marks of a desperate struggle.

Leo followed the trail of blood with his light, his breath catching in his throat. He aimed the beam into the fissure. It was a tight, vertical crack in the stone, no wider than his own shoulders. A man could not fit through it.

Not a whole man.

The truth crashed down on him with the force of a physical blow, shattering his hope into a million pieces. The rockfall hadn't been an accident that separated them. It had been an ambush. A tactic. The whispers he’d heard—left his brother—weren’t just taunts; they were a statement of fact. The Chatterlings hadn't just caused a cave-in. They had hunted. They had dragged Thomas, piece by bloody piece, into the deep, secret places of the earth where science and reason could not follow.

His scientific worldview, already cracked and battered, finally and irrevocably shattered. There was no rational explanation for this. There was no carbon monoxide, no infrasound, no hallucination that could account for his brother’s flashlight lying in a pool of his blood before a crack too small for him to fit through. There were only the monsters. The legends were true.

And as this horrifying, world-ending realization crystallized in his mind, the helpful green waypoint above the fissure vanished. In its place, a new line of text burned itself into his vision. It was not a warning. It was not an objective. It was an epitaph, delivered with the cold, passionless finality of a computer reporting an error.

[OBJECTIVE FAILED. PLAYER TWO HAS DISCONNECTED.]