I Die to Rise: Resurrection System-Chapter 98: Hollow Eyes!

Kurt couldn’t tell which was more messed up. The fact that he was being straddled by an assassin with a dagger held over his head, or the fact that he was turned on by it. The evidence was rather undeniable, pressing insistently against her.

Squish!

Lena slammed the dagger down into a scorpion the size of a human foot that had been crawling toward Kurt’s head. "Sand scorpions," she whispered. "Poisonous fuckers."

When she shifted slightly, she felt it. Something huge brushing against her through the thin fabric of their prison uniforms.

She froze.

"Oh?" Lena tilted her head, not quite sure what she was feeling at first. Then her eyes widened with realization. "Oh."

A slow smile spread across her face. "Wow."

She didn’t need to touch it to realize just how big it was. "I heard Untouched hunters are supposed to be celibate. Untouched not just from essence, but from all carnal desires." She raised an eyebrow. "Seems like someone didn’t get the memo."

Kurt cleared his throat, grabbing her hips and gently lifting her off him. "Maybe I’m different."

"That so?" Her smile turned devious for a moment before her ears twitched sharply, swiveling toward something in the distance, tracking sounds Kurt couldn’t hear. Then her expression went serious. "When there’s one, there are bound to be hundreds more."

She grabbed the small monster core left behind by the sand scorpion and scanned it against her collar. "We need to get out of here."

She stood and kicked Razor’s leg. "Hey. We’re leaving."

The chittering sounds were now loud enough for even Kurt to hear. Sand scorpions burrowed out from beneath rocks and sand, marching toward them in a coordinated swarm. Kurt’s eyes tracked the movement. He counted a hundred... two hundred... five hundred... eight hundred.

"Bollocks."

Razor stood and stared up at the sky. The sun wasn’t out yet. "It’s still too dark. We can’t risk falling into a vanishing pit. I’d prefer not to get crushed into paste under a thousand feet of swirling sand."

"And I prefer not to get stung to death," Lena countered.

This was the Crimson Hollows all over again, except this time Kurt was stuck with powerless hunters and couldn’t risk revealing he could use other abilities.

So he grabbed Razor like a sack of potatoes under one arm and pulled Lena by her waist into his other side. "Hold on."

The swarm surged forward just as he stomped into the sandy floor and launched skyward from sheer leg strength alone.

Moving through the air in an arc toward the north, Kurt landed two miles ahead of their previous position. And from their soft landing, the sand erupted in a cloud of dust.

"Figured we just had to get past the range of the vanishing pits if we couldn’t see well enough to navigate," Kurt said with a grin, letting them go.

Razor stumbled slightly, shaking sand from his mohawk. "That was a fucking terrible experience."

"I don’t know," Lena said, brushing herself off. "It wasn’t half bad."

Then they turned their attention to a figure standing a few feet ahead.

It was one of the prisoners they’d journeyed with earlier. The three who’d decided to split off.

Except they weren’t three anymore. There was only one. Older-looking, maybe in his forties... Dane. In his right hand, a sack that most likely contained the cores they had been stockpiling.

"What happened to the sidekicks?" Kurt asked.

Dane bowed his head, eyes squeezing shut in apparent anguish. "They didn’t make it." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "The plan was to gather cores and scan them once we got to a safe zone..."

"Ah. I see," Kurt said flatly. "And now you get to scan all those cores for yourself."

Dane raised his head. His eyes were dry. "Are you accusing me of something?"

"If the shoe fits, mate."

"Fuck you!" Dane grabbed Kurt’s prison uniform, yanking him forward. "You know, you’ve got a lot of nerve."

"We don’t have time for this," Lena said, rolling her eyes. "We’re a mile away from a safe zone and an exit gate. So can we stop the chattering and try to get the fuck out of here?"

"Agreed," Razor said.

"Agreed," Kurt concluded, slapping Dane’s hand away and starting toward the safe zone with Lena and Razor.

Once they’d put some distance between themselves and Dane, Razor leaned in and whispered, "He killed those poor bastards. Or at least led them to their deaths."

Kurt’s fingers clenched into fists for a second before relaxing. "Yeah."

They were about thirty feet from the exit gate when three giant centipedes burrowed out of the ground, towering over them like segmented nightmares.

"Let’s get this over with," Kurt said, rushing the one in the middle while Lena took the right and Razor ran toward the left, swinging his chain.

Maybe it was the compiled shittiness of his entire experience with the Circle finally bubbling up, or the fact that he badly wanted to cave in Dane’s face with his boots, but the centipede received the full brunt of it.

A single punch completely obliterated its form. The centipede was instantly eviscerated by the sheer power of his strike, chitin and ichor exploding outward in a grotesque spray, leaving behind a glowing core he picked up.

On his right, Lena was just about done. Her daggers had already severed all hundred of the centipede’s giant crawly limbs before she concluded with a strike from above, dropping down and driving the blade straight into its head.

Lena landed on all fours, perfectly balanced, tail swishing behind her, then grabbed her core, scanning it. Afterwards, she licked the back of her hand in the way a cat would, rubbing it across her hair.

On the other side, Razor was wrapping up. He screamed too loud with each swing of his chain, almost comically aggressive like he was overcompensating for something.

The centipede reared up, dove down, and rammed into him, sending both of them tumbling into the sand. A few seconds later, the centipede erupted back out with Razor on its back, chain wrapped around its mandibles as he rode it like a rampaging bull, laughing maniacally.

Kurt grinned, shaking his head. "I owe him money, you know."

Lena turned to him with a smile. "That’s unfortunate."

Razor dropped to the ground moments later, the monster dead. He shook sand from his mohawk and grabbed his core to scan.

With that, they proceeded to the safe zone and stepped through the gate. At the same time, multiple other prisoners were coming through from different sections of the dungeon, all spatially connected to this main exit point.

Five minutes later, Dane and many more prisoners stepped out, and the gate turned from blue to brown, indicating no non-monster life remained within the dungeon.

Apparently, only a few hours had passed in the real world as opposed to the days they’d spent in the Bast dungeon. Not every dungeon had this time dilation effect, but the ones that did still fascinated Kurt in a way he couldn’t quite explain.

The system chimed.

[SUB SYSTEM QUEST 1: Survive Bast Dungeon - COMPLETE]

[Reward: +10 Points]

[SUB SYSTEM QUEST 2: Defeat 50 D-Rank Monsters - COMPLETE]

[Reward: +10 Points]

[Available Points: 40]

Looking around, Kurt noticed the numbers had significantly dropped. A quick cursory glance suggested no more than fifty prisoners remained.

"Alright," a Circle guard announced. "The D.A. will handle core retrieval. As for us, we’re heading back to the Circle. All of you, get in the blimp."

They all filed in silently.

***

Two days later, they arrived back at the Circle.

The return journey felt longer than the trip out, maybe because Kurt had nothing to distract himself from the grim reality of what he was planning. Breaking Riley out. Getting her market value up. Trying to make it to the auction.

When they finally disembarked, Lena grabbed his arm.

"Come on, tiger," she said. "I’ll introduce you to the crew."

She led him through the Walk, navigating the identical radial structures with practiced ease, until they reached a section where the prisoners were distinctly different.

Minaris. All of them.

Cat-eared women with colourful fur. A massive ox-like man with horns curving from his skull. A fox Minari with scars across his muzzle. They moved with a fluidity that set them apart from the other prisoners, even without access to their essence.

Lena stopped in front of the ox man. "Urm. This is Kurt, a friend of Riley’s. He’s an Untouched. Helped us survive the Bast run."

Urm studied Kurt with dark, calculating eyes. He was huge, easily seven feet tall, muscles like stone, and he carried himself like someone who’d been in the Circle for a very long time. "An Untouched, huh?"

"That’s what they tell me," Kurt said.

Urm grunted. "Lena vouches for you. That’s enough." He gestured toward the back of the section. "Riley’s over there. But don’t expect much. She’s been in the Hole for three weeks. She just got out."

Kurt’s stomach tightened. "Three weeks?"

Urm nodded grimly. "Warden doesn’t take kindly to prisoners who fight back."

Kurt followed Urm’s gesture and spotted her.

Riley sat against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around them. Her mouse ears were flat against her head, and her eyes stared blankly at nothing. She didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just sat there like a hollow shell.

Kurt approached slowly and crouched beside her, but she still didn’t react.

He reached out and gently took her hand that felt cold and lifeless.

"You may not know me," Kurt said quietly, "but I’m a friend of Cassandra’s. She sent me to help."

Riley’s ears twitched just once at the sound of a name she must have recognized.

But it was the only reaction. Her stare remained blank, empty, like she was somewhere far away and couldn’t find her way back.

Kurt turned to Urm, who’d followed him over. "Will she be alright?"

Urm crossed his massive arms, his face unreadable. "Some people recover after weeks." He paused, voice heavy. "Some stay trapped in their own heads forever... others just go insane."

Kurt looked back at Riley, still holding her hand, and exhaled slowly. He was about to do something really risky.

"Bloody hell."