Sword Art Online: Vengeance

The Eighth Chapter - Desperation

October 6th, 2027

“Damn you…you killed us all! God damn you!” Net began to charge once again at Sina, but she’d already begun to sprint into the corridor she’d spent the past minute slowly approaching.

I turned in circles, trying to trace the source of the monsters’ sounds, but it only took me a moment to come to the horrifying realization that the reason I couldn’t find their source was that they were simply coming from everywhere. Far behind me, in the corridor from which we’d entered the room, screaming broke out as the monsters reached them. At least two were engulfed by the voracious insects before I turned away, focusing my attention instead on the fleeing perpetrator of the massacre. But she too, along with Net, had frozen in place.

For a few seconds, the room was eerily quiet. Sina’s escape plan, in the absence of the invisibility potions she’d so adamantly demanded Net acquire, had been to flee the room through the hall on the opposite side. Now, the look on her face was an unmistakably clear indication of just how wrong she was. As if materializing from thin air, the swarm was upon us. Sina was instantaneously overwhelmed and brought to the ground by the tidal wave of indiscernibly shaped insects. She perished in a burst of light not even a full second later.

“God damn it, run!” Net shouted. There was no time to develop a course of action. All I knew was that we needed to get as far away as possible. The four of us flew on feet that barely seemed to even touch the ground, carrying us at superhuman speeds. The buzzing of the huge swarm behind us was growing quieter; we were gaining ground. Intermittent flashes of light from the opposite side of the room marked the deaths of guild members who fell one by one to the all-consuming miasma.

In the dim light of the chamber, I had only my ears to rely on, but the sound of approaching bugs seemed to be omnipresent. Clearly there would be no escape behind us, nor in front, and I could both hear and faintly see them approaching from the left, but perhaps…

“Right!” I called out without hesitation. “We have to go down the right hallway!”

The four of us changed direction simultaneously and veered towards the archway. Our pursuers, unable to sense our location by sound amidst the sounds of their own clacking legs and pincers, continued to rush forwards until they began to collide with the elevated platform at the room’s center where the Blood Totem once sat. This obstacle was short-lived, however; immediately, the foot-long insects began to crawl over the pedestal in desperate yet ignorant efforts to reach us. In reality, their course actually would lead them to prey: the remainder of the party.

Once we reached the singular empty hallway, we could only stand and watch the ensuing chaos. I don’t know how many died and continued to die, and I most likely never will, but that number was something I cared not to think about. I could only be glad that a handful of us had managed to escape.

A voice suddenly broke through the muffled cries of the doomed warriors. “I need to help them,” Net panted. “They…they’ll all die…”

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “Don’t tell me you forgot what happened to Sina about thirty seconds ago. Those things ate her alive in half a second. You think you stand a chance? Just leave the poor bastards! They’ll have to fend for themselves!”

“Hah…just as I thought. You’re a damned coward.” I was met with a stare from him that I knew well. It was a look of pure contempt.

“Courage and throwing your life away are two different things entirely, Net. Be reasonable for a sec-”

“Be reasonable? You’d have me sit back here while my entire guild is slaughtered by those things!?” He turned his back to me. “People like you are all the same. You have so little to lose, yet you cling to it relentlessly.”