Chapter 337:Climbing and descending.

Chapter 337: 337:Climbing and descending.

He deliberately stopped checking the clock because every time he did, less time seemed to have passed than he’d expected.

He climbed, walked and crawled. He rested for five minutes and continued. He found another vertical section.

Silver’s gloves were becoming worn. His shoulder was throbbing. His thigh wound had begun hurting again.

He stopped long enough to check it and found no bleeding. He continued immediately afterwards. The queen’s route entered another large tunnel.

Silver smiled when he noticed the slope. It was going up.

Finally.

He followed it for almost forty minutes, then the tunnel curved downward.

He stopped and looked at the slope, his expression becoming completely blank.

"You know what? I’m not even surprised anymore."

He descended.

At the bottom, the passage curved around an enormous underground rock formation before climbing again on the opposite side.

Silver understood what had happened. The queen hadn’t gone down for no reason. The rock mass was too dense to tunnel through easily. It had gone around which was logical but still irritating.

Silver climbed again.

Eventually he stopped testing the network module every hour. The repeated failure was becoming depressing; instead, he focused on moving.

At some point, he realized his thoughts had become almost mechanical.

He stopped.

His headlamp illuminated another broad stretch of scratched stone. Silver leaned against the wall, his breathing heavy.

His entire body felt exhausted. He pulled out his water to find that only half the bottle remained.

Silver drank carefully.

He looked upward. The tunnel continued, of course it did. He checked his phone.

No signal.

He looked at the time, then frowned. Something wasn’t right.

He tried remembering when he’d entered the queen’s route. His sense of time was too distorted.

Silver opened the system.

"How long have I been travelling since I entered the queen’s route?"

The system answered immediately.

[Calculating elapsed travel time.]

Silver waited.

[Elapsed Time Since Entry Into Primary Queen Route: 14 Hours, 11 Minutes.]

Silver stared at the number.

Fourteen hours.

He looked back down the tunnel, then upward, then back at the system.

"Fourteen?"

[Confirmed.]

Silver rubbed his face.

"You’re telling me I’ve been climbing through this place for fourteen hours?"

[Elapsed time includes periods of combat, medical treatment, exploration and short-duration rest.] 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

Silver sighed.

"Fine. I’ve been suffering through this place for fourteen hours."

The system didn’t correct him.

He lowered himself onto a large flat stone. His legs immediately thanked him. He leaned his head against the wall.

Fourteen hours.

He’d been so focused on finding a route upward that he hadn’t realized how long he’d been moving.

That was dangerous.

Exhaustion caused mistakes and mistakes underground got people killed. Silver looked at his hands. There was slight trembling.

His spatial reserves had dropped from repeated uses of Spatial Sense and Short-Step.

He wasn’t continuing like this. Silver stood again, but only long enough to search for somewhere better to rest.

He found a shallow alcove roughly twenty meters farther along.

It wasn’t perfect, nothing underground was, but it had stone on three sides. It had only one approach large enough for a major creature, and enough room for Silver to sit comfortably.

He activated Spatial Sense.

[Spatial Sense Lv2 Activated.]

He checked the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. There were no hollow burrows immediately surrounding him and movement nearby.

Silver expanded the range slightly, still nothing. He deactivated the skill.

"Good enough."

He placed a luminescent marker near the entrance. He sat with his back against the deepest wall.

His sword went on his left and his handgun on his right. The system storage opened.

Silver retrieved an emergency field meal. He looked at the package, then sighed.

"I’m starting to hate these."

He opened it anyway.

Food was food.

Silver began eating slowly. His body desperately needed calories. He drank water, then removed the medical kit.

His shoulder dressing had loosened from hours of movement. Silver carefully removed it.

The wound was slowly healing with no signs of an infection.

He cleaned it again, applied fresh dressing, then checked his thigh. It was also better. His ribs couldn’t be wrapped easily without restricting his breathing, so he left them alone.

Silver leaned back.

For the first time in hours, he allowed himself to relax slightly, not completely. His handgun remained within reach.

He ate another mouthful.

His thoughts drifted toward Ravenna. Nearly two more days had probably passed since the collapse by now.

She had to be in Alpha Three. Silver hoped so. He wondered whether she’d found Shawn. If she had, his cousin was probably already making calls.

Silver smiled faintly.

Shawn was going to be furious. Assuming he didn’t kill him himself after rescuing him.

Silver took another bite and looked at his phone.

No signal.

"Just a little higher."

The Portable Network Restoration Module sat in his storage waiting for even the faintest connection.

He would find it, eventually.

Silver continued eating.

He didn’t know that several hours earlier, while climbing through one of the narrower passages, drops of his blood had fallen onto the stone.

He hadn’t noticed them.

The wound had stopped bleeding soon afterward but something else had. Far behind him, a dark shape had found the scent.

It had followed slowly, never rushing, or getting close enough for Silver’s brief uses of Spatial Sense to detect it.

Whenever Silver stopped, it stopped and whenever he moved, it followed. Through the narrow passages, across the chambers, and past the abandoned worm tunnels.

Following the increasingly faint scent until it became fresh again. Now, while Silver sat inside the alcove eating, something moved through the darkness several tunnels behind him.

Its padded feet made almost no sound against the stone. Its head remained low with its nostrils flared.

Blood.

The scent was stronger here. The creature continued forward. And Silver, exhausted, had finally allowed himself to rest.

His sense of time gradually became unreliable. There was nothing to tell him whether it was morning or evening.

Only his phone.