[SWAMP 1 - STRUGGLE]

“Ah, amazing!” he exclaims with a smile. He’s sure the encroaching fear is just his imagination: if she’s confident with this spot, then he’s sure they’ll be okay, at least for a little while.

Picking up his pace, he fills his vision with nothing else but dreams of the cabin: warmth, safety, food, and perhaps some lively conversation with a cute girl?

A night of deep connection in a safehouse surrounded by fireflies and treefrogs… he can’t even start to imagine a better evening.

“M- Hey, stop!” Valerie shouts as the pattering of his feet overtake her voice.

“It’s right there!” he shouts back, keeping pace. “You want to be safe, don’t yo-”

But that’s the last “almost relaxed” thing that comes out of his voice tonight.

His right foot lands into its next step, passes through the soil, and it goes deeper. His foot travels a good half meter before it finds a sharp wooden spear.

All he can do is scream as he jerks his leg up from the pit.

The solid and well-stabilized stick has pierced up through the top of his bare foot, and embedded itself into the mid-point of his shin.

As Masaru yells with everything he can pull into his lungs, Valerie looks to somewhere else in the swamp.

It’s not only a horribly painful sensation for Masaru, but it’s also a weird one, as if he’s pulling something underneath him. Upon focusing, he can feel it: a thin metallic wire pulling from the trap in his foot and off into a nearby tree, from the nearby tree to a further away tree, and off in the direction of the lake.

Valerie bites her lip, immediately hyperventilating as the entire swamp falls silent.

No more chirping from bugs. No more croaking from frogs. Even the breeze in the leaves above halts its long dance to be made less noticeable.

Masaru grits his teeth, clamping his jaws together with everything he has to stifle another scream.

“What…” he curses before continuing. “Is this!?”

“Shit,” she hisses out as she fumbles with her rifle and steps about in a frenzy to get over to Masaru.

Sound returns to the swamp, but this time it’s no croaking and chirping songs… it’s just noise.

Yes, mindless white noise, like the slow, low growl of a lion waiting in the deepest cave in the world. It’s an ear-filling drone of unknown sound: noise made simply to distract and muffle softer things, like the approach of footsteps.

“Not this again!” Valerie cries, her chest rising and falling faster and faster as she stumbles back and forth. “Why’d you go and do that?!” she adds as she gets to him and tries to give him her shoulder to lean on.

It takes Masaru a moment to regain his balance, but he recovers to a single foot and begins hopping as best he can with her hurried pace.

“You have to be slow here!” she shouts. “Especially when it’s dark!”

Masaru forces himself to reply between pain-stricken breaths, “But I… the lake.”

“Traps, you idiot!” she snips back, helping him with her little frame as best she can into the clearing with the little comfy cabin.

He nods. Yes, traps. A bit obvious now, but he can’t blame her if it seems like it needs restating after he ran right into one.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he snaps back. “You’re the idiot.”

“I was trying to!” Valerie says back. “That’s why I was taking the front!”

His eyes sharpen with self-loathing as they breach into the final clearing leading up to the cabin.

“Alright! Almost there!” she sighs in relief as the noise becomes so loud she has to yell to feel heard.

He relies fully on her shoulder as she unceremoniously pushes open the door.

A lithe, sharp sound, one that Masaru will become much more used to, until he’s done, whines from the door.

“Wh-”

“Shit!”

The two of them barely speak as the door-trap activates, the pressure of the door’s opening pulling a mechanism from within the cabin.

A wooden bolt smacks into Valeries knee, and she doubles back with him, the two collapsing in the mud right at the steps of the cabin.

She curses, he curses, the two tremble over each other as they attempt to recover, but the noise only becomes louder.

“It… it cheated!” Valerie screams between agonized breaths. “It’s f***ing cheating!”

Masaru does his best to get her back to her feet, but the balancing act, mixed with the speed at which they’re trying to move, makes the process slower than it needs to be.

“What do you mean?” he asks, every word in his voice marked with pain.

“It’s never done that!” she shouts, letting go of him and attempting to crawl up the steps instead as she checks the swamp behind them. “This was always…”

“Always what?!” Masaru asks. He looks at her face, and sees the doe-like horror of a prey animal waiting for its end. Masaru looks back, too.

“Safe,” Valerie says, just as a huge figure in a long coat, its wide-brimmed hat submerging its face into an unknowable umbra.

Masaru’s eyes widen like true prey. The figure’s eyes glow a demoniac, blood-starved red.

“Not again!” Valerie says as the figure brandishes a lumberjack’s axe from under his coat. She lifts up her rifle to take her shot. “Not again!”

She fires, nicking the side of the figure’s collar as it rears up to swing.

There’s no quick climactic death. Valerie screams in what sounds to be both fear and anger as he feels the axe blade smash into his body again and again.

It’s brutalizing, slower than the other ways he’s died, with his skeleton and extremities destroyed before that increasingly-familiar drowning feeling wells up in his lungs.

This really is hell, he tells himself before the axe blade smashes into his face. His last conscious thoughts are filled with Valerie’s yelps as The Enemy moves on to her. There’s another gunshot… but the screaming doesn’t end.

He feels something more, a brief glimpse of consciousness in a sea of fatal sleep.

The cicadas sing again, and his spirit cries out to turn around. He does so, just in time to face a figure in a familiar alleyway.

The stiletto enters his aortic arch again – Masaru cannot see the face of his killer.