Chapter 1702 Strdl’s Fears

--- Strdl --- (Genuinely has no idea what time it is)

Strdl was stumbling along at this point. Her sense of balance had long since been destroyed. She was barely managing to stay on her feet and it constantly felt like Hunter was getting further away no matter how much she tried. The surroundings weren’t helping matters either. At some point everything had lost its colour. It had creeped in slowly, with the walls ending up grey before too long, then the ground, and the ceiling. Even Ronldo wasn’t immune to it nor were her crystals.

It was getting hard to breath. Every step Strdl took forward made her feel like she was pushing against an icy river. The more effort she put in the worse it felt, with the ’current’ pushing back against her alongside pins and needles. Strdl was certain that she had water on her face more than once. There was a worry that it was blood instead of tears but whenever she reached up with her fingers to clear it away… they came back dry.

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Her vision was starting to go black around the edges… or perhaps it had been that way for a long time. Strdl couldn’t shake the sense that her vision was narrowing further and further but every time she put thought into that, measuring the current things she could see it never seemed to be true. Darkness clung to the edges of her eyes, just barely hanging above the walls. Pressing down on her and making it feel like she needed to claw open her ribcage to allow her lungs more room to breathe.

Strdl had never been claustrophobic. Growing up underground meant that it wasn’t a fear she developed and neither did any of her friends. Enclosed spaces was simply the way of things. The only reason she knew about it was that sometimes outsiders would have panic attacks over it, and it had been part of her police training to recognise the symptoms and help take people outside. Even with that… she’d never even SEEN someone with claustrophobia. Heard about it a time or two but never seen it let alone properly understand it.

Now though? Strdl was certain she did understand. The darkness wasn’t comforting it was hungry. An abyss of sharp teeth and claws that was waiting just outside the walls of her own eyes to come in and devour her. If she stopped walking, if Hunter got too far away Strdl was certain they’d come for her. The fact that she’d seen those weird tentacle things was not helping matters. It was hard shove aside the idea that the darkness was watching and waiting when you knew there were things that lived in it that were in fact, watching and waiting.

So when Strdl stumbled across a bit of uneven terrain, not so different than the countless other patches of it in the tunnel… simply the one that got her… leading to a fall. Strdl immediately felt her heart jump into her throat. Her everything screamed at her to do something even as she was falling. Her perception sped up an obscene amount. It felt like she had hours to figure out some way to stop her fall. Some trick with her crystals, some grand use of body control. Heck, even just sliding her other foot forward with a decent speed could have prevented things from getting worse…

But Strdl’s mind was simply screaming. The moment she fell it felt like death itself was standing next to her, ready to ’greet’ her in a permanent manner and there was nothing she could possibly do to escape it. Never mind the multiple solutions she had, they’d all been chased from her mind in that moment of horror. Hunter would be getting further away, and Strdl didn’t know if she would ever get up again.

When her face impacted the hard stone it was almost a relief. The sharp pain was able to cut through some of the panic. Not all of it, but the pain was proof that she wasn’t dead just yet. That her heart still beat and she could still do something about it. It wasn’t even a large amount of pain. Strdl had a strong body and plenty of training. A small fall simply from tripping was a joke under normal circumstances and in truth it might have just been bits of dust getting in her eyes that caused any reaction at all.

Yet it was still glorious. It was an escape from this never ending fear. Strdl felt reinvigorated and managed to stumble upwards to her feet. Pushing her fears back for just long enough to notice that Hunter wasn’t in view anymore. The panic was back. Blood was rushing to her ears and Strdl started to glance around wildly, looking for any sign of the lamia.

"Are you alright?" asked Hunter calmly from her side as if this was just a minor thing.

Strdl screamed, leaping into the air and smashing her head onto the ceiling, falling down and having her legs give out underneath her as she collapsed onto the ground. Hunter just stood nearby, light in hand and waiting for Strdl to recover. This took… some time as Strdl’s mind tried to piece everything back together in regards to what happened.

With her eyes closed things weren’t so bad… but there was still that pressure on her chest. Breathing was still difficult and the pounding in her head had gotten worse if anything… then again she did just crack it against the ceiling. When Strdl eventually managed to crack open an eye she felt like she was seeing a whole new world blasted with colour.

Hunter felt like she lit up the surroundings. The stone was still an unnatural grey but Hunter had been untouched by whatever was affecting the rest of the place. Even her dark black tail had depth and volume to it. Something Strdl hadn’t even noticed had been missing from the walls. The light bounced off Hunter’s scales, there were variations between them all. Subtle things that added up to be amazing differences in the re-adjusting eyes of Strdl.

Hunter’s hair, face, jacket. It all had colour to it and the lantern she was holding nearly made the walls look like they were normal. A second glance revealed that something was still wrong with them but it was still more colour then before. They didn’t quite reflect the light but seemed to almost suck it in and return a bit of their natural earthy tones. "I…" Strdl tried to say but nothing else would come out.

"You seem somewhat unwell," stated Hunter.

Which was enough to give rise to a spark of annoyance. "Just ’unwell’?" hissed Strdl as she stumbled slightly from standing up so quickly. "I feel like I’m coming apart at the seems! Every step is agony. My lungs are on fire, the darkness feels like it’s about to eat me and I feel like I’m one step away from collapsing!"

"That does indeed seem to be an issue," stated Hunter, face blank.

Strdl wanted to slap her, to reach out and touch her. To caress the face that so much colour. Strdl shook her head and slapped her grasping hand down. "I… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It feels like I’m slowly being attacked! Breathing is an effort, I can’t seem to walk straight and everything is turning grey!"

Hunter considered the issue for a few moments. "Hmm… it seems the distort space-time is causing you more issues than it is for me. I suspect that the… ’time’ isn’t quite the right word but it’s close enough for this. So, the ’time’ is being leached from the area around here likely to fuel the disrupted space. As a demon my lifespan gives me a lot more ’weight’ preventing it from causing me issues,"

"Wait am I losing lifespan as we walk here? Or like… am I rapidly aging?!" cried Strdl.

"No not at all. That’s very much not how this works. I’m using ’time’ extremely loosely here. Rapid aging is a different spell and life-force is more of a concept for natura mages, and even then, it’s more of a renewable resource then something that slowly burns down over time. Though technically there are some forms of corruption that… never mind it’s not important.

"What’s actually happening is that you’re slowly being frozen in time and your existence would eventually come to no longer move through it. Think of it a bit like… capturing the energy from a flowing river or a boulder rolling down hill. That kinetic energy can be captured and turned into other things. Right here your ’time’ energy is being restrained to support all of this," explained Hunter.

"Why are you fine? I thought you said it wasn’t a lifespan thing… and how much do I need to be worried about being trapped forever?" asked Strdl in panic.

"Well because I’m from another dimension I’m not as connected to this realms ’timestream’ once again a very, very loose term that I’m only using to help you understand. Additionally, I’m likely older then you which gives me more ’momentum’ to stop. Plus as a demon my demonic energy helps shield me from the effect and on top of that the fact I will likely live longer does also give me a buffer because… well time energy is somewhat a-temporal because it is time. Sort of. Look it’s complicated just try not to worry about it too much…" stated Hunter.

"And the horrors in the darkness?" asked Strdl.

"Try not to worry about those because they can smell weakness," stated Hunter before she started moving again.