New Story -- Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The process of regrowing his body was neither pleasant to see nor was it quick. As opposed to how fast the repairing of his body went while he had been shot through the air after the volcano, the wait was excruciating and difficult to watch. Unfortunately for Thaden’s consciousness, which was forced to watch it all happen without turning away, he saw it all happen from start to finish; if he had a stomach, he would’ve been constantly heaving up his guts during the horrendous procedure.

This time, it started with his head as it was largely repaired – at least to the point where it wasn’t a mangled mess. From there, glistening strands of what he assumed were nerve clusters slithered out of the bottom of his ragged neck, eventually forming the basis of his form as it laid on the dirty stone floor of the well-lit and secure room where his head had been thrown. Once they were in place, veins and arteries seemed to emerge from the nerve strands, growing from seemingly nothing, followed by internal organs, then bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and numerous other body parts he wasn’t really knowledgeable about, before covering his entire form with skin that seemed to emerge from inside the flesh. After that, the other features he’d noticed regrowing during his earlier resurrection like his hair and facial stubble occurred, until his body was fully repaired to the point where he felt his consciousness pulled back inside.

In all, Thaden estimated that it took a total of 12 hours to complete the disturbing process. He figured it only took that long because whatever it was that brought him back to life had to essentially rebuild everything from scratch. While he had been forced to watch his body being reformed, he wondered what would’ve happened if his head had been entirely destroyed – or even eaten by those same monsters that ate the rest of his body.  Would this miraculous resurrection still work if I had actually reached the lava in that volcano?

Whatever it was that was bringing him back to life, he wasn’t exactly sure how it worked – or whether he actually wanted to be resurrected in the first place. While he hadn’t felt all of the pain his body went through as it was repeatedly destroyed, he had felt plenty of it before he “died” – and then had to watch as his corpse was subjected to even worse destruction. He would’ve thought it a blessing to not have to feel all that pain, but somehow the fact that he was powerless and forced to watch the pure desecration of his body afterwards was much worse.

As his consciousness was pulled back into his body, he sat up with another gasp as his brand-new lungs pulled in its first breath of fresh—

A coughing fit assaulted him as he realized that the air inside the room was far from fresh. The smells of rotting flesh assaulted his nose and he felt himself gagging as if he was going to throw up, but he knew for a fact that he didn’t have anything inside of his stomach.

He’d seen it created from scratch, after all, and it was indeed empty.

Scrambling to his feet, he nearly fell as he slipped on some unknown liquid underneath him, which was coming from the pile of heads he had landed on earlier. Moving across the room to get away from direct contact with the rotting flesh, he was finally able to take a breath without wanting to immediately gag. It was still horribly strong even across the room, but he managed to get ahold of himself long enough to look around for the first time.

The room wasn’t nearly as large as he expected; in fact, it was simply a round-shaped natural cave approximately 20 feet in diameter and a flat side across from the pile of heads that held the iron-banded wooden door. The ceiling extended another three or four feet above his head for the most part, which put it at about nine or ten feet high. In four different places along the rough-hewn walls were iron sconces holding blazing torches made of what appeared to be wood; when he looked closer at the one nearest him, he was surprised that he didn’t feel any heat from the fire, and the fire seemed to surround the top of the wooden torch without actually burning it.

Huh? How does that work? Is it a hologram?

He wasn’t even sure why he was questioning such a thing, considering that he had just watched his entire body rebuild itself from nothing, but that was old news by this point. The magically burning torches was something altogether different—

Magically burning? Can that be it? Magic? That would certainly explain how my body fixed itself, because modern medicine certainly couldn’t have done that. Perhaps advanced technology from aliens? I was abducted, after all.

Thaden really had no idea what happened. Numerous possibilities flashed through his mind at the thought, but he pushed it aside as he shivered slightly and looked around the room some more.

He was still naked in a cold cave, and the torches gave off absolutely no heat. He didn’t think he’d freeze to death – if he even could die from hypothermia at this point – but it certainly wasn’t the most comfortable.

Apart from the heavy wooden door and the strange torches, there was the wooden rack that held the metal weapons he’d seen earlier. One of them appeared to be heavy spear, complete with a sharpened and tapered point; another was a longsword made from the same material, which he assumed was iron from its dark appearance, though he could be wrong. He wasn’t a metal expert, after all, though he was fairly sure they weren’t stainless steel. He obviously knew the material his forks and spoons back home looked like. Lastly, a small knife was displayed between the two larger weapons, though it didn’t seem to be made from metal; instead, it was faded yellow like it was made from old ivory… or bone. He shivered even harder when he noticed the hilt looked exactly like the end of one of his leg bones, and it was nearly the same size.

He ignored the pile of heads, since he’d seen enough of that for a lifetime, as his attention was focused on the closed iron chest on the opposite side. He was curious as to what was inside of it, but investigating meant getting closer to the rotting flesh – which he was reluctant to return to after putting some distance between it and him.

It wasn’t just these things in the room, however. To the left of the doorway, in what could be considered a corner in the otherwise round room, there was a pile of multi-colored rags. Cautiously stepping closer to them, he kicked them a few times as he was worried there might be something living inside of them like a nest, but luckily nothing seemed to be alive inside. It was at this point that he realized that they weren’t just rags, but clothing; almost all of the clothing articles he saw at first glance had cuts and slashes torn through them, and more than one showed signs of being punctured.

The bloodstains that covered every single one was more than enough evidence that whoever these clothes to belonged to were wearing them at the time they suffered damage.

Originally highly disturbed to be seeing what was likely the clothing of the people whose heads were currently rotting in a pile in the center of the room, he hesitated to touch them. However, knowing that they wouldn’t be needing them, especially as he considered that their bodies had likely been consumed similarly to his own, he shook off his disgust as he knelt down on the cold stone and began sorting through the soiled and damaged clothes. Even as he touched the first pair of ripped pants made of what appeared to be homemade cloth, his hands shook uncontrollably as the events over the last day unconsciously replayed over and over in his mind.

Where even am I? Is this all real? Am I in a coma and this is just a dream? What were those monstrous creatures that ate my body? Who were all those naked people in that massive glass-walled room?

Thaden took a few deep breaths, which he immediately regretted after he inhaled more of the rotten stench permeating the room, but it also helped to center his focus on what he was doing now. As a work-from-home Data Analyst for a fortune-500 company, he was completely out of his depth here, but he could at least apply his skills to the situation. Normally, he compiled and analyzed data from customers in order to develop strategies to overcome a variety of business obstacles as well as recommending new opportunities for targeted sales; of course, that didn’t really apply here, but the processes used in the analyzation of data and strategies for accommodating for unknown variables could still be applied.

He just had to break it down into smaller chunks so that it was easier to deal with.

First, he needed to solve his immediate problem, which was the chill inside the cave. With his focus on solving that issue, he dug through the bloody clothes, ignoring the fact that some of them looked entirely too small for an adult, and eventually found two pairs of dark brown pants that appeared that they might fit him. He pulled them both onto his bare legs, as they had holes in them that would let in the chill if he didn’t double-up his protection. They were made from a rough, linen-like fabric and had a drawstring on them fed through some crudely sown loops, and he was reminded of his sweatpants back home that he typically wore while working at his computer. Definitely not as warm or as soft as those sweatpants, but it was better than nothing.

He followed the pants up with two long-sleeve shirts, both originally a light tan color that was more dark-red than anything else now due to the bloodstains, though they were thankfully made of a slightly softer material than the pants, so they didn’t itch him too badly once he slipped them on.

Amazingly, he found a pair of wool socks buried inside the pile of clothes that were only slightly bloodstained and contained just two small holes, and he slipped them onto his feet with relief as the cold stone floor of the cave had been greatly sapping his warmth from the contact. He even found some crude leather boots with what appeared to be cork acting as the sole, and while they were probably a size or two larger than was comfortable, they had leather strings in them that allowed him to tighten them as much as he could.

Feeling better about his warmth situation now that he was no longer fully naked, Thaden compiled the rest of the information he’d gathered, both consciously and unconsciously, and analyzed what he should do next.

Obviously, he was in a cave, but he was also deep inside of it according to his memories of his head’s transportation. There were numerous monsters with spindly limbs and a large furry torso that likely inhabited the cave system he was thrown inside, so they would have to be considered when he tried to leave. As for leaving, it didn’t appear as if the door was necessarily locked, so he figured that he could simply push them open and walk out.

Given the monsters’ small stature, he extrapolated that they were relatively weak in terms of strength, though they were so foreign that he new that the assumption could be incorrect. There were too many unknown variables right now to accurately predict how they would react if he were to try and make his way past them – or if he attempted to kill them.  He barely even shuddered thinking about killing them even though he’d never hurt anything more than creepy bugs in his life, because he’d already seen that they were vicious creatures that killed people and stored their heads in a room like trophies.  Apart from their appearance, which was disturbing in their own right, he saw them as serial killers that didn’t deserve a trial for the crimes they’d committed.

And the fact that they had eaten his entire body didn’t lend them any sympathy from Thaden.

After he was able to escape from the cave system, he would then investigate the immediate area around him, gaining more information about where he was in order to answer some of the questions he had.

To get to that point, he just needed to follow the steps to get there. The first step, his clothing, was already done, so now he needed investigate the rest of the cave he was in to discover if there were any other variables that could help him out. He was already eyeing the weapons rack and knew that he’d grab at least one of the weapons on it to help defend himself from the monstrous creatures that brought him there, but he still had the chest to look inside. For all he knew, there might be a powerful assault rifle inside just waiting for him to grab it and go all “John Wick” on the freaks outside the door.

Walking over to the chest while covering his nose and mouth with his left hand to block out at least some of the rotten smell, he bent down and saw that there was a simple iron latch on the lid holding it closed. With a flick of the latch to the side, Thaden lifted the lid of the chest and looked inside. To his disappointment, there wasn’t a fully loaded AK-47 waiting for him to pick up, nor were there any other weapons. Instead, there were a total of two things inside the wooden box.

The first was a bloodstained leather pouch with a drawstring very similar to the one on his pilfered pants, though much thinner in width. Lifting it out, he heard what sounded like the jingle of coins, and he spread the pouch opening wide to confirm what his ears told him. Pouring a few of them out into his hand, he saw what looked very similar to pennies made from tarnished copper, though all of them were so dirty and worn that he couldn’t tell what kind of design was on them. He figured it was some sort of head, like Lincoln was on the U.S. penny, but the blob stamped on the copper coins could’ve been just about anything as far as he could tell.

All of the coins were also slightly misshapen and minutely different in size compared to each other, as if they hadn’t been machine made to exact measurements. This led him to believe that he was in some sort of world where minting machines weren’t exactly common; the primitiveness of this was only confirmed further when he considered the weapons on the nearby weapon rack and the quality of the clothing he had acquired.

I’m guessing that there’s no large, big-box superstore nearby that I can visit and pick up cheap clothing, a flat screen TV, and groceries all at the same time.

Putting the coins back in the pouch, he looked at the other item inside the chest. While not a weapon, he thought that it might at least be useable for protection.

Lifting out the small round shield, composed of a scratched-up dark wood and banded around the edges with an iron plate, he was immediately surprised at how heavy it was. He thought that it had to weigh at least 20 pounds, which wasn’t exactly heavy, but if he were to hold it by the handle on the back with his left hand, he probably couldn’t hold it aloft for long before he got tired. Still, it was better than nothing.

He stood up straight and slipped his hand through the handle of the shield, which was approximately 18 in diameter, and let his right hand drop from where it was holding the defensive wood-and-iron piece of equipment. Almost instantly, the shield dropped down despite his efforts of keeping it aloft, as if it had suddenly gained 100 pounds in a second. He was forced to drop it as his hand couldn’t keep ahold of it, and it slammed into his foot painfully before coming to a rest.

Hopping around on one foot while he grabbed the other with his hands, he remembered at the last moment not to scream out in pain and shout obscenities despite wanting to do just that. There were those monsters somewhere outside, after all, and he didn’t want to call their attention to his existence quite yet. Fortunately, slamming into his foot helped to mitigate the sound of the shield hitting the floor, so other than a dull thud, it didn’t make much noise.

When he was finally able to put his foot back down, Thaden gingerly walked to the nearby wall so that he could lean on it to take the weight off his injury. As soon as he did that, he was surprised when an insistent pressure behind his left eye caused him to stop and investigate what it was. Suddenly, words appeared in front of him like a hologram, and he remembered the last time he had seen it back when he had arrived at the glass-walled room.

Darkwood Buckler (Common) not compatible with current Class!

Class? What does that mean?

However, before he could wonder about that, he discovered that those words weren’t the only ones that had been trying to get his attention.