Here's a chapter after the long wait! I'm sorry the next chapter isn't done yet, and it would most probably not be up tomorrow either. So don't read this chapter so fast! Because it's the only one you have right now...right?
[Nea's POV]
I ran up the stairs, finding another way to get down to where the Diamond of Light had been. I held the Diamond between my fingers, and it cast a white glow on all the walls. It was much brighter than any fire I had seen, and definitely more beautiful.
Red had seemed troubled right after the door had locked Scarlett in, but after I convinced him that I knew what I was doing (which I was totally lying, about), he seemed to calm down a little bit more. But by just a little bit.
I knew something like that would always happen. Every time we found something, surely some annoying - or even scary - thing would happen, and we just can't continue.
And now it was Scarlett. Hell, she was quite useful when it came to finding the Diamonds. She had found the first one, and was also the first to find out how to use it. Now, without her, we just couldn't do anything. After all, finding her was the least we could do.
I wished I had a watch of sorts. I didn't know how long we were in this dark building. The Diamond of Light made it seem like it was daytime, but I doubted it. It felt like we had been here for hours.
"Can you hear that?" Red broke the silence.
"Hear what?" I said, but I stopped to listen. There was a soft scuttling noise, like rat feet on the concrete. "That's...disgusting."
But that wasn't all. I noticed the sound getting louder, and I was sure it definitely wasn't a rat. Nor was it many rats. Something bigger, something more…scary.
At that point, a thick black stick poked out of the wall. The cracks grew, and I was scared that the building might collapse on top of us. But that wasn't the point.
A second black stick poked out, and then a third. Then a round head poked out of the wall. With that, I screamed, "OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT-"
There was a spider in the room. But not those normal ones - it was huge, even bigger than five times of me. Its sharp legs were digging into the ground as it advanced in us.
I could feel my knees shaking and my hands turning cold but I couldn't do anything to stop them. I closed my eyes shut and turned away from it, like it couldn't see me if I didn't see it. But that was the biggest mistake I had ever made.
The next moment, I was in the air. Then I was thrown onto a wall and fell on the ground. You might just say I was imagining things, and I was hoping so badly I was. But if this was a dream, it simply was keeping me in. I just had to survive.
I rolled onto my side, trying to ignore the severe pain shooting up my arm from my wrist. There was a bump on it, and I was quite sure I had dislocated my wrist. But after a few seconds, it popped back into place, but the pain was still enough to make me cringe.
At the corner of my eye, I saw Red. He seemed quite...calm...when facing the spider although he was moving quickly. Suddenly everything seemed alright when he was around. I noticed him managing homself quite well, and always got out of sticky situations.
But that feeling didn't last long. Red somehow managed to get out of the view of the spider and it was facing me instead. I pushed myself off the floor with my better hand and stepped back.
And right after that, big mistake number two happened. I tripped backwards into the staircase which was going downwards. I landed on my butt on the landing, and the only thing I had in my hand was the remainder of some knives I had taken from the building.
The spider's big eyes stared at me like it was thinking what would be the most painful way to finish me off.
"Nea, hang on!" I heard Red's shout from somewhere behind the spider. But this time, I was sure he couldn't do anything. Rolling out of the way, I scrambled into a half-kneeling, half-squatting position and took aim with my knives.
The first one missed way off. I realised it would be no use to throw the knives, so I got up on my feet and ran straight at the spider, and hoping it was confused enough to stop making those scary clitter-clack noises, I embedded the knife into its mouth.
That goo was gross. Like really gross. It was brownish-yellow, and it spilled out of the wound, oozing between the bumps on its cracked exoskeleton.
"Totally made much sense," I panted, my heart still palpitating from the sight of the spider. Dead or not, it was equally scary, but at least this time, it didn't move.
"I guess you don't need to, then," called Red from the other side of the room.
"Don't wanna say anything," I shrugged, "Let's go find Scarlett."
We stepped over the carcass of the gigantic dead spider, mostly Red trying to pull me across, and we continued down the stairs.
[Redford's POV]
I could feel Nea was still jittery from the spider attack, as she was squeezing my hand really tightly, her hands were ice cold, and they were shaking. I tried to calm her down, but it didn't work until we were some distance away from where we came from.
The place was bigger than I had expected. The winding staircases took us deeper into the ground, but nowhere nearer to the doors. Instead, I thought they were bringing us further away. We came to an empty room, where we sat down to take a break.
"What's this?" Nea asked quietly. She was fingering a blue leather bracelet on my right hand. I looked at it sadly.
"From my parents. But I never knew them," I said.
"The only thing I remembered was my dad…he was whispering something about 'helping out', 'saving the world' and 'might die'," Nea said. I guessed her father was referencing to the dangers that would come our way like the spider.
I leaned my head against the dusty wall. I wanted to know who my parents were. But I felt that they probably were like those zombies - not thinking, maybe if they met me they wouldn't even know I was their son.
I listened to her breaths, the soft inhale and exhale pattern. It was so calming. And so ironic that we had been chased by a giant spider, tons of zombies, lost two friends, and almost died millions of times.
"You know what I used to do, back in the Glade?" She broke the silence. "I used to braid the long grass into a friend's hair, and she would do it for me too."
I could feel that she was clinging onto the past. She was unable to forget it, to move on. But I could feel what the joys were in the Glade. I liked to delay the runners, and always got ranted about, but those were just fun.
My eyes were getting heavy, but I forced them open, thinking of things to keep me awake. But I didn't need to a few seconds later.
"Yeah, that certainly sounds like real fun," a voice behind me drawled.
Ooh! Nice cliffy! But I'm just gonna say that the next chapter -SPOILER ALERT!- has a lot, like a lot of answers that you need. And be sure not to miss that one!
