Transmigration in Mordor

The silence in the vast cavern was alive. It pressed down on his shoulders, seeped into his lungs—a shroud of sound woven from emptiness and the distant echo of forgotten suffering. Arches of titanic femurs rose toward unfathomable darkness, and the walls, lined with sickly, gray, sticky silk, seemed to sweat a putrid humidity. Everywhere, suspended like macabre fruit in a mad orchard, desiccated corpses were wrapped in cocoons, their twisted forms frozen in eternal agony.

Zac wasn't walking. He was crawling. Every fiber of his being was taut, focused on a single goal: erasure. He wanted to become a shadow, a held breath, an anomaly so insignificant that even this nightmare realm wouldn't bother to notice it.

'Everything. Bet everything on silence. Become the void. Do not exist. Eleven tears into stealth. Eleven prayers to be forgotten.'

His body was an instrument of stealth stretched to the limit. He edged along a wall of bones, his fingers barely grazing the powdery surface. In the center of the cavern, a mountain of chitin, legs, and mandibles creaked softly in its sleep. The skeletal spider—the queen of this charnel house, the warden of his misery. He held his breath as he slipped behind a pillar of fused vertebrae. He was almost there. The exit, a simple black fissure on the far side of the chamber, was within view. Hope was a painful thing, a shard of glass in his gut.

Then, the air changed. The temperature dropped sharply. A chill that was not physical ran through him, a frozen alarm ringing directly in his soul.

'No. Not the eyes. She's never needed her eyes.'

The skeletal spider didn't turn. Its monstrous mass simply rose, soundlessly, like a tide of death. She knew. She had always known. Fear had a scent, a taste, a texture that this creature could feel in the air.

'She doesn't see. She senses. She senses fear. And I am full of it.'

A shrill scream—the sound of a thousand fingernails scraping a chalkboard—tore through the silence. The beast charged. It wasn't a run, but a landslide, a wall of nightmare bearing down on him. Zac didn't even have time to scream. A scythe-like leg, as long as a man, crashed down with the force of a falling tree. There was a sickening crack of dead branches breaking. The sound of his own ribcage imploding. The leg pinned him to the ground, and the air was forced from his lungs in a bloody gurgle. His last vision, as darkness swallowed him, was the indifferent maw of the creature descending to devour him—an abyss of mandibles and nothingness.

A spasm. The world returned in a flash of white pain. Zac was lying on his makeshift bed near the sanctuary's fountain, his body wracked by convulsions that were only the echo of his death. The memory of being impaled was still a phantom pain, a spectral claw in his chest.

'Failure. Again. The system is perfect in its cruelty. It gives me the hope of stealth, just to remind me that my soul is too loud to hide.'

He got up, his gaze empty. Madness was no longer a risk on the horizon; it was the ground he walked on, a process underway that was dismantling him from the inside. His slow mental agony manifested in alternating anxious agitation and apathetic withdrawal, an exhausting struggle against his own psychic helplessness.

What followed was a blur of rage and death. He spent his Tears of Regret on the `Forge of Brutality`. He headed back to the skeletal spider and charged it with a cry of defiance. His stinger glanced off its carapace with a pathetic metallic clang before a leg swatted him aside like an insect. Dead.

He tried again, stealthy, striking the same spot over and over. On the eleventh attempt, the blade finally sank in with a spongy ripping sound. A chunk of necrotic flesh, as big as a fist, was torn free, oozing black, oily liquid. The creature didn't even pause. It felt neither pain nor discomfort. It was like removing a tick from a mountain. She seized him in her mandibles and crushed him slowly. Dead.

Three more tries. Three more deaths, each more inventive and atrocious than the last. Devoured alive, fangs tearing his flesh strip by strip. Dissolved by a jet of acid that melted him as he screamed. Methodically crushed under the beast's weight, hearing every bone in his body crack one after the other.

Defeated, broken, he returned to the lower tunnels. A new light burned in his eyes. It was no longer the rage of despair, but a methodical coldness, a nihilistic calculation.

'If I can't kill the queen… I'll slaughter her offspring.'

He didn't hide anymore. He walked down the center of the tunnel, and the mutant spiders, as big as dogs, swarmed toward him. It wasn't a fight, but a slaughter. His stinger danced, sliced, hacked. He gutted one creature, its greenish ichor splattering his face. He decapitated another, its head rolling to the floor with a soft thud. He was bitten, torn, but the pain was distant. Death was no longer failure. It was a production cost. He died. He returned. He killed more. He died. He returned. He killed even more. Six times, the pain of resurrection tore through him, but with each return, his harvest was greater, his technique more effective, his fury colder. There was a morbid fascination in this orgy of violence, a fever that seized him as he became the monster of this tunnel.

Standing amid a carpet of chitinous corpses, he noticed something. The survivors hesitated. They approached, their mandibles clicking, but they kept their distance, as if held back by an invisible force.

'What…? They're less aggressive. Is it my strength? Do they fear me?'

Confused, he turned and returned to the sanctuary, his body covered in a sludge of spider blood and viscera.

He collapsed into the fountain without even pausing to think, the mystical water washing the ichor and grime from his body.