[CRACKED WORLD]
[Grey Temolt VS. {Candidates}]
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[Description: You’ve fallen into a crevice of the past, a crack in history. Survive the instance to make your way back to the present.]
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[Congratulations, Genesis Candidate! You have triggered a Rare Arc Instance! Good luck and don’t die! :)]
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The first thing that hit Grey was the smell. First it smelt like fresh piss in a cleaning the sides of the bowl with my stream sort of way. Then came the tinge of vomit and the wall of B.O.
Grey gagged. Somehow it was even worse than the sewer. At least you knew sewage was something to stink, but this space felt like it was almost trying to mask how bad it was and failing miserably.
It was almost like catching a whiff of the delicious food you had just eaten before you vomited it all back up and ruined your day, your throat, and your nose all at once.
"Look. Another one."
The second thing that came to Grey was the noise, or mostly lack thereof. Any there was came from so far away it was muffled and hidden beneath layers of incomprehensible jumble. But that sentence he had just heard—if he could call it that—was right nearby.
Finally, Grey’s eyes adjusted to what was going on around him.
His hands rattled when they tried to move and his lip twitched.
’I’m a fucking prisoner?’
It wasn’t a very good prison. As far as Grey could tell, all his treasures were very much still here, right down to black forces. In another life, even if nothing else was snatched, those would most definitely be gone.
He chuckled to himself.
Unsurprisingly, his inventory was untouched as well. Everything was perfectly intact outside of his actual freedom.
When he was sure of that, he looked around to find that pretty much everyone around him was in the same situation. The difference was that they were in groups of three and he was alone.
’Well, I guess that’s another reason the old man wanted to do things that way.’
Grey shook his head. The real question was if these people were from Zone 234 or if they were from another place.
By now, Grey was pretty sure Amunet wasn’t from Zone 234. It wasn’t as though he had interacted with many of the other participants of his Zone, but he felt that if Amunet was in his zone, she would be making a bigger splash than she was, especially with her new Legendary treasures.
Grey shook his head. ’Just you wait.’
"He’s alone though."
"Yeah, it seems like all the rest of us kept out original teams. He’s a bit unlucky."
"He can also hear you." Grey said. "You know, back in my day, people used to communicate face to face."
The teams speaking amongst one another fell into silence. Every one of them was now looking at Grey, but none of them seemed to pick up on his joke or want to pick up on it.
It felt like a lot more of the latter because Grey highly doubted that so many people could have such a poor sense of humor. It was a statistical impossibility.
Plus, he was hilarious. Not getting even a single chuckle was just rude.
Grey grinned. He understood what was going on here.
This sort of tense atmosphere could only be caused by a single thing.
A clanging interrupted his thoughts and a gate in the distance slammed open. Or was it closed? Grey couldn’t tell. But the shifting feet that came after it seemed to suggest the first.
A weighted sound of footsteps echoed. It sounded like whoever it was had legs too heavy to lift all the way up, and yet heavy enough that even without doing so, the ground quaked with their gait.
A shudder of earth came with a scrape of sole, then rinse and repeat, again and again until a looming shadow appeared.
The creature was hunched over even beneath the seven foot ceilings, its hulking mass so large that whatever light made it into the cage from the torches was almost entirely blocked.
Because of this, Grey couldn’t see the creature’s face clearly. But he bet the bastard was ugly.
The cage doors opened and the creature reached inside.
A team of three was yanked up to their feet. They went spiralling forward and nearly collapsed into the shit stained cobble stone. But they luckily managed to protect themselves.
Grey raised an eyebrow, wondering where they were going to be taken. He had a guess from earlier, but—
He was suddenly lurched up to his feet right after them. He managed to catch himself as well, his body fluttering down like it didn’t have much mass to it at all.
Seemingly by accident, Grey landed next to the only woman of the three-man team.
"Nice weather we’re having, huh? Too bad this fat fuck smells worse than the cell."
The woman’s eye twitched when she heard this. She looked away a moment later, closing her eyes shut tight.
"Tough crowd, tough crowd." Grey said with a sigh.
"Would you shut up?!" one of the woman’s two other teammates snapped.
Now, Grey had been through a lot in his life. Literal death, in fact. But this day, being yelled at by a middle-aged man with a blond mohawk and the tattoo of an anime girl’s ass on the side of his skull...
This was most definitely the worst thing he had ever experienced.
"Unreal." That was all Grey could get out.
"We are about to fight to death, do you understand? I will do everything in my power to gut you like a fish. You would do well to get your head in the game if you want to last more than a few seconds."
Grey sighed. "Now why do you have to go and say such oddly nice things? That’ll make it harder to kill you mohawk man."
The middle-aged man’s jaw clenched tightly as they were all yanked out of the cage.