Abel instantly found a place to hide, finding a rusted garbage bin just a few meters away from him.
As he ducked and began to worry about what just happened, he began hearing sounds coming from the street ahead.
It was at best murmurs and he couldn't distinguish the sounds, but they didn't sound human-like at all.
'Where the hell am I?' he looked at his surroundings, finding the alley he was in strangely familiar yet different. It was the one he was in just seconds ago, and one he passed every day to reach the restaurant quicker.
Yet now, it had the look as if it went through decades in time, where everything was rotting and falling off, overgrown weeds springing from cracks in the concrete, and the metal garbage bin he was hiding behind was completely rusted.
After a few minutes of hiding, he was going nowhere with his thoughts as well as asking the Recorder thing to get him out of there, but there was nothing. After that message telling him he entered a protected Underlayer thing it just stayed silent, aside from the Record panel appearing whenever he thought about it.
'Am I really in the Underlayer? I thought it would be a more hellish place...' Having finally calmed down and gathered his thoughts, he crawled through the alley, trying to be sneaky and figure out where the sounds were coming from.
When he reached the opening of the alley, he saw what could only be described as a marketplace, yet the people in the market were not humans, not entirely at least.
'What the fuck? are those Ratmen?' he was completely stumped as he looked at the humanoids walking on 2 legs going through the marketplace. They resembled Rats, their rat-like faces adorned with small ears, 2 large front teeth, and a big swishing tail, moreover, they were the size of teenagers in height as far as he could see since they showed different age looks typical to humans.
'Why are there Ratmen here? and why are they dressed in medieval-like clothes?' He could even see a large majority of them whether they be male Ratmen or female Ratmen having swords, shields, daggers, and spears as they strolled around the marketplace.
As he tried to slowly return to the shadowy alley and try to find a way to leave this place, he heard a screech coming from a child Ratmen in front of him, and it pointed its four-fingered claw-like hand right at him.
'Oh fuck!!' He instantly turned around and began running to the other side of the alley to escape into another alley to his left, he hit something hard, like a hard brick wall.
'Fuck!! my nose!!' he tumbled to the ground as his nose began to bleed, with eyes filled with tears, he saw armored Ratmen storming into the alleyway.
screech!! Screech!!
They clambered around him, screeching non-stop while surrounding him, some even crawled around with both their arms and feet, like a real rats while others stalked around like how one would imagine a primitive human with a club would hunt, but they had daggers pointed at him.
He even saw some of them drooling as they sniffed his blood and saw his trembling form.
Screeechhh!!
A loud screech came behind them and all the Ratmen surrounding him quieted down and stepped back, revealing a beefy specimen of the Ratmen, one that stood in height above all the Ratmen present.
The almost 6 ft tall Ratmen looked at him with a dead-like expression, before screeching once again, causing two Ratmen to emerge from the group before and raise him from the floor while simultaneously wrapping their claw hands around his hands.
"Wait, stop, I'm innocent, I didn't do anything!!" Yet they completely ignored him and kept dragging him past the alley and out into the marketplace where all eyes focused on him.
With the beefy Ratmen leading, all the other Ratmen respectfully stepped back opening a wide path for their walk.
He passed through debilitated buildings and roads. Everything was debilitated, falling apart, and rusting yet the place was the same as the place he was familiar with in the real world.
To his shock, they dragged him into the restaurant he worked at, now debilitated like the rest of the surroundings but it was furbished and looked like it had been used a lot, unlike the other places that looked completely deserted.
Screech!!
The beefy Ratmen in especially good armor pointed to a room that the restaurant used as storage, while the two Ratmen dragging him threw him into the dark storage room.
"Wait!! don't close the-" he tried to say but,
Bang!
And the door closed with complete force, blunging him into total darkness.
'For fucks sake!! Have I been cursed or am I in a comma, and experiencing intensely vivid nightmares?' as he tried to adjust his sitting position, a crawling sensation passed over his hands, freaking him out of his mind as he jumped up in shock.
'What the fuck was that!?' As he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness since he saw a little light coming from underneath the door, he felt that sensation again, this time over his legs.
"AHHHH!! WHAT THE HELL!!?" he screamed in fright and began to stomp around the floor, thinking it was a bug crawling through the place.
After a few minutes of screaming and thrashing the place, the door opened, and like a maddened man he rushed out of the place like possessed.
Before he could get past the door, he was body checked by the beefy Ratmen from before, causing him to fall on his ass. The beefy Ratmen now alone didn't even give him a second to orient himself as he was taken by the collar and dragged through the dirty ground to somewhere else.
"hey!! let go!!" he said, yet he received no response. Now getting truly angry yet scared he lashed out.
"Let go of me!! you fucking RAT!!" Just as he said those angry words, the beefy Ratmen who was dragging him unceremoniously through the trash and dirt-covered hallway violently threw him into a room while closing the door and standing guard over it.
'Aw Aw awww fuck that burns!!' He felt his back battered to the ground, his lower back skin peeling against the clean yet slightly jagged concrete floor. His jacket along with his t-shirt had been slightly above him as the Beefy Ratmen intentionally threw him on his back.
"You shouldn't insult my subordinates with such demeaning insults." Suddenly he heard a voice, one where he could understand what they were saying.
He, with difficulty and trembling hands, sat up, the pain of his back skin peeling still fresh and sore.
Abel looked at the source of the voice, seeing it in the form of a human man with short stature, sparse hair, and 2 rat-like teeth.
"Manager!? is that you!?" The man in front of him was truly the manager of the restaurant he worked at, one he wouldn't forget since the man looked funny with rat-like features you see in animations often.
"Yes, and it seems you have encountered something you shouldn't have." The manager replied quietly and with a dignified expression as he looked at Abel from his poor quality yet throne-like chair.
"... this nightmare sure feels way too realistic, I mean my quiet and meek manager is somehow the leader of a group of Ratmen, I mean how more unrealistic could this get?" with a deprecating laugh, Abel stood up painfully, his back burning as he stood face to face with the Manager.
"It seems your integration hit you hard, if I were you, I would start to believe whatever is happening in front of you to be the reality you're now a part of." the manager replied as he put his right hand against his cheek, watching Abel with an amusing gaze.
"You must be fucking with me! this must be an elaborate prank, and it has seriously gone out of control. Whoever is managing this show, I will sue you for the rest of my life for every penny you might have!! you hear me!?" Abel was completely hysterical, looking around the room searching for hidden cameras that deep down he knew wouldn't find.
"What a poor bastard, it seems you spent all of your luck in acquiring whatever allowed you to be a part of the Hidden World." as he said so, the manager calmly stood up from his poor-looking throne, wearing some sort of wizardry-like robes.
"Well it doesn't matter anymore, you might have been a good server, but now you're going to be served." As he uttered the last words, the manager's calm face completely transformed into a disgusting drool-dripping face, A face with complete rat-like features just like the rest of those Ratmen outside.
"WHAT THE FUCKK!?" Abel was utterly confused, scared, and almost shat himself when the transformation began, seeing the human manager instantly transform into a humongous fat Ratmen.
He was so huge the 3-meter-high room couldn't accommodate his size and had to crouch with his claw hands to be able to walk.
Now he was completely sure that this was a nightmare, nothing about this whole thing made sense, this isn't how reality worked.
The rat monster manager walked slowly toward his meal, enjoying the intense terror and fear it was showing and emitting.
Just as the drooling rat monster manager was about to crunch on the head on the immobile, trembling, and terror-stricken Abel, the Beefy Ratmen entered the room with a bang.
SCREECHHH!!!!
This scream caused the rat monster to stop in its tracks, cocking its humongous head to the beefy Ratmen instantly.
"WHAT!? Didn't we just push back those monsters!? How did they return so quickly!?!!" The rat manager looked back at the terrified Abel who just peed himself, finding him unworthy to prioritize over dealing with the menace that he had been fighting against for his entire life.
"WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!? Let's go!!" The rat monster rushed after the beefy Ratmen, and the door closed off with a bang, causing Abel to wake up from his terrified state.
'I felt death... this is real?' completely exhausted, he fainted, the extreme turn of events completely exhausting him.