As Haze sprinted through the night, he suddenly heard a sickening slithering sound behind him.
He glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes widening in terror as he saw the five tentacles disappearing beneath the sand, their bodies slipping into the earth with a sickening slurping sound.
In the blink of an eye, they were gone, leaving only the undulating sand to mark their passing.
But Haze's relief was short-lived.
Just as Haze breathed a sigh of relief, the sand beneath his feet suddenly erupted, and the tentacles shot up from the earth, their barbed tips lashing out at him with terrifying speed.
Haze sprinted through the labyrinth of tentacles, his feet flying across the sand as he darted and twisted around the creatures' deadly strikes.
He slipped beneath a grasping tentacle, leaped over another, and slid beneath a third, his movements a fluid and precise dance as he avoided the tentacles' attacks.
