Rounding a sharp, jagged corner, Sultan finally emerged from the narrow, confined passages he had grown accustomed to in the last hours.
They had been replaced by a much broader and more expansive road-like area.
Tap, tap.
Using the echo produced by tapping the handle of his knife, Sultan estimated that this new route was approximately the size of a railway. However, he didn't deem it necessary or significant enough to cross to the other side and verify that conclusion.
Why bother? The blue spot marking his return point was only a few minutes' walk ahead.
the Citizen had assured Sultan repeatedly that once he reached this blue dot, he should consider himself home.
Were it not for the fear of stumbling into some grotesque apparition, or even just tripping over debris in the darkness, Sultan would have been sprinting by now. Instead, he jogged and trotted cautiously, Excited for it all to end.
Until he reached… a wall.
No problem. He now considered it vital to cross to the other side. Surely, he would find an exit or perhaps another hall like the one he had initially crawled out of, right?
Wrong. It was a complete and utter dead-end in every sense of the word.
After pacing back and forth several times, he confirmed the disheartening reality: still a dead-end. Sultan even attempted to scale the infuriating barrier, hoping an exit might be higher up. No luck.
"Damn you," he growled, slamming his fist into the cursed roadblock as if sheer force could make it move.
It didn't.
yet Sultan didn't stop there. Like the crash of relentless waves, he rained devastating punch after devastating punch, not caring for the resulting noise.
When his hands were too raw and bloody to continue, he used his back, slamming it against the wall again and again. Crimson streaks ran down his body, mixing with the thick honey.
The barricade, of course, didn't budge an inch. It stood as unyielding and disdainful as a mountain against the meaningless fury of the waves.
Eventually, His blows weakened, each one softer than the last, until the final strike fell short, leaving him to collapse onto the ground, utterly defeated.
He sat there, his dreams shattered, his hopes reduced to ashes scattered by the wind.
Longingly, Sultan gazed at the blue dot, extending his hand as if he could touch it, grasp it. But, of course, he couldn't.
The only thing crueler than starving a famished man is to feast in front of him without offering a taste.
Lowering his hand, he rested it in his lap, dissociating from it all.
For a long while, he sat there, staring blankly into the distance, numb to everything.
"Huff." Finally, a forceful exhale escaped from between his lips, carrying with it all the gloomy, depressing thoughts.
Sultan stood again. Disbelief and shock were unaffordable luxuries in such a situation. He had to move, or he wouldn't be alive to even attempt returning.
However, before leaving this area, there was one more foolish action he felt compelled to try.
Rasing the unassuming knife that was pretending to be a part of his hand, he slashed vertically at the wall.
The blade skidded across the surface like a sledge on ice, not penetrating even an inch.
"Idiot," Sultan muttered, scolding himself for thinking he could cut through a wall.
Sighing heavily once more, he turned and walked away to find another exit.
Silence reclaimed the area once again, and the wall remained utterly unchanged-
except for a freshly etched line, an unhealing scar left by a little knife.
***
[A G0 three-star adversary has been eliminated.]
The whisper came, as usual, accompanied by the same heavenly sensation.
Yet this time Sultan had been ready for it, Taking only a second or slightly more, he was able to shrug it off quickly enough.
Despite the Citizen explaining that this reaction was likely related to his awakened traits, Sultan still had no way to nullify it completely.
What he did manage, however, was to avoid letting it stun him into unresponsiveness.
It wasn't easy, though. The temptation to savor it for infinity called to his soul, and his body wanted nothing more than to prolong the moment forever. Sultan had to use all his willpower to extract himself as soon as possible, and yet a few seconds of delation seemed inevitable.
Moving quickly, he gripped the creature he had just slain and used his knife to extract its stinger. Not wasting any more time, Sultan left the scene of the crime, rushing madly away. This wasn't the first—or even the tenth—time he had cut down one of those hateful bees, so he knew he had only a window of 3 to 5 minutes before the area would be swarmed by his relentless enemies. After abandoning the blocked route , the first thing Sultan did in his unguided detour was to revisit the honey chamber. There, he took the equivalent of a meal and reapplied his disguise by taking a honey bath. Then, he got to explore his current accommodations more thoroughly and without interruptions. Fortunately, his lackluster map, which consisted of an arrow pointing to the location he needed to go, had given him an unexpected yet pleasant surprise in the form of saving a detailed record of the areas he had already been to. As a result, he got to move freely without the fear of circling around himself like a lost chicken, noticing a few interesting facts about this eerie, cold place in the process. First, reality proved it to be much larger and far deeper than he initially thought. Second, the maddened insects only occupied a small section of the whole area. It would take Sultan only a few hours of uninterrupted walking to cover their entire territory. Lastly, there was another type of occupant. When he ventured out of the domain of the oversized bees, he had been attacked by another insectoid creature, specifically spiders.