The Ruins Don’t Feel Safe
The ruins looked safer from far away.
Up close, they felt… worse.
Broken stone walls leaned against rubble, with cracked pillars buried in dirt. Symbols were carved into the rock. This place wasn’t abandoned.
We gathered inside, breathing hard.
Counting.
Seventeen went in.
Thirteen made it into the ruins.
No one said their names out loud.
A girl slid down against a wall and hugged her knees. Someone else paced in tight circles, muttering to himself. The guy with the headset finally took it off and threw it on the ground.
“So…” he said, voice shaky. “This place is special… those… things they didn’t chase us in.”
“That doesn’t mean they won’t come in,” someone replied.
I leaned against a pillar and closed my eyes for half a second.
The monsters had stopped at the tree line.
They were not scared.
Not tired either.
They chose not to follow.
Which meant these ruins were important.
“Hey,” a quiet voice said.
I opened my eyes.
A girl stood a few feet away from me.
“You didn’t use your points, you ok?” she said.
I blinked. “What?”
“I saw you,” she continued. “Everyone else reacted and spent them. You didn’t.”
“…Yeah. Not yet.”
She nodded like that answer made sense.
“I’m Mira.”
“Ryen.”
We shook hands.
“People who rush decisions usually die first in movies,” she said. “I decided to split mine. Endurance and perception. Just enough.”
“See anything useful?” I asked.
She glanced at the walls.
“A fight was in this place… it was long ago. Look at the cuts in the stone, those are weapon marks.”
That made my stomach twist.
So Stage 1 wasn't a peaceful one.
A system notification flickered briefly in my vision.
AREA DISCOVERED: ANCIENT OUTPOST
STATUS: TEMPORARY SAFE ZONE
Temporary?
Of course it was.
A man nearby opened his menu and cursed.
“Why is the first stage so hard? How hard are going to be the other ones?”
No one answered him.
Because if this was Stage 1…
then that meant Stage 2 would be much harder.
And Stage 3.
And all the way up to twelve.
Someone else whispered, “Do you think anyone has ever cleared this?”
No response.
The ruins creaked.
Stone grinding against stone.
Dust fell from above.
Mira stiffened.
“…It’s not empty,” she said.
The system chimed, soft but unmistakable.
NOTICE:
SAFE ZONES DECAY OVER TIME.
PREPARE OR MOVE.
I closed the window.
“Alright,” I said quietly. “We don’t stay long.”
Mira met my eyes.
“Good,” she replied. “Because whatever built this place?”
“It died here,” I finished.
The ruins shifted again.
Something was waking up beneath us.
The night fell quickly.
One second the sky was gray and dim, the next it became dark. There was no sunset. Just the sky becoming darker over time.
Someone lit a fire using broken wood and scraps around the ruins, they found some old weapons… they had some value. The flames flickered weakly, barely giving heat.
This was a temporary safe zone.
Those words wouldn’t leave my head.
We spread out, but not too far. No one wanted to be completely alone. At the same time, no one trusted anyone else enough to sleep close.
I sat against a cracked pillar, knees pulled up, eyes scanning the dark.
Mira sat nearby, sharpening a short blade she must’ve found earlier. The sound was steady. It helped calm him down more than the fire.
“How many hours do you think we passed?” someone asked.
“No clue,” another voice answered. “It’s hard to tell without the sun in the sky.”
“That’s on purpose,” Mira said quietly.
A few people looked at her.
“We wont know when to move, we have to act on instinct.” she continued. “Well not like I know much about this world.”
A guy across the fire scoffed. “You sound like you wasted your life playing games.”
She didn’t look offended. Just tired.
“I’ve played a lot of games like this,” she said. “This one… just nevermind.”
That shut him up.
The system hadn’t said anything since we talked. That made me worried.
A sudden clatter echoed from deeper inside the ruins.
Everyone flinched.
“It’s probably some wind,” someone whispered.
I listened.
No wind around us, no water either.
The sound of stone scraping against stone rang deep inside.
Something moved beneath us.
I stood slowly.
“Don’t,” a man hissed. “You’ll probably trigger something.”
“I’m not triggering anything,” I said. “It already knows we’re here.”
That was the truth no one wanted to hear.
A woman near the fire broke down crying. Quiet at first. Then harder over time.
“I just wanted to play something before bed,” she sobbed. “I have work tomorrow. I have a family… I have so much left to do.”
No one knew what to say.
A notification flickered in my vision.
NOTICE:
MENTAL FATIGUE INCREASES OVER TIME.
Yeah. No shit.
A man named Owen, he was tall and nervous, always kept glancing at everyone, he stood up suddenly.
“We should take watches,” he said. “Like… shifts. If this place gets dangerous we need to know about it.”
No one argued.
That scared me.
No one was questioning him, they were all too tired to give it much thought.
That was how groups of people died…
We split into pairs. One awake, one resting. No one really slept.
When it was my turn to watch, the fire had gotten weak. The shadows danced across the walls, stretching into shapes.
Mira sat beside me.
“You still haven’t used your points, you know you can’t keep them forever,” she said softly.
“I’ll spend them when I have more information,” I replied.
She smiled faintly. “Who knows, we all might make it out of here…”
I considered lying.
“More people are going to die…,” I said. “None of us can trust each other, we have too much to lose, better be alone than dead.”
She nodded.
“Still… At least you can trust me?”
“Yeah.”
We sat in silence for a bit.
Then she said, “People are going to start killing each other.”
Not if.
When.
“I know,” I said.
A scream cut through the ruins.
We both stood instantly.
“It’s from the west side,” someone yelled.
The stone cracked.
A section of the floor collapsed, the dust all went upward as something massive shifted beneath the ruins.
The system chimed.
WARNING:
SAFE ZONE FAILURE IMMINENT.
Panic erupted among everyone.
People grabbed their bags and weapons. Someone shoved past me, nearly knocking me over.
“MOVE!”
“WHERE DO WE GO?”
“DON’T LEAVE ME HERE”
I opened my status window again.
Ten points.
Still untouched.
My heart hammered hard.
I didn’t have much of a choice, not now.
The ruins weren’t protected.
They were bait to kill more people.
That's why the monsters didn’t follow, they knew we would have to go back eventually.
I closed the window.
Still not yet.
“Everyone to the east exit!” I shouted. “Go now!”
Some listened.
Most didn’t.
The ground split open behind us.
Something roared.
The ruins didn’t collapse all at once.
They collapsed in pieces.
The stone cracked beneath our feet as we ran, the dust filling the air. Someone tripped ahead of me and disappeared into a hole in the floor. I didn’t look back long enough to see if they died.
The roar came again.
It was closer. Much louder.
It was not an animal.
The creature was angry.
“Keep going to the east exit, don’t stop!” I yelled again, not even sure why people were listening to me.
Maybe because someone had to tell them what to do, someone had to at least sound reasonable.
Mira was beside me, a blade in her hand, eyes scanning the surrounding constantly. She didn’t panic. She was rather calm given the situation we were in.
Behind us, the stones started crumbling as the ruins kept on breaking. The ruins weren’t a shelter, they were a lid, and something underneath, had finally decided to breathe.
A man stumbled into me.
“Please, help me”
The ground shifted.
A stone pillar collapsed between us.
His voice went silent.
The system chimed again.
PLAYER TERMINATED.
There was not a body.
Not much of an echo either.
Just gone.
We went through the east opening and went into the forest again, but it didn’t feel like an escape. The trees surrounded us once again, the branches hitting us as we ran for our lives.
The monsters from before weren't very patient.
Shapes moved between the trunks. They were low and fast, it all felt coordinated.
“They’re slowly surrounding us,” Mira said.
That made my stomach twist.
We reached a narrow ravine, the rock walls were tight.
“Here!” Owen shouted. “We can hold them off here!”
Some people agreed instantly. Others hesitated.
That hesitation cost us a lot.
The first creature lunged from the trees, slamming into a man before he could finish opening his menu. Teeth bit around his neck. Blood sprayed across the ravine wall.
Screams echoed.
The fight became chaotic.
People swung wildly. Magic flared weakly, they were barely sparks and gusts, nothing powerful or decisive. Someone with too much strength and little control smashed their weapon into the rock, the monster struck its hand into his head killing him instantly.
I ducked, heart hammering.
Still hadn’t allocated my stat points.
I grabbed a fallen spear, it was crude and chipped, and was probably scavenged from the ruins. It was better than having nothing.
A wolf looking creature leapt at me.
I barely rolled aside. Before its claws tore through the stone where my head had been.
I stabbed it.
The stab was not clean, definitely not skilled.
It shrieked and backed off, not dead.
Mira finished it off with a quick slash to the throat.
It collapsed.
Didn’t dissolve.
Just… died.
The other monsters froze for half a second.
That was not enough.
The monsters kept going forward.
We started falling back, step by step, losing ground, losing people. The ravine narrowed further ahead, it slowly became too narrow.
This was all a trap.
“Climb up!” someone yelled.
People scrambled up the rock walls. Some barely made it up. A few slipped, but kept going.
One didn’t get up.
The system chimed again. And again.
By the time we forced our way out the other side, more died.
Much fewer people were with us.
We were all breathing hard, our hands and wounds bleeding and shaking.
The forest went quiet.
The system finally spoke.
STAGE 1 CONTINUES.
PLAYER COUNT UPDATED: 9
Nine.
I stared at the number.
There used to be seventeen.
Now there were only nine.
And Stage 1 wasn’t even coming close to being over.
End of chapter 2.
