While the group debated what could have been living in their sanctuary, someone suggested they hunt it down. Or at the very least, find out what was happening on the upper floors. Get answers rather than sit around guessing.
And that is exactly what they did.
Meanwhile, Benny was doing the same thing from the opposite direction. He planned to move back down now that he had thought it over. He was going to stalk those people, or whatever they were, and find out what he was dealing with before deciding on his next move.
Both sides had the same idea. The knowledge that someone else was here besides them was both worrisome and deeply curious. Who were they? What were they? Either way, a confrontation would come in due time. The labyrinth was too small for two unknowns to dance around each other forever.
Gustav led the group upward while Benny descended toward the second floor. Moving in opposite directions through the same stone corridors, neither aware of how quickly the distance between them was closing.
The group had been restless since their discovery. They ran watch rotations through the night, but nothing came within their sight. No sounds. No shadows. No signs of the mysterious visitor returning. The waiting made them more anxious, not less.
So they decided to find out now rather than later. Better to chase the answer than let it come to them on its own terms.
By now, Benny knew the layout of the second floor like the back of his hand. He moved through it with quiet confidence, stocking his food supply and taking a weapon in hand. He found a vantage point where he couldn't be seen by monsters or by whatever he was trying to follow. Then he settled in and waited a bit further from the second floor entrance that would eventually lead up from the third.
As time passed, Benny noticed the floor's eerie stillness. Not only were the rabbit folk no longer here, but the mutated scorpions were also far too few and far between. The corridors that once teemed with creatures were quiet. Almost peaceful.
He smiled at the thought. He knew he had made those fools cower in fear. Had driven them deep into their dimensional spaces and sealed the terror of him inside their collective memory.
He waited. He was patient when he needed to be.
Hours passed. Then he heard something. A footstep. Then another. And more after that, a steady rhythm building from below. His head perked up from his vantage point, his enhanced senses sharpening immediately.
His heart beat faster. Not the frantic, bloodthirsty pulse he felt during hunts and kills, when everything narrowed to instinct and violence. This was different. Uncertain. Half anticipation and half dread. Whatever was coming up those stairs, he wasn't prepared to assume what it was.
Then the area around the entrance to the third floor lit up. A light source coming up from below, carried by whoever was ascending. He saw shadows stretching ahead of the figures, long and distorted against the stone walls.
But those shadows didn't move like monsters. They moved like him. Bipedal, upright, deliberate. Just like those intelligent creatures he had encountered in the dimensional subspaces, but something felt different. Something felt more familiar in a way he couldn't explain.
From the sound of their footsteps, he counted at least ten.
Several seconds passed, and then the light went out. Darkness reclaimed the passage, the space now only illuminated by the pale glow of light crystals hanging from walls and ceiling. It was just enough to make out shapes from a distance. Not enough for most people.
But Benny wasn't most people anymore. With the enhanced senses that came with the power living inside him, he could make out the figures clearly enough. They were moving carefully, stealthily, spread out in a formation that suggested training and experience. These weren't panicked survivors stumbling through the dark.
The first one to poke its head fully into view was a slim figure, hooded and moving low. From the build and the careful way they moved, Benny's first thought was assassin. Then came the next, and the next, until all ten of them were visible. By their proportions, by the way they carried themselves and their weapons, they looked human.
At least from a distance.
He wasn't sure enough to reveal himself. Not yet. He had ample food, enough to wait them out for days if he needed to. He could continue to stalk them. Watch their patterns. Learn their behaviors before making any decision about what to do next.
He settled back into his hiding spot and watched.
Meanwhile, the group made their way toward the second floor sanctuary. They wanted to confirm something. To use the second floor space as a reference point and compare it against what they had found on the third.
They had already ruled out the ghost theory after a particularly heated debate. One argument had cut through all the noise and stuck: their supposed ghost could feel hunger and eat. The food stocks didn't lie. And would a ghost even have a stomach to process food? Would it need to?
No. Whatever this was, it was physical. It had needs. It consumes food so it is a living being.
That narrowed things down considerably.
The next theory was the skin walker. A mimicry type of monster that could shapeshift and wear human skin, behaving and leaving traces exactly as a human would. They had heard of such creatures before, referenced in the notes and records of other labyrinth expeditions they had studied before this one. But hearing about something and knowing how to identify it were very different things.
They didn't know enough about skin walkers to confirm or deny the possibility. Could they eat? Could they use tools? Could they set fires and prepare food? These were questions none of them had definitive answers to.
The third possibility was the one that nobody wanted to say out loud, because saying it out loud made it feel too much like hope. And hope, in this place, had a way of getting you killed.
Another survivor.
They knew Benny was dead. They had accepted that, grieved it in the ways that people grieve when they don't have the time or safety to grieve properly. But other than Benny, there was no one else they knew of. Unless someone else from the original expedition had survived separately. Someone who had been cut off early and had been making their own way through the floors this entire time.
But then why hadn't that person approached them? Why hadn't they made contact? If it was a human survivor who had been alone in this place for this long, the sight of other humans would have been a relief. Should have driven them straight toward the group rather than away from it.
Unless this person had changed. Unless being alone in the dark for this long had done something to them that made the idea of approaching other humans complicated. Or it could be a loss in trust to others, most probably from the betrayal they all have experienced.
The group moved through the second floor corridors in tight formation. Nobody spoke. Greaves watched the rear. Senna tracked the path ahead. Gustav set the pace, steady and unhurried.
And somewhere in the shadows above them, a pair of hollow eyes followed their every move, watching from a vantage point they couldn't see.
The hunters were being stalked by the very thing they were hunting. And neither side knew yet what they would do when the distance finally closed to nothing.