I slammed the spear once again, and suddenly all the sounds vanished, as if the world had died.
A heartbeat later I realized all the faces on the wall had stopped moving.
Every eye, every mouth, every twisted expression was fixed on me. Then, like a tide, they rushed straight at me.
I didn't even get a chance to scream. The floor, the air, everything folded into them.
I was swallowed whole.
Cold flesh pressed from all sides; eyes blinked against my skin, mouths breathed over me.
I could feel myself sinking through shifting layers of skin and muscle.
I went blind for a moment, and suddenly I wasn't in the chamber anymore.
I glanced around in horror.
I stood inside a realm made of faces unnaturally stretching and shuddering around me like jelly trying to form shapes.
They were everywhere.
Beneath my feet. Above my head.
But just as I felt myself drowning in them, something yanked me upwards.
"What the frick is happening to me right now? I'm sure I didn't perform that infamous luck-enhancement ritual,"
I growled under my breath as I found myself somewhere entirely different.
I couldn't even begin to figure out what I was seeing. The place didn't look like anything.
It was brightness and darkness existing together all at once.
it made my insides lurch, twisting up a sickening sense of vertigo.
Out of that nothingness, a silhouette broke free, human-shaped, sprinting directly toward me.
I tried to dodge, but before I could react, it plunged straight into my chest.
Pain rippled through my brain. My head snapped back.
"Fuck this bullshit," I grumbled, as I found myself standing in that face dimension again, breathing in heavy gasps.
"One more surprise and I swear I'll kill myself,"
I declared with a grin, convinced that doing so would obviously put a stop to whatever this madness was.
I walked forward, faces constantly rose and sank like bubbles in rotting stew.
From time to time, whole torsos crawled just beneath the surface, dragging themselves along with raw bone nubs before melting back into the mass.
Overhead, tongue-shaped ribbons drifted silently, fishing for stray thoughts and twitching whenever they caught something they seemed to like.
The stitched skin-walkers never truly stood still.
They swayed and convulsed in a slow rhythm, rearranging their limbs as though trying to remember what a body was supposed to look like.
Far off in the murk, an enormous jaw opened and closed every few minutes, inhaling flocks of fluttering teeth that swarmed through the gloom before pouring back out again.
A distant scream exploded across the space.
I snapped my head toward where six dark figures struggled, half-submerged, being dragged down by the faces below them.
They writhed in agony, arms thrashing, mouths stretching in silent pain as they were devoured.
"Well, now that I think about it, I might have performed that ritual,"
I muttered as a chill ran down my spine. But another thought clawed its way into my mind, one I tried not to voice.
"Why am I not one of them too?" I whispered, scanning the faces around me as I crept back a few steps.
"You can feed on me all you want and I won't even complain. In fact, I must remind you I am much more delicious than those freaks,"
I announced theatrically to the faces surrounding me, both hands flung out at my sides, head thrown back in rapturous bliss.
After waiting a moment, I slowly lowered my hands and knelt down.
"Alright, time to perform some experiments now that I'm sure they're just a bunch of creep-jitters who wouldn't dare backbite,"
I practically screamed, excitement flaring for reasons I didn't fully understand as I focused my information particles, trying to tear those faces apart using what I knew.
"She did mention two information particle assortments can't exist together, so why the heck aren't these faces pulling apart or trying to escape?"
I muttered, finding their behavior increasingly strange.
A sudden idea struck. Then I realized how utterly skull-empty it was and dismissed it.
"It's not like they aren't made of information particles..."
Reassuring myself, I poured information particles with much more density, a stream instead of short bursts.
Consequences followed swiftly.
My head began to throb violently.
A searing pain unlike any I'd felt before.
Worse than any strain I'd experienced using far more information particles in the past.
Though most people were never even forced to push themselves to that limit to begin with.
Then finally one of the faces cracked. Just a thin, jagged split.
Without wasting a second, I dove through it and hit...
Sand.
Blazing light. Scorching heat.
The sand burned my palms. I rolled onto my back, still clutching my spear.
Blinking rapidly, I looked around.
Faces.
Real faces, not those grotesque ones, began to appear.
They were staring. Some whispered in awe. Others pointed.
Looking beyond them, I saw the entrance of the Pyramids of Elfphte. Realization crashed into me. I was somehow back at the entrance.
I wanted to bolt, but the circle of onlookers subtly tightened around me.
They must have watched me emerge from thin air.
Shit.
I swallowed hard, forcing a grin.
"Relax," I said lightly, trying to steady myself as cold sweat trickled down my spine. "No pants ripped. No damage done. Nothing to see here."
A few chuckled. Most just kept staring.
Realization dawned painfully fast that my genius idea of using a famous joke to play the situation off had failed miserably.
I shifted my spear casually, trying to look calm and nonchalant, though every instinct in my body was screaming that normal had nothing to do with this place anymore.
"Seriously,"
I shrugged, hands raised in surrender. "Just a bit of sightseeing gone wrong and nothing more…"
Honestly, at that point, there was absolutely nothing I could do.
Except pray I didn't get charged for trespassing, false allegations, and whatever international law covers materializing like an idiot in front of a historic monument.