Ryan had no idea how long he had been sitting against the cold stone wall. His breathing was too loud like he had just sprinted a mile. The golden panel was gone, but the words still hung in his head.
Chosen of Anubis.
"Yeah, right. Next you know I'll sprout jackal ears and start solving mysteries with scuby dog."
He snorted, but the sound sounded cracked and ugly. He swallowed it back down. No time to lose his mind.
How long he had been staring blankly at the blocked entrance. Seconds? Hours? It didn't matter. He needed to move, or he would die.
"Okay, Ryan," he said, forcing air into his lungs. His voice sounded too loud in the tomb. "Step one, don't suffocate in an ancient death chamber. Step two… figure out what the hell 'Heir to Anubis' even means."
His new Death Sight showed him more than any normal human visions could do, showing him every detail of the collapsed chamber. He spotted a gap halfway up the pile at the entrance, a cluster of rocks held together by one massive slab. If he could move that…
He needed leverage. His eyes scanned the chamber floor, but found nothing useful.
"Seriously?" he muttered, slamming a fist against the rock pile, but the stone didn't move an inch. He jammed his fingers into a crack beside the slab and pulled, grunting with the effort. The stone didn't even groan. It was useless.
He staggered back, breathing heavily. What would Hassan do? Or… what would a hero in one of Leo's comics do? They would find a way, not just lie down and die.
He forced himself to look again. Through a narrow gap in the rocks, something glinted caught his eyes.
A crowbar. Half-buried under fallen stone, just out of reach.
Ryan's chest tightened. "You've got to be kidding me."
He shoved his arm through the narrowest gap. "Come on, come on," he grunted.
His skin scraped raw against the sharp edges, but he ignored the pain. His fingers stretched, straining, until they brushed against cold metal. He hooked it, ignoring the sting of torn flesh as he dragged it through. Finally, it clattered free into his hands.
"Alright. Let's do this."
He went back to the slab, and jammed the tip of the crowbar into the crack beside the slab, and leaned on it with all his weight.
At first, the stone just groaned. Then, with a crack loud enough to make his ears ring, the slab shifted.
Dust poured down from the ceiling, and a cascade of smaller stones tumbled into the chamber. He coughed, but when the air cleared, there was a hole. Barely big enough to squeeze through.
Ryan didn't think twice. He grabbed his bag, then shoved the crowbar ahead of him, and scrambled through. He fell into the corridor beyond, gasping, his body screaming with a dozen new aches.
The corridor was wrecked. More collapses blocked the path, creating a treacherous maze of fallen stone. All the lights inside the tomb were dead, but with Death Sight, he picked out a way forward. He moved carefully, using the crowbar to clear smaller obstructions and pressed on.
As he got closer to the main entrance, his gut dropped. The final collapse wasn't just bad, it was a full wall of rock and dirt. And lying near the bottom of it was the body of a man in a rescue worker's uniform, his face twisted in terror.
Ryan froze. "This... wasn't a cave-in," he whispered.
Something had happened out there. Something worse.
Panic tried to claw at him, but he gritted his teeth and swung the crowbar again. Over and over, until his arms burned, until sweat and dust and blood mixed on his skin. Time lost all meaning, and his world was reduced to the crowbar, the stone, and his stubborn refusal to quit.
Then, finally after what felt like an eternity, a crack opened.
Sickly green light seeped in through the opening. The air that rushed in smelled of ozone and something metallic and foul, like old blood. He clawed at the gap, widened it, dragged himself through into the Valley of the Kings.
But the valley wasn't the Valley he came to a few hours ago.
The brilliant Egyptian sun was gone, replaced by a bruised sky of sickly greens and yellows. And above the horizon, a massive tear in the air pulsed. It swirled with shifting colours.
Ryan stared at it. "What the actual fuck...?"
His gaze dropped from the sky to the valley's sandy ground, only to find the university gone, but the ground was littered with lifeless bodies strewn around the entrance of KV62. Soldiers, rescue workers.
A frantic hope flared in his chest. Megan, Leo, Dr. Hassan… they must have escaped before this happened.
But the rescue team hadn't been so lucky. Their battered trucks were overturned, some still burning. The soldiers and workers were scattered across the sand like broken dolls. Their advanced rifles lay discarded, useless against whatever had done this.
They hadn't been crushed, they had been torn apart. It was the work of something far more savage than any animal he had ever known.
A wave of nausea washed over him, and he leaned against a rock, his legs trembling. "No," he whispered. "No, no, no..."
This couldn't be real, another hallucination. But the smell of blood and burning fuel was too sharp, and the sight of the Gate too vivid.
The tomb that had trapped him had, in a sick twist of fate, been his salvation.
His Death Sight made it worse. Through it, he could see the faint traces of life-force still clinging to the corpses. It was a horrifying sight, and he was the only one left to see it.
'They're all dead,' he thought, stumbling forward, his eyes scanning the devastation, landing to the place where the student's bus was. And there, huddled near the avalanche of broken vehicles, were three familiar figures. He recognized Dr. Hassan's shirt he was wearing today, and the other two of his teachers. They weren't moving.
"No..." he whispered, his voice cracking.
Ryan activated his Death Sight once more with his mind, confirming the horrifying truth. They had made it out from the collapsed tomb, only to be slaughtered while waiting for his rescue.
Grief punched through him, but his shock numbed it. He staggered forward, the crowbar feeling useless in his hand. He needed something to fight whatever thing attacked these people.
His eyes landed on the body of a soldier a few feet away, an advanced rifle lying beside his outstretched hand. He walked over with stiff movement. Then he tried his best to ignore the man's twisted face, and picked up the magazine and found two more on the soldier's belt, shoving them into his backpack.
"Okay. New plan," he whispered, his eyes flicking from corpses to the monstrous Gate in the sky. "Survive this clusterfuck."