Erupting into a cacophony of terror, all one-hundred naked and terrified souls sought one thing: survival. Sada had witnessed the spontaneous creation of two creatures from her worst nightmares. No, actually. She couldn’t believe that a human mind could think up monsters of this magnitude.

The sickly horse demon named Mezu was shrieking at the top of its lungs. The shrill cries of the beast were so intense that Sada felt the need to cover her ears at the risk of them bursting. The obese demon Gozu looked to be thinking as it held up its massive blade; admiring the ravaged upper torso of a man still partially clinging to it.

What was this? How could this have happened to her? Was there even a means of escape, or was that some kind of cruel joke belonging to whatever was holding them captive? Sada reflected briefly as she stood catatonic, mulling over the words the voice had spoken to them. Salvation lying on the cusp of despair. It was a riddle, but with the chaos around her, she could hardly focus her mind on solving it.

“Hey… Hey!”

Sada blinked and looked to the voice calling to her. Jimmy had grabbed ahold of her wrist and pulled.

“We need to get moving! Come on!”

Sada felt annoyed at the interruption but quickly nodded as she and the boy took off toward the wall behind them. Not too far away, Gozu sat in his filth as he guarded the grooved quarry wall behind his tumor-infested body. Mezu on the other hand chased after the other souls that fled as fast as their legs could carry them.

Noticing a fallen tree ahead, Sada pointed.

“We can take cover here, come on!” she said to Jimmy and anyone else within earshot.

Jimmy and Sada quickly dashed behind the tree, peeking up to spot if Mezu had seen them. The beast was sprinting about the arena, splashing up pools of bloody mud as he’d skid to a halt in order to catch his fleeing prey off guard. Luckily his focus was away from them at the moment.

“Oh god, I’m gonna die… I’m gonna die, aren’t I?” Jimmy muttered to himself, his back pressed against the bark. “Maybe we should just play dead and hope they don’t notice…”

Sada ignored him. She was intent on using this chance to evaluate the monsters in the distance.

Mezu continuously howled like the animalistic demon he was, and yet, his companion remained quiet. Sada strained her eyes as Mezu knelt down, its thin muscles partially obscured by the shaggy blood-soaked fur hanging from its body.

—What is that on its head?

Gigantic antlers, from the look of it. But something else. It appeared to be bandages stained a color not unlike heavy rust. Where she anticipated the creature’s eyes to be, there were instead wrappings. But why?

—Its screaming, the rampant flailing… it’s almost like…

Mezu, could the demon possibly be blind? That would explain the wailing. In a circular chasm like this with high rock walls, the echoes created from any noise would be extremely telling.

“It’s sensing us through echolocation,” Sada said out loud, still looking ahead. “That fat one can't move, so it’s only dangerous at close range… I think.”

Jimmy looked over at Sada, blinking as his eyebrows furrowed up into a state of disbelief.

“What the… how the hell did you figure that out? Wait, are saying we can beat this thing??” he said with a newfound glimmer of hope in his voice.

“It was easy to deduce and no, not exactly. These things might as well be tanks. We can’t do anything to them. If we’re smart though, we can avoid them. But from here on, we can’t make any noise. Even with its echolocation, if we appear stationary it seems to confuse us with the dead.”

Jimmy opened his mouth to speak, but quickly shut it and nodded just as fast.

Mezu was still far off, distracted by the cries of others who hadn’t yet caught on. It was far enough out of their range that Sada could focus on something more pressing. Her escape.

—If that disembodied voice wanted us dead, he’d have simply killed us without the whole song and dance. If this is entertaining for him, there has to be a challenge here that we can overcome. There must be!

She thought back to the few unfortunates that ran up to the locked gates before it disappeared.

—There was no way to open it… It was simply a trap.

If the gates were only for show, how could they possibly escape?

—The voice said “the cusp of despair”… Wait, could it be that…

In the distance, she could see Mezu backing its latest victim against the cliffside. The person quickly scrambled, trying to climb the rocky walls to no avail as the monster quickly approached them. The person managed to squeeze themselves into one of the many long vertical grooves in the quarry walls.

At that moment, it appeared as though they knew they were going to die. She didn’t want to look and yet, something compelled her to keep staring ahead.

The person reached for something. Something behind their back, hidden in the groove. As Mezu raised its clawed hoof, its intended prey did something Sada and the abomination weren’t expecting.

In a split second, the cornered human shot up into the air like a rocket.

—The hell!?

Sure enough, her eyes weren’t deceiving her. The person was clinging onto something long and thin as it propelled them up into the sky toward the large construct above them.

So this was the cusp of despair hinted at not so long ago. Their salvation was hidden away, only discoverable after being backed into a corner.

“Hey,” Sada whispered. “I know how to escape. We just have to reach one of those grooves in the wall.”

“So it wasn’t just me witnessing that guy fly off into the sky,” Jimmy exclaimed through hushed whispers. “Okay, so, the walls are our goal. But the closest wall to us is…”

Jimmy turned around to survey the surroundings. Behind him were a multitude of people already running for the cliffside. Some had figured out the riddle’s solution while others were simply following blind instinct. Regardless, he spotted people reaching into the crevices just as Sada had, only to be whisked away to safety above.

Sada turned around as well, noticing the dilemma. With the entirety of the quarry being shaped like a perfect circle, she could attribute it with a mental image. Where they were currently located was toward the nine on the face of a clock. Gozu and the locked gates would be located where the five was and Mezu was currently at the three.

From their position behind the fallen log, it would take about thirty seconds to fully reach the closest cliffside. That was only if they sprinted, which would most certainly attract the attention of the demon Mezu.

To make matters worse, she could see a flurry of people approaching the wall in small groups. People were teaming up for safety, something that wasn’t too uncommon. What was worrying was how one after another, people were being saved by these grooves and yet, no one used the same groove twice.

“Forget about that section of the wall. We need to find a gap in the wall that someone hasn’t used yet. I’m thinking there may only be enough for each person.”

Sada felt something watching her, something that was neither a horrifying monster nor a supernatural entity. Turning to her left, she found a pair of two men crawling through the bloody mud on their stomachs.

“Who the hell are you guys?” Sada whispered, collecting herself from the brief shock. Despite all the commotion, she forgot for a brief moment that there was a possibility of others being nearby.

“People that heard enough,” one of the men said, the large mustache on his upper lip stiff with caked on blood.

“We were just tryin' to avoid that demon, but if you’re sayin' that those cracks are how we get outta here, then screw waitin'!” the other man said, rising from the swamp.

His friend rose up to join him. The two men covered in crimson slime took off sprinting toward the cliffside in a mad dash toward freedom.

Without so much as a warning, Sada felt the ground underneath her vibrate and ripples shook the waters around them.

“Wait, you idiots—” Sada tried to warn before an ear-splitting scream rang out behind her.

—Shit!!

With no time to speak, she pushed Jimmy down into the muck and flung herself in as well.

Not a second later, Sada felt the vibrations growing in intensity.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

Like the beat of a war drum, it shook her to her bones as another ghastly wail rang out. Looking up to assess her surroundings, her arm still around Jimmy as he lay in the blood beside her, she sensed an abrupt gap in the demon’s galloping.

For a moment in time, the sky darkened as a shadow passed over her vision.

Her strained eyes darted upwards to see Mezu overhead, having leapt through the air to bypass the log they were hiding behind. The airborne creature let out a hungry wail as it cleared several meters per second. Like a missile touching down, Mezu landed directly in front of the two men who were by now ten meters ahead of Sada’s position.

A resulting tidal wave ripped across the surface from the monster’s impact, coming at Sada quickly.

—This literally couldn’t get any worse.

As the wave neared their faces, they both held their breath without so much as a peep from their lips. Mezu had already found its prey as the two men attempted to flee back towards the log to no avail.

Both men were swept off their feet in Mezu’s clawed hand, the size of the wolfish paw dwarfing their individual bodies. As they screamed out curses and pleas of mercy, Sada was almost glad she wouldn’t be able to witness what came next.

Mezu opened its elongated maw, drooling immensely as small waterfalls of saliva passed through the gaps in the demon’s thin, rectangular teeth. As it held both men up to enjoy its latest prey, the tidal wave was mere inches from Sada’s face.

Both her and Jimmy shut their eyes to protect from the foreign liquid invading the sensitive areas. What felt like a sticky and viscous substance, yet revoltingly lukewarm washed over them.

Whether by morbid chance or a stroke of divine comedy at their expense, both teens were now baptized in the blood of countless others who had met their fates in the same pit they now found themselves within.

With the wave cleared, Sada opened her mouth to inhale and used her hands minimally, carefully wiping the blood from her face while taking care to avoid excessive noise. As she opened her eyes, clearing the red syrup from her face, she saw the bisected abdomen and legs of both men hitting the swamp waters with a sickening splash. Looking up in horror, the shaggy wolf-horse had the upper parts of the doomed duo in its gnashing jaws.

Even from far away, Sada could see the tendons and viscera being chawed up recklessly by the monster. She could hear the snapping of bone and cartilage as the arms and ribs contorted to fit the rapid compressing within Mezu’s mouth.

The nightmarish sight caused vomit to rise up in her gullet as she held back to keep from becoming sick. Jimmy simultaneously held both hands in front of his mouth for the same reason.

The beast was maybe fifteen meters away from their prone position. It sniffed in the air, much like a hound would searching for the trail of its delectable prey.

Sada knew it was finished with its snack and was hungering for more. To make matters worse, the remaining people in the quarry had grown wiser and whereas minutes ago there was an orchestra of screams, it had now softened into a chasm of soft whimpering and labored breathing.

Mezu reared back and screamed into the air, its voice causing the massive iron chains suspended from the castle in the sky to vibrate. It was like listening to metal chunks grinding in a blender and made Sada’s head ring. If it was possible for someone’s head to explode simply from soundwaves, she wondered if hers was about to.

As Mezu lowered its head back down, it growled in frustration. In a display of animalistic fury, it extended its black talons and raked the side of the quarry’s rock. A shower of sparks flew across the air alongside an ear-piercing noise that was almost as terrible as the ones emitted from the beast.

It tilted its head toward the right, in the direction of where the number three would be located on their figurative quarry clock’s face. Without hesitation, Mezu’s muscles tightened and it began bounding off in that direction.

As the thumping grew fainter and Mezu became someone else’s problem for the timebeing, Sada breathed a sigh of relief.

“That was… God... I-I think I pissed myself,” Jimmy mumbled.

“You'll do more than piss if it comes that close again,” Sada bluntly replied. “Get a move on, we can’t waste anymore time here. We'll have to leave while that thing is far away from us.”

Jimmy nodded in agreement as the two got up from the swamp, entirely coated in red aside from the smears on their faces.

From what she had witnessed before, no one had been near the section of wall located around the number seven on her would-be clock. If there were still chains present there, that was their ticket out.

Not wanting to attract attention by splashing around in a hurry, Sada and Jimmy carefully waded through the surface of the bloody swamp. It would be roughly a minute before they could reach the wall.

What bothered her most though was the fact that while Mezu chased after other survivors, its companion Gozu just sat in place. It gazed out at the competition, the only part moving was its head slowly swiveling like an owl’s. What was truly gut-wrenching was the fact that several unclaimed gaps in the cliffside existed around and behind Gozu’s stationary position.

—It… It knows. It has the upper hand. Once the available grooves are claimed, the remaining survivors are going to have to come right to him… and that’s when he’ll strike.