Though the cavern boomed and shook and shrieked and cracked, Rook-- snug in the dim silence of his hideous helmet --heard nothing. He felt it, though: like a tuning fork, the sword conveyed to his bones every strike and howl. He felt the silent explosion deep within the Old One's gullet, he felt the release of moonlight, and he felt the slightest shift of angle that heralded the monster's fall.

Rook planted a boot in the Old One's baggy flesh, yanked out the sword with a glugging squelch of goopy water, and dragged the dripping weapon behind him while he scrambled and clambered over a sharp cluster of mana crystals that, a moment later, shattered under the weight of the fallen monster.

With his back against the wall, Rook watched the dead mass for signs of movement or trickery. From afar he scrutinized the hundreds of wrists and fingers for twitching, but it seemed the thing was truly dead.

Only then did he pry his helmet off his head. His face felt immediately cold, and his ears stabbed by a rush of noise: the echo of roaring water outside, the residual [i]thwoom[/i] of the monster's impact, and a faint shrill cry in the distance. He stretched his jaw, scrubbed a hand through his sweat-matted hair, wiped his sword on the sole of his boot, and approached the Old One with quiet guarded steps.

The first thing he noticed was that all the hands were the same. He'd expected limbs of different lengths, different ages, different shades of brown and beige to match the stories of the swallowed misfortunate. But these limbs were all nearly identical, differentiated by a few freckles and hairs but no more. He cut an incision around one of the arms and, through a goop of blubber, found that there was not a person attached to it, only more bones. He tried one more, just to be sure, but there was no one here to rescue, no swallowed victims to return to their villages.

By this time he was nearly covered in sticky pus, but at least it didn't stink. It smelled almost like rosemary. He sloshed through the growing puddle toward the head, where he planned one more autopsy in pursuit of the mana shard that should be embedded there.

The mana shard was the crystallized essence of the Old One: it was the core around which the rest of its shape attached and materialized and moved. Technically, a mana shard left alone for a hundred years would begin to grow anew, but none of them were allowed to remain stagnant so long. It was a mana shard embedded in his sword that hummed that destructive pitch, and another in his helmet that could, among other things, block every drop of sound. This one, he assumed while he sliced into the empty space that used to be the face of a screaming child, probably would grow more arms or something equally grotesque.

He palmed a sharp blue stone and rubbed a sleeve across his forehead, which only succeeded in smearing more goop on his face. He squinted into the dark in the direction of the tiny alarm.

"[color=8dc73f]Sounds like a pig,[/color]" he commented, picking up his helmet. Surely it was some animal trapped inside, maybe kept for the monster's midnight snack. But he couldn't shake the feeling that it was [i]calling[/i]. His grip tightened on his sword as he clambered over the mana clusters toward the noise. "[color=8dc73f]There was only supposed to be [i]one[/i] of these things, right?[/color]"

The last thing he was prepared to deal with was a mass of many-armed monsters swarming down in response to the shrieking call.