Nova ran, even though his body was giving out much faster than he had anticipated, as the seconds leapt by. He grew tired, and eventually, he stopped. He panted, his hands on his knees, his eyes wide, his mouth covering for his nose.

He heard a roar from the distance, which kept getting louder and louder, meaning that it was coming towards him. He instantly stood up and found a place to hide. As the roars got louder and louder, with him being fully alert and clenching his daggers, the roars eventually faded away.

He sighed, knowing that he was currently as strong as a D-rank or lower Adventurer. He couldn't risk fighting monsters or other Adventurers in the state he was currently residing in. So, he chose the safer route until he recovered to his B-rank status. Though something like that wasn't going to necessarily happen.

He used the wall as his crutches to support himself and walk until he found anything related to the French Guild. He didn't hear anything, no roars, no screams, nothing like that. It felt as if the deafening silence was getting an entirely new meaning.

There were no announcements regarding teams losing, like there were when the Irish team had lost, with nearly all of them losing their lives. There had only been two other teams after the Irish that had officially lost: the Brazilian Guild and the Spanish Guild.

He kept walking, sometimes contorting his face to express his annoyance that he felt about his weak mortal body. Though he did want to experience pain, suffering, struggle, and all the things humans felt throughout their lifetime, he knew he couldn't exactly complain about something like this either.

As he kept walking forward, saving up as much energy as he could, he heard another scream, but it felt more like a vicious snarl. It wasn't the wolves or the Shadow Drakes from earlier; it was something else. Something that wasn't going to show him any mercy.

"Fuck," he said to himself. "That's going to be a pain."

He knew that the monster he had just heard was going to come in his direction, so he blended in with the labyrinth's walls again, thinking it was enough until the monster passed by, but he was so wrong.

As the monster nearly leapt past him, it stopped in its tracks and decided to take a couple of steps back and inspected the wall, to find nothing. Nova had deftly used his saved-up energy to escape and hide behind another wall, where the walls rumbled, closing the path between him and the monster.

He sighed as the walls fully shut, a small smile tainting his face, though that was short-lived. From above him, saliva dropped to his head. He was very startled and apprehensive, and slowly looked up to see that same monster on top of the giant labyrinth wall.

It was a centipede-looking monster, though not the same thing. The monster on top of the labyrinth wall looked like a huge, grotesque, terrifying non-centipede centipede.

Its long, elongated body was covered in a dark armored shell. It had many legs jutted from each segment, moving in a strange, smooth rhythm that let it crawl quickly and quietly. Its head was big, with several sharp, glowing eyes that moved on their own, constantly searching. Long fangs dripped with thick saliva. Smaller clawed limbs along its sides twitched. Its size alone cast a huge shadow over the walls.

Nova ran away from the monster, but the monster ascended towards him, blocking his path. Nova grew more irritated as the monster snarled, moving like a centipede towards him, and then standing tall and slamming itself into him.

Nova barely dodged the huge, grotesque creature, coming towards him, panting hard, as he was on the ground. He had rolled over, though that didn't buy him any time at all. The centipede circled him, snarling at him, as if he were the next prey it was going to consume.

Nova looked at the ranking for the centipede, realizing it was an evolved A-rank threat. He gulped hard; the shallowness of the gulp only triggered the scornful, suppressed, vile laugh of the centipede.

His head wasn't in the game; it was spinning in circles. His legs gave out, his body fucked to the utmost degree, as now he was even worse than a D-rank Adventurer. He had no hope of surviving such a situation as this one. But he knew he always got lucky one way or the other; he couldn't risk dying on his first playthrough this early on as a mortal.

The centipede kept circling Nova, inspecting him, letting down its guard. Knowing that Nova had run out of all possible moves in this game of chess, it kept tormenting him until he spawned his daggers and hurled one of them over.

As the dagger collided with the centipede, it didn't even put a scratch. And instead, it broke in front of him. The other dagger also despawned, and his mana and energy had officially run out to the point that he couldn't even use his ability.

The centipede, with its rear, put a shallow gash at Nova's back, amplifying the already worsened state of him further. He coughed up blood, his muscles, tissues, and everything else in his back, ripped slightly open, like a piece of paper. He was barely alive; it was a miracle he was still alive.

He slouched over, his back ripping apart further, blood spilling to the ground, as the skin near the gash seared, due to the centipede's venom, attached to its grotesque figure, covering every ounce of its body.

Nova didn't cry, he didn't yell, he just sat there, letting his body rot, as if he knew he was already dead. He couldn't even speak, internally or externally. He was lifeless.

The centipede cut through Nova until his eyes flickered, singeing his body with venom. The centipede's snarl got even worse, as Nova did nothing and let himself rot like a corpse.

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