8: The rescue in the cave

Max hit the red diamond with all his might, and the gem began to crack under the pressure of his fist. A bright, blinding red flash emerged from within the red diamond. That's when the scorpion let out one last roar before collapsing completely. Max fell to the ground on his knees, luckily, the blow to his feet was not hard, and it didn't hurt at all.

Max took a deep breath, corrected his posture, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and relaxed the tension emanating from his body. The scorpion lay dead motionless at his feet, and for now, tranquility took over again.

Max stepped back, watching as the scorpion's body slowly disintegrated into the air, until nothing was left of it.

Suddenly, Max felt his legs give out, and he fell to his knees on the ground, exhaustion overtaking him, and he barely had time to register everything that was happening around him before losing consciousness.

He woke up hours later, feeling the cold ground under his body. His vision slowly adjusted, and the first thing he noticed was a blurry female figure leaning before him, as if wanting to help him wake up. Max recognized her instantly: she is the woman he had gone to that world to look for.

“Max… Come on, wake up,” the woman's voice is soft, but urgent and insistent. "Please wake up. Come on, I need your help.”

Max blinked several times, trying to focus her vision on his face. She is young, with large, radiant eyes that stare at him with a mix of desperation and determination. Her hair is dark and fell in messy cascades on her shoulders. Her hands trembled slightly as they held Max's wrist to feel her pulse.

“I'm… I'm here,” Max murmured, struggling to find the breath to sit up. "What happened? Are you OK?".

But then, in the blink of an eye, the woman disappeared, leaving Max alone in that cold, dark place again.

Max froze, blinking and trying to process what just happened. The woman, who was his objective in having come to this world so strange and similar to the one he knew, has disappeared abruptly as she had appeared. Max felt a mixture of frustration and relief, knowing that that woman would not let him die in that gloomy fate. At least, he felt like she was getting closer than ever.

He got up with effort, her muscles are tense due to her weakness, since the confrontation with the scorpion had been fatal, one of the most violent of his entire life. Max begins to walk, although he tries to do it stealthily because if in his first stay he already had his encounter with a deadly beast, it is most likely that later he will have to run into another one, or something else anywhere in his life path.

The atmosphere is permeated with an oppressive air and a disturbing silence that was only broken by the echo of his own movements.

As he walked, he tried to hold firm each of the details of the encounter with the mysterious woman. The woman's eyes, full of desperation, and her voice, which had urged him to wake up and want to hurry up and help her. Max couldn't shake the impression that something else is happening to the woman, her words were revealing that she was experiencing more things than he could be, putting her in danger. Everything seemed as if she was trying to convey a hidden message that Max has not yet deciphered.

Max came to a crossroads in the hallway and stopped. To the left of him, there is a dark tunnel that descended further into the bowels of the earth. The building he entered was no longer just a building, Max has realized that it has become something else.

To the right of him, a steep staircase ascended towards a dim light in the distance. The decision for Max is crucial, and before making it, he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to listen to his warrior instinct and thus figure out what decision is the right one for him to make at that moment.

The woman's voice echoes in his mind again, soft and light: “I need your help.”

With determination, Max climbs the ladder. The climb was exhausting because it wasn't just a simple 10 steps that he had to go down, there were more, Max lost count by the time he knew that the count was over 10. But even though the climb was exhausting, Max decided to keep going. , he would not give up on his decision to save the woman until he had a feeling that he was much closer to finding her.

The light at the end of the stairs turned out to be a kind of cave, a very small one that only one person could walk inside. The cave is illuminated by a fire-like light, and Max could feel the incredible heat rising from inside the cave. Max ventured out, and explored the cave cautiously, feeling that his feet were burning with every step he took, but not on the verge of being burned, the heat is bearable, but Max could not afford to behave like a child weeping, and continued his search for the woman.

He didn't find any sign of where the mysterious woman from his nightmares could be, Max had his five senses alert for whatever was going to happen to him. Then, the warrior advanced, feeling that the heat became much more suffocating with each step he took, and as he went deeper into the cave.

The flickering light of the fire was cast among accompanying distorted shadows on the walls of the cave, giving him a feeling that he was not alone, even though he was. The muscles in his legs trembled with effort, but his determination to rescue that woman kept him steadfast in finishing his mission.

Suddenly, a sharp sound broke the silence. Max stopped in the middle of the cave, trying to strain his ears. Finally, Max heard it, it was a moan, a whisper of pain. Following the sound, he went deeper into the cave until he reached an opening that led to a larger than usual place inside the cave. There, he came across the edge of a cliff illuminated by the light of lava below, he saw the woman, she had been tied to the highest branch of an old tree that had been tilted dangerously towards the bottom of the cliff, any movement, the woman would end up inside a bottomless pit.