Our World Is Now A Dungeon World

Rivers Of Blood

They stepped into a world that had finished dying and started rotting.

 

The street outside Arianna's flat was carpeted in feathers. Hundreds of pigeons lay twisted across the pavement, bodies split open from the inside as though something had tried to hatch out of them and failed. The smell hit Riley first—copper and decay and the chemical sweetness of burst organs. Miko covered her nose with her sleeve. Amber pressed her hand to her mouth, swallowing hard. Arianna walked through the dead birds without looking down, one hand locked in Biscuit's scruff, and Riley understood that something behind her eyes had been cauterised shut.

 

A taxi sat in the middle of Tooley Street with its bonnet up and its driver slumped over the wheel. Riley tried the door. Dead electrics. He tried a BMW parked against the kerb, then a delivery van, then a motorcycle toppled beside a postbox. Nothing. No ignition, no dash lights, no phone signal beyond the System interface glowing faintly on each of their screens.

 

"Everything with a circuit is fried," Amber said. She tested a fourth car and stepped back, her voice tight. "Whatever hit the grid killed anything with a chip. Engines, phones, traffic systems. All of it."

 

"So we walk," Riley said.

 

They walked.

 

Southwark unfolded before them like a wound. Bodies lay in doorways and across intersections, some human and some not, and some caught between the two in ways that made Riley's doubled stats feel like cruelty—his Moonlit Perception showed him every detail he didn't want. A woman face down outside a Pret, her back opened in four parallel trenches. A police officer propped against his car, his weapon still in his hand, his throat gone.

 

Riley stopped at a bus shelter.

 

Two children lay curled together inside, untouched but grey, as if something had drained them dry. A boy, maybe eight. A girl younger, her hand still gripping his sleeve. Riley's enhanced perception caught details he wished it wouldn't—the way their lips had turned blue, the frost patterns spreading across their skin despite the warm air, the absolute stillness of their chests.

 

"Riley." Miko's voice came from behind him, quiet. "We have to keep moving."

 

He couldn't look away. The System had given him the ability to see everything, and now he couldn't unsee this. Two kids who'd probably run here thinking the shelter would protect them. Who'd held onto each other at the end.

 

"Riley." Firmer now.

 

He turned. Miko's face was pale, her jaw set. She'd seen them too. They all had. But Arianna had already walked past, eyes forward, and Amber stood frozen three steps back, one hand covering her mouth, the other wrapped around her stomach.

 

"Come on," Miko said, and pulled him away.

 

Blood ran in the gutters. Not figuratively. Literal streams of it, joining tributaries where the road dipped, feeding a dark river that followed the camber toward storm drains already choked and overflowing. Miko stopped at a junction where the gutters met and the pool was deep enough to reflect the fractured sky.

 

"Don't look at it," Riley said.

 

"Bit late for that."

 

Gunfire crackled from the north—not single shots but sustained bursts that thinned and scattered and resumed. The centre of London was a furnace of noise: screaming, something immense groaning like stressed metal, and beneath it a rhythmic chittering that rose and fell like breathing.

 

"Police are still fighting," Amber murmured, her voice steadier now, clinging to the practical.

 

"For now," Riley said.

 

The first attack came on Tower Bridge Road. Three rats, each the size of a Labrador, exploded from a shattered kebab shop window and lunged for the closest warm body—Arianna. Biscuit hit the first one mid-leap, jaws closing around its neck with a crack that echoed off the buildings. The second scrambled past and Riley threw his hand out on instinct. Moonlight surged down his forearm and condensed into a narrow blade, three feet of pale silver light humming against his palm. It felt right, like gripping something he'd always known was there. He cut sideways and the rat split apart, its insides steaming in the cool air.

 

Miko took the third. She hadn't summoned the Soul Blade yet—but the glass shard in her hand moved with inhuman economy, Blade Instinct reading the creature's trajectory before it landed. She opened its belly in a single upward stroke and sidestepped the mess.

 

Three phones chimed simultaneously.

 

COMBAT EXPERIENCE GAINED. Entity: Sewer Rat (Mutated) x3. XP awarded per contribution: Riley 45, Miko 40, Arianna 15 (via bonded creature).

 

"It's like a video game," Miko said, reading her screen. Her voice carried a strange flatness. "It's tracking what we do. Individual contribution."

 

"I got points and I didn't even move," Arianna said. She stared at Biscuit, who dropped the dead rat and licked blood from his muzzle. "He counts as mine."

 

Riley looked at his own screen. Forty-five points. For killing a mutated rat while two dead children lay three streets back. The number sat there, bright and cheerful, and something sour rose in his throat.

 

"This is fucked," he said quietly.

 

Miko glanced at him. "Yeah."

 

"But we need it," Amber added, her voice hard. "Whatever this System is, it's keeping us alive. So we use it."

 

"Then keep him hunting," Riley said to Arianna, pushing down the nausea. He turned the moonlight blade in his hand, marvelling at the weight of it—light but present, humming with a resonance that matched his pulse. When a cloud drifted across the moon the blade dimmed and he felt the drain in his chest, a reservoir thinning. He dismissed it and the energy crept back. Store it. Spend it wisely.

 

They pushed south. The attacks came in scattered bursts—a mutated fox with quills erupting from its spine that Biscuit brought down after a vicious thirty-second fight that left Arianna white-knuckled and shaking. Riley's reserves dropped to half as he held the moonlight blade steady, and his legs began to ache with a deep, bone-tired heaviness that the adrenaline couldn't quite mask.

 

"How much further?" Miko asked, breathing hard.

 

"Old Kent Road," Amber said. "Maybe another mile."

 

Arianna stumbled. Just a half-step, her foot catching on uneven pavement, but Riley saw the way her shoulders sagged, the way her grip on Biscuit's collar had gone white-knuckled not from fear but from needing something to hold onto. The numbness that had carried her this far was cracking.

 

"Ari," he said.

 

"I'm fine." Her voice was flat. Automatic. "Keep going."

 

But she wasn't fine. None of them were. They were running on fumes and terror and the gamified promise that killing things would make them stronger, and Riley could feel his own reserves draining with each step, each reformed blade, each moment of enhanced perception that showed him more horror than any human should process.

 

Miko fell into step beside him after they passed the Bricklayer's Arms junction. Her sleeve was torn and something had scratched her cheek.

 

"You're not bad with that thing," she said, nodding at the blade he'd reformed.

 

"I literally just wave it and things die."

 

"Yeah, so romantic." She wiped blood from her jaw, and he saw her hand trembling slightly. "I hit level two. Got a stat bump. Agility went from ten to twelve."

 

"Already?"

 

"Consecutive engagements. My passive rewards not stopping." She looked at him sideways, something brittle and bright in her eyes, and he recognized it—the same thing he was doing. Talking. Joking. Anything to avoid thinking about what they'd seen. "Race you."

 

Despite everything, he almost smiled. Almost.

 

They found the supermarket on Old Kent Road. A Tesco Extra, its automatic doors jammed open, its interior a cathedral of shadows. The car park was empty except for a delivery lorry on its side and a trail of something viscous leading from the lorry's ruptured cargo bay into the store's entrance.

 

"We need food," Amber said. "Water. Medical supplies. Anything we can carry."

 

"Agreed." Riley dismissed his blade to conserve reserves—the well in his chest felt dangerously shallow now—and peered through the entrance. Shelves stood in darkened rows, some toppled. Produce had already begun to mutate—he could see fruit swelling on a display stand, rinds splitting to reveal something fibrous and moving. But the tinned aisle would still be good. Bottled water. Bandages from the pharmacy section.

 

"Biscuit's hackles are up," Arianna said quietly.

 

Riley looked. The dog's bristling fur had risen into a ridge along his spine. A low growl built in his throat, not the quick warning from the rat encounters but something sustained and deep. His brown eyes were fixed on the dark interior of the store.

 

"Something's in there," Arianna whispered. Through the bond she could feel it—her dog's terror seeping into her own chest like cold water. Her voice cracked slightly. "Something big."

 

From deep inside the supermarket came a sound. A slow, wet exhalation, followed by the groan of metal shelving being pushed aside like cardboard. Then silence. Then a second breath, longer, heavier, resonating through the concrete floor and into the soles of Riley's trainers.

 

In the darkness between the aisles, something moved. Not walked—moved. A shape too large for the space it occupied, flowing like liquid shadow across the back wall. Riley's Moonlit Perception caught the edge of it: glistening flesh, too many joints, and something that might have been eyes reflecting the faint light from outside.

 

The smell hit them. Rot and ammonia and underneath it something sweet and wrong, like fruit left to ferment in a closed room.

 

He reformed the blade. Moonlight sang against his palm, but the light was dimmer now, the drain immediate and sharp. His reserves were nearly empty.

 

"We need those supplies," he said, hearing the exhaustion in his own voice.

 

Miko drew herself up and closed her eyes. When she opened them, a shimmer of pale steel materialised in her grip—longer than the glass shard, balanced, lethal. The Soul Blade. It pulsed once and went solid.

 

She looked at Riley. At Arianna, who was barely holding herself together. At Amber, who'd gone very still, her golden light flickering weakly around her fingertips.

 

"Then we go in," Miko said.

 

And they stepped into the dark.