Chapter 2

I'm standingon top of black water, with a sky like magma above. Barreling toward me are a dozen creatures, each more hideous than the next.

The first looks as if twenty sets of ant mandibles had mushroomed to the size of a truck and had sprouted antennae and legs. Another resembles a massive spiral worm, or maybe a syphilis bacterium, with centipede-like legs ending in knife-sharp talons. The least horrific of the creatures reminds me of a tardigrade, a microscopic animal that lives in water and has no discernable eyes or nose, a hole for a mouth, and eight limbs that end in claws attached to the body of a sea cow—except there's nothing microscopic about this tardigrade. It's ten feet tall.

The mandible creature is in the lead, leaping toward me as it shrieks through each of its mandibles. If I decided to chew up some diamonds, that's probably what it would sound like. Magnified a thousandfold. I get the creepy feeling that the thing is trying to say something, but on a frequency more likely to make my ears bleed than to pass on any information.

A furry appendage snakes from my wrist and elongates into a whip as the shrieking beast leaps at me, mandibles clacking in unison.

I crack the whip. A sonic boom ripples the black water around me. My whip slices the mandible creature into even halves that plop at my feet, spraying me with sticky green goop. I'm paralyzed with disgust—which is when the syphilis creature's talon pierces my left shoulder.

The pain is nauseating and sharp, and I feel lucky that my whip is attached to my body, else I would've dropped it. Disgust now a distant memory, I crack my weapon again. With a second sonic boom, I cleave the syphilis thing in half and dodge the bloody stream that spurts out.

Seeing what happened to their brethren, the remaining monsters attack with a lot less enthusiasm, which is good because I'm losing blood from my shoulder by the bucketful. Before they realize that I'm weakening, I go on the offensive, cracking the whip.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Only the tardigrade is left standing, and it turns to flee with a speed one wouldn't expect from such humongous bulk.

I leap after it, whip ready. "Oh, no, you're not going anywhere." A sonic boom later, the tardigrade rains down in pieces.

As soon as it does, the world around me changes.