Unsavory thoughts ran through Benny's mind throughout his current hellish experience.
The bugs in front of him weren't attacking. They were leaving him alone, passing by his hiding spot without even pausing. But the thought never left him. The fear of death. The terror of dying. Something deep within was screaming at him to attack the bugs before they attacked him.
It was instinct. Primal. The animal part of his brain was demanding him to commit preemptive violence.
But there was another voice inside his head, equally loud, equally insistent. This one screamed that he wouldn't be able to achieve anything by attacking. That death would be the only thing waiting for him if he tried. That he would be overwhelmed in seconds, consumed alive by creatures that numbered in the millions.
Logic versus panic. Reason versus fear.
In actual reality, Benny was frozen in that tiny crevice, trembling uncontrollably. He was trapped not by the bugs but by his own thoughts, his own mind turning against him. This was the real enemy. Not the labyrinth cleaners. Not the darkness or the hunger or the pain.
Himself.
This was actually a side effect of staying too long in the darkness of the labyrinth. It ate at your mental health slowly, insidiously, no matter what you did to resist it. Your body could physically move forward, could keep functioning through willpower and instinct. But when your mind broke, everything else would crumble around you.
The labyrinth didn't just kill people with monsters and traps. It killed them by breaking their minds first, leaving them hollow shells that eventually made fatal mistakes.
And even after losing major portions of his memory, Benny was still fundamentally the same person he'd been before. Still that same coward who'd always been pulled toward fear like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like fear was his default state, the place he always returned to no matter how far he tried to run from it.
The memory loss hadn't changed that. Death and resurrection hadn't erased his fundamental nature.
He was still afraid. Still trembling. Still fighting battles inside his own head while the real world moved on around him.
---
But the bugs didn't care about Benny's internal struggles.
The labyrinth cleaners had no interest in his fear, his trembling, his mental breakdown happening in real-time. He wasn't food. Not yet. He was still alive, still moving, still breathing. And they'd assessed him as non-threatening to their current existence.
So they did nothing but pass by him, continuing their work with mechanical efficiency.
After an hour or so, the bugs had cleared the space and moved to other parts of the disposal pit. Making sure they completed their job thoroughly. The clattering noise of their countless feet had vanished. What remained now was the distant echo of nothingness. Silence that pressed against the ears like a physical weight.
And Benny. Well, Benny was still trembling.
He'd curled into a fetal position, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs. He couldn't move from it. Couldn't pull himself out of the trance his fear had put him in.
His mind was elsewhere, trapped in loops of terror and what-if scenarios that played out over and over. What if they'd found him? What if they'd attacked? What if he'd been eaten alive like those corpses, conscious and screaming as millions of mandibles tore him apart piece by piece?
The thoughts wouldn't stop. The fear wouldn't release him.
It took several more minutes before he was finally able to pull himself out of it. To force his breathing to slow. To convince his body to stop shaking. To reassure himself that the bugs were no longer there, that the danger had passed.
There was silence at last. His breathing became louder than the noise inside his head, the only sound in the empty cavern.
And exhausted from the adrenaline crash, from the mental battle he'd fought against himself, he began to slip back into sleep. Back to the dream world where he felt safe. Where nothing could hurt him. Where he didn't have to be afraid.
Hopefully, this was all just one big bad dream that he would eventually wake up from.
---
The next morning, he felt refreshed. Weirdly enough, that was how he felt.
It seemed he'd already forgotten about the previous night and what had happened. The terror. The trembling. The mental breakdown. All of it had faded into a vague uneasiness that he couldn't quite place.
But evidence showed that something had occurred. When he crawled out of his cavern, moving slowly and carefully on still-weak legs, the place seemed clean. Unnaturally clean.
There was no longer the rotting smell of death that had permeated everything. The stench that had been so thick you could taste it was gone. There were no piles of dead bodies, no heaps of waste that had been disposed of here. The disposal pit had been emptied.
So was it all truly just a dream? Or was it reality that his mind had partially blocked out to protect him from the trauma?
He didn't know. Couldn't tell for certain. But he was glad it had worked out in the end, regardless of whether it had been real or imagined.
With that uncertainty hanging over him, he set it all aside. He didn't want to dwell on things he couldn't determine with certainty. Didn't want to question his own perception of reality. That path led to madness, and he was close enough to that edge already.
It was time to focus on practical matters. Time to plan what to do going forward.
And the most pressing issue was becoming more apparent with every passing hour.
His stomach was grumbling. Growling at him with increasing insistence. Whatever reserved body fat he'd had before was being consumed by his metabolism now. He'd had no food for days, surviving only on water alone. And with the loss of the rotting flesh and corpses, whatever potential food source he might have scavenged directly had been cleaned away by the bugs.
The thought of eating rotting corpse meat was repulsive, made his stomach turn even in his desperate state. But desperate people did desperate things. And if that had been his only option, he might have considered it.
Now, though, that option is gone. The disposal pit was empty. Clean. Nothing organic remained except him.
But this cave system must have something he could eat, right? There had to be some form of sustenance available. Moss growing on the walls? Underground fungi? Small creatures that lived in the crevices?
He would have to trust his instincts once more. They'd kept him alive this long, guided him to water when he was dying of thirst. Maybe they could guide him to food as well.
He began exploring the cave system more thoroughly, searching for anything edible. His enhanced senses, sharpened by hunger and necessity, detected subtle changes in the air. The faint smell of moisture. The slight movement of air currents that indicated passages leading deeper into the stone.
The mini-map updated as he crawled, revealing new sections of the cave network he hadn't explored yet. Some passages were too narrow for him to fit through. Others opened into larger chambers that stretched beyond his limited field of vision.
In one such chamber, he found something promising. A patch of pale, sickly-looking mushrooms growing from a crack in the wall. They were unlike any mushrooms he'd seen before, if he could even remember seeing mushrooms. These were translucent, almost glowing faintly in the darkness.
Instinct told him they might be edible. But another part of him warned they could be poisonous.
It was a gamble. Eat them and potentially survive. Or avoid them and definitely starve to death within the next day or two.
He studied the mushrooms carefully, trying to remember if there was some way to test for poison. Some survival techniques he should have known before. But his memory provided nothing. Just vague unease and the gnawing hunger in his gut.
Eventually, desperation made the choice for him. He picked one of the smaller mushrooms and bit into it carefully. The taste was bitter, unpleasant, but not unbearable. The texture was slimy, like eating raw meat that had gone slightly off.
He waited, chewing slowly, monitoring his body for any immediate reaction. No burning sensation. No sudden nausea. No indication of poison, at least not fast-acting poison.
So he swallowed. And waited some more.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. No adverse effects. His stomach accepted the food without complaint, grateful to have anything at all to work with.
Encouraged, he ate another mushroom. Then another. He cleared the entire patch, consuming every fungus he could reach. It wasn't enough to truly satisfy his hunger, but it was something. It would keep him functional for another day or two while he searched for more substantial food.
As he crawled back toward his chosen cave with his temporary shelter, he considered his situation more carefully.
He'd survived the night. Survived the bugs. Found water. Found basic food. Found weapons and armor. He had the essentials for survival, at least in the short term.
But he couldn't stay here forever. This disposal pit, while currently empty, would fill up again eventually. The rat kingdom would continue dumping their dead and waste here. The bugs would return weekly to clean it out. The cycle would repeat endlessly.
He needed to find a way out. A way back to wherever he'd come from before ending up here. Or at least a way to somewhere else, anywhere that wasn't a corpse pit in monster territory.
The mini-map showed passages leading away from the main chamber. Some of them might connect to the rat kingdom proper. Others might lead deeper into the labyrinth, to other sections he didn't know existed.
Either direction was dangerous. But staying here was dangerous too. And eventually, his luck would run out. The bugs would decide he was food after all. Or the rat men would discover him during one of their dumping runs. Or he would starve when the mushrooms ran out.
No, he needed to move. To explore. To find answers about where he was and how to escape.
But first, he needed to regain his strength. His legs were still barely functional. His body was still recovering from whatever trauma had put him here in the first place. He needed more food, more rest, more time.
So he would wait. Just a little longer. Build up his resources. Build up his strength. Learn to walk again instead of crawling everywhere.
And then he would venture into the unknown passages, following the mini-map into darkness, searching for a way out of this nightmare.
His enemy was himself. His fear. His broken mind. His failing body. But he would overcome those enemies the same way he'd overcome everything else so far.
One crawling step at a time. One moment of terror survived at a time. One day of not dying at a time.
He was still alive. Still functioning. Still refusing to give up.
And that would have to be enough.
For now.