CRACK.
The guard went limp. Shane's fingers, slick with sweat, fumbled for the key ring, unhooked it, and pulled it through the bars. His hands trembled so badly he could barely fit the key into the lock. The ant at the front of his cage had chewed through one bar and was now forcing its head through the gap, its mandibles snapping inches from his face.
The lock clicked.
Shane shoved the door open, the momentum slamming the iron gate into the ant, stunning it. He burst out of the cage into a scene from a nightmare. The hall was a maelstrom of chitin, steel, and screaming bodies. He saw a slave, now free, try to strangle a guard with his own chain. He saw another slave being dragged away by two ants, his cries muffled.
Shane knew he had to move. Now.
Ducking low, Shane used the chaos as his cover. An ant lunged at him, and he dropped and rolled under a wooden cart used for moving feed, the creature's pincers closing on empty air. A guard, seeing a slave loose, swung his club. Shane sidestepped, the wind of the blow rustling his hair, and shoved a stumbling ant into the guard's path, creating a momentary distraction.
A glancing blow from a panicked slave's elbow caught Shane's temple, making stars dance in his vision, making him scramble over the body of a dead ant, and a sharp piece of its broken chitin leg sliced a deep gash along his calf. He stifled a cry, limping forward, the warm blood instantly soaking through his thin green tunic.
The main doorway was a maw of violence, clogged with ants and the last desperate stands of the guards. It was a death trap. His eyes scanned the room and found a smaller, secondary door—a servants' entrance—partially hidden behind a torn banner, the same one the auction master had escaped through.
He made a dash for it, his heart hammering against his ribs. Just as he reached for the handle, an ant dropped from the ceiling in front of him. It was smaller, faster. It skittered towards him, its antennae twitching. Shane had nothing, no weapon, nor magic. In a final, futile act of defiance, he kicked a loose piece of brick at it.
The brick missed, but the motion made him stumble back against the wall. His hand landed on the fallen sword of the guard he had knocked out. He hefted it. It was heavy, ungainly and as the ant lunged, he swung with all his might. The blow wasn't clean, but it connected with the creature's side, knocking it off course. The cut wasn't deep enough to kill the ant, but it was able to disorient it, and that was all he needed.
He wrenched the door open and plunged through into a narrow, dark corridor, slamming it shut behind him. He didn't stop to breathe. He ran, limping, through the back passages of the auction house, following the scent of the outside and the sounds of the larger battle, which guided him toward an exit.
He burst out into an alleyway, the cold desert air a shock to his system. The sounds of the pen were behind him. The chaos within the city of Duskmor was before him, and it was burning.
He leaned against a wall, gasping, his body aching from the cut and countless bruises. He had escaped the pen, but he was alone, wounded, and in the middle of a city under siege. The plan to rescue Plavenin was in ashes. She was in a secure wing, now more heavily guarded than ever. He couldn't get to her.
But he was free, although he was free, it seems the trial wasn't complete yet,
Pushing off the wall, Shane moved deeper into the chaotic streets, a shadow flitting from one ruined building to the next, drawn inexorably toward the epicenter of the destruction, the eastern sector, where the earth-shaking impacts of a titanic battle grew louder with every step.
As the ant horde began their orderly retreat, carrying their spoils, a figure emerged from the shadows of a collapsed alleyway. Shane, who had witnessed the final, brutal moments of the Xeric and half hyena half ant battle from a hiding spot, finally came out, he couldn't even comprehend what he had witnessed, till now Shane would have said the exchange between the warden and the Dune-dogs was the most epic thing he had seen so far since the trial began. Still, just from the little he saw between this xeric and the chimera ant blew that away tenfold, the destruction around the battlefield was something else, burnt bodies of both ants and people littered around.
While slowly looking around, thinking of where to go, what directions to take, Shane saw something glint on the ground near Shelby's ravaged body, it was a ring.
Shane hurried forward, his heart pounding, and picked up the ring, before disappearing into the City.
------
The immediate, overwhelming ant tide had receded, leaving behind a different kind of chaos. The primary swarm was gone, but stragglers, injured, disoriented, or simply slow ants still skittered through the rubble, being hunted down by squads of grim-faced city guards. Their focus was the eastern wall, or what was left of it, where a massive breach yawned open, a gaping wound in the city's defenses, and guards were scrambling to set up a makeshift barricade, their shouts echoing with a mixture of urgency and exhaustion.
Shane knew he couldn't stay in the open. He ducked into the skeleton of a collapsed bakery, the air still sweet with the scent of burnt bread and coppery blood. He needed to think, to plan, even while he moved. He noticed that the people were looking at him strangely, maybe due to his clothes, because he had seen humans walking around, so it couldn't be because of his race.
His eyes fell on a dead man slumped against a broken counter, a civilian, by the looks of his simple, dusty tunic and trousers, a plan grim but necessary, formed in his mind.
Crouching low, he moved to the body. "Sorry," he muttered. Slowly, he stripped the dead man of his outer clothes. Then, acting on a paranoid instinct, he removed his own distinctive green slave tunic and dressed the corpse in it. If anyone was looking for an escaped slave, they might just find this body and assume their quarry was dead.
He pulled the dead man's clothes over his own. They were coarse and smelled of dust and sweat, but that would do for now. 'I need to figure out what to do next, since my escaping didn't end the second trial. My original thought was current; I might still need to get Plavenin out, either that or it has something to do with Vitreom Enchanters. I need a plan. I need information.'
As he adjusted the ill-fitting tunic, his fingers brushed against the ring in his pocket. He pulled it out, examining it in a sliver of moonlight that pierced the ruined roof. It was a simple, heavy band of a silvery metal, unadorned but for a few faint, unreadable runes along the inside. It was still warm.
He slipped it onto his finger. It fit perfectly.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a faint, familiar chime echoed in his mind, and a translucent screen flickered before his eyes.
> [ITEM IDENTIFIED: STORAGE RING]
> GRADE: [FLAWLESS]
> EFFECTS:
> - Provides a 5x5x5 meter extradimensional storage space.
> - Mental command to store/retrieve items.
"It works just like the system's inventory, was kinda expecting something more" Shane sighed.
Peering out from his hiding spot, he watched the guards patrolling the breach. The Eastern sector was a lost cause for now, it was the most heavily monitored part of the city. His goal was to survive and complete this trial. To do that, he needed to get away from here, to find a place to lay low and understand what this trial truly required of him.
He looked at the ring again, and this time images of what was stored within it appeared in Shane's mind. The ring had mostly weapons, food, clothes that would definitely be oversized for Shane, and a few coins, which might have been the most important thing within the ring.
"With this, I should be able to get a room to stay" Shane pulled out the coins from within the ring, after counting and sorting them by their color he discovered that there were 150 copper colored coins, and 3 silver colored coins