How to Get Girls, Get Rich, and Rule the World (Even If You're Ugly)-Chapter 57: How to NOT get in home after a long night in a manhole (1)

Chapter 57: How to NOT get in home after a long night in a manhole (1)

The sound of metal scraping stone was already behind us, but the stench was still everywhere.

Organic mud, rot compacted over decades, mixed with some kind of soaked grease that clung even to your thoughts.

The tunnel was low enough to force our shoulders into a hunch, and too narrow to allow for any comfortable breath.

The porous walls dripped with moisture like the sweat of some subterranean monster. Every inch forward was a battle between reason and the instinct to run — to nowhere.

Crawling demands humility.

But here... it demanded surrender.

Thalia was behind me, muttering under her breath, coughing every so often, the sound muffled by a scarf she improvised with her own shirt.

"If we die here, I just want to make it clear... you’re still the one to blame," she murmured, her voice nearly swallowed by the tunnel’s damp echo.

"If we die here, Thalia, no one will be left to write the final version of this story. So... technically, your accusation won’t make the record."

She grunted something between disgust and nausea.

I kept crawling.

There was something strangely comforting about that place, and that was the problem. It was primitive. Filthy. Feral. And yet, familiar.

In my other life — the one that now lives only as an encrypted file in my mind — there were other kinds of sewers.

Corridors too clean, made of glass and concrete, where men in tailored suits smiled while burying entire careers with a single email. There, the sewage was metaphorical. But it still stank. Stank of vanity dressed as protocol, of lies written in technical vocabulary, of power concentrated in the hands of people who never got their own dirty.

And even in that sterilized world, I met people who understood filth far better than any executive: the street cleaners.

I worked for a while on an "urban renewal" project — which, in practice, was just a pretty name for cleaning out poor areas before selling them to larger groups. I’d talk to the cleaners when I could. Listen to their stories. Not out of altruism. Out of interest.

I remember one in particular. A small man, calm eyes, hands calloused like aged leather. He told me, while tossing lime on a mold-stained wall, that the secret to enduring the stench was simple: stop fighting it.

"You try not to breathe, and it beats you. You accept it’s part of the smell, and then... it vanishes," he said, grinning with a missing tooth. "At first, you throw up. Then you eat lunch in the middle of the trash and don’t even notice anymore."

And it was true.

With time, your nose gives up the fight. Your body adapts. The mind finds another kind of hygiene — the one that comes from knowing that even covered in grime, you’re more honest than a thousand men in ties.

And now, crawling through this real sewer, with the smell soaking into my bones, I thought of him.

Of the missing tooth.

The calm smile.

The practical silence of someone who works where no one wants to look.

And for a moment...

I felt like he’d understand exactly where I was now.

Might even say: "See? Everyone ends up down here, sooner or later."

And honestly, I was starting to get used to the smell.

"Are you sure this leads somewhere?" Thalia asked, breaking the loop of reflections, her voice thick with doubt.

"No."

"Oh, perfect!"

"Look on the bright side: you’re in the most honest part of the city."

She coughed. Choked a little on the comment.

I slid forward a few more feet, feeling my shoulder bump into something too soft to be stone. I chose not to investigate.

The darkness in there wasn’t just the absence of light. It was the kind of black that seemed to mold itself around the body, filling your ears, clinging to your skin — like the city itself trying to erase us from reality, inch by inch.

My eyes were almost used to it, but it was like seeing through ashes. With every push forward, the risk of touching the wrong thing grew.

I raised my hand, pinched my fingers just right.

A spark.

Tiny embers leapt between my fingertips, dancing for half a second. Gentle heat. Just enough light to reveal the nearby wall, the damp texture, the veins of sludge packed into the recesses. The magical energy was restrained — too much would draw attention; too little and we’d be blind.

I kept crawling.

Spark.

A few more feet.

Spark again.

With each flicker of light, my mind began organizing the tunnel like a mental map: crack here, bend there, offshoot sewer pipe on the left — and a rusted grate hanging like a rotten tooth.

And then, in the silence that followed... the sound began.

Claws scraping.

Multiple.

Fast.

Scratching the metal pipes, like they were testing the thickness. Then came the hisses — not normal ones, but long, with a pulse at the end. You know when a sound carries intent? This one did. It had rhythm.

Thalia stopped behind me.

"What was that?" she asked, her voice already trembling.

"Just the locals," I replied, forcing a grin that didn’t fit the moment. "Probably mad we used the back door without knocking."

"Are those rats?" Thalia whispered, her voice shaking like water at the bottom of a loosely sealed bottle.

There was a tense silence. A distant scratching answered in my place.

"Probably," I murmured, trying to keep my tone light.

She froze instantly. Literally. Her body locked up behind me like some part of her nervous system had yanked the emergency brake. Her knees stopped moving. The soft bump of her elbow against the wall ceased. Her breath caught — trapped between fear and denial.

"I hate rats, Dante."

Her voice was thin now, almost a hiss. And it wasn’t one of those throwaway lines said with the dismissive tone of someone trying to keep composure. It was visceral. The kind of hatred formed early in life, somewhere between childhood screams and recurring nightmares.

I turned my head slightly — just enough to glimpse her over my shoulder.

She was pale, as far as the dim light would let me see. Eyes wide, pupils blown. Her hands were clenched into tight fists — not out of anger, but restraint. Her fingers trembled. She was biting her lower lip hard enough that I worried she might break the skin. The improvised scarf was crumpled and twisted, like she’d been gripping it too tight without noticing.

"They don’t really care about that," I murmured.

She shot me a look that, if it could, would’ve shoved me all the way back through the tunnel to the surface.

But I wasn’t joking. And she knew I wasn’t mocking her. That was just how I talked — a layer of irony over the urgency to keep moving.

"Dante..." she whispered. "If anything touches me, I swear I’ll—"

"Scream?"

She hesitated.

"I’ll bite."

I smiled. But I didn’t turn my head. The sound of more paws skittering through the pipes made me clench my fist.

Yeah. They were close.

And now, they knew we were too.

She held her breath when another scratch echoed — closer this time. A little ahead of us. It sounded like it came from a side pipe — a broken conduit or a forgotten offshoot.

"Dante..." she hissed. "They’re close."

"Relax. They’re not that big."

I hoped I was right.

Until I wasn’t.

I made another spark, casual, just like I’d been doing.

Only this time, the flash landed right on it.

Less than three meters ahead, halfway out of an oval-shaped hole in the side wall, a rat the size of a small dog stood still. Its fur was thick, matted with dried blood.

The front paws were thin but muscular, and the claws... claws built to flay leather. But the most disturbing part was the head. The snout stretched too far. The eyes sunken and dark, like they were wells of sewage.

And it wasn’t startled by the light.

On the contrary.

It didn’t blink.

It didn’t flinch.

It saw me.

Its lips pulled back, revealing long, yellowed teeth — curved like old fishing hooks. It wore an expression of patience. Of something that had seen people down here before.

Thalia, still behind me, whispered:

"Tell me I’m imagining this."

"I wish I could."