They’d learned that like most of the newly arrived terrors that were steadily wiping out the human race, it was sensitive to the scent of blood.  Allistor looked around, finding a broken and slightly bent length of rebar close by.  He pressed the bend down against his leg, mostly straightening it back out. Then he used his improved strength to apply pressure as he rapidly scraped one end back and forth across the side of the steel beam until it had sharpened to a point.

Taking a deep breath, he looked down at the hole a few feet away.  “They were the last humans you’re gonna kill.”   He dragged the rough point across the back of his hand, drawing blood.  His interface flashed with a red negative five, indicating he’d taken damage.  Waiting until a decent amount had pooled, he flicked his hand toward the manhole.  Droplets sprayed across the ground, with just a few making it down into the darkness.  But he knew it would be enough.

He carefully moved around through the debris until he was on the opposite side of the hole.  Crouching down behind a mound of rubble and metal, he put the back of his hand to his mouth and sucked the blood from it.  Keeping his mouth on it to prevent more open bleeding, he waited.  After a few moments, the bleeding stopped, and he watched as the small wound began to heal over.

The wet sound returned quickly.  The scraping of scales against the concrete sides of the tunnel below.  A moment later first one, then a second tentacle reached up and grasped the edge of the manhole.  A third emerged and wandered back and forth around the edge, searching for prey.  When it found nothing moving, the creature’s octopus-like head emerged to look around with two of its bulbous eyes that swiveled in protruding sockets.  It sniffed the air, turning toward the line of blood droplets in the dust.   One tentacle reached out to touch the nearest droplet, returning to the creature’s maw, where a purple tongue flashed out and tasted the blood.  It gave a gurgling purr as it lifted itself the rest of the way to the surface.

The moment its torso cleared the hole, Allistor lunged.  He drove the point of the rebar spear into the uppermost tentacle joint, twisting it violently as it penetrated the thing’s rubbery flesh, scoring a critical backstab.  It screamed and fell forward, off balance with the lower half of its body still in the hole.