"You ever hear about the gator in the sewer?"
Niko laughed into the mic, the camera mounted on his chest catching the glint of water dripping from the ceiling. The storm drain echoed around him as his boots splashed through ankle-deep sludge.
"Classic New York myth," his friend Ray replied from behind the camera. "People flush baby alligators, they grow up in the tunnels. Eat rats. Grow huge. Whatever."
But this wasn't New York. This was Dolridge an old city with old tunnels and older secrets. And tonight, they were live-streaming a deep dive for their urban legend channel.
They had coordinates from a forum thread too weird to ignore: a sewer maintenance map with handwritten notes,"KEEP OUT," "DO NOT OPEN GRATE 43C," and one word scrawled in red ink:"BELLY."
They found the grate.
Below it, the tunnel sloped into darkness. The air was thick and wrong. Slippery bones crunched under their boots. Not rat bones bigger. Some cracked open cleanly, like something knew how to get the marrow.
Ray started to feel it first. A low hum, like pressure in his ears. "Dude… do you hear that?"
Niko didn't. But he started seeing shapes in the walls. Marks. Etched into the slime covered brick. A repeating spiral and something like claws.
They pressed deeper, into a chamber that shouldn't exist. Huge. Circular. Ancient. Covered in mosaics of reptilian figures with open jaws and red, bleeding eyes. And at the center,an altar. With fresh meat.
And a camcorder. Still on.
They played the footage.
Screams. Something massive moving through the water. A voice, whispering through the static:"He lives where the waste flows… He remembers the surface."
That's when the water rippled.
They turned. Something slid out of the tunnel long, slick, armored. Scaled skin the color of sewage, limbs twisted like they weren't meant for walking anymore. It stood. Towering. Blind milky eyes turned toward them. Not an alligator.
Something older.
Something worshipped.
The stream went black.______________________________________________________________________________________________
The Truth
The city's official story: equipment failure. Lost connection. No trace of the boys ever found.
But weeks later, a tech worker found something buried in the sewer servers. A corrupted livestream file. Inside were flickering frames a claw, a spiral, a long jaw snapping shut.
And one phrase hidden in the video's data signature:"Property of The Belly."
Uncovered documents from a defunct biotech firm revealed test subjects injected with reptilian DNA and abandoned in the tunnels after collapse of Project Nile. But cultists found one. It grew. Adapted. Learned to echo voices to draw prey.
The alligator in the sewer?
Not a myth.
Just the beginning.