You don’t have to deal with it on your own, Lux, she insisted.
With this, I do. Promise me.
She hesitated momentarily, then gave me a small nod. I promise.
Resigned to the difficulty ahead, I turned and scanned the hallway in both directions. “I’m assuming you have no idea what this place is?” I asked Val.
“No,” she answered slowly, shaking her head. “I have never heard of a structure beneath Shadowmine. This is all so...” she trailed off, looking back and forth. “How could such a place exist?”
“More secrets,” I muttered. I attempted to send out a quick scan of Detection, but the mana pooled at the edges of my boots with the all-too-familiar sensation of the Serathids’ aura. “Well, no sense in waiting, I guess.” After squinting down both sides of the hall for a final moment and finding nothing out of the ordinary in either direction, I led our group to the right. The rancid smell in the air increased rapidly as we walked, becoming so pungent that I had to lessen my Enhanced Senses to keep from gagging. The hallway turned ninety degrees to the left, then ended a few dozen yards ahead with a heavy metal door that had been knocked from its hinges.
We found the source of the stench beyond the broken door: a long chamber constructed entirely of metal from floor to ceiling, completely filled with rotting Serathid corpses. Blood squelched beneath my boots as I stepped inside and peered around the piles of decaying beasts, looking for any signs of life. “What could have done this?” Val asked as she entered behind me, her voice buzzing as she pinched her nose closed.
“They did,” I answered, pointing my sword towards the nearest corpse. “They killed each other.” Half of the beast’s body was stripped down to the bone, its chitinous armor shattered away to reveal the skin and muscle within. The mortal blows that had slain the monsters were all obvious slash wounds, made only more apparent by the dark ichor staining most of the beasts’ bladed appendages. “They killed and ate each other.” The burning in my arm grew more painful as I walked further into the room, consciously absorbing the ambient death energy to keep it away from Lia.
“Vile creatures,” Val swore.
As I scanned the rest of the room, the entirety of the situation became more apparent. “They were locked in here by someone. They were starving, so they ate each other. Eventually, they broke out of that door and made the passage we found to reach the surface.” The metal walls, which had appeared to be some sort of patterned steel, were covered floor-to-ceiling in deep slash marks. “Something other than these beasts is down here, or at least, was down here. These things were intentionally imprisoned here.”
“Maybe this whole invasion was an accident,” Lia posited. “Whoever was down here clearly tried to stop these things from getting out. Not that it worked, but still...maybe it wasn’t one of Virram’s plans after all.”
“Or his plans just got out of hand. Or this is his plan.” Lia’s point was valid, but I refused to give Virram the benefit of the doubt. “Summoning these...creatures isn’t something you do entirely by accident. You have to be—”
“Noises. At the far door,” Val hissed, waving off our conversation. As we fell into silence, I noticed the sounds she had somehow picked up over my bitter complaining: taps and scrapes against the metal door opposite where we had entered. “More Serathids.”
I formed up with Lia and dashed across the room. The door was secured by two parallel steel bars that were controlled by a single wheel at the center. “This must lead further in,” I said, placing a hand on the wheel. “Ready?” Lia and Val nodded in unison, and I spun the wheel and threw open the door. Two bladed arms flew past me and caught on Val’s shield as the first monster lunged toward us. As it stood, preoccupied with its strike, Lia and I stabbed through its hanging body, and Val shoved its broken corpse back into the doorway.
“Close the door!” she shouted, striking out at the next Serathid that attempted to enter the room. As she repelled the intruder, I put my shoulder into the heavy bulwark door, latching it shut immediately after the beast was pushed through. I watched Val expectantly, waiting for an explanation as the walled-off beasts banged against the metal. “Two more at the door, but beyond, at the end of the hallway...scores of them. They did not react to our skirmish.”
“Well, they might react now,” I said in annoyance, motioning to the door as it shook under the full weight of the ravenous beasts. My eyes turned to Lia, and we set an instant plan into motion through our accelerated link. I spun the door open once again and allowed her to slip into the hallway, deftly rolling beneath the first beast to skewer the second with both longswords. Her sudden movement distracted the final Serathid and allowed me to catch it unaware with a plunging stab into its skull.
With the entrance momentarily unassailed, we took the opportunity to confirm Val’s assessment. Beyond the doorway, a wide hallway ran over a hundred feet back, ending in a chamber far too large to accurately gauge from our distance. I squinted at the movement and repowered my Enhanced Senses, marveling at how Val could have taken such an accurate estimate in such a brief amount of time. Serathids appeared and disappeared at the entrance to the chamber as they scuttled about with some unseen purpose, easily fifty strong, if not more. Also in accordance with Val’s report, they seemed to take no notice of us as we lingered in the doorway.
“That has to be what we’re looking for, right?” Lia whispered. “Or at least, closer to what we’re looking for.”
The
