A/N: The new chapter. I worked a bit faster than usual because it was exciting and easy to write. It hope it is to read too... Enjoy!
Reviews are welcome!
Chapter 35 – Slavery part 1
Behind the door was another hallway, this time with a lot of rooms on both sides. Minos heard some people speaking above the moaning, shouting and screaming from further down the hall. He advanced further down the hall, weary of any signs of alert.
He passed the room where multiple guards were playing a game of –presumably- cards. He snuck past the open door in a rush, but no-one saw him. Minos continued down the hall, passing several storage-rooms on his way. He reached a big, locked door. There was a small window in it, on the very top of the door, and Minos tried to peak through.
He hung upside down from the ceiling, clinging on to a piece of rock that stuck out just enough to wrap his hand around. He peeked through the window, and almost fell to the floor in amazement.
It was slavery.
Minos could see clearly what was beyond the closed door. He saw a huge room, at least two hundred metres long, and Minos couldn't even guess how wide or deep. There was a metal pathway suspended into the rocky ceiling of the room with lots and lots of cables. On the other end of the pathway there were two guards standing, fully armed with staff weapons. The pathway split down there, and two sets of stairs leading left and right descended down into the rest of the room.
Shouts and screams of both pain and misery were now clearer than ever. Minos moved closer towards the window, almost with his nose pressed against it. The room was wider than he had expected, or even guessed possible, but there were multiple big towers of rock that held up the ceiling above.
He started guessing how deep it was, but he had no idea. He couldn't see the floor of the room through the small, rectangular window he was peeking through. He could guess what the room was for. It was a mine.
He could see the signs easily. Many crevasses, tears and holes riddled the walls of the chamber, but the structures used to make them were nowhere to see. The only structure tied to the far wall of the room were the metal stairs that cascaded downwards. He looked better, and saw that there was a small amount of smoke in the room, which was led away by a small air canal to the surface.
Minos had to do something. This room was a mine, a big one for as far as he could tell, so it supplied the war factory above. That was where the strange amounts of outgoing and incoming goods where for. And he could guess that the people down there were not volunteers, or paid workers. They were slaves
This was a relatively secluded part of the facility, so Minos guessed that there were no patrols that ran down here. And if he was careful, the rest of the soldiers would only know of him when it was already too late.
He let himself drop soundlessly from the ceiling, catching himself like a cat on his feet, and ran off towards the room where the guards had been in. He'd finally get to do what he liked best – to fight.
Minos casually walked into the room the guards were in. They all sat, stunned by his sudden appearance, locked in their chairs. When the first one made for his weapons, Minos grabbed his arm and broke it. His screams seemed to get the rest out of their trance, for they started moving around, trying to grab and kill Minos.
The first one attacked him from behind, but Minos felt the attack coming and swung his leg backwards, catching the man full in the face and breaking his neck from the force that bent his head backwards. The second man that attacked him came from the side, so Minos twisted himself in a strange way and punched the guy rock-hard on the nose. He wouldn't be getting up again.
The third guy went down the same way, but by this time the remaining three guards had gotten hold of their staff weapons. They fired at Minos, but he saw the shots coming and managed to evade them. He plunged himself forward, grabbing one of the staff weapons and yanking it out of the owner's grip with surprising strength.
He swung the staff around, catching the middle man straight in the stomach with the pointy end and moving on to hit the third one on the backside of the head, killing him instantly. The only still-standing guard was brought down by the other end of the staff in a rapid succession of blows to the chest and neck. Minos quickly finished the last remaining guard with a blow to the neck too, obliterating the third vertebrae and killing him instantly.
Minos cocked out a small grin when he stole another staff from the corner of the room. He was going to use it soon, and he was going to like it. The guards he had just defeated were not even a challenge, for Minos had both the element of surprise and the element of strength on his side. Almost all of his attackers thought that he was just a weak boy, and all of them were proven wrong.
Minos left the room, leaving the six dead guards behind, and made his way towards the mine. He opened the door quietly, poked both staff weapons through the opening, aimed and fired. Both guards fell down simultaneously.
Luckily they fell down without a loud clash, otherwise Minos would have had a hard time walking over the steel pathway unnoticed. He made not a sound as he stayed low when he crossed the pathway. He quickly looked around, to observe his surroundings, and almost fainted on the spot.
The cavern was immense. It was a huge, enormous, gigantic underground room spanning multiple miles in both directions. There were enormous steel support columns placed strategically around the room, holding up the ceiling. The rocky room was shaped like a long crescent, having a small curve in the walls. The room was about two hundred metres wide, for as far as Minos could tell, and about two or three miles in both directions. It was huge.
Minos looked down, and saw huge amounts of workers, slaves of the Ori, walking around between the machineries as they mined deeper and deeper into the bottom of the room. It was about two-hundred metres deep in the middle, and some three hundred at the sides.
The stairs on the far end of the room led down, almost two hundred metres, before they reached a small platform. On the platform was some kind of retractable bridge, which would prevent the workers from escaping. The bridge spanned some twenty metres, until it reached another metal support column that completed the path towards the centre of the room.
Most of the heavy machines, which were probably ore smelters or purifiers designed by the Ori, stood centred on one of ten 'hills' in the middle of the room. They stuck out from the rest of the floor because they were higher, structured heaps of rock. Minos could see multiple tunnels leading into the anthills of rock, which probably led toward the sleeping rooms for the slaves. If they were allowed to sleep.
He noticed that all the slaves were busy digging deeper into the floor of the room, excavating rocks and soil using crude and simple tools. They dug deep cuts across the bottom of the room, leaving the rocky outcrops on which the machines rested untouched.
Minos made his way towards the other side of the metal pathway. No-one had noticed yet that there were guards lying dead on the stairs. He passed them, and took a left turn towards the stairs leading down.
Minos wasn't seen because of his small form, and because none of the slaves dared to look up. He reached the steel drop-bridge, and found a lever to unlock the mechanism holding it in place. He was waiting for the bridge to drop, but it didn't. Minos stepped back, took a sprint and jumped into the deck of the bridge. Due to the shock, which wasn't that big really because of Minos' low weight, the rusty holding mechanism got loose and the bridge lowered.
"Who are you?" one of the enslaved men asked curiously.
" The biggest enemy of your enslavers, so I'm a friend." Minos said. "All the guards are dead, so if you want to be free you are free to go."
"Are all the guards dead?" Spoke a voice from above. "Really? I hadn't noticed."
Minos looked up and saw to his surprise that there was a massive patrol of guards standing on the metal pathway a few hundred metres above him.
"FIRE!" The leader guard shouted, and the other guards fired.
Minos and the slaves ducked away behind one of the machines. Minos ran around the machine, charging both staff weapons he had in his hands. He expertly fired a few shots, killing a few guards on the pathway. The guards quickly saw Minos' new position, and focussed their fire on there.
Minos, however, wasn't even there anymore. He had ducked under the cover of the smoke coming from the machine towards another one, and returned fire from there. But the guards on the pathway were not stupid. They switched their fire from the previous point to where Minos was hiding. All the other slaves in the area had fled, presumably and hopefully to somewhere safe.
Minos ducked away after a blast from one of the guards had almost hit him. He made a sprint, turned in midair so that both staff weapons he was holding were aimed at the guards, and fired. At least six guards fell, having been shot by the blasts from Minos' staffs. His momentum allowed him to keep going, make a backwards somersault and roll to safety behind one of the heavy machines.
Minos wasn't going to do nothing. After all, there were almost fifty guards firing at him from the top of the metal pathway into the room. He moved towards the edge of the machine he was hiding behind, peeked around the corner and fired twice. Two guards fell down, taken down by the blasts shot with Minos' incredible aim.
He had practised long and hard to increase his aiming to the level it now was, which was almost impossible to reach without years and years of training. Minos could hit a speeding bird with a small rock from over a hundred metres away. He had tested that once, but he had used a catapult to shoot small stones instead of birds. He wasn't going to kill a poor bird just for nothing. Unlike with his enemies, Minos showed great compassion for animals and innocent people. Although, if one had asked it to the guards he had shot, one wouldn't have got that answer.
Minos had almost finished killing off all the guards on the metal pathway, using both staffs, which were longer than himself by at least a foot, to their full extent.
Meanwhile, all the slaves from this complex had stopped working to see the firefight, and word had spread towards the other complexes as well, halting all the work in the mine.
Minos swept away the sweat from his forehead after the fight had subsided and the last of the guards were dead.
"Do you want to be free?" Minos asked.
"Of course!" one of the slaves shouted.
"Then follow me!" Minos shouted.
The war cry that followed had even Minos shaking in his boots. All the slaves in the entire mine, probably about ten thousand or something, shouted at the same time. They took the tools they had in their hands, and followed Minos as he sprinted towards the bridge.
The whole group ran on the stairs, most of the men hyper by the option of freedom. Minos was almost afraid that the paths couldn't hold such a weight, but apparently the structures were sturdier than he'd thought because they held with ease.