"How fucking long can this hallway be?!" Hilda exclaimed as she kept walking on, following Robin who lit the way forward. "We should've reached the end minutes ago!"
Even Janus was starting to feel a little uneasy. This hallway they were walking down was much longer than he ever thought it would be. He had a bad feeling, he wasn't sure if he wanted to see what was past the thick veil of darkness ahead of them. "I hate to say the shorty is right, but this is the longest hallway I have ever been down."
Robin pushed on, opening the doors before carrying on. There were so many bedrooms and just plain empty rooms. It made him wonder just how long it took the miner's guild to make this place. Suddenly, he heard the sound of something striking stone. He stopped right in his tracks. "Do you hear that?" He whispered to the others.
Hilda recognized the sound almost immediately. She recognized pattern, the sound of metal colliding with rock, making that satisfying echo. "Someone is mining." She whispered to them.
Janus looked back to her with a rather confused expression on his face. "You know that for sure? How?" He knew that she used to live in a place that had many mines, but how could she tell it was someone mining? For all he knew, it could be some guy bashing the lock off a door.
"I just know, fuck head." Hilda spat back at him, knowing he was going to try and piss her off some more. She was not in the mood for his shit.
Just as Janus opened his mouth to retaliate with a snappy comeback, a scream rattled their eardrums. Everyone tried covering their ears, trying to stop themselves from going deaf. It was so loud, and the empty hallway did nothing to dampen the sound. If anything, it only amplified it. "My ears!" Janus yelled.
Hilda's ears were ringing, she dropped both her sword and her shield just to cover up her ears. She looked to the others, seeing Robin dropping his halberd, and Thea dropping her mace. A shocked look spread across the dwarf's face as she saw the torch slipping from Thea's fingers. "Don't!"
Before Thea even realized what she had done, the torch already hit the floor. She quickly knelt down to pick it up, but the sound of a door slamming open rang out, followed by a huge gust of wind. The cold air sent a shiver down her spine, and snuffed out the flames of the torch. "The light! Janus, we need light!"
Janus lifted up his right hand as flames seemed to burst out around his wrist, illuminating the hallway. It wasn't as bright as the torch, but at least now they could see something instead of absolutely nothing. "Calm down there, oh great sister of the light! Afraid of the dark are we?" Janus replied with a smirk.
Thea just glared back at him before then picking up the snuffed out torch. She then walked back towards Janus, letting him light it once more. "We don't know what else lurks in the darkness." She reminded him.
"I'll take that as a yes." Janus replied with a smug look on his face, before then hearing something that startled even him.
"No!" A loud strange altered male voice screamed down the halls.
Robin looked to the others, who had also stopped moving. Everyone was clearly surprised by the loud monstrous voice. He had a feeling that whatever it was knew that they were coming. While the others stayed silent, he instead tried to communicate. "Hello?!" He yelled out.
Hilda quickly looked right at Robin. "What the fuck are you doing? You're giving away our position. They will be on us like flies on shit." She angrily whispered to him before hearing that same monstrous voice responding to Robin's call.
"You don't want to be here! Turn back! Or your flesh will become the next blank canvas upon which a nightmare shall be made!" The monstrous voice warned them.
Janus then chuckled a little. "Even the monsters are telling us to turn back now!" He said in a rather amused tone of voice.
"I am no monster! I am just deformed... Mangled. You do not want to become what they made me... I cannot leave this place, but I can warn you. But you won't listen, will you? Once you know there is gold, you won't leave. Your greed leads you straight into a fate worse than death. I have seen others come, and others die. I still hear their cries! I still hear their lies!" The voice told the group.
Janus just rolled his eyes as he walked ahead. He bet it was just some crazy guy at the end of the corridor telling them all this. "Blah, blah, blah. Just tell us where the gold is." The blaziken replied.
"You will never be rich, you will never live to see that gold at the end of this dark pit. The only thing you will see is black and red, and the only thing you will take with you, is madness, if you are lucky. If you don't believe me, come see me! Come see what they did to my once human body! Come see what living fucking hell they have made me suffer!"
Janus just walked on, pushing forwards through the darkness until finally, they saw a door at the end of this long hallway. It was a relief to see that there was actually an end to this hallway. Hilda, Robin and Thea all followed Janus as he pushed open the door, which led into a large square stone room, twenty feet wide, and twenty foot long with another door on the opposite wall. There was a thick charnel smell in the air, which Janus then almost choked on. As he walked in, he saw something to his right, something that made him pause, and shut up for once. He saw what looked like intestines and large veins growing like vines from the wall. On the wall was a heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, bladder, pretty much the entire contents of a human being at the centre of those dangling organs was a large upside down deformed human head. It was missing one eye, and the one eye it did have seemed too large for the eye socket. It was bloodshot, looking at all four of them. The lips were big and bloated, red. The skin had turned to a strange rotting brownish green color, and the ears appeared to have been ripped off at some point. The head was supported by a series of vines, and what looked like a large spine tracking all the way up into a hole in the ceiling. "That... Looks rough..."
"You have no idea how painful this is... To feel your own lungs scraping against the cold hard stone you are bound to, forever. My heart, I can see it beating... I want it to stop. Make it stop." The deformed creature begged for the sweet release of death.
Hilda was the first to step forwards. "If that's what you want." She simply said as she prepared to drive her sword right into the still beating heart.
Robin quickly stepped in, not wanting to waste this opportunity to find out just what the hell was going on in this place. "Wait! You're the first thing that has spoken to us in this place. Can you tell us what happened here? Where is the gold?"
"Gold, gold, gold... You have no idea how many people I have seen pass through here, and how many creatures come crawling back out of that door... I have seen the gold, it was down there, but that was such a long time ago. A creature showed it to me, shortly before forcing me to drink the tainted blood of the men I worked with. They deconstructed me, tore me down to the bone and then cast them aside. I do not know where they came from, I do not know what they even really are. All I know is that it all started at when the miner's guild were busy making lower levels for us. It took them longer than it should've... When I went to investigate, I saw what had become of them. I saw some were dead, and the others ate the flesh of their kin. I thought they were insane, but then I saw a large maggot like creature sliding down the throat of a corpse. It was dead, but it seemed to spring to life. It took control, and then it ate. Those maggots couldn't have killed them all though, there was something else down there, something that changes and bends flesh, an architect of blood and bone. This is not necromancy, it is something else... Soon, we were all dying, all being killed by the people right besides us. There was no escape, but some chose to leave, take their chances with the unbelievably heavy snow fall outside. I think the ones who ran froze to death, the ones who stayed and fought went insane, or died. Or both. We didn't stand a chance."
Thea thought this sounded incredibly similar to what she read in that diary. Just as she thought that, she pulled it out, and held it up for the creature to see. "Is this yours?"
"Yes, it is... I wrote it when I could still move, when I was still something at least partially pleasant to look at. Now look at me... Nothing but a monster, trapped here with the rest." The deformed human sounded incredibly depressed, and for good reason too.
Robin still had more questions. He was still sceptical of this creature's words. "You said they changed you, why did they change you? What purpose do you serve?" He asked.
The creature appeared to let out an almost painful sigh. Every breath the creature took sounded so painful. "At first, I thought it was to scare away intruders, or drive me insane. But now, I think it was to draw people like you in. Once you hear of gold, your type always press on, but your type never return. Why do I think this? Because I have come to realize I cannot lie, not even if I want to. I want to tell you that there is nothing here, and you should just run while you can, but I know that there was gold down in those lower levels. I saw it, I think that is why that creature shown me the gold before it changed me. They want to trap you in their spiders web, and mash your bodies up. I have seen so many horrific creatures, I wonder if they can think like I can. I wonder if they are trapped inside those bodies, unable to control their bloodlust..." The deformed human began to think aloud. He hoped that wasn't the case, no one else should have to suffer this same fate.
Thea felt so sorry for this poor mutilated human. It was clear to her that he was no monster, but a victim. "You won't have to worry about that anymore."
"No, I won't." The mutilated human replied with a smile on his strange face. Soon, he would have that release he has been wanting for so long. But, he had one last request. "You are a monk, are you not? Will you pray for me before your friends kill me?"
"I will." Thea said as she now lowered her head, and interlocked her fingers. "Arceus, please take this man into your many arms. May he find peace by your side."
As Thea prayed, Hilda watched as the mutilated man closed his one strange eye. It was then that Hilda cleaved his heart in two, blood spilling and spurting onto the blade and onto the floor below. She heard the strange man grunting in pain, before then seeing his face relax, his jaw hanging open. The lungs stopped taking in air, the other organs ceased to function. Many people feared death, but for this man, death was the best gift he could possibly receive. Finally, the mutilated human was dead. "If I ever end up like him... I don't want your sympathy, I want you to kill me." She firmly told them.
"Don't worry, I will be happy to end you if that happened!" Janus replied, chuckling as he walked towards the door that had yet to be opened. He could feel Hilda's eyes on him, it was almost like she was burning holes into him with her glare. "Are you staring at me? I feel like you're staring at me."
Robin saw the dwarf glaring at the blaziken as if she was about to tear his spine right out of his back, so he quickly stepped in between them just in case. "Let's keep moving."
Thea stared at the mutilated man, lost in her thoughts. She hoped that man didn't suffer too much in his final moments, but at least he was free of all the pain. His ordeal was over, but theirs may just be starting.
Author's note: Now they know what to expect if they fall in battle against what is beyond that door. Will they become nothing more than some kind of nightmarish creature? Or will they survive whatever awaits them below? Thank you again to BigBossSonic and Zarfy for looking through and editing this.