He took a step closer and he saw more details on the boots. Black leather, soft-looking so they were probably well-worn. They had a silver plate on the top to protect the top of the foot. The greaves were make-shift. They were just one long metal plate strapped over the boots with buckles around his the calves. Two or three buckles. The boots ended under the knees, and Takeda took another step forward. Black pants with a single blue stripe down the front of each leg tucked into the top of the boots.

Above the legs there was a dark brown, leather belt, with a square gold clasp in the middle. It had some Chinese symbol on it that Takeda didn't know. A piece of blue cloth lay hanging from the clasp, with a white dragon embroidered into it.

Takeda took another step closer, and the wall ended. He had an unimpeded view of the person laying there.

Clipped to the sides of the belt and hanging down were thick, blue, leather flaps to protect his legs and three more brown buckles that wrapped the whole way around his body and clipped together in the front.

He saw what made Jin react that strongly. It was revolting. It smelled like death - that dense smell that stuck to his nose and the back of his throat. Takeda almost retched from the smell, but at the sight he saw, he nearly doubled over.

Above the belt, the body just . . . ended. There was no upper half to speak of. Goopy, frozen blood was spattered in a perfect arc around the top of the waist, like the person was ripped violently in half. And scattered about in the puddle like tentacles were the tendrils and tissues of intestines, leading back into the legs.

"G-god-" he croaked, heaving as he turned away. He inhaled another whiff of the stench of death, and had to walk away a few steps. His eyes watered, his stomach churned. He was sure he would be sick.

He could hear the others reacting just as violently as him. Jacqui gasped. Cassie made a throaty noise of disgust. "Where's his other half?" Cassie said, and the mental image assaulted Takeda again. His stomach heaved and he lurched forward, further away from it.

"Look. Over there," Jin said. His voice sounded pinched, and when Takeda looked back at him, keeping his eyes above the snow, he had his nose pinched with his fingers. Blocking out the awful smell. Takeda followed his hand, because it was pointing up and away from the lower half. But when he looked he wished he hadn't.

Seeing the other half of the body confirmed what he already knew, but was avoiding thinking about. It was Sub-Zero. His top half was dragged halfway up the rocks around the inclosure. His vest flapped haphazardly around his chest with no belt to root itself in. His mouth was locked open in a silent scream and his crystal blue eyes were dead and staring in permanent shock at the pain of being eviscerated. He had snowflakes peppered in his beard, so he had been there for a while.

His one arm was extended forward, and upon closer inspection, his hand was nearly ripped off at the wrist. Bloody gums of membranes held it together, but barely, and he was missing some fingers. If Takeda had to guess, the wolves ripped him apart - no . . . ate him apart . . . then tried to drag him away by his hand before attacking the four of them.

They wouldn't have had to try very hard. His ribs were exposed through his chest, picked clean by claws and teeth, and bits of rotting flesh scattered behind, in the trail of blood from where he was dragged.

"Shit," Cassie said. "God, that's . . . that's . . . "

"Unfortunate?" Jacqui offered weakly.

" . . . Um . . . shit."

"What do we do?" Jacqui asked.

" . . . Get him down, I guess?" Cassie said. "Someone help me-"

"No. No way," Jin said, shaking his head. "We're not dragging him back down here. Number one, that's disgusting. Number two, there's no hope for him now."

"This is an S & R. We need to."

"There's nothing in the rules of an S & R about taking a dead body back with us."

"There is in the M.I.A. and K.I.A. protocol," Cassie fought back.

"He's not in the military. And he smells. Awful," Jin said, and the smell assaulted Takeda's senses again. He resisted the urge to retch, instead plugging his nose like Jin.

Cassie gestured wildly to both halves of him. "We can't just leave him here like this. Who cares if he smells? We need to take him back!"

Jin rolled his eyes. "Cass, look at him. Predators have already ripped him apart and ate a lot of him. We're really going to try and take that back to base? What're we gonna do, ship him in pieces back to the Lin Kuei for a proper ceremony-?"

"No, of course not! Don't be stupid!"

"Okay, also, why do you think the wolves flipped when we got so close? They were protecting their kill. If we want them to stay away from us while we pass through here, we'll let them have him."

"The wolves flipped because they're Netherrealm Hell Hounds and we're human beings for them to eat! Either way, you want to toss somebody to the wolves? Let them eat the rest of him here? That's cruel, Jin. That's really fucking cruel."

"Fine! Then you carry him - both halves of him! You carry him through the Spider Caves, and you carry him into the mausoleum and you carry him back and let his intestines slap in the snow while you walk-"

"Jin, that's gross!" Jacqui said. She looked green, and Takeda bet he looked the same.

"Well, what else is she gonna do? She wants to take him, so she can carry his legs over her shoulder and drag his upper body behind her by his other hand."

"I'm not saying I want to take him with us, asshole! I'm just saying that I don't want to just leave him here to be eaten. That's super . . . undignified. He's Sub-Zero. He's the Grandmaster of the Lin Kuei. That's just . . . "

Takeda knew what she was thinking. It was different when they were looking at a real person. What Jin had said before was true. They had killed monsters before. Unimaginable creatures. In unimaginable ways. They had ripped spines out of bodies. They had punched holes through bodies. They had shot kneecaps and severed limbs and done ridiculously awful things to mindless creatures.

It was different with a real person. A real person who they had talked to, fought with, fought against, taken advice from. Known personally. Sub-Zero came to their aid during Shinnok's invasion. He didn't deserve this, and seeing him so defeated and . . . he guessed humiliated, was a tough blow.

"We could always take him back - just to the front gate," Takeda suggested. He really didn't want to drag Sub-Zero's pieces - ugh - all the way back to the front. He really wanted to get as far away from his body as possible. It looked cold and frozen and waxy, like it wasn't real. It looked frozen in a moment, and at any point the time would unfreeze and he would come to life and start screaming. "Did anybody bring, like, an extra sleeping bag, or a tarp or something?" They could lay him on the tarp and drag him behind them. Takeda pictured it in his head, more than sure if he tried to say it out loud he would lose his lunch. His stomach lurched again, and felt like it was sitting under his sternum. He sent the picture to the three of them.

"That's a good idea," Cassie said, "but I didn't bring anything."

"Me either," Jacqui said.

"What about the tent tarp?" Jin asked, apparently on board with this solution.

"You really want to make our tent tarp smell like death?" Cassie countered.

"Oh. Right," Jin said.

"I think we have to leave him here," Cassie said after a while of thick silence. "There's nowhere else for us to go. We have to go back to the spider place. Until we find Kenshi's sword, that's the only place we can go. I don't want to take him down there with us. He's too . . . unwieldy to drag around. And the blood and stuff will be an easy target for those giant ass spiders. It might even attract them to us. We need to be ready and available to fight them. We can't do that if we have a body with us-"

"But I'm saying leave him at the front gate," Takeda said. "It's the best compromise I can think of. We're not leaving him here, but we're not taking him with us into the Caves, or wherever. He . . . could still be taken by predators but if they take him he's no worse off than he was now."

"We don't have any way to drag him around, though," Cassie said.

"What are we going to do if we find someone else?" Jacqui asked. "What if we find my dad alive, but too weak to do anything? Are we just going to leave him, too? Just leave his body here to the animals?"

" . . . I don't know, okay? I'm just trying to make the best decision for the situation we're in. Right now, I think we need to leave him here." She took one last glance at his- . . . pieces, a frown on her face and what Takeda thought looked like pity in her eyes. He could practically feel her internal conflict coming from her face. "Does anybody disagree? Think about the logistics. We can't take him with us." To Takeda, it sounded like she said that to convince herself more so than the rest of them.

"Let's leave him," Takeda said, but his voice sounded small and lost. He was still in shock and disgust to some degree, he figured. Sub-Zero's loss still hadn't hit him yet. All he wanted right now was to get away from the stench and the sight before he lost the canned lunch they ate a little bit ago.

"Leave him," Jacqui said softly.

"Let's leave him," Jin said.

"Okay. Should we . . . bury him or something, though?" Cassie asked.

"We can't. We don't have anything to . . . " Jacqui said, patting her pockets as though she could find a shovel or something to help them dig a hole.

"Oh. Right. Sorry. Okay. Let's keep going. We have to go back to Boneland to get to the Spider Caves. Time check," she said.

Jin checked the stopwatch on his wrist. "Stopwatch says four hours, thirteen minutes."

"Cool. Let's get to the Spider Caves, and we'll decide if we want to rest early, or keep going."

Nobody moved right away. Takeda shuffled awkwardly towards the tunnel, and the others kind of did the same, but none of them fully turned away from Sub-Zero. Takeda had that same sensation as before that they would never see Sub-Zero again - and perhaps they never would. Actually, Takeda realized, they definitely never would. Not unless they found Liu Kang's Dragon's Fire and came back for the Temple. And then they'd have to walk past his half-decomposed body again, that they abandoned in the first place, assuming his body was still there, and the wolves hadn't drug him off to finish what he started. That was the worst part about it, to him. He could understand that his body would be a burden, if it were him, but he would at least hope he wasn't left out to deteriorate. He would hope someone would have the courtesy to bury him or something.

He would hope that if they found Kenshi like that . . . he was left in honor.

But they wouldn't find Kenshi like that. Or Jax, or Raiden, or anybody.

Poor Sub-Zero, but Takeda hoped he would be the only casualty.

Still, though, leaving Sub-Zero here, only to come back past it for the Temple, seemed cruel, like Cassie said. Did anybody even realize the fact that they'd be back?

"You guys know we'll be back here, right?" he asked them. "We'll have to come back when we find the Dragon's Fire to open the Temple."

"Yeah," Cassie said. "Yeah, yeah!" She snapped her fingers, and an idea sparked in her eyes. "We can bring him back with us then, after we open everything up!" she said. "It'll be a lot easier to deal with stuff in general when there's no more exploring to do!"

"Okay, but that doesn't solve the problem of what we're going to do with him in the meantime," Jacqui countered.

" . . . Oh, yeah."

"Yeah, like, we'd still have to leave him out here in the snow until we get back."

" . . . We're about to leave a dead body in the snow, that's not even cold, to rot even further," Takeda said, hoping to imply his thoughts on that.

"Wait, wait, wait- we have his ice," Jin said, throwing his arms out like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "We have his stupid ice! The cold would help preserve him, wouldn't it? Just until we're able to figure out what to do with him. Why don't we just use his ice, encase him a bit - at bare minimum frost him over - and then that way it'll keep predators off of him, and it'll keep him from . . . rotting more."

Takeda reached into one of the pouches of his backpack, but when his fingers even got close to the ball, they numbed up immediately. "Agh, shit. Anybody have a towel or something I can grab this with?"

The three of them took a moment to look, but instead of waiting on them, Takeda unraveled the scarf from around his neck and twirled it around his hand instead as a buffer. He opened the flap on his backpack and saw the frost coating the entire inside of that pocket. He grabbed the ball of ice and held it out to Jin, wrapped in its little bundle.

"You think you'd be able to use this? The Shaolin are more elementally versed than the Shirai Ryu. I only know how to use a bit of fire."

"I can probably figure it out," Jin said, nodding as he took the ball from Takeda. He cradled it in the scarf, pulling it away so that a small portion of the ice was exposed. He walked as close to Sub-Zero's legs as he wanted to get, and closed his eyes.

He took several deep breaths, and Takeda realized he was doing a sort of mini-meditation. He opened his eyes after a few seconds, and held the ball straight out in front of him. He said something in Chinese, "Bīng, wǒ zhǐhuī nǐ," and as if it awoke the ball, it started to glow blue with a sharp edge, like the cold power inside of it. Sub-Zero's form glowed as well with the same light, and suddenly there was a flash so bright the four of them had to shield their eyes. When they recovered, Sub-Zero's legs were encased in a thick layer of ice.

It almost looked like crystal, or diamond. The little geometric fractals curved and contoured to Sub-Zero's form. His waist looked a little strange, because the white snow and Sub-Zero's blues and blacks maintained a certain color scheme and it was interrupted by the shocking red of his blood and other things around the body. But it was all frozen over.

Jin got as close as he could to the rest of Sub-Zero, even going as far as to climb a little bit up the mountain. The ball glowed, the flash glared, and Sub-Zero's top half was encased in ice too. Jin climbed back down, handing the ice ball back to Takeda.

"Way to go, man," Takeda told him.

"Thanks." Takeda tucked the ice back into a pouch on his pocket and moved to wrap the scarf around his neck, but it was freezing cold, and had a bit of frost on it as well. Instead, he decided to keep it in the pocket with the ball. It could be the Ice Buffer.

"Okay, he looks good. Nice job, Jin," Cassie said. "Let's head back to the front, and when we get there, we'll decide what to do. We're definitely going down into the caves, but we're going to decide if we want to rest before we go. Plus, Jin, you're gonna want to update the books and stuff, right?"

" . . . Yeah," he said, but his voice sounded far away and distant. He was staring at Sub-Zero's ice pieces, and Cassie snapped her fingers in front of his face.

"Hey. You in there?"

"Yeah - hey, let's do one more thing before we leave. I'm gonna chant a quick mantra. It won't take very long, like, ten minutes. Chinese Buddhists use them for invocations of Buddha. It's sort of like a prayer or blessing for his soul. Kind of like how people say last words over a coffin for Western funerals."

"Yeah, that's a good idea," Cassie said. "That's really kind of you."

Jin shrugged, and the four of them stood quietly and waited while Jin sang the solemn chant. From what Takeda could hear, it was the same words over and over and over again, inflected in exactly the same way. Sometimes the contour of the melody would change. In the middle it seemed to get higher and higher but otherwise, it was droned in exactly the same way.

Jin slowly faded out and sang the mantra for the last time. When it was finished, he nodded and turned away from Sub-Zero. "Okay. Let's go."

It felt better to leave after that. Like he received his last rights and blessing, and his body was protected until they found a way to get him out of here. The four of them started walking back the way they came, back towards the tunnel.

"That was really nice, Jin," Jacqui said. "What was it, again?"

"Just a quick Buddhist mantra. 'Om Mani Padme Hum'. It's usually sung at Chinese funerals to invoke feelings of compassion and Chenrezig who's like the embodiment of compassion. Chinese funeral traditions are pretty extensive, and can sometimes take up to, like, thirty days."

"Huh." Jacqui said. Jin was like an encyclopedia. He knew a little about everything.

The tunnel loomed ahead of them again, but without the threat of wolves behind them, it seemed much less threatening. Cassie pushed to the front, and pulled one of her pistols from her holster and held her hand out straight behind her.

"Glowstick me," she said.

Takeda pulled it from his belt and slapped it into her hand, and she held it straight out in front of her. "Not taking any chances," she said. "Let's go."

A/N: So the Krypt has claimed its first tragedy.

I really struggled with their reactions. They don't really know Sub-Zero so they're not necessarily sad, mostly just shocked or disgusted. Let me know how I did.

This chapter is pretty chill compared to what's happening next. Next they go into the Spider Caves, so that'll be fun!

Leave a review if you have the time. Thanks for all who followed/favorited.

~Keyblader