System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 228
In the dark sewers, it was almost black enough to swallow the last trace of light. Filthy, stinking liquid ran through the channels with a soft murmur, and now and then rats and cockroaches crawled from the corners, giving off faint squeaks.
Soft footsteps rang out. Three figures carrying torches stopped at a certain point in the tunnel. “The two Fleder corpses are gone...” someone said.
“To vampires, human blood is fine wine. To wild beasts, the blood of lesser vampires is just as hard to resist.” Orin touched the side of his hood and lowered his voice. “Those Fleder corpses ... they’ve probably already been torn apart and eaten clean.”
“Open your eyes. There’s no scattered meat or bones nearby. Those corpses don’t look as if they were eaten,” Kael said darkly.
After delivering the three knights back into Adda’s hands, the Kael brothers had decided to accompany Roy into the sewers. With three Witchers working together, they could handle the vast majority of dangers.
The Witchers’ pupils began to catch the cold light, reflecting a dragged trail across the muck-covered ground, one ordinary men would never have noticed. Above that winding mark, a faint crimson ribbon condensed from blood particles appeared, stretching into the unseen dark and pointing out the way for them.
“This way...” Orin wiped the sewage from his palm on his red-and-white headscarf, then strode forward along the trail.
Roy and Kael followed behind. Compared with the reckless Orin, the two of them moved more cautiously. They extinguished their torches, hid half their bodies in the dark, and advanced while staying alert to everything around them.
The corpse had not been dragged very far, but not too close either. They passed two tunnels already marked on the map, and at last came to an old brick wall covered in moss and floating algae.
A three-way junction. The passage to the left and the one ahead both led into places they had never been, and here, of all places, the blood-red ribbon and the drag marks ended abruptly.
The Witchers exchanged a glance, quickly searched the nearby ground and walls, and then found scattered marks on the bricks in the corner. It was a line of simple characters from the Common Speech of the Northern Kingdoms.
A filthy, dangerous sewer, deserted by men, how could a row of characters appear here for no reason? All three Witchers realized at once that this was some sort of mechanism.
The Witcher brothers did not touch it rashly. They had no clue what to do.
After a brief moment of thought, a flash of that bizarre dream suddenly crossed Roy’s mind, the shriek the spider-like monster had hurled at him from within that giant web.
“Black Grebas...”
“Blakat ... gray ... ba...”
He remembered now. That strange title of unknown meaning had also appeared beneath one Fleder’s tongue.
A coincidence?
Roy checked the characters on the wall again, and his heart settled. No more, no less, they matched exactly.
“This is the key to the mechanism.” Roy reached for the bricks painted with the characters while signaling to the Orin brothers to draw their weapons, form their Signs, and stand guard on either side of the wall.
Once he had touched every character, a light, crisp sound abruptly rang out, like the instant a key turns open a lock.
Roy pressed against the wall and pushed forward again. The wall, which had not budged in the slightest before, now swung inward with ease.
The heavy brickwork scraped across the ground with a great grinding noise, and behind it a hidden chamber slowly revealed itself.
At the entrance to the chamber, the Witchers waited a short while. When no movement came, two of them split off to scout ahead.
Kael went first. He pulled a fist-sized glass ball from the leather pouch at his waist and rolled it along the ground into the depths of the chamber, then advanced with Roy along the path the glass sphere had taken.
The two entered a narrow corridor. Crimson carpet covered the floor, crusted over with dried blood scabs. A fresh blood trail could still be seen. The walls on both sides kept the same rough, dark gray style as the sewer outside, the only difference being that they had been worked by human hands and looked somewhat smoother.
Beyond the corridor was a spacious, brightly lit hall. Braziers in the corners burned fiercely, laying the whole chamber bare. There were no needless decorations. At the center stood a single altar, the most striking thing in the room.
A stench far fouler than anything in the sewers rushed straight at them.
The altar was piled with corpses. Hundreds upon thousands of dead creatures had been heaped into a small mountain. At a glance, one could easily make out small animals such as rats, mid-sized animals such as hounds, monsters like Drowners and Nekkers, even humans.
Most had been there for years and were reduced to bare skeletons, but some were fresher, rotted deep into corruption, covered in red and green sores, slime, and mottled rotten flesh.
Among them were the two headless Fleder corpses.
The Witchers’ gaze moved farther on. Behind the altar stood a tall wooden frame like a doorframe, and hanging from black thread upon it was a totem.
Painted on the totem was a web, and crouched within that web was a vividly lifelike Arachas. Black bristles, sharp chitinous legs, a savage form, it was the very monster Roy had seen in his dream, only reduced in size.
“Black Grebas ... could that mean this thing?” Roy froze for a moment. Then, in a daze, the blood-red pattern behind the Arachas seemed to come alive and begin writhing, slow at first, then faster, forming a whirlpool that dragged in all his attention.
At the same time, a seductive whisper echoed in his ears, like the blended voices of countless men, women, old folk, and children speaking as one.
For an instant, layer upon layer of hallucinations rose before his eyes. Roy’s expression grew distant, but his powerful willpower rang a warning bell inside him.
He shook his head and bit the tip of his tongue. After the sharp pain, the twisted visions vanished from sight.
He looked away at once.
“Don’t look at that totem!”
“Mn...”
The Kael brothers jolted themselves awake and shook off the hallucination at the same time.
The three exchanged grave looks.
In silent accord, they rose onto the balls of their feet, bent low, and began moving toward the altar.
Everything about the hidden chamber proved this place was an underground stronghold of some secret cult. The question was, where had the priest gone?
The braziers were still burning, so where had the cultist who dragged in the Fleder corpses gone?
After only a few steps, Kael stopped and pointed at the altar piled up like a mound.
Roy followed the direction of his finger and focused. He heard the faintest trace of breathing and heartbeat. The breathing was chaotic, the heartbeat quick, enough to show the tension of whoever was hiding there.
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