"That's..." Irene starts.
"Genocide," I finish. "You're talking about wiping out a hundred thousand people."
"They are not people anymore," Valerius says sadly. "They are echoes of what they once were, trapped in endless torment. Death would be a mercy."
"There has to be another way." Irene said.
"If there is, I have not found it in a thousand years of searching."
And then he's gone, leaving us standing alone beside the pool where his body sleeps on, unchanged.
The chamber feels colder now.
"Well," I say after a moment. "This escalated quickly."
"A hundred thousand creatures," Irene whispers. "Aiden, if they escape..."
"No worries, I won't let that happen."
Irene stared at me then nodded.
"Still we need to see what are we working with."
I look around the chamber.
There have to be other passages leading deeper. The emperor said the city was miles below us.
I start walking toward the far side of the chamber, studying the walls. Sure enough, there's another corridor partially hidden behind one of the massive pillars.
"Found it."
The passage slopes downward at a steep angle, and the air gets colder as we descend. The runes on the walls change too, becoming more angular, more aggressive looking.
"The energy signature is shifting,"
"Yeah, I can feel it."
After ten minutes of walking, we start hearing sounds from below. Scratching. Scraping. And something else.
Moaning.
The corridor opens into another chamber, smaller than the first but still huge. And unlike the pristine room above, this one shows signs of damage. Claw marks in the stone. Dark stains on the walls.
But what catches my attention are the bars.
Massive iron bars stretch across the far end of the chamber, glowing with containment magic. And beyond them...
"Holy shit."
So many creatures pressed up against those bars. Dozens of them crowded together, reaching through with these crazy long arms that end in claws sharp enough to cut steel. The metal's actually singing when their talons scrape against it.
They used to be human, I can tell, but now? Now they're something else. Too tall, some of them stretching eight or nine feet. Arms and legs pulled out like taffy. Faces all twisted up with jaws full of needle teeth.
Their eyes glow with a sickly yellow light.
Irene breathes. "Look at their eyes. They're not mindless."
She's right. The creatures aren't just raging beasts. They watch us with intelligence, studying us. Calculating.
One of them speaks.
"Help... us..."
The voice is distorted, barely recognizable as human, but the words are clear.
"They remember," I say quietly. "They know what they used to be."
More voices join the first.
"Please..."
"Make it stop..."
"Kill us..."
Irene takes a step back. "Aiden, this is horrible."
I walk closer to the bars. The creatures reach for me, but not aggressively. Desperately.
"You're in pain," I say to the nearest one.
It nods."Always... hurts..."
"How long have you been like this?"
"Forever..." another one whispers. "So... long..."
I study their forms, noting the magical corruption that twists their bodies. It's not just physical transformation. The magic itself is eating at them, constantly changing them, never letting them settle into any stable form.
"No wonder they want to die," I mutter.
"Can you help them?" Irene asks.
"Of course." I reach into my inventory, pulling out a familiar small crystal.
"Is that..?" Irene asked.
"Yup." It's the Everdawn Crystal I have used to turn Irene back into a human again.
"But Aiden," Irene says, her eyes darting between me and the creatures, "there are hundreds of thousands of them down here. It'll take forever to cure them one by one. And what if the seals break while you're working? What if some escape before you can finish?"
I grin at her. "Who said anything about one by one?"
Back into the inventory I go, and this time I pull out something really special. Looks like a metal ball about the size of a basketball.
"What is that?" Irene asks. "This," I say, tossing the sphere up and catching it, loving the solid weight of it, "is a Resonance Amplifier. It can expand the effects of any magical item within a thousand-mile radius."
"You really do have everything…"
I winked at her.
I'm about to start setting it up when the whole chamber shakes.
Not like an earthquake. Like something huge just slammed into the mountain from below.
The bars start to crack.
"Oh shit," I breathe, watching hairline fractures spread across the glowing metal. "That's not good."
Another impact. Stronger this time. More cracks appear, and the magic holding the bars together flickers.
"Aiden," Irene says, backing away from the barrier.
"The seals are failing faster than we thought."
A third impact, and this time I hear it. A sound like a thousand voices screaming at once, echoing up from the depths below. The creatures behind the bars get more agitated, pressing harder against the metal.
Then the bars shatter.
Glass and magic explode outward as dozens of transformed people pour through the gap. They move fast. Claws scraping against stone, those yellow eyes locked on us.
"Don't kill them!" I shout, golden portals opening behind me. "We're here to save them!"
I dodge left as the first one swipes at my head. Instead of drawing a sword, I summon a staff from one of my portals and use it to knock the creature back.
The creature staggers but doesn't go down.
"Help... us..." it moans, even as it tries to claw my face off.
Irene's got her staff out. She creates barriers of energy to keep them back, not trying to hurt them. Problem is, there's a lot of them.
"We can't hold them off like this!" she yells, ducking under a swipe from another creature.
Astra's floating above us, using telekinesis to push the creatures back without actually harming them. But more keep coming through the broken barrier. And I can hear even more rumbling from deeper in the mountain.
She's right. Even with my portals and weapons, fighting this many without hurting them? Not happening.
Time for a different approach.
I take a deep breath and let my will explode outward.
Every single creature in the chamber stops dead. Just freezes mid-step, mid-swipe, mid-everything. The ones that were charging at us drop to their knees. Others collapse completely, eyes rolling back. A few of the stronger ones are still standing, but they're shaking, unable to move forward.
"What did you do?" Irene whispers, staring at the now-motionless army of creatures.
"Convinced them to take a nap,"
I drop to one knee and activate the Amplifier on the ground. The thing starts humming immediately, runes lighting up in sequence. But it needs time to sync with the Everdawn Crystal.
As the Amplifier reaches full power, light explodes from the crystal, amplified a thousand times over by the resonance device. It floods the chamber, passes through the walls, spreads out in all directions like a wave of pure energy.
The creatures that were starting to get back up freeze again, but this time it's different. As the light hits them fully, and everything changes.
The nearest one, the guy who was about to claw my face off a second ago, starts changing. His yellow eyes flicker, then dim, then go completely normal. Brown, I think. The twisted snarl on his face relaxes. His arms, which were way too long and ended in those razor claws, start shrinking back to normal size.
The claws retract, becoming regular fingernails. His skin shifts from that gross gray-green color back to something that looks human. The extra joints in his limbs disappear. Those weird growths on his back just melt away like they were never there.
All across the chamber, dozens of creatures are going through the same thing. Bodies shrinking down to normal size. Faces becoming human again. The constant moaning and scratching stops, replaced by something else.
Crying.
"Oh god," one of them whispers, looking down at his hands like he's never seen them before. "Oh god, what were we?"
"It's okay," I tell him, standing up slowly. "You're free. You're safe."
But he's not listening. None of them are. They're all staring at their bodies, touching their faces, trying to figure out what happened to them. Some are laughing. Some are sobbing. A few just sit there in shock.
"I remember," a woman says, her voice shaking. "I remember everything. The pain, the hunger, the way we..." She stops, looking horrified.
"Hey." I walk over to her. "That wasn't you. That was the curse. You're free now."
She looks up at me with tears in her eyes. "You saved us."
"We saved you," I correct, glancing at Irene and Astra. "All of us."
The light from the Amplifier is still spreading. I can feel it moving through the mountain, reaching deeper and deeper into the underground city. More transformations happening all over the place.
"How many?" Irene asks quietly.
"All of them," I say. "The device is hitting everything within a thousand miles. Every person that got transformed is getting cured right now."
We stand there watching as more people stumble into the chamber from deeper passages. All human now. All confused and scared and grateful and traumatized. But now they are free. For the first time in over a thousand years.
This is what I came here for. Not the treasure or the adventure or the power.
This.
But then the whole mountain shakes again.
"Uh oh," I say, looking up at the ceiling. Cracks are spreading across the stone above us.
"The seals," Irene realizes. "They weren't just containing the people. They were holding up the city itself."
More rumbling. Dust rains down from above. The newly human people look around in panic, and I don't blame them. They just got their lives back, and now the whole place is about to collapse on top of them.
"We need to get everyone out," I say. "Now."
Before I could turn back to the inventory, Irene interjected.
"I've got this," she says, raising her staff.
Magic erupts from her in ways I've never seen before. Not the controlled, precise spells she usually does. This is raw power, massive and overwhelming. The air around her starts glowing.
Then portals start opening.
Not just one or two. Hundreds of them. All across the chamber, in the corridors beyond, probably throughout the entire underground city. Each one leading to the surface, to safety outside the mountain.
"Everyone through the portals!" I shout to the crowd of confused people. "Now! Move!"
They don't need to be told twice. The ground is shaking worse now, chunks of stone falling from the ceiling. People rush toward the nearest portals, helping each other, carrying the ones who are too weak to walk on their own.
"Irene," I say, watching her maintain hundreds of portals at once. Sweat is pouring down her face, her hands shaking from the effort. "This is incredible."
"Less talking," she grunts, "more evacuating."
Right. I start helping people through the portals, making sure nobody gets left behind. Astra's doing the same, using telekinesis to lift the injured ones through to safety.
The last person disappears through a portal just as a huge chunk of ceiling crashes down where they'd been standing.
"Time to go!" I grab Irene's arm as she closes the last few portals. She's barely standing, completely drained from that massive spell.
We leap through the final portal just as the chamber collapses behind us.
We land on grass under open sky, surrounded by thousands of people who shouldn't exist. People who were dead for over a thousand years, now alive and free and safe.
Irene collapses next to me, exhausted but smiling.
"Not bad for a day's work," she says.
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