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Content Warning. Disturbing descriptions/scenes.
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Several minutes pass. The iron bar handle jolts out with a pull and then down, screeching as the door slowly slides open.
"Well, so much for stealth there..." Lucky's tone drips with sarcasm as Noland leans back, using his entire bodyweight to pull open the iron door.
"No kidding!" he grunts.
"You know we're lucky that no one was there with you two jabbering, right?" Jade adds, peering in as it opens.
Lucky snorts. "Oh, and like the door doesn't announce our presence if someone was?"
"It might've. If the factory was on the other side, it could've blended-"
"Stop," Noland exhales, pushing past the two of them. "In and out. Remember?"
The interior was a dimly lit corridor with flickering lights. Metal chambers stretched out with nothing but the chemical lights that shifted colors as the reaction occurred inside the bulbs. Lights that, if they ever broke, would permanently scar or potentially kill anyone beneath, yet are used throughout the city. Still, at times, it looked pretty cool when the lights blended together, and none of them denied that.
"Who goes first?"
"I will," Noland stepped forward. "Jade in the middle, Lucky behind."
"Eck. You two stink," Jade sniffed, following behind.
"What a surprise!"
"Shut up!"
After their brief bickering subsided, all that was left was the echo of their wet footsteps through the tunnel. Within a minute, the squelch of wet boots faded, and stealth returned, but the tension remained. Lucky kept his hands clenched as fists, as if ready to fight something from the rear, and Jade gripped Noland's jacket. Sometimes, while walking, the tension on his jacket felt like he was being choked, the fabric cutting into his neck.
"You need to loosen your grip, you're strangling me," he whispered.
"Sorry..."
Noland glanced back at her. They still donned their hoods and face masks out of safety, and in case someone spotted them, but her slightly hunched shoulders betrayed her nervousness. Very different from her bravado at sea. A different scenario, a different fear.
Still, he didn't say anything, and his eyes returned forward. That was his role. And sure enough, faint clinking and clanking started to echo into the tunnel. Whistling. Loud banging. Shouts of command. The sizzle of boiling liquid impacting.
Something smoky and irony in smell hit his nose, and with it, a heat more intense than anything from the lower sewers. Ironic, considering their entire surroundings, but this had a distinct smell. More pungent and less sharp, and it lingered in the nostrils. And even though he told Jade not to tighten her grip, except now with both hands.
"It doesn't smell right," Jade whispered anxiously.
"Shh! Hands only!"
It was Lucky who first crouched, tapping Jade's shoulder. She glanced back and did the same, tapping Noland to follow. All three of them lowered their bodies and slowly approached the bright light that separated the tunnel from the opening like a solid line.
Noland's heartbeat was racing, as was theirs, as he carefully peeked his head out, quickly scanning left and right.
The opening was behind pipes that towered up meters high with a metal grate behind it, and another series of pipes on the opposite side, climbing up as well. Orange lights and heavy heat danced through the gaps as thin, illuminated, misty vapors. On both sides, separated by several meters, were two openings between these grates and pipes.
Waving at Lucky toward the right, he quickly darts left. Gingerly, he touches the pipes, ensuring they aren't hot, before flattening himself against them. The orange light, wavering and flickering, dances as he peers out with Jade peering through the pipes more at her height.
And in the factory? Drawing their breaths and stiffening with horror?
Two men throw an old man's corpse into a large centrifuge with boiling hot chemicals spraying from multiple points like hoses. His body tumbles around with the violent spray and sickening cracks. Hair, toenails- everything falls out, but his skin remains intact.
After thirty seconds, the machine shuts off and they reach in, hoisting him out for the next two workers. They begin dissecting him- cutting off the head, removing certain parts, and making a clean incision across the stomach to scoop out the guts. From there, they separate them into different piles.
One pile is all the organs- kidneys, heart, liver, eyes, brain- all placed into a very wealthy-looking box with fancy insignias across it. The rest, the less valuable, into a plain brown one.
They stare in horror, as the containers are see-through glass, and they can see everything. But it doesn't end. Transfixed by the process, and with the hissing covering up the sound of Jade's vomiting, the emptied corpse is thrown into a large 4-by-4 meter vat. Enormous for just one body. Yet a worker walks up, pours a canister of green chemicals onto it, and in a grotesque bubbling manipulation, it expands.
Pink and tumorous-looking, it squelches and moves as if it has life. Steam rises, and a foul, rotten smell with a pungent sour odor fills the air. Yet what draws Noland's attention is a worker walking up to a container, hissing with mist breaking loose, and pulling out a canister with golden liquid shining through.
"That's the serum?" Noland whispers, pale and nauseous.
"What?" Jade weakly replies, collapsed to one knee with snot and bile dripping from her exposed face.
He sympathetically looks down at her, but returns his gaze to watch.
The worker dumps the entire canister in and then, he could feel it. A large amount of mana, sensed even from here, surges from the worker who begins to stir the mutated human inside the see-through vat. Slowly, but surely, it dries up and becomes crumbly. Moisture evaporates, and it begins to look cooked until it eventually resembles what they all know. Ground meat, in mass quantity, produced from a single frail, dead old man, ready to be consumed with a steamy odor.
'That mana...that must be the undeniable difference they always mention between city sections,' Noland thought. 'I've never 'sensed' it until now.'
"Where's the salt?" the worker asks, letting the mana circulation die down.
"We ran out," the worker replies at the bottom of the steps.
Sighing, the circulation resumes, and the stirring starts again. "Fine. We'll give this batch to the lower west section."
Noland flinches. That is their sector. That food? 'Ugh... Tonight's dinner, old man flesh-'
"Blerg." A faint belching sound. He looks over. Lucky had turned away and lowered his mask to vomit as well. Thankfully, no one turned.
The worker at the top of the vat, however, digs two hands into the pile of ground meat. The worker at the bottom? He brings two ration boxes over.
"Mark those. We'll collect them next week."
Nodding, his mask and goggles bouncing, the worker takes the boxes to a far-off station and adds two droplets of a red chemical into them. They shake and violently shift before falling still again before he closes the boxes. The rest of the boxes they begin to fill? No such thing.
Noland finally couldn't hold it and let out his own vomit, which triggered Jade again. Her goggles were lifted, revealing a tear-stained, traumatized face. She was hyperventilating and shaking.
'This is bad. We can't function like this...' Noland thought, looking between them. Thankfully, back here, there weren't any obvious signs of things that were repeatedly accessed. Everything was dusty, with layers of grime on it all- much less clean than out there. There were no boxes or containers either. Just the waste system exit.
Worse yet though, when he walked over to Lucky on shaky legs to check on him, it was an entirely separate horror story on his side of the factory.
A huge vat, filled with squealing live roaches, gets hit with a large flame from underneath as two workers flood the base with magic. After a large hose sucks most of them out, they throw two new and alive ones inside. A worker grabs them, each squealing horrifically, and jabs a giant needle into them, filled with a concoction that looks disturbingly similar to the one used on the human.
Rather than turning into a large vat of meat, however, once the vat is sealed, the squealing's pitch becomes louder and louder. Somehow, from within itself, a new roach bursts out. Then another from that. Then another, and another. And the process repeats itself.
This meant that somewhere between, to which Noland couldn't see, was perhaps the process to create their pills. Harsh sizzling and bubbling seemed to confirm this belief in him, but he doubted it could be as horrific as the two he had just witnessed.
"FINISH UP!" a loud, angry voice bellowed, causing them to jolt. Noland rushed over to Jade, who was still on her knees, peeking out, her leg in her own puddle of vomit.
A large man, with a gut held in only by his belt, stood near a doorway. Rolls of fat rippled over themselves, his pristine white shirt and pants a sharp contrast to the filth around him. Rings adorned his fingers with sparkling metals, and a large pipe burned from his mouth. An insignia marked his chest- a house crest with an orange sun behind it.
"That's the noble family controlling the western districts. Our district," Jade croaked weakly, bending away out of sight to whisper while still on her hands and knees.
"I want you all gone within the hour! Chop chop! Do you realize how hard it is for me to run this business?!" he bellowed again, jowls flapping and his face turning beet red. "I want you gone so that I can relax and enjoy my supper!"
The momentary pause after his outburst ended quickly as the workers sped up, clearly eager to leave themselves. The noble grunted, puffing his pipe, before waddling around to exit.
Boom!
A loud bang echoed as the door slammed shut. A few of the workers jumped but continued at a faster pace. It looked like the longest process would be cleaning the meat vat.
"It's a waiting game," Noland whispered. "Let's go back for now."
Jade nodded with a sniff, and Noland quickly ran over to Lucky to tell him the same. Just like the workers, they were eager to leave- even if it was only briefly.
The entire time walking back, they were silent. No one spoke. Jade shivered, clutching onto Noland's side. Her breaths were shaky, to say the least. For all the mutilations, stories of death and dismemberment, and the occasional gore they had seen, this wasn't anything like that. It was different. Traumatic. To discover the process behind their food- and the lives lost to make it. Noland didn't even want to think about the vegetables at this point.
Outside the door, and around the corner for safety, Lucky finally spoke with a croaky and shaking voice.
"So... Fenrik knew..."
They all froze, turning toward him in shock and realization. He returned the same expression but with bitterness too.
"Fenrik knew about all of this. And he didn't tell us."