Deacon groaned into the mud-brick flooring, his hands curling against the cold brick. He didn't even attempt to lift his head yet. It felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the sides of his skull, then turned him into a pinball for the hell of it on the way down. He wasn't sure if his shoulder or his ribs hurt more, but his nose… yeah, that was definitely broken.
He sniffed and immediately regretted it, as a sharp, stinging pain stabbed behind his eyes and something warm trickled from his nostrils. I hate… when this happens, Deacon thought to himself as he rolled to his side and let out a muffled curse.
"Gah – fuck," he muttered, grabbing the bridge of his nose. Everything sounded… wrong. Muffled, like he was underwater. There were sounds, faint echoes of familiar voices, maybe, but they felt like they were a layer too far away to reach.
His fingers slid down the edge of his nose until they found the bend that wasn't supposed to be there.
He braced himself as he felt around his nose and saw that it was just out of place and in need of righting it.
"Alright," he mumbled to himself under his breath, before snapping his nose back into place with a sickening crunch.
A blast of pain erupted through his sinuses, but it only lasted for a couple of seconds. He might've yelled; he couldn't even tell if he did, but his ears popped immediately after, and then sound came rushing back in all at once.
"– eacon! Deacon, answer if you can hear us!"
"– he's not fucking dead, shut up –"
"– hurry the hell up and say something!"
"– no I'm not climbing back up there, do you see how narrow that shit is –"
Jass, Sam, Bonehead, Esmerelda. All four of their voices were overlapping, frantic and distorted previously were now suddenly clear. How fixing his nose managed to fix his ears, he didn't know.
He coughed once, snorted out some blood onto the ground, then pushed himself off the ground. "I'm still alive, assholes," he called, voice hoarse. "Just give me a second, I think I left parts of my brain on the way down with how my head was practically a pinball in the tunnel."
"Holy shit, there you are!" Jass. Sharp relief in her voice, barely masked behind the usual irritation. "You weren't answering."
"I couldn't really hear anything up until ten seconds ago," Deacon chuckled, snapping his fingers and casting Ignis to light up the area around him.
Glancing around, now able to see, he saw that he was in some sort of small, mud-brick room, which, judging by how loud the voices of his friends were, his cell-room was side by side with everyone else's.
Jass exhaled, her shoulders dropping slightly as she leaned the flat of her glaive against her leg. She didn't answer right away, still half-watching the mud-brick room she fell into.
"Where are you?" Esmerelda asked, eyes not leaving the surroundings, her hands still glowing faintly as she was now able to use her magic.
There was a pause, long enough that Jass was about to repeat the question, before Deacon's voice returned. Slower this time. "Not sure, but I think we're in some sort of cell? Everyone got a wooden door in front of them?"
"Yeah," Sam, Jass, Bonehead, and Esmeralda answered.
There was a beat of silence, the kind that wasn't exactly comfortable, more like everyone was collectively realizing that their situation had gone from bad to 'you've got to be fucking with me' in record time.
Esmerelda was the first to speak again, quiet but pointed. "Everyone's got one of these, right? The band?"
Deacon blinked and, for the first time, really noticed the cold pressure around his left wrist. He looked down, brow furrowing. "What band?"
Then he saw it.
A thin silver band pressed tight against the skin of his wrist like it was fused to it. The metal glinted faintly, catching the low, flickering light of Ignis that was hovering above him.
"Oh... well, that's not ominous," he muttered.
"What is it?" Jass asked, already tugging at hers.
"Stop pulling on it," Deacon snapped, sharper than he meant to be. "It's… not a good idea."
She froze, and so did everyone else.
Item Name: Silver Binding of Huitzilopochtli
Type: Tool – Cursed Band
Rarity: Unique
Description:
A silver band ritually branded to the wrist of those who fail the blood rite of Huitzilopochtli. Given only after the Test of Proving Thy Faith, this band discerns the divine favor within the blood of the clergy of Huitzilopochtli. If the wearer's blood lacks the blessed resonance of the god's clergy, the band marks them as cattle – property of the temple. Attempts to leave sacred grounds while still bonded will result in immediate death. The only known method of removal is immersion in the sap of the Huitzilopochtli Ceiba Tree, a sacred and closely guarded resource of the clergy of Huitzilopochtli.
Effects: Cattle of the clergy of Huitzilopochtli
Requirements: Failure of the Blood Rite of Huitzilopochtli
"Silver Binding of Huitzilopochtli," he murmured to himself, but Bonehead, who was just in the room beside him, picked it up.
"... That's how you pronounce that name?" Bonehead said, deadpan. "… That does not sound like a real word."
"Regardless, we have no choice but to keep on exploring this place till we find a Huitzilopochtli Ceiba Tree and get ourselves free," Deacon's tone turned dry, but there was no hiding the edge creeping in as he leaned his back against the wall closest to the drop above him. "Else we truly are fucked because judging by its words, even if we were to chop off our own hands, it doesn't look like it'll help with it being involved in some sort of blood ritual."
He shook out his hand and stood fully upright, ignoring the way his legs briefly wobbled under him.
"We need to move," he said. "That Ceiba Tree… assuming the clergy still exists down here in whatever hellhole this is, they're probably guarding it or it's being protected in here. A sacred tree like that? It wouldn't be left sitting above ground."
"… Especially with a name that screams 'temple centerpiece,'" Sam chimed in. "It's probably some sort of holy or blessed tree that the temple would hold in high regard, just like the various other holy relics in the other churches on Floor Zero that we visited on that field trip we had 6 years back."
"Exactly." Deacon nodded once, as if confirming it to himself. "So, if we want even a chance at ditching these slave bracelets that kill us if we try and leave with them still on, we keep going. Somewhere in here, there's a room they don't want us in, and that's the room we need to find."
"Or die trying," Bonehead added helpfully.
Deacon rolled his eyes. "Appreciate the optimism."
A beat passed. The mud-brick silence settled again, heavy with the weight of the unknown.
"On my mark," Deacon said, stepping toward the wooden door in front of him. "We open our doors, see what's beyond. We don't split too far, stay in voice contact, and no one tries to break through the walls. We don't know what this place is made of. One bad collapse and it's dirt nap time for all of us."
"Copy that," Jass muttered, tightening her grip on the shaft of her glaive.
"One… two…" Deacon counted, breathing in. "Three!"
Wood groaned as the five doors snapped open in unison, their hinges groaning from sudden use.
Deacon blinked as Ignis's light stretched only a few feet forward, revealing not another cell, but a narrow, arched corridor that bent out of sight in both directions. And in addition to the forked corridor, were that the walls looked to be made out of stone brick, not mud-brick, carved with various scripts that he didn't recognize, nor did the Tower translate them to him.
"Shit," Jass said, somewhere out of sight. "I've got a hallway. You guys?"
"Same," Esmerelda confirmed, the voice furthest from him. "Stone walls. Passage continues left. I can't tell which direction leads where."
"Yup," Bonehead added. "Corridor leading us into darkness, check. And here I was hoping for a dining room or something."
"Don't suppose anyone's got a map?" Sam offered, the sarcasm hanging off his words like a blade.
"… I wish," Deacon said, rubbing his temple. "And we're still separated from one another."
They all paused, glancing at the walls between them, solid, unmoving, no obvious cracks or shared space. Just stone and more stone.
"Should we try breaking through?" Sam asked after a moment. "Maybe use the acids Bonehead has to melt through them?"
"No," Jass said firmly. "Not unless you're fond of suffocating under two tons of ceiling. We don't know if these walls are load-bearing ones or are designed to collapse if we try to hit them. This temple is as old as shit and probably barely holding itself up as it is. If we try to mess with it, we could quite literally turn into oil."
A tense silence settled after Jass's warning.
"Alright," Deacon finally said, exhaling slowly through his nose. "Then we go forward. We follow the paths in front of us and pray they connect eventually. If not…" he glanced back at the door, frowning, "we meet back here. Give it a full day. If we're not back by then, something went wrong."
There were a few seconds of hesitation before Bonehead replied. "Define a full day. Like… normal day? Tower time? Underground hell temple time? Do they even have a clock here?"
"By checking your phone, you dumbass," Deacon rolled his eyes and pulled his manaphone from his Spatial Sling Bag. The screen flickered to life to display the time: 7:03 AM.
"So… we check back in by 7 A.M. tomorrow. At this exact spot." Deacon said, before tucking his manaphone back into his Spatial Sling Bag.
"Assuming this place doesn't reconfigure itself every three hours like some maze genre floors are like," Sam muttered.
"Right then," he muttered. "See you guys soon. If I find the tree first, I'll make sure to tap the tree and fill up as much sap from it as possible for us."
"Don't!" Bonehead shouted immediately after. "Just get enough for yourself, we don't know if the sap could be preserved for long after being extracted from the tree. So just to be safe, just take enough for yourself and nothing more."
Another brief moment of silence stretched between the group before they each produced a murmur of agreement with Bonehead's words, as he was their resident Alchemist.
And then, without another word, each of them took their first steps into the corridors in front of them, leaving the room they all fell face-first into.
His boots echoed quietly, but the pressure of the silver band on his wrist served as a constant reminder that at this moment in time, he was not free, he, along with his friends, according to the Tower, were the property of the clergy of Huitzilopochtli.
"I'm beginning to hate temples," he muttered under his breath. "And this whole gods really existing bullshit."
Somewhere down another hallway, too faint to be clearly heard, Sam's voice replied in the dark:
"Same."
Deacon's boots thudded quietly on the brick floor with Ignis still hovering above his shoulder and casting light down the corridor ahead. The passage was tight, barely four feet wide.
His hand hovered near his belt, where he'd taken out his daggers, not his usual weapon of choice, which would have been his dual short swords, but close quarters had their own rules.
That was when he heard it.
A deep groan echoed from behind him.
Deacon pivoted on his heel, Ignis trailing behind his head like a comet's tail.
His eyes widened. "No. No, no, no!"
Before he could make it two steps forward, a grinding clatter of stone slammed through the air, and the corridor behind him vanished.