Deacon and Sam didn't say much as they stepped past the cell with the chained man. It was like walking through a graveyard made by a sadist with too much free time and an unlimited supply of dark stone and rusted iron, and it created some sort of twisted maze of steel cages and what looked like every torture tool ever created.
The room was… massive, and the further they walked down it, the more extreme it became.
The entire chamber stretched out much further than any room or passageway they've walked through while in the temple.
Deacon glanced behind them, about to comment on how far they'd been walking, and froze. Of course it did, and silently at that…
"… Sam," he muttered.
Sam turned, eyes widening. The entrance, if it even was one, was gone.
"…Motherfucker," Sam said quietly, then louder, "The one time it closes silently it's when we're in here of all places?"
"... It could be that there are things in here that are sensitive to sound," Deacon said with narrowed eyes. "We should keep our voices as quiet as possible."
Sam stared at the wall for a second longer, then threw up his hands before turning back on his heel and continuing to walk down the massive prison chamber.
"Yeah, there could be a warden or something, and they might want to do the same thing it did to them to us," Sam agreed, his voice tight as he glanced into another cell, only to flinch back as a desiccated body turned its head to track him, only for its head to then tumble off its neck. "What are we even supposed to do here? Kill the warden?... Wardens are those who are in charge of prisons, right?"
"Not die, and I think so," Deacon said as he stepped past a cell with something twitching inside a wet, hissing cocoon of human skin.
As they moved deeper into the prison chamber, they were woefully aware that the torches casting green light were flickering erratically, the air was beginning to feel heavier around them, as if pressing them down, and the floor gradually started sloping ever so slightly downward.
At some point, they realized the cells had stopped being filled with the people that definitely looked like they should be dead, but were alive, and started being filled with the not-so-horribly tortured people.
Moaning figures, twitching torsos, mouths gagged with iron masks. One man scraped his forehead repeatedly against the bars, carving a shallow rut into his skull with each movement.
"Why would they keep these people?" Sam asked quietly. "I mean, I get these people are a cult and love to do rituals and all," he said, just as he raised his right arm and wiggled his wrist to highlight the cattle bind on them both. "But, let's be honest here, why would they just keep them in these cages? Why not just kill them after their experiments worked or failed? Why keep them in cages?"
Deacon opened his mouth to reply, but then, without warning, the hairs on the back of Deacon's neck shot up.
Hissssss.
He wasn't alone in the feeling. Sam's entire body became peppered with goosebumps, and he spun on his heel just as Deacon did.
They both saw it at once.
Something massive surged forward through the flickering shadows between the torchlight; long, fast, and disregarded the silence it previously commanded in favor of swallowing both humans whole. A serpent. Black-scaled, eyes glowing faintly with toxic green light, and fangs longer than daggers bared wide.
"Shield!" Deacon barked just as the beast lunged.
Sam didn't hesitate; his right palm snapped out in front of him, already having his spell half-formed from the very first moment both he and Deacon entered this place. Wind Barrier roared to life around them both, a transparent vortex of wind blades, just in time to intercept the lunge of the massive serpent.
The serpent hit it with full force, and the spell held for half a heartbeat.
Then, shattered, glass-like shards of wind magic dispersed violently as the serpent's weight tore through it.
"What the–?" Sam barely managed before Deacon's leg snapped to his side and kicked him in the midsection, sending both him and himself in opposite directions, away from the massive serpent's lunge.
Sam released a wet cough as his back collided with the bars of a cage that housed a person being splayed out like a starfish and bound by binds of old vine.
His eyes snapped back open a second later to see the widened jaw of the serpent having gone past both him and Deacon. His eyes went to find Deacon's, but he couldn't find him but a second later, he did.
Deacon was already moving.
Echoform Reliquary shifted mid-draw, the weapon merging with its other half and extending into its broadsword form in one seamless transition. Moments later, it quickly found itself set ablaze as Deacon cast Flame Armament.
With a burst of mana into his feet, Deacon stepped sideways and up, catching traction against a cage bar just long enough to pivot in the air.
The serpent reared back, jaws wide to strike again, only to meet the gleam of steel.
The blade cleaved through the neck with a wet crunch and a spray of crimson-red blood, the serpent's forward momentum carrying its body past them as its head arced into the air before hitting the stone brick floor with a meaty thunk and rolling across it.
Its body writhed for a couple more seconds as it also hit the ground, before going still.
Deacon landed in a crouch, Echoform Reliquary losing its flame-wreath as Deacon stopped sending mana into Flame Armament.
*[Twintongued Serpent Lv 7] has been slain – Partial XP has been given.*
Sam blinked. "...Thanks for the save," he said as he pushed himself up while tenderly rubbing the back of his head, as it was sore from hitting against the rusty metal bars behind him. "I didn't expect Wind Barrier to break that easily against a Lv 7."
"Same here," Deacon agreed, giving the area around them a once-over as he then used a couple mana strings to lift up the head of the serpent he just killed and drop it into his Spatial Sling Bag, thinking that Bonehead might experiment with the poison it might store within itself, if it even had poison. "There's no way it should have been able to shatter through it that easily and only come out with three or four nicks on its head on collision."
"Do you think that maybe the Aztecs or whoever these cultists of Huitzilopochtli are did something to make them a lot stronger?" Sam asked as he shot two manabolts in repetition at the dead serpent's body and saw two shallow drill-like burrowing wounds atop the scales, not even reaching its flesh. "Because this ain't normal. There's no way its mana resistance should be this high even after its death."
Deacon narrowed his eyes at the marks Sam's manabolts made. "That's… I mean, for its size, I did find it a bit odd with how easily I cut through it, but I didn't really think much of it," Deacon muttered before he stabbed Echoform Reliquary's broadsword into the serpent's corpse and saw how easily it cut through its scales and into its flesh.
"Now, I'm sure they must have done something to this snake to somehow weaken its resistance toward physical attacks and bolster its magical resistance," Sam said, kneeling beside the bloody stump of a neck of the serpent and pointing at its crimson-red muscle tissues. "Cause your flames should have at least tenderized its flesh or at the very least cooked it lightly, but it looked like your flames did nothing to them."
… Which is especially weird considering my new Class Skill, Blistering Flames, empowered my flames to linger within anyone I use my flames on, but just like Sam is saying, it looks like my flames did nothing to it, Deacon nodded in agreement. "Yeah, that would make sense, given how large it is. Normally in the wild, bigger creatures are normally physically tougher, but this one is physically weak as shit, so maybe these cultists did some rituals or alchemy or whatever the hell and swapped its magical resistance with is physical resistance via blood ritual, like how they had these bands ritually bound to our blood."
"But why?" Sam asked aloud, lost in his own thoughts. "This serpent is obviously one bred or raised to hunt and kill larger prey, meaning that know they they're gonna tussle and constrict large prey like deer, hogs, etc… not to mention their venom sacs which are supposed to be much larger than their smaller counterparts due to their proclivity to hunt larger prey… why would they empower their magical resistance and not their physical?"
A pregnant pause filled the air between them, only occasionally interrupted by the moans and groans of the tortured humans inside their cages.
"Experiments?" Deacon offered, and seeing the slight nod from Sam, he continued. "Maybe they were testing out some rituals or trying to train new initiates, and this was the cost, or maybe doing this is complicated, and senior cultists, I know jack shit about rituals."
"Changing something like this is far too advanced for some new initiates," Sam said, with a shake of his head. "I've seen a couple magical ones, cause family magic and all that… changing something like this is beyond advanced. To compare it is like altering your fire affinity to an earth one, which I wouldn't even know where to even start with that."
"Have you done any yourself? I remember you telling us on your 11th and 13th birthday that you had to go home for a week to do some sort of magic ritual, you and Esmerelda, if I remember correctly?" Deacon asked.
"Yeah, we did," Sam nodded. "I don't know what ritual Esmerelda did, but I assume it was something like mine, where it was a basic set of magical empowerment rituals that would minorly enhance my mana channels and my magical power."
"Oh?" Deacon said. "Why didn't we have those rituals at the academy? Is it just a noble thing – no, Esmerelda isn't a noble, so why wouldn't…?"
"Cost and risk," Sam answered. "The cost for the resources alone is in the hundreds of thousands of credits, and it's extremely risky to do because not only do you have to tailor the ritual to yourself, you have to make sure everything is perfect in order to not end up as a puddle of blood. As such, you need to have someone who has like 10 PhDs in magic theory to have a success rate of at least 50% to even think about performing a ritual that would directly affect someone's body in such a way."
"And there's no way in hell the Academy would waste that much money and risk the lives of that many cadets for that," Deacon finished, now understanding why the academy hadn't done so.
"Exactly," Sam said, gesturing for them to keep walking. "When we did my ritual, my great-grandfather performed it. He spent months preparing, making sure everything was accounted for and perfect so I wouldn't end up growing a second asshole or something during or after the ritual."
"And just for context, my great-grandpa looks like he's been alive since pre-Gen One, and he knows practically everything about magic. When I asked him about the success rate of the ritual, the one I took when I was eleven, he told me it had a 40% chance of success."
"40%?" Deacon shouted at Sam in shock. "Your family accepted that risk?"
"They're the ones who were in favor of it, saying that 40% was incredibly high," Sam replied, his eyes lingering on a moaning, flayed human who was blankly staring at the bars of his cage. "… All for the betterment of the family, am I right?"