The chamber shook again.
It wasn't violent, but it was strong enough to rattle the rusty cells and cause a chorus of groans and clanks from within the cages around them. One of the tortured humans, a woman with a face more scar tissue than skin, let out a wheezing moan as the motion jostled her forward against the bars and cracked open her skull, but for some reason she remained alive or, the more correct term would be that she was able to move for 5 minutes with her brain visibly out of her skull before falling to the ground lifelessly.
Sam steadied himself against the nearest wall. "That's the third time now. It's getting more frequent."
Deacon looked up from where he was crouched beside one of the low, shack-like buildings tucked into the far corner of the prison-torture chamber area they were blocked in. "Yeah. I don't know what's causing it, but at this point, I'm just gonna assume it's Jass or Esmerelda letting loose on. Or perhaps they're in a room together and fighting some big ass monster. Or hell, another group could be in here with us and don't give a shit about keeping the place still standing."
Sam snorted and kicked aside a ripped-off rusty iron cage bar on the floor. "Man... This is boring as shit. We've been in here for like 8 hours now and still haven't found shit."
"Not to mention how depressing everything is in here."
"You can say that again," Deacon muttered as he gave a glance to their surroundings once again.
[Human Lv 0]
***
[Human Lv 0]
Just like the cannibals and according to Jass and Esmerelda, it seems that every human they met that wasn't a cadet was a level 0 and judging by what Sam has found within the books he'd pilfered and read from within his Family Archives, they were a new group of people who would be joining the Tower once they came into contact with the Waystone of Floor Three.
And upon touching it, they would receive the blessing of the System and teleport onto Floor Zero, and from there, it would be up to the academy or the government in charge to figure out what to do with them, but they would just interrogate them before anything.
***
They'd been searching for hours.
The massive torture-prison chamber seemed to sprawl endlessly in every direction, becoming an unnatural maze carved by some sick and mentally deranged cultists who definitely more than deserved to have their lives be in the hands of those they tortured.
So far, there was no sign of an exit, or an objective, or even a hint of what they were supposed to do. Just… more cages. More bodies. More madness.
Deacon wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist and turned back to the shed he was rummaging through. "So far, just rusty torture tools. Let's see…" He picked up a twisted iron sawblade still caked in dried flesh. "Bone scrapers, thumb screws, a branding set, jaw prongs, a rack clamp…" He trailed off and tossed the sawblade aside with a grimace. "Like, the second I see a cultist, the first thing Imma do is toss them in a cage, and when we leave and unlock everyone else's cages and then theirs, and let the ones tortured by them get revenge."
"Facts," Sam said as he stood beside the doorway. "Anything useful?"
"Depends. You want yet another jar of fingers?" Deacon muttered, eyeing yet another jar of pickled human fingers hidden beneath a pile of bloodied rags, then paused as he pulled a brittle stack of parchment from within a drawer that he unlocked with the help of his dagger. "Wait… I found some notes."
"What type of notes?" Sam perked up. "Something other than more Huitzilopochtli worshiping rituals? Or are they more Experimentation logs? Cause if they're the latter, I don't wanna hear them, the last one we read still fucked me up what they did with sacrificing their own peckers to Huitzilopochtli as both a proof of faith and to amplify their own magical power."
"…The second," Deacon muttered as he flipped through the pages. "Yup. It's talking about various rituals, how they were performed, how they were made, and the results. Just like the others we found in the other shack. They were definitely conducting ritual experiments on people here if it wasn't obvious enough from what we've already seen."
"Pretty sure with all this documentation we've found already, every cultist of Huitzilopochtli already has a death sentence signed for them," Sam sighed as he turned around to continue keeping a lookout. "Anything else in those notes other than that?"
Deacon shook his head while grimacing slightly, flipping through a few more sheets. "Not really. Most of these just continue to talk about how most of their newer rituals that they were devising ended in rapid organ degeneration, system collapse, mana channels being burnt to high hell, scales growing on their flesh, but no functional transformation into a full-bodied snake. Lots of notes on induced mutations and serpent-blood infusion in their rituals on them."
Sam folded his arms, gaze narrowing as he glanced back at the rows of cages. "That tracks with what we've seen. The further we go down here, the more… reptilian they've started looking."
"Yeah. I noticed that too," Deacon said. "But none of them fully turned. Just patchy scale growth, discolored eyes, maybe a tailbone bump. One guy had half his jaw stretched out and serrated like a snake's, but the rest of him was still human."
"Failed hybrids," Sam muttered. "They're trying to make something… more. Probably wanted full serpent-warriors or something, but it kept stopping short. You think that serpent from earlier was one of the successes?"
Deacon nodded slowly. "Maybe. Or maybe it was the baseline they were trying to mimic."
"Okay, but that still doesn't make sense, cause if they wanted to become like Huitzilopochtli, shouldn't they have done rituals with hummingbirds, and try to gain feathers on their bodies like the ones he had on him?" Sam said aloud. "This just doesn't make any–"
Another faint rumble rolled beneath their feet, rattling the cages and their inhabitants once more.
"That's number four now," Sam groaned, rubbing his head as the sudden rumble had caused it to smack against the wooden doorway he was leaning on.
"Still don't feel like anything's moving under us, though," Deacon said. "I feel like it's coming from above us, because I think with how far my pathway was, I was at the lowest section of this temple."
"I wonder if they're having as much fun as we are," Sam wondered aloud, referring to Jass, Esmerelda, and Bonehead.
Deacon folded the notes and tucked them into his Spatial Sling Bag, just like what he'd done with the others, just in case they might need or want to go over the notes again, if they thought they'd missed something within them. "Would I be an ass if I hoped they were going through a trial just as boring as the one we're dealing with right now?"
"I mean, you were an ass even before saying that, so…" Sam cheekily replied.
"Har, har, har," Deacon replied dryly while rolling his eyes at Sam's response.
Deacon stepped out of the ramshackle shed and squinted up at the oppressive stone ceiling far above.
He stretched his arms overhead, joints popping with a satisfying crack, before letting out a long, tired sigh.
"Alright," he muttered, brushing some dried rust flakes off his gloved palms. "This place is too big. We're going to be here until we die if we just keep moving together."
Sam, still lingering by the warped cage doorway, glanced over. "So, we split up?"
"Just for a bit. We'll cover more ground, but keep an eye out for any more serpents, and always keep up an Earth shield around you."
Sam raised a brow. "But what about accidentally causing a cave-in?"
"I mean, with all the shaking in the temple, it would have collapsed a long time ago if it was really that structurally weak. Besides, just conjure up stone if you don't want to take it out of the ground," Deacon suggested. "I know it's a lot more magically demanding to do it, but if we continue moving at the same speed as we are now, we'll run out of supplies and starve to death here."
"Got it, worst case, if we can't find how to exit and the whole place starts crumbling down, we just start destroying the walls around us to find where that tree is and get rid of the slave bindings on us before booking it out of here." Sam nodded. "Holler if you find anything."
Deacon gave him a two-fingered salute before leaping atop the nearest cage and darting towards the left, while Sam similarly leaped atop of a cage and conjured and surrounded himself in a thick shield of earth that hovered around his form before darting towards the left.
***
"Deacon! Yo! I think I found something!"
He stopped himself just as he was about to leap off yet another cage top toward a nearby shack he'd spotted just a few meters away. "Where?" he shouted back at him.
"Back at that altar!" Sam's voice echoed through the maze of cages, distant but clear. "The one with seven metal rods around it, the ones that were three feet high, remember? The one with the robed corpse in the middle?"
"On my way!" Deacon shouted just as he pivoted on his heel and shot towards the opposite direction he was previously headed towards. It had been four hours since they'd decided to split up, and in that time, he'd found nothing that was of value other than the experimentation notes.
He sprinted, boots thudding loudly now as he cut back toward the area he'd found two hours ago and alerted Sam about it, but after not finding anything they could do with it, he left to continue exploring for clues.
As Deacon skidded to a stop near the clearing that held the ritual site, he immediately spotted Sam standing within the circular boundary, near the cracked stone altar. His boots scraped over the blood-stained floor as he closed the gap, eyeing the scene with suspicion.
Sam stood beside the altar, his brows furrowed in thought, and the robed figure that was previously at the foot of the altar was now hanging lifelessly in the air, being held up by Sam's magic.
Deacon's brows knitted together. "Alright... what did you find?"
"Just gimme a sec," Sam said, dusting off his hands and stepping back from the altar. "When you left, I continued to look for clues in regard to this whole thing," he said while gesturing wildly to the ritual site around them.
"After a couple minutes of nothing, I decided that I was out of my depths in regards to translating what the site was for, and turned my attention to the altar, where once I imbued it with mana, words emerged on top of it," he continued, pressing his palm onto the altar to reveal hundreds of glowing words that spiraled around the entire altar and tossing the robed figure's corpse onto the altar. "And when I moved this corpse out of the way to examine the base of the altar, I put him on top of it cause I didn't want to move away from the altar in case it might permanently deactivate, the whole ritual site primed itself."
"What?... Why would it do that?" Deacon asked as he felt the ritual site begin to tingle with mana.
"Fuck if I know," Sam shrugged. "But, as I read the last couple of lines, it mentioned seven serpent heads, and so when I did this," he said as he took out a severed head that looked like one of the serpent creatures they'd killed earlier from his Spatial Satchel, he walked towards the nearest metal rod that looked just slightly bloodier than the others.
Crouching beside it, Sam looked at Deacon one last time, and then, without ceremony, slammed the serpent's head downward, impaling it onto the rod.
Almost immediately, Deacon saw that the section of the ritual site where the pole was connected turned bright red.