The procession had barely moved fifty yards from the mining face before it halted in the widened junction of Sector 4, a natural hall of jagged stone where the main rail lines converged. The guards who had seized Adam forced him to his knees, the impact jarring his spine.
They weren't taking him to the surface immediately. They were making a theater of his destruction.
The heavy footsteps echoed down the cavern, a new sound distinct from the rhythmic marching of the soldiers. Each thud was a hammer blow against Adam's already frayed nerves. From the shadows of the main tunnel, three hulking demons emerged. These were not mere overseers; they were Demon Enforcers. Their obsidian skin glistened under the meager light as if coated in oil, and their armor was fused directly into their flesh, glowing with faint, necrotic pulses. Their eyes, like smoldering embers, fixed on Adam with a mixture of boredom and predatory hunger.
Behind them, flanked by two more guards, walked a smaller figure. He was wrinkled, his skin the texture of dry parchment, his horns curled tight against a skull that seemed too large for his body. He wore the ornate, flowing robes of the Magistratum.
This was High Justicar Malakor.
"Adam Ashbourne," Malakor's voice boomed. It wasn't loud, but it was amplified by some dark art, causing the very dust on the floor to vibrate. "Slave designation 7-3-4."
Adam looked up, spitting a mixture of blood and dust onto the boot of the guard holding him. He refused to lower his eyes.
"You are charged with the murder of Taskmaster Xy'lar, a loyal servant of the Yandhaq Empire," Malakor intoned, reading from a holographic scroll that hovered above his clawed hand. "By the laws of Yandhaq, such a crime against a demon is not merely murder. It is blasphemy. It demands the ultimate price."
The silence in the cavern was absolute. Hundreds of other slaves had stopped their work, pressing themselves into the shadows, watching with terrified eyes.
Suddenly, a commotion erupted from the tunnel Adam had just been dragged from.
"Let him go!"
The roar shattered the silence. Karl broke through the line of perimeter guards, his massive frame barreling through them like a runaway mine cart. He hadn't stayed back. He hadn't listened. Behind him, moving with desperate speed, was Elena.
Adam's heart hammered against his ribs. "No!" he shouted, straining against the hands holding him down. "Karl, stay back! Elena!"
Karl skidded to a halt ten feet away, his chest heaving, his pickaxe—heavy, rusted, and lethal—clutched in a white-knuckled grip. Elena rushed to Adam's side, slipping past a surprised guard to kneel beside him. She grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into his flesh as if she could physically anchor him to this life.
"He was protecting me!" Elena cried out, her voice trembling but cutting through the stagnant air with crystal clarity. She looked up at the High Justicar, tears streaming down her grime-streaked face. "Xy'lar… he tried to… he tried to force himself on me! Adam saved me! Is there no justice? Is there no law for us?"
Malakor's gaze flickered to Elena. It was the look a man might give a buzzing mosquito. A slow, dismissive sneer twisted his lipless mouth.
"Silence, livestock," Malakor hissed. "Your testimony is irrelevant. A demon's honor is paramount. Property has no voice, and it certainly has no virtue to defend." He looked back to Adam. "Adam Ashbourne, you will come with us. Your execution will be slow. It will be public. Resist, and suffer the consequences right here."
"We won't let you take him!" Karl roared. He stepped forward, placing himself between the Justicar and Adam. The pickaxe gleamed menacingly in the harsh light.
The lead Demon Enforcer laughed—a dry, rasping sound like grinding stones. "Look at it," the demon mocked. "The cattle thinks it has horns."
The demon lunged.
It was a blur of dark scales and sharpened claws, moving with a speed that defied physics for a creature of that size. But Karl was fueled by a lifetime of repressed rage. His years of brutal labor had turned his body into a machine of dense muscle. He didn't flinch.
Karl met the charge head-on. He sidestepped the sweeping claw and swung his pickaxe in a wide, whistling arc.
CRACK.
The sound was sickeningly wet. The point of the pickaxe struck the demon's forearm, punching through the obsidian scales and shattering the bone beneath. The demon recoiled with a hiss of genuine pain and shock, stumbling back, its arm bent at an unnatural angle. Black blood sprayed across the cavern floor, sizzling where it touched the stone.
The cavern gasped. A slave had drawn blood.
"Adam, run!" Elena shrieked, pushing him. "Please, just run!"
But Adam wouldn't. He couldn't. He looked at Karl, who was now breathing hard, holding the pickaxe like a warrior's battleaxe. He looked at Elena, whose eyes held a terrifying mixture of love and finality. If he ran, they died. If he stayed... maybe, just maybe, they could take a few of these bastards with them.
Adam surged upward. He headbutted the guard holding him, hearing the cartilage of the demon's nose snap. As the guard reeled back, Adam snatched a discarded pickaxe from the ground.
"We fight!" Adam screamed, the sound tearing raw from his throat.
The cavern erupted into chaos.
The remaining two Enforcers roared, a sound that shook the stalactites above, and charged.
Adam met them with a surge of desperate adrenaline. He wasn't a soldier; he was a miner. He knew how to find the weak points in rock, and he applied that now to the living stone of the demons' armor. He swung wildly, aiming for the joints—the neck, the armpits, the groin.
Elena, despite her petite stature, became a whirlwind of motion. She grabbed a handful of silica dust and flung it into the eyes of an advancing guard, blinding him. She darted and wove between their legs, her small hands finding purchase on their thick hides, hindering their movements, screaming to distract them from landing fatal blows on Adam and Karl.
But the centerpiece of the rebellion was Karl.
He was a titan. He took a heavy blow to the shoulder from a demon's gauntlet, a hit that would have pulverized a normal man. Karl merely staggered, roared, and retaliated with a furious punch that sent the demon stumbling back, its snout gushing black ichor.
"For every day!" Karl shouted, swinging the axe. "For every scar!"
But there were too many. And they were demons, bred in the pits of war, their strength far surpassing any human limit.
The demon Karl had injured first had recovered. It circled behind him, its eyes burning with humiliation and murder. Karl was busy holding off two guards, his back exposed.
"Karl! Behind you!" Adam screamed.
It was too late.
The Enforcer moved with liquid agility. It didn't use a weapon; it used its sheer mass. It brought a heavy, armored fist down on the back of Karl's head.
The sound was a dull, final thud.
Karl's eyes rolled back. His knees hit the stone first, followed by his massive torso. He didn't twitch. He didn't groan. He just fell, a mountain collapsing into the sea. A dark stain began to spread rapidly beneath his head, mixing with the ore dust.
"KARL!"
The scream ripped from Adam's throat, ragged and bloody. Time seemed to fracture. He saw his friend—the man who had shared his rations, who had carried Adam when he was sick, who had kept them laughing in the dark—lying still.
Fury, cold and absolute, ignited within Adam. It was a possession. He turned on the demon that had struck Karl. He didn't care about defense. He didn't care about pain. He lunged, a primal scream tearing from his lips, and buried his pickaxe deep into the demon's chest, aiming for where the heart should be.
The pickaxe sank in with a gruesome resistance. The demon gurgled, its vertical pupils widening in shock. It clawed at Adam's face, but Adam pushed the handle deeper, twisting it, pouring every ounce of his hatred into the metal. The demon shuddered and crumpled.
Adam stood over the fallen monster, his chest heaving. But as he turned to find Elena, a searing, white-hot pain erupted in his side.
He gasped, the air fleeing his lungs. He looked down. A serrated demon blade was protruding from his flesh, just above the hip. The Enforcer behind him twisted the blade before ripping it out.
Adam stumbled, his legs turning to water. He fell to one knee, gasping for air that tasted like copper. The world began to spin.
An executioner's shadow fell over him. The remaining Enforcer raised a massive war hammer, preparing to crush Adam's skull.
"No!"
A small body slammed into Adam, shoving him sideways with surprising force.
Elena.
She pushed him out of the path of the hammer, interposing herself between him and the death blow.
"Go, Adam! Go now!" she pleaded, her voice laced with agony. Her eyes, usually so distant, were wide with terror—not for herself, but for him. She looked at him one last time, a lifetime of unspoken words passing between them in a microsecond.
The demon, enraged that its target had moved, didn't stop the swing. It merely redirected it.
The claws of the Enforcer raked across Elena's back.
She cried out—a high, sharp sound that snapped something deep inside Adam's soul. It was the sound of a bird's wing breaking. She collapsed forward, her blonde hair fanning out on the grimy floor like a halo in the mud. Her sapphire eyes, wide and glassy, stared blankly at the cavern ceiling.
"ELENA!"
Adam's roar was an animalistic sound, a guttural cry of pure, unadulterated despair that echoed down the infinite tunnels of the mine.
His world shattered.
Karl, his strength. Elena, his heart.
Both gone. In the span of a minute, the only two reasons Adam had to breathe had been extinguished.
The remaining demons closed in, forming a circle of iron and hate. High Justicar Malakor stepped over Elena's body as if she were a piece of trash, his robes sweeping the dust.
Adam looked at the pickaxe in his hand. He looked at the circle of monsters. He looked at Elena's still face.
The fight drained out of him, replaced by an overwhelming, crushing emptiness. It was a coldness colder than the void of space. What was the point? If he fought and died now, he would just be another corpse in the pile.
He dropped the pickaxe.
Clang.
The sound echoed hollowly, a funeral bell for his life as a man.
"I surrender," he choked out. The words tasted like ash. Tears mingled with the dust and sweat on his face, carving channels through the blood. "I surrender."
The demons seized him instantly. Their grips were like iron bands, bruising his bone, twisting his arms until the shoulders nearly popped. They dragged him to his knees before Malakor.
The Elder demon looked down at Adam with chilling indifference. He gestured to the bodies of Karl and Elena.
"A waste of labor," Malakor sneered. He leaned in, his foul breath washing over Adam's face. "Adam Ashbourne, for the murder of Xy'lar, and for inciting this pathetic rebellion against the Yandhaq Empire, death is too kind a release for you."
Malakor straightened up, his voice projecting to the entire cavern.
"You are sentenced to lifetime imprisonment in Kazakhar Prison."
A collective gasp went through the watching slaves. Kazakhar. It was a place where the worst criminals of the galaxy were sent to rot, a place of nightmares where no light ever touched the surface. It was a sentence worse than death.
"Let this be a lesson to all slaves who dare to defy their masters," Malakor pronounced.
As they dragged Adam away, his boots dragging through the dirt, he didn't struggle. He didn't scream. He stared fixedly at the receding forms of his friends. Karl, the mountain who fell. Elena, the angel who broke.
The demons thought they had broken him. They thought they were dragging a defeated man to a hole in the ground.
But deep in the crushed ruins of Adam's heart, a single, burning ember ignited. It was fed by the image of Elena's dead eyes. It was fueled by the memory of Karl's last breath.
Vengeance.
The thought whispered in his mind, growing louder with every step.
I will survive Kazakhar, he promised the silence. I will eat the dark. I will grow stronger.
He stopped crying. His expression hardened into a mask of terrifying calm.
One day, I will return. I will not just kill them. I will eradicate them. I will burn their empire until only ash remains.
This was no longer just about survival. It was about a debt. A promise made to the fallen, a future painted in the blood of his enemies. The slave named Adam died in that cavern.