After struggling across the wretched grounds, we finally arrived at the towering structure. Of course, the moment we got there, we didn't raise siege to the tower like some battle-drugged party charging blindly into death.
From afar, the thing had looked like a tower- a colossal gray monument rising beyond the pale skeletal remains of the Ivory forest, like the crooked finger of some forgotten god clawing its way back into the world.
We observed from a safe distance as the strange structure's shadow cascaded over us. Slowly, we moved closer beneath the embrace of the Ivory Forest.
Milo and I wouldn't have had it any other way… after surviving that entire ordeal at the Wretched Cathedral, then traveling through the Rim Seraph Passage within the backyard of death itself.
Chills ran down my spine whenever I thought of the monsters that could've been harboring that place.
The closer we got to the monument, the more wrong it felt. It seemed as though our existence rejected what stood before us.
It wasn't strange, it was unnatural… wrong in the worst ways possible. The structure itself should not have existed in this world… merely looking at it was tasking on our mind.
And worst it starting to affect Milo.
The constant strain of protectiong the cadets with the majority of his aura… shielding them from the maddening corruption saturating this cursed place… and still having to fight off monsters again and again. It was finally catching up to him.
His body suddenly jerked violently. Then he collapsed onto one knee.
Milo…!
Before I could react, a stream of glowing blue liquid burst violently from his nose and mouth, spilling out in terrifying speed like pressurized blood forced from a ruptured organ. He looked in agonizing pain. I didn't need him to tell me that. The sight alone made my chest tighten.
I immediately grabbed his shoulders, forcing him upright before he could fall face-first into the dead gray earth beneath us.
His entire body trembled, his breathing had become uneven. His pupils looked unfocused.
'No…!'
This was bad. Far worse that I had thought… His condition… 'Was it worsening?'
A cold wave of dread crashed through me. My thoughts spiraled violently as I stared at him, panic slowly sinking deeper into my chest.
I was worried. But as that fear settled in… another realization crept into my mind, and I hated myself for it.
Now that I thought about it… the main reason I was panicking this much wasn't entirely because of Milo's condition.
No… It was because I didn't want to carry all of this burden by myself. The thought of being left alone here… trapped in this nightmare… protecting the cadets… fighting for survival… navigating this cursed wasteland with no one beside me...
My face twisted. I didn't know what expression I was making at the time, nor could I see myself. No mirror to comfirm it… but I knew the expression was there all the same: pathetic, utterly useless… the face of a spineless loser.
It terrified me more than I wanted to admit, because deep down… I knew the truth. If Milo collapsed here…
Everything would fall on me, and who knew what I'd become if I was left alone in this madness for too long.
If people looked at me and Milo they would probably reach the assumption that Milo was the muscular dumb one, while me the logical smart one.
No… In truth. He was the brave one whereas I just stood behind like some kind of narcissistical control freak... My true character would show.
This place was already eating away at our sanity. I could feel it gnawing at the edges of my thoughts like invisible teeth digging into my mind itself. Probably fueling all these meaniless thought.
If I lost Milo now… who would stop me from losing myself next?
We looked back at the damn structure. Its outer walls twisted upward in grotesque, uneven spirals, as though molten stone, flesh, bone and metal had all been fused together by some unimaginable force and left to rot for centuries. Massive jagged ridges protruded form its surface like layers of sharpened scales, overlapping endlessly in chaotic patterns that hurt the eyes if stared at for too long.
Yet when I touched its surface… It was… warm. Disgustinly warm, like skin and bones.
Warm like blood was still circulating somewhere deep within its impossible structure. Veins of blackened crimson minerals pulsed beneath the walls, glowing faintly through the cracks like dying embers trapped underneath translucent flesh. Sometimes the veins twitched. Sometimes they pulsed harder… almost reacting to our presence.
And then I realized something hat made my stomach tighten violently. The structure was breathing. 'Holy…!'
Not enough for the eye to immediately notice. No… far subtler than that. If you stood still long enough, the walls expanded outward by mere fractions before contracting inward again. Slow. Rhythmically alive.
Each exhale released foul gusts of air through tiny fracturs along the surface. The smell hit us immediately. Rotting flesh. Wet soil.Rust... Burnt marrow.
The nauseating scent of blood that had been left stagnant for centuries. And beneath all of that… something far older. Something ancient and buried so deep within time that the human mind instinctively recoiled from identifying it.
Around its base, the world itself had died. No pale grass or roots, even other monsters seemed to be unwelcoming of the presense of the structure.
Good for us. It would be hard to have to fight our way in… not in his state. I glanced at Milo, then immediately at the tower.
The ground had become a mix of black and gray, cracked and brittle, as though every ounce of life force had been violently drained from the earth itself. Jagged claw marks stretched outward in endless directions, carving through stone and dirt alike.
Thousands of them… some fresh enough to still crumble at the edges, some ancient like something fossilized.
Some so enormous… I couldn't imaging what kind of creature could've left them behind.
And then there was the sounds.
Gods… the sounds.
At first it was only a low vibration in the air. A distant humming noise subtle enough to mistakem for the wind.
But the longer we stood there… the more the sound changed. The humming became whispers. Hundreds of voices layered over each other, then thousands.
Muttering incoherent syllables in broken tongues I had never heard before. Some sounded like children crying. Others sounded like grown men laughing hysterically. Some were screaming in agony… but the screams were muffled, as though they were trapped somewhere far beneath layers of flesh and stone.
It was enough to make my skin crawl. Then came the groaning… Deep, wet, hollow.
The kind of sound giant throuats would make if something enormous was choking on riveres of its own blood.
I reached out and grabbed the strange material coating the tower's wall. Then we began climbing.
The golden bracelet on my wrist flashed faintly… then I channeled the power of Aurum. Instantly, our clothes and armor began taking on the same texture and appearance as the tower itself.
This was the power of one of my Swordpaths, Vanta. It allowed me to channel the mineral essence of surrounding materials and manipulate that borrowed energy as my own.
As we climbed, I shared the power with Milo, and soon parts of our bodies reflected the exact composition of the tower.
When we eventually reached the top, our eyes widened in disbelief.
It wasn't a tower, it was a well. A well of monsters… a pit overflowing with them.
The mouth of the structure itself was monstrous. Calling it just a well felt instulting.
Its opeing was wide enough to swallow an entire fortress whole. The edges curved inward in jagged formations resembling rows of enormous serrated teeth, giving the horrifying illusion that the entire structure wasn't a tower… but the gaping maw of some colossal predator waiting patiently for prey to step closer.
Black slime oozed endlessly from its edges. Thick, viscous, tar-like… yet somehow… it moved against gravity.
Crawling upward.
As if alive, looking inside was worse… Far worse.
I couldn't truly see into its depths because it descended into darkness far below. But the sounds — the guttural groans and distorted shrieks rising upward — were proof enough. And the darkness wasn't empty… it moved.
The shifting silhouettes moving within those depths made us immediately consider retreating.
Still… we needed to investigate further.
Carefully lowering ourselves deeper with a rope I had enhanced with gold, we realized it wasn't simply a well. At the bottom stretched countless tunnels branching outward like an endless maze. The oppressive sensation radiating from beneath was enough to make our nerves scream.
At first I thought it was shifting shadows. My mind trying to create shapes where there were none.
Then I realized… something inside was moving, hundreds of things. No... Thousands.
Shapes crawled across the inner walls, dragging themselves over one another in disturbing masses of writhing flesh. Some had too many limbs bending in directions joints should never allow. Others had none at all, forcing themselves forward by convulsing their entire bodies against the walls.
Some looked vaguely human… humanoids. That was somehow worse.
Their silhouettes resembled people… but horribly wrong. Limbs bend backwards, arms too long, spines protruding through skin… heads hanging sideways by twisted necks that snapped and rotate unnaturally whenever they moved.
Deeper below were… eyes.
Thousands of eyes.
Opening and closing throughout the darkness like stars drowning in an endless abyss. Some glowed white, others burned crimson.
Most were pitch black, darker than the void surrounding them… absorbing light itself. Some were impossibly large.
Blinking slowly and watching… no waiting.
As if they had noticed us long before we had noticed them.
Throughout the entire ordeal, Milo and I remained silent.
We weren't completely invisible… but we were partially concealed, enough to avoid immediate notice.
When our feet met the death-soaked earth, we found out that the inner walls of the abyss were riddled with tunnels… countless tunnels. Thousand of openings burrowed into the flesh-like stone, twisting endlessly in all directions like veins spreading outward rom the heart of some unimagingable organism.
Each tunnel leaked black fluid that dripped endlessly downward, and from within came sounds, bone cracking noises.
There were also corpses, mixed of ancient and fresh beast's skeletons. Severed limbs scattered carelessly like discarded scraps. Some skulls had bite marks large enough to crush and entire man whole.
Others had been hollowed form the inside, their contents scraped clean until only fragile shells remained, as though they had been hit by a devastating attack and left for weaker monsters to prey on.
I couldn't really tell because, we weren't moving, in order to avoid the gaze of thousands of monsters. We didn't want them to stop moving and attacking each other just to notice and focus their efforts on us.
We obseved from a corner… edging out bodies to the frame of the pit.
Rusted weapons and armor littered the ridges, but even those had begun sinking into the walls… slowly being absorbed as though the structure itself was digesting everything thrown into it.
Then the largest cracked tunnel… where even darkness seemed to collapse under its own weight… trembled violently.
Something was shaking it… something vast.
Something so imcomprehensibly enormous that it hasten the pace of the other creatures around, and made them flee into other tunnels. A swurm of flying monsters shook the abyssal skies in desperate speed, heading quickly for the exit… the mouth of the pit.
Black feathers shimmered back down.
The entire abyss trembled violently. Dust fell from the walls. The tunnels suddenly went silent, every creature inside stopped moving at once.
Then…
A sound emerged, like a dangerous roar. But I think it was just the slow breath of inhale. The cursed monstrosity in there, were the signature energy of the Gate Mark was coming from was probably asleep.
A single breath so deep and heavy it sounded as though the abyss itself had lungs. I did not know if it was the madness getting to me but. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to scream out while running towards the strange sound, and then… meet an horrific end.
A crazy feeling warped my entire being, unknowingly I was smiling… Milo grabbed me, then I stared at him.
Seeing him in pain stirred back my sanity... My jaw tightened.
That was close… it seemed like the corruption was eating at him too, but thank God he woke me up before it was too late…
I didn't want to… but I had one more understanding, a horrifying one at that. This structure, it wasn't a nest, nor was a just a lair.
But a dining hall, structured to feed the foul relic of an existence that laid its belly down in the tunnel.
And whatever it was feeding… that thing currently sleeping at the bottom of the massive tunnel… had not woken up yet. So this was our chance to get the cadets and disappear from this hell.
Chances like this rarely presented itself. Not in this kind of world... only in fairytales, provided it's the good kind, because you'll find out that even fairytales has it's ups and downs.
The sigil's energy we had sensed became stronger, almost as if it were directly in front of us.
Without exchanging a word, we decided to climb back.
After a long and painstaking ascent — making sure nothing in the skies above or within the depths below discovered us — we finally turned our backs on the monstrous pit.
Then we made our way back toward camp, avoiding the ruined cathedral entirely.
Along the way, we stumbled upon what looked like a battlefield. But by the time we arrived, it had already fallen silent. The combatants were nowhere to be found.
Only destruction remained. Trees had been torn apart, massive craters scarred the earth, and the ground itself had been stained with black sand that resembled dried blood.
I gritted my teeth as we hurried forward, hastening our pace to reach camp.
But when we finally arrived, we discovered that all the cadets were fine… seemingly unharmed.
I asked Darrin, Marcus, and Tasha if anything had happened while we were gone, but they had no report to give.
It was a relief. After all, we had been away for long.
So without wasting any more time… we began preparing, packing up our supplies… and making our way toward the well.
We had to escape… immediately. The thought alone was enough to make my blood run cold… who knew when one of those abomination driven by hunger would rise from the depths of the pit and erase us entirely?
Or even worse when what ever lurked with that abyss would awarken and slaughter us all without effort and out of bordom. Every second spent surviving in this forsaken place felt like enduring a slow, merciless torture, and awaiting the time our prolonged existence would come to an end at the claws of those vile monsters.