Chapter 425: The Ritual Field
Chapter 425: The Ritual Sacrifice Ground
Now, only himself was left here.
Agatha slowly withdrew her gaze from the lamp, she turned around, leaving Consul Winston in the cold and calm darkness, and walked towards those “branches” that were intertwined in the endless space, and towards that huge curtain of thorns that was like a dome of heaven and earth.
A not-so-bright lamp hung from her waist, her right hand held the cane that had accompanied her for many years in her memory, and her left hand still clutched the brass key from Winston – the key was no longer cold, but carried a heat as if it were the temperature of her body, as if… …was gradually merging with his body.
But Agatha had stopped paying attention to what had changed in this body of hers.
She just stepped in the darkness, feeling the body tangibly moving forward, and as long as the chaos around her hadn’t completely engulfed and assimilated itself, there was still a need for her to move forward.
She searched for a place to land in the nothingness, and every time she took a step, paths of ground appeared in the darkness, and she searched for a way out of the thorn bushes, and the narrow apertures between the intertwining branches that she could pass through from time to time.
Sharp “thorns” soon cut through her clothes, and the dense “fabric” was as fragile as loose ash and fog before the mind-surge of the ancient god. She occasionally touched the sparks that leapt between the thorns – and when she touched those flashes, she could almost visibly feel something burrowing into her mind.
It was the mind of an ancient god, a murmur from a profound holy lord-without any malice, not even a full intent, but to a weak mortal, the shortest spark of thought was as bright and blinding as a brilliant candle in the darkness of the night.
Another dim flash of light passed quickly from the distance, slipping out of sight along the dark branches of the thorns, and a strand of Agatha’s hair met with it, and in a hundredth of a second a new “knowledge” appeared in her mind–
111010011001101110000110……111001111011111010100100……
Agatha couldn’t understand what the sparks were communicating to her – as Winston had told himself, don’t try to guess the thinking of the ancient gods.
It would be madness.
She lifted her head.
A magnificent giant structure bridged by dead wood and thorns loomed over the view, dense dull flashes of light danced like stray fireflies among the thorn bushes, a thin layer of fog shrouded the outside of the thorn barrier, and in the depths of the fog, the massive limbs of the Profound Sacred Lord were bobbing slightly – as if it were an invitation.
The surroundings chilled down again – and it was a more definite and piercing cold than before, cold with a dampness that seemed to seep into the body as if it were trying to freeze the bones.
Agatha subconsciously tightened the clothes on her chest, only to realize that at some point her outfit had been torn and tattered, while those thorns along the way had left uncountable cuts, large and small, on her skin.
In the wounds, the dirty black sticky substance was slowly writhing like blood.
But just when she thought that the cold would completely consume her, a faint and warm heat once again came from her chest ……
……
A small cluster of green embers burned quietly in Agatha’s chest, and the ghostly green light illuminated her face and the cold and damp sewers around her.
All sensations seemed far away, or separated from her own sanity by a thick curtain, and the temperature in her veins seemed to have faded over time, along with the exhaustion and hurt accumulated along the way.
Agatha shook her head slowly, trying to dispel the numbness that had taken over her mind, and just as her vision wavered, out of the corner of her eye she suddenly caught a glimpse of something different.
She saw that the dark and closed sewer corridor in front of her seemed to become spacious all of a sudden, and a layer of mist floated up in the hazy space, in which something like a tree branch or a thorn bush appeared and slowly spread towards her.
In the next moment, however, this hallucinatory vision disappeared, and there was still only the darkness of the corridor in her eyes.
And a gate at the end of it.
Plop …… plop …… plop ……
The moment she gazed at that gate, it was as if a disembodied heartbeat was heard beside Agatha’s ears, as if a huge heart was hiding across that gate, pulsing and growing in the darkness.
Agatha’s already sluggish and numb spirit suddenly perked up, and her eyes instantly focused on that door.
“Ah …… I have found you ……”
She gathered the fire in her hand and took a step towards the darkness, the almost broken combat cane supporting her forward for the last time, her pace getting faster and faster, even gradually bringing up the sound of the wind as she stepped towards the darkness, and left it behind again, while the low, horrible heartbeat gradually beat like a heavy drumbeat on her heart, and even on her mind.
Gradually she heard something else interspersed with that heartbeat, as if it were a thousand people praying, chanting, calling out to some dark and unnameable being.
She couldn’t have cared less how much noise was in all those mixed voices – she was close to delivering the fire, and the heretics’ lair lay in the deepest depths ahead of her.
The sound of cane and heel tapping on the ground was intense. And just then, Agatha suddenly heard something else – not her own footsteps, nor the heartbeats and benedictions of the crowd gathered in the depths of the corridor.
It was other footsteps, a large group of people, and the dense footsteps sounded like they were coming from another direction – close to the corridor in front of her, but separated by a wall or two.
The footsteps were punctuated by gunshots, large caliber rifles.
Someone else? Living people? Someone else moving with them in this city of mirrors?
Doubts instantly surfaced in Agatha’s mind, yet they didn’t affect her progress in the least – she almost instantly sprinted through the last stretch before the gates to the large door where the constant sound of a heartbeat was coming from.
The door was slightly open with a gap, and in the gap was a darkness so thick that it could not be melted, a darkness like substance that escaped and flowed outward a little.
But this was exactly what Agatha had been searching for all the way.
She pressed her shoulder dead against the heavy doorway and pushed it slowly open with all her strength.
With a creaking sound, the door opened.
A vast darkness appeared in front of Agatha’s eyes – or rather, some kind of infinite “shadow” shrouded the otherwise normal space, leaving only darkness in front of her eyes.
She could only barely discern that the darkness appeared to be an assembly hall, where the widest intersection in the sewers had been transformed into a place of sacrifice and breeding for the Ancient Gods, and where countless shapeless creatures wriggled in the darkness, malice like a stench that poured out of her face.
Immediately afterward, before she could react, she heard a swift cracking sound coming from the nearby darkness, something was coming towards her, while a familiar yet disgusting voice rang out from that sacrificial field in the distance – with teasing and mockery:
“Ah, the final sacrifice has finally arrived – how nice that the other you just made it to the intended place.”
“Bang!”
The cane swung out, erupting in short, glittering sparks in the darkness, and a hideous, grotesque section of limb was struck off in the air, falling at Agatha’s feet while she narrowly missed her footing due to the impact – after barely regaining her balance, she immediately raised her head and looked in the direction from which the voice of the words had come.
One could only barely see the tall, thin figure of a young man standing at the end of the darkness.
He opened his hands in this direction.
“Come, Sacrifice, your arrival was part of the plan – now the time has come to construct the passage.”
Agatha supported herself with her cane, slowly raising her head in weakness and dizziness, “You are asking for death ……”
“Yes, we’re all going to die here, but it doesn’t matter, as soon as you step in here, the ritual has been successful – and I admit, it is indeed a trap.”
……
A gunshot rang out with a bang, and fire accompanied by an explosion tore through the dimness of the corridor as a powerful slug shot a twisted monster with three eyes in the head, the latter’s mutated and hideous body collapsing to the ground, rapidly melting and disintegrating into a sickening black sludge.
Yet more monstrous hisses continued to ring out from all around, and more monstrous and twisted things were emerging in a steady stream – from the walls around them, from the pipes, from the drains, and even from the crevices in the dome.
The slime-like substance seeped and flowed outward from almost any crevice visible to the naked eye, turning into uncountable monsters that were plausibly different from humans.
“I don’t think we have enough bullets!”
One of the sailors shouted, while darting to change rounds for his rifle, raising it, and firing, while his shouts were accompanied by the crackling sound of spectral flames as they burned, sounding hoarse and dark.
Lawrence, on the other hand, had no time to respond to the sailor’s shouts – there was a swift gust of wind coming from the back of his head, and he only had time to slightly sidestep the fatal blow, followed by a backhanded grab driven by intuition.
A humanoid monster dressed in the uniform of a decades-old city-state guard with a sword raised in his hand was yanked from behind him and fell hard to the floor.
Lawrence stepped forward and planted a heavy foot on the fake freak’s chest, and the spectral flames on his body instantly rose, spreading the burning flames to burn the humanoid monster into a pile of ashes in almost no time.
In the next second, Lawrence, whose body was covered in ghostly flames, raised his head and looked ahead at the corridor that seemed to never end.
As far as the eye could see, it was full of profane monstrosities.
(End of chapter)