Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 48

Athela had already vaulted over the stone ledge encompassing their solitary refuge amid the rubble and was sliding down a large stone slab leading to the dirt below with a chittering cackle. Hitting the ground running, she lunged on all twelve legs toward the temple as fast as she could—which was pretty damn fast—with Riven and Azmoth scrambling to catch up.

His heart pounded, and his nerves were on edge. Those definitely sounded like human voices, but the screaming and pleas were quickly dying out and had altogether stopped by the time he’d made it halfway to the cathedral. Had some other group from Earth ended up here? Were there more people from the Elysium core worlds that’d decided to appear? He began summoning blood magic to charge up a lance along his right arm, keeping an eye out on his surroundings as he ran.

Thirty seconds later, his sprint slowed to a crawl, and he began sneaking heel to toe to avoid making noise, with Azmoth doing his best to make as little noise as possible, too, though the larger demon had a tough time of it given his bulk and the metal fused to his body.

The cathedral’s towering entrance was ajar and always had been to the best of Riven’s knowledge. Once these marble double doors had been neatly fixated into the front, but to move such massive pillars of stone to shut the entrance down would have taken a Herculean effort.

When he finally made it to the daunting, steepled passage at the front of the cathedral, his body pressed up against the marble and he began slinking ahead. Step-by-step, he cautiously moved forward, heart pounding ever harder as he got closer to what he knew to be a very dangerous lair even by standards of the ruins they lived in. He could hear crunching, ripping, and distant muffled shouts for mercy from deeper into the structure.

Coming to a stop at the edge of the ajar door and scowling down at Athela, who was already peering in, he gave his eyes time to adjust…and what he saw made him very confused.

The entrance led directly into a tall, domed area with a ruined set of two incomplete statues in the far back, worn away by time and obvious physical abuse. Pieces of the large statues littered the ground beneath, but judging by the remaining details he could tell that they had once been angels.

Around the room, hanging off the ceiling support struts, were at least two dozen torn tapestries. The colors of the tapestries had been worn away by age. A large spiral staircase was off to the right, a long dark hallway leading straight ahead and to the left, and then here in the main room of the spacious cathedral was a myriad of different items that really didn’t belong. The most prominent of which was a yellow school bus.

It was an antique, and it even had letters written in English that said “Bakers ISD” along the side. The door had been ripped off, tossed to the side, and crumpled up next to the body of a human man wearing a flannel T-shirt that was being fed on by a creature that resembled the larger goat man they’d seen wandering the area in the past, though this satyr was much smaller and likely an adolescent. It also didn’t have its insides partially exposed like the larger one did and had a full set of abdominal muscles instead.

There were two other fallen satyrs of similar levels searching the bus, each standing at around four feet tall, but otherwise the room was empty of living creatures. Piles of shit lay scattered across the dirty tiled floor, and trails of blood led from the bus all the way down the dark hallway to the left.

Athela’s whispering voice from behind startled him. “Wow. That’s a car, right? I’ve always wanted to see one since you told me stories about them! How did it get here? Ooh, and look at that dead guy…how tasty. Do you think there are more?”

Riven didn’t bother looking down and kept his eyes focused on the nearest satyr, watching its sharp teeth chomp down on bits and pieces of the man as it carved off chunks of bloody flesh with a small, curved knife and popped them into its mouth. The dark fur along its lower half and head were caked in dirt, and Riven could smell the foul stench of the creatures from here.

“It is very likely there are more. I heard begging, and the voices were definitely female…”

He slowly inhaled and exhaled, building up the bravery needed for what he was about to do. He didn’t know why a bus, of all things, had been brought to the dungeon, or why now and not earlier when they’d first been spawned here, but he didn’t care. That wasn’t important. What was important was finding whoever was down that hallway and helping them escape. “I didn’t see the goat man. At least not the big one. We may have a chance to save them if there are people still alive and all that’s left are these little guys…”

From behind them, a low, malevolent chuckle rose from Azmoth’s chest as he knelt next to them and peered in—despite not having any eyes. “Can…can I eat satyr? I cook them and eat them, yes?”

Riven glanced back. Azmoth’s toothy grin and giddiness really did remind Riven of a child, and he had to pause to really consider that Azmoth was indeed an infant.

“Yes…” Riven said slowly, placing a finger to his lips and keeping his voice low. “But in a little bit. We need to kill them quietly and then go deeper in to see if we can save the others…assuming there are more humans left.”

Azmoth’s armored, spiked head nodded avidly while imitating Riven with a finger up to his lips. “Yes, yes. We kill quietly and eat later. That’s good.”

Riven waited until the two fallen satyrs on the bus finally made their way off it, stepping down onto the stone of the dirty cathedral floor and carrying another mutilated body, that of a young woman, with them. It looked like her neck had been broken in two places, and a large gash was torn through her upper half…

What a grisly sight.

Despite this, Riven kept his cool and counted to three under his breath from where he sat with Athela. At the end of the count, he pushed a torrent of mana into his left arm and channeled five large discs of spinning red razors that thundered ahead at breakneck speed. They cleanly split the first of the fallen satyrs like it was made of paper, lopping off the head and cutting through its body at various points just as the second satyr was taken out by a lightning-fast strike of Riven’s Blood Lance.

With a scream of surprise from the second satyr that made Riven scowl, he lunged forward to finish the job—only to see that it was already dead before it hit the floor.

The attack had been so fast that the third satyr was in a state of shock and confusion as Athela leaped onto it from behind and sank her fangs into the creature’s throat. Rot quickly afflicted the remnants of its windpipe as the arachnid tore its jugular out, and she did a happy dance atop its corpse only a minute later while wiggling her front legs.

Despite the fight being a quick hit, the second creature’s brief scream made Riven slightly nervous. He peered down the dark hallway to his left, watching carefully for any signs of movement as Azmoth and Athela crept up behind him.

Yet, despite Azmoth’s best attempts to remain quiet, he did occasionally make noise with those big, armored feet of his.

“Azmoth, I’m going to unsummon you for now…but I’ll resummon you at the first sign of a fight,” Riven stated with a glance back at the large demon. “You’re just a little loud. Not your fault! But we need to be sneaky.”

Riven brought a finger up to his chest where Azmoth’s red pentagram was burned into his skin between his clavicles, right above Athela’s blue one, and concentrated on the command Unsummon.

With a nod of understanding, Azmoth vanished through a portal of fire into the abyssal forest he’d spawned from. Riven felt the dip in his mana immediately, frowning at the cost his unsummoning needed. Every time he summoned or unsummoned one of them, it was a pretty decent percentage of his total mana, so he had to be careful how often he did it.

Athela prodded him with a foot. “Anything on these guys?”

Riven shook his head with a frown while irreverently poking the wide-eyed goat man’s face with his staff. “Other than lots of ugly? No, I don’t see any loot. Let’s keep moving; we can look for treasure later. Right now the priority is trying to find out whether or not there are still people alive.”

The trail of blood led them a good forty meters down the hall as the light grew dimmer and dimmer. Both Riven and Athela did their best to keep their footsteps noiseless, with Athela having a much easier time of it as she scampered along the ceiling like a shadow.

Up until the end of the hall, it was pretty barren. There were two empty rooms on the right side with a lot of broken boxes, bones, and more goat excrement, but not much else. The stench was rather foul here, too, so they made their way as hastily as possible and came to a crossroads between hallways going left and right and a set of stone stairs that led underground.

Riven pointed to the trail of blood in the weak light of the ruin, and Athela rushed to scout ahead as he descended the steps.

The smell got worse when they hit the bottom, and the floor became thick with a viscous fluid that made it all the harder to remain quiet as they tried to sneak through. The low glow of a lantern hanging along the wall to Riven’s left gave them a meager amount of sight, though, and he quickly found that the blood trail had been lost in the quarter-inch of dark fluid on the floor.

“Crap.” Riven quickly looked around, seeing passages to his left, right, and front—none of which had obvious signs of recent passage. He was about to ask Athela her opinion on where to start when he heard another distant scream from his right.

They immediately started moving.

Ancient stonework riddled with splendid carvings of heroics, monsters, and cities lined the long, domed halls. Green moss, the first of this particular kind that they’d seen since turning up in this dungeon, was plastered along various corners and patches of ceiling. The viscous liquid Riven stood in, which they still didn’t know the identity of, was everywhere…and about every other stretch of hallway had a dim lantern planted on a stone outcropping to light the way.

“We’re already lost, aren’t we?” Athela asked nonchalantly from her perch upside down on the ceiling.

“No. I’m memorizing the layout as we go.”

Another scream and distant begging filtered through the underground maze, pushing them forward past many barred or empty rooms until eventually they came to a much bigger and cylindrical room spanning many dozens of yards across.

It was something between a prison and a sacrificial chamber.

The large room smelled like iron and viscera. Torches were placed at intervals along the walls, and a large pentagram with runic markings was etched into the ceiling high above. There were numerous cells holding captives along the entirety of the circumference, with the two exceptions being the entrance they now knelt in, keeping to the shadows, and the bloody stone altar on the opposite side of the room.

At the raised altar, two of the smaller satyrs, or goat men, stood at either side as they brutally carved daggers into a screaming woman’s chest. Rope tied to stone circlets held the flailing woman down. There were also three more of the satyrs standing around and chanting as they waved their small glistening daggers around, with the firelight of the tomb’s torches reflecting off the blades. One of them, obviously the leader of the pack, wore a hood.

The victim, who was likely in her forties, wore a ripped, bloodied mess of what had once been a shirt with a fast-food logo on it, and was begging for her life between screams and sobs. Those screams and sobs abruptly cut off, and she began to go into shock as one of the two goat men made a baahhing noise similar to that of a sheep and triumphantly lifted up the heart he’d carved out of the woman.

It was sickening to watch, and as Riven looked around he saw even more bodies.

There was only one other person left alive, a scrawny, shirtless man in his late teens or early twenties with a short blond mohawk in the cell closest to the altar on the left. Other than that, all the other cages were filled with monsters of various sorts. There were a couple undead, a harpy, and two Jabob demons—all of which were below level 3. All of which were screaming, growling, moaning, crying, or rattling the bars. A couple Jabob and ghoul corpses were already piled at the foot of the altar, covered in blood and missing pieces of their bodies at random that mixed with the human corpses.