"This is the Graveyard of Ancient Heroes. The Imperial heroes who died centuries and millennia ago all rest here." The little girl's voice drifted out of the darkness. "Once the catacombs were filled, this cemetery fell out of use. Now this holy place is tended by our Firelinkers' sect, and serves as our sanctuary."
I felt, hair-raisingly, that the voice circled me like a ghost.
"A cemetery naturally has only one gate… Come with me, Unkindled."
So I followed, groping like a blind man, guided only by that pat-pat sound of bare feet slapping metal flooring ahead of me.
The moment I heard these true, genuine catacomb-dwellers were some kind of weird sect, my heart climbed straight into my throat. After all, there was still a whole crowd of Ecclesiarchy lunatics upstairs scrambling to butcher me…
So I made up my mind to speak as little as possible. The more you talk, the more you slip.
But the girl guiding me opened her mouth first.
"You're really strange. Your voice, your scent, your warmth, your structure… Everything says you're alive, and pure besides, but…"
I couldn't help the inner snark: Of course I'm human. A plain, honest, law-abiding human. If you want to say I don't have some 'fire,' that's the part that's strange.
"…Why is there no flame on you? We can't see you at all…"
My expression immediately went flat. In a place where you can't see your hand in front of your face, I can't see you either, all right? That said—how exactly were these people moving around so freely in this darkness?
"That's why you wandered around in our sanctuary for so long after you broke in. You went really deep before we noticed… When we go back, we'll probably get punished again…" The little girl was clearly a chatterbox, muttering nonstop. "How can someone with no fire even live… Unless your fire is somewhere else? Or your fire is beyond what we can see…?"
"...Yuriar!" A harsh reprimand suddenly cracked down from the darkness above, startling me. The little girl's voice instantly shut off, as if her throat had been sealed.
And so, in the heavy, oppressive silence of the dark, I followed those footsteps for another stretch.
Then I suddenly felt a continuous vibration under my feet. Somewhere far ahead came the dull, rumbling throb of machinery turning. And then—
That familiar sound. The one that triggers my PTSD.
Heavy metal footsteps.
And lots of them.
All the mothers in the world—those murder-gods from the church above had found this place, opened the cemetery gate, and entered to search!
I reflexively spun around to run, but in pitch-black darkness, where the hell could I even run?
Almost despairing, I begged those so-called "Firelinkers" in the dark: Could they get me out another way? I couldn't be found by the pursuers. I would die.
"…So that's how it is," an old voice echoed calmly in the darkness. "They believe you are blasphemy against the Undying God-Emperor and their faith… Absurd. You have no relation to the Undying God-Emperor whatsoever. In my view, the latter is the greater reason."
"They have crossed the line." The hard female voice came with a mess of heavy footsteps, impacts, and metal scraping—anger very clear in her tone. "To charge into the sanctuary and crash about like this is a violation of the accord!"
"They truly are in a hurry…" The old voice remained unhurried, even as I was burning with panic. And then she finally said what I'd been desperate to hear. "But the Unkindled does not belong to the Undying God-Emperor. He should not, and will not, die here… No. His life and death are not ours to decide…"
"Yuriar, take him out by the Ember Stairway."
A warm little hand suddenly seized my fingers.
My hand was already slick and sticky with blood from the cut on my wrist, but I could still tell that hand was about the size of a young girl's—only enough to wrap around four of my fingers. Yet the skin on her palm felt rougher than mine.
"Move, this way!" This time the girl's voice came from very close in front of me, and she started pulling me into a run.
So I was dragged along in a stumbling jog.
There was no choice. I couldn't see the path ahead at all. In fact, I couldn't even see the person holding my hand.
I felt the ground's material change again and again beneath my feet. We seemed to pass through rooms, cross suspended walkways, even squeeze through pipes or conduits… A few times I missed a step on stairways and nearly plunged, but I'd kept my body tense and my mind alert, and managed to catch myself on the next tread instead of making a spectacular fool of myself by tumbling.
And then—light.
Light.
It was dim and yellowed, but it was real, long-lost brightness.
Still being pulled along, I made a sharp turn into a low iron door, and my view opened up all at once.
It was a vast space shrouded in smoke and steam—like the atrium of a gigantic shopping mall, or a colossal rocket assembly bay… In any case, ahead and to both sides I could only barely make out distant, complex structures: high walls that looked part building, part city block, part bulkhead.
Above, mechanical structures stood in clusters like stalactites, along with metal forms so strange they were hard to describe. Below was a deep, enormous, moving, thriving sinkhole of a world. Through the smoke and steam, I could see countless buildings, rails, and lights packed together in layers.
A tremendous roar came from the left. I twisted my head—
And saw a long iron dragon, belching clouds and steam, erupting from the lights and fog below. It climbed straight up along the wall of this enormous space, sparks flying like lightning—
Like an absurdly oversized metal sightseeing lift, long and segmented, or simply a train crawling vertically up a wall—
Then it plunged into a massive gate in the roof. The thunder of it went on for a long time before the "tail" finally vanished completely.
I stared, stunned, at the underground city…
No. Wait. That wasn't right.
I remembered the cathedral where I first landed was at least two to three thousand meters up in Spirepeak City. Even after dropping for so long, I should still be one or two thousand meters above the ground. Which meant everything below wasn't an underground city at all—
It was the base section of Spirepeak City's gigantic tower.
"We all use this place—the Ember Stairway—to travel between the lower city and the sanctuary." While I was still dazed by the sight, the girl spoke from behind me. In the open, noisy space, her voice sounded thin and small. "Go down from here."
"Farewell, Unkindled. May we never meet again."
I whipped around, but I only caught a glimpse of a tiny back disappearing swiftly into the darkness beyond the iron door. I only had time to see that she was thin and small, wearing incomplete tight black clothing with patches of pale yellow—perhaps white.
She looked less like a person and more like a greyhound standing upright.
I lowered my gaze—
And very nearly got taken out on the spot by my acrophobia.
I felt like I was standing on top of a dam—like the crest of a hydroelectric barrier. In reality, it was just a reinforcing beam jutting out from one wall of the enormous space.
That "iron door" behind me was nothing more than a missing square panel in the metal wall.
As for below…
There was a whole row of pipes—maybe a dozen or more—each as thick as a man's torso. Like heat-exchange tubes on a massive radiator, they extended neatly from beneath the beam and vanished into the abyss, dozens or even hundreds of meters down. Smoke and steam made the bottom impossible to see.
It wasn't a vertical drop. By my guess, the slope was fifty or sixty degrees. They called this a "stairway," right?
I mean, in theory, some martial-arts grandmaster could climb this.
But it was so hard-core that my first instinct was to sit down, plant my backside, and bicycle-kick my way back into the safe darkness of the catacombs.
Then the heavy, life-ending footsteps came again from the darkness behind me—closer, closer—shattering my fantasy without mercy.
The pursuers were clearly many, and they had spread out to search the entire cemetery quickly and methodically. It was only a matter of time before they found this place, and then the "inevitable ending" the Firelinkers had spoken of would arrive.
I stared into the smoke-choked abyss, thinking of what they'd said—my life and death were not theirs to decide.
If I jumped and slid down the pipes, I might die. I might land safely.
Fine. Then it came down to my own luck, didn't it? Maybe flexibility and reaction speed, too.
Should I pray to that "God-Emperor" everyone here kept invoking?
…No. Specialties are specialties.
"Jackie Chan, bless me!"
I bellowed with all the heroic righteousness I could muster, and then I jumped.
(End of Chapter)
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