Chapter 295: The Beating of His Hideous Heart

Chapter 295: The Beating of His Hideous Heart

While most souls were gathered around the city’s center, where the habitable shelter and free services were clustered, there were still some people out and about in the city. I startled one group of fellows who were engaged in the time-honored tradition of scavenging and looting as I sprinted past. They did their best not to look guilty or suspicious, failing quite impressively, but there weren't any rules that barred some profitable recovery efforts. So long as no one else held a claim to the goods, it was finders keeper at the moment. That was something we’d probably need to issue more concrete guidance on soon. I gave them a wave and a nod, leaving them to their business.

Further out were a few people who preferred the peace and quiet of living away from the crowd, lovers looking for some privacy, and some entrepreneurs who were trying to stake a claim on premium real estate while the matter of ownership was nebulous. Nebulous to them, that is. I knew exactly who owned it all, and that was me. We’d need to make an announcement of some kind about that. Housing wouldn’t be in high demand any time soon, so I was happy to give them a lease so long as that property wasn’t essential in some other way. I made a mental note of these addresses and carried on.

I also ran past what I’d identified as a criminal hideout, where the remnants of the city’s underbelly had coalesced. Drugs, gambling, sex work, black market goods, that sort of thing. So far, I hadn’t bothered with it much, outside of ensuring that no violence was happening and that none of the ladies (or fellows) of the night were being forced into their situation. As it turned out, prostitution wasn’t even illegal in the empire; it was just heavily frowned upon. This led those who wished to engage in the practice to do so in more secluded establishments, such as the one here.

I wasn’t a Littan authority figure, and this legally questionable environment was a self-solving problem. The people in charge, their customers, and most of their employees were Littan citizens, all of whom had been forced to return to Litta over the last few months. However, it seemed they could only smuggle so much of their illicit property along with them, leaving a healthy stash behind. Two of the recently freed slaves were going through the wares, although these people would not have gotten the memo that they were freed as of yet.

I’d gotten pretty good at expanding my vision to include any part of the Closet, even without Grotto’s little obelisk, so I did a little spying and listened to the chatter between the pair. After a minute or two, my suspicion was that they were being coerced into keeping the stuff secure until the owners could find a way to get it back out of the city. Depending on the method of coercion, that may not have been a problem anymore now that these two were no longer considered property. If there were other threats being made, then we’d find a way to deal with them.

While I now had clear authority over this area and the people in it, I had no desire to roleplay a cop. I wasn’t even sure if I cared to confiscate this stuff or just declare it the property of these two unwilling henchmen. Closetland’s criminal code was underdeveloped, so technically, a lot of the things inside the stash house weren't illegal yet. They might never be, depending on how libertarian we were feeling. I marked it as a potential hot spot and carried on.

In the northern quarter of the city, about halfway to the city walls, I caught a glimpse of something bizarre with Soul-Sight. My head reflexively snapped in the direction of the oddity as I came to a full stop and automatically took a defensive stance. I only realized I’d pulled out my hammer and shield once I was stalking down an alleyway in between half-demolished buildings.

Most souls appeared like a liquid halo surrounding a person’s form, and while I could get a sense for someone’s emotions at a glance, only the most powerful souls imparted any tangible sensation when viewed, unless I was looking very closely. This entity was a diffuse, twisting cloud below the ground; the soul–if that’s even what it was–taking on a form I’d never seen before. It evoked an unsettling chill when I touched it with Soul-Sight, and the sensation only grew more disturbing as I focused in on it and drew closer.

At the end of the alley was a crossroad where another alley intersected it. The backs of four separate buildings were visible here, although the space was rather ordinary. Krimsim loved its alleyways in the more densely built regions. As for what was below this crossroad, I had no idea, and the more I looked down, penetrating through the ground to the weird soul cloud, the stranger it seemed.

“Grotto, do you know what’s directly below me?”

[Is this a serious inquiry or the opening to an ill-considered joke of some kind?]

“Serious,” I thought to him. There was a moment of consideration from my bonded familiar.

[It is moderately unsettling that you did not needlessly embellish your response. One moment.] I felt the Core’s presence grow in my mind as he took over for whatever subroutine was tracking me, taking a personal look at my location. Grotto was tracking everyone inside the Closet, but could only pay attention to so much at once with his primary processor, or so he’d told me.

[There is nothing of any importance.]

“Could you be more specific?”

[The top two inches are hardwood over a six-inch concrete base. After that, there are eleven feet of treated soil before the mesh layer, which includes roughly three feet worth of waste rock supported by four interposing brass webs. That sits upon another concrete layer, below which are two collapsed pipes, one for water drainage and another for raw sewage. Both are full, neither is functional.]

“Are you seeing that in real time or looking at some kind of schematics?”

[I am cross-referencing data collected by my golems and the planning documents submitted for the various buildings around you.]

“So it’s an educated guess.”

[My golems have mapped out the entirety of the remains of the undercity, so I am confident in the composition of the highest and lowest layers. As for what is in between those, what I’ve outlined is the material present everywhere else I have taken samples. However, it is possible that the Littans were infested by a brain worm when constructing this specific junction and decided to use cotton stuffing to support the roads and buildings instead of their normal substrata.]

“Right, so it’s a highly educated guess. What’s the undercity?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

[Krimsim was constructed on an artificial platform with extensive chambers beneath. They were trapped and regularly patrolled in an effort to mitigate mana monsters invading from below ground. Most of that infrastructure was left behind during teleportation, reducing the majority of it to crawlspaces. Collapse in these areas is responsible for a substantial portion of the city’s structural damage.]

While Grotto and I had our psychic chat, I took a shot at extending my vision below ground towards the soul cloud. It worked about as well as sticking my eyeballs in the dirt, which is to say not well at all. I gave Grotto the rundown on what I’d encountered, and his solution was property damage.

[There is an unknown entity hiding in a disused portion of your city, a city that was recently rescued from a large invasion of hostile creatures. I believe you are justified in obliterating that block to eliminate any potential threat. A ten-second Explosion! charge should suffice.]

“Yeah, I’m not gonna put another hole in the place.”

While Grotto continued to advocate for extreme destruction and overwhelming force, I mana-shaped an Oblivion Orb into a thin rectangular plane. A quick cast carved a slice all the way down to bedrock, with bedrock in this case being the indestructible floor of the Closet. I repeated this move three more times, making sure to keep my cuts on the outside of the majority of the soul cloud. While I doubted that this thing was a friendly face who’d accidentally clipped through the ground, weirder things had happened. I didn’t want to cut somebody in half before figuring out whether they deserved to get dismembered.

Some of the cloud’s tendrils snaked off in thin veins back towards the center of the city, some as small as an individual hair, so while I did my best to give its edges some room, I still ended up giving the thing a light trim in places. By the end, I’d cut out the entire center square of the crossroad. After that, I spread my arms wide and commanded the soil and stone to rise and do my bidding.

I reshaped the floor of the Closet below the crossroad, pushing it upward in a rectangular column and forcing the cut section to slide up out of the ground. The soul cloud rose with it, and by the time the entire cube of dirt was at ground level, there wasn’t much to see that I hadn’t already been expecting.

“I can confirm that there is no cotton stuffing below the roadways here,” I thought to Grotto, as I looked over the cross-section of soil, concrete, rock, and brass, matching what the Core had listed out earlier.

[I will add that data point to my spreadsheets.]

“You have spreadsheets?”

[Of course. I even have one for cataloguing inane questions. Would you like to know how many entries come from you, specifically?]

“No, I’m good.”

[Here is a hint: there are over ten thousand total rows.

While the cube was nothing special at first glance, I quickly tracked down the strands of soul stuff that had been cut, walking around to the south-facing side. There, I found what looked and smelled like thin strings of meat covered in actual shit. I scrunched up my nose and fought against the urge to follow Grotto’s advice to annihilate the thing without further investigation. Instead, I used my vast dimensional powers to store my hammer and shield, then summon a shovel from our dedicated tool shed within the Closet.

I carefully began scraping the dirt away, moving clods of wet soil from around the amorphous, squirming soul, revealing more of the disgusting meat fibers. They grew thicker the closer I got to the center, until I found what I was pretty sure was bone mixed in. The only thing that made me uncertain was that the off-white material had sharp, crystalline growths jutting out of it. As I carefully worked my way around, I even began to find organs.

It felt like I was uncovering some kind of poorly hidden corpse, but souls don’t linger for very long around the dead, and despite the smell, these organs looked fresh. When I found a bulbous mass of muscle beating like a heart, driving the tempo of the soul’s pulse, I halted my work and sent a psychic summons to the rest of the team. I could feel Grotto’s look of morbid fascination through our link as easily as I could feel my gag reflex trying to activate.

Varrin was the first to arrive, taking one look at the half-excavated mass of smelly meat and pulsing organs before drawing his sword. Etja showed up next, carrying Xim on her back. The former immediately took away and covered her mouth and nose, while the latter leaned in until she was inches from the heart-like thing. I got a ping from Nuralie letting me know she was hidden somewhere nearby, along with an offer to let me borrow her HAZMAT suit. Tempting, but I declined. There was no way it would fit me, and if we’re being honest, I’d been splattered with worse.

With the whole crew there to bear witness to the ick, I began pushing more of the dirt away until a mangled face was exposed. It was skinless, with fibrous bone showing through in some places and bulging muscle twisted in distinctly unhealthy ways in others. The meat strings hung off of it in a dozen places with no apparent rhyme or reason, and as we watched, the flesh inched forward to meld with the adjoining mass of tissue. It had eyelids, thank the gods, which were closed, although its lower jaw hung low, exposing a tongue that looked like it was the recent victim of an industrial workplace accident of some kind.

I took a step back and leaned against my shovel, then waved a hand up and down at the ‘person’. “Soooo, what the fuck?”

“I think this man may need some help,” said Etja, her voice muffled. She was still covering half her face with two hands, while she’d pulled out a wand with her third, and mana danced along the fingers of her fourth. The type of help Etja was willing to provide looked like it might be the “put them out of their misery” kind.

“You can tell it’s a man?” I asked. She pointed her wand at the person’s lower half, but I wasn’t sure the thing she was pointing at was the thing she thought it was. Tough to tell, since the person’s whole body looked like it was missing half of everything and growing too much of everything else.

“I could try to heal them,” Xim offered. “But I honestly can’t tell if they need to be healed.”

I raised an eyebrow in her direction. “This looks like someone at the peak of health to you?”

Xim walked around the person, still half-buried in the cube of dirt, wood, and concrete, looking them up and down with a critical eye. “I don’t think they’re injured,” she said. “But they’re obviously not… whole.”

“This creature is profane to the Eschenden,” Nuralie thought to us. “My evil sense is giving confusing signals.”

“Is this a Shog situation?” I thought back. “It’s on the evil spectrum, but not evil in the classical sense?”

“I think you are misremembering my opinion on Shog.” Pause. “But yes.”

Etja moved her wand away from the person’s nethers and urgently pointed it at the ground beside the cube instead. She didn’t say anything, but the noise she made expressed her discomfort and alarm well enough. I looked to where she was pointing to find several more of the meat strands burrowing up out of the ground and squirming their way toward our new friend with each beat of the bloated heart. These were the source of the thin strands of soul I’d cut with my Orb, looking to reconnect with their host. Knowing what the soul presence represented, I grew uneasy with how far they seemed to travel back towards the town square.

Xim gently pushed the tendrils away from the cube with her boot, halting their progress.

A wet cough came from the excavated creature, and its eyes opened wide. They blinked a few times as they took in the four of us who were visible and took a deep breath. I could see parts of their diaphragm move from behind their latticework ribcage.

“Hello,” they said in a rasping, masculine voice. Apparently, the thing Etja had pointed out was, in fact, the thing that she thought it was. Either that, or there were some strange anatomical coincidences going on here.

When the man spoke, a single beat of his heart hit more fiercely, and his soul vibrated and condensed as a subtle power radiated through it. When that happened, I noticed more tiny strands of his soul that I hadn’t seen before, ones that were so fine they’d completely escaped my Sight. Fortunately, I was staring at this thing’s spiritual essence with as much focus as possible without going on a deep dive, which was something I was hesitant to do given the feeling I got from the exposure I already had. That smidgen of power was just enough to draw my attention to those tiny threads, which travelled through the air rather than the ground.

Like strands of a spider’s web that caught the light just so, four of these threads extended out from the entombed man and connected, one a piece, to each of my party members.