From Slave to King: My Rebate System Built Me a Kingdom With Beauties!-Chapter 240: Kraghul Rescued Or...!?

The door was exactly as he remembered it, the same iron surface, same faint discoloration along the edges where the runes had been inscribed and then deliberately worn down. Everything in front of him matched. The layout, the smell of the damp stones, the slight downward tilt in the floor before the threshold. He knew this place a little too well, more than he would have preferred as a matter of fact.

The blood-curdling weight he had felt pressing against him deeper in the tunnels was gone. It had lifted somewhere between the last turn and now, and the absence of it loosened something in his chest that he hadn’t realized was coiled tight. He stood for a moment and breathed it out, telling himself it had been nothing. Paranoia, his senses running ahead of reality the way they sometimes did in unfamiliar territory.

He had access to magic now, yes, but it was nothing like his physical strength, it was not something he could point and use like a weapon. If something had been in those tunnels, something he couldn’t fight and couldn’t outrun, there was no version of this that ended well. So it had to have been nothing.

He mostly believed that.

"Kraghul is behind that door," he said.

The three sisters shifted behind him. He felt it before he heard it, the subtle change in their breathing, the weight of three minds moving through the same calculation at the same time. He read it clearly without trying. "If he is not there. If this is wrong. If this goblin brought us here for another reason entirely. WE WILL KILL HIM!"

The conclusion was the same in all three of them.

He took a step back and kept his face neutral. "Open it."

He had expected Thulga to test the handle first. To check for traps, assess the frame, do something methodical. Instead she stepped forward, drew her arm back, and put her fist through the door.

The iron didn’t bend. It shattered, pieces of it spinning off into the chamber beyond with a crash that rang through the entire tunnel like a bell struck too hard. Byung kissed his teeth in utter irritation.

"Did it have to be that loud?" he said under his breath.

Nobody answered. They were already moving through the gap.

The chamber was exactly as he had seen it before, stone tables, damp walls, the low ceiling pressing down. And Kraghul, suspended in the centre of it, held up by chains that had been replaced since his last time here. New iron, thick and clean, driven through his limbs at the forearms and shins. His head hung forward. His chest moved, barely.

All three sisters stopped.

Roktha made a sound that she immediately suppressed. Mazga didn’t make any sound at all, which was somehow worse, Thulga crossed the chamber in four strides and got her hands on the chains.

"Get him down," Byung said. "Now. We don’t have time—"

"How did you know?" Roktha said. She wasn’t looking at Kraghul. She was looking at Byung, and the casualness was completely gone from her voice. "How did you know where he was. How did you know what state he was in."

Byung read the rest of it without needing to try. It sat plainly in her mind, same as it had in the tunnel.

"Not now," he said.

"That’s not—"

"Not now." He held her gaze. "Get him down and get him out. Everything else can wait until we are outside."

Roktha looked at her sisters. Something passed between the three of them without words. Then Thulga worked the chains loose from the wall with her bare hands, iron groaning and giving way, and Mazga caught Kraghul’s weight before he could drop.

The sound that came out of him when the chains pulled free was low and involuntary, pain surfacing through unconsciousness, the body registering what the mind couldn’t. His eyes opened to a thin crack.

He looked at Mazga first. Then his gaze moved, slow and unfocused, and found Byung standing in the gap where the door had been.

"Y-You came back," Kraghul muttered.

Then his eyes closed again, his full weight settling into his sister’s arms.

The three sisters stood with that for exactly one second. Whatever suspicion had been building toward Byung shifted, not gone, but complicated now, pushed aside by something more important.

Because the Kraghul they knew wouldn’t say those words to someone he perceived to be an enemy.

"Let’s move," Thulga said.

Byung turned back toward the tunnel but stopped shortly after.

The path was wrong.

He stood at the threshold and stared at what should have been the route they came in on. The angle was different. The downward slope that had been on his left coming in was now straight ahead. The rough patch on the right wall where Mazga had dragged her knuckle passing through, gone. He turned his head slowly, checking the adjoining passages, running every detail against what he had memorized on the way in.

None of it matched.

He stood completely still.

"Why aren’t we moving?" Mazga asked from behind him, Kraghul’s weight across her shoulders. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Byung said nothing for a moment. He studied the three openings ahead of him. Identical in width. Identical ceiling height. The air moving through each of them in the same direction.

"The path changed," he said.

Silence behind him as the orcs had no idea what he was talking about in that moment as they didn’t have clear visuals of what was ahead of them.

"What do you mean the path changed," Thulga said slowly.

"I mean it’s different from when we came in." He kept his voice flat. "The layout has shifted."

Another silence, longer this time.

"Tunnels don’t shift," Roktha said.

"No," Byung agreed. "They don’t."

He stared at the three openings and thought about the weight he had felt pressing against him on the way in, the thing that had no scent, no name, no shape he could put to it. The thing he had decided was nothing.

He reconsidered that assessment now because something told him he had walked right into a trap.