Outworld Liberators-Chapter 221: The Face in the Ceiling

"Take the pills first. They should give you a boost," Oswin said.

Fay, Jenkii, and Jackson saw only advantage in swallowing the elixir first.

The change was most obvious in Jenkii and Jackson. Their meridians swelled, then tightened, as though their bodies were breathing from within.

With each pulse, imbalance and impurity were forced out through their pores in streams of turbid qi, a foul gray vapor not unlike smoke.

Fay's result was gentler. Only a faint mist clung to her skin, yet the effect was still there.

Where Jenkii and Jackson gained nearly ten percent, Fay managed barely one.

The difference lay in how Radeon had trained her. He had never allowed his disciples to cultivate wantonly.

Every part of the body was measured with care, each channel tempered in order, so that no small weakness was left behind.

In the lower cultivation worlds, practitioners liked to name crude stages such as right hand qi control and left hand qi control, but to Radeon that was nonsense dressed in fancy words, a flaw mistaken for refinement.

Before long, the three of them had absorbed the last of the medicine's power.

Fay, Oswin, Jenkii, and Jackson approached the great stone door.

Jenkii grinned and stepped forward, eager to test the strength newly settled in her limbs, but Oswin caught her by the forearm before she could lay a hand on it.

"Is there a problem?" Jenkii asked.

"Let me divine it first. Then give me a moment to recover," Oswin said.

"Let him do his job," Jackson said, his gaze fixed on Jenkii.

Jenkii raised both hands in surrender. She had no wish to argue, much less come to blows, with pretty boy Jackson.

This time, Oswin did not dare bluff. He drew out the turtle shell and dropped two transparent marbles into its hollow belly, one red and one green.

Radeon had taught him this as one of the simplest forms of divination, an old method sharpened into something more practical.

A modernized Turtle Shell Divination.

Oswin guided his qi into the ten basic runes carved within, the marks for luck detection and malice detection stirring to life under his touch.

Then he shook the shell. The marbles rattled inside, sharp and dry.

When the sound died, he bent and peered through the opening.

Red.

He shook it again, harder this time. The marbles clashed, spun, and settled.

Still red.

"Best if we open the door from a distance," Oswin said.

"What did you see? How do we proceed?" Jackson asked.

"Danger behind it. I checked twice. It cannot be wrong." Oswin's expression turned stern.

Jenkii swept her gaze across the area until she found the trunk of a dead tree. She flooded her body with qi, bent low, and hauled the timber up with a grunt.

"This should work, right?" she asked, hefting the ten meter log in her arms.

Then she drew a deep breath, set her stance, and hurled it at the stone door with all her might.

The stone door groaned and lurched inward. Then something moved.

A sickly hand shot out from the darkness beyond, each finger as tall as a man. It seized the dead trunk and dragged it into the black in one savage pull.

"Now. Charge in," Oswin roared.

Jenkii moved first. Jackson and Fay followed close behind, keeping near enough to support her if anything lunged from the dark. Oswin came in last, brushing away every sign that they had entered at all.

The door slammed shut behind them. They found themselves in a hall of massive steel slabs, the floor beneath their feet carved with ornate depictions of some ancient age.

Fay snapped her whip out and gauged the corridor with a quick sweep.

"Three by three meters," she said.

Jackson stepped to the wall at once and rapped his knuckles against the metal.

"This looks like an array fortified wall. Breaking through it is out of the question."

Wanting to test for another way out, Jenkii shoved both hands into the narrow gap of the stone door.

Veins bulged along her arms. Qi flared over her skin. She strained until her shoulders trembled, but the door did not move.

Worse still, their vision was smothered to a mere two meters in every direction.

All of them pushed qi into their eyes, yet even that sharpened sight broke uselessly against the black.

Fay, Jackson, and Jenkii turned to Oswin.

"Can we stay here without getting caught off guard by that darkness?" Oswin asked.

His tone was even, but the question was not. He was probing, seeing whether any of them carried a barrier artifact worth trusting.

Jackson did.

The hood his master had given him came off in one smooth motion. He tossed it into the air. It struck the wall and clung there, the cloth spreading with a faint shimmer until it formed a protective barrier behind them.

Fay, Jackson, and Jenkii each took out spirit stones and drew on them to refill their reserves.

While they recovered, Oswin produced ten thin steel sticks, each no longer than a handspan, with one end rounded and the other honed to a sharp point.

He stepped before Fay first. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the sticks spinning toward her face.

Not hard enough to wound, only enough to make her flinch and squeeze her eyes shut.

The sticks clattered down. When Oswin checked their fall, five rounded ends faced her, and five sharp ones.

He repeated the test with Jackson. This time, eight rounded tips pointed his way, and only two sharp ones.

Then came Jenkii.

The sticks fell before her, and every last sharp tip faced in her direction.

Oswin frowned, gathered them up, and tested again.

When the clatter died, nine sharp ends still pointed at her.

"You are a very unlucky person," Oswin said, lifting a finger to Jenkii's nose.

Jenkii blushed at once. She could hardly deny it.

There had never been a stretch of days when some bird did not find a way to foul her clothes.

That alone would have been miserable enough, but her misfortune ran deeper than that.

Once, in Goldkeep Crownmarkets, she had bought a brand new cave abode with nearly all the savings she had. The very next day, before she had even finished preparing it for rent, a sinkhole opened beneath the cave abode and swallowed half of it whole.

Even now, part of her still doubted the fortune she had won back in the Gaming District. It had felt less like victory and more like the world preparing a nastier joke.

"This is good," Oswin said. "If luck turns its face from you so strongly, then you should take the lead. Creatures ahead may fix on you first. You can draw out the innate aggression of living things before it catches the rest of us unready."

Jackson found the diviner a little too eloquent. It took a certain kind of nerve to dress up a simple demand for cannon fodder in words that polished.

Even so, he said nothing. He was no diviner, and he knew he had little right to object.

From his sleeve, Oswin pulled out a coil of rope. The motion was smooth enough to hide where it had truly come from.

"Best we tie ourselves at the waist," he said as he moved to fasten them together one by one.

"Jenkii in front. Jackson second. I go third. Fay takes the rear."

He checked every knot thrice. In a darkness like this, losing sight of one another would be the same as losing them.

"We'll keep it simple," Oswin said. "Jenkii, shout strange if you see something you do not understand. Shout clues if you know enough to tell us what it is."

Then he looked at Fay and Jackson.

"If there is an enemy, Jenkii calls out and we move to support her at once."

Jenkii nodded. The task was simple, and simple work suited her just fine. Fay and Jackson gave their own nods soon after.

"For now, we walk only a shoulder's length apart. Stay close to the wall on one side. Move."

They set off at a brisk pace, careful without being slow, every nerve stretched tight. The corridor swallowed their steps and gave back only a dull, uneasy hush.

Then a groan rolled through the dark. Fay's head turned at once.

"Did you hear that?"

"Aye," Jenkii said, scratching the back of her head. "That was just me."

"Focus," Oswin said. "Keep moving."

So they did.

For ten long minutes, nothing came. No scrape of claw, no breath from the dark, no movement but their own. The silence itself began to feel like a trick, as if the corridor were waiting for them to grow careless.

Then came the sound of chewing.

It was loud enough to freeze the blood. Wet. Heavy. Rhythmic.

Oswin tugged the rope at his waist, and the others stopped at once. From his left hand, he produced a fine mist and sprayed it over his feet first.

Then he gave the same to Fay, Jackson, and Jenkii. The cool film settled over their boots like dew. When he nodded, they moved again, and this time their steps made no sound at all.

The chewing grew louder.

Each step brought it closer, fuller, more obscene, until it seemed less like feeding and more like something trying to grind stone between its teeth.

Then the corridor opened into a great chamber.

Here, at last, the darkness no longer choked their sight.

They could see across the room, and all four of them fixed on the same thing.

A nightmare crouched at the chamber's heart.

It stood nearly five meters tall. It had only one arm, and that enormous hand gripped the dead timber Jenkii had thrown earlier.

The hand was unmistakable, its fingers as tall as a man and too large for the rest of its body.

Its torso split open into a vertical maw lined with jagged teeth, and it fed by worrying the wood between those teeth as if the trunk were meat.

Beneath it stood four long, jointed legs, pallid as corpse flesh, each one tapering into a hooked point like a spear.

For all the world, it looked like some mad union of giant, starved man and spider crab.

Jenkii's grip tightened on her great axe. She raised the blade and pointed.

At once, Fay, Jackson, and Oswin shook their heads frantically.

The creature was feeding, which meant it was hungry, and hungry monsters were the worst kind.

Better to leave it to its meal than give it fresh prey to chase.

So they edged past it, silent as breath, each step measured against disaster.

Their attention stayed on the feeding thing below.

That was why none of them noticed the ceiling change.

Steel panels above them parted in narrow seams. From the opening, features slowly emerged.

Eyes first. Then cheeks. Then a mouth. It was not truly a face, not one any sane man would name, yet that was the shape the metal made, a vast countenance pressed into the ceiling itself.

The whole slab tilted downward, as though it were bending to peer at them.

Then it smiled. Not a trick of light. Not imagination. A smile.

Just as slowly, it returned to stillness and folded back into the ceiling as if it had never moved at all.

Below, the feeding monster gave a violent shudder. It did not roar. It did not turn.

It only trembled around its stolen timber, like a beast that had suddenly realized something worse than itself was waiting above.