Corps lay scattered across the ground at irregular intervals, some slumped against the walls like broken puppets, others heaped in grotesque piles, as if something had gathered the remains out of habit… or pleasure.
It was rare, in fact, to find a whole one.
Most were torn apart, slashed open, dismembered. Some were nothing more than torsos without legs, or skulls without jaws, frozen in silent grimaces of agony.
Gaël swallowed hard.
It wasn't the first time he had seen death, or even devastation, but this scene carried a different signature. A cold dread, something older, like whatever had done this had played with these lives before erasing them.
"These weren't ordinary adventurers…" Rai murmured, his low voice nearly lost in the muffled echoes of the tunnels.
He had crouched beside a particularly mangled corpse, and with expert fingers, peeled back the charred rags of a decomposing uniform. Beneath it, he revealed a metal plate bearing the faint remnants of a glowing inscription, Lutech glyphs, barely visible, but unmistakable.
"Lutech…" Brann echoed, leaning in beside him.
"Engineers. Direct agents of the Archon. Probably sent to study the rift, or secure a passage. This wasn't the Order's expedition. Our intel wasn't entirely accurate. The Archon wanted to go down too… and gave up."
He swept the surroundings with a cold glance, silently gauging the scale of the massacre.
"They were well-equipped… and it didn't help them at all."
"Take a look at this," Kaien called out. His voice echoed oddly, slipping along the stone and returning to them warped.
He was pointing to a wall a little farther down, where the torchlight revealed something more than just bare rock.
Everyone turned, and the silence thickened even more.
The stone in that spot was slashed, not by tools, nor by the slow erosion of time, but by claws.
Long gashes, sharp, almost precise, sliced through the rock as if it had been carved by a living blade moving at inhuman speed. The cuts crisscrossed, overlapped, forming a chaotic pattern of violence etched into the stone.
Gaël stepped forward, slowly, reached out with care, and brushed his fingertips along one of the mineral scars.
A shiver raced down his spine.
The rock wasn't cold. It was frozen.
Frozen solid, as if something older than warmth itself had left its mark there.
Rai narrowed his eyes, studying the claw marks.
"Could this be from the Hollowborn-beast we just encountered?"
Brann slowly shook his head, his voice sharp as steel.
"No. This looks like something bigger. Much bigger. This rock is especially dense."
Kaien forced a grin, too quickly.
"Oh... but nothing you can't slice through, right? Reassure me?"
Brann didn't answer.
"Shall we keep going?" Maera offered, her tone a touch drier than usual.
"Stay sharp. It's not over." Brann replied calmly, but firmly, before setting off again.
They moved forward, this time in a silence heavier than death. Even Nono didn't dare make a sound from the folds of his bag.
The tunnel narrowed, forcing them into single file, one after another, as if the Umbra itself were slowly tightening its jaws around them.
The bluish light of their torches cast shifting shadows, and each step sounded more muffled than the last, as if the darkness was learning how to follow them.
Then, around the bend of a corridor barely wider than a man's breath… They stumbled upon something even stranger.
A staircase. Massive, majestic, silent.
A stone stairway plunged into the depths like a giant's tongue, carved with an almost inhuman precision. Each step was etched with cryptic symbols engraved directly into the rock. These glyphs pulsed faintly with a bluish glow, flickering at irregular intervals, as if they were breathing, or remembering.
Gaël felt his heart quicken.
This wasn't human.
It was too straight, too pure, too ancient. There was a rigor in those lines that knew neither fatigue nor flaw.
"Who built this…?" he whispered, unable to hide the tension in his voice.
Kaien, just behind him, smiled, a much thinner smile than usual, the irony in it veiled by a new unease.
"That, kid... is exactly what we're about to find out."
Brann, at the front, stopped at the edge of the first step. He slowly lowered his gaze toward the abyss below, where the stairs vanished into a darkness the torches could no longer penetrate.
The air was heavier here, almost tangible, and the silence had become absolute, no longer a mere absence of sound, but a hostile void.
Without a word, Brann raised a hand, and his shadow-cloak dissipated.
The change was immediate.
The constant, suffocating pressure that always accompanied him, his quiet aura of death, receded slightly, as if the room itself had taken its first breath in ages.
But Gaël wasn't fooled. Brann hadn't stopped being a threat, he had simply hidden it.
"The Umbra-devouring seals are still active," Brann declared, his deep voice echoing through the stone like a warning etched in marble.
"Do not use Umbra here. If you do... you won't even have time to regret it."
A shiver crept down Gaël's spine.
Kaien raised an eyebrow, scanned the walls for a moment, then sighed with a hint of irritation. He tapped the pommel of his sabre with his fingers, thoughtful.
"Well… that certainly complicates things."
Rai, still silent, stepped forward. He placed a hand on one of the faintly glowing runes, his gaze tracing the etched lines as if reading a story no one else could see.
"For a Twilightborn, it's restrictive. But not fatal."
His voice, calm as ever, carried easily through the confined space.
"Fenrir, on the other hand, wouldn't make it through without being severely weakened."
He straightened and added:
"Our target might not have come this way. There must be other paths leading to the second level."
Brann gave no reply. He simply placed one foot on the first step.
And one by one, the others followed, descending deeper into the unknown.