Chapter 450 - Somewhere New

All that Simon could say was that wherever they were, it wasn’t Castle Gravenstone. The stones were a different shade of gray, they lacked the scratches that he’d grown used to, and the air smelled distinctly different. Gravenstone had smelled like old death that had turned to dust, but this new tunnel had just enough dampness that the death here was still fresh, and he could taste the hint of copper on his tongue.

Despite that, he felt certain that the place they stood was at least built by the hands of man, but that was it. Well, something like man, at least, he reminded himself as the spider-filled ruins flashed across his mind. He certainly hoped he wasn’t in a place like that again. He’d never managed to find his way out, and right now, finding a path to safety for Millie was paramount.

“Stay behind me,” he whispered, “and cover your lamp as much as possible. There could be trouble ahead.”

“Trouble?” she whimpered. “Let’s go back…upstairs, we’ll have the light of the moon and—”

Simon had planned to cut her off with another rebuke, but the sound of his sword sliding out of his sheath was enough to silence her. “There is no way back,” he whispered to her as he started walking down the dark hallway. “I wish there was, but… Well, I’ll explain it to you later.”

Millie said nothing after that. She walked behind him like a ghost, with only the thin beams of light created by her lantern to assure him that she was still there. That was good, because in all likelihood, they were one shouted alarm from an ugly death.

The screaming reoccurred every minute or so, but as they got closer to the source, there were words mixed in as well. He couldn’t hear them well enough to be certain of what was being said, but the tone made it clear they were demands. It became clear to Simon before he even reached the door that he was listening to someone being tortured.

“Wait here,” he whispered to Millie. “And scream if you see anyone coming.”

That last bit made her pale, but she nodded spasmodically as Simon opened the door as slowly and smoothly as he dared.Aufvarum Uuvellum would be a good spell to use here to dampen the screech of these hinges, Simon realized. It would have prevented him from hearing anything in the hallway, but he still might have considered it if he’d known the gestures for both words. He certainly wasn’t speaking any words of power just yet.

Though if it comes to losing my sight or getting that poor girl killed… Well, that wasn’t a choice at all. He’d fill the corridor with an inferno before he’d get someone killed when it was his fault she was here in the first place.

Where that place was became somewhat clearer when he opened the door enough to slip inside, and was slapped in the face with the scents and sounds of suffering. Such were the horrors that his sight wavered for a moment as he took it all in.

He’d expected a torture chamber, and that’s exactly what he found. There was nothing magical about it, and the only inhumans involved were the men inflicting the torments, but still, that was enough. Simon had long become inured to evil, but this was as bad as any goblin lair he’d ever entered.

The small stone room was lit by several torches, and besides Simon, it contained three men, two corpses, and one man who was halfway in between. I’m undoubtedly here to save him, Simon realized as he looked at the poor bastard. Saving him was a tall order, though, and he didn’t see how this level was even possible without healing magic.

“Not a lot of time left for you, I’m afraid,” the torturer said with a chuckle. “But you tell us where your friends are hiding, and there’s still enough time for a clean death, eh?”

The torturer who gloated was an ugly man, but not as ugly as the things he’d done to his victim. That man was young, with dark, shaggy hair. He’d been stripped to the waist, which showed off a series of nasty burns, and his nail-less fingertips were bleeding, but all of those horrors paled in comparison to the fact that he’d been partially disemboweled.

As Simon tried to study the wound to see if it was even healable, the first guard began to turn, so Simon stepped forward, putting his hips into a grand slam two-handed strike at the man’s throat. His gorget robbed the attack of much of its force, and Simon’s blow stuck deep into his trachea instead of beheading him, but that was enough. He released the sword and moved toward the second guard, who was looking at his dying partner as he collapsed to the ground instead of looking at the man who had killed him.

That instinct served him poorly, because by the time he looked up at Simon and reached for the hilt of his weapon, Simon already had his hands on the guard's helmet, and used its rim as a lever to break the man’s neck. He had just enough time to release his weapon and reach for his leather chin strap, but not enough time to pull it free before there was a violent crack, and he fell limply to the ground.

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The torturer chose that moment to step back and lift up his hands. “Easy!” he shouted. “I ain’t armed, and don’t want no trouble. If you want this’en you can have him.”

“I want to know what information you were trying to get out of him,” Simon countered, relying on his glare and his size as his only weapons.

It worked, too. The torturer had a small curved blade in his trembling hand, but didn’t brandish it. Instead, he said, “We was trying to get information out of him on where the rebels were hiding, right? Pain in the asses that they are, every time the guards kill one, two more rise up to take their place.”

“Maybe you should stop doing things that inspire rebellion,” Simon answered, before following that up with a barrage of questions about where they were.

Most of it confused the man. “Brin? Muran? Never heard of 'em,” the man grumbled. “Montain, though, pain in the asses that they are, we share a border with them at least.”

“Pain in the asses?” Simon asked. “Are they responsible for the rebellion then?”

“If you want to find out the answer to that, you gots to let me finish,” the torturer complained. “No one can say for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if those two bastards had teamed up to rat-fuck Versia into the ground. We won’t let 'em, though. We’ll—”

The torturer turned back to his charge, and Simon picked up the nearest heavy object, which turned out to be a red-hot poker, and brained him. As much as he would have loved to spend the next few hours learning the what, where, and when of this level, the man’s victim was obviously on death’s door, and there was no telling how much time he had until Millie shouted an alarm.

I wish I knew what he was rebelling against, or fighting for, Simon thought with a shake of his head as he moved to examine his patient.

At one point, he solved levels just because they were there. Now, while he wanted to save this man, he also wanted to understand what the consequences would be. Hell, he wanted to know where Versia was precisely, but that would have to come later. Any delays now, and this man was going to bleed out.

“First we save him, then we escape, and then I get my answers,” Simon told himself as he reached for his healing wand and realized he’d left that in the last level along with everything else.

Well, hopefully no one finds that lightning wand and gets up to no good, he thought as he decided on a different plan.

“Just let me die…” the man groaned as Simon pushed the man’s intestines back into his abdominal cavity and wiped away the blood on his chest above that gory mess. “I… I won’t tell you any more than I told him…”

“You probably will, but not like this,” Simon muttered. While he did want to know what was going on, at this moment, he was more concerned with keeping this man breathing. So, he dipped a finger in the man’s own blood and started to carefully trace a number of runes.

GervuulVrazig Hyakk Delzam was a complicated symbol when traced together. It looked rather like a spiraling, lopsided flower, but Simon wanted power and speed, so instead of just marking the man with greater healing and hoping for the best, he chose to use the greater word of instant flesh repair. Given how badly he was maimed, repair seemed to be a keyword here.

Simon had shoved his guts back inside, but without powerful magic, he wouldn’t last the hour without a blood transfusion and a sterile operating theatre, which weren’t something he was likely to see invented here for centuries.

Simon expected this magic to be violent and likely even painful, but he didn’t really have a choice. “You’re going to be okay,” Simon assured his patient as he finished connecting the last spiraling mark to the first to complete the flowing circuit. “But I’m sorry for this.”

“For what—” he gasped.

Those were the last intelligible words out of his mouth. Simon put all thoughts of releasing the man nowout of his mind as the prisoner started to scream and spasm. Instead, he covered his mouth with the rag and watched the transformation.

Simon rarely used big words when small words along with time would do, and as he watched the prisoner's aura flare violently while his flesh began to twist and move, he decided that was probably the correct answer. All that Simon’s magic had done was inflict the torturer’s many torments on his prisoner in reverse.

Instead of inflicting all that pain on him over hours or days, though, it happened in seconds. The burns were the first things to fade, and probably the gentlest. After that, the fingernails that had been ripped out started to regrow, and the major cuts began to grow shut.

Viscerally, it was a shocking scene, but it was even more so in the man’s aura. It was fairly bright, but the fireworks display that was exploding through it was brighter, and when it was over, and the tortured victim was whole once more, his aura was dimmer than before. Not because it had been darkened, but because it was exhausted.

Indeed, the man had passed out from the pain, and Simon saw no need to wake him yet. Rather than do that, he used the torturer’s key to undo his manacles, and then he went back out into the hallway to check on Millie, and in doing so, obviously scared her half to death. She very nearly dropped her lantern as she squeaked.

“Any signs of trouble?” he asked her. “Patrols? Alarms?”

“N-no, nothing like that,” she stammered. “What’s going on in t-there?”

“I wish you never had to find out,” Simon told her. He meant it, too. Unfortunately, she needed to come in here if his plan had any hope of succeeding. “But that’s going to have to… Just steel yourself. We need to get dressed, and you’re not going to like it.”