Outworld Liberators

Before the Flesh Titans ever charged the walls, the first true discovery belonged to the party sent down the abyss at the center of the city.

They descended through the sloping corridors toward the third stage, the ghost-green fog thickening with every step.

It clung to the stone, swallowed distance, and turned even the nearest shapes into blurred suggestions.

The first team of twenty five kept one hand to the corridor walls as they moved, sweeping the surface with spiritual sense, searching for any hidden seam, trap, or change in the stone.

Then the passage changed beneath their fingers.

"Hey, look at this. The terrain changed."

It had. The old cobblestone gave way to something rougher, coarser, more natural. The worked walls of the corridor became grainy stone.

"I confirm."

"Same here."

"I think this is a cave."

That was enough to tighten every throat in the group. Their rearmost pair were messengers, placed there for that very reason.

"Send word to the second party behind us," the leader ordered. "Tell them the corridor opens into a cave."

Romir had been chosen to lead the team because he was thorough, because he missed little, and because he knew when fear was worth obeying.

Before moving on, he tethered a steel rope to a jut of stone, then secured the line through the two men who remained behind in the cobbled corridor rather than advancing into the cave.

The rope had been forged above by the blacksmiths on the spot. It was no common mortal thing, but cultivator-made steel, many times tougher than any rope a village could hope to weave.

With qi gathered in his legs, Romir rushed ahead.

He swept through fifty meters of fog while his spiritual sense spread around him in a tight three-meter sphere, scraping at the limits of the cave with all the caution of a man expecting teeth in the walls.

When he returned, he told them what he had found. It was a large cave opening. So they pressed on.

Soon they had covered half a kilometer within the descending abyss, moving in a slow, careful line. Then, from somewhere ahead, they heard it.

A small laugh.

"You heard that?" one cultivator whispered.

"Yeah. Might just be water."

"Fools," Romir barked. "Stay alert. We are not here to get eliminated."

The rebuke steadied their hands, but not their nerves. Romir's skin had already begun to crawl. The sound had been too slight, too soft, yet it left his hair standing on end.

Worse, the unease did not pass. It only deepened, as though something down there had noticed them and was pleased by what it saw.

"Everyone," Romir shouted. "Tight circle formation. Shoulder to shoulder. Flare your spiritual sense to the limit. Tie the steel rope around your waists."

They obeyed at once.

The line collapsed inward until they stood packed together, each man bound to the next, each shoulder brushing another's sleeve. Qi flared around them in a trembling ring of awareness.

Then the city shuddered, and their cultivated bodies felt the impact before the sound fully reached them. At once, their vigilance sharpened. A moment later, a shout came down from the teams above.

"Eight Direction Walls are under attack."

The words rang through the air with practiced force. Clearly, this had been arranged beforehand, a way to pass news quickly without letting fear take hold.

"You think everyone's fine back at the wall?" one of the men muttered, trying to cut the tension.

"Sounds like they're fighting a big boy out there, eh, eh," another added, aiming for humor and missing it wide.

No one laughed.

Then the sob came.

Soft. Small. Heart-piercing.

"Mommy. I miss my mommy. Please help me find my mommy."

The effect was immediate. Every man in the circle went rigid. The back of their heads prickled so sharply it felt as if something cold had been driven into the skull.

Boots skidded on stone. Hands twitched on the steel rope. More than one cultivator nearly tore the binding loose from his own waist.

Romir did not. He knew that if they ran now, whatever was in the dark would pick them off one by one.

"Qi Barrier," he roared. "Do not worry about the cost. Raise it to the highest."

All twenty five moved as one as best they could, boots dragging in careful measure, shoulders pressed close, steel rope taut at their waists. No one wanted to be the first to break formation.

The voice came nearer all the same.

"Brother, have you seen my mommy?"

This time it sounded as though it stood right behind them.

The cultivators jolted. One nearly turned. Another sucked in a sharp breath as if the thing had breathed against his neck.

"Do not let it get to you," Romir roared. "It is an illusion skill, or a fake meant to shake us. If it could swallow us whole, why would it hide behind tricks? Use your heads."

That did more than soothe them. It gave them something to hold. Fear without shape was poison. Fear with a name could at least be fought.

The formation tightened. Arms hooked harder around one another. Spiritual senses flared until the pressure of them made some noses bleed. Step by step, they retreated, slow and unwilling to turn their backs fully on the cave behind them.

As soon as their boots found the old cobblestones again, the crying began to fade.

"Please..."

The last word lingered thinly in the green fog, then vanished.

No one spoke for a moment.

Romir bent and seized the steel rope they had left anchored ahead. He began to pull it back hand over hand, testing whether the line still reached into the cave.

Three meters came easily. Then the rope ended.

Not frayed. Not torn. Cut.

Romir stared at the clean end in his hand, and all warmth fled his fingers.

"Everyone," he said, his voice lower now, stripped of any pretense. "We need a new plan."

No one argued. They pulled out soon after, the whole probing force abandoning the descent for the time being.

Whatever waited below was not something they could brute-force with courage and a length of steel. Not like this. Not blind.

By the time they returned above and gave their report, Oswin was already there waiting for them. He listened without interruption. The more he heard, the grimmer his face became.

When the telling was done, a young woman among Romir's group spoke up. She was still shaking. Her eyes trembled worse than her hands.

"Are we too weak to advance to the third stage?" she asked. "Maybe this was a mistake. Is this Secret Realm really meant for Cornerstone Setting Stage after all?"

The mood might have turned then and there, fear looking for an easier target than the thing in the abyss.

Oswin raised one hand. The noise thinned, though not at once.

Then he stepped to the trembling cultivator and set a hand on her shoulder, not gently, not theatrically, but with the plain steadiness of a man reminding the crowd that she stood among them.

"Fellow cultivators," Oswin said. "Is this how we begin to break apart?"

The muttering shrank.

"Our masters taught us many things. One of them was not to look down on ourselves. I do not need any of you to calm down. I need you to think."

His gaze moved across them, hard and unsparing.

"What is the problem here? Is it her fear. Or is it the abyss. Why, all of a sudden, are some of you more eager to fight a woman than face the thing below?"

That struck where shouting could not. The crowd went still.

Fresh words, perhaps. Blunt words, certainly. Yet they carried the right weight. One by one, the cultivators lowered their eyes or looked back toward the dark and foggy descent.

Their anger, having lost its easy target, was forced at last to turn toward the real one.

"I do have a plan," Oswin said. He let his gaze pass over every man and woman gathered there. "But it will demand patience. Are you all willing to listen?"

Those assigned to the abyss expedition were not the strongest among them. Most were not even true combat specialists.

They came from institutes not yet worthy of being called sects, and from small sects so newly named that their ink had barely dried.

Oswin had not grouped them there out of mockery. These people had value. They were crafters, builders, refiners, the sort who knew how to wrest resources from stubborn ground and turn raw material into use.

He had sent them into the pit only to confirm what he already suspected. The abyss could not be explored by ordinary force of arms.

"We will make our own corridor," Oswin said.

That drew their full attention.

"This place stretches for miles. If the abyss will not give us a safe path to the third stage, then we will build one ourselves."

It was an idea born from hundreds of deductions. The exposed soil of the abyss was hard as steel, too dense to dig through by ordinary means.

But the earth beneath the houses and towers of the city was different. Softer. Workable. So the labor began at once.

Men and women spread through the ruined streets and started tearing into the ground around the houses. Nothing useful was wasted. Wood from roofs and walls was cut down and shaped into thick cylinders as broad as an arm.

Those skilled in wood and nature arts reinforced them until they were nearly as sound as steel.

Those versed in earth and metal shaped narrow chambers from compacted soil and forged support, each one no more than three meters long and a single meter wide.

That was the plan.

If the fog wanted to blind them, and whatever lived below wanted to turn the descent into a haunted crawl, then they would answer with craft instead of bravado.

They would roll their own armored corridor into the green dark, inch by inch, forcing a safe road where none had been given.

Even so, the foremost structure was larger than the rest. It was a circular chamber with a five-meter radius, built to house the spirit gathering array. Oswin sat within it alone, ready to mark the way down.

"I'll mark the path for everyone," Oswin said.