Global Survival: I Have Endless Skeletons

Killing the five members of the Slave Trade Guild did not change Thoren’s expression in the slightest as he continued descending deeper into the spiral corridor.

His footsteps stayed steady and his breathing calm.

The gruesome scene behind him had already vanished into the darkness.

This time he didn’t bother withdrawing his undead back into their undead space. The undead Storm Tyrant ahead of him, a massive hammer resting against one shoulder, while Garron carried his enormous butcher knife loosely in hand.

The undead Kaien remained within the darkness itself, appearing for only a fraction of a second before vanishing again, and the two shield soldiers walked right at his front.

Thoren had no intention of letting his guard down.

As the spiral corridor continued downward, one turn after another, the darkness seemed endless.

Finally, a faint light appeared ahead.

His eyes narrowed slightly, and he pressed forward. After walking for a few meters, the corridor opened into a massive underground chamber.

Low-lit fixtures hung from the ceiling, their weak glow barely reaching the far edges of the space.

Thoren stepped inside, his eyes sweeping the enormous space. Metal doors lined the walls, several corridors branching away into darkness, some doors closed, others left slightly open.

And the faint smell of blood hung in the air.

He followed the light, his footsteps echoing in the still atmosphere.

Then he saw it.

A pile of human skeletons heaped in one corner of the chamber, dozens of them, maybe more, some still relatively intact, others broken apart and piled carelessly atop one another.

He paused for a moment and his eyes resting on the bones. Though the sight didn’t surprise him.

After everything he had already seen, a pile of skeletons was hardly unexpected.

The deeper he went, the more rooms he found, most of them laboratories.

Unlike the aged, abandoned look of those in the abyss, these rooms were fitted with cutting-edge equipment.

Large screens covered sections of the walls, metal tables sat beneath bright white lights, and strange machines hummed continuously beside transparent containers of unidentified liquid, cables running from them into instruments displaying constantly shifting data.

Some machines were still running.

Some were stained with blood.

Others held things Thoren couldn’t immediately identify.

He passed one room, then another, then another, room after room making clear that whoever ran this place had poured enormous resources into their research.

What made it disturbing was the purpose behind it.

He stopped beside one open door.

Inside lay a human body, or what remained of one, stitched together from parts belonging to several different beasts.

Thick dark fur covered one side while scales covered the other.

One arm had been replaced with something resembling a beast’s limb, the legs altered into shapes that no longer resembled human legs at all.

The body lay motionless on a metal table, several tubes running into its chest. Thoren stared for a few seconds before moving on.

In another room, things grew worse.

A young man’s chest had been cut open, the ribs spread apart and held with metal instruments and his heart removed entirely.

Implanted instead into the chest of a wolf-like beast lying beneath. The creature’s body twitched occasionally as the heart inside it was still beating.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Thoren watched through the glass, his expression unmoved, his heart steady. He had seen enough death not to be shaken by blood alone.

But this wasn’t simple killing.

These people were deliberately taking living beings apart and rebuilding them into something else.

Human flesh and beast flesh, organs, bones, blood, all of it reduced to nothing more than material for experimentation.

Taking a deep breath, he turned away and kept going deeper.

The laboratories only grew more numerous.

Some rooms held strange plants growing directly out of human bodies. Others held beast organs suspended in glass containers.

The scent of chemicals mixed with blood, decay, and something metallic that clung heavily to the air.

But Thoren had not yet reached the worst of it.

He pressed on and the corridor narrowed around him.

Then he saw the cages.

Iron cages filled an entire section of the chamber. He stopped and his gaze moved slowly across the iron cages.

Children.

The children were somewhere between twelve and fifteen years old. Some sat against the bars, some lay on the cold floor, some simply stared into nothing.

None of them spoke.

None of them cried, and that was what made it so much worse. Their faces were completely lifeless.

Marks covered their bodies: cuts, burns, surgical scars, bruises, strange symbols carved into some of their skin.

Tubes ran into a few arms.

Several children were wrapped in bandages, barely able to lift their heads.

He stared at the cages as one child slowly raised his head, and their eyes met. There was no fear in the boy’s expression.

There was nothing at all, as though fear itself had already been beaten out of him. Subconsciously, Thoren’s eyes were deadly cold as he kept walking.

At the end of the chamber stood another room with its door open.

Children strapped to experimental tables, arms and legs bound in thick metal restraints, bodies entirely helpless.

Some were unconscious.

Others were still awake.

Their skulls had been opened, blood staining the sides of their heads, and inside the exposed brains, small worms moved slowly through the soft tissue, disappearing beneath the surface before resurfacing again.

Some crawled near the edges of the opened skull, others twisting through the brain itself.

One opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Another’s fingers twitched faintly against the metal table. The room reeked of blood, chemicals, and decay.

The scene was so grotesque that even the cold metal tables seemed stained with despair.

Human bodies were reduced to raw material.

Children caged like animals, living brains turned into breeding grounds for crawling parasites.

Thoren stood at the entrance and took in all of it.

The stitched bodies.

The stolen organs, the beast experiments, the cages, the children and the worms crawling through their exposed skulls.

Thoren had always known the Slave Trade Guild were monstrous, but he had never imagined they would go this far.

***

[AN: This Chapter is sponsored by: Scott_Berry_3382]