Chapter 590: The Vermin Beneath the Ground
Leaving the children’s experiment room, Thoren took a deep breath and released it slowly through his nose before continuing deeper into the underground facility.
The cold air filled his lungs and for a moment he stood still in the corridor. His eyes closed and the images of those children lingering in his mind.
He opened his eyes again and sighed helplessly. There was nothing he could do about what had already happened.
He couldn’t undo the past but he could make sure it never happened again.
His expression turned colder as he moved forward.
The deeper Thoren went, the more complicated the facility became. Eventually the corridor opened into another research zone, and the moment he stepped inside, he stopped.
Rows of transparent pods filled the enormous chamber, each one holding a young person. Most of them were under twenty-five.
They all floated naked inside a yellowish liquid, wires running from their arms, legs, chest, neck, and head into machines that continuously tracked their vital signs.
A low mechanical hum filled the chamber, hundreds of terminals beeping in an eerie, layered rhythm that seemed to saturate the entire room.
But they were no longer ordinary humans again. His eyes narrowed as he took in the extent of what had been done to them.
One young man’s body remained mostly human except for thick tree branches growing from his back and shoulders, pushing through his flesh and spreading across the inside of the pod.
Another had scales covering half his face and a serpentine tail in place of legs. Others had beast-like limbs, claws, horns, or strange plant growths sprouting from their bodies.
A few looked almost entirely human at first glance, until Thoren noticed movement beneath their skin, something alive, growing where nothing should have been growing at all.
He walked slowly past the rows of pods, then stopped as one in particular caught his attention.
Inside the pod floated a beautiful young girl.
Her long hair drifted gently in the liquid around a face that looked almost peaceful, as though she were merely asleep.
But beneath her chest, her stomach had become a monstrous maw lined with hundreds of serrated teeth, several long tongues twisting between them.
The flesh around it expanded and contracted with every heavy, unnatural breath.
Thoren’s eyes went cold and for a brief moment anger rose in his chest as his fingers tightened.
The sight was enough to disgust even someone like him who was accustomed to death.
He forced the anger back down with a slow deep breath.
What had been done couldn’t be undone.
His only task now was to make sure everyone connected to these atrocities pay with their lives.
Whatever was the goal of the Slave Trade Guild, he had no intention of letting it continue.
He turned from the pods and departed.
But the deeper he went, the more inhuman the experiments became. Some rooms held bodies suspended upside down inside large glass containers.
Others held creatures with no clear line left between human and beast, bodies covered in scales, wrapped in vines, sprouting extra limbs, growing organs that belonged to nothing natural.
What he was witnessing had nearly shattered his understanding of what people were willing to do once every restraint was gone and still, he kept moving deeper.
This time, his steps quickened.
He no longer wanted to spend another second looking at what filled these rooms as he wanted to find the source of everything.
The Vorlath Blood Compass stayed in his hand and its blood-red eye was still pointing forward. And this was the only reason he knew he was heading the right way.
Whatever the Slave Trade Guild was hiding lay somewhere deeper in this facility, and he intended to find it and destroy it.
He approached another section of the underground chamber. The corridor ahead looked completely empty and devoid of any source of activity.
Whoosh.
Suddenly, three figures lunged out of the darkness, their movements startlingly fast.
They had concealed themselves near the entrance, waiting for Thoren to enter their range before they ambushed him.
Quickly, the three members of the Slave Trade Guild struck at once. One swinging a blade toward his neck, another attacking from the side, the third circling toward his back.
But the instant they appeared, the undead Storm Tyrant moved.
Boom!
His massive body stepped between the attacks and its hammer swinging a wide arc.
Clang!
The first attacker’s weapon shattered instantly and its fragments scattered through the air. Seeing this, his eyes went wide in a heartbeat before the hammer struck him square in the chest.
Boom!
His body flew backward like a discarded doll and slammed into the wall.
At nearly the same moment, the undead Garron moved.
His massive butcher knife sweeping through the air.
Whoosh!
The second attacker’s blade met it and shattered on impact, his eyes widening in disbelief as the knife continued forward without pause.
Slash!
It tore straight through him, blood splattering across the corridor as his body collapsed.
The whole exchange had taken barely a second.
Seeing this, the third guild member was terrified and scared silly. This was no longer the battle he was ready to fight and so, he turned to flee into the darkness.
Unfortunately, he had forgotten something.
The darkness already belonged to something else.
A shadow shifted behind him, and undead Kaien appeared without a sound. Its blade was already in motion.
The guild member felt something cold press against his neck and his eyes widened.
Slash!
His head separated cleanly from his neck, blood spraying across the wall as his body stood for a moment longer before collapsing to the floor.
Thud.
Silence.
Thoren barely glanced at the corpses before his attention shifted back to the Vorlath Blood Compass.
A crimson flame shot out of the Blood compass and landed on the corpses of the Slave Trade Guild member and instantly, it consumed them into nothingness.
Thoren tightened his grip on the compass and pressed forward. From the message he was getting from the Blood Compass, he knew he was close.