Chapter 72: They Came From Below
Arthur and Aziel slowly walked through the crowd of bodies, their footsteps careful and deliberate. The sound of their boots against stone was occasionally punctuated by the crunch of brittle bone or the metallic scrape of disturbed armor. The air hung heavy with the scent of decay—not the fresh, pungent odor of recent death, but the ancient, dusty smell of long-departed life.
Arthur stopped and kneeled down over one of the fallen. They were wearing a full suit of steel armor... well, half a suit, as the bottom half of their body was nowhere to be seen. The torso ended abruptly at the waist in a mess of jagged metal and what might have once been flesh, now desiccated beyond recognition. The steel, once polished to a mirror shine, was now dulled by time and the elements, covered in a fine layer of the same dust that blanketed everything in this wasteland.
Ripped apart gruesomely, the bisected remains told a story of violence that Arthur wasn’t sure he wanted to understand. Yet curiosity—or perhaps the need to know what they were facing—drove him forward. He slowly reached for the visor of the helmet, his hand hovering momentarily as if hesitant to disturb the dead. With a soft scrape of metal against metal, he lifted it up.
Underneath was the face of a skeleton, the flesh long since reclaimed by the earth. As the visor opened, bugs crawled out of the helmet—tiny, pale creatures that had made their home in the dark confines of what was once a man’s head. Arthur momentarily flinched, his body instinctively recoiling before he calmed himself and took a closer look.
The bone of the skeleton was not the ivory white one might expect, but marred with veins of darkness spreading like a web across the surface. It was lined with that familiar blackness of corruption—the same taint he had encountered before, a signature of something far more sinister than natural death.
Which meant one thing. Arthur’s mind raced as the implications settled in. ’They were killed by void creatures... or... oh shit.’
The realization hit him like a physical blow, sending a jolt of adrenaline through his system. Arthur stood up fast, spinning in place, his eyes scanning the field of corpses before locking onto his companion who wandered between the bodies slightly ahead.
"AZIEL!" he called out, his voice echoing across the graveyard.
Aziel spun around quick, concern etched across his face. His hand instinctively moved to the hilt of his weapon, ready to draw at the first sign of danger. "What!?"