Chapter 71
After asking around a bit, Zeth found his way to the place the Inquisitors would be holding their witnesses.
At first, he’d assumed they’d be using existing prisons in the guard precinct, or at least building onto them somehow, but it turned out that they’d made an outpost on the outskirts of town. So he went out in the direction he was pointed in, expecting to see some tents set up.
But what he found was something else entirely.
Out away from the buildings and roads, Zeth saw a large stone structure cropping up from the ground, looking completely new. It was made of gray brick, walls towering high enough that it seemed to be several stories tall, and wide enough to be classified as a complex, not a simple building—it was like an entire office building, except made of reinforced stone and with defensive ramparts at the top. How had they made this thing so quickly?
Zeth worried that the real reason they’d taken so many people prisoner under the guise of “interrogating” them was actually because they just wanted to put them to work slaving away on this gigantic outpost, but even that couldn’t have been the case. It was expertly constructed, not a single brick out of place; it couldn’t have been made by a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing.
He continued approaching, curious about the nature of this strange structure. As he rounded one of its corners, he found the entrance, with a small crowd of angry people in front of it. Several were shouting out for the Inquisitors to let the people go, or to leave this place and never return. Upon seeing this, he stopped, not wanting to continue closer and get involved with the protest. If it became a riot, the last thing he’d want would be for them to assume he was a part of it and attack him.
But as he watched from afar, Zeth realized the Inquisitors were taking a different approach to dismantling the protest. As the people shouted in front of the shut door, it suddenly opened up, and one of the Inquisitors stepped out, wearing their signature plate armor and unsettling mask. The moment they came out of the building, they approached one of the protestors. Zeth couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the protester argued with them for a bit before calming down relatively quickly as the other ones continued to shout pointedly at the new target. But the Inquisitor ignored the others, and after a moment, they finished speaking, turning and walking right back into the building, bringing the person along with them, and shut the door.
Hesitantly, Zeth continued walking forward, curious about what was going on. The crowd seemed smaller than he would’ve expected, considering what the Inquisitors had done—were they just pulling people in one by one to disperse everyone?
As he drew closer, he watched as the door opened once again. Now that he could see better, he noticed that as the door opened, several angry people attempted to push the soldier aside and shove their way in, but the Inquisitor clearly had more than enough Stats to shrug off their attempts to move them. The door also seemed to only open up into a small room which had two more Inquisitors guarding it, standing by another door that would let you further in. They clearly didn’t want people barging in here.