Chương 155: 11. People of a Millennium Past 4

The room beyond was wide and open. Several metal tables were bolted to the floor, surrounded by overturned chairs and scattered debris. Along the walls stood a row of tall cabinets with transparent panels—most shattered or warped, their contents long since rotted beyond recognition. What actually stopped me wasn't the furniture. It was the bones scattered everywhere. The skeletons wore remnants of what had once been uniform clothing.

The fabric had mostly decayed, leaving only scattered fibers and metal fastenings clinging to bleached bone. From their positions, death had come suddenly. Some were slumped across tables. Others had collapsed near the doorway. One lay half-propped against a wall, as if it had been trying to crawl toward the exit in its final moments. I crouched beside the nearest and immediately noticed something wrong.

"The skulls..." Every single one bore a small, clean hole through the cranium. Not sword cuts. Not spear thrusts. Not the radiating fractures of blunt trauma. These holes were too small, too precise—clean with an almost surgical efficiency, as though something extremely fast and hard had simply punched through, nailing consciousness and life to the same instant. Stranger still: nearly every corpse was clutching something. Short. Heavy. Hard-edged, with a dark opening at one end.

They looked like distant, considerably more lethal relatives of Jessi's powder-guns—more refined, and infinitely less friendly in appearance. I was still staring at one when Ignicia crouched beside several skeletons and, without any change of expression, pried the objects from their grips and tossed them at me.

"Catch." I fumbled the armful against my chest, nearly staggered by the unexpected weight.

"What are these?"

"Ancient murder tools." She glanced at the bones with the detachment of someone assessing weather conditions.

"After several thousand years, who knows if they still function. But if even one works, it's probably more efficient than that sword on your hip." Looking down at the cold, heavy objects in my arms, I found it genuinely difficult to argue. Given the neat holes in those skulls, she wasn't wrong. We didn't linger in that room where death had been too quiet for too long. Following the passage deeper, the air had changed noticeably.

With the ventilation running, the congealed staleness had thinned, replaced by a sharper dry cold, the pervasive smell of rust, and something else—a faint synthetic odor I couldn't identify. It didn't belong to wood or leather or any material I understood. Something that had been sealed away too long, carrying the wrongness of objects from a world that had never been mine. The next space we entered showed clear signs of habitation. It was a vast living quarters.

Two rows of narrow bunks were bolted to the walls in stacked pairs, arranged with a rigidity that felt almost punitive. Metal lockers lined the floor beside them, several hanging open to spill rotted fabric, shattered containers, and blackened paper scraps. Further in was what had once served as a mess area—tables in neat rows, and along the wall, a series of rectangular fixtures whose purpose I couldn't begin to guess.

If not for the skeletons on the floor, I might have believed the occupants had simply stepped out for a drill.

"So ancient people slept in rows too," I murmured.

"I always assumed they reclined in glowing coffins."

"Sufficient ignorance makes everything romantic," Ignicia replied dryly, and pulled open an overhead locker. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Several objects tumbled out—square, hard, wrapped in silvery-grey film. I picked one up and turned it over. The packaging was completely sealed, the material stiff and brittle. Ignicia took it before I'd finished examining it and scored one corner open with her thumbnail.

Inside: something yellowish, dense, and deeply suspicious.

"Is this actually food?" I expressed considerable doubt.

"It appears to be rations." She said this matter-of-factly, then—entirely in keeping with her established policy of personally evaluating unknowns—took a bite. Her expression stopped moving entirely. Not shock. Not pain. The particular stunned silence of a highly dignified creature that has just been personally slapped across the face by inferior reality. I rarely got to see Ignicia make that face, so I asked with genuine curiosity: "Well?"

She swallowed with visible effort, then answered with complete deadpan delivery:"Like ground brick. With a light dusting of ash." I very nearly lost my composure.

"So... technically edible?"

"If the objective is biological survival rather than any form of enjoyment," she said coldly, shoving the remaining half into my hands, "then barely." I suppressed a grin and broke off a small piece. Then I understood completely. It was hard enough to constitute a dental hazard. Dry enough to absorb all moisture from the human throat. The flavor occupied the exact midpoint between compressed chaff and dust personally abandoned by the gods.

The only redeeming quality was its sheer density—as though consuming a single block could sustain a person for half a day on pure resentment alone.

"If the ancients had to eat this every day," I said, forcing the mouthful down, "it explains why they eventually started killing each other." Ignicia, very unusually, didn't argue. Further searching turned up more objects deep in another locker—greyish-white bars wrapped in oil paper and hard casings. They didn't look like food. They looked like extremely unappetizing soap, soft enough to take a fingerprint. I was about to say "probably for washing" when Ignicia picked one up and brought it to her nose.

"Your Highness, wait—" Too late. She operated on the unwavering principle of personally verifying unknown substances, so naturally the next step was touching her tongue to it. The next instant, her entire face contracted in revulsion. She hurled the bar away and did something I had genuinely never witnessed: she swore. Out loud. Without any attempt at restraint.

"What in all the blazing hells is that?!" The sheer violence of her reaction actually startled me.

"Not food, I take it?" She turned a look on me that contained equal parts indignation and wounded dignity.

"If I had known what it was, I wouldn't have tasted it." I retrieved the bar. It felt slightly tacky, faintly elastic—definitely not soap. The container beside it still bore faded script and a red warning symbol. I couldn't read the text, but the icon alone screamed do not ingest in any era's language. Ignicia pressed her fingers to her brow, working through something.

"Those markings... indicate hazardous material. Probably used for blasting rock, collapsing tunnels, or direct application to people." My hand twitched. I nearly dropped it.

"You just licked explosives?"

"If you ever mention this again," she said with deadly quiet, "I will use you to test its detonation capacity." I shut my mouth immediately. The incident had clarified something important: this wasn't just ancient living quarters and a tomb. It was also an armory for volatile materials. The risk profile of cabinet-searching had just escalated from "disturbing skeletal remains" to "becoming skeletal remains." Unfortunately, the impacts from our pursuers showed no interest in granting us time for caution.

Another series of heavy thuds echoed from the blocked entrance. Multiple strikes this time. The sea-dragon people hadn't given up. They might already be working through the outer facility, looking for another route. Ignicia's expression went cold again. Her hand pressed to her side, breathing slightly heavier—but her eyes had settled back into that familiar resolve: moving forward might kill us, staying here definitely will.

"We can't stay in the living quarters," she said.

"I wholeheartedly agree." I glanced around.

"Being cut down next to ancient bunk beds lacks any historical dignity." She didn't bother responding, just tilted her chin toward the far end. Beyond the living area, a wider passage opened up. The wall markings here were visibly different. The floor was smoother, longer—designed from the beginning to accommodate something large in transit. At the far end, deeper darkness gathered, carrying with it a damp, salt-heavy scent. Not the smell of surface caves.

Something like vast, still water that had been sealed underground for ages. We followed the passage forward. The closer we got to the end, the more the space expanded around us. Our footsteps rang with increasing hollowness. Ancient symbols and peeling paint still clung to the walls, none of which I could decipher. Ignicia moved slowly, her gaze constantly scanning both sides—cataloguing whatever she could recognize. We stopped at the edge of a colossal opening.

Before us: the entrance to an underground dry dock, descending into the earth. Just the entrance. And yet simply standing here, I could feel the crushing presence of the darkness below. Cold air rose in waves from the depths, carrying seawater, rust, and something else—the particular dead silence that only accompanies metal that has been sleeping for millennia. The guardrails on both sides were half-destroyed. The ramp ahead dropped straight down, vanishing into shadow that refused to resolve.

And somewhere in that absolute darkness, something enormous waited—something that felt larger than the island above it, patient in a way that had nothing to do with waiting and everything to do with having simply outlasted everything else. My throat went dry. Behind us: pursuers. Sea-dragon soldiers. The surface world and all its moving political pieces. Ahead: something older. Something deeper. Something that had no business belonging to our era. Ignicia had stopped beside me.

She stared down into the abyss, and for once there wasn't a trace of her usual mockery—only a wariness that seemed to rise from somewhere deeper than thought.