Chương 36: 15-1.When the Stars and Stripes Fall

Alvira didn't say it twice. Matthews stepped through the burned-out entrance first, iron-bound shield raised just enough to mean business, war hammer resting across his shoulder. The whole man settled into position like a tombstone custom-made to plug a doorway—solid, immovable, and vaguely ominous. Jessi and I followed close behind, while Lucas brought up the middle, clutching his lantern and newly replaced iron staff with an expression somewhere between a pilgrimage and a funeral march.

As for Alvira, she naturally took the rear, her footsteps so light they were almost soundless—which somehow made her presence even more impossible to ignore. The moment we crossed that threshold, the howling wind and snow from outside were severed clean. Not into silence. Into something else entirely. Our footsteps, our breathing, the faint clink of armor and weapons—this underground passage caught every sound and fed it back to us, layer after layer.

It felt wrong, like the place wasn't simply echoing but cataloguing every intruder who dared to breathe its air. Filing away fresh records of the living foolish enough to descend. The staircase plunged downward into the abyss. Wide and long—absurdly so, far beyond anything a normal basement had any right to be. It felt less like some noble's cellar and more like the skeletal remains of a massive public thoroughfare.

The walls on either side were lined with broad panels of smooth material, most of it peeling away in great sheets. Here and there, faded patterns and arrows still clung to the surface, along with clusters of Old Civilization script that made Lucas look like he wanted to fall to his knees and kiss the stone. But whatever those signs had once been meant to guide—crowds, thousands of them moving with purpose—they were directions for no one now. Long-expired instructions.

Epitaphs that had forgotten what they were mourning. The lantern's light swayed ahead of us, barely reaching the next few steps. Beyond that, the darkness yawned like a bottomless well, waiting with cyclopean patience for us to walk down into its maw. I didn't bother counting the steps. I only knew this descent ran deeper than any high-tier ruin we'd stumbled into before. Those places, at least, had carried some faint whiff of "adventurers stumbling upon treasure." This was different.

Too vast, too methodical, too much like the hollowed-out abdomen of something designed to swallow multitudes. With every step downward, that prickling sense of foreboding settled deeper into my chest. Jessi was walking very close to me. Not the normal shoulder-to-shoulder distance of teammates moving together. Closer than that—close enough that half a step more would have brought the edge of her cloak brushing against the back of my hand. I glanced sideways at her.

"What exactly are you doing?"

"Maintaining formation, obviously." She answered as if this were the most natural thing in the world, not even blinking.

"Alvira said so, didn't she? I stay by your side—cover your blind spots, finish off stragglers, charge in together."

"I mean you're about to step on my heels."

"That's because your noble legs are ridiculously long."

"Even you don't believe that excuse." Jessi tilted her chin up and flashed a smile of weaponized innocence.

"Oh my, you caught me."

"I really should have left you on the surface to keep Erina company."

"Too late for that." She deliberately lowered her voice, leaning just slightly closer.

"We're in a sealed underground space now. If I get scared, naturally I'll have to stick close to someone."

"Your being scared had better be worth at least two silver coins. I'd pay to see it."

"Still talking tough." Her grin widened with mischievous delight.

"When something actually jumps out of the dark, just don't be the first one to grab onto me."

"Don't worry. I'll make sure to push you forward as a scout."

"You're so mean, young master." She said it with her mouth, but her tone carried absolutely no intention of backing away. Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten used to it. Live long enough in the Northern Reaches and even your sense of what counts as "trouble" starts to malfunction. Up ahead, Matthews suddenly stopped. I dropped the banter instantly and put my hand back on my sword hilt. The veteran didn't look back—he simply raised his shield and pointed toward the lower left.

"Eyes down." I lowered my gaze and finally saw it: beneath the dust and scattered debris coating the steps, there were deep, dark streaks scarring the stone surface. Not blood—at least nothing that looked like blood anymore. More like traces of something that had been subjected to intense heat long ago, then blackened and worn smooth by time. Several steps were even slightly sunken, as if they'd once borne tremendous weight—or the panicked stampede of a massive crowd in a very short time.

Lucas leaned forward from behind, his lantern nearly taking off my ear.

"This kind of wear pattern... this frequency of traffic..."

"Move that lantern half an inch closer and I'll personally make you part of the wear pattern," I warned.

"Can you show even a little gentleness toward the pursuit of knowledge?"

"If knowledge insists on wearing your face, I find that physically impossible." He pulled back with an expression of profound personal injury. Alvira, however, spoke up from the rear in that flat tone of hers.

"This was clearly a main thoroughfare for heavy foot traffic." Lucas immediately perked up.

"See? I told you—""Shut up and listen." Alvira cut him off without ceremony.

"Those markings on the walls are mostly flow management and evacuation signage. The people of the Old Civilization had no magic. They couldn't sense the Natural Force, let alone channel it. When fire broke out, when structures collapsed, when disaster struck—they had nothing but fixed routes and mechanical systems to save them." Jessi raised an eyebrow.

"Sounds like a massive pain."

"To them, it was probably as normal as the fact that you can't fly," Alvira replied. I kept walking, eyes drifting over the faded remnants on the walls.

"So you can read this stuff?"

"Some of it." This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"Only some?" Lucas chimed in eagerly.

"Wasn't the Old Civilization just one civilization?" Alvira actually turned to look at him then. There was no mockery in her expression—only a very pure, very calm how did you manage to ask something that stupid.

"The Old Civilization had hundreds of languages," she said.

"Each with its own scripts, regional variants, specialized notation systems for different facilities. What you call 'the Old Civilization' is just a convenient label slapped onto countless nations, cities, and eras layered on top of each other across millennia." Lucas opened his mouth. Then, with admirable wisdom, closed it again. I shot Alvira a sidelong look.

"You know a remarkable amount." She stepped over a crumbled section of stone, her voice as level as if she were commenting on the weather.

"Because I've lived considerably longer than any of you." Jessi pounced on that immediately, turning back with a bright, predatory smile.

"So how old are you, exactly?" Alvira looked at her. For one brief moment, I genuinely expected her to just say none of your business. Instead, she curved her lips in a faint, dangerous smile.

"How old do you think I look?" Lucas, apparently suffering from some catastrophic failure of survival instinct, let his mouth outrun his brain by a full stride.

"Sixteen?" The staircase went very quiet for half a beat. Even I thought he might want to start composing his epitaph. Alvira didn't explode. She simply laughed—soft, brief, and entirely at his expense.

"I'm three hundred and seventeen years old, you fool." Lucas went completely still, clutching his iron staff like a hamster that had just been struck by the full weight of its own shattered worldview. Jessi showed no mercy whatsoever, laughing until her shoulders shook.

"Lucas, this is the first time I've seen someone make an elf look at them like a grandmother watching her slow grandchild." I couldn't resist twisting the knife.

"Look on the bright side. In a roundabout way, you just complimented her skincare routine."

"That is NOT the point!" Lucas protested with genuine anguish.

"Three hundred and seventeen years—what does that even mean?!"

"For you?" I said.

"Tuition."

"Cedric, sometimes I really wish you weren't so gifted at kicking people when they're down."

"Then maybe you should stop making such a habit of jumping into wells first." We bickered our way down the endless descent. Strangely enough, with all that chatter propping us up, the oppressive weight that had been settling into my chest never quite managed to swallow us whole. As loath as I am to admit it, Jessi and Lucas—in their own infuriating way—kept something human alive in this corridor that had no business housing the living.

Finally, just when I was beginning to suspect this staircase was planning to deliver us straight to the planet's core, it ended. We'd reached the bottom. The lantern and torchlight swept forward—and what they revealed wasn't a spacious hall or the broad corridor I'd been expecting. Instead: a massive iron shutter, sealed completely across the width of the passage, embedded deep into the surrounding stonework.

Its surface had gone black with rust over centuries, but the edges and tracks still held fast, locked together like clenched teeth. As if, across all these hundreds or thousands of years, it had been faithfully executing some command no living person remembered. Jessi walked up and knocked twice with her knuckles. Clang, clang. The sound came back hollow and dead.

"Dead end," she announced, then pressed her ear against the metal and blinked thoughtfully.

"Wait. No. There's definitely space behind this."

"That's a fire shutter," Alvira said, moving forward as she drew her short staff from beneath her cloak.

"Large Old Civilization facilities used them to partition sections. Fire, collapse, any major accident—these would drop automatically, sealing off areas completely." Lucas edged forward eagerly, eyes lighting up in a way that was frankly unsettling.

"So behind this door is the actual main complex?"

"Most likely."

"The ancients really made things complicated," Jessi said, folding her arms.

"If we see fire, we just run. They had to wait for doors to fall on them first." Alvira raised her staff, tip leveled at the center of the shutter's face.

"Because they had no magic." No arrogance in her voice. Just the flat recitation of historical fact.

"They couldn't feel the Natural Force or guide it. Against disasters of this scale, all they had were machines, automated systems, and pre-designed escape routes." I stared at that firmly sealed door and felt something shift in my understanding. In every story, the Old Civilization was painted as an age of gods—their ruins alone enough to make people crane their necks in awe. But standing here, listening to Alvira lay it out so matter-of-factly, the truth became clear.

No matter how advanced they were, they were still just people. Fire came—they still had to run. The door dropped—they could still be trapped behind it. Somehow, with that realization, the age of gods felt considerably less divine. Alvira wasted no more time. She pressed her palm against the shutter's surface, traced the edges—checking whether burning through would bring the whole thing down on our heads. Satisfied, she stepped back. The tip of her staff began to glow with familiar white radiance.

"Stand back." We stood back. The white light stretched and condensed into a blazing stream trailing pale blue fire, driving itself into the center of the iron shutter with tremendous force. BOOM—! The shriek of tortured metal exploded through the confined space, sharp enough to rattle teeth. Ice and rust that had clung to the surface for centuries vaporized under the intense heat.

A molten breach opened at the impact point and spread outward in all directions, like someone carving through the dead face of a door with a white-hot blade. Jessi whistled appreciatively.

"I like that spell." Matthews nodded.

"Efficient." I watched the metal continue to melt and came to an honest conclusion.

"I think my definition of elven elegance and reality don't quite overlap." Lucas had reverted to full scholar-on-the-verge-of-breakdown mode, clutching staff and lantern while muttering rapidly.

"High-density destructive formula... thermal concentration... structural severance rather than explosive force..."

"Close your mouth," I told him.

"If there's something waiting on the other side, you look the most like a buffet."

"Why me specifically?"

"Because right now you have the energy of an all-you-can-eat restaurant." While we talked, the shutter finally gave way. Alvira raised her hand and pushed. The warped remains groaned like something dying and tilted inward, leaving a gap just wide enough to pass through. Lantern and torchlight poured in after it. And then we saw what lay beyond. It wasn't a room. It wasn't a corridor. It was an underground concourse so vast it seemed to mock the very concept of enclosed space.

For one full second, my mind simply refused to process what I was seeing. Ceilings that soared impossibly high into shadow. An open atrium spanning multiple levels. The skeletal remains of storefronts arranged in concentric circles around the void—shattered glass railings, half-collapsed signs, the corroded shells of display cases. And there, frozen at its eternal angle, a massive escalator—its steps still tilted in permanent invitation, waiting for passengers who would never come.

The entire space had been engineered for one purpose: to swallow tens of thousands of human beings and hold them all at once. A cyclopean maw designed to process the living in industrial quantities. Now it held only dust, darkness, and the bones of commerce that time had not quite finished consuming. As our torchlight swept across the gloom, it caught fragments of what remained—faded promotional displays behind cracked glass, life-sized standees of figures in Old Civilization dress.

They stood there with their printed smiles intact, hands extended toward products whose purpose I couldn't begin to fathom, as though stubbornly convinced that the next wave of customers would come flowing down those dead escalators at any moment. The feeling that crept up my spine was wrong. Worse than finding a corpse. A corpse, at least, is honest—it tells you plainly that something died. But this underground mall refused that honesty.

It had preserved too much of the shape of "once alive," kept it too complete, too intact. The preservation of its mundane commercialism in this lightless tomb made something cold crawl along the back of my neck. Lucas's voice came out barely above a whisper.

"... Gods."

"This makes the capital's largest market look small," Jessi murmured, her usual teasing tone completely absent.

"Because this was never meant for a few hundred people," Alvira replied, her voice steady but her eyes constantly scanning the unfathomable darkness ahead.

"At its peak, a facility of this scale could absorb tens of thousands in a single day without strain." I couldn't help looking up again at those layered tiers receding into shadow above us. Tens of thousands. The number settled into my chest like a stone and refused to move. Just thinking about it made the silence unbearable—how tens of thousands of people had once moved through this space simultaneously, talking, arguing, eating, rushing somewhere, buying things they probably didn't need.

Now there was nothing left but the echo of our own breathing, bouncing off walls that had no business remembering so much life. The quiet here wasn't really quiet. It was loud in the worst possible way—noise with all the humanity scraped out of it. Somewhere around us, the other sixteen teams were cutting through their own entry points right now.

Which meant that inside this colossal dead beast, in sixteen different chambers of its rotting anatomy, sixteen other groups were doing exactly what we were—torches raised, boots careful, stepping into its stomach, its lung cavities, or whatever ancient organ had refused to decompose but couldn't quite remember why it was still holding its shape. I tightened my grip on my sword hilt and let out a slow breath. That was when it came. From somewhere deep in the darkness at the far end of the concourse—a sound.

Very faint. Almost nothing. Almost.