Chương 29

I saw the container, and I knew what this trial was going to be. Thankfully, before I had to explain the gory details, the System told us what we needed to do. For your first trial, you shall pay your toll in flesh and blood. In front of you lies a crystal box. You have one hour to fill it, with either blood or flesh. It will take ten liters of blood to fill it. As soon as I heard that, I cursed out loud.

"What? Ten liters is two humans' worth of blood. Bled dry. That's killing two people. It should be five! That's what it was in the movies — five liters of fucking blood, and we split one each. What do you mean, ten? Two liters each is going to kill us all!" But the dungeon wasn't done. Or, it said, pointedly, almost offended that I had interrupted it, you can pay your toll in flesh. Flesh is counted at four times the rate of blood. Flesh is very precious indeed.

And then the dungeon went silent — which, honestly, made it all creepier — as we stared at an empty crystal container, and then at each other. It sat right in the center of the room, at hip level, and we went around it and looked at it in silence for maybe half a minute.

"W-what do we do?" Hailey asked.

"Maybe I can heal us, and we will recover the blood loss."

"I'm not sure that blood can be regenerated through potions and healing," I said.

"During the battle, when I lost some blood, I was feeling pretty faint even after the healing. I fear that even if we tried splitting it equally, one of us might die." General Skullthrax was finally — finally — laughing sincerely, with all the others clapping at the design. They were ecstatic that the humans were now faced with what looked like an impossible trial. They would have to kill somebody in order to survive.

And this was a group of five people who knew each other, plus one stranger who had proven herself quite the outsider. Skullthrax was eating spaghetti with brains now — brain meatballs, to be precise — making appreciative sounds as some of the sauce splattered against his armor. It had been expensive to run this dungeon through the sponsorship on the first floor. But look: the humans were panicking.

"Now, I expect them to try and bleed each other. But the girl will refuse, because she is terrified of blood. And the dungeon is not done." The dungeon added one more line, right as the humans were all staring at the crystal bowl. And you had better save some of your strength. This is a dungeon. There is a boss at the end.

"What?" John exclaimed out loud.

"How is this a Saw dungeon with a damn boss at the end? It would have made sense if we could have all bled and stayed a little weak. Maybe someone was gonna give a little more blood. But this is insane!"

"They will soon realize that the easiest way is to cut someone," Skullthrax said.

"But they will have to cut a lot." His laugh boomed.

"My lord, your cruelty is so admirable!" Count Vortugh clapped. And everybody clapped together with him. This was an impossible trial — one of the most beautiful traps the Sorvos Empire had ever put together — and it would probably kill the only hope of the humans' holy city. But that's when Xivitz suddenly pointed at the mirror and said, "Your lordship. It seems that they have a forearm."

"What?" Skullthrax whirled in place.

"Lucas, what are you doing?" I asked. He had taken out his severed forearm. The inventory had kept it fresh, and he looked at it with a complicated expression on his face.

"I'm not sure that Father Okonkwo will be able to give me my arm back without this. But if this is a Saw thing, then selfishness…" He trailed off.

"Selfishness kills us all," I muttered. He nodded.

"John, chop this thing, and just throw it in. In a couple of pieces." He looked away. After he handed me his forearm, I used my spear to make three chunks out of it, forearm and hand. They made me quite sick. But then the crystal's count showed a 7. 7.

"Goddamn, Lucas. You have big-ass forearms." Marcus broke his usual countenance, swore, and cheered. All right. Then we all knew what was next. Tina took out a dagger and walked forward, closing her eyes.

"John, I— I'm not great with this. Can you cut my forearm or something?"

"Yeah. Maybe bite onto something. I'm not sure how much it's gonna hurt." I made several cuts on her forearm while Tina bit down on a piece of leather and cried in pain, as blood swiftly poured from the deep cuts.

"Hailey, stay ready." As soon as she had poured about three hundred and eighty milliliters of blood, Hailey healed her, and Tina sipped a health potion that she had gotten from one of her chests. We all did the same. When it was my turn, I cursed out loud from the pain, but it all went swiftly. The amount of blood each of us had to lose was basically less than a blood donation. This was easy.

"Alice, your turn," I said. She was last. She looked at the bowl, and she was shaking.

"I— I'm— I'm afraid of needles and blood," she said in a weak voice. I looked at her.

"Okay. Just don't look."

"I— I…" She was shaking even harder now.

"Alice, you need to put the damn blood in," Lucas said.

"We can't arrive too weak at the boss." Alice looked like she was about to have a breakdown, when Marcus stepped in and said, "I didn't even feel the blood loss. Just take the rest from me. It's fine. My Constitution is extremely high — I'm sure I'm regenerating blood as we speak." I looked at Marcus, and I was about to protest. But the timer was running, and we only had about ten minutes left. All right. I reopened his wounds, and he didn't even flinch as his blood poured into the bowl.

The entire group glanced at Alice every now and then. But in the end, we finished the trial, and a door magically appeared at the other end of the room, opposite the entrance door that had closed behind us. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Okay, let's go," I said, as soon as Marcus was healed. And when we entered the next room, we almost all puked on the spot. There was a sea of dead human corpses, and the stench of rot was terrible. So many of them looked like bloated, drowned corpses — white and swollen, leaking fluids that you could taste in your mouth. Some of those fluids felt like they were going down your esophagus the moment you looked at them.

"Holy shit," I swore.

"All right. What the fuck? What the fuck is this?" There must have been at least eighty corpses in there. Fuck. Fuck. System, what the hell is this trial? I hoped it wasn't going to be something like the corpses being reanimated, and us fighting eighty damn bloated corpses. But since this was a test of character and loyalty and whatever, I severely doubted that was the case. Welcome to the second test. This is the Body Keys. You will all need one key each to pass through the next door.

You have thirty minutes to find the keys. Twelve bodies in this room have keys inside of them. Six keys have been placed inside of all of you — and six keys are inside the rest of the corpses. Deep inside. That was all the AI explained, and then it went silent. A timer appeared at the top of the room, like a basketball-court timer. 29: 58.

"Fuck," I muttered. I felt something itch on the back of my hand, and when I looked, there was the outline of a small key. Jesus Christ. What in the body horror is this crap?

"Tina, give me the fucking dagger." Tina tossed me the dagger. I first puked all that I had eaten before coming here, and then I opened the back of my hand, fishing out a key. I puked again, and then I retched while holding up the key.

"I got it," I said. The others quickly looked over their own bodies, but in the next five minutes, none of them could find a key. Whatever outline had surfaced on the back of my hand, theirs weren't showing. Deep inside, the dungeon had said. Mine had come up to the skin — and I suspected the Sphere had something to do with me being able to see it at all. Theirs could be anywhere. Behind a rib. Under a liver. Finding one blind would mean butchering yourself alive.

And that made me realize just how twisted this was going to be. General Skullthrax had his arms crossed.

"That was another damn stroke of luck. Humans apparently have good luck. We should have considered that." A few laughed, but it was more awkward than not. So General Skullthrax looked at them.

"The keys are inside their bodies. If the rest of them want to make it out of there alive, either they kill each other — or they start rifling through the corpses. And they don't have the time to find all the keys. So one of them has to die."

"Your dark lordship," Xivitz said.

"I think they have found something."

"Tina — to your right. It's in his belly. Like, the upper left of his stomach." There was a giant, fat, bloated man who looked like he had come out of a horror movie. Tina looked at me, and she said, "How the hell do you know?"

"I have a metal detector skill. Who the fuck cares? Get the key. Guys, help her." They all went to the corpse, and we found the first key. I watched Tina pull the key out, covered in those disgusting fluids. And so I propped myself up and used the Sphere of Intuition again. It was very clear, in my perception, where the keys were. The bodies were literally glowing. And so we started making our way through them. Everybody helped. Everybody dug through the innards of those dead people.

And we had four keys with five minutes left — it took longer than one would think to find a key inside the slimy flesh of a corpse. I found the fifth, feeling sick and woozy from the spectacle.

"I didn't know I was this much of a pussy," I said out loud, while Lucas took the key with his good hand. Only Alice was missing one.

"Alice, can you fucking give me some help, please?" I said, pointing at a pile of corpses.

"It's below all those." Alice didn't say anything. She just started sobbing, uncontrollably. She started hyperventilating, crying, bawling her eyes out in a way that startled all of us. She was clearly having the kind of crisis I had never seen a person have — not even in the movies were they this violent, this uncomfortable to watch. She bent, and squatted on her knees, and cried. And she started shouting.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm useless. I'm sorry. I'm so useless." And that's when I knew I had to hurry. I went to her, my hands dirty with blood and gore, and just took her hand — and put my own key in it.

"Just… please get back. I need to do something." She looked terrified, and confused. But I pushed her away gently. And then I marked one of the corpses with my skill.

"Guys, this is going to be really fucking disgusting. But we're not gonna be able to move all those corpses in time." I activated Judgment of Raziel, and threw my spear. The explosion blew up a shower of gore — the kind you could only have nightmares about. And as some flesh and blood entered my nose and my mouth, which I had forgotten to fully close while panting, I made my way forward using the Sphere of Intuition.

I sank my hand through the pieces of flesh, and took out another key, just as the timer was hitting its last minute. The timer stopped. And a door appeared at the end.

"All right. Another one down. Fuck." I retched, and spat, and made my way toward the third room, angry, nervous. I gave a pat on Alice's shoulder and said, "It's fine. This is a fucking nightmare. It's all right." But she kept repeating that she was a coward — and a bunch of other terrible things about herself that I don't wanna repeat. Congratulations on passing the first two tests. Those two were a little bloody, if you catch my drift. So why don't we have an easier one?

There was a small pew in the middle of the room — the kind you find in a church — and a box of wood right in front of it. The System explained the rules. This is the Confessional. Each of you will take a turn and kneel on the pew. You will have to name your worst sin — or what you believe is your worst sin — while all the others stand inside the confessional, on the other side. If you lie, all the others are dead. A cloud of poison will fill the box — and only the box — and you can walk off.

"Holy shit," I said, looking at the others.

"Guys, please. I don't fucking care what any of you have done. But let's not kill everybody else, all right?" I said, and then I went first, onto the pew.

"Yeah — you don't kill us," Lucas scoffed, while they entered the wooden box of the confessional. I got on my knees, and I started thinking. So, I guess the worst thing I've done is… I started thinking back to my family. To my fraught relationship with them. And then I found something else.

"I wanted to kill that man. George. I didn't like how he spoke to us. And when we saw him outside — I didn't feel bad about having to kill him. I think that my guilt, after, was because I actually enjoyed getting the opportunity to get back at such a sack of shit. So, yeah. I enjoyed killing a man. And I buried him because I felt guilty. Not about killing him. About enjoying the fact that I killed him."

I could barely see the others, because there were just a few holes in the wooden box that let me catch a glimpse of them. I waited for them to say something — just for Marcus to sigh and say, "It's gonna be three Hail Marys, John. And yeah, fuck that guy. Is this your worst sin? Good Lord." Congratulations. The first member of your team has passed the test, the dungeon said. Holy. I got up, and when the others came out of the box, I hugged Marcus.

"Thank you, man."

"That's all right, dude. This is the fucking apocalypse." Next went Tina, who revealed that she had once gotten someone fired for not liking their jokes. We all commented that, honestly, this was the least egregious thing we thought HR had ever done. She hadn't liked the joke — and we were happy she could no longer have us fired. Then it was Lucas's turn. And I thought — I genuinely thought — it would get really dark, knowing Lucas.

But what he said was, "I stole an entire character from my friend's World of Warcraft account, and I denied it for years. He still doesn't know. And he's probably dead now." He looked really put down, and sad, and even shed a few tears.

"This is the first time I've said this out loud." When we came out, we didn't want to make light of his personal grief. But I said, "I mean… man, I get the breach of loyalty and friendship. But you know what? It's fine. Just get back in the box." Next went Hailey, who said that she had once brought a dog back to the shelter, after trying to rescue it and getting bitten by it. We honestly hadn't expected much worse from her. But she really felt bad about that. Marcus had the dark one.

Apparently, he had beaten his father until he broke his jaw — for slapping his mom. Then it was Alice's turn. We all watched as she — still with puffy, red eyes — knelt on the pew. What she said made the blood in my veins stop.

"It's not my fault. I— I— I—"