Chương 143: Chapter 141: What They Became

The ramp went down for a long time. The structure was designed for processions, being wide enough to accommodate our entire formation comfortably with extra space. It sloped downwards in a single, continuous path, unlike the switchbacking entrance stairs. The walls rose close on both sides, smooth black stone covered in relief work from knee height to far above our heads, and the dry channels ran down along both edges of the ramp itself, cut deeper here than they had been in the streets above.

I kept glancing at those channels as we walked. In the city they had wandered, branching between houses, gathering at basins. Here they only went one way, straight down the slope ahead of us, and the stone in their beds was polished smoother than anywhere else we'd seen. Everything above fed into this, I thought. The entire city drained downhill. The carvings on the walls had changed in tone since the plaza. Up in the city, the murals had been a story: the war, the flight, the building, the bat above it all.

Down here, the work stopped telling a story and started recording a structure. Rows of masked figures stood in ranks, each rank smaller than the one before it, bowls, staves or knives in their hands, and there were glyphs repeated beside each rank like titles. It was an organization chart cut into stone. A priesthood, with grades and orders, and at the top of every arrangement, twice the size of any priest, stood the figure we'd been following since the first mural: the masked shaman with his staff.

"He's in all of them now," Alice said. She'd noticed it at the same time I had.

"Every panel. There are more carvings of him than of the bat now." She was right. Camazotz still appeared, wings spread across the top of the larger compositions, but the wings had been pushed higher and further from the action with every panel we passed, until the bat was a border, a decoration around the edges of scenes that were really about the masked figure and his priests.

"Interesting," Cyrus said slowly.

"It's like he is replacing the creature in their culture." The ramp ended at a gate, two massive doorposts carved as standing priests, holding up a lintel shaped as a pair of folded wings — the bat reduced, finally, to architecture. Beyond it, the space opened up tremendously. We had entered the temple district. Contrary to the city above, which was built for living, this place was made for rituals and worship.

There were no houses, no market squares, no worn doorsteps, just halls — long pillared buildings with raised platforms at their ends — and open courts with altars at their centers, arranged along one central avenue that continued the line of the ramp, running straight ahead of us into the dark and, by the slope of it, still downward. The channels were everywhere now.

They came down out of every hall, out of every court, joining and rejoining along the avenue like tributaries, all of them flowing in the same direction we were walking.

"I really hate this place," Denxy said.

"Stay sharp," I said.

"If anything in this city is still defended, it's this." We moved up the avenue in formation, but we slowed down the pace. Scale and Mano Roja went along the flanks, checking the side halls, and twice Mano Roja's low whistle stopped the column while he checked some statues in the alley. The deeper we went, the more elaborate the carvings became, and the more the masked shaman's image swallowed everything else. He stood alone now in most panels, while priests knelt to him.

In fact, from one point, whole crowds knelt to him, like he actually became their priest-king. In one enormous composition that covered the entire face of a terraced tower, he stood with his staff raised and the bat's wings draped over his shoulders, worn like a cloak. Verdugo stopped in front of that one for a moment, looking up.

"I have a bad feeling about this, amigos," he said.

"No one should wear a god like that."

"Well," Cyrus said.

"It is safe to assume that Camazotz is not an actual god in the game. I wouldn't call something like that early-game content."

"That's fair," I nodded.

"But when we first cleared the Ravenmere Catacombs, the end boss was trying to reach godhood." Memories of Az'Bädar started resurfacing the moment I finished talking. How the boss could actually read my mind during battle, the way it had transformed into a winged abomination, the hard-earned victory. We were in the level twenties. It would be crazy to assume that was at the level of gods in this world, but lore implications weren't always set in stone like game mechanics were.

We found the heart of the district maybe ten minutes later, where the avenue opened into a court larger than the plaza above, dominated by a single altar made of black stone. It stood on a platform ringed by basins, and every channel we had followed since the city converged here, running into them from all directions, and from the basins into grooves on the altar's sides, and from the grooves up the steps to the flat table at the top.

"That sort of confirms the blood ritual part," Leona said with an awkward grin.

"Great," Alysanna murmured.

"Ravenmere was about a cult of priests obsessed with immortality," I said, turning to Cyrus.

"Do you think the same was happening here?"

"I can't tell," the mage replied.

"Could simply be a sacrifice to Camazotz."

"Or to the shaman-guy," Somnus chimed in. Out of nowhere, Lune walked out onto the platform. The others went quiet as she crossed to the foot of the altar with her little sun trailing above her. The moment her light touched the lowest step, something happened. Dust lifted from the flagstones, every grain rising at once, and instead of scattering it gathered, pulling together into columns and bodies, and then the bodies into rows, until the haze cloud of dust materialized into a vision all around us.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The court was filled with hundreds of goblins, rank upon rank kneeling in the same arrangement the carvings had drilled into us all the way down, packed shoulder to shoulder where we stood. Priests lined the platform steps in their bat-faced masks, bowls in their hands, and at the top of the altar, beside the dark table, stood the shaman. He was old.

Under the mask and the headdress, his body was bent and thin, his staff doing the work of holding him up, and when he raised his free arm, the whole assembly below started chanting. At first, we couldn't quite catch what they were saying, but the more they got into it, the clearer it became. Ah Puch. Ah Puch. Ah Puch. They kept going, and the goblin shaman stood at the top of his altar, drinking it in.

Then the priests began to climb the steps with their bowls, but before they could reach him, the dust settled once again, leaving us alone in the dead city. For a few seconds, the only sound was Lune's paws as she backed away from the altar. Her ears were flat, her light had dimmed to almost nothing, and she came back to my side and pressed against my leg. She was afraid this time, and I couldn't blame her.

"Ah Puch," Verdugo said quietly.

"Of course."

"You know that name too," Alice said.

"We do," Diego nodded, coming up to his squad leader.

"Lord of Xibalba." Rafael joined them.

"God of death. In the myths he rules the underworld. He's the one the dead belong to."

"But he is supposed to be a demon," Verdugo said.

"Not an old, green man with a stick."

"He was their leader," I said.

"They followed him down here, he taught them to live with the thing in the dark, and somewhere along the way they stopped worshipping the bat and started worshipping him."

"He's creepy," Carmen scoffed.

"What happened to them?" Corral asked.

"Where did the people — goblins? — go?" The answer came out of the side halls. Mano Roja's whistle cut the air, the signal for contact, and then I heard them — a dry, scrabbling rush from at least three directions, things moving fast through streets we'd checked and found empty.

"Contact!" Mano Roja shouted, activating Stealth as he sprinted back toward the column.

"Lots!"

"Formation!" I called, but everyone was already moving, the drilled order snapping into place around the casters. Denxy, Corral, and Rafael shoulder to shoulder at the front, Alice and Redcap a step behind, Verdugo pacing the shield line with his axe low.

"Era el momento," the Berserker grinned. They came into the light all at once, and the sight was shocking. We'd spent the last hour learning about these creatures, following their journey to the depths below, and now we could finally see what they'd become. They were goblins once, for sure. Short, with long hands and pointy ears; the frame was still there. But their skin was sickly grey, the texture ashy, and they were void of anything resembling something alive.

Still, they weren't undead in the true sense of the word. They weren't rotting, no skeletal body parts or mystic light controlling their bodies. Their gazes, however, were empty, as if they had lost their sight centuries ago, and they seemed almost indifferent to the intruders and themselves both, blending into the shadows and the haze. It was hard to describe, but it somehow felt like the world had forgotten them, and they happily faded into oblivion. Hollowed of Xibalba Level 24"Hold the line!"

Rafael's voice rang over the noise.

"Do not chase!" The first ones reached the shields, and the fight immediately felt wrong. There was no charge. They came out of the haze at a walk, drifting between the pillars and the basin rims, and when the front rank met the shield wall, they kept pushing, indifferent to the attacks we sent their way. No snarling, no shrieking, none of the noise a goblin fight was supposed to come with.

"Chain Aggression!" Denxy's shield flashed, but the skill did almost nothing. A few of the nearest turned toward him, then even those simply lost interest mid-step and drifted past the shield line's edge as if he had stopped existing, heads tilting toward Desirae's Candlelight instead.

"Taunts are barely holding!" Denxy shouted.

"They don't care about me!"

"They care about the light," I called, because I'd been watching it happen since they emerged. Twilight Hunter cut through the haze, and through it I could see what the others couldn't: dozens more of them out in the dark, and every one of them oriented on a glow. They had ignored Alice as she carved through them, the pair of Rogues darting at their flanks, and the tanks with their shields. Their empty gazes were fixated on Lune's Foxfire entirely, like moths on a lamp.

Some of them went past the Candlelights, and they gave no time to Rafael's burning club, or Alice's lightning, either. They kept gravitating toward my companion's light.

"It's Foxfire," I said.

"They're ignoring everything else."

"Why?" Alice called from the line.

"No idea." The skill had no specific taunt prompt, and it was basically no different than most light-source abilities. But something down here knows the difference, I thought, and Lune knows something about this place, too.

"We can use it." Cyrus arrived at the same place a heartbeat later.

"Her light is the bait. Orion, can she place it away from herself?" She could, and she didn't need instructions either. The little sun drifted away, floating out over the platform's far side, painting the basins gold. Lune stayed pressed against my leg, fur up, watching her own light leave her with her ears flat, and I kneeled next to her, resting one hand on her shoulder in comfort. The effect was immediate and deeply unsettling.

The entire field of them turned at once, with no signal and no sound, and the flow of grey bodies bent away from the shield line and toward the floating sun like water changing the direction of its course.

"They're bunching," I reported, tracking the dark.

"Thirty, forty under it. More incoming from the halls."

"Then that's the kill zone," Cyrus said.

"Wait for them to cluster, then let hell loose." It took most of a minute for the field to gather, grey bodies wading through the gold-painted dark from every hall mouth at once, packing themselves shoulder to shoulder beneath the floating sun.

"Now," Cyrus said, and the dark came apart. Three heads of fire rose behind him, vast and bright enough to throw the whole temple district into hard relief for the first time since we'd entered it.

"Flame Hydra: Inferno!" The heads opened their jaws in unison and bathed the gathered mass in crimson flame, a stream of it, continuous, the heat of it reaching us across half the court, and into the burning press the rest of the rotation landed almost as one. Alice raised her blade overhead and called her Lightning Storm down through the Hydra's glare, white bolts hammering the cluster, litting the grey bodies from inside.

Somnus's Shadow Bolt Barrage fell through the gaps between strikes, unthreading whatever the fire and lightning left standing. Redcap took three running steps and hurled his spear with a shout of "Mach Spear!", and the weapon turned into a flat line of force that tore through the entire width of the crowd before snapping back into his hand. I drew to my ear and loosed into the center of it.

"Verdant Arrow." The shot left my bow with a thundering sound, blitzing through the crowd of enemies. Green light burst upward into a thicket of thorned growth that lashed through everything around it; living growth, down here where nothing had grown for centuries.

"Flame Drill!" Leona's spell corkscrewed in, and melted through whatever was still on its feet, and the dual Holy Nova of Desirae and Carmen went off at the cluster's flank, flattening the stragglers that had wandered wide of the kill zone. Rafael had already swapped weapons — the macuahuitl away, the familiar emerald blade out — and met the few that drifted past the line with a wide, glowing "Emerald Slash!" that took down seven of them in one arc.

Through all of it, through fire and storm and thorns, not one of them turned away from the little golden sun, and when the Hydra's heads finally crashed down to seal the work, the last of the Hollowed were still reaching toward the light as they came apart. Then the spells guttered out, and the dark folded back in over the court, and nothing in it moved anymore. Level Up!