Rise Online: Return of the Legendary Player

687  Consumed Village (Part 2)

The silence in that stuffy basement was so deafening that it was as if the walls were whispering in the ears of the people present.

Kaizen and Andrew, paralyzed by the disturbing discovery before them, stared wide-eyed at the man in the cell. He was sitting in a dark corner, his chains rattling as he moved. His hair was matted, and his clothes were torn and stained with dried blood. In his hand, he held a piece of bone, which he used as a tool to write on the walls. The smell of blood permeated the air, and seemed to become even more intense when the torchlight revealed the macabre nature of his improvised writing.

"My God... Urgh..." whispered Andrew, horrified and a little nauseous. "What happened here?"

The man in the cell looked up at the same time as he turned his head, and showed his eyes empty of any glimmer of sanity. He muttered unintelligible words, a continuous stream of delirium that made no sense.

Kaizen, remaining calm, approached the cell and asked carefully: "My friend, what happened here? Who did this to you?"

The man continued to mumble, but his words were incoherent. It wasn't another language, or Kaizen would have known because of the title 'Master of Languages'. What's more, the man soon began to shake his head frantically, as if trying to push away terrible memories.

Andrew approached, looking at the words written on the walls. "They are coming... the eyes in the darkness... we cannot escape..." He read aloud once more, trying to understand the meaning behind these enigmatic words.

Kaizen looked down at the floor of the cell and saw the lifeless body of the man's cellmate. He was pale and covered in wounds, with an expression of horror frozen on his face. It was clear that he had been used to write those grotesque words on the walls after he died.

Carefully, Kaizen asked the man again: "Please tell us what happened here. We want to help."

The man in the cell looked at Kaizen, his eyes finally finding focus for a moment. He whispered, his voice shaky and hoarse:

"They came from the shadows... there was no escape... they can see us even in the dark..."

Andrew frowned. "Who are 'they'? What do you mean they can see even in the dark?"

The man faltered, struggling to find the right words. "Faceless creatures... hungry for our light. They can't be killed... we can only hide..."

"It's useless..." Andrew muttered after taking a deep breath.

In fact, those words were so confusing that they sounded disturbing, but of course there was a sense of truth in them. Something terrible had happened in that village, as well as in the rest of Mibothen, and at least they knew there was a 'They', i.e. someone had done all this, it wasn't just the impact wave of energy that Ragnar said the residents near the border had seen.

Deciding that there was nothing more they could do at that moment, Kaizen opened his system and sent a message to Xisrith to bring Xisrith. They needed someone with a lot of knowledge of cryptozoology to understand what was going on, because even though he was the Psyker, what he knew about the supernatural was nothing compared to the smartest woman in the world.

While they waited for Xisrith and Alina, they busied themselves investigating the rest of the basement.

In addition to the macabre cell, the basement housed a series of dusty documents and old village records. They found maps showing routes to other towns and cities, which was a good start, considering that the map Kaizen has is out of date.

The reinforcement team finally arrived and, obviously, Jayaa came in Xisrith's place.

"Hey, Jayaa, shouldn't you stay in the wagon?" Kaizen asked.

"Xisrith said she'd better stay, and I agreed without hesitation, of course. I know she's stronger than me."

Kaizen and Andrew exchanged a look and could only laugh.

For her part, Alina examined the scene with a critical eye and began asking questions of the man in the cell, who was still visibly upset.

As his mind was confused, Alina used a spell called <Brain Organizer> to make the man articulate his words better.

"I've always wanted to use this... I just have to be careful, because it could cause permanent degenerative damage to his mind." She said.

Then the man began to describe how everything led up to this situation in the basement. According to him, he had been arrested for stealing some apples from a merchant's cart and he was only supposed to be in jail for five days, but as the winter wore on, he asked the mayor to keep him longer, but during one early morning, while the village was asleep, a thunderclap shook everything and the noise of the storm became so oppressive that he thought he could tear the town hall apart.

Suddenly, however, silence overtook everything, from one minute to the next. No voice, no sound of footsteps above him, nothing. Not even a scream. The thief was surprised, because it was common to hear footsteps above him, from the people in the town hall, because many shopkeepers spent the night there so as not to be caught in the storms in the middle of the roads.

The silence went on and on, but it seemed to get louder and louder. At one point, he began to hear the beating of his own heart, as clear as the ticking of a clock. At the same time, he strangely began to feel watched, and in his own words, he described it:

"I didn't know what to do... The world seemed to have stopped... And the darkness that enveloped me seemed to embrace me more and more... Suddenly, amidst this sea of claustrophobic silence, a low whisper blew into my right ear, then my left, until in the darkness itself I finally distinguished them, they hadn't been there a moment ago... But in reality, they were always there, I just wasn't able to see them! Now I can! I can see them! I CAN'T FORGET!"