"I'm surprised anyone still uses a relic like a sword these days."
Even now, Jenkins didn't miss a chance to taunt him. In truth, though the wound looked grueso, it wasn't deep. A green aura pulsed faintly in the shadows, steadily nding his flesh.
"There are suits of armor over there. If they were holding loaded guns, you'd already be dead. Williams, I didn't want to kill you. Your death would bring nothing but trouble. But alas, the condition for breaking the seal is a living blood sacrifice. And that woman, due to her special bloodline, can't be used. So, my apologies!"
"Why did you kill the doctor?"
He asked while locked in a struggle, straining to push the sword's blade upward. Quirk, apparently confident in his advantage, actually answered him:
"Faking my death gave the freedom to move. Although I learned from those aberrations what was sealed here, I still needed to carefully locate the gate itself."
"And you're the one who led us to discover the key keeper's secret, aren't you?"
"Of course. I needed a scapegoat for the doctor's murder to keep anyone from suspecting . I truly didn't expect this, Williams. To think you're an Enchanter. Now, if you'll excuse , it's ti for you to die!"
With a final shout, he once again threw his weight into the sword, forcing it down.
Jenkins took a deep breath. "Look at my face!"
Quirk instinctively lifted his head, only to be t with a torrent of fire erupting from Jenkins's mouth. He was instantly engulfed by the Inexhaustible Fire, screaming as he writhed on the ground.
Drawing on his experience from killing the man in the abandoned church outside Nolan, Jenkins worried that letting Quirk die here would fulfill the condition for the blood sacrifice. Just as the man was on his last breath, Jenkins withdrew the Inexhaustible Fire and gave him a cursory healing.
He glanced again at the blue gem radiating a faint light in the darkness, and the golden chains forged from runes. Then, Jenkins hoisted Quirk onto his shoulder and prepared to return to the surface.
As he made his way back through the dim corridor, the tempting doors that had lined the walls did not reappear. The corridor opened into the fan-shaped clearing, and just beyond it lay the entrance to the stairs.
Just five steps from the corridor's exit, Jenkins stopped, his brow furrowed. The fan-shaped clearing was far wider than the corridor, creating significant blind spots from his current vantage point. The areas right next to the entrance, in particular, were completely obscured by the walls.
A sudden, sharp premonition of extre danger pricked at him. Sothing was waiting for him, just to the side of the corridor's entrance.
He dropped Quirk to the floor, tore a piece of unburnt cloth from the man's clothes, and set it ablaze with the Inexhaustible Fire. Wrapping it around a loose stone, he tossed it out into the clearing.
The fan-shaped clearing was illuminated, and the light cast a long shadow from a figure hiding just out of sight. It was sothing the height of a child, its body and limbs starkly angular. Its joints were hollowed out, held together by so unseen chanism. It stood pressed against the wall by the corridor's entrance, perfectly still.
"A puppet..."
Jenkins swallowed hard. "Isn't the seal supposed to be intact? Could this be another illusion, like those doors?"
He didn't dare gamble on it being an illusion, and the figure hiding by the entrance didn't move. They were locked in a stalemate. Jenkins could feel a palpable sense of danger radiating from the owner of that shadow.
The burning cloth flickered quietly. Even with Jenkins deliberately controlling the fla's intensity, it sputtered out after a few minutes.
The mont the fla died, a black silhouette erged from behind Jenkins. It slid forward without a sound, exploding the instant it passed the threshold of the entrance.
The explosion didn't cause the corridor to collapse or seem to have any other effect. But as the echo faded, a wooden gear clattered out from the blind spot and rolled to a stop in the middle of the entrance.
"What's this supposed to an? Did I actually blow up the puppet?"
He quieted his breathing and glanced back. He could still see the sealing chamber behind him, and the seal itself appeared to be intact.
"Did Mrs. Hydela lie? Was this whole thing a trap, and the puppet escaped long ago? No, my Lie Godhood didn't detect any falsehood!"
He set a piece of his own coat on fire and threw it outside. The flas still revealed the puppet's silhouette.
"Should I use my divinity now? No, no, not yet. I need to figure out what's happening first. This is my last drop of divinity, after all."
Ignoring Quirk at his feet, Jenkins crept toward the entrance again, keeping his back to the wall but never crossing the threshold. He closed his eyes to concentrate. Yes, there was a target nearby that his Blasphemous Creation could lock onto.
"Alright."
He silently activated the ability and imdiately heard a rustling from the blind spot. A sudden, shrill, childlike cry echoed from the clearing, followed by the sound of what seed to be a pile of wooden parts clattering to the floor.
The sense of danger vanished instantly. Jenkins leaped out into the open, aiming a makeshift miner's lamp cobbled together from tal parts at the spot where the puppet had been.
The puppet was gone. All that remained on the floor was a pile of crude doll parts and a single, faintly translucent Blasphemy Seed.
"Problem solved!"
He let out a breath of relief and bent to pick up the Blasphemy Seed, but a nagging feeling told him sothing was wrong.
"How could a dangerously sealed creature like that leave behind less than a full coin... Oh no!"
He spun around and ran back into the corridor, only to see a new puppet dragging the unconscious Quirk into the sealing chamber. The puppet shot Jenkins a human-like, mocking grin, then raised a fist like a hamr—devoid of fingers—and brought it down, smashing Quirk's head to pulp.
"They're mass-produced... It was a diversion!"
With Quirk's death, white brain matter and dark red blood splattered across the sealing chamber. The head-sized blue gem wavered in the air for a mont before dropping to the ground like a steam-powered airship that had lost its lift.
As the seal shattered, a foul, sourceless wind howled through the underground space. It wasn't the stench of rotting flesh, but sothing closer to the sll of decaying wood.
The runes on the floor flared with one final golden pulse before fading into darkness. Directly above the circular space, a pitch-black mass struggled to push its way through, held back by so invisible barrier.
A cacophony of whispers swirled around him, the unintelligible words punctuated by the eerie sound of children's laughter. He felt an invisible blow to his head, and blood began to trickle from his nose.
Jenkins stumbled, nearly falling, but caught himself against the wall just in ti. His vision blurred, everything doubling, and he felt unseen eyes watching him from the darkness.
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