Falling into the Abyss

Thank you Papercrane for your kofis—Bonus Chapter (4/5)

Facing Samuel’s question, Ethan was simply at a loss. His gaze darted behind Samuel, and he found that Schneider and the others were not far away, staring at him with eyes filled with suspicion.

Among these people, only Samuel had seen his mutation, but would Samuel tell Schneider?

Ethan didn’t want Samuel to know about the chaotic images he saw, so he made up a casual excuse, “Nothing. I had a headache just now. Let’s go.”

Ethan was silent as he listened to all of their speculations as they walked through the empty hall.

“There’s such a large palace that is not consistent with the horned people’s regular architectural style,” the sergeant looked around and said, “The shape of these pillars gives people a……very uncomfortable feeling. They seem like they’re about to collapse.”

“Don’t you think it might be an ancient mausoleum or something? For the Holy race or something akin to it, and most probably for ancient princes and nobles. Maybe that was the style at that time.”

“Damn, people having horns on their heads is strange enough. Why would their tombs be built so strangely?”

“This may not be a tomb, but a temple,” Stan leaned against Schneider’s back and whispered, “Before I went to the city, I saw many ancient tombs that were different from those on the major planets. No tomb owner would make the entrance so obvious and choose such a damp place, especially if the other party was a noble. On the contrary, it should be a temple. I heard that the dead bodies of the horned people are usually buried in trees, but their temples are usually buried deep in the ground.”

Ethan agreed with him. He had seen some pictures of the horned people’s temples, which were really buried deep underground like tombs. However, the architectural style of this temple was not in line with the rounded architectural style of the horned people. Moreover, it was too large and seemed to have been abandoned for quite a long time. There was also a smell of decay in the air, like a mummy that had been asleep for a thousand years.

Most importantly, there were no apparent sculptures of the Great Wise Man worshipped by the people here.

Finally, they came to the end of the hall. However, their footsteps abruptly halted. At the end of the hall was a towering stone wall without any stone carvings. The wall was covered from top to bottom with round holes, big and small, just like a pockmarked face eroded by wind and frost. One of the biggest holes was close to the ground and appeared like a subway tunnel that was just dug out. All the stones in the holes were pitted by corrosion. There were some translucent mucus membranes left in the grooves, spreading to the ground and the surrounding area.

A faint cold wind blew out from those caves, along with a strong fishy smell.

“Do you guys think……” Samuel was the first to speak, “These holes couldn’t be where the worms drill out from, right……”

What he said was precisely what everyone was thinking, but when they heard someone saying it, all of them felt their scalps turn numb.

Looking at the number of the holes, and looking at the holes as big as the subway tunnels……

“So those worms out there were trapping us in their nest? Do they want to save us for the winter?” Samuel hummed and laughed as he sought to find humor in their worrying situation, but the others didn’t feel that it was very funny.

The sergeant sighed and said, “We’re dead.”

Ethan suddenly approached the nearest large hole and reached for the rock, before climbing up and standing inside the hole. He suddenly heard a long sigh, and the stench spread to his nose.

”Ethan! Come back!” Samuel cried earnestly behind him.

Ethan looked back at them. “You wait for me here. I’ll go in and have a look. There may be other exits.”

He did not want to recall the scene of Ethan’s mutation and didn’t want to believe that Ethan had become……a monster.

He looked so normal now, no different from before? Maybe that mutation was only temporary? Samuel kept telling himself that.

However, now he had no choice but to suspect that if they were trapped here and Ethan could really control those huge worms, did Ethan belong to their human side or the disgusting worms’ side?

His suspicion and hesitation did not escape Ethan’s eyes. The Beta stepped back and said, “Don’t follow me.” After he finished speaking, he gave Samuel a deep look before turning around. The darkness quickly engulfed his figure.

He didn’t even bring a light source.

Samuel turned around and saw the other three staring at him in disbelief. Schneider asked, “You’ll allow him to head inside just like this?”

“He……he said he knew what he was doing. He didn’t want us to follow.”

Schneider lowered Stan from his back and frowned, asking, “Do you believe him?”

Samuel hesitated for a moment and nodded.

Now, two of them were seriously injured, so it was not appropriate to act recklessly. They decided to move a little further away from the wall to rest and wait for a while. Stan had lost a lot of blood. They sprinkled the rest of the hemostatic agent on the wound, but it continued to ooze blood. Additionally, the burn on the sergeant’s arm was getting worse. Although it had been bandaged up, the sergeant seemed to feel itchy and often scratched it hard. And gradually, the arm gave off a bad smell.

No one knew if the acid from those worms was poisonous.

Schneider and the sergeant continued to try to use their pagers to contact headquarters for help. Still, somehow none of their electronic devices could transmit or receive any signal. It was like they were being cut off from the world by an invisible wall. Finally, the sergeant angrily threw the communicator on the ground and gave up.

Darkness, the color of instinctual fear, was the result of mixing every color together. It also represents the color when everything falls into nonexistence and is the color of nothingness.

Ethan used to be very afraid of the dark. When he was a child, he accidentally dropped his father’s capsule into a water cup and was locked in a narrow closet by his father. His mother had gone abroad to perform at that time, and only he and his father were at home. He was locked up all day. No matter how he begged for forgiveness, it was useless. He almost thought that his father would never let him out again.

From then on, he had grown afraid of the darkness and narrow spaces. When he was sleeping, he used to have to turn on a dim light beside his pillow. When Roland saw it, he laughed that he was such a big adult, yet he was afraid of the dark.

However, now he didn’t feel anxious, and he even liked this kind of darkness. He didn’t know why but although he couldn’t see anything, he could sense what direction he was going.

Maybe he was born to be in the dark.

The bumpy road below his feet reminded him of the tracks inside an intestine. He suspected that he was walking in the stomach of a huge monster. He thought that if he was really in a creature’s intestines, he might soon be digested into a pool of excrement. Thinking of this, he began to chuckle.

He tried to feel whether Tanisiel transmitted any thoughts to him in the dark, but his mind was still hauntingly empty. He had not heard from Tanisiel for a week, and he had begun to wonder whether their temporary soul bond had lost its effect? Or, could he have accidentally failed to notice a thought that Tanisiel passed on to him? Or……something happened to Tanisiel?

He refused to believe in the last possibility. He didn’t know what he would do if something happened to Tanisiel.

At this time, he suddenly heard a sigh near his ear.

The sigh came from so close that it seemed to have originated in his ear. He could even feel the fluffy breath of air blow as the hairs inside his ear shook.

“Who!” Ethan exclaimed with a shudder.

He was enveloped in silence. It was as though he had been petrified into a statue, like how amber wraps around a bug.

Ethan took a few more steps. This time, he felt something sticky rub on the back of his hand. He staggered a few steps in the opposite direction and snapped, “Who’s here!”

He was greeted by silence in the darkness. Just as Ethan felt that he was about to lose his patience, a childish and androgynous voice spoke, “We are here. For a very long time.”

The voice sounded strange as if their tongue was not very flexible, and their words were laced with a strong accent.

Ethan tried to reach out in all directions, but he couldn’t touch anything. He ran forward, trying to get rid of the unreal voice, unsure if it was a hallucination.

However, the voice followed him.

“It’s so cold here, so cold, so crowded……”

“We’re leaving……to a warmer place……to wait for the descent of God……”

“Egg……eggs……lay eggs……expand……”

The rigid, mechanical, and childlike voice constantly followed him like a nightmare. He was unable to distinguish the direction and source.

Everyone else had fallen asleep. Schneider was alone in the dark, watching Samuel’s sleeping face. He turned the light on the gun to the dimmest setting. The gentle light stroked the side of Samuel’s face, causing the rigid and strong outline of his face to soften until he appeared more like a real Omega than his usual appearance.

Schneider looked down at the palm of his hand and thought that they might die here together.

Before he became the chief security officer of the Forbidden City, he was sent along with the garrison to wipe out some pirates who had been harassing the Earth Union’s borders. In that fierce battle, his comrades in arms and his lover, a strong and beautiful female Alpha, were instantly burned into steam by the pirate’s new microwave gun right before his eyes. He had been seriously injured in that war, causing his right hand to become a little inflexible, so he was no longer suitable to be a front-line officer. Because he had successfully protected several civilian hostages, he was awarded several medals and transferred to the Forbidden City. Initially, the chief security officer was an idle title with little work and a hefty salary because most of the actual management was in each of the East and West areas, such as Vasilev in the East. As the chief security officer, he only needed to be responsible for formulating the basic guard and defense policies, making regular patrols in the Forbidden City, and ensuring that enough nonhuman personnel were arranged for all the atonement missions assigned by the Forbidden City’s Council.

However, probably due to his personality, he liked to complete many tasks, and many of the jobs that Vasilev and the West Area’s director were in charge of were taken over by him. He probably wanted to keep himself busy so that he didn’t have to think of his lover, who has been dead for several years.

That was until he found Samuel and saw his wild and tough eyes, surging with uneasiness. That look was highly similar to his former lover. It was true that Samuel was different from her, but after her death, Samuel had been the only one to move his heart.

He wanted to obtain Samuel, to embrace his cheetah-like body, to see his face soaked in desire, to hear his own name called out by his full lips.

If they were going to die here, then he hoped to be able to voice the obsession that had been torturing him before their end arrived.

He looked with fascination at Samuel’s side profile and leaned downwards to steal a kiss on that cheek. However, just as he bent down, Samuel opened his eyes. The dark brown eyes turned slightly and looked at him.

Schneider’s body turned stiff, and he sat up straight quickly, acting in a prim and proper manner.

“You want to kiss me?” Samuel asked in a factual tone.

“No,” Schneider retorted too quickly, and his excuse was also very lame, “I just wanted to see if you were really asleep.”

Samuel sat up slowly, his eyes shining in the dark. “It seems that Ethan was right.”

“What?”

“He said you like me.”

Schneider wanted to refute the accusation, but he didn’t know why he repeated his previous question. “……Do you believe him?”

“I didn’t believe him before, but I do now.” Samuel seemed to find it a little funny, folding his arms and staring at him. “The chief security officer actually took a fancy to me, a nonhuman. Should I feel very honored?”

His prickly tone hurt Schneider, and he looked away and whispered, “Don’t talk to me in that tone. I don’t owe you anything.”

“You’re right. It was me who has always owed you.” Samuel saw that the handsome and perpetually face now contained a hint of sadness, and his heart softened. He asked in a low voice, “Are you sure it wasn’t because of the last time you……were in a special predicament, and I helped you, and you accidentally took me as your Alpha and fell in love with me?”

Schneider’s cheeks flushed, but the light was too dim for Samuel to see. “Don’t feel too good about yourself!”

Samuel chuckled in a low voice and leaned forward, deliberately getting close to the embarrassed chief security officer as he frivolously traced Schneider’s jaw with his fingers. “If I kiss you now, will you hit me?”

“……Yes!”

“Do you want to try?”

“You dare!” The chief security officer’s angry look was dignified and frightening. Still, for some reason, Samuel felt it was a little cute.

Samuel was about to cause a little more mischief when he heard a cry of pain from the sergeant. The sergeant, who was lying on the ground, was covering his burned arm and rolling on the ground as though he was in great pain.

Schneider rushed over and had Samuel hold him down before carefully untying the bandage around his arm.

Then, he almost threw up.

In the festering and putrid wound, a large section of white maggots greedily devoured the rotten meat.

When the sergeant himself saw his arm, he immediately screamed, “No, no, no, no, no!!!!”

Samuel and Schneider looked at each other in shock. The wound was deteriorating and decaying too quickly. It was not normal.

However, based on their recent missions, it seemed that most situations they had faced were far from ordinary.

Schneider toughened his voice and said to the sergeant, “The infection is too serious. It may require amputation.”

The author has something to say:

Happy new year, everyone ~ ~ ~ thank you for the little angels’ red envelopes ~ ~ muuuua!!!