Chapter Nine: The Cost of Escape

  “Now!” I roared, in a commanding tone “Don’t just stand there! Break it!”

  Mo Fei’s will was not a wedge against the ritual’s flow. It was a hammer to break the shackles of the ritual. He focused every ounce of his terror, rage, and sheer refusal to be devoured and executed; there was a single hairline fracture in a central vertebra of the Suture Worm, a segment that was glowing faintly.

  “THERE!” Mo Fei bellowed, pointing a trembling finger at the specific spot where bone met the pulsing, fleshy cord of the Suture worm. “Grig! Its spine! BREAK THAT One!!” His voice shouted with all might, almost coughing.

  Grig didn’t hesitate. He didn’t wish to be saved. He wanted to save. With a guttural cry that was pure, unrefined roar, He picked up the heaviest fallen bone fragment he could find, a thick, knotted femur from some long-absorbed prey and attacked the trembling Suture Worm.

  The chamber huffed a muffled noise that seemed to hold its breath. The acid ceased and rose further. The Worm now locked its eyes on them, taking them as a threat to its core function. It writhed its body to face Grig. Its jaw opened to stop him.

  It was a fraction of a second too slow.

  Grig's blow was not efficient. It was monumental. The femur struck a sledgehammer in a glowing fracture with a sound that was not a crack, but a crunch. The sound of sacred geometry being sabotaged.

  Elara stayed back, counting the time she was hoping the ritual would stop, her hands wrapped to gather, proving she was vigilant, looking around for any subtle change.

  Mo Fei caught the distance between himself and the Suture Worm and came beside it. It raised its head at him and aimed directly at Mo Fei with a precise strike. The jagged bone hit Mo Fei’s side, ripping it. The wound was deep but it wasn't enough to kill him; however, the blood loss afterwards could.

  “H-HAN!” Mo Fei’s voice came out in pain. His vision got blurry for a second as he gripped his tunic. He acted like bait. Han jumped at Suture Worm, his hand scratching out the flesh that was acting as a blanket. The Suture Worm’s attention shifted to him. Mo Fei stumbled back, a slight grin on his face, holding his side, blood dripping out, but it was no longer a big deal to him, not as bad as dying.

  Grig looked at Mo Fei, his eyes wary, his eyes searching for the weakness of the Suture Worm that was facing Han. There was nothing but bones, but inside it was meat. He looked at his shackled hand, and his leg hit something, a piece of bone, the corner was sharp enough. With a swift motion, he picked it up and lunged forward.

  When it was going to strike Han, Mo Fei’s expression gradually shifted to realization, and he threw himself at the Suture Worm; his side winced from the pain.

  The Suture Worm stopped at its track, and it threw its whip with its tail, cutting through the air an attack that, if it hits, it'd rip them in half. Mo Fei steps back from the attack, distancing himself.

  Grig leaned back, his back almost touching the flesh-made wall behind him. The tail hit the wall, and it severed the flesh of the wall. The impact shook the wall from its core.

  “I have to pierce through that flesh!” Grig’s thoughts were filled with dedication

  The air was filled with Suture Worm’s fury. Its tail-strike had missed, but the message behind this act was clear: they were not just prey; they were insects or pigs in the butcher shop.

  To Mo Fei, the pain in his side was a hot sensation twitching with every movement. He pressed a hand against the tear in his tunic, feeling the warm drops of blood. It was a distraction, just a small cost from a fight where losing meant everything fell apart.

  Mo Fei’s eyes locked with Grig across the execution chamber. No words were needed. The plan itself was written all over in his grim set of jaws and the sharpened bone shard in his fist. They were already giving hints of the future outcome.

  Han, ever the pivot, danced just out of range of the Worm’s gnashing, bony maw. He wasn’t attacking; with shouts and waves of his arms, he kept the creature’s attention. The Suture Worm was a bull in an arena.

  “The flesh, Grig! Go for it!” Mo Fei yelled, his voice was raw and hurried.

  Grig moved with the terrifying silence of a landslide. He charged low, bone pointed like a dagger toward the Suture Worm where the Worm’s segment met the living wall of the Cathedral.

  The Worm sensed him. It began to turn, and the sound of clattering grew echoing.

  Now it was the turn of Mo Fei.

  He ignored the fire in his ribs. Mo Fei sprinted toward the creature, not far away. Mo Fei’s aim wasn't its head or flanks because he leapt for the very segment Han had exposed, the one with the hairline fracture. His fingers, covered with his own blood, scrabbled against cold bone and wet, living cord. He had found a place and hung on.

  “GRIG! THROW THE PIECE!! HURRY!” His gaze lay on Grig, who nodded and ran towards him with the piece of sharp, jagged bone.

  The Worm jolted, a massive, disgusted spasm. It tried to buck off Mo Fei, to scrape him against the ceiling of ribs. The world became a violent blur of crimson flesh and white bone. But Mo Fei's weight, desperate and clinging, Han’s hit was the final distraction. The Suture Worm’s attention was now all on Mo Fei. A true threat to it. A weak human with no muscles carrying the will harder than cutting a mountain.

  Grig’s strike found its mark, but the bone missed. Mo Fei couldn't catch it, the bones fell to the ground, and the worm moved away from them. Without waiting for another moment, Han ran towards it, his movement quick. When his hand curled at the bone, he rushed to help Mo Fei, who was struggling to hold his weight. The Suture Worm was giving no break, its head hitting the wall, breaking its own skull, and its bone cutting the hand of Mo Fei, his eyes twitching with sharp pain, but he refused to let go. His hands almost slipped. The world felt like everything was over, but Mo Fei suppressed his pain and grasped it harder. The world was now blurry lines.

  A voice cut through the air. Elara, who was silently watching, screamed.

  “The acid is rising faster! Please do it fast,” her voice panicked, the acid ceasing upward, it was now burning the flesh of the walls, a scent of burning meat filled the air.

  Han's head moved towards her for a moment before he decided to jump in with no care for future outcomes. His stoicism faltered for a slight moment to change everything; his will for freedom was now higher than his stoicism.

  Han reached for Mo Fei’s hand. Mo Fei tried to move his hand towards him, but the Worm was not giving any moment, Han had to step backward to keep the distance from the sinister Centipede. With one last attempt, Han got close to it when the Suture Worm was going to hit the wall. Mo Fei moved his hand to hold the piece of bone, but a gasp escaped his mouth when the shockwave of hitting was all focused in his other arm. It gave his palm a long bruise that started bleeding. The white bone of Worm turned crimson from the drop. Mo Fei managed to take the piece of sharp bone.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “HAN! Stay away now, hurry. I am grateful for your efforts.” With this, he tightened his hand around the piece of bone and finally stabbed it directly into its flesh inside the bones of its neck. The bone went through the flesh precisely.

  There was no dramatic crunch. It was a wet, deep sound -THOCK- like an axe sinking into a wet tree root. The sharpened bone shard punched through the rotted flesh and bit deep into whatever passed for the creature’s nervous core.

  For a heartbeat, nothing happened at all.

  Then, the Suture Worm screamed, a sound that pierced the air and seemed to vibrate the very structure of their bones. Han, Elara, and Grig instinctively covered their ears in a desperate bid to shut out the noise, wincing at the intensity of the shrill.

  Mo Fei lunged to do the same to shield his ears, but he was a fraction of a second too slow. A sharp, white-hot burst of pain exploded in his head as one of his eardrums ruptured, leaving his world spinning in a deafening high-pitched sound. The cost of breaking the execution ritual was absolute for Mo Fei, a pressure that slammed his ears into a ringing void, then pushed past through. It gave him nauseating pain in his skull.

  Meanwhile, Han and Elara crumple, hands grasping at their heads, their own screams invisible in the torrent of noise. Grig was blown back off his feet.

  The rigid, ritualistic control broke apart. Every segment scattered around. The rhythmic clatter became a cacophony of snapping tendons and bones clattering together. From its gaping jaw,

  Another sound began to build, but it wasn't a harvesting note of the ritual; it was the sign of ritual collapse.

  The scream tore through the Cathedral. The living walls blistered. The four body-hollows started rotting away, a pungent scent of rotting flesh scattered around, and all of them covered their nose now. The piercing noise blasting their eardrums wasn't enough that now this smell was giving them a vibe of a Yelp review that would definitely start with 'Zero stars, would not recommend.

  And the acid lake boiled and receded. The ritual halted, and it was getting over.

  The flesh covering the exit started falling down, and it started shrinking. The doorway gradually started to open. Elara's eyes had sparkling glints; hope had visited her.

  Grig’s expressions that were full of dedication to survive faltered; he might have seen a future that he wished to live.

  Mo Fei’s expression shifted to smug; he had proven himself that he would stand against fate and his destiny. It was his other victory, but a far bigger achievement; he won this time a true win.

  Then Suture Worm’s catastrophic shriek was cut off as the silence swallowed it up. The Centipedes' form went rigid, then began to disintegrate, and the bones fell like silent fragments that fell like black snow.

  The execution was stopped.

  Mo Fei stumbled back from the edge of the rift; one side of his hearing was gone, replaced by a hollow ringing. His side throbbed, drops of blood falling like a river.

  His temporary comrades were picking themselves up, battered, but not deafened, their faces etched with a new kind of awe… not at salvation, but at the sheer, violent scale of the ruin we had wrought.

  Before them, the Master’s perfect living execution chamber was now a twitching, silent ruin.

  And through the grievous tear they had hacked into reality, a path of petrified wood and profound stillness beckoned with the only option left.

  Escape from the exit.

  Mo Fei, always cautious, took action recklessly, his hearing getting bad, but worse was his wound on his side. He tried to stand up, but the aftermath shook both his feet. Grig and Han offered their shoulders for support, though the pain needed painkillers or healing.

  The silence that followed the disintegration of the Suture Worm was not peaceful.

  For Mo Fei, the world was split in two. On one side: a shrill, endlessly creating noise. On the other hand, a vast, muffled void where sound went to die. He could see Han’s lips moving, and he could see the strain in Han’s throat, but all he could hear was a distant watery murmur.

  Elara’s hopeful gasp appeared theatrical; Grig's heavy breathing was just the rise and fall of his chest.

  Mo Fei, half in their world and half trapped in silence.

  “I can’t…” Mo Fei let out a whisper, his own voice, a vibration in his jaw, too loud for his blocked ear. “I can’t hear you clearly.” Mo Fei was trying to read their faces.

  Han’s eyes flickered with a quick understanding, then they shifted to urgency. He pointed a sharp finger at the tear in the world, the petrified wood doorway… then made a slashing motion across his throat and pointed back the way they’d come. Mo Fei tried to understand. He collected the dots. “The Cathedral is dying. It is not safe. Go. Now?”

  The chamber affirmed it, the blistered walls liquefied. It was in terminal necrosis, and they were standing in its rotting guts.

  “Move!” Mo Fei tried to yell, but the command was distorted, his voice uncontrolled. He stumbled forward, his side screaming a bright, hot protest with each step. The grin of victory in his face was gone; it was washed away by pain and a creeping, nauseating dizziness from blood loss. His vision flickers between clear and blurry.

  Grig, a solid pillar of muscle, moved instantly. He slung Mo Fei’s good arm over his shoulders, taking his weight without a word. Han supported the other side. Elara hurried ahead, eyes wide, checking out the weird, wobbly stuff around the exit.

  Petrified bones weren’t clean or inviting. It was a scar on the meat. The bone's edges were jagged like shattered wood. The silence emanated from it; it was heavy, a pressure that pushed against their eardrums. To Mo Fei’s deafened senses, it felt like walking toward a wall of cold static.

  When they reached the threshold, Elara hesitated, one foot on the spongy, dying flesh, the other hovering over the silent, grey dust of the path beyond.

  A deep, wet, tearing sound rang. A sound Mo Fei felt in his bones. He looked back to see.

  The far wall of the execution chamber was peeling away. The great sheets of red tissue sloughed away, revealing rot behind. The air kept growing thick with the suffocating reek of decaying meat. The Cathedral was beginning to reshape, perhaps for the next execution.

  “GO!” This time, Han’s shout was visible, a raw explosion of motion from his face as he realized the situation.

  Elara jumped. Her figure steps outside to the other chamber of the cave.

  Grig half-dragged, half-carried Mo Fei across. The moment they passed the threshold, the world changed.

  The sound died. Not faded. Died.

  For Han, Grig, and Elara, it was an assault of a different kind. The sudden change between shrill and deafening silence was overwhelming. Their own frantic breaths, their pounding hearts. For Mo Fei, it was a perverse relief. The tinnitus in his one ear faded into the universal quiet. The painful pressure difference between his ears equalized. Here, it was the native state.

  He pushed away from Grig, standing on wobbling legs. Grig alerted his expressions to help Mo Fei if needed. The world here was a cavern, illuminated by a sourceless grey twilight. The floor was a fine, soundless ash. It was cold and utterly lifeless. There was no source of life forms.

  Behind them, the doorway and the wound framed a view of the dying Cathedral. They were spectators watching the flesh merge to recreate the execution chamber. The last thing they saw was a surge of black, oily fluid before the petrified wood seemed to knit itself closed, leaving them outside.

  They had escaped.

  But as Mo Fei looked at his trembling hands, stained with his own blood, and felt the deep, thirsty ache in his side, he knew the obvious truth.

  They hadn’t won.

  “Han…” Mo Fei’s voice was heavy from the events. Han’s eyes met his.

  “You said if we manage to escape, then we will reach the ‘Ascendant’ of ‘Dream Weavers’, so was that through this exit?” Mo Fei questioned carrying the weight of the harsh truth as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. His eyes lay on the ground. And he realized they were not alone in the ash. There were footprints, recent ones, leading away into the dark.

  Someone else was here. Or had just left.

  The cost of the scream was paid. The price of the silence was now coming due.

  Han’s eyes first followed Mo Fei's; his expression turned into the heavy weight of realization.

  “Yes, we will reach the palace of the ‘Overseer’. The master had created these ways so even if someone breaks the ritual.” Han paused, his voice a low rasp that Mo Fei read on his lips, but he still could not hear clearly; his half-puzzled expressions said it all. Han sensed it, and he got closer to Mo Fei’s ear for Mo Fei to hear, and then Han continued.

  “Which his arrogant mind wouldn't believe but he'd still not play recklessly. This way will lead us into the lands of ‘Trasia’...”

  The words landed in the silence with the weight of a tombstone. The escape was nearly impossible without crossing paths with the ‘Overseer’.

  Elara hugged herself, her eyes darting to the dark tunnels. “So about those footprints…?”

  “Could be other ‘exhibits’,” Grig signed, his large hands moving with surprising, grim eloquence, “Or the minions of ‘Overseer’ that was preparing for the execution of the elders.”

  Mo Fei’s mind, sharpened by pain and silent desperation, pieced it together.

  “Then we will not follow the footprints,” Mo Fei said, his own voice sounding flat and strange to his one working ear. “We take a different way.”

  “All paths here lead to the same place, boy,” Han murmured, his shoulders slumping with a lifetime’s worth of crushed hope. “To him.” His stoicism of moving on what he couldn't control was his way of living.

  “No.” Mo Fei pointed at the wall, at the faint, ghostly impressions. Up close were dozens of faces, each etched with different expressions of terror. But among them, he saw something else… faint lines, diagrams. Most important was that interconnected pattern of circles. It was crude, scratched in desperation, but it was unmistakably the same pattern as that box.

  “He collects everything,” Mo Fei said, a new, reckless plan forming. “But he only values art, his imagination. The finished piece. What about the torn one? The mistakes?” He looked at the bloody bone shard still clutched in Grig’s hand, a fragment of the shattered Suture Worm. “What about the trash?”

  Before anyone could stop him, he took the shard and hurled it not down a main tunnel, but straight into the dark fissure.

  It didn’t clatter. The silence swallowed the sound of its fall. But a second later, a faint, blue light pulsed from the Crack.

  “It's certain that we will reach him, right?” Mo Fei said.

  The ghostly faces on the wall seemed to waver, their expressions shifting toward the fissure for a fleeting second before freezing again.

  “The stories…” Elara breathed, her voice a whisper in the void. “They also talk of the ‘Quiet that Eats.’ The thing even masters walls away. The ward-”

  Han said the next words with a sigh.

  “Feng, he knows about it, but he is left behind.” A person who could have helped them collect knowledge was Feng, but his cowardice left him in slavery.

  All of them looked at the path in the direction of Trasia.

  Han met Mo Fei’s eyes, his own wide with a terror beyond anything the Cathedral had inspired; he knew facing ‘Overseer’ was worse. His expression was a question.

  “Which hell do we choose?”

  The choice was no longer between capture and escape. It was between being made a monument to someone else’s power, or vanishing into a silence so complete it would un-write them from existence itself. ‘Overseer’ Who? A name? A cruel human who got power? Or a person that loves art… Mo Fei’s mind was questioning what hell he should choose. Meet the ‘Overseer’ of this land, or find an impossible way to escape.