Teclos turned around.

And immediately wished he had not.

The room beyond the iron door was not a dungeon.

It was a butcher’s shop with human parts.

For a moment, his mind refused to understand what his eyes were seeing. The stone walls stretched far and wide beneath the castle, as wide as the whole castle seemed. Lanterns burned in neat rows on both sides and on the ceiling, spaced approximately one meter apart. Their light shone over the iron contraptions, chains, hooks, cages, tables, and things Teclos did not even know how to name.

The smell hit him like a cloud of rot and disease.

Blood was everywhere, accompanied by burned flesh and sweat.

Fear and agony were carved into the faces of people lying on the contraptions or inside the cages. But none of them were alive. What he saw were just corpses.

Teclos’s stomach clenched violently. He tried to hold it back, tried to force himself to breathe through his mouth, but the next inhale only made it worse.

He stumbled one step to the side, grabbed the wall, and vomited.

The vomit tore through his throat in a jet stream until his eyes watered. His body shook as he emptied what little was still in his stomach, one hand pressed against the filthy, cold stone.

When it finally stopped, he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and forced himself to look again.

The first body that hung closest to him already spelled a bad omen for what atrocities he was about to see.

At first, he thought it was some kind of dried animal skin stretched across a frame. But then he saw a human face attached to it.

Or it had been one, once.

The body was shriveled, the skin pulled tight over bone like old leather that had been left unattended for too long in the sun. The cheeks had collapsed inward. The lips had peeled back from the teeth. The eyes were gone, but the sockets still seemed to stare at him with the last shape of terror carved around them.

Thin tubes ran from the corpse’s wrists and neck into glass jars beneath it.

And those jars were full of dark, clotted blood.

They had drained this person like livestock.

A few steps farther, another corpse lay strapped to a metal table. Its chest had been opened with careful, precise cuts, the ribs spread apart by iron clamps. Whatever had been inside was gone. Not torn out in a frenzy, but removed piece by piece, labeled and placed in jars along the shelf beside it.

Some of the jars still pulsed faintly with mana.

Teclos’s fingers trembled.

The deeper he moved, the worse it got.

There were cages hanging from the ceiling, each one barely large enough for a person to crouch inside. Some held bodies folded in impossible positions, their limbs twisted and stiff, bones broken and healed wrong again and again. Others held only scraps of what had once been human.

Hair, teeth, a single hand still chained to the bars.

A wheel stood near the center of the room, its spokes dark with old blood. There was a man’s corpse bound to it. His arms and legs had been stretched so far that the joints no longer looked like joints. His head hung to the side, and his jaw was locked open in a silent, final scream.

Beside it stood an iron chair covered in spikes, some long, some thin, all stained black near the tips. The body slumped in it was so thin it looked like a skeleton wrapped in torn cloth. Its fingers had been broken one by one, each bent at a different angle, as if whoever had done it had taken their time.

The faces were the worst part. Every corpse had one.

That same expression.

Eyes wide or hollow. Mouths open, with no teeth or barely any left. Their skin stretched and stiff like leather, markings of unbearable agony carved all over it. They had not died quickly. None of them had. Whatever happened here, or whoever did this, had stretched their deaths out until death itself must have felt like mercy.

Teclos kept walking, even as every part of him felt revolted by what he saw in every corner of the dungeon.

Racks lined one wall.

Iron masks sat on a table beside heated brands and tongs.

Chains dangled from pulleys above a pit filled with dark, dried stains.

There were saws, needles, hooks, clamps, curved blades, bone screws, barrels filled with filthy water, and narrow coffins lined with rusted spikes. One table had restraints for wrists, ankles, throat, and forehead. Another had grooves cut into the metal so blood could flow neatly into buckets beneath it.

It made Teclos want to vomit his guts out again.

This place was madness. It was hard for Teclos to comprehend what had happened here. He had seen some history books and documentaries about war in his previous world, but this was on another level.

This was organized, recorded, and maintained by some soulless people who should have been ended for the sake of humanity... and the church was right next to this shit, yet they still did these atrocities unbeknownst to anyone.

Besides the carnage, there were signs of very meticulous people doing this. The tools were cleaned after use and shone as if they were new. The floors had channels carved into them to drain blood. Each shelf and jar was labeled in alphabetical order. Instruments were arranged by size and purpose. There were ledgers stacked on a desk near the far wall, each one clean except for the bloody fingerprints staining the corners.

Some unknown psycho was working here.

Teclos stepped around a pile of bodies near the left side of the chamber. Well, more like remains than bodies. Some were hacked into pieces and thrown together until he could not tell where one person ended and another began. An arm without skin. A face with no lower jaw. A torso eaten through by something that had left small, round, bloody tunnels in the flesh. Bones stripped clean in places, while other parts remained swollen and black.

It was brutal beyond belief, and after a moment of holding his breath, a sound escaped Teclos’s throat.

Something between rage and horror, after he became less and less hopeful that Saldia was still alive. After all, gods knew what these lunatics had done to her in the whole week she had been missing.

Darkness gathered around his feet and spread across the floor. The mana trembled with rage, crawling toward every corpse in his vicinity.

The lantern flames on the wall flickered in the presence of true darkness.

Teclos searched from face to face, and for now, none of them were Saldia.

He checked and double-checked again.

The panic and disgust crawling through him made him move faster. He passed cages, tables, hanging bodies, and torn people for hundreds of meters. Every time he saw red hair, his heart stopped for a second. For now, luckily, it wasn’t her, even though he hated feeling relief upon seeing this madness. It was still better than finding her dead.

"Saldia," he whispered, desperately clinging to hope.

He reached the far side and found another iron door. There were scratch marks drawn on it with dried blood. He felt like he had entered a haunted house.

Teclos crouched.

He noticed something near the bottom of the doorframe, almost invisible beneath the iron frame. There was a faint smear of green-colored crushed herb ointment... he recognized that solution.

Just to be sure, his hand hovered over it. And sure enough, it was a pain-amplifying solution that attacked the nervous system... only this one was mixed even stronger. It had healing properties as well.

Great for torture...

Teclos stood up. By now, the shadows were swirling around him in an erratic, vortex-like pattern.

Whatever waited beyond that door made him anxious.

And whoever had built this place, whoever had done this beneath the castle, would pay now, because he would tear this festering wound open for the world to see and send the church after them once he gathered proof. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

Teclos exhaled one last time, mentally preparing himself, and then pushed the door open.

The next corridor was narrower than the chamber before it, but somehow it was even worse.

There were no bodies here, only desperate and bloody hand marks.

Deep scratches lined the walls, showing that people had been dragged away while clawing at the stone. Dark stains trailed across the floor, some old and black, others still fresh, accompanied by the boot marks of the perpetrators.

The air was cold, carrying a damp and sour smell.

With every careful step he took, he felt like he would lose his mind... he barely contained the darkness now, and if someone were to appear, they would surely notice him... although killing them would be a pleasure.

He did try to stretch his senses, but nothing came back clearly. The wards seemed to twist the space around him, dulling sound, swallowing mana, and making the corridor feel endless.

After a while of nothing but bloody walls, he passed smaller cells carved into the walls on both sides.

Most were empty.

Some were not.

A few prisoners sat curled in corners, too weak to lift their heads. Others stared past him with hollow eyes, as if he wasn’t even there. None of them spoke. None of them even begged to be released anymore. That silence scared him.

Teclos looked into every cell, searching for her even if he could not bear the empty gazes of the people behind the bars.

The Count was benevolent?

People liked that scum?

He funded orphanages and smiled in public. Who knew that underneath, he was one of the worst people alive...

Those angry thoughts now filled his head like poison. The Count wore a mask polished so brightly that everyone had gone blind staring at it.

And Saldia being alive, now that he’d seen everything?

That hope, the one he had clung to like a lifeline as he was sinking into deep and dark water, began to rot in his hands.

He hoped and even begged god that she was at least alive, even if she was like one of those hollow people back in the cells. Please, please be alive. That was all that went through his mind right now.

Then the corridor finally ended, and another iron door appeared. The only difference was that this one was massive.

Far larger than the last, reinforced with black metal bands and carved with so many runes that the surface shimmered faintly in the dark. It had no handle or window. Only a lock at its center, shaped like an eye.

Teclos stopped before it. Whatever was behind this door...

He already feared he knew.

He pulled out the last drops of the rune dissolver that he still had. It wouldn’t be enough to get through that heavily warded door, but in combination with the lockpicks, it might work.

With one hand, he smeared the dissolver around the keyframe like a barrier and inserted the lockpick. It took him three tries, but after the third one, he heard a resounding click.

And the door opened.

He stepped inside, and there was a room with ten strange machines before his eyes.

People were impaled on them, and a blue liquid ran down the spikes and from them into a big basin below, which was then sent somewhere along the tubes into another room.

He didn’t know what the machines were, but he knew what they gathered.

Mana.

He saw in real time how those leather skeletons from the first chamber were made...

"Ah..."

And what he feared the most came true. There she was, already with hollowed eyes, shriveled up like the rest of the corpses and with a face of unbearable agony.

There was no heartbeat anymore.

She was dead.

Teclos just stood there, and slowly, a pitch-black tear ran across his cheek. His eyes turned into two black holes that promised to swallow the whole world.

A full-on vortex released from his body and obscured his vision... not that it mattered anymore. The damage was done.

Then, in the next second, a blood-curdling mix between a scream and a growl escaped his mouth, and he lost control over himself.

That scream alerted two men who were working on those godforsaken machines, and they shouted at him.

"Oi! Who let you in here!? This is a restricted area!" one man shouted.

But before they could say anything else, Teclos suddenly appeared right next to them and hacked off their heads in quick succession.

After they collapsed, he released a torrent of compressed shadow slashes at the machinery and destroyed them.

He caught Saldia’s body when she fell, and in contrast to the violent outburst, he handled it with the utmost care, placing her in his lap and suppressing the vortex that was spewing from him.

"No..." he whispered. "Nooo!" Then he cried out, tears falling freely from his face now, although they were still pitch black.

What had he done to deserve this? Why was fate so cruel to him that it took everything away from him?

He sobbed, kneeling on the floor with Saldia in his hands.

Today another piece of his soul died again.