Soulless Soul

Chapter 5: The Sinking Catacombs

When consciousness returned, it came with a foul, suffocating stench. It was a sickening cocktail of damp earth, metallic rot, and old blood caked so deeply into the stagnant air that Sky could actively taste the copper on his tongue. He gagged, his throat tightening automatically against the foul air.

He groaned, pressing a trembling palm to his forehead. His head felt like it was splitting clean open. The back of his skull throbbed with a rhythmic, white-hot agony where the guard’s iron staff had connected. Every pulse of his heart sent a fresh wave of nausea rolling through his stomach. Sky forced his swollen, crust-rimmed eyes open, utterly dumbfounded by his surroundings.

He was in a cage. Not a small, claustrophobic box meant for a single prisoner, but a massive, vaulted enclosure. Thick, decaying iron bars curved upward into the darkness, their upper reaches completely lost in heavy, impenetrable shadow. The floor beneath him was a mixture of loose dirt and jagged stone, wet with an oily moisture cold enough to seep right through his trousers. And he was not alone. Others were moving alongside him, shifting restlessly like phantoms within the deep shadows of the dark cell.

The space was suffocatingly crowded. It felt less like a prison and more like a slaughterhouse holding pen. Freezing bodies pressed tightly against freezing bodies. In one corner, a cluster of children wept in low, exhausted whimpers, clutching desperately at their mothers’ tattered, mud-soaked clothes. Their faces were deathly pale, their eyes rimmed with raw red rings. In another corner, a group of men sat hollow-eyed and silent, staring blankly at the filth between their knees. Some rocked back and forth in a state of catatonic shock. Others didn’t move at all, staring right through the walls.

And in the far corners, half-buried in the damp, shifting earth, lay bloated corpses. They were already rotting, their skin turned a mottled purple-grey, actively being reclaimed by the hungry ground. The stench of their decomposition hung thick, yet no one had bothered to move them. Survival left no room for sanitation.

A fat, hairless rat scurried over Sky’s bare foot, its claws scratching against his skin. He jerked his leg away with a sharp intake of breath.

Think. Status. I need the Status.

Desperate for any kind of leverage or advantage he could find in this living hellhole, Sky closed his eyes. He deliberately blocked out the collective crying, the overwhelming smell of decay, and the suffocating weight of all those desperate people pressing into his personal space. He focused entirely inward, channeling his consciousness toward the back of his mind exactly the way the logistics officer had instructed.

With a faint, crystalline chime, a translucent, glowing array flickered into existence right in front of his eyes. The blue and gold writing floated silently in the dark air. It was a stark, jarring contrast—the only clean, perfect thing in this ocean of filth. Most of the user interface was greyed out, locked behind geometric seals that refused to budge.

But at the very top of the floating screen, blinking with an urgent, aggressive red hue, was a notification he hadn’t seen before.

[AN ARRAY HINT]

[Protect your soul at all costs. The vessel cannot survive without the core.]

Sky stared at the glowing pixels. His brow furrowed, a cold sweat breaking out across his neck. Protect my soul? How? How was he supposed to do that here, locked in a subterranean cage with no weapon, dwindling physical health, and absolutely no idea how the mechanical rules of this world worked? He didn’t understand the parameters of the array yet. And if he didn’t learn them fast, he’d be nothing more than another nameless corpse rotting in the dirt. He needed information. He needed to map this place out in his head, find a structural weakness, or exploit a guard’s routine. Anything.

Next to him, an old man was slumped heavily against the rusted bars. His skin looked like brittle parchment stretched precariously over old bone. His clothes hung off his skeletal frame like a tattered shroud. He hadn’t moved a single muscle since Sky had opened his eyes.

Sky leaned in closer, his voice barely a whisper. It came out dry and raspy, sounding like sandpaper scraping across raw wood. "Where... where are we? What is this place?"

It took an agonizingly long time for the old man to respond. Slowly, painfully, his head lifted. His eyes were completely hollow, sunken deep into his skull. No light remained in his pupils—just an absolute, crushing despair. Looking into them felt like staring into a house that had been entirely hollowed out by fire. It felt like his soul had been violently scooped out of him.

"We are in the Sinking Catacombs of Darkness," the old man rasped. His voice trembled and cracked like dry autumn leaves scraping across cement. "The bottom tier of a subterranean nowhere. The place where things are brought to be forgotten."

"How did you get here?" Sky asked, leaning his weight forward, hoping against hope to extract something useful from the man’s memory.

"I don’t know..." The old man’s gaze wandered aimlessly up into the dark vault. "It has been so long. I cannot even remember my own name at all. Nor my family. The damp eats your thoughts after a while."

Sky swallowed hard, his throat dry. "The Crimson Apostles? The ones in the red robes with the weeping eyes?"

"The same." The old man gave a wet, humorless chuckle that turned into a wet cough. "They do not want ransom, boy. They do not want gold or land. They are gathering living vessels. Bringing them down into the dark. For the Harvest."

"Harvest?" The word sent a chill straight down Sky’s spine.

"Sacrifice. Ritual. Feeding," the old man said, shrugging his bony shoulders as if discussing the weather. "The words change depending on which priest is speaking. The result does not. No one leaves this cage alive. And no one escapes the eyes of the abyss."

Sky frowned, his eyes narrowing as he looked through the bars. "How can you be sure of that? No one has ever escaped?"

The old man’s dull gaze flicked toward the heavy iron bars, then to the heavily armed guards walking their perimeter outside, and finally to the bloated corpses in the mud. "Because I have watched many come... and I have watched them all go. None return."

Sky’s stomach turned violently. "Then why are you still alive? Why didn’t they take you?"

The old man didn’t answer with words. Instead, with a slow, deliberate movement of his trembling hand, he pulled the collar of his tattered shirt down.

Sky choked back a gasp.

Where a human heart should be beating, there was absolutely nothing. Just a dark, impossible void. It was a hole right in the center of his chest, perfectly round, with tendrils of absolute shadow swirling slowly inside the cavity. There was no blood. No exposed organs. No bone. Just a terrifying, localized absence of reality.

Sky recoiled, his back hitting the dirt. Instantly, a brutal spike of pain shot through his skull. It was white-hot, agonizing, like someone had driven a rusted railroad nail straight into his brain.

"Agh!"

He fell entirely back onto the ground, clutching his head with both hands, his vision swimming with violently flashing colors. A few grueling minutes passed before the blinding pain finally dulled down to a heavy, throbbing ache behind his eyes. Sky sat up slowly, panting for air, his chest heaving. Heavy sweat ran down his face despite the freezing temperature of the catacombs.

With shaking hands, he conjured his runes again to check his vitals. The blue screen materialized before him.

Name: Skies

HP: 3 / 5

Armor: 3 / 5

"Damn it," Sky whispered under his breath, his teeth chattering. "I lost another one."

Just from looking at the old man’s chest. Just from the sheer cognitive headache of the proximity. The Dungeon Array was actively punishing him for witnessing things his current tier wasn’t supposed to comprehend. His health was ticking away without him even entering a fight, and if he didn’t find a way out of this cage soon, the Harvest wouldn’t even need to claim him—the environment would finish him first.

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