The cold stone wall pressed against his back. Erika looked at Loren, who was still pale and trembling slightly. He knew he couldn't do this alone.
He needed Loren. Specifically, he needed the minor 'inventory' privileges Quinn had just casually tossed to the noble boy.
"Loren," Erika said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "We have to leave the Black Tower. Now."
Loren's brow immediately furrowed in shock, his voice instinctively dropping even lower, laced with panic. "Are you insane, Erika? Leave? To where? Out into the blasted wasteland? The Creed's hunters are out there! This Tower at least… has walls."
"Walls won't stop what's coming," Erika replied, his gaze frighteningly lucid. "And Quinn didn't take us in out of kindness. We're just… 'miscellany' he hasn't gotten around to sorting yet. Specimens."
He deliberately used Quinn's word. He saw Loren flinch.
"I know he's a monster," Loren stammered, frantically trying to rationalize his fear, "but at least we're not dead yet! If we leave, we won't even survive the night!"
Erika stared at him. The truth burned in his throat: 'The Sanctum will find us because of me. If we stay, Quinn will slaughter us before the Creed even knocks on the door.'
He opened his mouth, and a violent, ugly struggle twisted his insides.
If he told Loren the truth—that he, Erika, was a walking tracking beacon bringing inevitable death to this Tower—would the noble boy still follow him? Or would Loren immediately run back to Quinn, offering Erika's head on a platter to prove his own 'utility' and secure his safety?
In the Sanctum, trust was the fastest way to get your throat cut.
Erika swallowed the truth. It tasted like ash and bile.
"Quinn is unstable," Erika lied, his voice chillingly smooth, exploiting the terror they had just shared. "You saw his face. You saw the corpse outside. He's looking for an excuse to vent his rage. If we wait for him to walk out of that bedroom… you think your 'inventory list' is going to save your life?"
He locked eyes with Loren, hammering the nail of fear deeper.
"I don't want to wake up on his dissection table."
Silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating.
Loren's fingers curled into tight fists, then slowly relaxed. He was terrified of the wasteland, yes, but the image of Quinn's dead, stormy eyes in that bedroom was a far more immediate, visceral horror.
Finally, his shoulders slumped. It was the posture of a cornered animal choosing the lesser of two nightmares.
"Are you sure?" Loren looked up, his voice cracking slightly. "Even if it's a dead end out there?"
"Staying here is a dead end," Erika said, maintaining his unsettling, deceptive calm. "If we move now... we might have a chance."
Loren swallowed hard. He took a hesitant step forward, his aristocratic composure completely shattered, leaving only raw, desperate survival instinct.
"Fine," Loren hissed, his voice trembling. "But I'm not doing this for you. I just… I don't want to be here when he snaps."
Not for you.
The selfish honesty of the statement actually brought Erika a twisted sense of relief.
"Good," Erika nodded. "But we can't just walk out the front door. He'll sense it."
Loren bit his lower lip until it turned white. He looked down the dim corridor, pointing toward a patch of deeper shadow. "When Master Quinn… when he told me to sort the inventory, he gave me a temporary… 'transit' privilege. Just for moving heavy items between storage rooms on the lower levels."
Loren's words sparked like a flint in the dark.
"The lower levels?" Erika stepped closer, his heart hammering. "The junk graveyard where he first brought us in? The place with the old books?"
"I think so," Loren nodded, wiping sweat from his pale face. "But I don't know the exact layout. Using the transit authority blindly… we might end up in a collapsed sector, or drop straight into a defense array."
"It doesn't matter. It's closer to the outer wall than here," Erika interrupted, his tone carrying the coldness of a gambler pushing all his chips onto the table. "Do it. Now."
They moved swiftly down the corridor to a dead end.
Loren closed his eyes, his brow furrowed in intense concentration. He raised a trembling hand towards the solid stone wall. There was no dramatic chanting, no glowing magic circles.
Instead, the air simply sickened.
Erika felt the ambient, orderly energy of the Black Tower suddenly twist and curdle around Loren's fingertips. It was a subtle, nauseating spatial distortion.
With a sound like tearing wet canvas, a vertical, jagged slit opened in the very fabric of the shadows against the wall. It didn't emit light; it seemed to aggressively suck the dim illumination out of the corridor. Through the wavering, unstable tear, Erika could faintly make out a suffocating gloom, the tilt of massive, rotting wooden shelves, and the unmistakable smell of ancient, decaying paper and metallic rust.
"It's barely holding… go!" Loren gasped, his face instantly drained of color, struggling to keep the spatial tear from snapping shut.
Without hesitation, Erika grabbed Loren's sleeve and threw himself into the jagged dark.
Passing through the fissure felt like being violently pushed through a membrane of freezing, viscous oil. The spatial hum drilled painfully into his eardrums.
The next instant, their boots hit solid ground with a heavy crunch of broken glass and dried rot.
The rift snapped shut behind them, plunging them into oppressive, dusty darkness.
They had succeeded.
They stood in an immensely vast, cavernous underground space. It was a colossal graveyard of discarded knowledge and broken machinery. Faint, sickly light seeped from unseen cracks high above, barely outlining mountainous piles of debris: rusted instrument chassis, shattered crystal clusters, and monolithic hills of rotting books fused together by time and dampness.
It was exactly the same suffocating, chaotic environment they had passed through when Quinn first dragged them into the Tower.
"We're down here," Erika whispered, his chest heaving, his eyes frantically scanning the menacing silhouettes of the junk piles. "Look for a draft. Anything that smells like the wasteland."
Yet, the very moment he took a step forward—
Thrum.
A low, subterranean vibration, bone-rattling and slow, emanated from the deep shadows directly ahead.
In the darkness of a massive debris pile, three points of dark, blood-red light snapped open in sequence. They glowed like the mechanical, unblinking eyes of a slumbering beast that had just been stepped on.
The red lights slowly rose, accompanied by the terrifying sound of grinding, rusted gears and the screech of shifting metal plates.
Their desperate reconnaissance had instantly triggered a brand-new nightmare.
Erika froze, the cold sweat turning to ice on his skin.
To get out, they would have to bleed for it.