Mon'Ter

Chapter 12: The Underground.

In the middle of the night, Mon’Ter stood before the opened entrance of a staircase which led beneath the city.   

The reality of the fact that Elyenora was already inside was still sinking in, as he wondered. ‘Why did she go down without me? Is she safe...?”   

A bit worried over the prospect that his new found companion might be in danger among the people they’d call enemies down there.  

Mon’Ter quickly rushed down the staircase with high speed, his visage having the semblance of a shadow.  

‘Need to catch up to her... Could be bad...’ Mon’Ter thought, running down to the bottom of the excessively long staircase and into a wide maze.  

This underground maze was nearly fifty meters down beneath the surface, which seemed like an overkill even to Mon’Ter who didn’t understand much about these things like underground hideouts or cities and their buildings.  

The walls of the dark hallways were old and mossy, many cracks showed to have spread across each surface over the long years since this place had been constructed.   

Despite the apparent age of this place however, recent use was still evident with a number of things visible to Mon’Ter like pieces of hair on the floor, trails of what might have been sacks being dragged, footprints in some places that had more dirt than stone, and most importantly scent.  

Mon’Ter could smell a multitude of different scents that have been roaming these tunnels for quite a while. He could also see in the darkness just fine, so he managed to navigate easily through every corner, following his senses towards the final destination he had in mind.  

Elyenora.  

‘She is quite far away...’ Mon’Ter’s thoughts drifted into silence as he focused on passing through each corner.    

A few minutes passed since he had entered the Maze, having passed dozens of hallways and corridors, some leading to empty rooms which were both small and big in size.    

Finally, Mon’Ter stumbled onto a rather large room.   

It had a tall ceiling, about ten meters up into the air. There were quite a few old intricate patterns laying on the stone ground, perhaps used for some kind of magic, however they obviously hadn’t been in use for many years.   

Pillars dotted the sides and corners of the room with their own patterns placed all over them and there was also a pattern of circles dead in the middle of it all.  

There was an empty hole in the center of the circular patterns, perhaps once having been the place where something had been embedded inside.  

Aside from the actual look of the room, this seemed to be a sort of place that housed the people that stayed here.  

As there were many tables, chairs and other furniture in this place. The biggest give away was the multitude of bodies littering the floor, all of which wore black garbs that covered the entirety of their skin area.  

There were eight dead on the floor, having been so for at least an hour or more. Each held well-crafted and expensive weapons in hand, some having dropped them to their side. They consisted of dual daggers and short blades, all laced with poisonous substances.  

“Ely was here...” Mon’Ter murmured, looking at the many stab wounds that the people on the floor had received.  

She’d actually killed her opponents this time, something she usually holds back on when facing human enemies.  

Elyenora had made a point to Mon’Ter before about killing people who were considered enemies, saying that in most cases it would be better to simply knock them out and leave the rest to the ‘Authorities’, something he didn’t understand and that she had explained to him afterwards.   

Mon’Ter had replied that he usually would always try to only kill humans if they tried to kill him first, making an obvious stance in their matter of life and death,  

To him this wasn’t a big problem, most humans wouldn’t be able to do much to him anyway and he could simply swat them away. So this was only a minor inconvenience at times.  

However, in the rare exception that an enemy was too strong, then even Elyenora would have to rethink her judgement on these matters.  

‘Were they too strong... For Ely to spare...?’ Mon’Ter thought as he ran past the eight corpses littering the ground and towards the three exits of the spacious room, moving once more towards Elyenora’s direction into the left hallway.  

She had been inside of here for at least over an hour based on the bodies, maybe two or three at best.  

Shana’s scent was something else that Mon’Ter could pick up in the air, she had actually followed Elyenora down here, probably in an effort to help her out in this task of saving the kidnapped children.  

However, a different bunch of scents seem to have also been following Elyenora this whole time as well, they were all obviously siding with the princess, much like Shana was.   

‘Did she find help?’ Mon’Ter thought again, feeling a bit out of it.  

Why had he left to search for clues on his own if it only ended up slowing them down? He should have just walked together with Elyenora until she had found her own clue.  

But it was too late to feel bad over the wrong decisions that were made, he was here now so he would help now.  

…  

After running for a while, Mon’Ter caught a whiff of blood in the air, not long after that he could see some burnt marks on the ground of the hallway that he was currently in which led to a sharp turn on the left.  

On the corner of the intersection of the hall, a large bloodstain had been splattered on both sides of the wall and the ground, reaching up to the ceiling.  

Most of the smell of the blood was of an unfamiliar human to Mon’Ter, so it didn’t bother him all that much, however it was definitely one of the ones who had been following Elyenora from before which was worrisome in that regard. 

He moved forward, walking past the stain of blood and into another larger room, even bigger than the one from before. This room had been mostly untouched and empty until recently, the more than a dozen giant stains of fresh blood splattered across the floor and walls being an obvious sign of a battle having been fought here not too long ago.  

"Ely…" Murmured Mon’Ter with a worried gaze while he quickly decided to take the path where Elyenora’s presence drifted off to. 

Corridor after Corridor, turn after turn, he moved swiftly across the hallways in long strides. His mind turning silent while everything he was focusing on was the final destination. 

In a short time, Mon’Ter saw another exit of the hallways which led to the biggest room yet, it was easily a one hundred by one hundred meter wide space with many pillars that dotted across on both the left and right sides. 

Everything was covered in old runic patterns that had long since lost what had powered them before into action, carvings of warriors battling against a figure that resembled a floating eye were placed all over the walls and reached up to the ceiling, where the Eye like figure was at its largest.  

The eye itself was at the very middle of the roof and gazed down upon the center of the room where a huge altar stood. It had the form of a fountain with a pedestal over it, the inner part of the pedestal was hollowed and showed through so that the fountain could spew out its contents which had long since been drained, whatever they might have been. 

The room, much like the rest of this entire place, gave off a sense of old. As if it had been constructed long before the city above it had even been conceived.  

Perhaps this entire underground base had once been an ancient site, however that didn’t matter at this moment to Mon’Ter in the slightest. 

What mattered was that through the thick darkness of the area he could see something horrendous on the far end of the room.

“What...” Mon’Ter whispered to himself, "What... Is this...?" His gruff deep voice moved across the large room.

This was not what he expected to find, it was not what he wanted to find. 

What did the monster like man see? What was before him now that he had reached this room?

What happened here?

...