The inside of the city was completely different from the wasteland outside.
The scorched black rock beneath their feet had been replaced by massive blocks of rough, icy stone that glowed with a faint green light.
The city's buildings now stood right before them, and their twisted, non-Euclidean architecture was even more maddening up close. Towers leaned at impossible angles, defying gravity.
Archways twisted into shapes that resembled exposed organs. The streets didn't run in straight lines; instead, they spiraled, folded, and bent in ways that made their heads spin, as if the city's entire spatial structure had been hopelessly distorted.
As unsettling as the city itself was, something else was even more horrifying: the battlefield Ian had left behind.
Everywhere they looked were enormous craters. Some were so smooth around the edges that it looked as though intense heat had melted the stone in an instant. Others were split apart by jagged fractures, as if ripped open by an unimaginable force.
Many of the warped buildings were scarred by severe corrosion, and some were coated in an off-white substance that looked eerily like bone ash. Elsewhere, thick black slime oozed across the ground, giving off a nauseating stench.
And of course, there were bodies.
They were everywhere; the city was littered with corpses so grotesque that words could barely describe them.
Some had been drained completely dry, leaving nothing but shriveled, scaly husks curled into twisted heaps. They vaguely resembled Deep Ones, or perhaps even stranger hybrids.
Others had been crushed by an invisible force into piles of mangled flesh mixed with green slime and shattered bony armor, filling the air with a sickening fishy odor.
Still others seemed to have exploded from the inside, scattered into countless faintly glowing fragments that resembled rotting jellyfish.
None of them were human. Their forms varied wildly, but every corpse carried the same ancient, maddening aura as R'lyeh itself. They weren't any creature known on Earth, nor did they resemble anything recorded in any catalogue of magical creatures.
These had been the enemies of that Legendary Wizard, the city's "residents," or perhaps its spawn.
"What a horrifying place..."
Saruman and Kag unconsciously held their breath as they carefully picked their way through the bizarre corpses and shattered ruins.
"I think I'm going to throw up," Kag muttered, gripping the hilt of his sword so tightly his palms were slick with sweat. He had never witnessed such grotesque deaths before.
"These creatures were powerful," Saruman said, staying alert for danger while examining the lingering energy around the corpses.
He was trying to reconstruct the battle from the traces left behind.
"Most of them were killed instantly by pure death magic."
He pointed to a relatively intact corpse that looked like a grotesque fusion of a giant starfish and an octopus.
"See? There are no signs of resistance. Its life was extinguished in a single moment."
Then he pointed toward a nearby area riddled with deep corrosion.
"And this..." he murmured, "it looks as though something stronger than acid erased everything here. Some even more terrifying form of energy."
Following the densest trail of destruction, they slowly advanced deeper into the city. The farther they went, the more devastating the damage became, and the corpses grew larger, and far stranger.
At one point, they came across the remains of a monster the size of a small hill, its body covered in thick armor plating and countless writhing tentacles.
Its head, if it could even be called a head, had been blown apart by an unimaginably powerful attack. Green blood and brain matter had long since hardened across the ground.
The sight left both men speechless.
Yet despite all the destruction, despite the endless monster corpses, they never found any trace of the Legendary Wizard. No blood, no torn pieces of clothing, not a single sign that a human had ever been there.
It was as though the person who had unleashed such earth-shaking magic and battled countless horrifying beings had simply vanished the moment the fighting ended.
"Where did he go?" Kag finally whispered, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the deathly silent streets. "Could it be... that at the end of the battle..."
He didn't finish the sentence; the implication was obvious. Had the Legendary perished along with his enemies?
Saruman slowly shook his head, frowning.
"I don't think so. If they'd destroyed each other, there should be much stronger traces of annihilated magic... and some remains. But there are only the monsters' corpses. It looks more like... he left."
"He left?" Kag looked around in confusion. "Where could he have gone? Is there some exit here that we don't know about?"
He searched their surroundings, but all he saw were increasingly twisted buildings and countless monster corpses strewn across the streets.
Saruman was just as puzzled. He cast several detection spells, searching for lingering spatial disturbances or any remaining traces of magic, but found nothing.
R'lyeh's chaotic energy field interfered so heavily with detection magic that trying to find a specific magical trace was like trying to pick out a single note in a deafening wall of noise.
It was practically impossible.
The incredibly powerful Legendary, their only real hope of survival, had appeared without warning and disappeared just as suddenly, leaving behind no clues at all.
The tiny spark of hope they'd just found was mercilessly crushed by reality once again.
The two stood atop a mound of mangled monster corpses, staring toward the city's darker, deeper center. It looked less like the heart of a city and more like a passage leading to the core of the earth, or another dimension altogether. Neither of them knew where to go next.
"This place definitely wasn't built by humans," Saruman muttered as they stood atop the grotesque hill of nameless monster remains.
Dark green and purple-black fluids, thick as tar and reeking of decay, soaked through the soles of their boots. The air was saturated with the overwhelming stench of blood, rot, and a sharp, ozone-like smell that burned their noses.
Ahead, the depths of R'lyeh became even stranger.
"I agree. No matter how insane humans get, nobody comes up with architecture like this." Kag couldn't have agreed more with Saruman's assessment.
The deeper they went, the more distorted the city's structures became. The massive green stone looked like melted wax that had flowed and hardened into impossible holes, spirals, and jagged spikes without the slightest hint of logic.
Some buildings were coated in thick, translucent membranes resembling living tissue, pulsing faintly with subtle waves of mental corruption. It was as if they were nothing more than bacteria growing on the skin of an unimaginably enormous creature.
The farther they advanced, the narrower and more labyrinthine the streets became. Some spiraled steeply upward, while others plunged sharply downward. A few simply disappeared into walls or ceilings, as though continuing into another dimension.
The light grew dimmer, too. Only the eerie green glow of the stone itself, along with the ghostly phosphorescence leaking from patches of slime and scattered corpse fragments, provided enough illumination to reveal the nightmare around them.
"We're not going to end up walking in circles forever again, are we?" After what had happened in the Infinite Corridor, Kag had become jumpy about anything involving mazes or impossible spaces. Once bitten, twice shy.
Saruman wasn't any less uneasy, but he knew panic wouldn't help. He forced himself to think.
"We have the map. It might be another trap, but it's all we've got."
Taking a deep breath of the foul air, Saruman unrolled the parchment once more. Under the dim green light, the twisted lines almost seemed alive, writhing ever so slightly. After comparing the map to their surroundings, he estimated their current position.
According to the map, they were near a node in the city's middle ring, marked with a distorted trident-shaped symbol. Beside it was another mysterious symbol resembling a droplet.
"According to the map," Saruman said, pointing at the three different lines extending from the trident-shaped node, "there are three... or rather, three possible main routes ahead."
He pointed to the first.
"This path is relatively straight. It leads toward the largest area marked with the symbol for 'Gate.' But it passes through a region covered with dense, jagged markings. That probably indicates extreme danger... or severe spatial instability."
He moved to the second route.
"This one winds around several smaller nodes before eventually reaching the Gate as well. It's much longer, though, and passes through an area marked with something resembling tentacles."
His voice grew noticeably more serious. "And the third route..."
He paused, pointing at the shortest path. Nearly the entire route was covered in chaotic spirals.
"This one goes straight to the Gate and is by far the shortest. But according to the map, the spatial structure here is unbelievably chaotic."
He narrowed his eyes.
"It may even consist of overlapping layers of space."
Under normal circumstances, that would have been impossible. But nothing in this city obeyed normal logic anymore. The common sense they had relied on all their lives meant nothing here.
"This is way over my head." Kag stared at the dizzying map until his eyes hurt. "You know me, I'm just a warrior. You decide, Saruman. You're better at this than I am. Which route?"
In their little team, Lina and Saruman had always been the ones who did the thinking. Kag's job had simply been to swing his sword whenever they pointed him at a target. Now that Lina was out of commission, there was only one brain left to rely on.
"My luck's always been terrible," Kag grumbled. "When I was a kid, if there was one sweet fruit in the basket, I'd always pick the sour one."
In a way, it made sense. Someone with terrible luck probably shouldn't be making life-or-death decisions.
"We can't just choose at random," Saruman said after a long silence, his eyes moving back and forth between the three routes.
The first path had obvious dangers, but it was the fastest.
The second seemed safer, but it was much longer and full of unknowns.
The third... the third was pure gambling. One step could lead to heaven, the next straight to hell.
Even Saruman found himself hesitating. He stood there thinking for a long time before finally making up his mind.
"We can't afford to waste time taking detours."
He pointed at the first route.
"Lina's condition, and yours, is getting worse. We have to find a way out as quickly as possible. We'll take the first path. We'll go straight through the dangerous area and head for the place marked 'Gate.' Stay on your guard. Be ready for an attack at any moment."
Once the decision was made, neither of them hesitated any longer. Saruman rolled up the map and put it away.
A steady white light bloomed from the tip of his wand like a lighthouse in the darkness, pushing back the city's sickly green glow and easing their frayed nerves ever so slightly. Kag followed closely behind, carrying Lina on his back while gripping his greatsword like a faithful shadow.
Together, they set foot on the route the map had marked as 'Dangerous'.
The supposedly "straight" path was anything but. It twisted, rose, and fell in ways that constantly assaulted their sanity as corruption seeped from every corner of the city.
Because of that, Saruman had to pour even more magic into maintaining his own mind. Then, through the Dark Magic bond connecting him and Kag, he shared that fragile clarity with his companion.
It wasn't easy for either of them.
More than once, both of them found themselves wondering whether the word "straight" was nothing more than the desperate fantasy of people clinging to hope.
Here, at the forgotten edge of the world, even a straight line had become something warped. Every step they took felt as though the ground itself was silently mocking their determination.
"Damn it! It looks like a perfectly normal road!"
One moment they were climbing enormous slanted rocks whose smooth, oily surfaces resembled the skin of some living creature, faintly writhing beneath the moonlight.
The next, they had to turn sideways to squeeze through cracks barely wide enough for a single person. The fissures crossed one another like the ribs of some gigantic beast, cold, wet, and filled with the mixed stench of decay and sulfur.
Passing through them felt less like walking through stone and more like being slowly swallowed by an ancient creature. Breathing itself became difficult.
The surrounding buildings had long since surpassed anything human geometry could explain.
They weren't structures built from stone; they looked like nightmares that had grown straight out of the earth. Towering spires pierced through one another at impossible angles, their walls covered in spiraling reliefs.
If anyone stared at the carvings for too long, they slowly began to move. The shifting lines gradually formed indescribable faces and twisted limbs.
Even the shadows cast by those carvings refused to stay still, writhing and stretching across the stone walls like living things as they reshaped themselves into ever-changing symbols, as though whispering forbidden incantations from an age long forgotten.
The countless holes and spirals were so black that even light seemed unable to escape them.
Yet both men constantly felt unseen eyes watching from the darkness, emotionless, hungry, waiting for the slightest crack in their resolve so they could drag their souls into an eternal abyss of chaos.
The mental corruption in the air grew stronger with every step. At first, it had been nothing more than faint whispers drifting past their ears like wind blowing through dry bones.
Now the voices had become clear, distinct, and filled with malice as broken syllables pierced directly into the weakest corners of their minds.
"Give up..."
"Thought is the source of suffering..."
"Only surrender brings peace..."
The voices weren't coming from the outside world. They echoed directly inside their brains, carrying a temptation both sweet and rotten, trying to strip away the last remnants of their grasp on reality.
"What... are we getting closer to?"
(End Of This Chapter)
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