80. The Seeds of Change Descend

The Seeds of Change Descend

In a dim room beneath the center of the ruined downtown of Sanguang City, figures began appearing in groups of two and three.

Roughly half of them looked identical: the same solid build, the same muscular limbs, the same classically handsome but unremarkable faces, pale skin, black hair, and hollow eyes flickering with strange inner light.

They wore what appeared to be simple black plate armor over garments of chain, leather, and linen that clung to their bodies like a second skin. A staff and a hammer hung from each of their belts.

The more of them arrived, the less dark the room became, but the more sinister it felt.

The walls were rough granite, bearing no marks of tools or human workmanship, shaped entirely by magic.

Their uniformity felt deeply unnatural to any observer.

The underground room had an odd curvature, noticeable at a glance but difficult to quantify, until someone tried to measure the room with eyes skilled at comparing distance and proportion.

Then the source of the wrongness became clear.

The room was thirty-three meters wide and sixty-six meters long. The ceiling was three meters above the eye level of everyone present, and the floor was three meters beneath it.

That floor was where the other half of those present appeared. Unlike the Dark Masons, they were not identical in the slightest.

They wore T-shirts and jeans, leather and cotton clothing, synthetic skirts, or silk dresses. Their varied garments had almost nothing in common except that they were modern, dirty, and, after two weeks of continuous torment, ragged enough to be nearly falling apart.

All of these people shared one other feature: their eyes were dull, as if they belonged to corpses, though their owners still breathed.

Sixty-six Dark Masons stood shoulder to shoulder in a circle, one span apart from each other.

Sixty-six mostly unresponsive captives, terrified and broken by the invasion’s horrors and forced to fight for survival every moment of every day since their capture, stood before the invaders in a second circle.

Some were survivors taken in raids. Others were collaborators driven mad by their own circumstances, or people who had joined the invaders for safety and then tried to flee after their remaining sanity failed.

Aside from being human, all the captives had one thing in common: they had killed enough monsters or people to develop abilities of a certain strength.

The Dark Masons raised their staffs in perfect unison, then brought them down hard across the prisoners’ backs with dull, heavy impacts.

The invaders’ magical architects were physically strong, stronger than any ordinary human.

These particular humans, however, had grown through the conflict in several different ways, and endurance was the most common. Not one of them fell to the first blow.

Then came the second, the third, and the fourth.

None of the humans tried to run, defend themselves, or activate any ability. They were simply murdered with methodical brutality.

They stood until they could no longer stand, then silently endured the strikes of one-amo-long black metal staffs, steadily, mechanically, and with appalling cruelty, until they were reduced to crushed meat and bone.

Every blow generated power, and the Dark Masons guided that power into the ritual. Strike after strike, for a total of one thousand nine hundred ninety-eight blows.

In each pile of bloody remains, one organ remained intact: a still-beating heart, proving that despite the victims being tortured beyond recognition, not one of them had truly died.

When the beating ended, every Dark Mason dipped his staff into the spreading pools of blood.

The black iron staffs drank the blood and lengthened as the pools diminished, growing from one amo to three times that length while their color darkened into deep crimson.

Then the architects of Mavis placed the three-meter staffs against the basalt floor, raised their hammers, and struck.

With each blow…