TWBFHA 10

A chill ran down Alex’s spine. His heart pounded like a blacksmith’s hammer.
The tunnel was a void of darkness, illuminated only by the red-glowing forceball.
Brutus took the lead, stepping forward cautiously.
His three heads each scanned a different direction, six eyes probing the endless dark.
One head turned back to check that the party was following.
Each eye caught and reflected the light.
For a moment, Alex remembered the old folktales of Cerberus said to be born in the underworld.
And he felt profoundly grateful that Brutus was on their side.
The coppery stench from outside the cave grew fainter the deeper they went into the tunnel, gradually replaced by the scent of damp earth.
Somewhere, water dripped onto stone.
Alex and Selina walked side-by-side in the middle of the formation, while Theresa quietly brought up the rear.
A small lantern hung from her belt.
Its light was weaker than Alex’s sphere, but it was a backup to keep them from being blind if the magic failed.

Alex maneuvered the forceball to cast a wide light.
He slowly swept the red glow over the walls, ceiling, and floor, determined not to miss anything.
After the creature in the trees last night, he desperately wanted to avoid anything else dropping from above.
Everyone moved as silently as possible, and the Mark continued to feed memories into his mind.
But these memories weren’t of combat or stealth training.
Memories of sneaking around as a child, looking for his father’s small knife. Scenes of searching the entire house for the cookies his mother had hidden.
The Mark replayed them with startling vividness.
It had been so long since he’d seen his parents’ faces that clearly.
He forced the emotion down and stepped carefully, matching the cautious movements of his younger self.
Theresa and Brutus moved with literal hunter-like grace and poise, and Selina did her best to match them.
Small and slight, she made no sound beyond her breathing.
Selina’s hand was tightly clasped in Alex’s, and he vowed never to let it go.

‘No matter what happens, I have to keep her safe.’

Alex prayed fervently they wouldn’t have to fight.
Silence Spiders are like ants.
The scattered remains of the small legion outside certainly suggested that.
So, the worker castes should have already cleared away their dead comrades.
That meant Cedric was likely right, and the dungeon core was probably still replenishing its forces.
A few would have been kept hidden, quiet, until the perceived threat had passed, ready to be deployed then.
The thought alone made Alex shudder.
The image of wolf-toothed spiders, creatures with blade-sharp claws, waiting in the dark filled his mind.

‘…Please let us not run into any of that. Just let us find the teleportation device quickly.’

Alex pointed upwards, whispering to Theresa.

“Hold.”

Theresa followed his gaze, then immediately frowned.
Alex’s forceball illuminated a tunnel in the ceiling about three or four meters above their heads.
Hidden in a natural rock crevice, it would have been nearly invisible without the light.
Theresa moved quietly beside it, bowstring drawn, arrow tip aimed at the upper tunnel.
Alex floated the sphere higher, and the red light poured into it.
The light spread deep into the burrow, revealing clear, blade-like tooth marks scored into the interior rock.
There was no sign of life now, but the ceiling passage led elsewhere, offering no comfort.
They waited in silence for several seconds, considering the possibility of something lunging from the side to attack the sphere.
But nothing came.
Theresa and Alex met each other’s eyes and sighed in shared relief.
Theresa loosened her bowstring and whispered.

“Hope it stays like this. Now, let’s just… wait, Brutus. What’s in your mouth? Drop it.”

One of Brutus’s three heads had apparently found something on the cave floor and picked it up.
Brutus obediently dropped it at Theresa’s command.
Click.
It sounded like a dry stick breaking.
While Alex kept watch down both sides of the passage, Theresa carefully bent and picked it up.

“Ugh….”

The moment she saw what was in her hand, she jerked it back as if bitten by a snake.
Selina trembled slightly as she asked.

“What? What is that?”
“Shh… it’s okay, Selina. Stay still. Don’t come over here.”

Theresa moved to stand beside Selina.

“Can you close your eyes for a second?”
“…Mhm….”

Selina squeezed her eyes shut.
Theresa turned her head toward Alex.

“See for yourself.”

Alex steeled himself, looked at the object Theresa had tossed down, and drew in a sharp breath.
The smell of rotting meat invaded his nostrils.
It was a hand.
What Brutus had picked up was a human hand, discarded on the cave floor.
The skin was mostly stripped away, leaving mostly bone.
More precisely, a common iron ring with two crossed pickaxes engraved on it was wedged onto a finger bone.

“The Explorer’s Guild….”

Alex shook his head.

“It was right under the ceiling tunnel.”

He lowered the forceball to illuminate the floor beneath it. There was a large, dark bloodstain.

“Looks like they got him from above.”

Selina asked quietly.

“What happened…?”
“Brutus found something, but it’s nothing for our little goblin to worry about.”

Alex reassured Selina, bringing the sphere’s light closer to the finger bones.
He examined the ends closely. Small, pitted marks covered the bone surface.

“Theresa, look at this. What do you make of these marks?”

Theresa covered Selina’s ears with her hands and peered over Alex’s shoulder.

“Tooth marks. Small teeth. Must’ve been pretty sharp and hard, needle-like. Hm… but the bone isn’t broken anywhere. Jaw strength not that strong, I guess.”

They exchanged a look. Their thoughts were the same without needing words.
Whatever stripped the flesh from this hand wasn’t a Silence Spider. The marks were too small.
Something else lurked in the dungeon.
Alex remembered watching ants as a child.
He’d seen two sizes near anthills, small ones and large ones. His teacher had explained they were workers and soldiers.
Perhaps the large spiders outside were like soldier ants, and somewhere inside were the workers.
If the tooth marks he was seeing belonged to them, they were dangerous enough, even if they were ‘workers.’

‘Definitely monsters in here.’

Alex explained his thoughts to Theresa.

“Let’s go a little further. The moment we see anything, we turn back.”

Theresa slowly lowered her hands from Selina’s ears.

“You can open your eyes now, Selina.”

The party moved forward again, carefully, into the dark.
Minutes passed, and as they descended deeper underground, new passages appeared in the ceiling and walls.
But thankfully, no more signs or corpses of monsters were found.
And then a stillness began to settle.
That’s when the temperature started shifting strangely. Some areas were cool, others warm as a summer noon.
A little further in, the temperature differences became extreme.
Near one passage, heat like a steamer wafted out; from another, a chill like midwinter blew.
The scent of the air kept changing too.
Musty and damp one moment, salty like seawater the next, then fresh like a forest after rain.
Sounds echoed from beyond the cave walls.
The high whistle of wind.
Birdsong from somewhere.
The low, vibrating rumble of distant waves.
Alex met Theresa’s eyes, and Selina squeezed his hand tighter.
Then, Brutus stopped.
The Cerberus had two heads lowered to the ground, sniffing, while the third stared intently down the passage ahead.

“What is it…?”

Alex lowered the sphere toward the ground.
Just ahead, beyond Brutus’s front paws, the rough cave floor suddenly ended.
In its place, cracked and worn marble tiles stretched beyond the edge of the light.
Theresa said.

“Alex, I see light up ahead.”

He looked up, cautiously gazing forward.
In the distance, part of the rock was faintly illuminated.
A different space existed there, vague but unmistakable.
Alex calmed his pounding heart.

“Alright. I’ll send the forceball in first. If it pops… we run like hell. Got it?”
“Agreed.”

Theresa said, sweeping her lantern beam over the passage behind them.
Alex manipulated his magic, pushing the forceball forward.
The red light slid down the tunnel, reaching the brighter area and angling slightly to the left.
For a count of ten, the magic circuit held steady.

“Nothing’s happening.”

Alex began drawing the forceball back.

“Advance.”

Theresa nodded silently.
She raised her lantern, sweeping the ceiling.
Her face was still set in a stern expression under the flickering light, but Alex knew fear lurked deep in her eyes.
Seeing that gave him a small measure of relief.
So he wasn’t the only one scared.
He thought of Cedric briefly.
How could the Chosen maintain such composure facing this kind of thing regularly?
For a moment, Alex felt the urge to turn and run back to the Coille Woods right then.
But looking down, he saw Selina trembling.

‘Can’t run from this.’

Even if some horrible spider monster waited at the end of this tunnel, under that strange magical light.

The shrine exceeded every expectation Alex had.
From the bend onward, the tunnel walls became smooth stone, and the floor transitioned from haphazardly broken tiles to much larger, undamaged ones.
About twenty paces past the corner, a single massive chamber revealed itself.
The party stopped in their tracks, staring into the shrine with open mouths.
Large tiles covered the entire floor like a giant chessboard.
Tiles wide enough for Brutus to stand on comfortably stretched endlessly to the far side of the room.
There, on opposite walls, two massive statues loomed.
They stood about six meters tall, shaped like goddesses—or perhaps demons, they looked more demonic than divine—with something like pointed fangs.

‘Or demons. They look more like demons than goddesses, honestly.’

Red rubies were set into the eyes of both statues, pulsing with an inner light.
That alone sent a shiver down Alex’s spine.
He swore by Uldar, it felt like those eyes were watching him.
Strange glyphs were carved into the statues’ bases, but Alex couldn’t read them at all.
And between the statues stood a set of enormous double doors.
They stretched to the ceiling, also sealed tight with a massive lock.
In the center of the shrine, floating about six meters in the air, was a door. Through it, blue sky and sunlight were visible.
Nothing else.
A cool breeze wafted from it, filling the chamber with fresh air.

‘That’s the sky.’

A portal to the sky.
The magic of the hero known as the ‘Wayfarer.’
For a moment, fear vanished, replaced by awe that filled Alex’s chest.
Real, ancient hero magic.
And for this moment, he was a little bit in love with it.

“So that’s where the wind sounds were coming from. And the hot and cold spots. You see it too, Selina, Theresa?”

He scanned the shrine again.

“This shrine itself… maybe it was brought into the dungeon through this portal from somewhere far away. The spiders couldn’t have made this.”
“Whoa….”

Selina breathed out a series of wonder-filled gasps. Her eyes were wide with pure amazement.

“It’s so pretty…”
“Yeah, it is.”

Theresa gave a small smile, but it vanished the moment she turned her gaze sideways.

“Look over there.”

She pointed to the shrine walls.
Here and there were marks like chisel strikes, cracks, and shattered spots.
The gouges and scrapes of Silence Spider blade-legs traced paths along the ceiling and walls.
Alex frowned.

‘Too many passages.’

It felt almost like an anthill here.
Imagining Silence Spiders crawling over that ceiling and walls made his skin crawl.
Then, his eyes narrowed.

“…Wait a minute.”

Alex looked back and forth between the marks on the ceiling and the floor tiles.
Some tiles around the sky portal had stains like raindrops.

“Alex, why?”
“What’s wrong?”

Selina whimpered and shrank back.
Alex floated the forceball toward one of the passages.
The sharp claw marks led from that spot deep into the passage.
Lowering the sphere to the floor, he saw the marks clearly imprinted on the floor tiles as well.
Scratches in the stone.
But as Alex scanned the shrine’s interior floor again, he pointed downward.

“Look at the floor here. The spiders don’t seem to have stepped here. The walls and ceiling are covered in marks, but this floor… there are no scratch marks at all.”

Theresa’s eyes narrowed.

“…Why wouldn’t they step on the floor?”

Alex stared hard at the floor tiles. Each large enough for two or three people to stand on.
And looking at the red rubies in the statues’ eyes sent another shiver down his spine.
Something was wrong.
Alex scrutinized the tiles one by one with suspicion.
Among the symmetrical, square tiles, some were slightly discolored with age.
Most were a pale grey, but some were different.
He cautiously leaned forward.
Without stepping into the room, he got a closer look at one tile.
A blackened, scorched mark.
Faded almost to the color of stone, but Alex recognized it instantly.
It was fire-blackened stone.
He remembered the last time he’d seen it.
On the floor of his parents’ burnt-out inn.

“Selina, Theresa, Brutus. Come here. There’s something I want to check.”