From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 81: Lab

"There’s something inside." I said, my voice low. The others stopped immediately.

"Something big?" Finn’s brow furrowed and he tilted his head slightly, the way he did when he was using his ability to sense silver. After a moment he shook it.

"I don’t feel any silver serpents." He said slowly. "I can only feel the silver of the walls."

"So it’s not a serpent..." I thought to myself, and then explained. "I was finally able to use the sense spell, and I can feel something big inside this building."

The outpost sat between two canyon walls, like a stone sandwich. The silver exterior was intact, no corrosion, no claw marks on the outer walls. Whatever was inside had been there for a while.

"Wait for me outside." I said, keeping my eyes on the entrance. "It’s better if I go in alone first and deal with whatever’s inside."

The silence that followed was immediate and uncomfortable.

"Allaran..." Kira started.

"If it’s a Corruptor I can handle it." I cut in before they dismissed the plan. "The dark water canteen keeps them from detecting me. I go in, I assess, and once the room is clear I’ll signal you."

"And if you can’t handle it?" Finn asked, worried.

"Then you’ll hear a lot of noise and you should run."

That answer probably didn’t comfort anyone.

Coco raised his hand slightly. "I have juice, if you need it." he offered.

I glanced at him for a moment. I appreciated the thought, but I was fairly sure juice wasn’t going to solve this particular problem...

"Keep it." I said. "Stay here. Don’t come in unless I call."

I left them at the entrance before anyone could say anything else.

The inside of the building was lit.

That was the first thing that surprised me.

Lamps lined the corridor walls, each one housing a smooth white stone that glowed with a steady light. Not flickering. Not dim. Just clean, white, and completely calm.

I moved slowly, one hand trailing the wall while the twenty spheres rotated in my mind.

The presence ahead was massive. Not in the way King Emi had been massive, that incomprehensible wrongness that made every one of my instincts scream. This was large and alive and moving, but within a range I could understand. Something I could map.

The corridor opened into a wide interior space, and I stopped.

The room was filled with equipment I didn’t have names for. Long glass instruments sat arranged across metal tables, some intact, some shattered on the floor. Shelves lined the walls with containers holding substances I couldn’t identify. The runic patterns etched into the surfaces looked similar to the ones on my cube. Something that had purpose beyond decoration.

A laboratory?

I moved through it carefully, stepping around the broken glass, and at the far end of the lab I found the door.

It was enormous.

Solid silver, sealed so tight that not a single line of light came through from the other side. No handle. No visible mechanism.

Behind it, the presence moved.

Slow, deliberate footsteps that sent faint vibrations through the floor each time they landed. Whatever it was, it was big.

I stood there for a moment, thinking.

Breaking the door open with Switch was possible, but the sound of a piece of silver landing on the floor could alert the thing on the other side.

Then I thought about the cube.

I reached into my inventory and pulled it out. The green light across the runic pattern pulsed once in my hand.

If I activated the barrier first and then went inside, I would be protected, with time to look before anything could reach me. The door would have a hole, but I could block it with the barrier. Nothing could come out.

I thought through it twice to make sure I wasn’t missing something.

Then I noticed the other entries in my inventory.

Two new items sat below the cube. One listed as armor. One listed as a helmet.

They hadn’t been there before. Somewhere in the serpent fight or its aftermath the system had quietly deposited them, and I hadn’t been paying attention. It felt like finding money in a coat pocket... except the coat was my soul.

I selected the armor.

The item requires cleansing before appraisal.

I tried the helmet.

The item requires cleansing before appraisal.

I stared at the words for a moment.

Cleansing. What does that even mean...

I wished there was some kind of tutorial for all of this. Unfortunately, the only person who seemed to know anything about it was an old man who spoke almost entirely in riddles. Also, his only son had died because of me... though he doesn’t know that. Probably for the best.

I pushed the thought aside for later and turned my attention back to the door.

’Barrier.’

The familiar green light expanded outward from the cube, pressing silently through the solid silver of the door as if the metal wasn’t there. The barrier didn’t care about physical obstacles. It simply existed on the other side, waiting.

’Grow.’

I let it expand just enough to clear a space I could land in.

Then I touched a section of the door and focused on the silver floor. I imagined a big circular box inside the door.

Switch.

The sound was deep and heavy, a resonant clang that echoed through the lab behind me and definitely carried.

But I was already on the other side.

The room was vast.

My barrier hummed with green light around me as I took it in.

The ceiling stretched upward. The walls were curved, which made the space feel bigger. More white stone lamps shone here, several of them. The previous occupants had really committed to the lighting situation.

At the center of the room sat a runic table.

The patterns carved into its surface were dense and deliberate. They surrounded a depression at the table’s center, and resting inside that depression was a cube.

It had a similar shape as my own. But that one didn’t seem to be working.

A Ward.

Beside the table, collapsed against its base in a position that suggested it had died sitting against it, was a skeleton wearing a lab coat.

I looked at it for a long moment.

Then the footsteps reached me.

I turned.

The Corruptor was tall, filling roughly a third of the room’s length when it stood to its full height. Its body was dense with dark mass, shifting slightly at its edges like something not fully committed to a single shape. Its limbs were too long in proportion to its torso. Its movements had the deliberate, measured quality of something that wasn’t hurrying because it had never needed to.

It had no eyes.

Two smooth surfaces sat where they should have been, and yet it had turned toward me the moment I appeared, head angled in my direction with perfect accuracy.

It knew exactly where I was.

The Corruptor’s head tilted slightly to one side, as if curious about something. I had never seen one react like that.

I looked at the skeleton in the lab coat, then at the cube on the runic table.

Whoever you were, you died in the same room as this thing. I’d really like to know why, or how.

But the Corruptor wasn’t offering explanations. It was just standing there. Tilting its head. Waiting.

Or maybe it wasn’t waiting. Maybe it had been standing in this room for centuries, watching a skeleton decay, and I was the most interesting thing that had happened in a while.

Great. A curious Corruptor. Exactly what I needed.