Chapter 56: Stratum 5 - The Sunken Necropolis

Chapter 56: Chapter 56: Stratum 5 - The Sunken Necropolis

"Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt." — Sun Tzu

The Sunken Necropolis taught its first lesson at the entrance: light was a form of money, and the dead no longer spent it.

Beyond the arrival locks, the city swallowed the expedition. Squad Eleven entered the drowned darkness last because Joel walked slowly and saw no reason to apologize for it.

The Grand Processional had once been a wide boulevard. Now it felt like a throat. The ceilings hung so low that even the tallest students had to bend down.

Black water reached from their thighs to their chests along the avenue. Stale air filled pockets above the water, trapped there for longer than most nations had existed. The cold crept up their boots like a debt collector climbing toward their ankles.

The only light came from the jellyfish.

They drifted through the flooded halls in slow groups, their bell-shaped bodies glowing soft blue and violet. Some were as large as lanterns. Whenever the water moved near them, they flashed brightly like matches being struck.

Joel watched a group of jellyfish scatter when a student splashed through the water. He stored the information away as something valuable.

The city had an alarm system, and anyone could learn how it worked.

Almost nobody was paying attention to it.

The top squads had no such patience.

The five-member teams ranked from first to twentieth rushed down the main avenue in tight formations, holding their echo-lanterns high.

The lanterns sent bright signals through the water, reading the road ahead like a blind man tapping his cane.

The leading squad even tried to jog. In chest-deep water, the noise was like a kitchen falling down a staircase.

SPLSH.

They were hunting the boss markers on their maps. The Coalition’s fee system had died with Victor in that crater, leaving a gap for others to fill. Every ambitious student in the top twenty wanted a powerful kill to add to their records.

Joel raised his fist. Squad Eleven stopped at the entrance to a side canal, waiting quietly in the darkness like creditors waiting to collect a debt.

"The prize is right ahead of us," Roan whispered. "All of it. And you want to look around these flooded slums?"

"Watch the water, not the prize," Joel said. "Tell me what happens when they send out a ping."

Joel had asked because his Aegis Frame had been absorbing the pressure of the deep ever since their descent. As it took in the constant force, he had begun to sense the tiny currents moving through the Necropolis.

A normal ping should return as a single echo.

But the pings from the elite squads came back twice. The second echo arrived a moment after the first.

It was not a reflection. Reflections did not keep such perfect timing.

Something beneath the streets was listening and sending signals back. It was patient, like a creature that kept records of everything it heard.

The Necropolis was a giant sonar trap spread across the entire city.

And the elite squads were giving away their positions like drunken heirs throwing money around at a festival.

[ SONAR RETURNS: ANOMALOUS ]

[ PING REFLECTIONS: 2X SOURCE, STAGGERED ]

[ NOTE: THE LOUD ANNOUNCE THEMSELVES TO EVERY LENDER IN THE DARK. ]

"The echoes are wrong," Sybill whispered. "Something is answering them."

"It is," Joel said. "We’ll go through the clerks’ district, the city’s back offices. The water there is too quiet to be worth trapping. Every ghoul that answers their noise is one less ghoul waiting in our path. I didn’t sabotage those squads. I simply chose not to share their way out."

The trap sprang while he was still speaking. Or perhaps it had been waiting for some time and had only just decided to collect its payment.

A scream came from far up the Processional, then stopped halfway through.

The darkness ahead of the elite squads began to boil.

The doorways on both sides of the avenue emptied. At first, nothing moved. Then, all at once, pale shapes poured out.

They were Drowned Ghouls. Once, they had been people. The deep had bleached their bodies bone-white, and their jaws hung far beyond their natural limits. Their smooth eye sockets were empty. Sight was a luxury in a city where the dead hunted by sound.

They rushed through the water and crawled along the ceilings, moving as fast as thrown knives. Every one of them headed straight for the noise.

They moved with the patience of creatures that had been doing this for three thousand years.

[ DROWNED GHOUL: LEVEL 25, X40+ ]

[ SPEED: HIGH. SIGHT: NONE. APPETITE: OPEN-ENDED. ]

[ NOTE: THEY HUNT SOUND AND SCENT. THE DEEP KEEPS ITS OWN LEDGER OF NOISEMAKERS. ]

The elite squads fought back with loud attacks. A fireball exploded against a row of pillars with a sound, lighting up the area for a second. Ghouls covered the walls, ceilings, and water.

A shield squad formed a tight line and held its ground. A Sky-Lancer killed three ghouls in a row with spears made of hardened air.

In the panic, someone dropped an echo-lantern. It sank into the water, still sending out pings. Six ghouls rushed after it, ignoring the living. The lantern was making more noise than the screaming students.

One squad tried to retreat instead of fighting. They turned around and walked straight into another group of ghouls. The creatures had already found every exit hours ago.

The screams grew louder, almost like a choir. Different groups of ghouls seemed to have their own parts, each adding to the terrible sound.

Joel watched with the calm look of a man watching another company fall apart. Then he led his squad into the canal.

"Our chance is now, while they’re making all that noise," he said. "Keep moving."

He put his plan into action while the screams continued.

Sybill’s hex took eleven seconds to cast. Nobody rushed her. Joel had planned for those eleven seconds.

The Cadaver-Shroud covered them like cold silk. Under its effect, they no longer smelled like living people. They smelled like old water.

Joel approved. The disguise was good enough.

Roan drew runes on the soles of their boots to help them grip the ground. He also added marks to silence their footsteps and stop their boots from splashing.

"We’re sneaking through the back office of a haunted city," he whispered. "I want it on record that I hate this plan for one reason. It’s obviously the right one."

They moved in single file along the edge of the canal. The battle behind them glowed like a distant festival, but the rest of the city remained dark and silent.

Groups of jellyfish floated above the water. Whenever one flashed as the squad passed, they stopped moving and waited for the light to fade.

The cathedral bell rang once in the distance.

DOOM.

The sound passed through the stone and into their bones. The breathing from the deep had begun to follow the same rhythm.

They found the straggler at the third junction.

It was a bull ghoul dragging a torn platinum cloak that had belonged to someone from the upper district. It crossed the canal ten meters ahead of them, turning its broken neck from side to side as it listened.

Joel’s squad was halfway across the canal. The water reached their chests, and they had nowhere to hide.

Sybill’s shroud could fool the ghoul’s nose, but its ears were another problem.

Joel was about to take his next step. One splash could give them away.

And if that happened, the ledger offered no way to escape forty more ghouls.

So Joel did not take the next step. Instead, he slowly sank beneath the water until his head disappeared.

He moved as slowly as falling dirt. In deep water, anything that stayed still became part of the surroundings. And the surroundings attracted no attention.

When the ghoul’s ruined face drifted within arm’s reach, Joel grabbed its jaw and the top of its skull.

He released a small amount of stored charge through his palms, using Kinetic Bastion. He kept all the force inside the ghoul’s head, releasing none into the water.

Its skull cracked with a soft crack, like a knuckle cracking underwater.

The jellyfish barely moved.

Joel weighed down the body with rubble and left the city to deal with the rest.

[Ding!]

[ KINETIC BASTION: CONTAINED RELEASE ]

[ COLLATERAL ACOUSTIC SIGNATURE: 0.2 PERCENT ]

[ EXPERIENCE: JOEL +12 ]

[ SURVIVAL ACCUMULATION: +3% ]

Roan stared at the silt settling in the water, then forced himself to keep moving.

"You killed that thing more quietly than I can sneeze," he whispered.

His voice carried both disgust and a strange kind of respect.

Sybill said nothing, but the hex-thread around her fingers was steadier than before.

At that moment, the return beacon flickered.

Joel turned it under the jellyfish’s light. The thin crack had spread into a web of smaller cracks.

The sabotage was not a single act. Someone had planned it step by step, and the Kole family’s plan was working just as they had expected.

Their way out was becoming a one-way door.

That left only one useful direction: down, toward the relic vaults. The elite squads were too busy fighting for their lives to reach them.

As Joel led his team deeper into the city, the breathing sound rose and fell around them, matching the rhythm of the cathedral bell.

Whatever was down there had all the time in the world.

Joel understood one simple rule.

His house did not rush toward a fire just because everyone else was running there. It took the longer, darker path to the vault.

Then it collected.