Tales of the Endless Empire

Chapter 447: Innovative Sacrificial Methods

“I can’t believe how crude your footwork is. No, I wouldn’t even call that footwork. In fact, that you manage to walk without tripping over your own feet is a MIRACLE,” Saranya shouted at Thalion while floating beside the wagon.Thalion had long gotten used to her constant complaints, but right now wasn’t the time to stop and train with the sword.

“Well then, just show me how I should move instead. Also, why am I the only one who can see and hear you?”

This question had been circling in his head for quite a while now. Normally the answer would have been that he was the one bound to the sword, but he had been able to see her already back in her father’s laboratory.

“Because you are the one bound to me. Stop asking those stupid questions. Now back to sword training…”

She answered, but Thalion interrupted her in a serious tone.

“I could already see you before I was bound to the sword.”

Right now his nerves were really on edge with everything happening, and having someone constantly talking and criticizing wasn’t helping.

“Then my father must have bound us already to some extent. Are you never thinking for yourself?”

Good. No more questions for the stupid sword, Thalion noted while whipping the lizards to go a bit faster.

Good thing he didn’t need to do much when it came to steering the wagon. Just slap the lizards from time to time with the whip and everything was fine. They already seemed to know the way.

The walls loomed bigger and bigger in the sky before him. He estimated that they were at least over fifty meters tall. The design of the wall wasn’t simple either, with multiple runes engraved into it. Brute-forcing his way into this giant city likely wasn’t even possible. Good that he had taken the wagon.

He also began to wonder what the others were doing. Could it be that they were already inside the city? To be fair, he had kind of wasted the start, so they might have had enough time to enter.

He just wasn’t sure if a chosen was strong enough to overcome the defenses of the city, because even when he didn’t see it, he could feel invisible pressure coming from the walls and extending upward. It was likely a whole dome that made it impossible to fly over.

The gates were relatively tiny in comparison to the walls. By Earth standards they were still massive, over fifteen meters high. The gates were wide open, and multiple wagons like his were currently entering.

Thalion simply stopped at the end of the line, and it didn’t take long until there were a bunch of other wagons placed behind him. The only difference was that they were steered by a few more soldiers and ritualists. Often also one of the Scarlet Wardens was present.

From time to time a soldier came by and checked how filled the wagons were. Thalion leaned back in his seat and tried to show that he was relaxed and maybe a bit annoyed.

So far it seemed to have worked, since none of the guards had addressed him. They weren’t really controlling anything and most of the time only made small talk with the soldiers on the wagons about how the mission went.

Thalion just followed the wagon before him through the gate, only waving to one of the guards, mimicking the sign the soldiers before him made.

Saranya was hidden under a red blanket on the seat beside him because hell would break loose if someone saw her. To brawl his way through the city likely wasn’t possible at the start.

Thalion would try to be sneaky while getting an overview of where and how the people were sacrificed. He also wanted to know where the sacrificed blood was brought to or where it flowed. It was pretty obvious that it had to be around the ziggurat in the middle, but he wanted more details.

Also, Thalion wanted to taint the blood with his curse. There had to be some failsafe against bad blood—at least Thalion would have integrated a few. Yet would those notice cursed blood?

If the only control happened before the sacrifice, it would go very badly for the king and the Scarlet Continuum.

The wagon rolled over black cobblestone streets. The air inside the city was filled with the stench of blood, and he had to hold the Sanguis Impera back from growing outward. For the plant, this was what it considered the perfect environment.

That Thalion had to look like a normal ritualist while holding back the hungry Sanguis Impera, while the image of Saranya was showing him movements with the sword and constantly talking—he really hadn’t expected the last stage would go like this.

The streets were mostly empty, with only the occasional soldier patrolling. Behind the windows of the houses no light burned, and some doors had been kicked in. If Thalion spotted a normal citizen trying to gaze onto the street, they immediately ducked away.

Maybe they had started the sacrificing with the villages outside the city and would only turn to the citizens inside when the villages were cleared?

The wagons were bumping over the streets for thirty more minutes until they arrived at a tower that was built next to the ziggurat.

The tower had a pretty big gate through which the wagons entered one after another. The soldiers around this gate also weren’t normal. Thalion guessed that they had to be Scarlet Guards, at least judging by how strong their aura was. They also weren’t doing much controlling like the guards at the city gate and just motioned them in after checking if the cages were filled.

Thalion was just happy that they hadn’t identified him yet. That he was an F-grade would definitely bring some unwanted attention.

Thalion breathed out in relief when the guard before him motioned to drive the carriage inside. It was immediately clear that Thalion didn’t want to get discovered in this place. Powerful soldiers were all over it.

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The biggest outlier was one half-human, half-spider creature. Thalion didn’t dare to identify the guy right now, but the creature had the upper body of a human and the lower one of a spider. Runes were carved into his body and skin, and his chitin armor was dark red. The passive aura leaking from him was also above all the other soldiers.

The tower was already quite big from the outside, but the inside exceeded that by at least ten times. The road simply continued and was going down now. It seemed like the tower was just some kind of waypoint to the underground beneath the city.

The carriage before Thalion had stopped, and the cage doors were opened. Every single prisoner was pulled out. Then they were forced to walk through something that looked like a metal detector but was probably meant for something completely different.

The spider-man and a few blood priests were observing the process while taking a sample of the blood. After the ordeal, most of them were let back into the cage, while only a few others were separated and pulled into a different cage. Those individuals immediately started to cry and plead when that happened, which was why Thalion guessed that it wasn’t a good thing—even though he failed to understand why, since all of them were about to get sacrificed.

With Thalion’s prisoners, every single one was returned, with one of the priests giving him the thumbs-up for having found a very good batch of sacrifices.

This all had to happen pretty fast, and Thalion began to wonder how long this must have been planned. There were whole constructions built only for the purpose of easily sacrificing the citizens. Kind of crazy when you think about it.

Whoever this king was, he had to either be batshit crazy or close to death already to rely on such cruel methods.

The carriage before Thalion had already disappeared into the dark underground before him, and Thalion just hoped that there weren’t many turns he had to take. Otherwise, this would very quickly become a mess.

Even when the matchup was pretty good, he would like to avoid starting a fight here, where fighters were stationed at every corner. No, the plan was to check out what was going on here and how he could deal the greatest damage possible—and strike when the moment was right.

The city was gigantic, but Thalion was confident that the top of the leaderboard would cause a ruckus in no time. Only humans should be able to sneak in like he just had. To be fair, maybe elves were also able to hide their appearance and long ears under a hood like Thalion had. The guards at the gates weren’t really checking anyway.

For orcs and the First Daughter, it would look different. There was no chance that the guards wouldn’t notice them. Thalion suspected that they were currently farming the soldiers outside the walls, also waiting for the right moment. At least that was what Thalion would have done if he had been unable to enter.

Sooner or later, Thalion believed that it wouldn’t take long until someone else entered, and then all hell would break loose. If all the fighters stationed here swarmed out to fight the intruding enemy, Thalion would make some tiny adjustments at the most crucial points.

The tunnels were illuminated by dark red crystals in the ceiling. So far it was quite easy for Thalion, as there weren’t any turns. The two lizards in the front suffered a bit on the way down, as they had to slow down the whole carriage, but otherwise everything went smoothly.

There was a walkway on the side of the tunnel where over five-meter-high metal golems patrolled. In the middle of their chests, Thalion could clearly see powerful blood crystals providing them with energy.

This civilization really was interesting. On the one hand, they were totally medieval, but then they had things like those golems and buildings like the towers and the ziggurat.

The street in the tunnels was also far better than the black cobblestone. It was completely smooth, which made it a far better experience compared to the constant up and down on the cobblestone.

The smell of blood also got more and more intense the further he drove, and even his prisoners began to whimper.

Thalion could hear a carriage catching up from behind.

This was something Thalion couldn’t have, and he also let the lizards speed up by a good margin. He really didn’t need someone behind him complaining about his speed. There was already Saranya, who was constantly talking about swings and stabs, completely oblivious to what was happening around her.

Thalion, in the meantime, had to remain calm while going through control after control and now the tunnel. His nerves had gotten a lot of training these days.

It didn’t take long until Thalion arrived at the final destination for the prisoners. The carriage that had entered the tunnels before him halted before a big entrance to something Thalion couldn’t see yet. A priest was directing some red mist into the carriage, where the prisoners began to cough until they slumped to the ground. Still conscious but unable to move.

Now a lot of helpers in ritualistic clothes were opening the cage and carrying the prisoners inside. Thalion halted behind the carriage and immediately was the first there, blowing the red mist into his own prisoners.

To just sit there and try not to look was hard. Behind him, the next carriage had also halted and watched what was happening to his prisoners like Thalion had done to the carriage before him.

Yet just watching and driving out wasn’t what he had planned. Instead, he jumped down from his position and made his way over to the other carriage. His sword Saranya was put into his spatial ring because there was no way he could hide it, and the constant talking was just too distracting.

“I need someone to steer the carriage because I need to help here,” Thalion said in a commanding tone that didn’t leave much room for argument.

There were four people in red robes on the carriage behind him, and one just nodded and jumped off, going to the front of his carriage.

Meanwhile, Thalion walked over to the now open cage and fluidly lined up between the other red robes, flinging one of the prisoners over his shoulder.

The entrance led into a smaller tunnel that went further down before opening into some sort of laboratory. There were all kinds of absurd machines to kill the humans.

There were three gigantic juicers. Back on Earth they had been much smaller and used for fruits. Here they were over five meters wide and made from black stone. Into the funnel they just threw the barely conscious humans. From above, another stone funnel went downward while starting to rotate.

Thalion could observe the process on a fully loaded machine, which looked horrific. Under it, a metal rod went out where all the blood flowed into a channel in the stone floor that guided it to a hole in the room where it disappeared.

In the channel there were also occasional filters, since there wasn’t only blood coming out of the juicer but also ripped flesh, teeth, or eyeballs that somehow survived the process.

The juicers weren’t the only machines in the room. There was something that looked like an iron maiden. With every prisoner killed in those iron maidens, a red crystal in the mouth of the screaming face placed on the outside began to glow more and more.

Most of the humans were thrown into the juicers, with only a few ending up in the iron maidens.

There were also a few other operations that weren’t used at all, but Thalion had no idea what the quadrants with a few holes as entrances were meant for.

He felt very bad when throwing the prisoner into one of the juicers. Next, he would have gone back outside to get the rest, but an alarm shrilled through the laboratory.

“Attention. Everyone on guard. We have invaders inside the city. I repeat. We have invaders inside the city.”

The voice came from a rune on the ceiling between all the red lights.

While all the others listened in shock, Thalion sneakily walked over to a small chest where the red crystals were stored. He acted like he was putting something inside, but instead he put every single crystal into his spatial amulet.

“Quick, let’s get outside!” one arachne in the back bellowed at the red robes in the room. This arachnid human wore a red mask over his face, and the tone was very angry.

It all looked like Thalion’s opportunity was right there. He just needed to wait a bit until the room cleared a bit more.

Just a little bit longer.