City of Fallen Souls: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 3) Jez Cajiao (best color ebook reader txt) 📖

here…” Bane called, and we ran forward, ignoring all bodies aside from the Promethean. Lydia paused to search its corpse roughly, cutting its bag free and passing it to me to store for later. I dropped it into my Bag of Spatial Folding, confident without checking that it would be of lower quality.

The next room was packed with small cages, most filled with rotting filth and dangling… bits. The few cages that were occupied by living things held people with open, weeping sores . They looked weak, starved, and as though they’d long ago given up on life. One woman with dirty white hair stared listlessly at me as we entered the room.

“Well, fuck…” I muttered, gaping at the revolting conditions. “What the hell is this?” It was Yen who spoke up, pointing to the gnawed bones in one of the cages nearby.

“It’s a dining hall…” she said disgustedly, picking her way carefully across the filth-strewn floor.

“Sick bastards…” I muttered, moving from cage to cage. Four people remained alive in a room that housed twenty cages, and each of them bore bleeding, weeping wounds surrounded by jagged toothmarks.

I was suddenly furious that we’d left the chained Imps with the Legionnaires. I wanted to cut their throats for this. I’d kick them off the side of the tower; no, I’d take them to the Great Tower and throw…

“It’s not... their... fault,” came a whisper from the white-haired woman, and I spun, looking back at her.

“Save your strength,” I hushed her, examining the cage for a way to release her.

“No…” she said, swallowing hard and fighting to speak, her voice raspy and weak. “It’s not... their fault, it’s mine…” she shook her head mournfully. “I was studying... the Imps, and I wasn’t careful... enough with my research… they’re… simple creatures. They... get addicted to emotions, and sentients… leak emotions into their bodies. We change… how we taste to certain creatures, like…Imps, depending on... what we feel... when we die.” A whimper caught in her throat. “I told the... wrong person. I was... studying them, and I... trusted the wrong man… that’s how we all... ended up here…” She closed her eyes and started to shake, sobs escaping her. “It’s all... my fault…”

“No,” I said emphatically. “It’s the fucking Skyking’s fault, not yours, and we’re going to teach it a lesson it’ll never forget.” I found the lock on her cage. The metal contraption was rusty and frankly covered in months of shit, so I ignored it, instead pushing the base of my naginata through the attached loop of chain and twisting, using the weapon as a lever to snap the rusty mess free.

The bottom of the cage fell out, and she collapsed to the floor with a disgusting ‘squelch.’ I swallowed hard at the smell that arose, but I dismissed the shield and reached out, helping her to move to a clear area, the rest of my team doing the same for the other three captives.

“Where’s the next stairwell?” I asked the room in general, and Bane spoke up.

“The corner of the room, beyond that door.” He gestured to an opening nearby. “The other stairwell must just bypass this floor, as there can’t be much left here, what with the size of the room and all. The floor below was probably the opposite to this for the Legion.”

“Okay, let’s get these people over near there, give them a quick heal to keep them going; then we need to move on,” I directed, turning to look at the woman I was helping to stand. “We’ll come back for you, but you don’t want to be with us as we go fight.”

“Jax…” Bane said, moving closer.

“What’s up, mate?” I asked distractedly, watching how badly the woman was struggling, her atrophied limbs shaking as they tried to bear her weight.

“The illusion spell that hid the group…” he started, shaking his head in frustration. “I don’t understand how they hid from my Worldsense as well,” he admitted. “It takes a highly skilled illusionist to create something that can reflect the pulses of my Worldsense, so we must be careful, very careful, going forward. If one had not made a noise, I’d have missed them.”

“Okay, mate, will do.” My mind was spinning. I’d not even considered that. “Warn the others, will you?” I asked as Oracle hovered next to me, examining the woman. I’d asked her not to use our mana unless it was over half for the next few fights, just in case I needed to kickstart our shield, and I could sense that she was feeling a bit useless.

“Do you want to heal her?” I asked Oracle, and she immediately began casting, wrapping the woman in a sheath of magic that lifted her, groaning, from the floor as it scanned her inside and out to rebuild and repair the most grievous injuries. I watched flesh literally bubbling up to fill the bite marks, smoothing out sores and pustules, and her face slowly gaining mass, her cheeks filling in from the impression of ‘Skeletor’ she’d been doing seconds before.

Oracle broke it off before it went too far, leaving me at just over a third of my mana. The truncated spell had still used an easy hundred to start her healing.

Yen was already examining the staircase up to the next level, and Bane was with her. Grizz had dropped back to the last stairwell and was listening carefully, and Stephanos was watching out of the open wall for anyone trying to come in. That left Jian and Arrin dealing with Miren’s wound, and Nigret and Lydia moving people over to where we were.

“We need more mana…” I muttered, searching through my bags and hating that I’d not taken the time to make some more potions.

“I’ve got two…” Arrin called, having somehow heard me, and he passed me one. Thankfully, it was an ‘Average’ quality potion that restored a hundred mana, with a boosted regeneration that would double my own for the next minute.

I downed it quickly, sighing