Jason was jerked bato sciousness as his body choked out more vomit. His throat seared as his empty stomach tried to cast out what wasn’t there, almost gagging him as it did. His head was filled with stabbing pain and when he opened his eyes everything blurred like he was uer. The only clear thing was the little silhouette showing his health, the head now a gring red. His thoughts skittered about like a roach, dashing out of reach as he tried to pin them down.
Slowly, he came to something approximating his sehere was a light sourewhere up ahead, but the light it put out was blood red. Otherwise, the tunnel was dark, but his new power allowed him to see through it. He was once again in a cage, but bigger tha. It was the same kind of heavy cage the lion-man had been in, with thick, heavy bars. Apparently they didn’t want him kig the door open again.
His cage was being taken down a wide, stounnel. It was more like a train tuhan a cave, with an arched roof and ft floors. There was even a rail, like for a mining cart. His cage was on a ptform, being pushed along the rail. Three more cages were being pushed the same way.
The people doing the pushing were wearing bright red robes and ugly demon masks. More of them led the front, carrying nterns with stained gss that produced the ominous red light.
Jason wasn’t thinking about what to do so much as desperately hoping the pain in his head would subside. He was trating on his breathing when a s appeared.
Quest: [Escape!]
Objective failed: Leave the grounds of Vane Manor without being caught.Quest failed.
New Quest: [The Blood Feast]
You have been captured and are set to be sacrificed by a blood cult. You o avoid being a sacrifice.
Objective: Avoid being sacrificed 0/1.Reward: Esseional objective: Save the other designated sacrifices 0/3.Reward: Awakening stohe long tunnel ended in a pair of enormous stone doors into which impressive but grotesque images had been carved, depig some kind of ibalistic y. Four cultists stepped forward, two to a drabbing the handles and pulling batil the doors swung ponderously open. When they did, red light flooded the tunnel, apanied by an incredible heat and a bitter smell. It washed through the doors and over the group like a wave, carrying with it a coppery taste that y thi the tongue.
“That’s a lot of red fgs,” Jason said.
A fist nded hard on the side of his cage.
“Quiet,” a harsh voice barked.
Beyond the doors was a vast, circur chamber, like a great der carved straight out of solid rock. Some twenty-five metres across and at least twice as high, it was enough to boggle Jason’s mind even through his punch-drunk haze. The walls were bck, like some long-dormant magma chamber, but even starting from a natural cavern it would have been a moal bour t it to its current state. Ft stone sbs, carved out of the same bck stone, had been ied into the walls like pegs. They made a punishingly steep set of stairs that wound their to the higher parts of the chamber.
Dominating the room was a red pool of roiling, bubbling liquid, taking up almost all the floor space. It was the source of the light, along with the heat and the coppery stench of blood. The tre of the pool ed, as if on the point of boiling. The sound of thick, sloshing liquid echoed up through the chamber. The red light shone from deep within the pool, washing the whole chamber in red as if everything was coated in blood.
“That isn’t good,” Jason heard from one of the ed people. It was Rufus, who had told him how to use the spirit s. The lion man was there in his own big cage, along with one of the two women. The other was o be seen. One of the robed cultists bashed on the side of Rufus’ cage.
“I said quiet.”
“Or what?” the lion man grumbled. “You’ll sacrifice us in your creepy ritual pit?”
The other prisoners were also dirty and ragged, but nothing like Jason. He had no shirt, no hair, there was blood and old healing oi crusted all over him. His face was coated in blood from his broken nose, along with puffy bck eyes and flecks of vomit.
The rail that had carried the cages on ptforms through the tunnel e the door. The cultists lifted the cages off, two people to each small cage, and four to the rge ohey carried them up the steep stairs, audibly straining at the effort. The lion-man’s cage was the most troublesome, even with four people lugging it. The stairs wound up and around the circur wall, the group pausing after a quarter turn. They had reached a ptform, set into the wall like the stairs, but much rger. It extended out well over the blood pit below.
“Leave the big one first,” one of the cultists said. “No point carrying the heaviest one all the way to the top.”
Jashe voice of the woman he had heard in the celr while pretending to be unscious.
“Thank you, midy,” one of the cultists said gratefully. Jashe voice as the shovel-carrying man she had addressed as Dougall.
The cage holding the big man was left against the wall. Dougall and one of the other cultists walked over to the edge of the ptform and took up a waiting position, fag out over the pool below. The rest tinued on. The stairs tio wind upwards beyond the ptform, making another quarter-turn around the room before reag a sed ptform.
“Leave the cage,” the woman said.
“Isn’t he the ohat killed the young master?” one of the cultists asked. “You don’t want to save that one for st?”
“I’m not going to make you haul that thing all the for my own satisfa.”
“Thank you, midy.”
The four cultists roughly dropped Jason’s cage up against the wall. As at the first ptform, two cultists took up positions at the ptform’s edge while the rest of the cultists with the remaining two cages resumed the climb. Jason watched as they made another quarter-turn ast to the ptform, which hid them from sight.
Jason took a look around. His vision was still like looking through a stranger’s gsses, but it was slowly improving. The ptform he was on looked like rough-hewn obsidian, shiny and dark. He had no idea how the massive stoform had been shoved into the wall like a six ton peg.
Examining the cage, the bars were much thicker tha one he had been in. Looking closer, there even seemed to be faint traagical engravings on them. Oddly, Jashem as reinf magic. The knowledge from the skill book was making itself known. It was an odd sensation, remembering something he had never learned. He was certain the silver spirit he used before wouldn’t be enough to break out, and he couldn’t reach the lock through the narrow bars to try his key ring.
Pulling out one of the gold ranked s, he tur over in his hand. Uhe ones he got from looting monsters, this one was embossed with the profile of a serious looking man on one side and some kind of crest oher, along with the engraved wreenstone’. His hope was that the gold would be powerful enough.
He looked up at the two people standing at the edge of the ptform. He couldn’t tell if they were men or women in their hooded robes, but her were paying attention to him. Ihey were at the edge of the ptform looking out. If he could escape the cage quiough, he thought there was a ce to rush at least one of them right off the edge
He took a deep breath, fog on the in his hand. He thought the silver had flooded him with strength, but pared to the gold, that had been a meagre trickle. It was like having a hurrie inside him and he shed out with his feet, hoping it was enough to burst open the cage door.
Instead of opening, the door shot off its hinges like it was fired from a etal screeg as the whole front of the cage was ed. The door moved almost too fast to see, barely defleg as it smmed into one of the cultists, sending them flipping off the edge of the ptform. They didn’t even scream, dead the moment the cage door crushed the top half of their body.
Startled, Jason crawled from the ruined front of the cage and to his feet. The other cultist reacted quickly, turning and rushing Jason. The ’s power was fading quickly and Jason threw out a fist with the lingering strength of the behind it. To his horror, his fist buried itself in the cultist’s chest cavity. The cultist let out a gurgling sound and died, dropping off Jason’s fist as the strength from the left him. Jason looked in horror at his own bloody fist.
It wasn’t just his newfound strength that left him as the power of the faded. The strain of the ’s power left him feeling eed, barely staying on his feet. His eyes wao close, his body urging him just to y down and sleep. He was jolted back to wakefulness by a powerful, r voice.
“THEY’RE ING FOR YOU!”
Jason’s head snapped up and saw multiple cultists ing back dowairs. Looking around, the pair from below were ing up as well. Peering over the edge, he spotted the door below, on the far side of the blood-red pool. He had a terrible idea.
“Magic power, you’d better work.”
As he backed up, the starlight cloak formed around his body, shrouding him in light-speckled darkness. After a steeling breath, he ran to the edge, leaping out as he urged the cloak’s power to reduce his weight. He sailed through the air, shadow cloak sweeping out behind him like a trail of stars. Floating over the bloody pool, he nded almost perfectly in front of the huge stone doors, still open.
“That went startlingly well.”
He looked up at the stairs, spotting the cultists bolting down them in pursuit. He ran through the doors and into the tuhen stopped.
“Just run,” he told himself. “You ’t save them, you’re terrible at everything. Just run.”
Instead of running he ducked behind one of the heavy stone doors, which the cultists had not opened fully due to their enormous weight. He pressed himself between the wall and the door and waited. The cloak dimmed, going frht stars to melding Jason into the shadows as he admonished himself silently.
Well done, idiot. Now yoing to be tossed into a pit of blood by ibals and then probably eaten. Good job.
Cultists came rushing through the door, sprinting up the tunnel as fast as their bulky ceremonial robes would allow. None of them so much as gnced back at Jason’s hiding spot. Jason stayed stock still as more cultists came through as he cowered behind the door.
