“Huh. So, in other words, this is the bottom of the well,” Zenos said, leaning back against the rough wall of the dim underground passageway.
“Don’t just stand there looking cozy,” a bearded prisoner snapped gruffly. “Once you’re sent here, that’s it. You can never leave. This place will be your grave.”
Aston Behringer, the prisoner, was the one who had taken Zenos out of the slums after the loss of his mentor—only to later cast him out. Zenos had thought they’d never meet again, and certainly not in a place like this.
“You can’t leave, huh...? Well, that poses a problem,” Zenos mused.
Aston barked out a laugh. “‘A problem,’ he says!”
“Why do you sound so smug? And what is this place, anyway?”
“Hell if I know. I wouldn’t be stuck here if I did. All I’ve gathered is we’re somewhere deep underground within the kingdom. That teleportation circle back there is the only way in, and you can’t use it to get out.”
In other words, there was no exit for the prisoners sent here—all of whom were dissidents, found guilty of crimes against their betters.
“Yo, Zenos, weren’t you living the good life in the slums?” Aston asked. “How in blazes did you end up down here?”
“I don’t really know either,” Zenos said. “But apparently I made someone in the royal family mad.”
“Ha! A slum rat like you, pissing off royalty?”
“Look, stuff happened, a royal was involved, and that made another royal mad.”
“Glad to see you still don’t make one lick of sense...”
“And you? How did you end up here?”
Aston had once devastated part of the slums after becoming a golem—an ancient magical construct—driven by his hatred toward Zenos. He’d been arrested by the Royal Guard afterward. And while he’d caused turmoil, he wasn’t exactly a dissident.
“Me? I was stuck in a holding cell in the outskirts of the capital,” Aston explained. “But then a new warden, a young guy, came in. Real piece of work.”
Apparently, the man beat prisoners for fun, even those in for just minor offenses. For his own amusement, he’d target frail elderly commoners, claiming the fear on their faces was entertaining. Aston, bothered by the warden’s behavior, had volunteered for a whipping—and then, taking advantage of a moment of distraction, he’d tackled the young warden while still in handcuffs.
“Turns out the asshole was some big-shot noble’s cousin twice removed or whatever. Three days later, here I was,” Aston concluded.
“Huh...”
“If you don’t care, why’d you ask?!”
“No, I mean... I was just thinking you’ve changed a bit.”
Back during their adventuring days, Aston had always insisted on being the center of attention—he’d hardly been the type to get angry on someone else’s behalf. But Aston hadn’t joined in when Zenos had arrived and the other prisoners had attacked him. If anything, it seemed like he’d come along in an attempt to stop them.
“Heh. Doesn’t sound like praise coming from you,” Aston scoffed.
“It wasn’t praise,” Zenos said.
“What the hell? Hey!”
“So, what am I supposed to do here?”
“Huh? You work until you die.”
This underground mine yielded high-quality manastones, and the prisoners were forced to extract them, Aston explained. A few small enchanted lifts were connected to the surface, and when the mined stones were placed on the lifts, an amount of food proportional to their value and quantity would be delivered back down through the same mechanisms. So by sending up manastones, the prisoners received enough food to survive. If they couldn’t mine enough, they would starve.
In short, those who didn’t work didn’t eat.
“I see. Can I ask you something else?” Zenos asked.
“Gonna have to charge you at this rate,” Aston grumbled.
“And spend it on what, down here?”
“Shut up! Turn of phrase, all right?! Just go ahead and ask, damn it!”
Aston had apparently only been down here for two months, but he seemed to be mentally unraveling already—it was clear this place would break anyone down given enough time.
“Why did those guys come at me?”
Shortly after Zenos had arrived via teleportation circle, he’d been assaulted by multiple men. From a practical standpoint, that seemed like a stupid decision—their time would’ve been better spent on mining manastones instead.
Aston gave a small sigh before answering. “The rule is just that your food rations are based on the stones you send up. Nothing else.”
“Ah. I see.”
In other words, prisoners didn’t have to mine the stones themselves. All they had to do was wrestle new arrivals into submission and force them to do the mining instead. So those guys treated others like their personal mining slaves and kept the food for themselves.
“There’s this one big group with a boss guy who controls all the stones and food,” Aston explained. “Anyone not with his lackeys barely even gets scraps.”
Zenos thought back on the frail, stick-thin limbs of the men who’d attacked him. That a faction would form when this many people gathered together seemed inevitable. The powerful got more resources—whether up on the surface or down here in the dark. This was, after all, a country where people were bound by class from birth.
Perhaps the class system itself was the greatest illness plaguing the nation. The more people he met, the more often this thought occurred to Zenos.
“The class system...” Zenos muttered.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Aston asked.
“Oh, I was just thinking. The whole ‘crime against your betters’ thing only exists because of the class system. And the longer that system goes on, the more people suffer unfairly because of it.”
“You only just realized that? That’s how it’s always been.”
“Well, yeah, but when you really think about it...it’s not healthy at all.”
If the class system was a plague slowly eating away at people, then what could Zenos do as a healer?
“A third-rate healer just mends wounds. A second-rate healer heals people. A first-rate healer makes the world a better place...” he murmured.
“What are you babbling about? Words aren’t gonna get us out of this hellhole.”
“Well...yeah.”
Philosophy was great and all, but his immediate priority was surviving in this environment. Zenos shook off his thoughts and stared into the pitch-black tunnel ahead.
“But if prisoners are gonna team up into gangs, wouldn’t it be more productive to cooperate, share information, and mine as a group instead of just exploiting one another? Everyone would get more in the long run that way,” Zenos mused.
“There’s a problem with that method, though,” Aston said.
Zenos tilted his head. “There is?”
Just then, a scream echoed through the mine. Startled, Zenos instinctively broke into a sprint toward the voice, and saw a few men fleeing in terror.
“They’re coming!”
“Ruuun!”
Zenos watched, confused, as the men ran with their arms flailing in a panic. Erratic footsteps echoed in the darkness behind them, gradually growing louder. A foul stench struck his nostrils, and low, guttural moans rumbled from deeper underground, reverberating in his eardrums.
“Zombies?” he asked.
Eight undead, with arms outstretched and rotting teeth bared, were now within view.
“Dammit! Here they come! This is why we can’t just mine in peace!” Aston shouted in frustration.
The mine, it seemed, was infested with undead. Though they could be driven back, that added to the exhaustion of the malnourished prisoners—who would then drop dead and join the decaying enemies’ ranks. Those killed by the undead would also turn, continuing the never-ending, nightmarish cycle. The deeper one went into the mine, the more undead appeared. No one wanted to go deeper in, despite the high-quality manastone reserves there.
Due to the immense danger, the mine’s entrance had been completely sealed shut, turning it into a massive underground prison where expendable criminals were put to work until they died.
“Huh...” Zenos muttered.
“Don’t ‘huh’ me! These things keep coming back even when we kill them! If you don’t wanna get eaten, you should get the hell outta here!” Aston snapped.
“Uh, Aston, did you forget what it is I do?”
“Huh? Wait. Oh!”
As his former leader’s eyes widened with realization, Zenos held out his right hand.
“Heal.”
With the chant, white light rushed forth from his palm, sweeping through the tunnel like a wave.
“Graaaaa...”
Engulfed in the pure light, the zombies shrieked faintly before turning to dust in an instant. At last, their pitiful souls departed from the depths of the earth and ascended toward the heavens.
“Huh...?”
The men who had been running with tears in their eyes now froze in place, staring blankly at the empty tunnel. Still stunned, they slowly turned to face Zenos.
“D-Did you just do that?” one of them asked.
Zenos cracked his shoulders.
“Say, can you guys take me to your boss?”