“You’re telling me you know the Beast King?” the White Tiger asked, looking surprised as he lay on a bed of foraged tree roots.
The Beast King was one of the Black Guild’s oldest top executives, whom Zenos had met during his infiltration of the organization.
“Yeah. Friend of yours?”
“We fought all the time over territory back in the day, but he’s an honorable man with a strong backbone. We eventually realized we were alike and made peace. Our relationship wasn’t so bad after that. How is he doing? I remember him being very worried about his estranged daughter.”
“He’s doing great.”
Zenos had even met the Beast King’s daughter, Pista, who’d turned out to be an information broker.
“Is that so? Glad to hear it...”
“How did you end up down here?” Zenos asked.
“Powerful people get in touch with top executives sometimes. They have their own territorial disputes, and they need someone to handle the dirty work that they can’t make public.”
There had been a time when the White Tiger had considered cooperating with such people in exchange for gold, but he’d ultimately refused, not wanting to be anyone else’s pawn. As a result, he’d roused their ire, fallen into a trap, and ultimately been sent to the underground mine.
“And then you became the boss of this place,” Zenos ventured.
“That’s how it turned out,” the White Tiger confirmed.
When the beastman had first arrived, fights over the mined manastones were rampant. Clashes between groups had been brutal, and because of that, deaths were common—worsening the vicious cycle of undead spawning.
“Someone had to bring order to this place,” the White Tiger explained.
He’d demonstrated his strength to the other prisoners, formed a large faction, and taken control of the mine. Members of his faction were given food in proportion to their work, and anyone deliberately causing chaos was forcibly eliminated.
“I felt sorry for those who ended up here for the same reason as me, just for defying someone in power. I try to keep some order here, but I’m getting old. My body’s breaking down, and I can’t move like I used to. Plus, more and more people keep getting sent down here, and I can’t keep track of everything anymore.”
As such, groups like the men that had first picked a fight with Zenos were becoming more commonplace.
“Honestly, I was ready for my time to end. Most of the men who ended up here with me have already passed, and I’m tired of digging up manastones in this dark hellhole just to trade for barely enough food to get through each day. This place’s a living nightmare.” The White Tiger rubbed his belly and gave a small smile. “But...thanks to you, I’m still kicking. Never thought I’d meet such a skilled healer. Living long has its perks, I guess,” he said with a guffaw.
The beastman slowly sat up.
“I wasn’t afraid of death, but I did have one regret. So now that I’m healed, I guess I’ll try to keep going a bit longer. Thank you, Shadow Healer Zenos.”
“A regret, you said?”
“Yeah. Just one. I want to feel the sunlight again before I die.”
Zenos sat down before the White Tiger as the beastman gazed up at the ceiling through narrowed eyes. “Actually, that’s what I wanted your help with.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is there any way out of this place?”
Zenos had accepted punishment for the saintess incident to protect the slums. But everything had happened too quickly, and he hadn’t had the chance to explain things to anyone. He was certain people were worried and fretting about him, and he couldn’t just let things be without talking to them again.
The White Tiger fell silent, then slowly shook his head.
“I owe you my life, Zenos, and so I’ll help you with anything you ask. I, too, want to get out of this place. But I can’t make any promises. I’ve been here over fifteen years. I’ve looked for escape routes, dug through the bedrock toward the surface, tried everything I could think of. But no one’s ever made it out of here.”
Originally, this prison had been a manastone mine deep underground. But due to the high number of roaming undead, it was extremely dangerous, and the whole thing had been sealed. Only the pulley system for transporting stones, a complex network of air vents, and a one-way teleportation circle remained, while the mine itself had been completely shut off from the surface.
“The pulley and the air vents connect to the surface, right?” Zenos asked. “What if we worked together to expand them until a person could fit through?”
“I’ve tried that many times, but the entire mine seems to be blocked off by a barrier of some kind. On top of that, the surface is really far up, and the ground is unstable. While digging, we ended up causing cave-ins that destroyed several of the pulleys and vents, and all it did was bury a bunch of us alive.”
“I see...”
The White Tiger frowned, his throat rumbling. Zenos, meanwhile, scratched his head and stared blankly at the ceiling. The situation was shaping up to be worse than he’d thought.
“Well, that’s a bummer. What to do...”
He turned several ideas over in his head, but nothing good came to mind. As the silence dragged on, he felt someone’s gaze on him and turned around to find Aston staring in his direction, arms crossed.
“What’s the matter, Aston?”
“Zenos, you think you can figure this out on your own?”
“Well, yeah.”
“All we can do down here is survive until the next day, you know.”
Aston wasn’t wrong, but Zenos figured if that was all they did, they’d just be stuck here until death.
“But you know,” Aston continued, arms still crossed, “maybe there’s more to it than that. Watching you made me start to wonder...”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“Nope.”
“You don’t?!” Zenos blurted out.
“Look,” Aston said in a calm tone. “You’re not like me. You’ve spent your life using those hands of yours to help others, right? That’s how you found your place. No?”
“You’re...not wrong, I don’t think.”
“Then you just gotta sit and wait. If everything you’ve built up is real, there’s gotta be people out there thinking about how to help you. They’ll do something. You don’t always have to be the one doing the saving. Maybe you should be getting saved, for once.”
Zenos’s eyes widened. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Sh-Shut up!” Aston yelled, turning his face away.
More relaxed, Zenos smiled. “Well, I do feel a little better.”
“Heh.”