A raid by cultists was nowhere in the escape plans Kuklo had spent every day of the last two years devising. He had come up with every hiccup he could think of and considered countermeasures. In the end, he’d been ambushed by a disaster far outclassing any scenarios in his ironclad plan.
Such perhaps was the Titan’s son’s destiny─or curse…
Still, the intrusion by the believers was the only unexpected element. Everything else was going as planned.
Kuklo and Sharle headed for Wall Sheena’s underground city.
Originally an evacuation shelter in the case of a Titan attack─a special location set up for the privileged classes such as the royal family and individuals in the royal government─the city now had a unique identity as the country’s pleasure quarters. It was, in essence, a red light district. It was also Kuklo’s hometown; “Titan children” tended to be bought or sold in the underground city, and the sideshow Dario had visited was also located there.
The underground city’s population was in the hundreds to the thousands, and its size was indistinct. The city’s boundaries were constantly spreading out like a net as its population grew. It was likely that no one person had an accurate grasp of the entirety of the underground city’s structure. None tried to know or fancied to create a map. The name of anyone who undertook such a project would surely be added to the list of missing persons by the next day.
The place was a hotbed of crime of all stripes. While it would normally be targeted for crackdowns and arrests, its existence was tolerated thanks to the pleasures it offered the wealthy. As the roster of clients and patrons included the keepers of the very laws it broke, the city’s character could be said to be as underground as its location. The residents knew more than a few of the visitors’ secrets, and a roundup would cause troubles for a host of individuals. All of this led Kuklo and Sharle to choose the underground city as their hiding place. Its inhabitants, who had come there for a multitude of reasons, didn’t scrutinize others’ pasts in exchange for not revealing their own. So it was that Kuklo and Sharle avoided inviting undue suspicion despite having appeared out of nowhere.
One thing that was essential to living in the underground city was hard currency. Simple coins, these were spheres of metal the size of the tip of a pinky that bore the seal of the factory city and nothing more. While they were made of low-quality steel, a byproduct of the Iron Bamboo refinement process, thanks to their provenance they were undeniably hard and difficult to forge, and thus widely circulated.
Sharle had readied about five hundred of these coins as their war chest. One was enough to feed an average family for a day, meaning they were well funded. Aside, of course, from daily living expenses, the coins also paid for treatment for Kuklo’s eye. Ultimately, his right eye was useless and had to be surgically removed. Half of their holdings went to an unlicensed doctor for his services.
✦ ✦ ✦
To Kuklo, life in the underground city was true freedom. No shackles restricted his movements, and no rascal abused him. Now he lived in a world where he made all of his own decisions, and there was no greater joy. Still, this proved confusing to him. Though he had won liberty, he could not figure out what to do with it.
While Kuklo wrestled with his freedom, Sharle, the once-caged princess, naturally struggled with the burden of subsisting in the underground city. All her life she had left maids to perform the most basic of daily tasks, leaving her a well-bred but utterly inexperienced lady in practical matters.
While the two stood in contrast, Sharle was the first to adapt. This was not because her gender made her more adaptable but simply due to her wealth of life experiences. Compared to Kuklo’s, that is.