However reckless Stella might be, she wasn’t stupid enough to fire her heat rays toward the surface and bury herself alive under a cave-in. Which meant, without question, that she was somewhere in these tunnels.
We might’ve gone too deep, Oakley thought.
He turned and told Joanne and Alex behind him that they should head back, then pivoted on his heel to retrace their steps.
That was when a faintly sweet scent brushed his nose, tickling his sinuses.
He froze mid-step.
At the same time, a roar shook the mine—rock collapsing on a higher level.
“What!?” he snapped.
The battle on the surface had intensified, and the shockwaves were finally starting to chew at the bedrock near the tunnels. A cascade of rubble and stone crashed down between them, forming a barrier that split the three apart.
“Oakley!” Joanne shouted.
“Senpai!” Alex’s voice followed, muffled by dust and stone.
And the collapse triggered yet another upheaval.
A fissure ripped open under Oakley’s feet, and the ground simply gave way, dragging him down into a bottomless black.
As he dropped in free fall, he glanced up and saw a perfectly square opening cut into the rock above, as if someone had gouged the earth out with a giant chisel.
This wasn’t natural. It was obviously man-made.
“A trap, huh?”
Oakley twisted his body midair, jammed the Flame Spear’s tip into the wall, and used it as a brake.
His fall slowed at last, and then, something slammed into his right flank.
Pain exploded along his ribs.
He twisted to see what it was, and a raw scream tore out of his throat.
A fist-sized monstrosity was clamped onto him, fangs buried in his side.
“Ghh!? You—!”
It was a strange, spider-like insect. Its legs were absurdly numerous, its body long and flattened, like some nightmare cross between a centipede and a threadworm.
He had a split-second’s certainty that it would chew straight through his flesh if he didn’t act. Clinging to the spear with one hand to keep from falling, he yanked a knife from inside his clothes with the other and hacked at the parasite.
He slashed it over and over; after several strikes, the thing went limp and peeled off, tumbling away into the dark.
Even as it fell, Oakley already knew whose handiwork this was.
“Karatenaaaaaa!” he roared, voice echoing up the shaft.
The name alone made his guts boil.
That gray-haired woman was a lump of pure disgust given human shape, a torturer who had seduced the believers of the Northeastern Branch, turned them into her tools, and sent them as assassins.
“Get out here, you bastard! I’ll kill you myself. Come on out, you coward!” Oakley roared into the dark.
Dangling in midair, he glared down into the blackness below.
She had to be down there.
Once she’d noticed his betrayal, she must have flipped the board and laid a trap in the depths instead.
His voice echoed up and down the shaft.
No answer from Joanne. No answer from Alex.
Instead…
Hith, hith. Skitter, skitter. Something huge and many-limbed was moving in the dark. Climbing.
Answering his shouted challenge, a massive presence drew closer. In the halo of holy fire flickering at the tip of the Flame Spear, the woman finally revealed herself.
“You’ve walked right into my trap, Oakley,” Karatena said, her voice dripping with satisfaction. “There’s no escape now.”
From her back sprouted ten jointed limbs like monstrous insect legs, and the once-delicate face he remembered was now marred by bulging veins.
A cruel-looking beak-bladed weapon hung at her hip, and in her right hand, she gripped a buster sword far too large for a normal person.
Karatena Wallmix crawled along the wall on those hooked, chitinous tarsi as if she’d been born there.
“Karatena!” Oakley growled.
“When the tunnels began to fill with smoke, I realized you were behind it. So, I went to ground and waited. They say criminals always return to the scene, don’t they?”
“That body. You really went and let a parasite in.”
“Oh yes. Just to make absolutely sure I'd be the one... to kill you.”
Her body warped into something grotesquely inhuman as she slowly dragged her purple tongue across her lips in obscene delight.
Even the fact that the soldiers she’d sicced on him had been wiped out seemed to fit neatly into her expectations.
“If you had that oversized toy from the start,” Oakley said, nodding at the buster sword, “you could’ve just come yourself instead of throwing small fry at me. Why drag the other believers into it?”
“To draw out your anger, of course. You hate that sort of thing, don’t you?”
“It’s not ‘that sort of thing.’ I hate all of you.”
“My, my… more savage than I thought. How brave.”
She flexed the jointed limbs on her back and began to bound freely around the shaft, kicking off walls and rock with inhuman agility.
Each time she jumped, something dropped from the wide sleeves of her robe—fist-sized, twisted spiders that tumbled and clung to the stone.
All of them were small parasites, clearly her brood, Karatena’s own “children.”
“Go, my darlings!” she crooned. “Feast on the fool until nothing remains!”
A swarm of grotesque insects, shaped in ways that triggered pure, visceral disgust, swarmed up toward him.
Suspended as he was, Oakley couldn’t even swing his weapon properly.
With all those spider legs, Karatena had the clear advantage in this vertical battlefield.
Oakley slammed his knife into the rock wall and planted a boot on the hilt, using it as a makeshift foothold to launch himself toward Karatena.
Dodging the oncoming insects midair, he drove the blazing Flame Spear straight at her.
Of course, an attack that straightforward was never going to land.
In stark contrast to Oakley, who was restricted to mostly linear movements within the shaft, Karatena used the jointed limbs on her back to move freely in three dimensions, skittering and leaping with inhuman agility.
But Oakley had expected that outcome from the start.
He twisted his body mid-flight and whipped out an overhead kick.
“Ggh!?”
Caught off guard, Karatena let out a startled cry and hurriedly brought her buster sword up to guard.
The sole of his boot crashed dead center into the blade.
Using that impact as a springboard, Oakley kicked off the flat of the sword, flipping through the air as he spun the Flame Spear in a vicious arc.
In the darkness of the vertical shaft, an elliptical trail of fire carved itself into the air.
Two of Karatena’s jointed limbs were swallowed by the holy flames.
Before the fire could spread, she made a ruthless decision and severed them herself.
The band of fire lit their faces for a heartbeat, painting two visages, stark in the gloom, twisted with hatred and murderous intent. Oakley lost his footing.
Karatena, her posture ruined, staggered in midair.
They grabbed at each other’s clothes at the same moment, and together they plunged into the depths.
They tumbled, grappling and striking, smashing into the rock walls as they fell through endless black.
After that long, sickening descent, they finally slammed into a ground that felt strangely soft for an underground space.
The impact sent them both bouncing and rolling, until they were flung back-first into opposite walls at diagonal corners of the chamber.
Right after they hit, the “ground” beneath them changed. What had felt like solid footing shuddered with a deep activation roar and then began sinking gently downward. They were standing on top of an elevator platform that had been abandoned long, long ago. The entire structure was made of plant tissue, but neither of them noticed.
As the lift slowly picked up speed, the two, still reeling from the fall, dragged their faces up.
“Karatena!” Oakley snarled.
“Oakley!” Karatena hissed back.
Both of them were lives twisted off-course by Fuankilo, now facing each other head-on, eyes locked.
Karatena rose, supported by eight remaining jointed limbs, and swung both her weapons in powerful, sweeping motions.
Oakley Mercury, executive candidate of the Aros Temple Cult.
Karatena Wallmix, likewise an executive candidate of the Aros Temple Cult.
On the descending platform, far beneath the city of Jade, the second duel between candidates began.