The group of four moved down the corridor with much less caution than they had during their original trek. Instead of following the walls in low crouches, they moved at a jog. Well, most of them moved at a jog; Caster had to run in long, loping strides to keep up with them.

While it took them nearly a dozen long minutes to clear all of the individual rooms that lined the corridor at irregular intervals, it only took them two minutes to reach the back of the procession of freed humans. Dozens of humans wearing the eclectic mix of leather and cloth milled out in near silence within the corridor.

Even though much of the corridor was practically featureless, Octavius was able to identify where they were waiting. It was the entrance to the room that held the boxes full of shattered bones, as well as the secret exit.

He was thankful for their silence as they waited for their turns to climb out. Even the young children among them, with the smallest being maybe seven years old, only spoke in excited whispers.

His eyes scanned past the crowd and saw Finn and Raj standing guard at the unexplored side of the group of freed captives. The others weren’t within his line of sight, so he assumed that they were facilitating the group’s movement up the secret tunnel. Every dozen or so seconds, the line would move forward slightly as another person began their climb.

He grimaced slightly as he supervised their slow progress. The lowest level person among them was level 8, but most of them were physically normal humans. After all, the thralls had forced them all to put their stat points into intelligence from the moment of their capture. Beyond that, there were four young children that he could see, and all of them would slow their progress further.

Well, he commented to himself, one thing’s for sure. I definitely have time to check out the new exit they’re digging out.

After a moment’s thought, he gestured for Marcus’s group to follow him over to Finn and Raj. Once they stood in a huddle, he addressed them.

“Alright, I’m going to head down the corridor and try to figure out where exactly the new tunnel that they’re making opens up. If we can find it, that at least gives us options on how to counter it,” he reasoned, “Marcus, I want your team to stand guard here while the people we freed climb up. Send someone to be a forward scout to warn you if any thralls are approaching.

“Bill, we definitely haven’t noticed a diversion going on. With Toby’s death, we know that they were engaged in combat with something, probably the thralls. Go up to the surface and check if the camp is still there. If it is, lead the people over. If not, bring them back to the Sanctuary and warn the Council of what has happened.”

“Finn,” he addressed the resident jokester of the group, “You’re with me. We’re going to check out the new tunnel.”

Various “Yes, sir,”’s and “Ok”’s responded to his plan, and Finn grinned wolfishly. “So,” the young man said in an all too pleased manner, “You and me get to go do the exciting stuff while these schmucks are on babysitting duty?”

When Octavius nodded at him, he pumped his fist once and then flinched when Marcus cuffed the back of his head.

“Watch it,” the marine grumbled, “Or I’ll make sure that you have the oh one hundred guard shift for a week.”

The young man’s smile only seemed to grow at the threat. “You wouldn’t do that to me Sarge!” he exclaimed with his hands clenching an imaginary wound on his chest, “I’m valiantly taking the most dangerous assignment while you get to remain perfectly safe!”

The marine began to grumble under his breath as he turned to his own team to inform them of their guard arrangements. Octavius smiled at the young man and shook his head slightly.

Hefting his spear, he began to move down the corridor along its inner wall. He could hear the soft footfalls of Finn behind him as he moved from door to door. This time, they neglected to check each and every door as they moved. He estimated that the freed captives would take another give or take five minutes to at least clear the corridor, meaning that they didn’t have time to check each room for errant thralls.

Even so, it came as a mild surprise when they failed to encounter a single thrall over the course of their journey. In fact, he began to wonder if Robert had actually already begun his distraction and he just hadn’t noticed any clear signs of it.

As they moved in ready crouches, he found his eyes constantly straying to the status of his party members at the edge of his vision. There, the blank space that recently held Toby’s name seemed to radiate sorrow. However, what he kept glancing at wasn’t that. Instead, he checked the health bar under Jabir’s name.

The man was a close-range fighter. If there was an ongoing attack on the humans above, he would’ve guessed that there would be at least a hint. Instead, there was nothing. There was no decreasing stamina that might indicate a heated battle, and there definitely wasn’t a decrease in health. In the end, he could only conclude that there wasn’t some form of mass assault on the humans high above their heads.

After three minutes of making their way down the wide hallway, they reached something that made Octavius pause. As the corridor leveled out, he was able to see a massive arched doorway. It was identical in size and shape to the one that led to the entrance hall of the underground complex, only the set of massive wooden doors were missing. More important than that, however, was the fact that it was on the wrong side of the corridor for it to lead to the entrance hall.

He instant halted his movement and backtracked a step until he was almost entirely hidden by the gentle curve of the hallway. Finn looked at him with a curious expression, and Octavius held a finger up to his lips before turning back to the doorway. It could only be one thing — the new tunnel that they were excavating.

His eyes scanned from back to forth across the corridor. With every pass, he inched slightly more forward until the entirety of the empty doorway was in sight. There wasn’t a single thrall present that he could see. There wasn’t even the glimmer in the air that would signify the presence of a thrall under an illusion.

He couldn’t see the door that would lead to the massive entrance hall from where he stood and considered crossing the corridor so that he could. After a moment’s thought, he decided to wait for a moment. Instead, he closed his eyes and concentrated on listening for any sounds.

After a second of silence, he thought he heard something. It was low and distant. He just couldn’t seem to place what it was. It sounded a lot like some sort of irregular rumbling, only it was slightly distorted. In the end, the only thing that he could determine was that the sound wasn’t natural and was coming from the open doorway.

The sudden sound of metal clashing against metal suddenly echoed through the corridor. Octavius instinctively flinched from the sudden loud sound, and he immediately fell into a combat stance. What followed were a dozen long seconds of silence.

The operator remained on guard as he moved laterally across the corridor. Once he reached the halfway point between both walls, the wooden door that led to the entrance hall came into sight. It was directly opposite the new empty doorway and was different than what Octavius remembered.

Whereas before the wooden door was connected to the doorway with massive hinges on the inside, now they sat flush with the stone. Beyond that, the crack that ran between the two large doors was missing as well. The entire entrance hall was sealed off.

It seems as though we don’t have a backup exit, he realized, Though, I suppose that’s something better to figure out now than when it’s needed.

He reached the wall opposite the sealed wooden door and walked along it in a crouch. Finn’s light breathing behind him was the only sound besides for the continuous low noise from the open doorway in front of him. The noise grew louder and louder as they approached until the different sounds that made it up began to differentiate themselves.

He was able to pick out the sound of something heavy scrape against stone, followed by a soft rustle of fabric on fabric. Dozens of such sounds reached his ears over the course of half a dozen seconds, and he wondered what was going on inside of the doorway. One thing was clear, however. There were definitely a lot of living things beyond it.

Even so close to the main entrance hall, the corridor was lit dimly. Octavius looked up and found an orb of light suspended directly between the two massive doorways and breathed a sigh of relief. With a light positioned there, his shadow would be cast away from the door. That would allow him to approach it without being spotted by anything or anyone inside.

He moved closer and closer to the open door with Finn hot on his heels. As soon as he reached its edge, he paused and listened. The constant sounds of small movements were suddenly broken by a loud scraping sound that lasted half a second before the corridor descended into near silence once more.

Octavius finally was able to place where he had heard something like the sound before. It was nearly identical to the sound of a large amount of soldiers standing in formation. Everyone was trying to be still and quiet, but there were still the sounds of the small movements that people inevitably made.

Of course, none of that could account for the sporadic loud sounds that punctuated the eerie silence. The first sound of clashing metal made him think of combat, but the long pauses between the sounds made him dismiss the idea. Unless the battle was over in a single move, there would’ve been a lot more noise.

Turning to Finn, he gestured for the young man to wait a moment. When the young man nodded in reply, he closed his eyes and began to concentrate. He reached out the dim shadows in the doorway that was not two feet from him. Slowly, his senses expanded as he established a connection with a larger and larger region of the shadow.

His senses became sharper where the shadow at the edges of his control was farther away from the light in front of the doorway. Expanding the range of his senses even more, he was able to create a mental picture of what laid beyond the doorway.

On the other side of the door, the floor continued maybe two dozen feet before falling off at the sides. Directly in front of the doorway, a series of short steps led down eight or so feet to where a massive chamber opened up. His senses at the edges of the chamber were incredibly sharp, which told him that they were in deep shadow.

The section of the walls of the room that he was able to sense implied that the room was perfectly circular and perhaps even dome-shaped. As his senses stretched farther into the cavernous room, they encountered feet and legs. There were ranks upon ranks of them. Every pair of legs was pointed directly toward the center of the circular room.

As his shadow sense reached toward the center of the room, it grew weaker and weaker until he was only able to sense within the shadows cast by the thralls that stood in irregular circles around the center of the room. He was annoyed that he wasn’t able to figure out what they were all watching but dismissed the concern as he began to look for wherever the actual tunnel was.

It was clear to him that the large circular room was some sort of staging ground, which meant that the exit would be nearby. Although it took him a moment, he was quickly able to find two halls that led downward and back toward the cliff face. They stood in the shadows on either side of the staircase.

Tuning most of the information that was flooding his mind, he tried to sense down the tunnel. If he didn’t even have to enter the massive room, he’d be extremely pleased. However, even as his senses raced down the tunnels, the core of mana within him emptied at an alarming rate. Even though his shadow sense spell took barely any mana, covering such a large area for even a few seconds ate up mana far too quickly. Fifty mana gone… A hundred… Two hundred…

He cut off the spell with an annoyed scowl. He’d used forty percent of his mana in three seconds and wasn’t even able to reach the end of the tunnels. What he was able to learn, however, was extremely helpful to him.

He knew that the edges of the large room were in deep shadows and that he could enter the tunnels without stepping into the light. The two tunnels pitched sharply downward and met in the middle to form a single larger tunnel. From there, it turned sharply back and forth to prevent it from becoming too steep. He was only able to sense past two bends before he had cut off the spell, but had been able to confirm the lack of thralls within at least that section of the tunnel.

Biting his lip, he decided that he had to enter the tunnel. If he was correct and the room was circular, it would be a fair assumption to say that many of the thralls were facing the doorway. In that case, anyone in the doorway would be silhouetted sharply against the dim light of the corridor.

He turned to Finn and gestured for the young man to lead in close. Cupping his ear, he whispered at a volume that even he wouldn’t be able to hear from half a dozen feet away.

“There is a massive room on the other side. Past the doorway, there is a drop of a few feet on both sides. Just past the drop, there are the entrances to the tunnel that leads down,” he explained, “There are a ton of thralls in there just standing around. If we crawl along the edge of the doorway and drop down to the tunnels, they likely won’t be able to see us. Just follow my lead, ok?”

The younger man nodded and his face settled into a determined expression. Octavius gripped either side of his spear and separated the two halves. His fingers dexterously moved to tie them to his back as he moved to a prone position. Inching around the corner, he began to crawl forward.

Huh, who knew all those hours climbing under barbed wire in training might actually come in useful in such a place, he idly commented to himself as he crawled forward.

As he dragged his body a few feet at a time, he took in the room. The platform in front of him blocked his view of all but the farthest thralls. In the middle of the dome-shaped room there hung a large orb of light. Putting his head down, he concentrated on not making a sound as he crawled.

As soon as he reached the other side of the entry hall, he slowly moved so that he could drop feet-first onto the ground to the side of the elevated platform. Inching backward, his center of mass tipped him over the edge, and he dropped. His fingers immediately caught the edge and slowed his momentum before he released his hold and fell the final few feet.

His boots impacted the ground with barely a sound, and he immediately made room for Finn. As he waited for the younger man to drop down, he peered over the heads of the shorter thralls and toward the middle of the room.

There must have been hundreds of them. Most wore the cloth and leather that identified them as low-level mages, while others wore the plain robes of the shapers and higher-level mages. In the middle of the room, there was an open circle that was maybe twenty feet across. In the middle of it, stood Kzedr in all its alien glory.

The large thralls dual blades flashed through the air, aiming for the two blurs that moved around it. The blurs seemed to flash forward in intervals of up to a dozen feet at a time before stopping and starting once more. When one of them halted to change directions, Octavius realized what was happening. The large thrall was fighting with two of the Nightstalkers.

It seemed as though the Nightstalkers weren’t able to hurt the large thrall, but in turn, they were able to avoid all of Kzedr’s powerful blows. He wondered why they were fighting, but decided that he had more immediate concerns when Finn dropped beside him.

He couldn’t even see the young man in the deep shadows, so he gripped Finn’s wrist and led him to where he remembered the tunnel’s entrance to be. Twenty feet into the tunnel, they came to their first small light, and Octavius released him.

Making sure to count his paces, Octavius moved silently down the tunnel. They moved around three bends before a sound reached them. It was a series of cracking sounds that could only come from rock being broken apart. They were getting close to the site of the construction.

They reached the final bend, he inched around the corner. There, a dozen stone shapers in grey colored robes stood with arms raised as the stone seemed to crack and make way for them. Six rogues stood idly behind the shapers with relaxed postures.

Octavius cursed in the safety of his mind. There was no way that they could wipe out the stone shapers even if the two of them were to sacrifice their lives. Instead, he estimated the distance between the bend and where the tunnel ended before stepping back behind cover. Finn looked at him with a questioning expression, and he nodded at the young man.

‘There are twelve shapers and six rogues,’ he mouthed silently. It seemed as though the young man understood even in the low light, and he nodded. Closing his eyes Octavius tallied up the distance that they’d covered. They were within twenty-five feet of the first exit, at least horizontally. Vertically, they were far lower.

He already knew generally how tall the cliff was and how far down the entrance hall stood. That, along with the depth into the cliffside that the tunnel began, he was able to estimate how long the tunnel needed to be before it broke out into the open air.

A minute later, he’d completed the simple arithmetic, and his eyes shot open. The distance that he’d estimated that the tunnel needed to be was shorter than the distance that he guessed it already was, even when accounting for the bends. Either his estimates for the distances were very far off, or the thralls couldn’t be far from completing the tunnel.

Well, shit, was the only thing that came to mind.