Chapter 84: Death under the volcano

The magma level began to subside. In less than ten minutes there was no magma inside the volcano, only an enormous door on the wall.

It was clear as day that the Magma Key belonged to the door that appeared on the bottom of the Runiou Volcano.

"Shall we?!" Safo invited his team to descend.

Climbing down was extremely hard for Safo. It took him an hour and a half, softly putting his legs from the to the rock a bit lower. Nimble and surprisingly fast, Miloud finished the job in 15 minutes. Luna was the second.

"Damn, I could've just teleported myself to Luna. Why I'm so stupid?!" Safo cursed himself while Miloud and Luna laughed at him. They remembered the option but never suggested it.

"Look at it as sort of a training, and don't complain." Miloud found a way to be a mentor.

A ten meters tall and 4 in width, a gigantic stone door blocked Safo's path to the new hidden item. He gulped and walked closer to the door.

Safo summoned the Magma Key and inserted it into the small hole on the side of the gates. Yes, it was more of a gate than a door.

...

"What next? Do we need to gather more keys or something?" Safo managed to finish his words when he had been teleported from the bottom of the volcano.

A couple of seconds of the black screen was proof of his suspicion.

Safo found himself in a poorly lighted space, seemingly underground. It was a big cavern with divided spaces, like rooms. Different rooms had different objects. A chair made of stone, a stone bed with leather stripes, a small wooden box, all in separate rooms.

Each room had luminescent fungus, to brighten the place. It wasn't much but was enough to distinguish the object and to have some orientation in the rooms.

Further inspection of the rooms gave even weirder results. While some rooms were primitive, where objects were made of wood and stone, other rooms showed technological advancement. Metal tools like dull scissors, metal disked saw, metal tubes, glass bottles filled with colorful liquid substances.

When Safo moved further he saw high-tech rooms, hospital wards with medical tools, an operational table, a room with firearms, a room with an offline robot.

' What is this place?' Safo was lost in thought he could fathom why objects from real life could be in the game. He was about to enter the next room when a scream full of pain and fear appalled the place.

"Luna, Miloud, is that you?" Safo took his fighting stance and, being highly alarmed, moved towards the voice.

"HELP!" A man's voice once more overwhelmed Safo's ears.

"Please, help me."

Safo hurried his pace, his shield was ready to deflect anything. Safo was ready to face any monster, He also considered that the cunning monster could replicate a player's voice to hunt lure adventures. Safo expected a trap.

After several wrong rooms, he finally found the one he was looking for. A man didn't stop yelling for help, not for a moment.

When Safo entered the room, his world perception shattered. A not healthy thin guy was tied up to a stone chair looking in his direction. Safo noticed a long thin metal pole coming out of his bleeding stomach.

An injured guy started to cry and speak incomprehensible words. He tried to move his head or hand towards Safo but was tightly fixed. Only his short bony finger moved in chaos trying to send a message for a new guest.

Out of nowhere, a new metal pole materialized and went through the skinny guy's chest. An inaudible groan of horror... and the guy stopped moving.

Safo's grasp on his shield tightened, he blocked his stomach and chest in case he would be the next one to be attacked by the metal poles.

In the next moment, a pale and skinny body disappeared.

'I was too late.' Was I supposed to save him?'

Seconds later the voice rang again, but from a different room.

"I'm here, I'm here. Please, let me go. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Sobbed the voice. Safo ran to save the next one.

'Is this place randomly teleports players to kill them or something?' On the way, Safo tried to theorize about the quest's true intentions.

Safo entered a room with a stone bed but was taken aback by seeing the same guy from the previous room.

"But you...how?" Safo pointed to the place where he just came.

While he talked an electric saw with a bladed disk appeared before the guy on the bed. His movements were restricted by the leather strips, no matter how much he desperately wiggled, he couldn't get himself free.

The disk began to rotate with a buzzing noise. Safo couldn't let the same fate happen to the poor guy, he jumped and knocked away the hovering saw right before it dropped on the body.

Once moved out of the way the saw disintegrated and vanished from the view.

"Help. Please, help. Help me, please." The guy didn't stop begging Safo.

Latter tried to find a way to release the strips and free the guy but the belts had no clasp to be used. Safo circled around the bed, trying to focus on a rescue operation and not to be distracted by the plea of a victim.

Suddenly the noise stopped. Safo turned to see what made the guy mute and saw a heavy rock piece on top of his squished to jelly head. The scene was sickening.

After a moment, the body dematerialized only to be respawned in some other room to be killed again.

The next hundred or so death moments the skinny guy shared with Safo Nur. Finally, he begged Safo: "Kill me please, kill me. Let me be free from this hell. We did the wrong thing, but I don't deserve this." Tears were the regular companion of the guy, he cried non-stop.

While Safo was pondering about the words of the skinny guy he died again impaled by a thick stone cone.

In the next room, Safo asked who locked the guy in the game and got an answer that he knew deep in his heart.

"Creator of this game. He imprisoned us all here. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know, I swear." The laser beam dropped on his forehead and his head exploded.

"KILL ME!"

In the next room, the guy was inside of the metal container which was fixed on top of the fire. Safo watched how the guy had been slowly baked. He banged the walls of the sarcophagus to no avail, Safo could help.

The next room was a quartering place, the guy was tied up horizontally while his arms and legs were pulled into different directions. The procedure was slow as well.

Safo couldn't bear it anymore. Just by watching he felt sickened, he had no idea what the guy felt. Safo ran towards the guy and slammed his head with a rock. Again and again.

It was a game but I didn't feel like it at all. Safo was killing a real person from the real world, he felt that it wasn't his in-game avatar.

In the end, the skinny guy smiled at Safo. "It is different this time. Thank you." Safo kept going.

The pulling mechanism stopped, the body with a smashed open skull and with an oozing brain matter didn't disappear to the next room. It was his last death.

[ You have killed FatBone (Creator’s enemy). You gained 10000 Exp. ]

[ You obtained a God's galoshes. ]

A black rubber cover appeared on top of his footwear as extra protection. Safo quickly went to his inventory to check out the stats of God's galoshes.

[ Name: God's galoshes

Tier: 4

Stats:

+ 1 points to all stats

+ 5 to Defense

+ 50 to HP

Additional set bonus (???) ]

"Fuc* my leaf, this is some cheater stuff. Miloud will be pissed, again. Haha. I will be the King of this game." Safo's voice went down a bit when he remembered the FatBone. "And I will learn about that poor guy."

Safo wanted to go and untie the guy to properly bury him but was distracted by the rumble. The whole place started to shake and crumble down. The ceiling began to fall by pieces and magma came out from the cracks on the floor.

'Damn it. He wants to hide his crimes, this Creator.'

Safo had no choice but to run to the light that shone from the cracks. Upon coming closer Safo saw the humongous stone door; it was still closed but became semi-transparent. Miloud and Luna stood on the other side with worried looks on their faces.

Safo walked through as if there wasn't any door at all.

"We have to get out of here guys. I think Runiou will erupt soon." Safo told him to use teleporters and in the next moment, no living soul was on the bottom of the volcano.

BOOM!