While he and YunYun were thinking, Zia’s eyes suddenly lit up in excitement.

“Let me be him!” She whispered and pointed at the bishop who was still hanging over Nick’s shoulder. Obviously playing supporting actress’s role was too boring for her and she wanted a promotion.

“But the voice?” Nick asked.

“I’ll only say something like ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and you do the talking. Simple guards shouldn’t know relationship between the bishop and elder Sonor that well.” Zia answered.

“Well. Those people by no means are simple guards, but we can try. If anything goes awry we immediately retreat and leave the temple grounds, all right?” Nick thought for a bit and agreed to Zia’s whim. The idea was not that bad.

They stripped the poor head of the church and Zia quickly changed into his white robe while Nick put more sedative herbs in his moth. There was no reason for the old man to wake up before the play was over. Then they tied him up making sure there was no way he could get free and raise alarm even if he woke up, and simply put him down on the stairs. No one cared about his comfort anyway.

Few minutes later the guards at the door heard soft steps approaching.

“… and in the end they detonated rank five beast core. I barely got away, albeit injured.” Guards discerned an aged voice and from behind the corner two people appeared on the staircase, one in dark hooded robe and another in white.

“Really?” The person in white said in a feminine voice. There were very few people who could come down here and only one they knew wore white robes and spoke like that.

“Indeed!” Nick nodded while they both step by step continued to approach the guards, “For over a week I had to …”

Unfortunately the guards didn’t hear how the story ended, because the moment Nick and Zia was approximately four meters away, he could almost discern the faces of the two. In turn, they probably could as well, therefore he gave a quick hand signal and YunYun like a lightning shot out from behind him and cut of the heads of both guards with one slash.

Their primitive idea did work in the end, but unfortunately the whole place now was a mess. The blood from the two bodies painted everything red – the doors, the walls and stairs as well.

Seeing that YunYun wanted to apologize, Nick just waved her off. This was probably the best scenario they could’ve hoped for. Now they needed to figure out what was behind the door number two. Of course, there was no way for them to guess, therefore they quickly agreed to proceed further as they were. But, since almost certainly there was no need for further theatrics, they changed into their ‘ninja costumes’ first.

Nick carefully pushed the door to open a small gap and tried to peep through, but only saw the same stairway stretching into the darkness. He sighed, opened the door a bit more and slid through while the girls followed, but as soon as they got through, everyone froze.

The stairway did indeed continued to stretch further down, but the tunnel ended few meters behind the door and a huge, incredibly huge hall opened before them. It was hard to imagine how such large cavern could exist underneath the pyramid. It was almost like a medium sized underground coliseum with a large round stage, may be twenty five meters in diameter, in the middle, but instead of the spectator seats around it there was water. Indeed, the platform in the middle was basically a small island, except it was connected to the cave walls with eight identical walkways and one of those led to the door the three youths came from. Now they understood why the air became more humid – it was almost like the whole water of this region was gathered here, in this strange underground pool.

The whole cavern was at least hundred fifty, two hundred meters wide, may be even more and in the darkness it was not possible to see its ceiling, but it was definitely dozens of meters high or even higher.

On the round platform that was in the middle of the water, there were multiple lighting formations turned on and one could discern eight three to four meter high columns, covered in rune carvings, erected right at the end of those walkways. There seemed to be strange lines and markings on the ground as well and they all led to the center, to a very strange looking statue.

“Zia!” Nick whispered, “You will destroy that formation, while YunYun and I cover you.”

“What?” Zia had hard time to pull herself together at the sight in front of her.

“The columns, the walkways and the runes on the ground. All of that is some kind of formation. You are the best candidate to destroy all of that!” Nick hurriedly explained and beckoned for them to follow.

Indeed, he was certain this whole setup was some kind of formation, but, obviously, it was unknown what this formation was for. Be as it may it seemed to be important for the temple and thus, for the Lori kingdom, therefore they had to use this opportunity and destroy it.

Quickly, but still trying to be stealthy, they approached the center. They didn’t see any guards yet, but were confident there had to be some. If the both doors were guarded like that, obviously someone should be here as well.

They already held their weapons in their hands and Zia was almost swinging hers at the closest column when a loud squeaky noise disrupted the calm in the cavern. It sounded like someone was scratching a porcelain plate with a steel fork, except hundreds of times louder and, in fact, it was a voice.

“Blood! I smell blood! Intruders!” To the horror of the three it turned out to be the statue in the middle that suddenly came to life and screamed. The scream itself was not the scary part – it was the way the statue looked.

Only now the trio could see that in the middle of the platform there was something like a throne. On it sat a creature with a similar body to a human, may be one and a half meters tall. The small and thin body seemed to be all dried up, but the head of this being was in a size of bucket, may be larger and was supported with a weird construction connected to the chair.

Currently, after the first scream, the mouth of this enormous head was slowly soundlessly moving, while its eyes were still closed, more precisely, it seemed they could not even open because of how deeply eyelids were sunken in the eye sockets. For Nick this view directly reminded of how aliens were portrayed in some older movies. Be as it may, this was incredibly creepy.

“Assassins! Protect the mother! She’s a mother to us all!” Suddenly a female voice shouted and trio saw several people madly charging over from every direction using those walkways. Apparently there was something like rooms in the cavern walls where they stayed until now.

Nick came to his senses first, “Zia! The formation! YunYun! Cover the exit – don’t let anyone out! Otherwise we are dead!”

They did not plan to fight, especially engage in such a large scale battle, but that didn’t mean they were not prepared or were scared of it. The only scary thing currently sat in the middle of the platform gasping like a stranded fish.

When Nick dashed towards the throne to draw most attention, Zia already slashed her huge weapon at the first column. If this was three years ago, she may be would’ve only been capable of leaving some marks, but now she cut the half meter thick stone column like it was made of butter.

‘Boom!’ the top half landed on the platform.

“Nooooo!” The creature on the throne screamed like someone was torturing it.

At this moment Nick was already three meters from it, but was blocked by a thirty, thirty five year old woman who jumped out from behind the throne. Apparently she was already there when they came in, they just didn’t notice her earlier.

“Die!” She shouted and tried to stab Nick with her sword, but the latter did a half-roll to his left while slashing at her right thigh.

“Arhhhh!” A scream full of pain reverberated through the cavern. Screaming in agony the woman lost her balance and fell down splashing the platform red with blood while her right leg rolled away.

Nick’s expression didn’t change and he dashed back towards Zia to intercept another female Qi master who jumped at her from the distance of almost five meters. Nick also jumped up and managed to slash her somewhere at the waistline and from his powerful attack her two halves dropped directly into the water while Zia destroyed the next column.

For a split second Nick got to observe her wielding the Pig sticker and felt like they were back in the jungle and she was practicing on the lake.

‘So she did create her own ‘Butterfly’ move!’ A thought ran through Nick’s mind seeing how Zia cut the column vertically in two identical halves.

But there was no time for him to admire his friends progress – the next crazed woman with a sword in her hand ran at him.

From the looks of it this was the real Lori temple, the creep in the middle was the ‘goddess’ and these females, dressed in linen robes, were some sort of priestesses. Even more, all of them were Qi masters, but the downside was that their combat skills were not that good.

Of course, it was downside for them and Nick was not going to complain. He lowered his stature and prepared to evade the attacker’s sword when suddenly another priestess caught his right forearm with a whip. He barely managed to drop down to the floor on his back and the sword barely missed him.

Nick quickly switched Wakizashi to his left hand and cut off the whip, but with a corner of his eye he noticed another one coming from his left. He couldn’t really evade and turned his back towards it to receive a painful slash. The whip was already flying towards him the second time, when the head of the priestess rolled off her shoulders.

YunYun stood behind the falling headless body and intended to take care of the other priestess, when Nick angrily shouted, “The doors!”

Not all priestesses ran at them crazily screaming. A couple cheeky ones ran over water towards the exit, apparently trying to call for help. Nick already foresaw that, therefore asked YunYun to guard the exit. Unfortunately the girl was either too bored or too worried about him and came to help.

“Sorry!” YunYun shouted back realizing her mistake and only left a guilty smile behind while darting towards the door.

Nick wasn’t really worried someone could get away from her, he knew YunYun’s speed better than anyone else. He was concerned there could be some formation at the door or close to the stairs and the priestesses could raise the alarm. Fortunately it wasn’t the case. The two who reached the door before YunYun, charged through and ran up the stairs. It was only a matter of seconds before they will get caught.

Nick turned his attention back to the platform. While he was distracted, Zia got entangled by two priestesses and this fight was incredibly inconvenient for her since those two were using whips as well. May be because they understood they didn’t have a chance in a direct confrontation or were just trained this way, they jumped around trying to position Zia between them and whipped her mercilessly. The latter was annoyed to no end, but while trying to avoid the whips, she still managed to destroy a couple of columns and cause large damage to the platform.

She knew very well Nick was nearby and it was only a matter of seconds before he would ‘free’ her.