A blinding light enveloped us and before we knew it, Emeri and I found ourselves at the edge of a forest, on a plateau that overlooked a valley.

To our right, a middle-aged man with a scar above his eyes and some stubble on his chin stared down at the valley below. The man had a distinct look, one we both remembered seeing before.

“Sunny!” Emeri exclaimed. The young boy that had lost both his first and second homes to cults had grown up while we weren’t looking. Judging from his gear, he had grown stronger and wealthier, too. I wondered whether we would get to find out how that had happened when we got our hands on the third statue.

“Looks like he’s all grown up…” Emeri murmured, mirroring my thoughts.

There was something curious about the valley he was so fervently staring at, though. While it seemed like a perfectly normal, if overgrown, grassland from up here, something made the view feel… off. Sunny must have gotten the same idea, because he got a determined look on his face.

It felt strange to call him sunny when he was now older than me, so I settled for calling him Helios, instead.

Helios eventually departed from the forest’s edge, slowly descending into the valley by stalking from bush to bush. Emeri and I followed along as he did so, neither of us knowing where Helios was headed. Why he bothered moving so stealthily was lost on me for a while, until I found out why the valley had seemed so odd in the first place.

As we got to the base of it, I noticed a faint shimmer in the air above us. Now that I was paying closer attention, I quickly realised that the shimmer spread all the way to the earth below us. Something was hidden here…

“There’s something hidden-” I tried to explain to Emeri, but she shut me up with a wave, communicating that she had noticed as well. So had Helios, because once he got to the edge of the mysterious shimmer, he drew a simple sword from his belt, enveloped it white mana and slammed it into whatever was being hidden.

It was only now that I realised that Helios had to be at least tier 6, because the world erupted into a bright white flash as he released his attack. When we regained our sight, a grand building revealed itself before us. Hardly old enough to be called a ruin, it still resembled the architecture of the older dungeons from that time, with a flat roof and several levels separated by terraces. A stairway led from terrace to terrace, all the way up the building to the top.

A large gateway had been carved into the stone, the metal gate that had been placed inside dented from Helios’ attack. A large sign hung above the gate, its writing unintelligible. Helios was was probably mute, so he wasn’t about to tell us what it said, either.

He grunted when he realised that a single attack hadn’t been enough to break through, only revealing the building, before he decided to renew his assault with more vigor. The gate didn’t hold for much longer and soon enough the way inside had been cleared, allowing us to follow behind Helios as he entered the building.

“What is this place?” I couldn’t help but murmur, fascinated by the signs painted on the walls. Unlike our alphabet, these signs were more similar to small drawings of people and objects, though there were a number of exceptions that were more similar to our own way of writing. And it was writing, because a repeating structure was clearly visible in the series of paintings.

“A ziggurat, as they’re called. These days, only a few ruins like this still exist, since the church doesn’t like them much. They’re theorized to have been built as shrines to pagan gods, which ruffles more than a few feathers…”

“Pagan gods? Is that why Helios is here?”

Emeri shrugged her shoulders, not sure.

Helios, for one, didn’t seem nearly as interested in the painted murals as I was. In fact, he was still dead set on whatever goal he had come here with, because he moved like a soldier.

Suddenly, some voices came from the distance, accompanied by small shining lights.

“Torches! The guards are finally here!”

Once again, Helios prepared for battle. His sword drawn, he didn’t even flinch as the familiar colours of skill-fire arced down the tunnel. Before the ranged skills could even hit him, a translucent barrier appeared, making the attacks fizzle out on contact as if they had never even existed.

Realising that these guards were about to be turned into dust, I ran over to them in hopes of getting any clue from their appearances. As I ran over, though, a white flash flew past me and incinerated them before I could even get there.

“Helios damn it, can’t you take your time!” I cursed.

“A little ironic, that.” Emeri commented.

“You don’t need to tell me that, I know… All right, I’m going to run on ahead and search the area, before this walking incinerator only leaves us with more questions.”

“Wh- Arthur, you can’t just run away from the focal point of the vision! We’re supposed to observe Helios!”

“I won’t be gone for long, Emeri. You stick with him while I go on ahead. I’ll be back in a sec!” I called out as I ran, hurriedly searching for anything interesting. This place was a treasure trove!

I turned a few corners before I finally found more guards rushing through the hallways. If it wasn’t for Helios casually walking through the place as if going on a morning walk, they would already be dead.

When I inspected them, however, I noticed something odd, however.

I closed in on them to get a closer look and realised that they were already as good as dead anyway, because they were in quite a state. Even as they ran through the corridor in search of the intruder, their eyes remained closed. They weren’t dead, though. They were sleeping! Some of them were snoring, others were drooling or sleep-talking… All while they were about to fight to the death!

I followed them all the way back the slowly advancing Helios, where I found out that they did, in fact, wake up at some point. Right as they were about to die, in fact. Only when it was too late, though…

Their eyes would open in shock and agony as their torso were separated from their lower bodies.

“Emeri! These people- they’re being controlled like puppets somehow! They’re all asleep, yet somehow moving!”

“Puppets? But why… why would Helios kill them if they were being controlled against their will?”

“How is he supposed to know, Emeri? And even if he knew, why would he?”

Emeri nodded hesitantly, not sure how to feel about that. Shaking my head, I remembered that Emeri was too kind for her own good, sometimes. These people died the moment they lost control of themselves to whatever lurked in the depths of this ziggurat.

I struck out on my own a few more times, but couldn’t find anything worth mentioning. More puppets crawled out of the woodwork, so to speak, but they all died helplessly.

The monotonous hallways seemed to go on forever, until, eventually, we reached a massive chamber.

Racks were set up on either side, space apart with the least amount of space between them. Each rack held four to five strange pods. They reminded me of the cocoons that insects attach to trees, only far bigger. Periodically, they pulsed with an eerie light.

Helios was curious too, because he walked up to one of the pods and gently drew his blade across its edge, cutting just deep enough to slice it open. A thick fluid gushed out of the cut, followed by a human body that dropped to the floor with a wet plop. Completely naked and hairless, this adult body was too far removed from what Emeri and I had expected to see, causing both of us to grimace.

Helios seemed unperturbed, however.

“A prisoner? Is he dead?” I wondered aloud while waiting for Emeri to recover from the shock.

He wasn’t, though, because I noticed that the prisoner’s chest was heaving up and down.

“Its breathing?”

Suddenly, the person on the floor began to cough violently, more of the thick fluid leaving their lungs. Eventually, they recovered enough to have a breath of fresh air. The man’s eyes widened in horror in response.

He started to sprawl on the slippery yet sticky stone floor of the chamber, desperately trying to cling onto anything in reach. When he finally noticed Helios, his eyes lit up with a desperate glint and the man started to cry.

“Please… bring me back! Bring me back!” he sobbed. “BRING ME BACK, I BEG OF YOU!”

His pleas were interrupted by Helios, as the man’s head was promptly separated from his body. Helios’ cold, dead stare did little to comfort Emeri, who looked as if she had been slapped.

“Why…?” she eventually whispered. But Helios couldn’t hear her. In fact, he wasn’t done yet. A bright light erupted from him, spreading in every direction. Moment later the light receded, revealing a mass of burnt husks and corpses. All of the pods had been filled with people. Now, all of them were dead.

“Why? Why would he do this? This isn’t Helios! This is all wrong! This is-”

“Calm yourself, Emeri! We don’t know why he did what he did! There’s more that we have yet to learn!” I interrupted, shaking her by the shoulders.

It seemed to work and shook her out of her Reverie, though there was still a haunted look on her face.

More importantly, we were about to find out what was going on, because I suddenly heard a loud heartbeat above us. Previously, I hadn’t paid attention to the roof of the chamber. It had already been sparsely lit before, while the roof was just a thick layer of darkness. Only now did I notice the oddity of that, as I, typically, could see right through darkness… Meaning that this was something else.

Now that the black mist had lifted and been replaced by the heartbeat, a giant cocoon revealed itself, a single green light pulsing inside.

The tension in the room could’ve been cut with a knife. After all, for the first time since the beginning of the raid, even the normally stoic Helios looked scared.