Paska gulped instinctively, trying to comprehend why his body was shivering so much. “I’m the future king of the underground – how could a young freak like him scare me? That shitty armour won’t do anything!” Fighting against his instincts, Paska roared as he lunged forward with his machete.
Ceres smirked, using the staff in his hand to parry the attacks, hitting Paska’s wrist multiple times to bounce the attack off. Paska suddenly felt like Ceres had no more openings, and his every move was being watched. Paska tried a few feint attacks, but nothing worked. It felt like he was fighting a robot.
Both of them could feel it in their bones – this was a life-or-death match.
Ceres, however, did not want to finish the fight earlier: he needed practice. He had yet to battle a skilled opponent since he woke up from the coma, so he cherished this opportunity to learn more about himself and his enhancements. This would be his second fight with the black-scale armour.
Ceres dropped the staff and kicked it towards Paska, who looked confused. “Don’t want you complaining later,” Ceres smirked under the black mask.
The arrogant tone from Ceres infuriated Paska even more.
“I’m the leader of the ‘Chosen’, Paska!” Paska yelled as he took the staff and slammed it on the ground. “The gods are watching over my fight now, and they will bless me with power!” The tattooed ‘Y’ symbol on his head glowed even brighter.
Ceres suddenly realized this was the first Chosen warrior he had seen that could make the symbol on their forehead glow. He had just assumed it was a way for them to distinguish themselves, not an actual sign of power.
Paska held his staff in a striking position, crouching low as he circled Ceres warily like a hunter.
Just as Ceres was about to mock him as a form of revenge, the staff’s end suddenly appeared before Ceres’s face.
He quickly dodged and parried it with his mace, caught off-guard by the sudden increase in speed shown by Paska. “Holy shit, he actually got power from a god?!” Ceres was stunned but continued to fight back against Paska.
With the increased speed, though Paska did not have enough striking power, he was now on par with Ceres in terms of combat ability even while Ceres wore the black armour and wielded the spiked mace.
The two of them exchanged moves, with Ceres now again on the backfoot. Ceres knew he needed to find a way to cut off whatever power Paska was tapping on.
The walls began to rise again, but Ceres and Paska had locked each other as their target. Only one of them was getting out alive.
Paska himself had yet to consider running off with his tail between his legs – how could the future king of the underground retreat?
The sheer strength of the two combatants caused craters on the floor as they moved through the maze, obliterating any real monsters that tried to intervene in the fight and target Ceres. The blows produced audible shockwaves as they hit each other. Ceres would have been injured long ago if it was not for the black-scale armour that protected and enhanced his body.
Paska gritted his teeth as he threw his staff towards Ceres like a javelin, forcing Ceres to dodge by leaning to the right. At that same instant, Paska performed a sweeping kick, knocking Ceres over while Paska held his machete with one hand, stabbing downwards.
Ceres twisted his body out of the way, rolling on the ground before recovering into a standing position. Suddenly, Ceres quickly ducked as the staff came flying back from behind him.
The staff flew like a returning javelin towards Paska, who simply caught it in his open hand. The staff was now glowing with similar glyphs too.
The fight became even harder for Ceres, as he had to watch out for high-speed feints as well as return attacks from the staff.
His brain began to overheat as his heartbeat pumped blood faster and faster, calculating and keeping track of Paska’s attack. Paska went into an unbridled fury, performing rapid attacks with his staff and machete in harmony.
However, it was not enough for Paska. His staff began to break into three equal parts, hovering in mid air around Paska and targeting Ceres.
Two of the parts shot towards Ceres, quickly hitting his wrists and forming a cuff around it. The glyphs grew even brighter, causing him to feel a sudden increase in gravity on his wrists.
The cuffs were trying to crush his arms, causing him to drop his spiked mace which clattered to the ground.
“Give up freak - the gods are on my side! Consider it your fate to die by my hands!” Paska roared as he quickly sprinted forward, swinging his machete.
In the split second before the machete was about to cut deep into Ceres’s neck, Ceres suddenly became fully mobile again, dodging the attack before grabbing Paska’s extended arm and twisting it. The cuffs had lost their effect for an unknown reason.
A clean snapping and a shredding sound emitted from the arm with Ceres holding onto his arm as he delivered a frontal kick on Paska’s chest, pulling hard.
The arm was ripped off, but Ceres did not sense any fear nor fright from Paska. He looked down on the arm and only noticed a series of metallic bones and wires dangling from the arm. There was no blood as well, the robotic arm covered by a fake flesh layer. Ceres looked towards Paska and noticed that his shoulder area was also exposed to reveal a metallic interior.
“What the..?” Ceres exclaimed before Paska suddenly directed the remaining third of the staff to attack Ceres, forcing him to drop the arm. A strong suction force pulled the arm back towards Paska, who grabbed it and began to run away from the fight.
The two disabled cuffs on Ceres’s wrists released themselves and morphed back into their original rigid state, connecting back into the staff before flying back to Paska.
“Even if I win, I will be exhausted and potentially betrayed by my warriors. If I want to be a king, I must survive first!” Paska was exhausted, but still spry enough to dash away from Ceres. Despite his pride, his highest priority was always survival. He wasn’t that dumb to fight a battle to the death when he could easily use the temple to his advantage.
Ceres wanted to give chase, but realized the expedition members were probably still under attack by the other warriors. He quickly rushed back to help, tracking them via his vision.
With the enhancement of the black-scale armour, he made quick work of the remaining warriors, though they had already killed a few other expedition members. None of them grieved – only those who focused their all on survival could live on to grieve later.
“We’ll regroup with the last human group when the walls come down again.” Ceres began to think carefully about how to escape the maze. Judging by the weird voice’s words, it seems that the way to leave this place was to kill the final boss. However, there was no final boss.
Ceres wondered where Paska would run to – did Paska already figure out the exit of the maze?
While waiting for the walls to retract again, he told Misa and Yan about his fight with Paska and found out that he was a cyborg.
“No no no that’s impossible! We barely have more than a dozen multi-terminals in our town – no way he could afford to convert into a cyborg… Unless…” Yan pondered.
“There has been a suspicion that some other force is backing Paska and his warriors. The amount of weaponry they have amassed is far beyond their capabilities. If we get out of here we need to investigate who funded them and for what purpose. It goes without saying that the force behind them is hostile to us.” Misa responded.
Ceres too was caught way off-guard by the fact that Paska was a cyborg. While prosthetic limbs were commonplace, it was hard to design them for combat purposes like the ones Paska had. The prosthetic limbs that he himself made for the town were usable for basic functions and some combat scenarios, but not to that extent.
He recalled Erik telling him about them fighting a cyborg criminal, but for him to meet one down underground where the level of technology was much lower was a game-changer. “It seems there’s something extremely valuable for a force to place this much investment into Paska,” Ceres thought to himself.
He also learnt more about the ‘Chosen’ from Misa and Yan. They call themselves that because they believed they had been selected by the gods who left behind the various artefacts and ruins that are scattered across the underground.
The artefacts came mostly in stones and pillars engraved with the same type of glyphs and carvings Ceres saw in the temple.
Paska’s staff was one of the more functional artefacts, but Misa also noted that she personally has not seen any other ‘Chosen’ warrior weaponize the artefact to that extent. This understanding led Ceres to also think about what this ancient temple represented.
“This solidifies my original assumption - It’s a slovesa ruin!” Ceres finally stated as a fact to himself. He had been so engrossed with the rescue mission in the past hour that he never stopped to even think about it again.
The Strathon system was originally controlled by the slovesa but was eventually conquered by humans more than two centuries ago. This meant all the artefacts and buildings underground should be related to the slovesa.
But from the lessons he had been taught about the slovesa, it was said they were a violent race that continuously plundered and enslaved other alien races, even before humans had arrived. It was possible that the ancient temple might be from another race that existed on the planet before the slovesa arrived as well.
Ceres however could not truly accept that it was a slovesa temple for one major reason: why was the weird voice able to talk to him in a human language?
He assumed it could be some form of automated assistant built into the temple, but seeing the age of the temple it would have been impossible for the slovesa or any predecessor race to know of the human language beforehand.
Unless the temple is advanced enough to have a universal translator? Ceres rejected that as well.
Even after a thousand years of development, humans still are unable to immediately translate alien languages during first contact without invasive brain procedures.
Ceres was the only one who could hear the voice – neither Misa nor Yan had heard anything of the sort since they entered the maze.
Ignoring who made the temple, the biggest question now was the purpose of the temple. Did the alien race that made this place truly intend for it to be a maze? Or a trial of sorts?
Suddenly, the weird voice reverberated within his head.
[One hunter has successfully left the maze. Continue to work hard.]
Did Paska manage to leave? But how?
Ceres was planning on testing Yan’s previous assumption of launching to the ceiling using the movement of the walls, but the walls have yet to retract since their fight. Ceres informed Misa and Yan, shocking them but giving them hope.
“If he can escape, so can we!”
[Commencing final [email protected]*#(Sss wave. Error, Final boss not found. Initiating countermeasures. Commencing [email protected]*ave 1-19]
The walls receded and they soon saw the last human group in the distance. Ceres and the rest quickly rushed over, which naturally scared the last human group who tried to flee. Their numbers had also been cut in half since the last monster wave, so they were naturally panicking when they saw ‘monsters’ running over.
However, with the help of the multi-terminal, they managed to communicate as the number of real monsters doubled, falling from the ceiling like a waterfall. Ceres didn’t retract his black scale armour, smashing through the wave of monsters with his spiked mace and bare fist, punching and kicking. Misa watched in awe as Ceres almost killed all the real monsters himself.
[Kill Milestone reached. A qualified hunter has been detected. Ending mission. All unqualified hunters will be asked to leave. Please exit via the centre.]
The illusion plaguing the expedition finally released, revealing everybody to each other as real humans. They cried with joy as they reunited, hugging, with the maze finally being over.
In the centre of the maze, a white double door similar to the inner temple door suddenly appeared. The expedition members stared in horror at the five-meter-tall door that seemed to be meant for giants, afraid that a large monster would come out from it.
“That’s the exit, lets’s go!” Ceres led the united expedition group to the door, though he wondered what the weird voice was saying about a ‘qualified hunter’. He however wanted to leave this maze as fast as possible.
When they reached the door, Ceres noticed it looked exactly the same as the inner door he used to enter this maze in the first place, except this time when the door opened for him, it was a white translucent barrier instead of the pitch black one he previously encountered.
“We did it, we survived!” The survivors cheered as they hugged each other. “Wait, it’s dangerous!” Ceres warned. The last time he entered such a barrier he got teleported to this maze. He stuck half of his spiked mace in and managed to retrieve it.
One of the more daring expedition members stuck his entire head through the barrier to see the other side. “It’s the exit, we’re back to the original hall!” The expedition members did not hesitate any longer, rushing through the barrier to return to their temporary camp.
Ceres smiled and stepped through the barrier, but instead, he entered a separate dark unlit grey stone room.
“Huh, I don’t remember this being the temporary camp.” Ceres looked behind to find that the white barrier had disappeared and that his back was facing the wall.
“Yan? Misa?” After waiting a few more minutes, no one else appeared.
“Oh great, here we go again.” He had been teleported to a different location from everyone else.
Ceres looked behind to find that the white barrier had disappeared and that his back was facing the wall.
He tried peering through the darkness with the lack of light, scanning for any living beings.
[Qualified hunter, congratulations. Your actions have been recognized and recorded. You are currently ranked 102nd. Would you like to continue?]
A light from above shone on a large stone monument that was fixed in the centre of the room, with glyphs engraved on it like a ranking list. Ceres saw his name glow at the bottom of the list, though he wondered why he knew that was his name. It’s almost as if he could just feel it.
At the base of the stone monument were a few dead slovesa cores along with their rock bodies.
Ceres recognized them from his virtual battles with the slovesa. Most of the cores were from high-level slovesa, some of the cores being even larger than him.
This was effectively a large warning sign, so Ceres warily checked around the large stone monument, continuously keeping his eyes peeled for any movements. He was open to the possibility that the ancient temple was not built by the slovesa – just because there were dead bodies did not mean they were the creators.
It was very possible that the slovesa were also explorers that tried to raid the ancient temple and ended up in this state. Perhaps the temple was from an even older alien empire.
But why was he the only one who qualified from the expedition group? At least no one else showed up here, showing that everyone else was teleported to the exit.
“What happens if I don’t continue?” Ceres asked.
[Mediocrity and cowardice will be forever branded on your dead body and your descendants.] The voice replied for the first time.
Ceres froze. Dead body? “You mean I’ll die if I do not continue?”
The weird voice did not respond. Instead, a single white door appeared at the end of the stone room. “Okay, look no more random teleports okay? If you explain nicely, maybe I’ll go in, but otherwise, I won’t do it!” Ceres did not come here to raid the ancient temple, he only came to rescue people!
[Mediocrity and cowardice will be forever branded on your dead body and your descendants.]
Ceres eyed the dead slovesa cores, trying to judge how long had they been left there. It seemed like the slovesa core did not die from any puncture wound or cracking but was instead starved to death. With no external energy source, the slovesa core could only sustain itself for so long.
He also noted that the slovesa cores were not all of the same age, some looking a lot more pristine than others that looked much more weathered. Did this mean that the slovesa bodies here are of those who refused to enter the next door?
Ceres gulped instinctively. If he did not enter that white door, he may be trapped here indefinitely. He still had to get to the surface and find his friends.
“Fine, you win. But this better be the last room!”
Paska gulped instinctively, trying to comprehend why his body was shivering so much. “I’m the future king of the underground – how could a young freak like him scare me? That shitty armour won’t do anything!” Fighting against his instincts, Paska roared as he lunged forward with his machete.
Ceres smirked, using the staff in his hand to parry the attacks, hitting Paska’s wrist multiple times to bounce the attack off. Paska suddenly felt like Ceres had no more openings, and his every move was being watched. Paska tried a few feint attacks, but nothing worked. It felt like he was fighting a robot.
Both of them could feel it in their bones – this was a life-or-death match.
Ceres, however, did not want to finish the fight earlier: he needed practice. He had yet to battle a skilled opponent since he woke up from the coma, so he cherished this opportunity to learn more about himself and his enhancements. This would be his second fight with the black-scale armour.
Ceres dropped the staff and kicked it towards Paska, who looked confused. “Don’t want you complaining later,” Ceres smirked under the black mask.
The arrogant tone from Ceres infuriated Paska even more.
“I’m the leader of the ‘Chosen’, Paska!” Paska yelled as he took the staff and slammed it on the ground. “The gods are watching over my fight now, and they will bless me with power!” The tattooed ‘Y’ symbol on his head glowed even brighter.
Ceres suddenly realized this was the first Chosen warrior he had seen that could make the symbol on their forehead glow. He had just assumed it was a way for them to distinguish themselves, not an actual sign of power.
Paska held his staff in a striking position, crouching low as he circled Ceres warily like a hunter.
Just as Ceres was about to mock him as a form of revenge, the staff’s end suddenly appeared before Ceres’s face.
He quickly dodged and parried it with his mace, caught off-guard by the sudden increase in speed shown by Paska. “Holy shit, he actually got power from a god?!” Ceres was stunned but continued to fight back against Paska.
With the increased speed, though Paska did not have enough striking power, he was now on par with Ceres in terms of combat ability even while Ceres wore the black armour and wielded the spiked mace.
The two of them exchanged moves, with Ceres now again on the backfoot. Ceres knew he needed to find a way to cut off whatever power Paska was tapping on.
The walls began to rise again, but Ceres and Paska had locked each other as their target. Only one of them was getting out alive.
Paska himself had yet to consider running off with his tail between his legs – how could the future king of the underground retreat?
The sheer strength of the two combatants caused craters on the floor as they moved through the maze, obliterating any real monsters that tried to intervene in the fight and target Ceres. The blows produced audible shockwaves as they hit each other. Ceres would have been injured long ago if it was not for the black-scale armour that protected and enhanced his body.
Paska gritted his teeth as he threw his staff towards Ceres like a javelin, forcing Ceres to dodge by leaning to the right. At that same instant, Paska performed a sweeping kick, knocking Ceres over while Paska held his machete with one hand, stabbing downwards.
Ceres twisted his body out of the way, rolling on the ground before recovering into a standing position. Suddenly, Ceres quickly ducked as the staff came flying back from behind him.
The staff flew like a returning javelin towards Paska, who simply caught it in his open hand. The staff was now glowing with similar glyphs too.
The fight became even harder for Ceres, as he had to watch out for high-speed feints as well as return attacks from the staff.
His brain began to overheat as his heartbeat pumped blood faster and faster, calculating and keeping track of Paska’s attack. Paska went into an unbridled fury, performing rapid attacks with his staff and machete in harmony.
However, it was not enough for Paska. His staff began to break into three equal parts, hovering in mid air around Paska and targeting Ceres.
Two of the parts shot towards Ceres, quickly hitting his wrists and forming a cuff around it. The glyphs grew even brighter, causing him to feel a sudden increase in gravity on his wrists.
The cuffs were trying to crush his arms, causing him to drop his spiked mace which clattered to the ground.
“Give up freak - the gods are on my side! Consider it your fate to die by my hands!” Paska roared as he quickly sprinted forward, swinging his machete.
In the split second before the machete was about to cut deep into Ceres’s neck, Ceres suddenly became fully mobile again, dodging the attack before grabbing Paska’s extended arm and twisting it. The cuffs had lost their effect for an unknown reason.
A clean snapping and a shredding sound emitted from the arm with Ceres holding onto his arm as he delivered a frontal kick on Paska’s chest, pulling hard.
The arm was ripped off, but Ceres did not sense any fear nor fright from Paska. He looked down on the arm and only noticed a series of metallic bones and wires dangling from the arm. There was no blood as well, the robotic arm covered by a fake flesh layer. Ceres looked towards Paska and noticed that his shoulder area was also exposed to reveal a metallic interior.
“What the..?” Ceres exclaimed before Paska suddenly directed the remaining third of the staff to attack Ceres, forcing him to drop the arm. A strong suction force pulled the arm back towards Paska, who grabbed it and began to run away from the fight.
The two disabled cuffs on Ceres’s wrists released themselves and morphed back into their original rigid state, connecting back into the staff before flying back to Paska.
“Even if I win, I will be exhausted and potentially betrayed by my warriors. If I want to be a king, I must survive first!” Paska was exhausted, but still spry enough to dash away from Ceres. Despite his pride, his highest priority was always survival. He wasn’t that dumb to fight a battle to the death when he could easily use the temple to his advantage.
Ceres wanted to give chase, but realized the expedition members were probably still under attack by the other warriors. He quickly rushed back to help, tracking them via his vision.
With the enhancement of the black-scale armour, he made quick work of the remaining warriors, though they had already killed a few other expedition members. None of them grieved – only those who focused their all on survival could live on to grieve later.
“We’ll regroup with the last human group when the walls come down again.” Ceres began to think carefully about how to escape the maze. Judging by the weird voice’s words, it seems that the way to leave this place was to kill the final boss. However, there was no final boss.
Ceres wondered where Paska would run to – did Paska already figure out the exit of the maze?
While waiting for the walls to retract again, he told Misa and Yan about his fight with Paska and found out that he was a cyborg.
“No no no that’s impossible! We barely have more than a dozen multi-terminals in our town – no way he could afford to convert into a cyborg… Unless…” Yan pondered.
“There has been a suspicion that some other force is backing Paska and his warriors. The amount of weaponry they have amassed is far beyond their capabilities. If we get out of here we need to investigate who funded them and for what purpose. It goes without saying that the force behind them is hostile to us.” Misa responded.
Ceres too was caught way off-guard by the fact that Paska was a cyborg. While prosthetic limbs were commonplace, it was hard to design them for combat purposes like the ones Paska had. The prosthetic limbs that he himself made for the town were usable for basic functions and some combat scenarios, but not to that extent.
He recalled Erik telling him about them fighting a cyborg criminal, but for him to meet one down underground where the level of technology was much lower was a game-changer. “It seems there’s something extremely valuable for a force to place this much investment into Paska,” Ceres thought to himself.
He also learnt more about the ‘Chosen’ from Misa and Yan. They call themselves that because they believed they had been selected by the gods who left behind the various artefacts and ruins that are scattered across the underground.
The artefacts came mostly in stones and pillars engraved with the same type of glyphs and carvings Ceres saw in the temple.
Paska’s staff was one of the more functional artefacts, but Misa also noted that she personally has not seen any other ‘Chosen’ warrior weaponize the artefact to that extent. This understanding led Ceres to also think about what this ancient temple represented.
“This solidifies my original assumption - It’s a slovesa ruin!” Ceres finally stated as a fact to himself. He had been so engrossed with the rescue mission in the past hour that he never stopped to even think about it again.
The Strathon system was originally controlled by the slovesa but was eventually conquered by humans more than two centuries ago. This meant all the artefacts and buildings underground should be related to the slovesa.
But from the lessons he had been taught about the slovesa, it was said they were a violent race that continuously plundered and enslaved other alien races, even before humans had arrived. It was possible that the ancient temple might be from another race that existed on the planet before the slovesa arrived as well.
Ceres however could not truly accept that it was a slovesa temple for one major reason: why was the weird voice able to talk to him in a human language?
He assumed it could be some form of automated assistant built into the temple, but seeing the age of the temple it would have been impossible for the slovesa or any predecessor race to know of the human language beforehand.
Unless the temple is advanced enough to have a universal translator? Ceres rejected that as well.
Even after a thousand years of development, humans still are unable to immediately translate alien languages during first contact without invasive brain procedures.
Ceres was the only one who could hear the voice – neither Misa nor Yan had heard anything of the sort since they entered the maze.
Ignoring who made the temple, the biggest question now was the purpose of the temple. Did the alien race that made this place truly intend for it to be a maze? Or a trial of sorts?
Suddenly, the weird voice reverberated within his head.
[One hunter has successfully left the maze. Continue to work hard.]
Did Paska manage to leave? But how?
Ceres was planning on testing Yan’s previous assumption of launching to the ceiling using the movement of the walls, but the walls have yet to retract since their fight. Ceres informed Misa and Yan, shocking them but giving them hope.
“If he can escape, so can we!”
[Commencing final [email protected]*#(Sss wave. Error, Final boss not found. Initiating countermeasures. Commencing [email protected]*ave 1-19]
The walls receded and they soon saw the last human group in the distance. Ceres and the rest quickly rushed over, which naturally scared the last human group who tried to flee. Their numbers had also been cut in half since the last monster wave, so they were naturally panicking when they saw ‘monsters’ running over.
However, with the help of the multi-terminal, they managed to communicate as the number of real monsters doubled, falling from the ceiling like a waterfall. Ceres didn’t retract his black scale armour, smashing through the wave of monsters with his spiked mace and bare fist, punching and kicking. Misa watched in awe as Ceres almost killed all the real monsters himself.
[Kill Milestone reached. A qualified hunter has been detected. Ending mission. All unqualified hunters will be asked to leave. Please exit via the centre.]
The illusion plaguing the expedition finally released, revealing everybody to each other as real humans. They cried with joy as they reunited, hugging, with the maze finally being over.
In the centre of the maze, a white double door similar to the inner temple door suddenly appeared. The expedition members stared in horror at the five-meter-tall door that seemed to be meant for giants, afraid that a large monster would come out from it.
“That’s the exit, lets’s go!” Ceres led the united expedition group to the door, though he wondered what the weird voice was saying about a ‘qualified hunter’. He however wanted to leave this maze as fast as possible.
When they reached the door, Ceres noticed it looked exactly the same as the inner door he used to enter this maze in the first place, except this time when the door opened for him, it was a white translucent barrier instead of the pitch black one he previously encountered.
“We did it, we survived!” The survivors cheered as they hugged each other. “Wait, it’s dangerous!” Ceres warned. The last time he entered such a barrier he got teleported to this maze. He stuck half of his spiked mace in and managed to retrieve it.
One of the more daring expedition members stuck his entire head through the barrier to see the other side. “It’s the exit, we’re back to the original hall!” The expedition members did not hesitate any longer, rushing through the barrier to return to their temporary camp.
Ceres smiled and stepped through the barrier, but instead, he entered a separate dark unlit grey stone room.
“Huh, I don’t remember this being the temporary camp.” Ceres looked behind to find that the white barrier had disappeared and that his back was facing the wall.
“Yan? Misa?” After waiting a few more minutes, no one else appeared.
“Oh great, here we go again.” He had been teleported to a different location from everyone else.
Ceres looked behind to find that the white barrier had disappeared and that his back was facing the wall.
He tried peering through the darkness with the lack of light, scanning for any living beings.
[Qualified hunter, congratulations. Your actions have been recognized and recorded. You are currently ranked 102nd. Would you like to continue?]
A light from above shone on a large stone monument that was fixed in the centre of the room, with glyphs engraved on it like a ranking list. Ceres saw his name glow at the bottom of the list, though he wondered why he knew that was his name. It’s almost as if he could just feel it.
At the base of the stone monument were a few dead slovesa cores along with their rock bodies.
Ceres recognized them from his virtual battles with the slovesa. Most of the cores were from high-level slovesa, some of the cores being even larger than him.
This was effectively a large warning sign, so Ceres warily checked around the large stone monument, continuously keeping his eyes peeled for any movements. He was open to the possibility that the ancient temple was not built by the slovesa – just because there were dead bodies did not mean they were the creators.
It was very possible that the slovesa were also explorers that tried to raid the ancient temple and ended up in this state. Perhaps the temple was from an even older alien empire.
But why was he the only one who qualified from the expedition group? At least no one else showed up here, showing that everyone else was teleported to the exit.
“What happens if I don’t continue?” Ceres asked.
[Mediocrity and cowardice will be forever branded on your dead body and your descendants.] The voice replied for the first time.
Ceres froze. Dead body? “You mean I’ll die if I do not continue?”
The weird voice did not respond. Instead, a single white door appeared at the end of the stone room. “Okay, look no more random teleports okay? If you explain nicely, maybe I’ll go in, but otherwise, I won’t do it!” Ceres did not come here to raid the ancient temple, he only came to rescue people!
[Mediocrity and cowardice will be forever branded on your dead body and your descendants.]
Ceres eyed the dead slovesa cores, trying to judge how long had they been left there. It seemed like the slovesa core did not die from any puncture wound or cracking but was instead starved to death. With no external energy source, the slovesa core could only sustain itself for so long.
He also noted that the slovesa cores were not all of the same age, some looking a lot more pristine than others that looked much more weathered. Did this mean that the slovesa bodies here are of those who refused to enter the next door?
Ceres gulped instinctively. If he did not enter that white door, he may be trapped here indefinitely. He still had to get to the surface and find his friends.
“Fine, you win. But this better be the last room!”
