Chapter 60: Norona’s Secret [2]
The heavy, wet stench of copper and rotting marrow was the first thing that drifted through the sensory channels of Roy’s assumed Ogre form.
He opened his eyes—or rather, the dull yellow eyes of Captain Torga—to absolute darkness.
The air was thick, stagnant, and freezing cold.
The ambient mana grid of the cavern showed that the Troll Commander and his elite executioners had long since cleared the area, leaving only the quiet hum of the subterranean ritual arrays pulsing deeper within the permafrost.
He wasn’t on the stone floor where he had faked his death.
Moving his massive Ogre limbs slightly, the sickening squelch of cold flesh and the distinct rattle of iron armor echoed in the tight space.
Roy was buried under a heavy, suffocating mound.
Above him, beside him, and beneath his boots were heaps of cold, stiffening corpses.
The Trolls hadn’t bothered with burials or cremation; they had simply dragged the slaughtered captains and the spent, drained slaves to the edge of the ritual basin and tipped them into a massive, forgotten mining shaft.
Through the dim, violet luminescence of the distant mana cores above, Roy could see the faces of the pile.
Varg’s green, tusked face sat just inches from mine, his eyes wide and frozen in his final moments of betrayal.
Beneath him lay the twisted, pale limbs of lesser Goblins, Orc conscripts, and broken Ogre vanguards—all the "cattle" the western hierarchy had used and discarded to keep their secrets buried.
To the Trolls, this was a pit of erased knowledge.
To Roy, it was just a minor geographical transition.
’This form is too loud for a quiet exit,’ Roy thought.
The gravelly resonance of the Ogre brain registering the sheer weight of the bodies pressing down on his chestplate.
The massive, towering frame of the Ogre captain instantly imploded into a tiny, microscopic point of red data light.
The heavy iron breastplate, the massive broadsword, and the layers of dense muscle vanished from the pile, causing the mound of corpses above him to shift and settle with a hollow, heavy thud.
Down in the dark, narrow crevices between the cold skin of an Orc’s arm and a Goblin’s shattered shield, a tiny, dark-shelled cave cricket twitched its long antennae.
The perspective shifted entirely.
The heaps of corpses were no longer a pile of meat; they were a massive, towering mountain of black iron and pale flesh, a chaotic landscape of ribs and armor plates.
Using the insect’s nimble, jointed legs, Roy began to crawl.
He scurried smoothly through the narrow, blood-slick tunnels of the mound, passing beneath the cold jawbones of dead soldiers and navigating the sharp edges of discarded scimitars.
The scent of decay faded as he moved lower, slipping through the smallest gaps in the stone floor where the pile met the natural bedrock of the pit.
Within minutes, he broke free from the suffocating pressure of the heap, scaling the sheer, ice-sheathed wall of the disposal shaft until he reached a narrow, unmonitored fissure in the stone.
’This should be enough right?’ he softly exhaled.
Roy sat on a high ledge, looking back down at the dark pit of the discarded vanguard.
They thought they had buried the witnesses, but they had only given the architect the exact coordinates of their foundation.
"Finall" Roy’s lips curled into a dark grin, "There should be something interesting waiting for me inside right?"
Dropping from the fissure in the disposal shaft, Roy tracked the thick, copper-like scent of the ritual’s ley lines.
The deeper he went into the permafrost tunnels, the tighter the security became.
At every intersection and stone archway stood pairs of massive, blue-skinned Troll sentries.
Their heavy iron halberds pulsed with raw elemental frost, and the sheer, synchronized density of their breath indicated they were all Martial Warriors.
To find an entire fortress sector garrisoned exclusively by Master-tier combatants proved that this wasn’t just a military outpost—this was the beating heart of Norona City’s secret operations.
But to a divine architect, their perimeter lines were full of uncompiled gaps.
Shifting down into the form of a translucent cave spider, he dropped onto the stone floor and began to crawl.
Roy bypassed their heavy boots, slipped beneath the frost-rimed iron gates, and wove through the microscopic cracks in the bone-brick masonry.
The Trolls stood rigid, their frost-white eyes scanning the dark corridors for mortal intruders, entirely oblivious to the tiny arachnid navigating the rough stone right between their feet.
He crawled through a long, narrow drainage pipe until the stone gave way to a massive, split-level subterranean complex.
Slipping through a gap in the ceiling of the first major chamber, he peered down.
The room was lined with heavy, reinforced iron bars.
Inside the cages, dozens of newly captured beastmen slaves were packed tightly together.
Their hands and legs were bound with heavy, mana-suppressing chains, their heads hanging low in absolute exhaustion.
Moving past the holding cells, Roy squeezed through a keyhole into the adjacent chamber.
The contrast was immediate.
The stench of the slave pens was replaced by the dry, stagnant aroma of ancient parchment and old leather.
Massive obsidian shelves stretched up to the vaulted ceiling, packed to the brim with thousands of mysterious magic rune texts, scrolls, and ancient grimoires.
"How...How is this possible?" Roy’s eyes narrowed, "T-They are all human written"
He took out a book, slowly opening it, he went through the details.
These weren’t the crude, elemental runes of the Western Coalition.
The syntax, the geometric stabilization nodes, and the flow of the script were unmistakably human—designed by high-tier sorcerers from the ten continents’ human empires.
The Troll King hadn’t authored this ritual; he was merely executing orders from someone above him.
"Ancient magic spells specifically designed for rituals, how is such crude knowledge in this desert?"
Some grimoires were crafted in human skin, others were written with blood of humans, all black magics.
"I was right" Roy clenched his fist, "Something truly dangerous is brewing in Hudeii Desert"
"If i don’t put an end to Damascus’ plan" his eyes flickered for a second, "Hudeii Desert will be completely erased from the world"
Heavy, rapid footsteps.
The stone floor outside vibrated.
A Troll sentry, having noticed a microscopic shift in the room’s ambient temperature, shoved the heavy oak doors open, his halberd raised.
"Who goes there?!" he grunted, his frost-white eyes darting across the rows of bookshelves.
The library was entirely empty.
Hiding directly behind the swinging arc of the heavy oak door, a small, black-shelled spider clung to the wood, its multiple eyes tracking the guard’s movements with complete detachment.
The Troll grumbled, checking the dark corners of the room before stepping back out and slamming the heavy doors shut, locking the iron bolts into place.
The moment the lock clicked, the spider dropped to the floor, briefly shifting back to human form to memorize the exact spatial coordinates of the library’s data layout.
Then, collapsing back into a minute insect, Roy squeezed through a ventilation bore in the floorboards.
He followed the main conduit downward until the air grew thick, suffocating, and heavy with the absolute stench of death.
He crawled out into the final, most secure chamber.
The entire floor of the massive amphitheater was covered in an ocean of bones and the desiccated corpses of hundreds of beastmen slaves, all systematically sacrificed to feed something unknown.
At the center of the gruesome chamber rose a massive, black-iron altar pulsing with a volatile, dark violet divinity.
Lying unconscious atop the altar was a human—his body acting as a living conduit for the unknown source.
’Damascus..!!’ Roy’s body shuddered as he watched from the shadows.
What he was seeing was far too heinous than he could ever imagine.
Surrounding the base of the altar were a dozen high-tier Troll sorcerers, their long robes stained with blood, their arms raised toward the ceiling as they chanted in unison.
The language wasn’t the guttural tongue of the north.
It was a sequence of sharp, ancient Lydorian incantations—the exact linguistic keys used to rewrite soul boundaries.
Roy sat quietly in the shadows of the vaulted ceiling, my golden-crimson eyes recording every syllable of the chant.
’In the end, the Troll King was merely a pawn’ Roy shook his head, ’Just like how Telvanus descended while possessing the body of an avatar’
’Damascus seeks to do the same’ Roy finally understood while Damascus ignored the ten continents and settled on the Hudeii Desert.
The ten continents is where the True Gods focus their attention on, since it’s most occupied by humans.
Meanwhile the Hudeii Desert is completely isolated from the game, the same goes to some islands and other areas.
If Damascus seeks to descend by possessing an avatar in the ten continents, he will be noticed by the True Gods.
They’ll surely disrupt his plans, but in an isolated land like the Hudeii Desert.
No one will even dream of stopping his plans.
No one except Roy Vance that is.
’Hehehehehe’ Roy couldn’t help but chuckle, ’Things have not only gotten complicated but even more interesting’
"Should I kill them all and crush that avatar?" he held himself back.
"No" Roy shook his head, "It’s too early, I need to avoid the eyes of Damascus by all means..."
"Doing this myself will only expose me to the True Gods"
"I’ll crush them with my followers"