TBATE - CHANGING FATE

Chapter 17 - The Forgotten Past

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ARTHUR POV:

Feeling the wind rush around me and my weightless body falling down, it reminded me of the time in Widow's Crypt. I let out a small chuckle remembering how unlike now, I had to use my bare nails to claw at the walls and slow myself.

'Good times' I thought to myself.

Sensing that we were nearing the bottom, I slowed down to even further. Just as I was above the ground I cancelled the wind and gravity around me, and with a light thud we had reached our destination.

"What the fuck is this place?" Regis shouted while hopping out of me. "It's... a city?"

Scanning the area, what we were surrounded by were buildings and homes made out of stone and wood – the majority of which had already crumbled under the effects of time and damage. The cracks and dried out look of everything made it seem that everything down here had been forgotten for thousands of years.

Even though we were hundreds or thousands of meters below sea level, there was ambient light that lit up the surroundings. Light sources floated in the air and were attached to the buildings and ground, making it look almost like out of a fairy tale.

But the most shocking part wasn't the fact that were was a civilisation that once lived down here, but the size of it. Extending my senses to the furthest I could reach, the city we were in was at least tens of kilometres wide – possibly hundreds. I couldn't tell. It was almost comparable to Xyrus.

"Maybe the Djinns used to live here before?" Sylvie muttered while hopping off my head, and shifted into her human form. "It's similar to the sanctuary that we were in during the war."

Running my hand across the wall of a stone house next to me, I felt my hand dig into it without resistance and leave behind a carving of my fingers.

"The sanctuary wasn't this old..." I replied to Sylvie. "For stone to have decayed this bad, it needs to take at least several thousand years."

Wanting to get more information about what had happened, I decided to visit the largest building that I could see. Just at the end of where my vision wavered, I spotted what appeared to be a large mansion tens of meters tall.

Flying over the buildings until it was within a reasonable distance, I lowered myself to the ground and Godstepped to it. But just as I appeared in front of the mansion, I could hear the small cry of an animal coming from inside.

"Arthur..." Sylvie warned me anxiously.

"I know."

Even though I was tempted to go in and find what was making the noise in a place where all life had been gone for millennia's... my instincts had stopped me.

"There's something crazy down there," Regis said while sticking out his paw. "Look, I've even got goosebumps!"

"Regis, this isn't the time for that!" I barked at him, sweat slowly formed on my head. Even with both my mana core and aether core, I felt like I had no chance of winning against what was in this place.

"Tch- fine! Let's just hurry up and see what's down there already."

Walking in slowly through the entrance, I noticed that the mansion was almost like a labyrinth; hallways and doors interconnecting with each other and some leading to dead ends.

Making sure to behind a trail so we wouldn't get lost, I marked the ground with arrows to indicate our location. Even though from the outside the mansion appeared to be only the same size as the Helstea Manor, it felt far larger.