Treasure for All

15. Underneath the Underneath

"Of course," Hongjoong realized.

"The Roman god Mercury," said Celestia. "The messenger and god of travelers. He's the god of other things, but mainly the first two."

"So he's like Hermes," Dahae said.

"Yes, but the Romans basically copied Greece when it came to mythology," Celestia joked.

"What does the symbol have to do with Mercury?" San asked.

Somehow, Celestia was annoyed by her husband's comment, and shot him a look. "The most notable symbols for Mercury are the shoes with wings," she snapped, "or, in this current situation, a winged staff. It's the winged staff symbols we have to follow."

San just nodded. He knew his sweet wife wouldn't normally act like this. They had known each other since they were children, and San knew that Celestia was slow to anger. She has always been a sweetheart and would never hurt a fly.

Hormones, he thought.

"Looks like we're going left," the captain said after a moment of awkward silence. "We follow Mercury."

Like a mother goose with her little ducklings, Hongjoong led his team down the dark tunnel, this time the ground a little harder to walk on, and the path began to twist and turn. San worried about his wife falling, so he remained close behind her despite her just having snapped at him. They came across three or four more divided passageways, one of them splitting into six paths at one point; but the crew kept going down paths marked by the staff symbol.

After walking down some steps, a noise echoed off the walls, causing them to stop in their tracks. Voices.

"There must be tours going on above us," Dahae guessed.

San checked his map again and pinpointed where they were. "We're very close."

"You think they can hear us?" Mingi asked as everyone continued walking.

"Not if we keep our voices down," Hongjoong said.

"Plus, the Hypogeum is closed off to the general public," Celestia added. "They can only look at it from a bridge over it."

"And the map leads us right beneath the Hypogeum."

"Underneath the underneath."

"What's that?" Grace-Anne pointed out something.

Up ahead was another fork in the catacombs, but this time, a faint pale glow could be seen down one of them. Dahae checked the wall over it to make sure there was a symbol engraved, and sure enough they were to follow the light. One by one they turned off their flashlights and relied on the light to guide them.

The smell was now stronger, but nothing overwhelmingly horrid.

Soon, they approached an archway that separated the tunnel from a large stonewalled room. It was still dark, but a large slit in the tall ceiling provided enough light for the crew to spot something sparkling in the dark brown wall opposite them. The only separating between them and the diamond piece was a stone bridge with every other one discolored.

Hongjoong nearly stepped on one when Grace-Anne stopped him.

"What?" he asked.

Grace-Anne looked back down at the stones, picked up a loose rock by Yunho's foot, and tossed it onto one of the discolored stones. Immediately, it moved down about an inch, and an arrow shot out from one side to other faster than lightning.

"Don't say I didn't warn you," she said, "but you may wanna take a look down below."

She was pointing to where the room dropped about twenty feet around them and the bridge. When everyone else looked over, the smell finally made sense. To their horror, piles of dry human skeletons littered the floor beneath them. Each one had some sort of stick poking out from various body parts. Both the sight and smell triggered Celestia's nausea, and San followed her back down the path to a different one for her to release everything that was firing up her throat.