Free Web NovelChapter 249: Slop it up
The pathway led into a naturally formed room that was only a few metres across in terms of space. Just wide enough to comfortably swing a cat, not that Belladonna planned to do such a thing.
In the middle of this room there was a pile of what Belladonna could only generalise to be food. There was fresh meat, rotten meat, insects, body parts of random animals, fruit and veg. Essentially if it could be eaten, it was in this pile. Even the Tiger-striped deer that she had used as bait for her trap had been tossed carelessly into this pile.
Some of its guts were spilled into the contents of the pile, as something had torn it open and taken a few bites before moving on.
What those somethings were was obvious, as there was still over a dozen Grimshawls gorging themselves on the pile. They were like pigs at a trough, or someone who took the term ’bottomless all you can eat buffet’ as a challenge.
They just kept shovelling handful after fistful of food into their mouths, and considering they had four arms that was saying something about how fast they were eating it all.
Their mouths were naturally hidden beneath the darkness of their shawls, a darkness that even Belladonna’s dark vision could not penetrate, but she could still hear every bite. The crunch of bone, the squelch of juicy meat, the slurping as they tried to breath through mouthfuls of slop.
It was disgusting. But it was not as disgusting as what was behind the pile.
While the slop pile filled the centre of the room, the walls of the room were lined with heavy metal shackles. These shackles were crudely jammed into the walls, anchoring their chains there, or simply fused into large stones to weigh them down. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
Many of these shackles hung loose and open, waiting for their next victim to ensnare, but multiple of them already had a victim in their grasp. Two women, a man and a child were bound in shackles, their hands clasped behind their back or forced to remain above their heads, as they had collapsed against the walls.
They wore expressions that were somewhere between disgust and terror, as they desperately tried to shuffle themselves away from the centre of the room. Pulling their legs into their chest and pressing themselves against the wall.
Their chains rattled with every small movement and tears streamed down their reddened, quivering cheeks as they sniffled silently to themselves.
Belladonna was not so clueless, that she did not recognise what these creatures resembled. Ever since their first encounter, in fact even just from hearing the description of them, Belladonna had been thinking of goblins.
They were a classic for such worlds and games, after all. A mob that attacked villages and were dangerous in numbers, kidnapping women for their disgusting reasons. So when she had heard these sounds, and realised that there were living victims, she had been praying to herself that she would not find them in the process of those disgusting acts.
Thankfully, it seemed that these Grimshawls were not entirely like goblins. For none of these prisoners had been stripped of their clothing or defiled in such ways. But the idea that they had not been violated was not exactly reassuring to the people in question.
They were still brought here for a reason, after all.
Belladonna sent a few mental commands to Beans, and waited for him to dissolve into the darkness, before she made her move.
She darted quickly out of the corridor and into the room, moving to the Grimshawl closest to her. Although this one was facing away from her, since they were circling around the pile in the middle, that still meant half a dozen were facing her.
Although Belladonna did not care about them, as the moment she was able to be seen by them, spears of sharpened bone launched from the darkness behind them, before a cat leapt from the shadows letting out a wicked hiss as shadows enveloped his claws.
Belladonna manifested claws of her own, which seemed even stronger in the absolute darkness, but that increase in strength meant nothing here. Not because the creatures were too tough, the opposite in fact.
Grimshawls main advantage was stealth and numbers. Their bodies, as Belladonna discovered, were incredibly weak, so her claws tore through them like they were tissue paper.
She swiped downwards with both hands, cleaving off a Grimshawls arms before swiping its legs out from underneath it, leaving it to squeal on the floor, black blood spewing from its stump limbs.
The one to its left turned, only to get a backhanded slap to the face. It flew like a ragdoll, slamming against the wall and immediately dissolving on impact into nothing but a tattered cloth and a collection of trinkets that clattered to the floor.
The Grimshawl to stumpy’s right tried to run. However a hand clamped around one of its stick thin arms and wrenched it from the ground. It flailed in the air, clawing and kicking at its attacker like a toddler throwing a tantrum, before the hand that was grasping it started to spark with lighting.
Its body spasmed in the air again, this time from the volts that were ravaging through its system, something one could definitely not do to a toddler throwing a tantrum no matter how much you wanted to, before its body crumpled to dust as if it had been disintegrated by the lightning.
For the next, she pulled spell components from her bag and quickly smeared it across her hands, before performing a series of complex hand movements, which caused lighting to spark across her fingers like they were Tesla coils.
A bolt of lightning streaked across the room the next moment, striking a Grimshawl in the chest, which burst into a cloud of black dust and only left a smouldering rag drifting down to the ground.
The one after that got a fiery kick in the face, then the next got bludgeoned to death with the magical shield that she now only had on one arm, thanks to her incident with the Beast-men. Belladonna treated them not as a threat or even as an infestation, she was not intentionally cruel or dealing out some kind of vengeance or justice upon them.
She did not feel a single thing at all as she carried out the slaughter. freewebnσvel.cѳm
It was simply cold, methodical experimentation. Every death was different even if only slightly, as she tested out all the ways she could kill them, hoping that one might result in a source. There was simply one thing that, in her enthusiasm for science, that she had forgotten about.
She was seeing the world through dark vision, as was Beans’ and presumably the Grimshawls. However the victims in the room were another story entirely, as they could see nothing in the pitch black of the cave.
Their only understanding came from the high pitched squeals, the sounds of bloodshed and slaughter. Their only illumination came from the flashes of lightning that scorched onto their corneas and allowed them only to see silhouettes in the darkness for mere moments.
The only consistent thing they could see, was a pair of crimson eyes looming in the darkness, as it slaughtered with a chilling lack of emotion.
