Chapter 4: The Sect

  Any doubts Justinian had about his kidnapping now vanished. The kidnappers wanted the abducted people to serve as... living trap disarmers!

  "Move it, dammit!" one of the bandits shouted at the mute murderer, who was trying to signal that they needed to be cautious, that there was no telling when the floor might collapse again.

  The man may have had no tongue, but he could see that the kidnappers were undoubtedly in a hurry and their patience was wearing thin. They also had weapons, so logic dictated they should be taken seriously.

  Thus, he brutally shoved Justinian forward, so that he would be the one to walk first and run into any potential traps.

  'Scoundrels!' the young man lamented inwardly, placed at the point.

  Nevertheless, he had to move forward, carefully testing each step. The whole time, he was at the gunpoint of flintlock pistols and under the watchful eye of the mute, who was limping from some earlier wound.

  At first, everything went well, but the situation changed when the corridor they were moving through led to a small chamber. There was terribly little air here, and the darkness seemed to swallow any hope of getting out.

  A knot of dread tightened in Justinian's stomach.

  'We must still be in the city, but I've never heard of such a horrible place...'

  Unfortunately, no one cared about his dilemmas, and a push from behind reminded him that he was here to disarm traps, not to think.

  Frightened, he cautiously yet methodically took his next steps. He had crossed two meters into the chamber in this manner when his merciless bad luck made itself known.

  Justinian had stepped on a floor panel that triggered a trap.

  A dozen sharp needles shot out from the wall at immense speed. The boy didn't even have time to shield himself as several of them painfully embedded themselves in his ribs, while others—likely due to his slender frame—narrowly missed.

  "Aaaargh!" he howled, falling to his side, knocked off balance.

  "Damn it!" shouted one of the kidnappers, leaping back toward the entrance. His companion and the mute murderer fell to the floor when it turned out that besides the terrible needles... a second and third trap had also automatically activated!

  In a few places holes in the floor suddenly broke out and a strange smoke began to rise from the walls on either side of the chamber. At the sight of it, the bandits cursed and immediately began to retreat, dragging behind them—as an insurance policy—the citizen who survived at Mr. Rafalski's expense.

  Justinian, however, hit by the terrible needles was writhing in pain.

  When he was left alone in the room, he noticed the gathering smoke and destruction. Terrified, he looked around, assessing the situation.

  'This damn stuff is everywhere!'

  The smoke was thickest at the sides of the chamber, rendering the walls invisible. The entrance and the exit looked slightly better, as the gas was only just beginning to collect there.

  Justinian's first instinct was to retreat, but the entrance was further away, and time was running out. And so, instinctively, he made a decision and... ran forward.

  No more traps were triggered, but before he managed to get out of the chamber, he took in several mouthfuls of the strange smoke.

  'What is this cursed place?!' he thought when he found himself in a "safe" corridor, far from the gas's reach. There, utterly exhausted, he had to sit down for a moment.

  'Who are these kidnappers?! How can they be so cruel?' The boy, despite the poverty of the orphanage, had been raised to believe that people were generally good. He also believed that the world, in accordance with the teachings of the Great Order, was just.

  Today's events, however, had completely shattered him. First, he lost his sister, then his home was set on fire, and now he was fighting for his life in some cursed dungeon. The death of Mr. Rafalski, who died while doing a good deed, was also terrible.

  'This isn't really happening...' he repeated to himself feverishly. In his heart, however, he knew it was. What's worse, the situation was becoming more and more desperate.

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  Several long, sharp needles were painfully stuck in his side. With each passing moment, it became harder for him to breathe.

  The world, perhaps due to the pain or perhaps because of the smoke he had inhaled, seemed strangely unreal. He didn't know it, but that smoke was a terrible poison, and he didn't have much time left to live.

  Slowly losing control, he had the feeling that the dark cellar he was in would soon reveal its secret to him.

  It was then that something broke the silence.

  "...ee me..." he suddenly heard a quiet whisper, which nearly made him jump. He looked all around, seeing no one. Sweat trickled down his temples, and the headache grew even worse when he soon began to hear a commotion from the direction he had come from!

  'Damn it, how are they not afraid of that smoke?!'

  In absolute shock, the boy started running as fast as he could and disappeared around a nearby corner. His mind went blank, a primal scream tearing from his throat as the weight of the situation finally crushed him. He quickly ran down the stone, rust-colored stairs and, without stopping, ran through an empty doorway at the bottom.

  The whisper he had only heard faintly before now resounded clearly in his head, making the hair on his body stand on end.

  'Free me...'

  Although he tried to convince himself that it was just an illusion and a hallucination, the voice grew stronger.

  'This is impossible...' he thought, feeling more and more detached as his poisoned mind struggled to piece the clues together..

  'The bomb exploded before the ceremony, the queen wasn't in the cathedral yet...' he recalled the beginning of the terrible event, feeling his hands slowly grow heavier.

  Even though the whispers were getting louder, he tried to ignore them to solve the dreadful mystery.

  'Those strange bandits... and that strange fire... our kingdom has nothing that someone like that would want...' When he reached this conclusion, he hesitated. Thinking was even harder than a moment ago, and his conclusion sent a great chill through him.

  The voices in his head became almost impossible to ignore as he struggled one last time to reach the terrible conclusion.

  'We have nothing... except the devil...' he thought, feeling all the pieces of the puzzle—the strange dungeon that shouldn't exist and the horrible traps—suddenly fall into place.

  He knew now where he was. What he was hearing were the devil's whispers! They promised to grant his every wish, questioned his faith in the Great Order, and tried to attack his mind in various ways.

  Justinian didn't even hesitate. There was no way he would free the infernal being. He frantically looked for a place to hide, but the corridors were designed simply. He quickly realized that he was inevitably... approaching the evil's lair!

  With his heart pounding like a drum and the poison spreading through his body, he felt himself nearing certain death. He ignored the worsening dizzy spells, and before his eyes, he kept seeing the face of his dying sister. A sister who had shown him nothing but kindness and had led an incredibly hard life.

  'The world isn't just at all.' The thought hit him with a force he had never felt before. Where was justice when his brother was born sick, condemned to the mercy of others? Where was it when Sister Teresa, the purest soul he knew, died in a pool of blood? Where was it when Mr. Rafalski was callously thrown into an abyss by the one he was saving?

  He didn't notice when he reached the tomb's deepest chamber. The sounds of commotion from the gas chamber were growing louder. And in the chamber with him was the devil.

  The infernal being looked truly terrifying. He had a long, dirty beard, a wild gaze, and was covered in dried blood. Justinian looked at him for a moment, quickly locating the mechanism that imprisoned the devil.

  "I will give you all the riches of this world!" the hellspawn promised in a menacing tone.

  Riches. He couldn't care less about them.

  "I will save your life!" the devil offered, sensing something was wrong.

  What life? In a world where evil triumphs with impunity? Where his family's murderers walk free? His sister's last words echoed in his ears: "Never... lose faith... in justice..."

  "What the hell do you want?!" the frantic devil finally screamed, no longer knowing what he could offer. He had stopped the poison's effect in the man's body, yet he was still behaving strangely. The fiend even had tears in his eyes and was himself afraid of what was coming. Deep in the dungeon, aside from three normal people... he could sense another presence with a truly evil aura! Worse, it was approaching with terrifying haste!

  The boy standing before him suddenly seemed to come to his senses. A clear thought appeared in his mind, the one and only path that would allow him to honor his sister's wish.

  "I want revenge," he said, in a voice that made the hair on the devil's neck stand on end.

  "Done!" the terrified fiend replied.

  The boy immediately released the fastening mechanism. Only now, watching the devil instantly heal his wounds and change his appearance, did he realize what he had truly done. But the decision had been made, and it was too late to back out.

  As the hellspawn finished casting some spell in a foul tongue, Justinian managed to ask:

  "Can devils be just?"

  The fiend frowned, but stressed by the situation, he nodded. He then grabbed the boy and jumped with him into a newly opened passage to the sixty-sixth infernal dimension. The murderers arrived a few seconds too late.

  The boy opened his eyes. The first thing that hit him was the heavy, smog-filled air and a sight that made his skin crawl. Before him stretched four ominous-looking mountains, with a fifth—the largest—standing behind them, shrouded in mist.

  Somewhere in the distance, the pain-filled screams of the damned could be heard, and emaciated vultures circled the sky, searching for their next victim.

  At a fork in the road, just before the mountains, was a makeshift sign on a piece of paper nailed to wooden beams: "THE WORLD'S END SECT."

  Justinian guessed this was what hell looked like, but he had already made his decision.

  'Even if I become a devil... at least I'll be a just devil!'

  He didn't know, however, that there is one thing devils hate the most, something that affects them worse than holy water, prayers, or common sense. More than anything in the world, devils hated justice.