Chapter 88

 

When I groggily open my eyes again, I can see my legs in front of me, sliding along on the ground, making grooves in the dirt. It seems as though someone is dragging me through the dirt by the back of my shirt. My head is killing me and the rest of my body isn’t any better off. I can taste blood in my mouth and considering the last thing that I can remember is someone kicking me in the face, it makes sense. 

 

My whole body feels weak and I can barely put any strength into my hands. I think I can ball my hands into fists at least but I’m not sure how much power I can put behind them. I can only assume the scarred man is dragging me back to his cave and I’ll only have one chance to catch him off guard. For now, I’ll keep my eyes closed and try to recover as much strength as possible. 

 

How did it come to this? What went wrong? I want to say everything started going wrong because of Torban but honestly it might have started much earlier than Torban losing his mind. I think everything started going downhill the moment we left Midriver. We had to leave everything we had behind to escape being caught between two warring gangs and I understood that and I agreed with Derriv’s decision. But what if we had the power, the strength, the numbers to keep what was rightfully ours? 

 

I know the scarred man’s a psychopath and I shouldn’t pay any heed to his ramblings, but for some reason, I can’t keep what he said out of my head. If you’re too weak to keep what belongs to you, then you didn’t deserve it in the first place. Whose way is right? Derriv founded Candle in the Dark because he had his own moral code he didn’t want to betray and instead of recruiting en masse, he carefully scrutinized every individual who joined his outfit. I always thought that was the right way to run an outfit but being forced to leave Midriver and everything that’s happened since then is making me question if Derriv is actually right. 

 

If we had more people, if we didn’t have as strict requirements for members that we do, and if we were stronger, then we’d still be in Midriver right now. Georgil would still be alive, Uriah would still be alive, and I wouldn’t be anywhere near this hellhole right now. I always thought Derriv was a good man and following in his steps would lead me to better places because we were doing good things that made us feel like we were good people. We were Candle in the Dark and we were waging a just crusade against Midriver’s Darkness. But maybe that was naive of me. 

 

Where has doing good things and being a relatively good person landed me? In a fucking hole in the ground, that’s where. As I’m feeling sorry for myself and how bleak everything is, I find myself being dragged into a small cave, one of many carved into The Pit’s stone walls. The person dragging me by the collar of my shirt stops in front of the cave’s entrance and grabs a lit torch hanging right outside the cave before continuing inside, dragging me behind him. 

 

With my eyes half closed, I can see various items messily cluttering the cave’s ground. There’s mostly dirty rags spread out in a futile attempt to cover the dirt floor underneath but there’s also random pieces of discarded food waste as well. That explains the smell. I’m dragged over to a small pile of dirty rags and tossed onto them. Opening my eyes a little bit more, I can see the scarred man standing above me, holding a lit torch in his hand and looking down at me with a smile on his face. 

 

“I know you’re awake. You’re not nearly as sneaky as you think you are. My boys gave you quite the beatdown back there but seeing how you’re awake now, you’re a lot tougher than I gave you credit for. What do you say? Are you ready to come under my wing or do I need to teach you another lesson before you’re ready?” 

 

Now that the jig’s up, I open my eyes fully and glare at the scarred man. It’s now or never. I’m still not fully recovered and my whole body still feels weak as all hells but I’ve bought myself as much time as I could have. Closing my eyes, I immediately cast Flash in the air right above me and I can hear him crying out in surprise. 

 

Opening my eyes, I see the scarred man stumbling backwards a few steps with his eyes tightly shut and his arms waving around wildly, trying to find the cave’s walls. He ended up dropping the torch in the process, its flames still burning even in the dirt. Getting to my feet, I can feel how exhausted my body is and every inch of my body is screaming at me to lay down and rest. Stomping over to the scarred man, I grab onto his upper body and try to wrestle him to the ground. The problem is, I overestimated how much power I could exert and underestimated how strong the scarred man was. Although it’s difficult to tell from his baggy rags, he’s nothing like the rest of his goons and his body is covered in muscles. 

 

Leaning on him with all my body weight, I hook my right foot behind his left ankle and shove with everything I have, avoiding his attempts to grab onto me. When he trips over my foot, I realize I don’t have much more energy left in me and stagger over to the burning torch instead. Right as I got back to the scarred man with the torch in hand, he was trying to get back onto his feet with a growl, his face scarlet with anger and his eyes bloodshot with rage. Whipping the torch at his face with the burning end, he falls back down to the ground with a painful cry.  

 

His body thrashes around violently on the ground as he covers his burned face, still screaming at the top of his lungs and snarling threats at me. Standing above him with the torch still in hand, I can feel my lips spreading themselves out into a smile without even meaning to. Flipping the torch in my hand upside down, I shove the torch’s burning end right into his open mouth and his body jumps off the ground a few feet before landing with a horrible thud. His body convulses fiercely and shudders as his muffled groans weakly leak from his mouth. 

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I try to shove the torch deeper into the scarred man’s throat but it stops after a certain threshold and won’t go any further. Hearing his tearful sobs on the ground only makes my smile grow wider but at the same time I realize he won’t die just from this. Crouching down, I search his pockets for the knife he used earlier and find it in his right pocket. It’s a shoddily made little thing that looks like it was fashioned out of a butter knife and the handle is even wrapped with a dirty rag. I don’t intend to prolong his suffering too long and quickly slice open his throat, a weak gasp escaping his lips before his body goes still. 

 

Going back over to the pile of dirty linen rags, I plop myself down as I try to get my breathing under control. The sweat from my forehead seeps into my eyes and stings them but I’m too tired to care anymore at this point. With the amount of screaming that’s been coming from this cave and seeing how no one has shown up, this has to be a common occurrence for them. Looking back at the body, I know my work isn’t finished yet even though I’m completely exhausted. 

 

This place is a horrific hellhole that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before but at the same time it somehow reminds me of Midriver oddly enough. This scarred man can be likened to someone like Derriv or Alira seeing how he was able to lead and regroup his men with that speech of his earlier. But honestly speaking, he reminds me of Reed from Midriver’s Finest. I feel as though I can take some of the things I’ve learned there and apply them here. 

 

I can’t protect myself when I’m asleep but I can try my best to warn others away from me while I slumber by making an example out of the scarred man. Everyone in Midriver was cruel and vicious to a certain extent towards their enemies. Alira, Bertrand, Quinn, and The Wolves all did it in their own way. Why? Because it worked. 

 

Mutilating bodies is such a simple, but effective method in portraying just how ferocious, sadistic, and brutal you are. Bertrand and I did it to Priest Jerome, Wraine and Quinn did it to Baronet Humphrey, and The Wolves and Alira’s men did it to each other during their own war. Fucking hells, Nars became infamous in Midriver with how insane he was and earned himself the nickname, Gourmet. It’s distasteful, it’s beyond atrocious, it’s downright evil, but it works. 

 

I’m no stranger to it and with a sigh, I get off the rags and approach the body. Its eyes are still open with shock and horror and there’s trails of dried tears running down both sides of his face. The majority of his face is covered with old, crisscrossing scars and I bet there’s a story behind those but it doesn’t really matter right now. The torch is still sticking straight up out of his mouth and to be honest, it doesn’t look half bad to me. I’ll leave it alone. When Bertrand and I were working on Jerome, he told me to let my creativity run wild during those types of works because the more horrible and outrageous your work is, the better. 

 

Quickly going over everything I learned from Bertrand, I start digging out the scarred man’s eyes. There’s something special about eyes specifically and people inherently give them incredible importance and attention. Perhaps it’s due to how they’re usually one of the first characteristics we learn about someone. When you see a corpse without their eyes, you feel a strong sense of disgust and revulsion right away which is why one of the first things we did to Jerome was dig out his eyes and replace them with two copper coins. Though I don’t have copper coins available to me down here, shoving a couple of dirty rags into his empty eye sockets works well enough I suppose. With nowhere else to put his eyes, I go ahead and drop them into his mouth, letting them join the torch. 

 

Standing up to view the body in full, I can already picture all the things I want to do with it in my head and quickly get to work, dying the small knife scarlet with blood. About an hour later, my hands are covered in blood and bits of viscera. The… body in front of me no longer looks human and more closely resembles one of the many deer carcasses we found during our journey from Midriver to Ocean’s Rest, mauled to death by a bear preparing for hibernation. Wiping off the knife with a rag I found, I stash it in my pocket before attempting to clean my hands with the rag as well to no avail. Tossing it aside, I grab the corpse by its right hand and drag it out of the cave. 

 

It’s a strenuous task but one that must be done with posthaste. I only assure myself I can go to sleep after I put the corpse on full display. Dragging it a few feet away from the cave’s entrance, I release it right in front of my cave. It’s far enough away that no wafts of smell will blow into the cave but close enough that others will know that this was my handiwork. 

 

Seeing the grisly trail of blood and filth leading from the cave to where I’m standing fills me with an odd feeling. For some godsforsaken reason, I feel giddy inside. Like I’m excited to show off my handicraft for others to see but the handicraft in question is the horrifically mutilated corpse of the man I just killed. Looking around, I see a few people sticking their heads out of their caves to see the spectacle happening on the bottom level. There has to be hundreds of caves carved down here but it seems like most of them are empty. 

 

Once there’s enough people paying attention to me, both from the upper levels and from the bottom level where I am, I spread my arms out wide with a flourish and shout joyously, “Good evening, everyone! Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Isaac, and I was given an incredible welcome to The Pit this very evening! To convey my appreciation for that warm welcome, I welcome you to me! I’ll be sure to get acquainted with each and every one of you! Your corpses will decorate my abode like flowers!”

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