999.M41 FEW MINUTES AFTER THE FALL OF CADIA || FOLLAX IV; SEGMENTUM ULTIMA; IMPERIUM NIHILIS

I slumped down to the ground and felt the cold concrete scrape against my bare butt.

Looking down, I noticed I didn't seem capable of replicating my clothes. Great.

With a sigh, I looked around the dark room. This was a large room with no windows, no furniture, or any kind of paint. Only cold concrete on all sides.

My fingers brushed against something sticky on the floor and looking at the ground for the first time in detail, I noticed a peculiar painting on it. There was no other way to put it than a ritual circle, painted in blood.

I was sitting near the middle of it, with the broken orb I crawled out of being right there. That doesn't bode well.

No sign of the demon that brought me here, nor a fiery hell.

Didn't I hear him speak though? I could barely comprehend it at the time but I think I heard 'for chaos' back then.

No matter, he seems to have gone away and left me here, all alone again. Not that I would want the companionship of that thing. The shiver that ran through my now human body was far more pronounced than before. My hands visibly shook and my vision clouded over as the aftereffect of the revulsion ran through me.

Unfortunately, this shifted my attention back to my soul and its senses.

I suddenly felt like I was all alone in a dark and eerie place, an endless rolling dark ocean expanding below me. Thankfully, I levitated far away from it but even from here I could feel a faint whisper of the same revulsion emanating from this ocean. I saw brief flickers of the things lurking deeper below the waves and it terrified me.

Monsters that wouldn't be out of place in the most disgusting R-rated horror movies, no these were things that no sane human mind could think up. It was only the upper parts of this thing that appeared like a dark ocean. I didn't even want to know what lurked deeper below.

If I were religious, I would probably be thanking God right now for not being dropped into the water, alas, I was not. Why wasn't I falling into it as I saw the many other small souls flicker below the waves? They were so small though, so weak, and somehow felt lesser than me.

The currents dragged them along and they were only prey to the many predators lurking nearby. The shinier a soul seemed the more of the monsters gathered around them. They didn't pounce though; they waited for an opportunity that didn't seem to come.

To say I was endlessly confused would be an understatement. I pulled my senses back into my human body and stood up shakily.

Here I was, a nude 23-year-old girl standing in the middle of a ritual circle drawn in blood in a dark underground room. I wasn't dead, at least.

I was far too calm about this but I didn't care. I wanted to get out of this dark room as soon as possible. My questions could wait, I couldn't get answers and even if I could, there would only be another torrent of new questions popping up or so I assume.

Thankfully, there was a way out. A small light flickered from an opening on the wall.

I made my way over, stumbling a few times due to my shaky legs or the copious amounts of blood coating the floor. It wasn't dry yet, did that mean all of this was fresh blood? No, focus.

Get out, then, questions.

I steadied myself on the wall once I reached the opening. Deep breaths.

That was a mistake. I coughed as I tasted the revolting smell of stale blood and molt on the air.

Even the air below all these felt different. Artificial and far too stale.

Far from the natural air back on Earth.

My walking was getting better as my shaking subsided once I put the room behind me.

The flickering lights on the top of the small concrete hallway didn't help calm my nerves though. Still, this hallway, which wouldn't be out of place in a horror videogame, was better than the room.

The ritual circle induced a deep sense of unease and the dark ocean felt somehow closer to me back there. As I put distance between us, even my soul calmed.

The hallways were like an abandoned maze. I stumbled across several rooms but all of them were abandoned, with no person in sight only splatters of dried blood and the signs of brutal fighting.

The concrete walls were sliced through in some places and had small dents in others. Ruined furniture and inert, rusty machines filled up the many rooms down here.

Still not a single window or natural source of light to be seen, nor anything living.

It took maybe an hour for me to find something different, time was hard to measure with my thoughts still muddled by all that had happened and locked inside this concrete building.

The room stank like all hell even from a few turns away but I made my way over and the sight that greeted me wasn't too different from what I expected.

The room was a large hall reaching twenty meters in height. The haphazard pile of human corpses reached halfway up to that.

My heart was beating in my throat and breathing grew increasingly harder. I steadied myself on the doorframe of the hallway as I took it all in.

The floor was covered in similar bloody scribblings to the one I arrived at. All of my leftover human instincts told me to leave this room running and screaming, but something held me back.

Something deep within me wanted me to use this. I knew I could use it. My new body wasn't running on prayers and hope. It needed sustenance.

In other words, the eldritch monster that was me was starving and this pile of human corpses started to look more and more like a meal instead of the horrible scene I knew it to be.

I unconsciously took a step forward, then another until I found myself looking down on the face of a man.

Horror was etched onto his face and he was missing the lower part of his body. Many of them were, to bleed them out better I think.

That's what they were, after all, blood sacrifices and material. For the ritual that presumably resulted in my dead soul being dragged into this shithole and tossed into this eldritch body.

That's not even a complaint. Whatever messed up place this was it is probably better than spending eternity as a vegetable in purgatory.

I grimaced at the overwhelming stench of blood and rotting corpses.

Bon appetit I guess.