The warehouse was an extremely long construction. It had a flat roof with rounded edges. On top, some rectangular windows could be seen that the sun still managed to bathe with its light. The undergrowth had already begun to make its way along the edges of all the walls, although not too much. The conservation runes had served very well for so many years, preventing both fungi and insects from completely invading the walls, but the worst must have been in the depths of that place.

The lieutenant let a good amount of time pass before taking his first steps.

The dimness embraced every corner of the warehouse, accentuating the feeling of abandonment and malevolence that permeated the place. Any person—such as the lieutenant—would have sensed the history of that place as a chill that froze their neck. Asmodeus could read it in every corner, although he didn't open his mouth, and the lieutenant didn't want to harass him with questions when he noticed he was extremely focused on the walls of the site.

The air was impregnated with a mixture of moisture and a metallic trace. Asmodeus jumped over the abandoned furniture to move forgotten wooden boxes, attentive to every wrinkle that could be seen in the walls. He continued searching while the lieutenant kept discreet guard and watched him with curiosity. Asmodeus fixed his gaze on an apparently unimportant area of the wall and jumped in front of it, reading words that couldn't be seen and following a trail that wasn't there. He reached for his belt to take out a vial of a liquid with shimmering particles and spread it on the wall forming a circle. First, a tremulous stain appeared on the stone surface, then strange lines began to form that together resembled some sort of hieroglyph.

The lieutenant approached to try to decipher those symbols, but his knowledge barely allowed him to identify them as a seal used in constructions. More spells of that kind began to appear on the walls around. Asmodeus then explained his purpose: they were to contain the shpabisshys signal in that place. That was how they prevented anyone from realizing what was happening there. Pain and agony intensified the energy footprint of the usshyers. Asmodeus had imagined that criminals must use something like that to be able to cover up their activities. That was how the only hope of the children to be rescued drowned between the walls under the influence of those seals.

The lieutenant cleared his mind of those gloomy reflections, as his nature prevented him from wandering too much into matters that could no longer be prevented or remedied. Instead, he just followed his friend from a distance, always five meters away to avoid any usshyer detecting his energy footprint ahead.

Military men like him carried a conversion stone that limited the detection of their aura, but he still needed to keep his distance. When the lieutenant looked at Asmodeus, he could almost feel him sharpening his ears to calculate that the sound of his steps corresponded to the five-meter distance he always demanded to maintain in those situations.

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Away from that large storage area were offices, or what were going to be offices and only ended up as empty rooms. Some broken windows let in some light to the place, but shadows still reigned.

Asmodeus abruptly stopped in front of those imposing ruins while the lieutenant advanced to one side. His friend was not a man who allowed himself to be enveloped by useless thoughts, so it only remained to think that that intense gaze on the area concealed more than could be thought. But what could he be seeing? Concrete was all the lieutenant could see in that place where Asmodeus's eyes rested intensely. Oddly enough, the next thing he did was stretch his lips while a ghostly whistle spread throughout the site. The sound at first was so deep that it made the lieutenant's ears resonate as if some device embedded in his head made them vibrate, but with great skill Asmodeus increased the sharpness of the whistle until from his lips came a dry sound of explosive nature that spread like lightning throughout the building.

The resulting echo seemed as ordinary as any other, an almost exact replica of the sound that originated it, but Asmodeus listened to it with such attention that it seemed like a whisper of complicity that revealed the secrets of the site to him.

He whistled again until from his lips exploded that sharp sound that caused the same echo as before. The lieutenant paid more attention, but found nothing extraordinary in it. Asmodeus, however, moved with utmost concentration toward a seemingly uninteresting corridor, as if he were chasing prey, then crossed the threshold of a door like the dozens there were in the site and ended up contemplating with great interest a corridor that seemed identical to the others.

When the lieutenant arrived at the site, he noticed the large hole in the wall at the back that led into the bowels of the earth. Its walls were lined with concrete like the rest of the building, but it was easy to tell they had been built in another era.

Asmodeus immediately advanced into the gloom. He couldn't see in the dark, like the lieutenant could, but he had moved forward with the same bravery as if he were walking under the sun. Under other circumstances, the lieutenant would have summoned a will-o'-the-wisp to help illuminate the site, but he knew by instinct that Asmodeus would be annoyed if he did that in that situation.

The corridor they descended forked into half-built paths, with no exit or anything beyond them except the earth at the bottom and the concrete that adorned it. Someone had wanted to expand that area, but something had stopped them. It was someone unrelated to the original construction of that building. They had tried to copy its original pattern, although they hadn't been very successful, as some lines of dampness invaded those corridors. That was the work of a novice or hasty restructurer. The lieutenant could realize that, although his experience didn't reach to glimpse the final goal of that strange procedure. Dead-end corridors. What for?

At the back, there seemed to be more things than it appeared. They both advanced through that corridor as the background distorted to reveal new and eerie endless cavities. A sudden thought made Asmodeus turn to the lieutenant with an alarmed face as a faint light illuminated everything for a brief moment. It was too late. The whistle of a blade prevented him from speaking and forced him to focus all his attention on the shadows in the background. He diverted a hand pushing from the wrist to one side, but a blade managed to tear through his abdomen.

The lieutenant shouted his friend's name and tried to advance to help him, but a sudden force from one side made him disappear behind another distorted wall in those mysterious corridors.