The door of the so-called teleport capsule opened, and the first to step out was the large man. His name was Xiang, and apparently, he was the leader of the group of four people. Xiang had distant Asian characteristics and a strong, bulky body, which made him look far more dangerous compared to the others.

The next person going out was the woman we had met earlier, dragging me, still tied with rope (though my feet were now untied), with her. After getting a good look at her, I had recognized her as the girl dashing towards Angel in the school shooting, though now she looked like an adult rather than a teenager. Even more, all four looked much older than they had during the school shooting.

The woman’s name was Diane, and she was the eyes and ears of the small team. Never once during the trip did I feel her attention move away from me. Her glare is not something you would want to make eye contact with. Still, though I don’t know why, she had healed me along the way, and all that pain I was feeling before was now gone.

Right as we stepped out of the door, the feeling of gloom filled the air. The scene filled with polished, metallic surfaces inside the capsule turned into a muddy, mossy, unpaved path outside. A dark forest wrapped the narrow path, seemingly about to suck us into the entangled mess of leafless trees. Over the hills in the distance, the light of the sunlight lit the heavy fog into a depressing bluish-grey color. Just a few yards from us, a beetle the size of a rat scurried across the road as fast as a dog.

“Don’t worry, you shouldn’t judge the nature of the rest of our kingdom by just this place,” Ben said. He was the third person to come out of the machine we were in, and he stopped right behind Diane. Ben was the man who captured us alongside Diane, and he had Angel, who was still unconscious, slung over his shoulder. He was probably the most carefree of everyone, trying to strike a conversation whenever he had the chance. That was exactly the person I hated the most. But even so, one shouldn’t be tricked by that seemingly cheerful attitude of his. Never once had I seen his dead eyes shine even a single bit brighter than an old, rusted piece of metal.

Behind Ben came Arthur in his rope handcuffs, directly followed by Wayne, whose short stature made him look younger than everybody else. I could never tell what Wayne was thinking or how he would talk, but something told me that he was dangerous. Maybe it was that he was the one who stabbed my shoulders back at the school, or maybe it was that the team had entrusted him, a much smaller person, to take care of Arthur, a large man with a build comparable to Xiang.

“You wanna know the reason why they made this place so creeeeepy?” Ben said in a spooky tone. He then tried to imitate a ghost but failed horribly. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to him anyway.

“Well, you wanna go back to the capsule and shut up?” Diane responded.

“This place,” Ben continued, ignoring Diane, “is a prison.”

Just as he said that, I looked up and finally saw the main attraction: a massive walled city was just slightly visible through the dense fog in the distance. It sat in the valley of two steep hills but still towered over them. I couldn’t see the dark city very well, but it definitely had large walls on the foundation. However, the buildings inside made even the walls feel small, standing almost 5 times higher. The spiked tips of the towers were harder to see in the fog, but they gave me shivers. And in the center of all that was a building larger than all the others—the king’s palace, if there was a king there.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“You know, they say that what you see on the surface is less than one percent the entire thing,” Ben chimed in.

I tried to look away, to find something better to look at, but everything—the dark forest, the muddy ground—gave me a chilling feeling. Everything just felt…off.

Then it hit me. This place was so much different from the environment that I was used to. The hills, the forest—they were different from the home that I had lived in for a decade an half. The first time I had somehow time traveled with Angel, we landed in the same place, just in a different time period. Was this place just very far in the past? No, there wouldn’t be a castle here. Then was it in the future? If so, then what caused the forest to become so barren? Why was a castle built?

Ben took a look at my confused face and scoffed. “He doesn’t even understand the basics of time leaping! Isn’t this hilarious?”

Diane glared at him, and I had to look away, even though she wasn’t looking at me. “That is NOT something you should be blabbering about. Obviously, it’s since he’s only a boy!”

“Calm down, guys,” Xiang said quietly from up ahead. Ben made a face and looked away. Diane just continued glaring at him silently.

We continued walking for a few minutes (why didn’t we go closer before coming out of that capsule?). Our shoes sloshed through the mud, making the only sound, other than the frequent scurrying of oversized insects, I could hear in the otherwise silent forest.

I was relieved when there were only a few more steps until we reached the gigantic gates in the castle walls. But just as I should have expected from the damp and cracking stone masonry, the castle was as silent as the woods.

There was just a single lone man guarding the huge gate, and he did nothing to stop us from entering through the wide-open gateway to the inside of the walls. Well, it is the outermost layer of defense—or in other words—the complete opposite of the front line of a prison. If there was anything he was defending from, then it would be escaping prisoners.

In the long tunnel through the thick wall, we finally stepped from the earthy mud onto an unevenly paved stone floor. Going through the tunnel, with our footsteps echoing through the hall, it felt like going across a barrier into a new world.

But the city on the other side was no different from the outside. Instead, it screamed everything of a ghost town. There were buildings of stone with entire walls or roofs crumbled. Many were five stories or higher. Peeking through the windows into the dark rooms inside, I couldn’t help but wonder which ones had been diners, which ones had been stores, and which ones just used to be plain living quarters. Had people lived on the “surface” of this prison once?

“Well, now that I think about it, prison probably isn’t the right word,” Ben said again, and waved his arms around, addressing the entire scene, “this place is a city of prisoners!”

Yeah, right. A place as quiet as here could definitely be called a city.

After weaving through the abandoned city and listening to Ben rant continuously about the dungeons below the surface, and how they’re all dark and dirty and smelly and quiet, we finally reached that large palace in the center of the town.

This was it. Our final destination.