Chapter 8 – Chamber and Den

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Their hero seemed hurt, so without thinking much about it, they rushed him to the nearest toilet in the palace. While Kuno was writhing in pain, one guard carried him and another opened the door.

It was designed like your everyday high school men’s toilet room. Against the wall directly across from the door stood eight stalls. To the left were ten urinals and next to those the sinks and mirrors. The stall walls/doors could be looked under or above through. No one seemed to be in any of them.

‘Put me down, I got it from here!’ Kuno said, looking up to the ceiling and seeing what he wanted to. He rushed into one of the stalls and locked the door.

‘Hah, get jebaited, suckers…’ he thought, rubbing his hands. ‘No! Come on, they’re good people. Don’t be mean.’

He looked up above him, seeing the opening of the ventilation system. ‘They’re still humans, I suppose,’ Kuno thought. ‘Even if they have magic in this world…’

It wasn’t an escape plan, for where could he go? But he did want to know more about the summoning process, so he had to ditch the guards and sneak in. He moved his hair back as he began formulating a plan:

‘It’s unlikely these vents will lead me directly to that summoning room, but if I can escape from the guards while they still think I’m here, I got enough time to figure it out.’ He remembered the walk from the summoning room where the High Order was to the Class Teller. ‘It’s not really hidden… but it is guarded… Either way, I should try to get up and do some spelunking. Try my luck.’

As he was about to climb on the pot, he heard one of the guards begin to talk:

‘Did any of you see Greg since yesterday? I know we pranked his ass, but he was kinda exaggerating with how sore he got.’

Kuno froze. ‘They’re still here!?’ he thought, coughing before saying: ‘Hey, uh, can you guys leave? I can’t go if I know people are in the room with me.’

He heard the guards stomp the floor, before one said in a stern tone: ‘Our apologies, Shitman. We are not allowed to leave the room, but we will stop talking to make it easier for you!’

Kuno couldn’t see them, but knew for sure they were saluting. He sighed. ‘I guess that’s that… Just act like you’ve taken a shit and get out…’

But then an idea popped up in his head. ‘Take a shit…’ he thought. ‘What are shits known for…’ He pulled his pants down and properly sat on the toilet seat. ‘Imagine,’ he thought. ‘Adjust the properties… and the most infamous property of shit is…’

He placed his elbow on his knee and rested his chin on his knuckle. As he stared at the lapis blue wall, his gut began to rumble, creating the toxic concoction Kuno pictured in his mind.

Upon release, all in the room heard a tiny splash, like a marble fell in a puddle. A second passed, then another, but upon the third, Kuno’s muscles tensed as his head turned beet red. And upon the fourth, it had reached the guards, all of whom had to hold on to something to keep them standing. Kuno heard their violent gags and coughs, along with the soft peeps their vocal chords made. When the first knees hit the ground, the other two knew they had to leave before all of them collapsed in this gas chamber. They picked up their friend and made their way.

When the color on Kuno’s face turned purple, the door of the bathroom shut with a grand slam. Kuno released his breath and when taking a new one, his eyes were bursting into tears. He immediately flushed the toilet and cleaned his bum before flushing again, then unlocked and kicked the stall door open. He pulled up his black pants and ran to the sink, ejecting a flood of sick into it from his mouth and nose.

The stomach acid burned his throat and nose, since he hadn’t eaten a bite yet. He turned the sink on and cleaned his mouth and nose as he coughed the last bits of fluid out.

When he tilted his head up, he saw himself in the mirror, with a half open mouth leaking saliva and a gigantic string of mucus from his nose to the sink, he stared at himself for a second. He coughed once more and wiped his nose. ‘Damn…’ he thought. ‘It’s like that time my arch nemesis won against us to qualify for the world championship of Bossfire…’

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He spit in the sink. ‘Don’t go exaggerating…’

He walked back to the stall and climbed the pot, then, holding onto the stall wall, pushed the ventilation rack up into the ceiling.

‘I think it can hold my weight,’ he thought, testing the vent’s stability. ‘But maybe not if I don’t gently climb it first…’

He hopped down and took his pants off, tying it around his waist like he did during the quest. He climbed the stall again and put his hands on the ventilation’s rim. He sniffed the mucus up from his still running nose, before ripping a controlled fart to lift him up, then continued to pass gas to get him safely in the vent. He placed the rack down and looked in front of him, seeing heaps of dust.

‘I guess they don’t use it anymore?’ he thought, beginning his crawl. ‘It did seem outdated for this place.’

He had two ways he could go, so chose the one away from the guards, since it didn’t really matter where the vents would lead him, as long as it was out of the guards’ sights.

As silently as possible crawl through the darkness later, Kuno found a side path to the left, leading to the fan. After crawling back, he continued onward as the dust began getting thicker and thicker. Breathing became more and more difficult as he went on, and thoughts of just giving up and going back to the bathroom entered his mind as he thought. ‘This isn’t going anywhere…’

Curiosity and stubbornness pushed him onward until the dust got so thick he literally had to push it aside to make space. ‘What the fuck?’ he thought, after a few meters when the dust got so dense it felt like he was digging himself out of being buried alive.

He gave up, feeling like he would suffocate and collapse in this vent before reaching the end. He began crawling back, relieved by the bad, but better air he could inhale. He crossed the path of the fan, looking at it and stopping.

‘The fan isn’t working… but… hey…’ he thought. ‘Wait a minute.’

He entered the vent space to the fan, then turned around, walking butt first into the dusty road he’d given up on.

The air came slowly, but sped up quickly, blasting the dust all around him. He lifted his shirt over his nose as he kept crawling backwards, blowing a continued fart to scatter the dust and open his path.

‘Hehehe, Go-Go-Gadget Leaf Blower,’ he said to himself, gradually raising the power of his fart to battle the denser dust.

The deeper he went, the more it seemed like he was crawling in the desert in the midst of a sandstorm, holding on to dear life as it raged around him.

He broke through, moving through a section he hadn’t been to. But as he blindly continued on, with one hand on his collar, he couldn’t stop himself from falling when the vent abruptly went downward.

‘Holy shit!’ he said as he fell a good thirty feet down the vent, amping up the impact of his fart by building the pressure so he could break his downward acceleration and land safely.

He got out of the vent, landing on the floor of a dimly lit, equally dusty room. The walls were radiating a faint orange glow, allowing him to see. There weren’t any windows, and by the height he fell, knew it was below ground level.

‘Where am I?’ Kuno thought, dusting himself off as he got back on his feet.

He saw a full bookcase, a wooden table and chair, and a small bed in the corner. Through the dust and age of everything, he noticed everything in this small room wasn’t crafted by any talented carpenter. All the pieces were crooked, only standing up by other means. Two of the table’s legs had books under them. The bookcase was put against a wall, with on the other side what seemed to be sandbags, placed to keep it from falling.

Kuno saw a ladder placed against the wall, leading to a trapdoor on the ceiling. ‘There’s the exit,’ he thought, but decided to stay and search the place, since it had definitely piqued his interest.

He drew a book from the bookcase and opened it up to a random page. He saw a hand drawn picture of what seemed to be a humanoid lizard. He turned to the next page, finding another picture, this time of a short and stumpy hedgehog. ‘Some sort of nature book or something?’ he thought, placing it back.

From the corner of his eye, he saw one book sized smaller than the rest. A book that lay on the table instead of in the bookcase. He gently pulled the chair and wiped the majority of dust off of it before sitting down.

He placed the book in front of him and turned the first page. The right page was empty, with on the upper left corner of the left page a sentence saying:

‘Turn to the last page and read the bottom right.’

He did as he was instructed, turning to the last page and looking down, seeing:

‘Got you, sucker!’

Kuno closed the book and let himself fall down on the ground, gently slamming the floor as to not make a sound. ‘Damn it! He got me!’ he said, squinting his eyes.

He got back up and opened the book again, this time to the second page. His heart skipped a beat upon seeing it. On the upper left it said: ‘Turn to the second to last page, this time it’s not a joke!’

But Kuno wasn’t going to fall for that.

On the right, however, written in the middle, big and bold, it said:

‘Diary of Alcott Baron Booker, the Shitman.’