Interlude: Skull, Part Two

The catacombs were damp, dark, and cramped.

Nikolas was having a hard time not developing claustrophobia in here. Even the second-shortest in Styx at five-foot-eleven, he still had to stoop so low that his back was almost parallel to the ground. There was barely an inch of space to either side of him, forcing him to keep his arms close to his torso.

Every time he stepped in a puddle in the dark, the splash would echo throughout the tunnels for tens of seconds before stopping. The ceiling constantly splattered him with globules of water dripping down from imperceptible cracks.

He was just glad he had sprung for the night vision upgrade to his Ex-Ear's screen. The others told him it was a stupid buy, but he was the one with the last laugh. It did help him see the cramped, borderline child-sized tunnels in full detail, though. So, you know, pros and cons.

Peton had told him that Skull's evil abomination-making lab was somewhere within these catacombs, three miles below the surface. Nikolas was perfectly fine with horror, hell, he enjoyed it. The skeletons in this place didn't even faze him.

But something about the way these tunnels forced him to hunch up and stumble along made him want to scream in frustration. It didn't help that his Ex-Ear's screen only covered his left eye, either, skewing his depth perception and making the place seem even tinier.

On the bright side, Nikolas had already encountered a horde of undead within this place, near the very start of the maze-like tunnels. It was a good thing because he discovered his Prodigy power (or Manifest Power, he supposed) worked on them.

The small bit of sentience Skull imbued in them was just enough for his illusions to work on them. So, after distracting them with an illusion of a rampaging, miles-long snake that quickly killed them, he continued on his way, stumbling into the darkness.

Where he had been for four hours now.

Once more, his Ex-Ear was a lifesaver. Every Ex-Ear came with a mapping system, one that could both chart paths for a Kozmos Drive and record the lay of the land you were in. Like his friends, he had his modified to prevent others from being able to tap into this function.

The system worked a lot like echolocation, bouncing inaudible waves out and recording what came back. Thanks to this, he was steadily zeroing in on the secret lab.

At last, as he rounded a corner, he saw light. Excited to finally be out of this place, he rushed forward, taking care not to step on any puddles as he did so. When he was a few feet away, he slowed down, making sure to not make a single noise.

He approached the light, which was coming from a doorway at the end of a tunnel leading to a dimly-lit room, and entered as quietly as possible, scanning the room as he did so.

Rather than a lab, it looked like a factory. The room was huge, a mile long and half as wide, with a ceiling five hundred feet above. The left half of the room had cauldrons full of melted, liquid metal attached to the ceiling in five different rows, tilting every now and then to fill a mold moved under by an assembly line.

These molds would then be brought through various hammering, shaping, and cooling machines and dropped from one level of conveyor belts to the next until a piece of armor came out, glossy and ebony-colored.

The right half of the room was filled with sorry-looking people strapped to metal tables, where machines would cut them open and either graft bones onto their own or break and reshape their bones.

Tubes stuck in their arms pumped green liquid into them, which presumably was what caused their bones to heal within seconds. Many looked like someone had decided to pump air into their bones, skeleton third arms or second heads grafted onto them and soon flooded with flesh by the green liquid. When the subject was deemed "satisfactory," a man in a long, white lab coat would step up, injecting them with a red liquid that quickly killed them.

His lab coat was without buttons or zippers and wrapped around him like a shirt that extended down to his ankle. His face was covered by a light blue surgical mask and reflective glasses, revealing only his black hair. His aura suggested he was an Avatar.

The center was filled with the skeletons of previous subjects, bones widened and strengthened to four times as thick as a normal human's bones. They looked more like the bones of giants than of humans, towering at ten feet tall with bones as thick as tree trunks.

More mechanical arms grafted the armor made on the left side of the room onto them, plating their already robust bones with sinister black metal. Their eye sockets glowed with red flame, staring emotionlessly forward.

The whole room was lit only by the dim glow of the liquid metal, along with torches behind the tables holding humans.

The man in the lab coat, the only human in the room not restrained, noticed Nikolas and yelled at the giant skeletons, screaming "Attack! Attack! Get him, you stupid sacks of bone!"

One of the giants, having just been fully outfitted in its black metal coating, started lumbering toward Nikolas, its steps leaving craters in the ground and causing loud *booms*. Nikolas simply walked forward, hands in his pockets. When the giant was within range, he threw up an illusion, making himself vanish from its sight while simultaneously conjuring a gorilla twice the size of its opponent.

When the two clashed, their fists meeting in the air, a shockwave spread out, ruffling Nikolas' white hair. The man in the mask, being just out of range of Nikolas' power, continued screaming his head off, unable to see the gorilla.

Nikolas got tired of the incessant screaming and drew a knife, flinging it across the room where it lodged itself into the man's eye. The man dropped dead instantly, the giant skeleton stopping its attack when its commander died.

'Alrighty, then. How do I blow up this massive fucking factory?'