The door swung open.
Gray mist flowed out silently, spreading in all directions until it submerged everything up to the knee. It was like the veil of a ghost or a dancing girl, gradually blurring the lines and contours of the walls and floor. The pile of humanoid spider corpses became dull smudges of color, and the corridors on either side seemed to grow narrower. An ominous silence and pressure squeezed in from all sides, surrounding the two of them in the pile of bodies. The thick mist made everything in the darkness seem to sway.
The mist was bone-chilling.
"What do you think this means?" Jeanne licked her lips, staring intently at the archway, now shrouded in gray mist. Grayish-black blood dripped from her sword blade, splattering on the floor and dyeing several pale, bisected human faces red.
Sassel absorbed the last wisp of spiritual essence, stood up, and shook his head. "Don't ask me. I don't know anything. The deeper we go into this place, the more it diverges from what's written in the texts."
She glanced at Sassel. "You first?"
"You first." Are you kidding me? If someone's going to die, it's you.
"Mister Sassel," Jeanne smiled, though the expression looked particularly twisted on her face. "You are my knight protector. You should understand what a knight protector is supposed to do, right?"
"Don't push it," he sneered. "I have no relationship with you whatsoever."
"Get the fuck in there!"
Jeanne grabbed the black sorcerer by the collar and, with one hand, threw him through the doorway.
The mist-filled entrance devoured the black sorcerer like the gaping mouth of a monster. A faint stench of rot drifted from the corner, stirring the mist and scraping against her cheeks, which were damp from the grim humidity. It was like a low, silent exhalation. Several minutes passed in silence. Jeanne, seemingly growing impatient, frowned and thrust her sword straight into the mist. After a soft shush, the air began to swirl violently around the blade, as if it would react to the slightest movement.
"You almost stabbed me!" As Jeanne tentatively stirred the gray mist with her blade, a hand suddenly shot out and roughly yanked her through the door.
The gray mist trembled violently, then quickly settled, resuming its silent spread, licking at the corpses on the floor.
"Hey, tell me—have you ever seen this place before?"
Jeanne was freezing. The temperature here was like deep winter, and her clothes were in tatters.
"What do you think I am, an encyclopedia?"
Sassel sighed and turned, looking back at where the door to the other side should have been. It was empty. Even the gray mist was gone. He scanned his surroundings but couldn't see anything that could be called an entrance—only three old, faded brick walls standing before him as if in mockery, forming a narrow, grim street corner. The place was indescribably dark, a darkness completely different in style from the damp prison. The corner was piled high with household garbage, and the pungent stench of filth and rotting meat was unbearable.
"Maybe the labyrinth of some unknown dark god? This goddamned place doesn't feel like the real world at all—and I still can't commune with my Lord's power," Jeanne shivered, forcing her stiff limbs to move. "Hey, can your spells summon me a coat?"
"I've never heard of a spell like that." Sassel exhaled softly and, without much hope, ordered her around. "How about you go and explore? Let's at least make sure we can survive. If we die in a labyrinth, our souls can't return to the real world."
"...Do you have a flame enchantment, then?"
"My reserves are limited. I'm not wasting mana maintaining a flame enchantment until just before you freeze to death."
As he replied with such a lack of compassion, Sassel watched as she—without the slightest hesitation—fished a wooden stick out of the garbage pile. She kicked away the fly-covered half-corpse of a human and, from beneath a pile of some unknown creature's guts, pulled out a greasy, damp rag. She wrapped it around the stick, and just like that, had an unlit torch.
It was a pile of garbage so rotten and foul that you could see maggots squirming in and out of it, a pile no one would want to get within a meter of.
"I'm a little curious about what kind of life you've lived," Sassel said, watching intently as Jeanne finished her work. He took the rotten, stinking wooden stick from her hand. "In a certain sense, you're quite remarkable."
Jeanne rolled her eyes.
"Alright." Sassel casually produced a ball of fire, lit the crudely made torch, and handed it to her. "My lady Inquisitor, is there anything else I should accomplish?"
"Just maintain your spell to hide our presence so those disgusting monsters don't ambush me," Jeanne said, taking the torch. "I'm not holding out any hope of escaping here quickly. For now, let's just focus on staying alive. We'll take it one step at a time."
The swaying flame brought a little warmth to her stiff limbs.
"That's it?" Sassel asked.
"That's it," she replied, her tone flat.
"Then you can lead the way," he said, trying to push his luck now that the atmosphere was friendly.
"As your superior, I need to inform you that the knight protector is usually the one responsible for leading the way and dying first," Jeanne sneered back at him.
"I thought our friendship had progressed to the point where you could lead the way."
"We have no friendship to speak of," she said.
This woman is impossible. Sassel shrugged, then turned and started walking out of the alley.
Jeanne followed close behind, the thin mist coiling in the air around them. He burned the souls he had collected to maintain the spell that concealed their presence and tracks. Translucent gray lines, visible only to him, formed irregular arcs around his body. Each one emerged from the depths of his soul, extended along his eyeballs into the surrounding air, and probed for minute vibrations and other information about their environment.
This was a deserted city. The sky above was a deep gray, as if covered by a heavy layer of dust. There were no stars, yet the sky silently emitted a dim, pale, cold light. The outlines of everything were soft, as if shrouded in fog, like the colors of an oil painting dissolving in water. The houses were blurry shapes, their walls covered in depressions and protrusions like curled jelly. The trees were malformed, their thick, overgrown branches densely packed on the trunks, like many human limbs nailed to the same post. The dirt path underfoot felt like a black carpet, soft to walk on, disgustingly so.
On the empty street, which looked like a silent film seen through a gray filter, a gray, one-legged bird was walking toward them. It was about half the height of a man and had a serrated beak. It moved slowly, so, so slowly, barely shuffling its body forward, at a pace so slow it was nauseating and terrifying.
"...Do you think we can eat that thing?" Jeanne asked him, her appetite apparently far greater than her fear of this bizarre world.
"I'll have to check. At least, this thing looks edible—and it doesn't have a human face embedded in any part of its body," Sassel licked his lips. He was getting hungry too. "As long as it doesn't have any strange toxins, tonight's meal is sorted."