My brain short circuited for a second. I could only stand there gaping at her. Zach, on the other hand, began laughing. "Hehe, he, ha, Ha, HA HA!" The slow build up left a resounding echo in the apartment. He continued on, laughing in between words. "Magic?! Like wizards and shit?! Like, pew pew, shooting lightning out of their fingertips?! HA!" I just stood there, looking at him. I glanced at Mino, and she met my eyes for a split second before staring hard at Zach. She reached out and roughly grabbed his shoulder.
"No, not like that. Not like some cartoon idiots running around creating flowers, not like that at all." She let go. All traces of amusement had vanished from Zach's body. "When you see a comrade get his face melted off of his bones by a fireball to the head, then you'll understand. That's why that boy didn't know how to describe some of those goblins, he didn't know." She got up from the chair and strode over to the front door.
I managed to rouse myself out of my shocked stupor and turned to Mino. "You never answered my other question. When?" She proceeded to pull her phone out of her pocket and glance at something on the screen. She slid it back in her pocket and turned to the door, the hinges creaking loudly as she walked out. "9:00 tonight. I'll see you boys in two hours, meet me there."
The door shut with a loud click.
I stood in front of the big concrete building that led to the hole. The only light illuminating the dark entrance was a street light directly above me, casting a long shadow on the sidewalk. I had shown up slightly early, intending on sitting inside and waiting, but my legs wouldn't move now. So I stood there, staring. The only thing I could feel was my finger nail flicking the tip of my knife again. Looks like I had picked up a new habit.
The sound of a car getting closer was heard behind me, and a pair of headlights cast me in a pale white glow. The car slid into place next to me, before the lights cut off completely, and the driver's door opened. The dull ticking of the engine cooling down was loud in the completely silent night. Mino stood up out of the car, and silently strode over to me, giving me a quick nod of her head. Almost on cue, I heard heavy footsteps from the other direction. Zach was sulking down the sidewalk towards us. His face was unreadable in the dull lighting.
"So, where's the rest of us?" I turned to Mino with a questioning look. There was only a slight quiver in my voice. She shook her head, her face hardening. "We're it. Just us, and this." She shrugged off an unnoticed backpack from her shoulder, and opened it. Inside, there were small tanks of what looked like gasoline, lighters, flashlights, and some sort of face apparatus. But I ignored almost all of that.
"Wait, wait, let me get this straight, you want us to fucking do this shit by ourselves, while it's night time?! Why the hell are we even here at night?! Our one advantage of daylight, which admittedly isn't very relevant down there, is completely gone, so why?!"
She sighed, explaining in a tired voice. "Most monsters have adopted human sleep patterns, because we almost always engage them during the day time. So, they're asleep right now. That's one of the reasons we're alone right now." Her voice turned from tired to scathing in an instant. "And because they 'Can't spare' the personnel right now." She said that with air quotes.
"So, what, we just do this shit by ourselves? What if it goes wrong, what if they wake up, what if…" She cut me off before I could continue. "It's already been decided. We either do this tonight, right here, right now, or…." She didn't have to continue the thought. I'm sure we were both given the same threat when we became Selected. By this point, Zach had already caught up with us, catching the last little bits of conversation. Mino and I both looked at him, and he just nodded.
Without another word, Mino handed both of us flashlights from her bag, keeping one for herself. The three of us turnt to the dark doorway. I could feel the dread and tension in the air, even from Mino, who usually radiated an air of calm. Together, we stalked forward.
Making our way through the dark passages had been surprisingly uneventful. The dank, cramped rocky hallways that were only briefly illuminated with fluorescent light bulbs were devoid of life, save for the few cockroaches and rats that scuttled along. We continued walking for a solid hour, looking for any sign of this supposed army that had been assembled. And yet we found nothing. After an hour of searching, Mino abruptly stopped before us, and turned to us with anger in her voice. "If that little shit Hic had lied about some massive goblin army, he's going to be in a world of trouble." However, Zach held up a finger to silence Mino. "Listen," he said.
At first, I heard nothing. But then a low rumbling noise that sounded familiar echoed very faintly in the dark hallway. "That almost sounds like-," Mino cut me off. "Snoring. We're close. Let's go."
It only took us five more minutes of walking to reach an extremely dark doorway that veered off to the left. Together, we flipped our flashlights towards the doorway and silently walked in. My knuckles were white on the grip of my knife.
Our flashlights revealed four doorways covered by actual wooden doors, two on each side of the hallway, before the end of the hallway, where there was an actual metal door fixed into place. The loud snoring sound could be heard coming from all 4 doors. The metal door was ominously quiet.
"Alright, take these." Mino handed us both two tanks of gasoline, followed by a book of matches and a lighter. "Use either one, I don't care, just make sure to spread the gasoline around enough to hit all of them." She glanced at the metal door. "I can feel a powerful presence in that room at the end, so I'm going down there. You guys got this?" Zach and I looked at each nervously before nodding. She had her blade sheathed in a scabbard that went across her lower back, and slowly slid it out of place. She readied it and stalked off down the hallway.
I turned to Zach and said, "I'll take the left two doors, you take the right." I crouched and waddled towards the aforementioned doors before I could hear his response. Reaching the first wooden door, I let out a small sigh, steeling myself for what could be in there. I silently pried it open, and shined my flashlight in.
Piles and piles of sleeping bodies. They were all stacked up on top of each other haphazardly, honestly looking like they would just tumble off of each other at some point. The stench was horrendous, making me visibly gag at the thickness of the stench in the air. I tried to take a couple of short breaths through my noise, just to see if that would help. It didn't. Shaking my head in disgust, I got to work.
I poured out the whole first tank of gasoline in lines. I had to weave my way around the sleeping goblins while trying to keep my light out of their face. Gor forbid one of them wakes up. So I poured the gas in lines around the piles. Hopefully the close proximity and the enclosed nature of the room would make sure that anybody who survived the fire would die of suffocation. However, I ran into a problem. Mino didn't pack enough gasoline. I had to dip into the second tank to ensure that I fully covered the room, so I knew for a fact there wouldn't be enough for a second room.
As I stepped out of the first room and approached the second, a solution popped into my head. Suffocation would work, right? So I'll light the door on fire, and hopefully we'll be out by the time the hallway fills with smoke, and the goblins inside will be dead before that even happens. So I spread the rest of the gasoline I had on the door, the pungent liquid seeping deep into the dry wood. I set down the two empty tanks and stepped back to admire my handiwork, when I heard a shout followed by a thud. Coming straight from the room with the metal door.
Panic shot through me. Should I go? Should I stay? How dangerous is it? What's happening? All these questions froze my legs in place. I couldn't move. But my choice was made for me. I heard the slap of footsteps on stone, and Zach sprinted past me, and yanked open the door. Shaking my head, I slapped myself once, hard, before running after him. I shut the door behind me after entering.
The inside had a ring of somehow smokeless torches going around the room. But, that wasn't what I was focused on. In the center of the room, the albino goblin I had seen before stood, a sword clutched tightly in its hand, a shit eating smirk on its face, as Mino lay slumped before it, blood coming heavily out of a wound in her head.