"I'm assuming we are going down there?" Lorey asks as she glances at Sydra, "Your face says you want to,"
"I mean... it is a secret tunnel hidden beneath an alter, so there has to be something interesting down there," Sydra says, taking several steps into the hole before coming to a stop.
"What's wrong?" Lorey asks as she watches Sydra look around in confusion. Turning around, Sydra walks back up the steps and heads over to the alter. "What are you doing?"
"Sorry, I just had a hunch that there might be something interesting here," Sydra says as he grabs the top of the alter and pulls it off. Reaching his hand into the hole that was hidden beneath the alter, Sydra pulls out a long bronze key. "I noticed that the alter was lighter than it should have been while I was moving it, and it looks like my hunch was correct,"
"Oh... It is still weird that there was a key hidden inside the alter though," Lorey says as Sydra walks back over to the hole and goes down the steps. "I wonder what it goes to,"
As the two of them walk down the steps, Sydra turns his lantern back on and looks around. Although the staircase down does have lights on either side of it, none of them are on at the moment.
"I'm sure we'll find out what it goes to eventually," Sydra says, increasing his pace down the steps that seemed to have no end, "Does it seem like these steps are going on longer than they should?"
"Yeah, you don't think we walked into a trap do you?" Lorey asks as the two of them stop walking. Turning to the wall, Sydra raises the lantern into the air and begins to study it.
"Yes, I think we did," Sydra says as he points towards several runes that are inscribed on the walls. "These runes are used to bewilder people, but I think I know how to fix the problem,"
"So you know how to inscribe runes as well?" Lorey asks as she watches Sydra dig through his backpack and pulls out his inscribing pen.
"Yes, I learned it when I was young," Sydra says as he remembers the nature spirit's long days of studying. "I just need to cancel out the power that is activating these runes, and we should be able to exit the bewildering trap,"
Placing his inscribing pen against the sandstone wall, Sydra begins to inscribe more runes underneath the ones already drawn. After placing three more runes on the wall the area surrounding Sydra and Lorey begins to crack, before shattering away.
As the bewildering rune's effect disappears a metal door appears at the bottom of the steps. Walking down the rest of the steps, Sydra slowly pushes the door open, only for it to creak loudly.
"Wow, if there were people around, that would have definitely alerted them to presence," Lorey says as she rubs her ears.
"Then let's hope there is no one around," Sydra says as he steps through the door and looks around. The room is long with shining black boxes placed against the rusted metal walls, illuminated by flickering lights hanging from the ceiling. Each black box has a thick wire protruding the top of it and running into the center of the room, where another black box is placed. The black box in the middle of the room is ten meters tall, and the front of it is made from glass, allowing Sydra and Lorey to look inside.
"Is that a Kantoko? It doesn't look like the others," Lorey asks as she and Sydra walk up to the box and look through the glass. The Kantoko on the other side is nine meters tall, and unlike the others that have red and orange shells, this one's shell is pitch black.
"That's for sure, this one looks like an evolved version of the others," Sydra says as he walks around the box, looking at it from different angles. Both the sides and the back of the box have wires running into them, and the wires seem to be pulsing like a heartbeat.
Turning away from the box, Sydra looks at the black boxes that are surrounding the walls. Approaching one of them, he notices that the front of it can open, but it requires a key. Pulling out the long bronze key from earlier, Sydra squats down and attempts to insert it in the slot, but the key is too large for the hole.
"Hey, there is a door at the end of the room," Lorey says as she points towards a bronze door that blends in with the walls around it. Standing up, Sydra walks toward the door to get a better look. As he gets closer, Sydra notices that the metallic smell from earlier is growing stronger.
Stopping next to the door, Sydra notices a large indent on the wall in the shape of the bronze key. Placing the bronze key into the indent, a clicking sound comes from the door, and the key melds into it.
'That's not your normal type of key,' Sydra thinks as the bronze door sweeps open and the stench of metal erupts into the room. Covering his nose, Sydra peeks past the door, only to find a room filled with vats of blood.
"Ugh, that is disgusting," Lorey says as she backs away from the door and pulls a cloth mask out from her backpack. As she places the mask over her face, Sydra enters the room to get a better look at the blood vats.
Inside each vat is a spinning device that is moving the blood around to keep it from hardening. As the blood churns, Sydra notices that not all the vats contain red blood, as a few of them are actually blue and purple. Beneath each vat is a shelf filled with glass canisters of blood, and every few seconds one of the canisters will be sucked into a tube on the floor and an empty one will take its place.
"Where do these tubes lead?" Sydra asks out loud as he bends down and looks inside the tube. Placing his hand over it, Sydra is surprised to feel the air being sucked into the tube. Moving his hand around the tube, Sydra notices that the suction force will only activate when his hand is directly above the tube.
"Did you find something?" Lorey asks as she walks into the room and sees Sydra down on his hands and knees above the tube. As Sydra turns to look at Lorey his foot goes over the tube and the suction pulls his shoe off. Dazed by the sudden loss of his shoe, Sydra looks back down at the tube, which is now making weird sounds.
"Crap, it took my shoe, and I think it got stuck," Sydra says as he creates a small spider and has it tie a strand of web around his hand. After making sure the web is securely attached to his hand, Sydra commands the spider to jump into the tube and retrieve his shoe.
While the spider is crawling into the tube, Sydra stands up and looks back at Lorey, who is trying not to laugh. "I was trying to figure out where the tubes led, if we can do that, we can figure out more about the reason behind these vats of blood," Sydra says as the spider climbs back out of the tube with Sydra's shoe between its front two legs.
"That makes sense, we might also be able to learn more about the reason there is a large Kantoko in that room," Lorey says, pointing back towards the large black room. After Sydra gets his shoe back on, he and Lorey begin to walk past the vats of blood in search of anything interesting.
"Do you know what type of blood this is?" Sydra asks as he peers into a vat of purple blood. The red blood was obviously from humans, and the blue blood came from a deep-sea creature called the Seacavern Hunter, but Sydra had never heard of purple blood before.
"Do you think it is the blood of the Kantoko?" Lorey asks as she watches several blood canisters being sucked into the ground. By now, the two of them had made their way to the end of the room, but they still had yet to find anything.
"I guess that's possible, but we can't be sure," Sydra says as he turns back around and begins heading back outside of the room. "I'm going to go break one of those black boxes open, and see what is inside,"
"I guess that is all we can do at the moment," Lorey says as she follows Sydra to the bronze doorway. Walking briskly, Lorey is surprised when she runs her face into Sydra's back, causing her to become slightly annoyed, "What are you doing now?"
"Sorry, there just seems to be something different about this room," Sydra says as he steps aside and lets Lorey look past him. Glancing into the room, Lorey freezes when she sees that the black box in the center of the room is slowly opening.