On the backs of the white robes they wore over their white uniforms as they ascended the dark stairs, there was the symbol of an owl standing with its head turned back so that its back was visible. The White Owls made their way up the stairs with their captain in the front, two behind him and two behind them. After climbing the stairs without any problems, they entered the pitch-black room and everyone put one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them and kept walking. When they approached the wooden stairs in the center of the room, everyone lined up like a rope and started to climb up. But this time, when they found themselves in a fully lit room, everyone shielded their eyes with their hands for a few seconds and after the ceiling of the room was covered with a thin layer of dark gas, they could see normally.
"Comrade Brendon," Zero One said, turning around and looking at his team. "Can you show us the way?"
As he stroked his goatee with his left hand, the dimple in his cheeks became slightly more pronounced and he tilted the brim of his hat slightly forward and said, "I'm sorry," he said. "For this I need an object of his, like a part of his body."
Zero Two, with a Buzz hairstyle, reached into his stomach and pulled out a small tube containing a few drops of blood. "Here."
After a second's hesitation, Brendon took the tube and took out a mole watch from the left pocket of the brown leather jacket with zero sleeves that he wore under his black robe. He then opened the watch and poured blood into it, and the compass inside the other semicircle of the mole watch pointed to the right. "Looks like we're out of here."
Brendon handed the tube back to Zero Two as the White Robes quickly resumed their journey. And as he put his hand to his stomach again, a small white light caught his eye. The room to the right was wide and long, but the white and black square patterns on the floor halted the captain's progress.
"11. Can you see what's under the ground?"
The black youth with Afro hair focused on the floor and the periphery of his pupils began to emit a golden yellow light. "It's not very clear, but... it looks like a mechanism with springs on both sides. I'm not sure, it's too dark."
"Maybe he's measuring weights," the leader said.
"Or person," added the emo-looking Zero Four.
"Then let's try it," Zero Five said, crossing his arms over his chest.
Zero Four said, "Okay. Let's take a step forward 05," and as he took a sudden step forward, the captain grabbed his teammate's robe, but Zero Four, an emo type with a scrawny body, slipped out of his robe and stood on the black square. And all the black squares simultaneously collapsed inward a few inches and the white squares began to glow.
"Maybe there should be the same number of people of each color," the captain said, and stepped into a white square. Then the white squares collapsed in on themselves and the black squares flashed but did not rise again. The rest of the team looked at each other and then Zero Two jumped to black, Zero Five to white and Eleven to the black square. The last one, Brendon Cook, jumped onto the white square and all the squares one step in front of them started to glow.
"This place is like a chessboard," the captain admitted.
"You're right, captain," the Afro-haired man agreed. "The mechanisms under the squares, spring-loaded on both sides, are in place as far as I can see. Maybe we need to create a pattern."
Zero Five said, "Black, white or white, black."
Zero Two nodded, "Yes. Yes," and the team continued in this pattern. When it came to the last squares, everyone took turns jumping on the color opposite to the one they had started with, leaving only Zero Two and Brendon behind. And as they took the last step, Brendon suddenly took a step out of the squares.
Zero Five said, "What are you doing, idiot! Are you going to get us killed?"
"Who told you you were going to die?" Brendon asked the team, stroking his goatee. "And the important thing is not to break the pattern. So the first one who jumps first, 04 in the first frame, jumps last, and that's it."
Zero Five quickly calmed down and as the team did as they were told and stepped out of the squares, the Afro-haired continued to look at the mechanisms under the squares and his eyes widened. And the square next to Zero Two dislodged, startling the big man, who took a step back and crashed into the ceiling himself. Some of his dismembered limbs fell off one by one after being embedded in the ceiling for a while. Some of them remained trapped in the ceiling.
"How can this be?" Eleven asked him, frowning.
Zero-five sighed deeply, clenching the barrette that held her fake blonde hair in place. And the emo type's eyes widened and his voice became hoarse. "No way... How-how... b-such a thing can happen."
"Zero Four," said Fake Blonde. "Did you like Zero Two?"
"Huh? Zero Two? What the hell are you talking about?" he pointed at his back with his thumb. "After I took off my captain's robe, I forgot to take it back. I'm crying over it. Now how can I go back and..." the robe fell over his head, covering his face.
"Maybe this place was looking for a victim," the captain speculated. "Brendon, where is he pointing now?"
Brendon quickly looked again at the compass on his watch. "It's pointing ahead now."
The captain turned and walked through the door and everyone else followed their leader. Brendon, who was last, looked up at the ceiling and opened his hand and a coin fell into his palm.
"Tura?"
When the team entered the new room, they saw several flights of stairs leading down and a floor filled with clear water. On the walls were stone pillars and on top of the pillars were motifs of people whipping themselves.
The fake blonde stretched her hands forward in disgust, and a cloud of black gas from the palms of her hands covered the water as black speckles appeared on her arms from elbows to fingertips.
Zero Four scratched the back of his head. "There's no electricity in a place like this, is there?"
"I think there is," the captain said, looking up at the fluorescents in the ceiling. "Whoever built this place must have really thought of everything."
Eleven backed up the shutterman's statement by saying, "There are definitely electrical wires everywhere."
"Will you pass now?" the fake blonde asked through clenched teeth.
Zero Four rushed forward and quickly crossed to the other side and turned around to see the captain, the afro and the fake blonde also crossing.
"E. Where's Cowboy?"
He lifted the brim of his hat and squinted his smoke-gray eyes beneath his long eyebrows at the White Owls on the other side.
"I'm sorry, but after we entered here, the compass pointed to the left. Really, the further down you go, the bigger and weirder this area called the Empty Corridor gets."
The captain looked up at Brendon from the top of his nose and pulled his mechanical left hand, which had a white coating, out of his robes, showing the cowboy a specific circular area on the top of his hand, "It's funny you should indicate your color so early," he said and snapped his fingers. A fireball from a large explosion on his back engulfed the White Owls, but they escaped unscathed thanks to the black curtain that surrounded them. When the curtain pulled back and filled its owner's palms again, Brendon's fragments were everywhere. A pair of standing feet, viscera stuck to the stone pillars, bloody chunks of flesh soaked in water and the pulp of intestines laid out on the stairs.
Zero One turned to the afro-haired youth and took a step forward, sticking his mechanical thumb into the youth's eye. Eleven was trying to pry his leader's fingers open with both hands while screaming in pain.
"You don't need those eyes if you can't see," said Zero One, pulling the young man's head to him, leaning in to his ear and throwing him forward. "Don't worry," the captain said as the young man fell on his back and threw his left hand to his eye in pain. "It will heal soon. Come on, we're going across." The captain's fingertips were bloody.
"But captain..." the fake blonde began, after wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. "I need... some... rest-"
Zero One wiped the comrade's blood from his fingers with her robe. "Were you saying something?"
"N-no..."
"Then what are you waiting for?"
Zero Five stretched his hands forward again and slowly began to slowly remove the darkness from the palms of his hands. Meanwhile, the black boy with the afro over his left eye looked in the direction the cowboy had told him, but he could see nothing.
The captain turned to the young man who was staring intently at the wall and asked, "What happened?" "What do you see?"
"D-I was trying to see if you were telling the truth."
The captain took a step towards the young man. "Conclusion?"
The young man opened his mouth and filled his lungs with air, but it would not come out of his throat. "That's right," he shouted, swallowing quickly.
"What are you yelling about, Eleven? Are you out of your mind?"
"Excuse me," he said, pulling the cap of his robe over his head. And the White Owls began to cross the street on a black curtain, but there was something strange. The pieces seemed to shift, heading towards a pair of feet that had remained standing.
"Captain!" Eleven said, looking quickly from side to side. "Something's wrong. Brendon's organs..."
The captain continued walking without saying anything and two gunshots rang out. Zero One, his legs suddenly untied, realized he was on his knees, looked ahead and saw a shadowy cowboy silhouette with ice blue eyes peering out from behind the pieces that were fitting together like a puzzle, pointing two six-shooters in his direction. The Shadow Cowboy cocked the guns with his thumbs and fired one more shot, but this time he blocked the black bullets with his mechanical arm and looked down at his arm with a sudden pause. There was not even a scratch.
As the cowboy cocked his guns again, the captain shouted, "Get across quickly, you fools! Why are you standing idly by?" he shouted and looked up to see a few drops of blood mixed with saliva running down his robe.
He was nose to nose with the creature, clinging to one end of the ceiling with his hands and to the other with his legs, which were as spindly as his arms, with a large head, no eyes, and a shark-like mouth full of sword and bullet wounds. The body of the Eleven fell into the water and was electrocuted.
"Kap...tan..." a low, pained voice called out to him, and he shifted his gaze down the creature and looked at Zero Five's neck between the teeth of a small, elongated second mouth on its abdomen. Then he looked at her dilated pupils.
"Lüt...fen...yar..." the little mouth closed its mouth and blood splattered on its leader's face, while the creature's real mouth opened wide, screaming with many different sounds coming from the same larynx and lowering its head towards Zero One. But as the black curtain disappeared beneath him, the man lost his balance and at the last moment grabbed one of the creature's teeth, stepped into the water and was electrocuted.
Stumbling to a halt with a sudden dizziness, Brendon realized that the creature in front of him was staring at him, so he took off his hat and threw it into the corridor to the left and the creature leapt at him, swinging its right hand. A flaming hot kick landed on the creature's head as it shrieked and shattered the floor and continued to attack the rising dust cloud with cursory strikes. And with the sound of a shotgun blast, its screams increased exponentially. Turning its body over, it stuck out its long, barbed tongue, and Brendon wrapped the creature's tongue around his left hand before pulling it back and firing the silver double-handed rifle in his right. As the creature fell, its head shattered by the destructive force of the rifle's blast, the cowboy's body suddenly burst into flames as his clothes caught fire at the extremities and his rifle at the handle and barrel.
At the other end of the dark corridor, a cowboy came out of the flames that had appeared right next to the hat with the tips burning, and after putting his hat on his head and his rifle on his back, he looked at the other dark side of the corridor behind him and said, "I wish I had made my robes from my Spirit Essence like my clothes." "Right, 04?"
"You're right," said an emo-type in white robes coming out of the wall. "I wish you had made better use of the benefits of being in Ireland."
"No problem. I'll go back there anyway."