“The sound of water?”
“That’s right. My perception is far superior to yours, Yuri. It’s faint, but I definitely sense the sound of water.”
Iris had no reason to lie about this. Yuri retracted the flames surrounding her sword to prevent the crackling of the fire from interfering with her senses.
The moment the fire went out, everything was swallowed by darkness, leaving only the faint glow radiating from Iris’s body.
Standing still, she carefully distinguished the movements around her. In such a quiet environment, even the slightest rustle would become obvious.
After waiting for a while, she still didn’t hear the sound Iris mentioned.
“Yuri, are you a fool? If you can’t hear it standing there, why don’t you press your ear against the wall?”
In the darkness, the Little Evil God’s glowing fingertip tapped the wall. Yuri stepped forward and pressed her ear against the stone.
This time, she did hear a very faint sound of flowing water.
She tried knocking on the stone. Judging by the sound, she likely couldn’t break through this thickness.
Even if she could, Yuri wouldn’t do it. Without knowing what was on the other side, she wouldn’t rashly make a noise that was too loud.
‘What if the other side is actually the den of Deep Abyss monsters? Wouldn’t I be delivering myself as meat to their door?’
She continued to press against the stone wall to sense the sound coming from the other side. The sound was very faint, and the flow was steady; the volume of water shouldn’t be large.
At this depth, there shouldn’t be an underground river.
If it were a real underground river, the sound wouldn’t be like this. Thus, there was another possibility for the sound of running water.
Yuri was in no hurry to voice her answer. Instead, she used the glow from Iris’s body to continue forward along the wall, stopping every few steps to listen. The sound of running water remained behind the wall on the right, parallel to the passage.
Then there was no mistake. There was a high probability that the other side of the stone wall was a sewer.
But why would an underground defensive fortification be built right next to a sewer?
Summoning the flames again, Yuri used the firelight to continue forward. After walking about fifty meters, the passage ahead began to turn right. After taking a few steps past the bend, Yuri stopped.
Before her was a pile of rubble that looked like a collapse, half-blocking the path forward.
Yuri went to the rubble. There was a gap just large enough for her to pass through. Standing here, even without pressing against the wall, she could still hear the slow flow of water.
Yuri crouched down and cleared some of the rubble to expand the gap, gradually revealing a dark hole. Along with it came a foul stench of decay and damp moisture.
“It really is the sewer.”
Yuri wasn’t too surprised by this result.
She continued to clear more space until she could pass through easily. Then, she poked her head into the hole to look. Below the opening, murky sewage was flowing slowly. There was a certain height between the water and the hole where she stood, making it look like a ventilation duct built into the upper part of the sewer wall.
“It’s actually connected to the sewers.”
Yuri withdrew her gaze and began to organize the information she had gathered.
Iris drifted over to sit on the nearby pile of rubble, swinging her small feet clad in white stockings.
“Who knows how they dug it? After all, they managed to dig a sewer into a labyrinth. Maybe they got confused themselves and forgot the sewer was nearby.”
Maybe it was just as Iris said. Because they accidentally dug through, the defensive fortification was abandoned.
Since that complex transformation magic circle existed within the underground works, could Yuri assume that place was the den for the transformed monsters?
If she followed this line of thinking, the source of the monsters she had encountered in the sewers became clear.
They hadn’t permeated through a breach in the barrier from the Deep Abyss; they had run out of their den through this gap.
Given that a magic circle existed underground, Yuri didn’t believe there was only one such circle beneath the entirety of Iron Anvil City.
There might very well be several of them.
‘What on earth are those two madmen trying to cook up?’
Why set up so many transformation magic circles under Iron Anvil City to create those twisted humanoid monsters?
As for why so many people had gone missing without anyone noticing a problem in the city…
Yuri could only believe that all those who became humanoid monsters were Cursed Ones captured by the City Lord.
Only then could so many people disappear without attracting any attention.
After all, ordinary citizens didn’t care why Cursed Ones went missing; they only hoped the missing ones were dead.
In this way, the large number of Cursed Ones in the city naturally became the best experimental materials.
But why?
Why transform those people into infected humanoid monsters? What benefit did they get from doing this?
Once her thinking moved in this direction, many things that previously had no answers suddenly became clear.
The Kaff she had encountered in the sewers was also a transformed humanoid monster. Behind him was Brol, who was responsible for ‘fishing’ and leading the Cursed Ones into the sewers.
Now it seemed that the purpose of letting them into the sewers was likely to test the power of those humanoid monsters.
And those who were lucky enough to escape, if they chose to go back to Brol, would be caught by the knights who had set an ambush in advance to become new experimental subjects.
When Yuri connected all of this, she suddenly felt a chill.
‘If I hadn’t run away then, would I have become a mindless humanoid monster by now?’
Continuing to trace the source, behind Brol was Pegum—the Pegum who was involved with the Deep Abyss.
Pegum chose to hide the truth while letting Brol execute these plans, which was why Brol could lure those people into the sewers without any burden. To a black market merchant, as long as it was profitable, they wouldn’t care about the underlying motive.
In this way, Brol became a pawn in Pegum’s hands. As long as he was there and could continue to attract people into the sewers, Pegum would have a steady stream of experimental data.
Of course, Brol might just be one of many pawns in Pegum’s hand. As for his other methods, Yuri didn’t know yet.
As for Bartol, who was behind Pegum, he definitely knew what Pegum was doing, and yet he tacitly allowed it all. No… he must be a participant as well.
That was why the barrier had not been repaired for so long. He didn’t care about the lives of everyone else in Iron Anvil City at all. Even when the Deep Abyss began a large-scale offensive, he only prepared a defensive line at the last moment.
He didn’t care about the fate of Iron Anvil City. It was just that the experiment wasn’t fully completed yet, and the time for the city’s fall hadn’t arrived, which was why he had Pegum clear out the Deep Abyss monsters.
So, what exactly were they doing all this for?
Did they want to analyze the Deep Abyss and utilize its power?
They really were two madmen who were tired of living.
The possibilities she thought of made Yuri’s scalp tingle. If they were allowed to continue, who knew what would happen? Perhaps the entire Iron Anvil City would become a sacrifice for the experiment.
Yuri crawled into the hole and entered the sewer. She had to leave quickly and find Keledon.
She had to stop those two madmen.
By the time Yuri found an exit in the labyrinthine sewers, she realized she had arrived at the entrance in the western part of the city.
Sure enough, following her previous marks led exactly to this exit.
‘Damn it… the Adventurers Guild is in the east. If I had known, I wouldn’t have looked for clues in the sewers. I found nothing, and now I have to cross most of the city to get to the east.’
When Yuri returned to the main road, however, she was met with a scene of people scattering and screaming for their lives.
‘What has happened now?’