The convoy had stopped once again. This time, however, there was one significant difference to the place Sunny had chosen to set camp — it was situated near one of the side passages, which they had avoided at all costs in the past.
Currently, the Irregulars were gathered around the dark entrance, staring at it with gloomy expressions on their faces.
Sunny did not look too enthused, either.
After a while, he sighed and glanced at his subordinates.
"Have any of you noticed it?"
They looked at each other, not sure what to say. After a while, Dorn spoke in a somber voice:
"What exactly were we supposed to notice, Captain?"
Sunny silently shook his head.
In the past few days, he had been observing the side passages attentively as the convoy passed them, trying to see if there was a pattern to when and where they appeared. The tunnel looked to be endless, after all, so it seemed that there was an endless amount of these branching paths, too… which was a bit weird.
In the process of observing the side passages, a sinking sense of suspicion took hold of his heart, and by now, that suspicion was all but confirmed.
He frowned.
"Well, I don't blame you. It's pretty hard to notice."
Then, Sunny pointed at a particular spot on the stone wall of the tunnel, right where it made way for the open chasm of the entrance to the side passage.
"There's a small protrusion there, and on the opposite side, the stone is chipped near the floor. There's also that crack over there."
They stared at the spots he showed, not quite sure of the meaning of these small, barely noticeable features.
"What about them?"
Sunny lingered for a moment.
"Nothing, really, in and of itself. But if you watched closely, you would have seen that these exact imperfections are present at each of the entrances we passed in the last couple of days. The first one we saw during the initial scouting had them, too. With how rough the walls of the tunnel are, it is only expected that there would be nothing smooth about the side passages, but still.
Exact cracks, at exactly the same spots, at hundreds of entrances… don't you think it's strange?"
Luster stared at the chipped portion of the wall, then scratched the back of his head.
"I don't get it. Did someone leave these marks on purpose?"
Sunny shook his head.
"No. What I am trying to say is that there are no hundreds of entrances. There's just one entrance, and one side passage, repeating over and over across the tunnel. All these entrances we saw were the same, and lead to the same place."
The Irregulars paled. After a long stretch of grim silence, Belle finally spoke:
"So, we are being invited somewhere."
Noticing his carefree smile, Kim shivered.
"...More like being lured somewhere, don't you think?"
The swordsman just shrugged.
"Well, an invitation has to be alluring, right? Otherwise, no one will come."
Kim stared at him with a deadpan expression for a few moments, then turned to Sunny.
"So what are we going to do, Captain?"
Sunny echoed Belle's smile, making her eyes widen slightly.
"What else? We are going to answer the invitation, of course. Sure, it all seems like a dreadful trap… after all, the damned tunnel more or less left us no choice but to try and explore the side passage. It's an ingenious food delivery system, if you think about it… the food delivers itself.
We are the food in this metaphor, of course, and we are going to deliver ourselves to whatever it is that's waiting underground."
Belle's eyes glinted.
"And then we eat it instead of it eating us?"
Sunny cleared his throat.
"Right. That's the plan… we are going to try to only be eaten a little, at the very least."
Something told him that his plan did not sound too encouraging to the Irregulars.
He coughed.
"Also, I have it on good authority that we will have to get the hell out of the tunnel as soon as the thing trapping us inside is found and destroyed. So, we will split into two teams. One team will go down, the other will remain with the convoy and make sure that all vehicles get to the surface."
The Irregulars looked at each other, trying to guess who will be assigned to which team. Luster was their best pilot, so he would have to remain with the Rhino… Samara's Aspect was less useful in narrow spaces, so there was no point in taking her deeper underground, either. The rest of them… that was the question.
Quentin looked into the darkness, and then asked calmly:
"So who is going to accept the invitation, Captain?"
Sunny glanced at him with a dour face.
"Ah, that's easy. I am going to take a look underground, while all of you will stay with the convoy."
The members of his cohort immediately protested.
"It's too dangerous to go alone!"
"Captain! Someone has to watch your back!"
"Please reconsider!"
Sunny listened to them for a while, then waved a hand.
"Shut up, you idiots! Do I look like a hero to you? If I could take you with me, I would. Hell, I'd take a whole army. However, none of you can traverse the distance fast enough to return to the convoy in time. I can, though."
He sighed, remembering one of the recruits he had decided to pass on. The guy who could create rifts in space… that Aspect would have come really handy right now. However, there was no time to regret past choices. He was very happy with his cohort, too.
"Plus, I am not going alone. I am taking Saint with me. What, did you think that I'd risk my hide if she wasn't close enough to save it?"
The Irregulars grumbled for a bit, but eventually accepted his decision. Captain's Echo was truly powerful… if a Master and an Ascended Demon couldn't handle the source of the unnatural darkness, then the members of the cohort would not be of much use there, anyway.
They were not an ordinary Master and an average Echo, either.
Sunny gave a few more orders, making sure that the convoy would be fine in his absence, then called Saint and returned to the mouth of the side passage.
The two of them faced the darkness, remained still for a while, and then silently dove into its cold embrace.
'Damnation...'