The area smelled like blood. Most of that was of the church members Reidar just killed, but it didn't matter; these guys likely deserved it anyway.
Reidar stepped inside and found the five Priests where the Shadow Specter-Kings had brought them—on the floor, backs against the wall.
They didn't even try to move a muscle or escape. Two of them were still unconscious from the Juggernaut's earlier intervention, but the other three were awake, and the moment Reidar walked in, their eyes locked on him with a mix of fear and defiance.
<They're going to make this difficult.>
And he was right. So, Reidar pulled a crate from the corner, set it in front of the Priests, and sat down.
"I'm going to ask questions," Reidar said. "You're going to answer them."
The Priest on the far left—a tall man with the pale, stretched skin that marked him as a mutated human—raised his chin and gave Reidar a look of defiance.
"We serve the Progenitor," the Priest said. "We don't answer to heretics."
Reidar looked at him for a moment. "Heretics, huh?" He clicked his tongue. "Too bad your Progenitor isn't here, right? Though unfortunately for you, I am. Here in the flesh, and guess what…I have forty-seven thousand creatures outside that will eat this building if I tell them to."
The second conscious Priest shook her head. "You can kill us. It won't matter. The Church is bigger than five Priests."
"Oh… no… I'm not going to kill you," Reidar said. "Not yet, at least."
The third conscious Priest said nothing. He was younger than the other two, and his mutation was less advanced for some reason—his skin was pale but hadn't started the other processes that Reidar had seen on Jorik, Mara, Aaron, or Silas. He stared at the floor, and his hands trembled.
"I'll give you one chance," Reidar said. "Tell me what the Church is doing in Kingsgate. Tell me who's running the operation, where your people are hiding, and how much of the infected food has been distributed."
The tall Priest spat on the ground. "Go fuck yourself."
Reidar nodded. He stood up, put the crate back in the corner, and walked to the door.
"Fine. We'll do this the hard way."
That scared the priests a little.
He reached out through the Overmind Consciousness and connected to thousands of the Vorathid Abyssal Horrors that were outside the building.
<Reduce your size. Wasp-sized. Enter the building through the door and begin feeding on the prisoners. Slowly. Don't kill them.>
The last part he kept private, pushing the command through a separate mental channel that the Priests wouldn't hear or see.
The Abyssal Horrors shrank in seconds, with a sound like cracking ice—or maybe bubble wrap being popped by an overenthusiastic child—until they were no larger than wasps. Small, black, and sporting tiny faces that looked like someone had asked an angry toddler to design "the scariest bug ever" while running a high fever. They were insects designed by something that not only hated everything alive but also had extremely poor impulse control and a flair for the dramatic.
They flew through the door and into the stone building.
The tall Priest saw them first. His defiance lasted about three seconds after the first Abyssal Horror landed on his arm and bit down.
The scream that came out of his mouth was not the kind of sound a brave man made. It was that of an animal and filled with a terror that went beyond physical pain by a wide margin, because the Vorathid Abyssal-Horrors didn't just bite—they fed, and their feeding process involved a corrosive secretion that dissolved flesh at a rate slow enough to keep the victim alive and aware of every second.
If they wanted, of course. Otherwise, the acid was the biological equivalent of a product review written by a furious customer. One star, thoroughly destructive, and absolutely no chance of a refund.
The woman Priest screamed next, and the young one tried to curl into a ball, but the other summons held him in place.
Reidar turned around and walked out of the building. He closed the door behind him and leaned against the stone wall outside, listening to the screams as they faded into the distance of the outpost.
In truth, Reidar didn't really like doing this, but these people were part of a machine that was planning on using innocent people, people that had to go through an incontestable amount of hardships and an apocalypse, as sacrificial pawns to destroy the Aegis Phalanx in the country.
Of course, these guys were spread on the planet, so doing this just here didn't really make sense.
He crossed his arms and waited.
The screams didn't stop for the first thirty minutes. They became hoarse around the forty-minute mark, which meant the Priests' vocal cords were giving out.
By the fifty-minute mark, the sounds had turned into gasping sobs that carried through the stone walls.
Reidar checked the time through the system interface and decided to give them one full hour.
When the hour was up, he opened the door and stepped back inside.
The stone room was a mess. Blood covered the floor in streaks and pools. The five Priests were all barely conscious now, including the two that had been knocked out earlier, and every single one of them was in a state that made Reidar, the perpetrator, pause.
The tall Priest's left arm was stripped of skin from the elbow down. His face was covered in small bite marks that had swollen into raised, purple welts.
The woman Priest had lost three of her fingers—bitten off at the second joint—and the stumps were still bleeding. The young Priest had fared the worst; the Abyssal Horrors had focused on his legs, and the flesh below his knees looked like it had been chewed by a hundred tiny mouths, which was more or less what had happened.
The two previously unconscious Priests had woken up to the feeding. One of them had vomited on himself. The other was crying.
The six Abyssal Horrors buzzed around the room, waiting for new orders.
"Leave," Reidar said to them, and they flew out through the door.
Reidar looked at the Priests. "Do you want to talk now?"
All five of them nodded.