Click... Creak—Click... The sound was subtle and crisp, possessing the unique texture of old metal components grinding, meshing, and rotating under intense force!
The roar contained a cold, mechanical, and precise rhythm.
It was absolutely not a sound of nature! Nor was it something a monster could produce!
Aegon's violet eyes constricted to pinpricks in an instant, and a near-tangible chill exploded from his tailbone, shooting straight up his spine to the crown of his head!
An image flashed through his mind like a bolt of lightning—not long ago, while passing over a certain section of the road, the corner of his eye had caught sight of several inconspicuous, bowl-sized metal wedges covered in dark red rust, seemingly embedded deep within the gaps between those giant stone slabs!
At the time, he had only thought they were part of the ancient architectural structure and hadn't looked further into it.
At this moment, the direction from which this rhythmic and eerie sound of mechanical gears came... matched perfectly with the distribution of those specific metal wedges in his memory!
He wasn't waiting, he wasn't afraid! He was... operating!
He was activating, or rather, releasing the locks on those wedges one by one!
Like the most skilled craftsman using specialized tools, he was calmly knocking away the final safety joints supporting a thousand-ton gate!
"Retreat! Scatter! Grab onto anything fixed!" Aegon's roar, like the bellow of a dying beast, used all his strength to tear through the pervading fear and silence.
The instant that roar left his mouth, he completely understood Corleone's intention and the truth of this place—
This wasn't some ancient passage that was accidentally fragile due to years of neglect; it was a giant trapdoor trap, meticulously designed and hidden for who knows how many centuries!
What Corleone was doing now was not destruction, but executing a series of calm, precise, and long-premeditated trap mechanisms.
However, perceiving the danger ahead of time did not mean he could avert the defeat.
His warning, after all, was a fatal second too late.
"Crack—!!! Rumble—!!!"
Almost at the same instant that the echoes of Aegon's roar were swallowed by the abyss, from beneath their feet—no, from the "inside" of the entire section of the "city wall"—there suddenly erupted a series of earth-shattering, terrifying loud noises, like the bones of a giant beast being crushed and broken all at once!
It was no longer the occasional loosening and falling of stones, but the core, most critical load-bearing structure of this passage letting out a mournful cry of total collapse after several pivot points were unlocked simultaneously!
It was the apocalyptic sound of rock groaning, snapping, and disintegrating under a pressure it could no longer withstand!
Aegon felt the ground vanish beneath him, followed by the world-spinning sensation of weightlessness!
The hundreds-of-meters-long giant stone "city wall" they stood upon did not collapse locally; instead, with the central axis as the boundary, it acted like an incredibly massive seesaw that had been triggered, the entire structure suddenly flipping downward!
The solid stone road instantly turned into an inclined, impossible-to-stand-on slide, then quickly became a vertical, all-consuming cliff!
Exclamations, death rattles, the dull thuds of heavy armor and bodies hitting stone walls, and the roar of rocks crumbling and falling... all these sounds exploded and mixed in an instant, forming a deafening symphony of death!
The crowd was like ants swept away by an invisible giant hand, or beans pouring out of a torn sack, sliding, tumbling, and falling straight down from that now-vertical "board" that had lost everything, plunging into the pitch-black cage below that was already known yet still bottomless.
The massive stone slabs collided, squeezed, and broke against each other as they fell, emitting one last series of short, desperate wails. The kicked-up dust and stone powder spread instantly like a thick fog, blurring everything.
In the final moment of completely losing balance, swept toward the darkness by a chaotic mass of bodies and stones,
Aegon relied on his incredible willpower to jerk his head around amidst the spinning world. His gaze, like a tempered sword, desperately pierced through the thick dust and countless falling, twisted figures to lock onto the start of the passage.
There, in a safe area that seemed worlds apart from the source of the disaster, stood a silent, blurry silhouette.
Corleone stood there, motionless.
Flickering firelight reflected from behind or beside him, barely outlining his thin and upright figure.
He was as cold as a statue of a deity long accustomed to life and death.
On his face, there was no wild joy from a successful scheme, no excitement after a massacre, not even the slightest ripple of emotion.
There was only a kind of... near-solemn, bone-deep calm that follows the final completion of a ritual.
That calm was more chilling than any hideous smile.
In his eyes, this perhaps wasn't a despicable betrayal and massacre, but merely... finally activating some long-sealed ancient device of House Torregar that had been waiting for him to complete the final step.
That was all... cold.
A viscous, cold sensation with a heavy smell of earth and decay was the first thing Aegon perceived when his consciousness returned.
Following that was a sharp pain as if every bone in his body had been taken apart and haphazardly reassembled, especially in his left shoulder and back, which burned with agony.
Coughing, he struggled to lift his head from a shoal that was half cold stagnant water and half slippery mud. Sewage flowed down his silver-white hair, blurring his vision.
"Cough... Ptui!"
Spitting out the muddy water, Aegon panted, barely managing to prop up his upper body with his arms.
It was dim before his eyes, with only a thin line of faint light from far above, outlining the hideous, broken edge of the "city wall" they had fallen from, like a scar across the dark horizon.
He was now at the bottom of this giant cage.
His eyes adjusted slightly to the darkness of the lower level.
It wasn't completely lightless here; some rock walls seemed to be covered in an extremely faint, sickly green moss-like substance, providing a meager amount of illumination.
Aegon observed his surroundings.
The first thing that caught his eye was the bottom of the cage itself—not the flat stone slabs he had expected, but a thick accumulation of mud, rubble, and... other debris he didn't care to examine closely that had built up over countless years.
Several relatively "fresh" corpses lay scattered in twisted positions nearby; some were unlucky souls who had fallen with him this time, while others were clearly from a long time ago, already reduced to skeletons draped in rags.
But what Aegon didn't notice was that the blood flowing from those "fresher" corpses was very eerie; as if controlled by an invisible hand, it flowed upward against common sense even from low-lying areas, all converging into winding grooves.
But immediately after, a sight that made his heart tighten appeared.
On the seemingly solid giant stone walls of the cage, near the bottom, several massive, irregular holes had appeared.
The largest one was wide enough for a carriage to pass through easily.
The edges of the stone walls around the holes were jagged and covered in massive scrape marks, as if they had been forcibly smashed through from the outside or bored through from the inside by something with terrifying power.
The light was too dim to see deep into the holes, but he could feel gusts of wind carrying a musty smell and a deeper stench of blood blowing out from within.
"This can't be explained by mere neglect..." Aegon endured the pain, trying to move his body to get a closer look, only to find that even a slight movement made his whole body feel like a broken bellows, aching everywhere.
Especially his left leg; a piercing pain made him gasp, nearly causing him to fall back into the muddy water.
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