Affinity: Chaos

Chapter 2149: Night Purge

The Mayor interrogated the two captives while Grey remained present. During the questioning, Grey finally understood something that had bothered him earlier. When he had first brought the two sealed men to the second hideout, the Necromancer had shown a clear, visible reaction, proof that he recognized the building. The Fire Elementalist, however, had only looked curious. The interrogation confirmed the reason: the Fire Elementalist had only recently been recruited and still knew almost nothing about the Necromancers’ inner workings or locations.

Grey wanted both men executed immediately after the questioning ended. The Mayor refused. He insisted on a public execution as a warning to anyone else in the city who might consider working with Necromancers or Gnomes. The Fire Elementalist had been a well-known and influential figure in Cinderloch for decades. Making an example of someone of his status would send a far stronger message than a quiet death.

They tried to learn the exact number of Peak Sovereigns inside the headquarters. The captured Necromancer claimed he knew of only one. No matter how the Mayor pressed him, the man repeated the same answer and refused to give more. Grey remained unconvinced. He felt the chances of there being only a single Peak Sovereign were low. Still, the man would not change his story.

Information on the rest of the forces proved equally limited. The only useful detail they obtained was the presence of a master array master among the Necromancers. According to the captive, once that array master was given time to fully deploy his formations, even an army of hundreds of thousands would suffer heavy losses. Whether the claim was true or exaggerated, they had no way of knowing until they entered the headquarters themselves. At the very least, the Necromancer confirmed that the western building was indeed the main headquarters of the Necromancers inside Cinderloch City. That alone meant they would not have to hunt for additional hidden groups afterward.

The moon still hung high and clear when Grey, Reynolds, the Mayor, Elder Harrington, and Elder Voss left the manor. They moved in complete silence, their auras tightly restrained, and crossed the night sky without drawing any attention. Within minutes they arrived above the long alley and the weathered building.

Grey took the lead. He formed the same sequence of hand seals he had memorized earlier. The stone slab slid aside with a low, grinding sound. One after another they dropped into the dark pathway and descended.

The passage opened into a long underground corridor. Doors lined both sides at regular intervals. Grey pushed the first door open a fraction and looked inside. His expression hardened. Piles of corpses filled the room, stacked with grim efficiency. He gestured for the others to look. The Mayor’s face went cold. These were the bodies of Cinderloch’s own defenders, soldiers and cultivators who had fallen in the repeated battles against the Gnomes over the past months. He had never given much thought to how the dead were handled after each fight; there had always been people assigned to that duty. Seeing so many of them here, collected like raw materials, meant the number of traitors in the city was higher than any of them had imagined.

Elder Harrington and Elder Voss shared the same icy expression. All three of the city’s peak experts felt the insult deeply. Men and women who had died protecting Cinderloch had been denied even a proper burial and were instead being stored for experiments.

They continued down the corridor in grim silence. Several more rooms revealed the same horror, some filled with intact bodies, others with corpses that had already been dissected and partially refined. The air grew heavier with the smell of preservatives and old blood. The further they walked, the more the weight of what they were seeing settled over the group.

At the end of the corridor they stopped before a pair of large bronze double doors. The surface of the doors was covered in faint, complex carvings that seemed to shift slightly under the dim light. The Mayor stepped forward and pushed them open. The heavy doors creaked for several long seconds before the group saw what waited on the other side.

Beyond the threshold lay a wide hall measuring several hundred square meters. The ceiling rose higher than expected, supported by thick stone pillars. Twenty figures stood gathered near the center, already facing the entrance in a loose but deliberate formation. None of them showed surprise. Their eyes were cold and expectant, as though they had been waiting for this exact moment.

Among the twenty, two figures stood noticeably shorter than the rest.

Gnomes.

The Mayor’s pupils contracted. He had never imagined Gnomes would dare sneak inside his city. The sight of them standing openly among the Necromancers made the betrayal feel even deeper.

A calm voice rose from within the group.

”It’s just as you predicted.”

A second, more confident voice answered, ”He’s easily predictable.”

Grey, Reynolds, the Mayor, and the two elders stepped fully into the hall. The speakers had made no effort to lower their voices, so every word carried clearly across the open space. The temperature in the hall felt slightly lower than the corridor, and the residual energy of dark techniques lingered in the air like a faint stain.

Grey’s eyes narrowed as he picked out the two Gnomes standing among the Necromancers. One of them wore a faint, almost amused expression. The other watched the entering group with open calculation. Grey’s gaze swept across the rest of the gathered figures and paused briefly on a woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties. She was an Eighth-stage Sovereign, the same woman who, along with the Fire Elementalist, had shown a flicker of panic the day he first announced the presence of Necromancers in the city. Her face was carefully blank now, but the tension in her shoulders had not completely disappeared.

His eyes moved on. Beneath the mixed auras of the twenty people he clearly sensed the dense, stable pressure of Peak Sovereigns.

Not one.

Two.

The two Peak Sovereign auras sat like heavy weights at the center of the group, distinct from the others and carefully controlled, yet impossible to miss once attention was directed at them. One of the auras felt older and more restrained. The other carried a sharper, more aggressive edge. Both were watching Grey in particular.