After several more hours of seemingly endless trek, Noah finally lost his patience and stopped. The path here was no different from before—it simply led out of darkness into more darkness. To the right, a sheer wall of rock rose upward; to the left, the black abyss yawned. Noah wasn’t sure if it was still the same chasm as before or an entirely new one. By now, he hardly cared.

  Opening YouTube on his tablet, he checked the timestamps on some random videos. It was a terribly inaccurate way of measuring time, but it was the only one he had.

  “Is it time already?” Gaudemunda asked, nervously eyeing the cliff’s edge.

  “It's time,” Noah nodded.

  He pulled from his pocket a stone he’d picked up along the way and began scratching a mark into the rock face.

  Let’s hope this place doesn’t ‘reset’ like some damn video game... he thought grimly. Otherwise, this entire journey would be worthless.

  When he finished, he placed the stone beneath the mark and glanced at her.

  “Still remember the way back?”

  Gaudemunda nodded. The path wasn’t that complicated, just five forks, and they’d carefully marked the last three.

  “Good. Then it’s time for a new experiment,” Noah said, stretching his legs.

  * * *

  When they returned to the big-ass grotto, the tablet still hadn’t chimed. Gaudemunda looked a little breathless but quickly stopped gasping for air once she remembered what she was.

  “Well?” she asked.

  Noah checked the device.

  “About three hours,” he estimated.

  “Wow...” she breathed.

  The ten-hour march had been retraced in just three hours of running. And they hadn’t even tried to go particularly fast.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll jog back to the last mark like we did just now,” Noah mused aloud. “That’ll leave us seven hours to explore further, at a steady pace.”

  “We could bring another lantern,” Gaudemunda suggested.

  He hesitated.

  “If I’m right, each lamp drains the charge. A second could throw off all the numbers and cut our time short.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure.”

  “Not until we test it, no,” he admitted. “But that would cost us an entire extra day.”

  “You said yourself—time is all we’ve got,” she reminded him.

  He nodded. They could afford to spend a day running tests. But Noah worried that in that time another cage would descend from the upper chasm, carrying a new victim, and he’d have to choose: rescue them or not. If he did, the recharge cycle would grow by another forty minutes. He already suspected that a clean conscience could ruin him just as easily as unchecked greed for “power.”

  The worst part was that neither of them knew what waited at the end of this road. Judgment? Freedom? An abandoned exit, leading them out without meeting another soul? Or maybe no end at all—just a path winding for thousands of kilometers along the abyss, impossible to finish.

  Or... had he miscalculated, and maybe the real path was to leap into the cage and descend?

  Noah didn’t know what Gaudemunda would do if he shared such thoughts. What if she turned against him, insisting on saving every trapped soul? Then his existence would spiral into an unsolvable nightmare, with each new rescuee adding chaos, danger, and unpredictability.

  He glanced at her, weighing. So far, Gaudemunda had caused no real problems, aside from those forty extra minutes of recharge time. She never tried to take initiative, always going along with his decisions. As if she felt indebted for being saved from the cage. Or maybe for being otherwise useless to him. In many ways, she was the perfect companion... except for those moments when Noah caught her staring at him with unblinking eyes, as if trying to read his very thoughts.

  “Come on. We’ll come back tomorrow,” he said at last, turning away from the abysses. He wanted to keep her far from temptation. Better she didn’t know.

  * * *

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Back in the small room with the bed, Noah checked his video uploads. Each one had gathered new comments, but none of them offered anything useful. The viewers weren’t taking his situation seriously; no one could tell him where he truly was or what to expect.

  A few hours later, the tablet finally pinged with its ten-percent warning, and Noah got back to work. After hauling twenty-four buckets, he added two extra and brought his point total back to four. The cage had not descended during all that time, and Noah secretly breathed easier. Together with Gaudemunda, he set off on their second march into the unknown.

  This time, they covered the previously explored path quickly, without hesitation. The carved marks reassured them: no other creatures haunted these tunnels, no admins had interfered. Noah picked up the stone he’d left at the last mark, and the two pressed on at a steady pace.

  * * *

  After a few more hours and another couple of path forks, they finally stumbled upon something different.

  A faint pallid light glimmered ahead, snatching a fragment of reality out of the dark.

  “Is that... daylight?” Gaudemunda whispered.

  “I don’t know. But there’s definitely something there.”

  No matter how he strained his eyes, Noah couldn’t make out the details. The illuminated section of the cavern was too far—perhaps several kilometers? Hard to judge without landmarks. But for the first time, the end of the path was visible... if it was the end, and not another waypoint.

  They quickened their steps, like two moths drawn to the glow. The path itself seemed to straighten, aimed directly at their destination. Only one fork stood in their way, but the choice now was obvious: toward the light, and nowhere else.

  The closer they drew, the more they realized—the glow was really far. At least five or six kilometers. And by now their march had dragged close to eight hours. Estimating their pace, Noah decided to keep going until the twelve-hour mark. Another five or six kilometers was nothing compared to what they had already endured. Neither of them felt any fatigue—only the constant need to watch their footing by the abyss.

  * * *

  “I think... I see people,” Gaudemunda said hesitantly.

  “What?” Noah stopped.

  The path here dropped at a dangerous slope, forcing them to slow down and tread carefully. Her words unsettled him. He’d grown almost accustomed to the silence and emptiness around them.

  For some reason, people sounded wrong.

  The glow ahead had grown stronger and larger. They could now make out a massive shard of rock wedged between the abyss walls, crowned by the source of light. Noah thought he saw structures atop the rock, but the distance was still too great... and Gaudemunda was claiming to see people?

  “I don’t see a damn thing,” he admitted after a minute of squinting.

  “I said ‘I think’...” she shrugged. “I’m not sure myself.”

  Noah gave up with a sigh and lit his footing again.

  “We’ve got three and a half hours left. Let’s move.”

  The path kept dropping, far below the glowing rock. Then, abruptly, it veered aside, ending in a staircase cut into the cliff, leading into a tunnel. There were no other branches. The tunnel seemed to head away from their destination.

  “Ha!” Noah barked a bitter laugh.

  “Did we... maybe take the wrong fork earlier?” Gaudemunda suggested.

  “It’s an hour back to that cursed crossroad. And this path looked more promising at the time... No. We’ll see it through,” he decided.

  She agreed without protest.

  The tunnel was narrow, spiraling upward claustrophobically. After hundreds of steps, they emerged into a tall, wide corridor. At least here they didn’t have to worry about falling into the abyss. The tunnel curved slightly but mostly ran straight.

  “I see it!” Gaudemunda cried, pointing.

  Noah spotted it too: a faint beam of light spilling in from the left wall.

  Suddenly, the woman bolted, running full speed toward it, barely watching her steps. Noah’s eyes widened at such recklessness, but he bit back his curses and chased after her.

  When she reached the glow, Gaudemunda vanished into it... and fell completely silent. Noah caught up moments later. The tunnel still stretched onward into darkness, no branching, only a small window cut into the wall. The light poured through it, pale and eerie.

  It lit the woman’s face, drained of joy. Noah swallowed his reprimand and stepped up beside her.

  Now he saw it too.

  People. Standing in neat rows along both sides of a stone bridge, heads bowed, hands clasped in prayer.

  People, carved from weathered stone, their backs adorned with vast, half-spread wings.

  These “people” were both unsettling and oddly familiar.

  Noah remembered where he’d seen them before.

  “Weeping Angels?..” he whispered, a chill running down his spine.