# Chapter 4: The Cistern's Slaughterhouse

  The darkness in Cistern Four was different from the night on the streets. It was thick, heavy. It swallowed the light and smelled of old ammonia and rotten blood.

  Nasir was hiding behind a cracked concrete pillar, thirty meters from the ambush slope. He wore Malik's oversized coat pulled up to his nose to muffle the stench. His fingers, thin and pale, trembled as they held two sulfur matches. The cough had been tamed by a bitter paste that Miren had forced down his throat before they descended.

  Further ahead, where the tunnel ended in a circular pool, Brog and Miren waited. The dwarf was planted in the exact center of the duct's exit, his shield driven into the mud like a tombstone. Miren was invisible, perched on some piping above.

  Malik walked alone, advancing into the pitch-black of the nest.

  The tunnel narrowed and the water rose to his shins. It wasn't clean water, but a viscous mud. Hard pieces cracked under the boy's patched boots. He stopped and felt the bottom. It was a femur. Bigger than an ox's. And it was snapped in half, sucked down to the marrow.

  Malik swallowed hard. The pain in his ribs, forcibly mended by Miren's magic, throbbed in time with his racing heart.

  *Breathe*, he told himself. *Be the bait.*

  He advanced another twenty meters, until the floor gave way into a muddy moat. In the center of the fetid puddle, a mountain of dark flesh rose and fell to the rhythm of a wet breathing. The Matriarch.

  She wasn't the size of a hound. She was the size of a cargo wagon. The bone plate on her forehead wasn't just a beak; it was an anvil of black keratin. Around the colossal monster, dozens of pale pups crawled blindly through the mud.

  Malik pulled the chemical baton he carried on his back. It was a thick glass cylinder ordered by Nasir, packed with magnesium powder.

  He smashed it against the stone wall.

  The explosion of white, incandescent light lit up the cistern, casting the beast's monstrous shadow onto the filthy walls.

  The Matriarch woke up.

  The roar wasn't high-pitched; it was guttural and deep. The water in the moat trembled. Blind, the beast turned its massive head toward the light piercing its watery nest.

  The smell of acid hit Malik's face like a punch.

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  "Come and get it, demon," Malik yelled, his voice strangled by terror.

  The beast lunged with the irrational speed of blind fury.

  Malik turned on his heel and ran.

  He didn't care about the noise he was making. He ran through the thick water driven by pure biological instinct. He could hear the beast's claws tearing at the concrete floor right on his heels. The scaly shell scraped against the tunnel walls. Strands of acid spat from the Matriarch's open maw, hissing as they hit the stones Malik had just passed.

  The slope finally appeared in the bluish gloom. The light from the baton in his hand flickered frantically. He saw the immovable wall planted at the exit. Brog's shield.

  "DOWN!" the dwarf's harsh voice thundered through the duct.

  Malik threw himself face-first into the water, sliding through the sludge. He dropped the baton halfway and curled his entire body beneath the raised shield.

  The Matriarch followed the heat and the dead light of the tube, emerging from the tight duct like a runaway crusher.

  She didn't try to brake. And Brog didn't retreat a millimeter.

  *CLAAANG!*

  The impact of the colossal skull against the black shield sounded like an anvil being crushed under industrial machinery. The shockwave threw dirty water all the way to the ceiling. Brog grunted fiercely, his lead boots dragging a handspan backward in the mud, sinking into the rough stone. The wall didn't yield. The bone plate on the beast's head let out a deep cracking sound from the massive impact.

  Disoriented, the Matriarch shook her skull and wrenched her jaw open to howl.

  Miren fell from the ceiling.

  Miren didn't hesitate. The holy blade sank into the Matriarch's eye socket, straight into the brain. The beast howled, convulsing, but it was already too late.

  Brog swung his hammer in a perfect arc. The Matriarch's bone anvil exploded into shards. The colossal body tumbled into the water with a dull, definitive thud.

  The water continued to lap against the edges of the cistern. It was over. About fifteen seconds after everything erupted in metal and roars, there was only silence.

  Miren stood up, slowly pulling the dead knife from the cracked head, wiping her expressionless face of dirty blood.

  Nasir waited for the silence. When the footsteps of Brog and Miren echoed away from the center of the puddle, he dragged himself out of hiding. He limped to his brother's motionless body, his eyes wide, his hands feeling Malik's chest for movement. The big boy coughed up mud, and Nasir felt the air return to his lungs for the first time in minutes. Alive. He was alive.

  Brog drove his boot into the Matriarch's broken head and wrenched the fangs out with a dry motion. One, two, three. He tossed them onto the ground, near Nasir, who was still hugging his brother in the foul water.

  "Three gold coins. As agreed." The dwarf's voice was harsh, devoid of enthusiasm. "The bait worked. And the coughing twig is frighteningly precise with those shitty maps. What are your names, boy?"

  Malik lifted his head, panting. He looked at his brother, then at Brog.

  "Fangs of Orynth," he answered, his voice rough. "We're called the Fangs of Orynth."

  Brog let out an unintelligible grunt and turned his back. Miren was already climbing the stairs, her gray coat disappearing into the darkness. There were no pats on the back, no praise. Just the clinking of gold on the ground and the silence of the dead beast.

  Only the two of them remained. In the filthy nest, before the colossal body of the Matriarch, Malik and Nasir looked at each other. The older brother pulled the younger one close, a hug dirty with blood and sludge. They didn't say anything. They didn't need to. The extract was secured. The door to the Underworld, once closed, was now thrown wide open. And they were alive.