The Crack In Heaven [A LitRPG Progression Fantasy] Chapter 58: Chapter 58: The Stench of What Should Have Been

Read chapter 58 of The Crack In Heaven [A LitRPG Progression Fantasy] by Adamus_Auguste on NovelPedia.

Chapter 58: The Stench of What Should Have Been No matter how much Kael brooded, Ashcoil Row never changed. Same contaminated air. Same dirty-faced kids running around. Names and looks were different. Junk tucked against greasy shirts and proud quips about being the best scavengers as they passed beside Tonio and Els were the same. An alley swallowed their thin frames, and they were gone. He had once been one of these kids. Carefree. Happy with a copper wire and the base of a broken oil lamp. Back then, Els and the other girls often sat by the cracked facade of Ben's house. New girls replaced them. New women in their patched aprons, too. Not the most important one. He could still see it: his mom seated on a cloth, teaching them how to patch shirts. Hear her greet neighbors as if they were family. Her nudge was still cold on his back from the day she pleaded with Marc to teach him to read from an old botanical book. Without the warmth he longed for. At least not from her. He glanced at Marc's thin frame in his burgundy suit. If that was the cruel price for his endurance, how much did Marc pay? After all, his divine debt still ran. The answer haunted him more than the question. Still, he checked his ledger for it. He frowned. Els and Tonio's truths still shimmered on the page. Nothing about Marc. Why? Proximity? He walked ten steps behind the man. Wait... There were no entries about Joss' truth either, and he had stood right beneath the bastard when Els punched an arrow through his neck. Not proximity. Then what? As he thought that searching for the answer now wouldn't help, Marc raised his hand. Kael stopped on the cracked cobbles leading to a familiar shack. Why had they returned here? Tonio tilted his head, the round frame of relic 78 perched on his nose, twisting his rat features into those of a hairy man. Beside him, Els' basket swung a little too hard. "D-Dad's house? That's not the safe place we wanted." Definitely not safe, and hard to live in for Els. But Marc wasn't leading them to safety. He led them to the unanchored, which meant Arthur's house should be on the way. The way to what? Only the gaping mouth of the burial pit loomed beyond it. Unless the unanchored were a charming gathering of half-decomposed corpses—and he was sure they'd make fine friends, just not his—there was nothing to find here. Marc circled the shack. Each rattle of his cane on the pavement echoed like a countdown to an idea Kael had already labelled terrible. Still, he followed to the edge—right to the spot he had stood when he threw Els' bloody razor down the pit. Far from them, he made out the silhouettes of a dozen people. Three of them let something fall over the edge. Not something: someone. Another man broken by the slums' poverty. With the shack blocking most gazes and steam drifting from the industrial district, the stench of decay slapped his broken nose. "Climb down." Marc might as well have punched it with his command. "Down?" Els stepped back. "Are you trying to bury us before we even die?" "Pit bad." Tonio clasped the bow slung across his shoulder. "Marc bad." He nudged Kael and Els behind him. But Kael's eyes locked onto the cliff wall. The uneven stones reminded him of a crooked question mark. And of the odd emptiness of the pit he had always mused over. Corpses thrown down for centuries. Not the shadow of a bone... Edwin and Walter told him the pit reached the center of the world, and he began to believe that maybe an evil spawn lived there, feeding on fresh deaths. But they could climb down... He lifted his face to Tonio, whose gaze drifted between Marc and him. "Drop the bow. We're going down." "What?" Els gripped his shoulders, her face close enough for her uneven breath to warm his cheeks. "Have you finally lost it?" She pressed her forehead against the bandages on his, and he pushed her with a groan. "Your wound... Sorry..." "Be careful." He sighed. "I thought the sewers and beggar streets were the best places to lie low, bu