The Vampire Prince's Toxic Consort (BL)
Chapter 44 The Labyrinth

Not everyone who set out to replace it had the luck to lay eyes on the Labyrinth, as it had its own will and would only show in front of certain people.

According to local tales, a Persian emperor built the Labyrinth of Mahoraga a thousand years ago to worship an ancient evil god and hide his treasures. The labyrinth was created to induce confusion and hallucinations, and only the one with the map could pass all the obstacles and reach the Sanctuary at the center. And even so, only the ones with the key could enter it.

Except for the emperor’s progeny, who held both the map and the key, anyone covetous of the treasure was often driven mad by all the hallucinations and lost in the Labyrinth forever.

And now, a thousand years later, the once majestic labyrinth was ravaged by indifferent time, relentless sun and venomous wind and reduced into an emaciated shadow of collapsed walls and broken columns. Yet it still echoed the howling of lost ghosts.

As they approached the ruin of the labyrinth, strange things happened. It was 4 pm in the afternoon, hours away from sunset time, yet with each step closer to the ruins, the heat in the air was receding drastically, and the sky became dimmer and dimmer as if the sun was extinguishing slowly. And by the time they were about one mile from the gate, the sky was completely dark, without a moon or stars. The never stopping wind stood still as if congealed into something thicker and heavier, pressing against each traveler’s chest.

No one was speaking in the group as the ominous air loomed over their head. Lucius could feel that every cell in his body was screaming “run” at him. As if something was written in his gene telling him danger was ahead. Ignoring it made him gravely unsettled and anxious.

The entrance gate slowly revealed itself and stood like a great gaping wound in time and space. The giant arch had partially collapsed and looked like an immemorial monster’s bones protruding from the sand. Behind the gate and the derelict walls were rows after rows of serried remains of once majestic stone buildings, and even now, after being ground by a thousand years of hardship, they still looked intimidating and forbidding.

The guide refused to go further, no matter how much they would pay him. Dorian and the three bodyguards went through the gate first. Lucius and Florian purposefully stayed behind, pretending to thank the guide’s help. The guide quickly passed a small package to Lucius and promptly scurried away.

Lucius felt the shape of the dagger through the fabric. It was very tiny. Something he could hide in his pocket. And the other thing was a vial of a familiar shape. He quickly shoved the package into his jacket pocket, exchanged a meaningful look with Florian, and hastened after Dorian.

The broken walls and columns were covered with statues of blurry faces and contorted bodies as if some immemorial memory slowly faded from history. And those crude, muddy, obscure expressions contained more malice than any refined dark art, often shifting ominously the longer you stared at them.

The passage was spacious in some places and so narrow in other areas that one had to sidle through, and the rocks were right in your face. Lucius was especially nervous in those areas, feeling like he was about to be crushed by the looming walls. Dorian had surreptitiously grabbed his hand, making sure that he was following his every step, which was a pretty sweet gesture.

The view at every turn looked very much the same, and not before long, Lucius had lost all sense of direction and even began to feel dizzy, albeit he attempted to remember their incoming way. The dark sky and dim light only made matter worse. However, Dorian proceeded confidently and only paused occasionally to check something on the scroll.

The silence of the labyrinth was lacerated by a stream of the giggling sound of a child. Everyone heard it, loud and clear, eerie and misplaced. There was no way a regular child would show up in a cursed, darkness-drenched labyrinth in the middle of nowhere. And they also heard quick steps running around in some nearby alleyway. As Lucius turned his head and tried to identify the source of the laughter, he saw a shadow scamper around the wall and disappear.

“What the...” One bodyguard, namely Selena, who also saw the child-like shadow, commented with an unnerved voice.

“Don’t listen, and don’t look.” Dorian warned them, “No matter what sound you hear or who you think you see. Keep your eyes forward.”

It was easier said than done. Shadows were moving ominously in their peripheral sight, and you never knew what would appear at the next turn. A weeping woman, a grinning man digging a hole, an old woman pulling out her intestines. Some of the scenes were so uncanny that even the vampires were spooked. Dorian and Florian were the only two who managed to keep their coolness, not reacting much to all the jump scares.

Lucius couldn’t remember how many times his heart almost jumped out of his throat. He did enjoy horror movies and haunted houses a lot, but they were only fun when he knew he was safe. And now, he almost peed his pants a few times.

“Are those real ghosts?” Lucius asked Dorian with a shaky voice after he screamed as a crazy-looking man ran toward him with an axe in hand but then dissipated a few steps away.

Dorian answered, “More like some condemned souls trapped in purgatory. But they are too weak to harm you.”

“Will there be anyone strong enough to harm us?”

“It has been a thousand years, and even the most vicious spirit should have worn away and no more than an echo of the past.“Dorian glanced at him teasingly, “You can hold my hand if you are scared.”

“Do I look like a chicken to you?” Lucius buffed up his chest and tried to walk as much confidence as he could muster up.

As they went deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, the wall around them began to move and change. At first the change was very subtle. So subtle that you would doubt if it was your hallucination. The face’s crude expressions shifted by just a smudge, and the positions of their limbs displaced just an inch or two. And the ground was also no longer solid and trustworthy, as one of the guards’ feet sunk into the seemingly hard granite floor as if stepped into the mud.

Only when Lucius saw a sculpt weeping blood tears was he sure he did not imagine things. All the blurry faces around them were weeping, and the dark red liquid trickled down the stone wall as the limbs and torso began to twitch and convulse.

“Holy shit!” Lucius cursed in fright and hid behind Doria. The three guards took out their guns, and Florian unsheathed the silver sword that Lucius ordered from an enchanter for him. The four warriors formed a circle around Dorian and Lucius, alarmingly standing against the drastically changing surroundings.

Soon the contorted figures began to detach themselves from the ancient crumbling walls, and the dirt and sand shed like snow. Yet what lay underneath was a nightmare. Their grayish, slimy, and rotten skin was covered in thousands of tiny eyes, and their face had no eyes or nose but a mess of tumors, oozing ulcers, and layers of loose, wrinkly skin. They made a strange metal clanging sound as they moved in an erratic but discordant way and swarmed in like a flood of maggots.

“I thought you said those ghosts won’t be strong enough to harm us!” Lucius said with a grimace as the sight of those gross pus and blisters made his stomach churn.

Dorian slightly opened his arm and shielded Lucius from the approaching things. He shook his head, “these are not ghosts. They are a type of demon.”

“Demons?! You mean those things in the scripture with horns, tails, and stuff?!“Lucius asked incredulously. He thought Demon was one of those made-up things, like Angels and God. Turns out they were real and much grosser than he thought.

The guards fired their guns and let the bullets rain like fire, and the silver bullets hit their soft flesh as if hitting mud, with a small squirt of pus popping out, and the flesh soon closed. Seeing the bullets didn’t do much harm, two of the bodyguards, Serena and Drak, transformed into their beast form, with buffed-up bodies and huge, sharp, and powerful claws, and the bodyguard named Simon unsheathed his double swords.

“Buy me five minutes,” Dorian said to the guards. His irises began to glow that familiar ominous red, but it kept getting brighter and brighter, and the light became tiny spider-web-like streaks spreading to the skin around his eyes. Electricity flared in the air around him.

Florian was the first to wield his sword. The runes on his sword glowed a fierce yellow light, and the blade morphed into a golden flower and quickly cut several closest demons into several clean and big chucks. Their cross-section is a myriad of densely packed eyes, some broken, oozing a slimy liquid. The meat chunks fell to the ground and soon melted away into puddles of murky-colored mucus.

Serena and Drake also pounced on the demons with great ferocity, tearing their limbs apart and twisting their head off. But the splashing slime seemed acidic and left burn marks on their skin. Simon also joined Florian in his sword dance. But the demons kept coming, and the eyeballs on their face and body shot out squirts of strong acidic poison with each twitching. Drake screamed as he was shot by the poison, and the skin on his thigh melted away instantly.

There were too many of them, and not before long would they be overwhelmed.

Dorian opened his wings and quickly shielded Lucius from several incoming poison shots. He grunted quietly, bearing the excruciating pain from the corrosive poison.

Lucius knew he couldn’t do much then, but it still pained him to see Dorian take the pain for him, making him feel weak and guilty.

What had he done for Dorian? All he had brought on him was danger, lies, and troubles. And yet Dorian still chose him when he could have had his brother, who probably deserved the prince’s love more than him.

The bodyguards and Florian bought Dorian some time, and he had been chanting beneath his breaths. The brightly burning red light traveled from his eyes to the center of his palms, and he cupped his hands together. The blazing color radiated fiercely from between his fingers, like a seed on the verge of explosion, barely held back by the vampire’s hands.

Ere long, the air current began to swirl rapidly around Dorian, lifting his silky raven locks. He let out a growl and released the energy between his palms.

Instantly a shockwave spread to all directions, and an invisible realm promptly expanded. As the boundary of Dorian’s realm passed through, the demons all crumbled and fell to the ground, turning into the same gory mucus covering the ground like a pool of filth. His realm pushed and pushed and only slowed down when it reached a half-mile radius, and within it, none of the demons survived.

It was a masterful parallel reality spell a dozen times more powerful than the one he used on Lucius’s birthday when he made a small realm around them in which the water was breathable.

The guards and Florian all stopped, panting heavily, trying to catch some breath. Serena passed a bottle of blood to Drake, as drinking blood could speed up the healing on his thigh.

Dorian’s eyes were still burning red, making him look like an ethereal being, but it consumed much of his strength. It felt like holding a small mountain over his shoulder because the bigger the realm, the heavier the burden. He said with exigency, “We have to move fast. I can’t hold this realm forever.”

In the gores of the disintegrating demons, Dorian and the rest of the group moved swiftly toward the center of the labyrinth. As they pass through, the demons let out screeching and rhythmic howls, seemingly signifying something about the incomers before they were destroyed by the realm.

Lucius asked quietly, “Are you ok? Your wounds on the wings seem pretty bad...”

“Don’t worry about it. They will heal soon.” Dorian reassured him, though he sounded a bit exerting.

“Is this normal? I thought Aslani progenies with the map are granted safe passage?“Lucius scanned the minacious shadows of the unpredictable ruins wearily.

Dorian’s frown deepened, “Perhaps something changed during the six years since my mother’s death. Or...maybe it’s because he knows that I never worshiped him as Aslani should have, and I never made any offering to him.”

All the demons seemed destroyed as they ventured on, and after one last turn, the Sanctuary was only two hundred yards away. It stood tall and forlorn like a dying king guarding his dilapidated kingdom.

But Dorian sensed something unusual before he could relax and shrink his realm. Something that didn’t fit into the rule he set for his domain was intruding forcefully, breaking his spell.

The next second, the ground began to tremble violently, and everyone was unstable on their feet. The next moment, the earth opened, and all the walls around them collapsed and fell into the opened chasm beneath their feet. Lucius scrambled to Dorian’s side, their hands clasped tightly in the chaos. And Florian, Serena and Drake were separated from them by the drastically widening chasm.

And then, a bone-chilling grumbling sound vibrated from the depth of the bottomless abyss, like a menacing sigh of a dragon from hell.

Two red dots the size of basketballs lit up in the abysmal darkness, and then two more dots, and then more. The number of dots kept rising rapidly, and their size was growing bigger and bigger. Soon Lucius realized they were not growing bigger, but rather approaching them with the speed of sound. And they were not red dots, but nine pairs of gigantic eyes.

In a gash of rancid, howling currents, the enormous thing burst out from the bottom of the pit and shot up to the lightless firmament. Dark scales radiated a lurid and oily iridescent. Each piece was as big as a man’s torso. As everyone finally recovered from the onslaught of the malodor, they beheld a leviathan towering over them like a giant tree erecting in front of several inconsequential ants. Nine dragon-like heads bore down on them like the stare of the Devil.

Lucius was seized by pure, primal terror, and his body petrified as if made of stone. He gulped and whispered, “What is it this time?”

And Dorian, for the first time, showed some fear, answered, “Hydra. It is a Hydra.”