Second Genesis

The desk Grey sat at shifted and moved. It felt like the entire room was moving, but that seemed like more of an optical illusion than anything else.

A hidden passage hidden beneath the desk opened up, and when Grey stood, he found there was a line of steps leading down into an infinite darkness. His eyes couldn’t help but narrow.

’Odd.’

Grey didn’t immediately move from his position. Standing there, his hands remained in the two drawers. This didn’t feel like any normal circulation pattern, and yet it somehow felt empty at the same time.

’Dammit, there’s no time.’

Grey’s jaw set and he chose to bury the mystery at the back of his mind. He hurried down the stairs after rounding the desk, not minding as it slid overhead.

He doubted that Silva’s set of keys would be useful down here, but he held onto them nonetheless. But what he wasn’t expecting was a wall of hot air to slam into him, and soon after that did come the scent of foul sewage.

Grey gagged, his body reacting as though it was about to expel everything it had ever consumed in every one of his sixteen years.

He just barely managed to hold it down, but he cursed inwardly.

’Don’t tell me this is just an escape route out of the city?’

Grey frowned.

He had been hoping to find some unique vault down here, something that might give him a Holy Frame he could hopefully use. So long as he had one, it would be like a shield Terran couldn’t break.

But instead, he was greeted with this nonsense.

’Fuck.’

Grey exhaled and stopped when he reached the bottom of the stairs. There was a light glow of green lining the walls and a river of something Grey didn’t want to find out about flowing right across.

On the other side of the river was another sidewalk of sorts similar to the one a step forward from where he was now. It wouldn’t be impossible for the current Grey to leap over the distance to it, but there didn’t seem to be anything of note over there.

Grey stepped forward and past the tunnel walls, looking left and right. But there was nothing but a long line of sludge river that turned off into a branching corner down below.

Suddenly a hatch opened from above and Grey immediately leapt back, just barely getting out of the way before something he really didn’t want to get a good look at plopped down.

To his surprise, though, there wasn’t much of a back splash. It was so muted the river was hardly affected and just continued forward unbothered.

’Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

Even if there was a secret that Giyoto was hiding down here, he had no clues and no time to find it. If this was the sewage system of the entire city, then it was at least as large as it. After all, it literally had to be connected to everything.

The moment Grey had the thought, his pupils constricted into pinholes and a huge grin spread across his face.

"Priests have to shit too."

Grey pulled up his map, and as expected, there was nothing but a sea of black outside of the regions he had personally laid eyes on. However, what there happened to be was a compass. And, above it, there was an overlay.

When Grey toggled through, he found that a map of the city was placed on top, and something very familiar was there.

’My map, it stays intact through loops.’

Grey hadn’t noticed this oddity at all before. But in this loop, he hadn’t gotten into the autonomous carriage and made his way to the Church Palace, and yet the route was already baked into his map.

Grey’s grin widened and he shot out like a cannon. He was already down to barely three quarters of the time in this loop. He needed to hurry up.

There were a lot of problems with this plan. Just because Giyoto had a secret passage into the sewer, didn’t mean that the Church Palace did. And even if there was a secret passage, what was he even looking for?

Grey didn’t have an answer to any of these questions, but what he did know was that he couldn’t just drag his feet and do nothing.

He had to do something. And if there was nothing to do, then he was going to ram his fist through something instead.

The sewage tunnels were a perfect one to one replica of the streets above. This wasn’t a surprise in the slightest and it fell right into Grey’s palms.

It took him another quarter hour before he managed to sprint all the way to what should have been just under the gates of the Church Palace. From a look at his overlaid map, the front of the Church lit up for him, but it was the back that was a question mark.

That much was still fine. It wasn’t like it would make a difference unless he could actually make it inside.

Grey began to move more slowly. There was a half hour left before he would be considered to have missed his Canon Event, and he really didn’t want to experience that pain again if he didn’t have to. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

His eyes started to scan the region. ’Come on, there’s got to be something, anything.’

There was no way Grey was going to wait for one of those hatches to open up. Even if he managed to push down his disgust at crawling through piss and shit, whatever hole was on the other end definitely wouldn’t be something he could crawl through.

If it was just a toilet, maybe he could just smash through. But who knew how many pipes there would be before then?

He wasn’t about to wade through shit if there was another option.

’Come on, come on. Something. Anything.’

Grey ran down the tunnels of the Church Palace, looking for anything he could until he came to a grinding halt.

’Thank god.’

There was a hidden tunnel to the side, one with a set of stairs that seemed to mirror the ones he had only just come down minutes ago one for one.