A rumbling sound, followed by the ground starting to collapse caused the men waiting above to flee back down the tunnel. They ran in a panic, but once they were in the underground passage, they were relatively safe. The Wolf Pack and the mayor were deeply confused, but with the path behind them collapsed, they had only one direction to go.
As they reentered the hospital, slightly panicked, a portal opened up and I stepped out. Behind me was everything that was left of the dungeon turning into nothing but rubble. The last of the levels were collapsing and I shut the portal before the debris could fly through. There was no longer anything left of the laboratory. If I could, I would have taken the lore that man spent his life adding to and crushed it into oblivion.
Once I was through the portal, I took one look across the five startled men. When my eyes fell on the sickly children, an ugly expression fell across my face. I didn’t look in the mayor’s direction again as I started walking outside.
“H-hey!” he cried out as I passed by him, reaching out for my arm.
I turned back, and whether it was some invisible pressure or the look in my eye, his hand stopped in place and his lips froze. It wasn’t that I hated the man. Rather, I was pissed that he had acted completely innocent in all of this, even going so far as to seek my sympathy by showing me the children, yet he knew the sins of this village. He had even been complicit in them. Just because he hadn’t worked alongside the catkin, he had still shown himself worthy of scorn.
“You let them experiment on your families, your friends, your neighbors,” I spoke in a low, quiet voice that turned out to be more frightening than when I yelled.
He looked away. “They’re cursed. They’re sickly… and dying. The catkin tribe dealt with them for us, gave them a purpose, and put them to use. Gave their pitiful lives value. Then, they started coming for two-tailed, and three-tailed, foxkin not suffering from any ailments, but by then it was too late to object…”
The wolfkin gave the foxkin disgusted looks. Wolfkin were pack animals, after all. The pack mattered to them. They didn’t know the whole story, but they had heard enough. The idea of turning on each other was repulsive to them.
“The rabbit-kin working with you. Was that also a ruse?”
He looked away. “The rabbitkin hate our kind the most. Still, they sought us out with the hopes that we would help them, even after they looked down on us so much. It… it was always the catkin who gave us a chance. They were more comfortable with death than most of the other animalkin. That’s why we always supported them as the alpha tribe and tried to do as they asked.
“We truly thought we were doing the right thing. Some may have died, but they were dying anyway. We believed that this research would allow them to return to normal, to return home. A few lives to cure this curse. Was that really so bad? Most of them volunteered…”
“I’ve seen your kind of volunteering!” I took a step toward him, causing him to stumble back. “You push them into a corner, make them feel abandoned. Only when they have nothing left would they cling to that tiny olive branch you extended.”
“We made a mistake.” He lowered his head. “I truly regret-”
“You only regret that they started going after those you didn’t ostracize, those you considered healthy and normal.”
“I don’t care about the foxkin. Two tails, five tails… you’re all the same to me. You can betray, ostracize, and torture each other all you want and it’s no business of mine.” My expression darkened. “But you never should have sold out Miki.”
“She had figured out a way to keep living, so we thought that she would have the secret… that’s what the catkin told us.”
At that point, I noticed a rising group of voices outside. The mayor stiffened, his expression going white for a second. He then gave a worried glance in my direction, or more specifically at the sword in my hand.
I turned away and shoved the door open to find a large crowd of foxkin emerging on the small building. It wasn’t just everyone who had been in the inn earlier. Now, it looked like just about everyone in town had gathered. Several had weapons or torches. It looks like I had stirred things up in this small village a bit too much, and now they were planning to drive me out of town. Let’s see where this went.