"Have the chemicals... been retrieved?"
Hearing Moran and the others, the Boss struggled to turn over amid the filthy, reeking piles of cloth and asked the question.
"No... Sorry... We barely made it back ourselves."
Moran kept staring at the bat-like outline behind the Boss. He suspected he had been beaten hard enough to hallucinate.
Yet a sense of danger lingered in Moran's heart.
Moran wanted to ask the Boss whether he could see the outline of a bat behind him. Was it some new decoration?
But Moran did not ask, because the Boss's eyes had long since gone blind. He could not see anything.
After thinking it over, Moran slowly stepped forward, picked up the oil lamp beside the Boss, and shone it at the bat-shaped outline behind him.
When the light touched the outline and Moran saw what it was, he began mocking himself.
It was not some terrifying monster that had him jumping at every shadow. It was merely a statue, an ornament.
When the Night Lords had withdrawn from this world during the Golden Crusade, they had left behind many things. This bat statue was one of them.
"Which idiot put this thing here?" Moran sighed helplessly, set down the oil lamp, walked aside, and pressed the factory's lighting switch.
The entire factory was illuminated in an instant.
As light seeped into the darkness before them, the chill born of fear seeped into the pores of Moran and his battle-brothers.
The sight before them stopped Moran and the others breathing the instant they saw it.
Corpses hung everywhere.
Bodies with only their upper halves remaining were tied to the ceiling beams by their spilled intestines.
Their lower halves were scattered everywhere.
Pulled-out arteries, bundles of human nerves, and blood vessels were wrapped around the long-abandoned machinery.