Their breathing sounded like bellows, huffing and wheezing.
He waited until the footsteps had completely faded before moving again.
His perception spread like ripples, touching a dense mass of sharp presences ahead.
Not metal, but living things, carrying the distinctively sickly-sweet scent of plants.
The next second, he was standing atop a dark red plant.
A faint resistance came from beneath his feet, as though he had crushed something hard and brittle.
Those leaves, said to slice through iron like mud, could not even scratch the tread of his soles.
The screams around him grew denser.
Pleas, curses, and gradually weakening ** wove together into a net.
He narrowed his eyes and looked into the deeper darkness.
The stairway should have been at the far end of this thorn forest.
The dragging of chains mingled with the sound of slicing leaves as figures in ragged prison uniforms stumbled through the blade-like plants, bright red gashes opening across their skin.
"Pathetic."
Rossi picked up a coldly gleaming leaf between his fingertips and gave it the lightest squeeze.
Even he had not realized that this body had long since surpassed the bounds of ordinary flesh.
Sharp branches and leaves that could cut through flesh rested in his palm as meekly as early spring buds.
Whoosh-
Pushing off, he raced across the rustling leaf blades toward that pitch-black opening ** the forest.
"Wait... did something just fall down?"
In the monitoring room above the steel forest, a man rubbed his eyes and leaned toward the screen.
"You imagined it."
His colleague leaned back in his chair and said lazily,
"Sure, there's an exit in the middle of Crimson Hell, but no prisoner's dared jump down there in years."
After all, below it lay the second level-Beast Hell.
Unless someone wanted to die, who