Chapter 31 Secret City Dwellers
The corridor was short, narrow, and unremarkable, with stone walls, a stone ceiling, and a flat floor paved with stone slabs. It led to an equally nondescript staircase.
It led to a small room, consisting only of a table, a small shelf with recognizable household items, and a mossy hole in the floor near one of the corners.
Thanks to my limited night vision, I didn't immediately notice that above the hole there was a pipe protruding from the wall with a faucet familiar to me from the previous world - apparently the local magicians had managed to create an analog of water and sewage.
There was another way out of the room, but it was blocked by an imposing block of stone. As a human I couldn't move it, but as an orc I could try. I took off my clothes beforehand so they wouldn't tear during the transformation - I didn't want to return from the dungeon without learning its secrets.
The block yielded to my efforts and moved aside. I boldly squeezed through the opening. I didn't put on my amulet because no one would see anyone in the walled off part of the dungeon.
The corridor was covered in centuries-old dust, and the walls were stained with mildew. I'd barely made it fifty meters before a long, flexible tentacle wrapped itself around my neck. A few more tentacles wrapped around my wrists.
I didn't know what the owner of the tentacles was going to do as I reflexively grabbed the tentacles with my hands and pulled them towards me. The owner of the tentacles flew out of the darkness beneath the ceiling and fell at my feet. It was a creature that looked remotely like an octopus, and I immediately recognized it as a tentacle monster. It was a rare fantasy hentai that didn't involve such creatures.
«Stop! Mercy!» the monster howled in a human voice, barely landing and hastily removing the tentacle from my neck. «I just wanted to talk to you, but I was afraid you'd attack.»
«Be that as it may, I believe you,» I muttered, releasing my opponent.
«And you should,» a new voice said from the ceiling. «There are a dozen of us here, and we wouldn't let our fellow man die.»
«How did you end up under a city of humans anyway?» I asked.
«We were brought here a long time ago. Or rather, some of us were. And the rest of us came here after...»
And the tentacle monster went on with his story. As it turned out, he was an ancient creature, remembering the days when they were bred in the West by elven women.
Moreover, they were bred solely to fulfill sexual needs, and any tentacle monster at the level of genetics knows how to fuck a girl to the point of exhaustion.
Then, when the elven women fell victim to their own creatures, the tentacle monsters had to flee their homelands in a hurry, for they were losing in strength to the orcs and in numbers to the goblins.
At the same time, they told me about the local dungeon. The corridor I was in, as it turned out, leads to a huge natural cave, all the other exits of which are carefully bricked up, except for a few mines that lead up.
The shafts lead to the local prison for particularly dangerous criminals, from which another victim is thrown down from time to time. Mostly men, but there are women too....
While I was listening to his story there was a window that the skill "night vision" has reached level 2 - I've been in the dungeon for an hour.
«And you did not try to catch the victims and negotiate with them?» I asked.
«We have. But the cunning jailers douse the men with some kind of liquid that makes each of us go crazy, and we tear them to pieces before we can come to our senses,» the older tentacle monster explained guiltily with his tentacles. «And with women, our instincts kick in and we fuck them without negotiation. By the time we let us go, they can't talk anymore... Actually, there are a dozen of us here because of them. There were only three to begin with.»
«What if one catches the victim and the others pour water on him? Maybe you can wash the bad stuff off the men before it affects you?» I suggested.
«That idea has crossed our minds,» my companion admitted. «But there is only a weak stream in the cave, and of vessels we have only the skulls of disemboweled poor fellows, in which much water cannot be carried away....»
«I, when I came down here, saw buckets on a rack in the room above, and a sort of plumbing sticking out of the wall-» I remembered.
«Wo! That's something else!» the tentacle monster perked up. «Since you opened the passage and the right stuff is there...»
He immediately developed a flurry of activity, and after a dozen minutes I could observe the unforgettable sight of tentacle monsters crawling along the ceiling, carrying buckets of water in their tentacles.
«Here we go. Now we can charge the rescuers to carry us out of the city unnoticed,» my companion rubbed his tentacles together.
«Don't you want to sneak out unnoticed? I opened the exit.»
«We will crawl stealthily until we reach the first woman we see. And then our instincts will take over.»
We discussed with the monster the plans for their escape from the city. At the same time, we found out the reasons why the monsters wanted to leave their habitat - they had overheard conversations in the prison and were aware of rumors about the impending demonic invasion.
In the end, we agreed to let them live in the orc cave. It was big enough for all of them, and the orcs, obeying me and the sensible Spiderman, wouldn't attack the tentacle monsters for no reason. In return, the monsters would help fight off the adventurers if necessary.
I declined the kind offer to learn more about the lives of tentacle monsters, deciding that seeing the details of the lives of a dozen tentacle-wielding monsters up close was too much for my psyche.