Free Nen by Sean Ding

the door handle in a clockwise direction and gave the door a light push. The door creaked opened. With hatchets firmly clutched in their hands, both men entered the dark room behind the door. They froze. The first thing that struck them was an extremely pungent stench in the room - a nose piercing smell of rotten food or garbage that bombarded their nasals without any warning. Other than that, it was eerily quiet and for a moment, Howard thought that he could even hear his heart thumping heavily against his chest. Scanty lighting from the hallway fell upon a small area about two feet away from their shoes. Beyond that was total darkness.
    “Yucks, what’s that smell?” Wong covered his nose with his hand and flipped the switch on his flashlight.
    The moment his flashlight projected a beam at the dark storage room, Wong howled in fear and staggered backwards, his legs had turned rubbery and Howard managed to catch him before he hit the ground.
    “Steady man, I saw it too.” Howard said to Wong. Taking the flashlight from Wong, he thumbed a wall switch. The fluorescent lamps on the ceilings crackled and then the entire storage room lighted up.
    Inside a twenty by fifteen feet windowless room, Howard and Wong were staring wide-eyed at a gruesome, dreadful scene that could not possibly be real. Just three or four steps away from them was a heap of human skeletons piled up to a man’s height - skeletons of Japanese soldiers with their torsos, limbs or even heads cut off. Almost every human skeleton was grossly mutilated just like the one at the tunnel entrance. Some of them were holding on to their rifles or pistols and there were hundreds of bullet holes on the surrounding four walls and the rear side of the iron doors. Samurai swords with age old blood stains protruded in all directions on the mountain of skeletons. From the way they were jutting out between the rib cages of some of the corpses, one could deduce that several victims in this mass grave had been stabbed to death by razor-sharp samurai swords.
    The floor was sticky and sludgy and a crimson layer of unknown stuff swamped all corners of it. The air was downright rotten and the sticky stuff on the floor could have been degenerated human remains that had gradually dried up over the past decades. Both men were unable to tear their gaze away from the carnage for a while.
    “What…what happened here?” Wong broke the silence.
    “Beats me Wong, I’d never seen anything like that.” Howard said with a sigh. “It’s a slaughter house here. These soldiers were dead for at least seventy years and no one in our world knew about it. I presume nobody had survived the killings and that’s the part that worries me.”
     

CHAPTER 16
     
    “What’s taking them so long?” Nelson asked, frowning.
    “Do you think they have found the way out?” Paul grunted. He wanted a cigarette badly but he had left his last pack in the hotel room.
    “Hope they are fine. Maybe they are still in the tunnel.” Nelson said. He was smiling sympathetically.
    “They must have left us.” Henry Parker sneered, twitching his skinny shoulders. His body seemed to be trembling as he talked.
    “I don’t think Howard would leave us here.” Sarah heard the conversation and commented.
    “What makes you so sure about that?” Henry retorted. He wasn’t moving but he seemed to be twitching inside his skin.
    “Because we could have died and Pauline crushed to death by the falling debris if it was not for him. Without Howard, we would not even be here in the first place.” Sarah’s voice rose a note. She stared into Henry’s shifty eyes and said firmly, “What have you done so far Henry? Besides giving negative comments and putting others down?”
    “You…you…I have done nothing wrong. Why are we following Howard’s call every time? I suggest we go back to the chamber and wait for help.” Henry blurted out his thoughts.
    “No way am I going back, Henry.” Paul said, pointing to