A large figure sat alone in the dark room. Eru assumed this was Brown. Shadows covered his face until a blast of lightning briefly lit it up. From the quick glance at Brown, Eru could tell that he was not okay. His face was pale and sweat was dripping down off of it.

“Welcome to my home,” Brown bellowed. He may have looked weak but his voice was powerful and echoed across the room. Basq locked the door behind them and ran up to the businessman. Brown continued, “Ahh you must be Basq and you came with some help? Are you getting weak?”

Basq grabbed Brown’s arm, locking it in place. He put pressure on the elbow almost enough to break it. Brown fidgeted in place, trying to not grimace in pain. “Enough!” Brown shouted, “I see you came with a couple of pawns. I know what you came here for. You want information from me. You aren’t going to get it, I took some poison and it will kill me soon enough!”

“You’ll talk before you die,” Basq replied and pulled one of Brown’s fingers back, slowly dislocating and breaking it. Brown screamed in pain. Charmalina and Eru moved in to closer to Basq and Brown.

“Why are you causing this chaos?” Eru whispered into Brown’s ear.

“It’s necessary so we can control the people. We don’t want them to hurt themselves. Nothing is getting done anymore. Strength is required to do the nasty stuff, you should know that. They’ll find you if you make it out of here alive. My place is going to get bombarded. I can hear it now” Brown rambled on getting more and more incoherent and started to laugh like a maniac.

“What’s the password?” Charmalina asked.

Brown replied with some gibberish to which they all memorized. He fell out of seat onto the floor and started frothing. Some cards, keys and various other items fell out of Brown’s pockets. Eru picked these up and put them in a spare pocket.

Thunder could be heard off in the distance. No wait not thunder Eru thought to himself. It sounded different. It was artillery firing. Was Brown telling the truth about getting bombarded? “We need to get out of here! What is the quickest exit?”

They could hear shells screaming getting closer and closer. “We should try to get into the tunnels.” Basq said and ran out a door in the room.

Charmalina followed, “What tunnels?” she asked. The alarms had gone silent. Looking out some windows they could see guards running away from the house and down the hill.

“The hill is full of tunnels that should provide some safety from the bombardment.” Basq replied hurriedly as he ran. The house started to shake as shells hit outside and started fires on the hills. The shells were getting closer to hitting the house.

No guards seemed to be around the must have all left, Eru noticed. He ran following Basq and Charmalina. They came to some stairs that lead down to a locked door. Eru’s heart raced as the house shook and shells started to hit it. A lucky blast could come through at anytime killing them where they stood. He got a few of Brown’s keys out and found one that fit and unlocked the door. They quickly got in and shut the solid door behind them.

The air changed once inside. It was humid and musty. The temperature was cooler than inside the building. Glass and wood started to shatter outside the tunnel, The ground shook as shells broke through the house. Eru paused as the ground shook and held onto the wall. It was enough to knock him down if he hadn’t held onto the wall for balance.

“Whoa that must have been a close one!” Charmalina commented and they ran down the tunnel once the ground wasn’t shaking so much.

It was dark in the tunnel. If there was lights they weren’t on. They could really only tell where there was a wall and where there wasn’t a wall. There were multiple paths but it didn’t seem to matter which way they went. They were getting deeper and deeper below the house. The path suddenly ended it was full of loose rocks. The rocks were piled up to the low ceiling and digging wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

They turned back to look for another way out when another explosion hit near them. They all fell to ground as everything shook. Chunks of stone fell and rolled down the tunnel. They heard water flowing from somewhere and slowly stood back up. The path was no longer blocked. They walked as fast as they could without falling and saw that the explosion had cut a hole to the sewer. Seeing no other way out they hopped into the full sewer just in time. Another shell hit above the tunnel and smashed it to smithereens.