She had been walking in pitch black for some time, in what seemed like a straight line when the sound of her footsteps changed. It sounded like she was walking on wood. She bent down and brushed the floor with her fingers. Floorboards...so this wasn't just a dark tunnel leading nowhere. She squinted ahead and noticed a small flicker of light. The end of the tunnel perhaps? Filled with suspense she picked up her pace and headed towards it.
In actual fact she had probably only been walking for about ten minutes but the dark, coupled with the fact that she was all alone and lost in an enclosed space, made it feel like forever. The floor beneath her feet was still wood judging by the soft noises her waraji made against the slats. Ahead of her the light was beginning to grow larger and she was beginning to make out shapes in the murky grey ahead of her. She could see she was in an average sized tunnel carved into the earth. The ceiling was high enough above her that if she reached out she couldn't touch it, and the walls on either side of her gave her enough room to manoeuvre with her zanpakuto. Even fight if she had to.
Right now however, that didn't seem to be an issue. She was completely alone down here as far as she could tell. The others who had been with her on the mission were nowhere to be found. She didn't even know if they'd followed her down here. She had no idea how she had managed to lose the stairway or the hatch. The only plausible explanation was that there had been two tunnels and when she had leapt forward out of Hisagi's grasp, she had somehow bypassed the steps and ended up leaping into another opening.
It still seemed ridiculous to her but it was the only logical explanation. After all, Chusei would never leave her stranded on her own like this. Not when the whole point of the mission was to find the shinigami who were already missing.
Azdeha shook her head, reminding herself that she needed to concentrate, and picked up her pace, her attention focused on the light ahead.
It was getting larger and her surroundings were getting lighter. If the situation hadn't been so unusual she might have been overjoyed, but instead she just worried about what she would find when she reached the source of the light.
She took a few steps forward, gazing into the light, trying to work out where it might be coming from. A light, a doorway, the exit? She was so engrossed in her train of thought that she almost didn't regain her balance in time when her foot slipped from underneath her, sending her skidding across the floor.
"What the hell?" The girl frowned and squinted down at the ground. There was some kind of dark liquid now smeared across it. The light still wasn't good enough to make it out from where she was standing. Instead she ran a finger along the bottom of her waraji and lifted it to her face, scrutinising it. It was slightly sticky and a dark rusty brown. "Blood?" She thought, and sniffed the fluid. A metallic smell hit her nose, confirming her suspicion.
She wiped it off on her hakama and studied the hallway in front of her. In the little bit of light that had reached this far into the hallway she could now make out what she hadn't noticed up until this point. The walls and floor ahead were blood spattered. Someone had been here, and they had been injured, and judging by the amount of blood, they weren't in good shape. Although the blood wasn't fresh, judging by the colour, it was still wet which meant that whoever this person was, she might still have time to find them. "Just don't let it be Renji or Byakuya." She muttered under her breath as she broke into a run.
As she ran down the corridor, the light grew bigger and brighter, illuminating her way even further. She could now make out the colour of the blood, and there was a lot of it. Coupled with deep gouges in the wall and ceiling, she knew for certain that whoever had been injured had put up a fight. And it had been a vicious one. She had no idea how many people had been here, or if all the blood came from just one of them, but if that was the case, whoever it belonged to probably didn't last much longer after the fight.
