Team Six, Jacob’s team, is encircled by eight Nightmare Archers of Apocalypse, ten Lancers of Apocalypse, and sixteen Soldiers of Apocalypse.
“Augusta!” Jacob shouts.
“Already on it, pretty boy!” Augusta, the bald woman with spider-legs tattooed on her face, laughs.
A massive dark door opens in the midst of them.
However, the Archers are already attacking.
Kai Valemont, Jacob’s brother, steps forward without even blinking and puts the massive sword in the way of five energy projectiles that would have vaporized anybody else’s barriers in Team Five, and probably killed a bunch of people.
Yet, when they touch the sword, they all bounce back, reflected with twice the power back. Only three archers survive the blow while all the Champions retreat before the melee fighters can arrive.
Kai is the second to last to go, only before Orrivane who, with Event Horizon, creates a black-hole-like shield that fizzles out the last three attacks directed straight at the door. A moment later, before the Nightmares can reach him, he enters through the Dark Door, and the threshold disappears with him.
“I would like for you to explain the situation,” Delefagus mutters, looking down at the hole where the Nightmares are now idling and then walking back to the next room with Jacob.
Arriving in the middle of the room they had as a fallback, Jacob finds everybody still staring at him. They use Dark Door, Augusta’s Rainbow Skill, an infinite-distance teleportation device that works with all places she’s visited, with a maximum of four registered locations.
It’s the same door that the Prophet uses to move across entire nations in the blink of an eye.
Yet, for some reason, the Original Primordial Dungeon, Lyra, has managed to shut it down. She can’t open doors that lead outside the Dungeons from either side. In hindsight, Jacob thinks he should have guessed that the Dungeon had planned to eventually stop people from coming in.
“I think you do owe us an explanation,” Nimirea says, staring down at Jacob.
“I suppose,” Jacob sighs. “It’s not like the Dark Champions are stupid and wouldn’t have investigated this on their own. So, I’ll save you bad guys some time if you want to look for Primordial Dungeons to loot in the future.”
Everybody perks their ears up at that.
“Rafnov, the Legendary Miner and God-Killer, was a sworn enemy of the Primordial Gods. I don’t really know all the details if I must be honest, but he was trying to poison them the same way they poison the land with their Primordial Dungeons.”
“That is very impressive,” Tharvok says under his breath in a creepy voice.
Jacob eyes the Human Dark Champion with a weirded-out look and nods.
“So, we can find resources, treasure, and things that could help us and the rest of the expedition out. I was informed that the resources are as numerous as the enemies. That means that however many monsters there are in the Dungeon, there should be at least the same amount of treasure. Between those who knew about it, it was named Rafnov’s Bounty.”
“Rafnov’s Bounty?” Zibrek chimes in, looking around. “And what about all those monsters? Is that normal? What the hell?”
“Yeah, about that…” Jacob frowns. “It’s not. I was told that the treasures were completely isolated from the monsters. It appears that the Primordial God of Apocalypse didn’t quite like people just entering for Rafnov’s bounty and filled the place up with Nightmares.”
“It makes sense,” Nimirea says. “Otherwise, we could have just defeated one room and looted ruin after ruin.”
“Heh, I guess,” Jacob shrugs.
There’s a beat and then Baal speaks up.
“We won’t be able to fight so many without risking casualties. Even with your Rainbow Skills in the mix, there’s still too much risk in tackling such groups alone like we’re doing right now.”
“I agree,” Jacob says, taking it so seriously that he doesn’t even practice his favorite sport: antagonizing Baal. “There’s no way for us, as we are right now, to face those large groups.”
Lady Kisanna is sitting cross-legged on the ground in the innermost part of the Dungeon, meditating beside its core, when a ripple of energy reaches her.
Her eyes shoot open.
“Someone has breached a room,” she says and, suddenly, two men walk out of the shadows. They, too, had been meditating until a moment ago.
“Someone found Rafnov’s Bounty, it appears,” one of the two says with spite. “Who is it, Kisanna?”
Kisanna gets up and walks up to the core, putting her palm over it. It’s a giant luminescent ball that levitates on a platform that stands above a gigantic drop that ends, thousands of feet below, in dark, poisoned waters of an underground lake. It almost resembles a distorted version of the Dungeon’s portal entrance.
“It’s the kids,” she says with a frown. “The Academy’s Champions.”
“Your daughter?” one of them asks.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“No,” she says with her eyes still closed, tilting her head, “it’s the first-year brats. Jacob Cloud and the Dark Champions.”
One of the two men steps out of the shadows. He’s tan and bald, with many rings made of gold pierced all over his face. He’s clad in a bright green robe—something that looks very unusual on a Cultist. And, over his face, two lines of red descend from his eyes down to his jaw, like bloody tears.
“One of them must have partaken of Rafnov’s inheritance,” the man says. “It appears that Karma has brought his lineage to meet our Lord again.”
“I don’t believe it’s going to make a difference,” Kisanna says. “The core has been absorbing the lives of countless civilians for the past six weeks. These brats are not going to make any difference in our plans. As the core grows stronger with the soul of the damned, we’ll just scale up the power of the Dungeon, Karzun.”
Karzun, the man with many golden piercings, raises a shaven eyebrow at her and says, “Check the progress. It should have absorbed more than two thousand souls. That’s enough to create a small horde of Nightmares.”
That’s the secret of the Cultist of Apocalypse that no one knows.
The Nightmares are abominations even beyond what every Knight and Adventurer understands. Not even their Headmaster likely possesses such knowledge.
The difference between what they consider an inferior God, like Asmodeus, is that it can only act on matter. It can acquire souls through contracts and pledges, but it cannot modify the very cloth of existence and reality: the soul.
True Gods, instead, like theirs, whose name one is forbidden to use while still a mortal, can wield power beyond any inferior God’s understanding.
Nightmares are born through the twisted souls of the damned. They’re the personification of doom, the form that people assume when their souls are transmogrified and emptied of everything but destruction incarnate.
What the Knights and Adventurers think happens when the Nightmares eat the flesh of their kills is not accurate. Not only do they absorb the power of the flesh, but they also send their souls to their God. And so does every kill inside the Dungeon.
Kisanna tightens her fist for a moment before checking the total number of souls they reaped.
If it wasn’t for that bastard brat, Jacob Cloud, and him killing the Minor Nightmare of Apocalypse that she had been nourishing with all her hatred, with all her resources—the same Nightmare that she would have fed with her children, her dearest blood… that would have allowed the Nightmare to transcend its inferior form and become…
GREAT.
“I’m of a half-mind to take all these thousands of souls and send them to kill Jacob Cloud,” Kisanna says with venom in her words. “That’s the bastard that ruined our plans.”
“I would enjoy seeing the Academy and the slaves of Asmodeus suffer almost as much as you would, Kisanna, but you know better than me our True Mission. Once Ashenmere falls, the rest of the world will soon follow. We were blessed to become the Apostles of our God.”
Hearing that, all three, even Karzun who just said it, drop to their knees and kowtow toward the core.
“Praise our Lord,” they chant. “Praise Apocalypse.”
They all feel a subtle warmth in their body, with strands of Mana tinted with divinity touching them, granting an almost ecstatic experience.
They all rise in glee, smiling widely from ear to ear.
“Our Lord is merciful.”
Their plan is to consume Ashenmere, to, for the first time in twenty thousand years, spawn an Original Primordial Dungeon right in the open instead of feeding their God scraps of souls like they have been forced to do until now.
And if that bastard of Jacob Cloud hadn’t interfered, they would have been way further along with their plans.
With a transcendent Nightmare at their beck and call, they could have razed Ashenmere to the ground overnight. They wouldn’t have even needed to completely fill up the maximum allowance of people that Lyra had. All they would have needed were the hundreds of thousands of souls in Ashenmere, and they could have spawned dozens of deadly Primordial Dungeons all over the world!
“Thankfully, that brat is done interfering,” Kisanna says with a shrill laugh. “Now, it’s just a matter of time before we slowly grind down all the people in the Dungeon. And if they get desperate and the Captain has them enter the portal, we will simply swarm them with a horde of Nightmares and kill them all!”
Karzun and the other man join the laughter.
“Finally, Jacob Cloud,” Kisanna says, putting her hand on the core once again, “you can’t do anything anymore. You’re weak, pathetic, and nothing but an arrogant brat.”
“Karma brought him to us so that we could slaughter one of Rafnov’s pigs!” Karzun shouts, howling. “They will know the wrath of our Lord and his masterpieces! They will know that no one can stop us now!”
“No one!” Kisanna echoes him. “NO ONE!”
She smiles as she sends her consciousness into the large Dungeon Core.
“With all the people we have killed thanks to the Mithril Disease, with all those souls, we will kill even more and—“
Kisanna’s voice cuts off as she suddenly frowns.
“Is there something wrong?” Karzun asks, taking a step forward with a wary expression.
Kisanna doesn’t reply for a moment, closing her eyes, focusing again on the core.
“How’s this possible?” she mutters, turning toward Karzun. “Karzun, has there been a problem with the Mithril Disease?”
“No? The Knight Commander sent away the only healer that was rescuing people as far as I know. They don’t know that feeding us even the weakest of souls is a grave mistake. So, by now, with Lyra growing in power after absorbing so many souls, there should be hundreds of people dying each day. There will be thousands, soon enough.”
Kisanna frowns, turning to look at the Dungeon Core again.
“Karzun. Take a look at this. Am I seeing things?”
Karzun swiftly walks over with his piercings jiggling in his wake.
Karzun puts his hand on the core and then, slowly but surely, his eyes get wider and wider.
“Wait! What happened?! How is it possible that only one hundred and three people died since the start!? We should already be well into four thousand casualties!”
Kisanna takes her hand off the core, reeling.
“I—I can’t believe this,” she mutters. “Who the hell is interfering with this?!”
“I will take their flesh and blood! I will drink from their damn skull!” Karzun booms, revealing an aura that, despite being at the very Peak of True Diamond, surpasses even those of some Intermediate Imperium Rank fighters.
“Whoever did this, they will pay! I will shred their souls and condemn them to never escape eternal torment!” Kisanna says, grabbing at her hair and tearing it out in chunks.
The trio starts roaring at the heavens, sending curses on whoever is sabotaging their plans.
Sir Maximilian frowns at a different sheaf of paper. “Janus. Why am I being told that Sabrina Margrave and Garros Blackmere have requested training time?”
“Because they have, sir.”
“And why is that allowed?”
Janus does not look up from his own page. “Apparently, sir, the deal you signed with Jacob Cloud lets it through. The two of them can be ordered to a different post — Team One, in this case — but they cannot be forbidden from training during the day. It’s in the Special Quest’s text.”
Sir Maximilian’s eyes narrow. “And what, exactly, are they doing during this training?”
“Team One’s reports say they go into an empty room and meditate. Six hours every day.”
A pause.
“Why am I being informed of something so minor, Janus?”
“Because Jacob Cloud is involved, sir. It seemed proper.”
Sir Maximilian looks up from his page for the first time. “Do you think he is up to something with this as well?”
Janus shrugs. He does not know.
“Oof,” Jacob says.
“What?” Nimirea looks at him.
“I don’t know, my ears are kinda ringing.”
“Some girl must be thinking about you,” Nimirea smirks at him.
“I guess,” Jacob says, rubbing his ear.