Sir Maximilian is sitting in the war room, looking at the map that has been drafted by the teams. It’s way past midnight but at Imperium Rank a man has very little need for sleep and sustenance. And he wouldn’t be able to sleep even if he wanted to.
As a candle burns low, taken by melancholy, he slowly moves a stack of papers on his desk, taking out a black folder.
He takes a deep breath and gets a cigar out of his Interspatial Ring. He lights it with a finger and takes a few good puffs with his eyes closed.
He coughs a few times.
“Imperium Rank tobacco plants don’t joke around,” he says, coughing some more. “But that’s the stuff.”
Numbing himself a little more, he finally gathers the courage to look at the folder. It’s now a matter of national security. He should look into the death rates among civilians as well since they could give him some hints about what is happening.
Usually, it’s his policy not to.
Looking at these numbers is depressing and self-defeating. He only looks at the civilian casualties at the end of a campaign. And he has never been in a situation where the civilians can’t even escape.
“This is going to be really bad,” Sir Maximilian sighs, chewing on the cigar’s butt and slowly opening the folder.
He looks at the first page—today’s page.
“Zero?” Sir Maximilian frowns. “What? Was there a reporting mistake? Did the disease relent, today? What the hell?”
He turns to yesterday’s page and he sees the same big fat zero.
He turns more and more pages and then, he runs out of the war room.
He finds Janus’s room nearby and knocks on it.
“Hm?” A sleepy voice comes from the other end.
“Janus! Damn it, why are you sleeping?!” Sir Maximilian enters the scribe’s room without asking for permission, finding his most trusted man in pink briefs.
“Sir,” Janus says, rubbing his face. “Could you not?”
Janus has a system that would have taken him immediately out of his slumber in case of emergency. Which, in his head, means that this is not a matter worth ruining his sleep over.
“Did you check the death rates?” Sir Maximilian says, tossing the black folder at Janus.
Janus frowns, activating a Superior Light Skill, and looks through the stack of pages.
His frown becomes deep.
“Sir, someone must have made a mistake.”
They both nod at each other and as soon as Janus wears some clothes, they run out of Lord Ashenvale’s estate and into the city proper.
They find the neighborhood that they used to triage the sickest patients and instead of a ghost town, they find it a bustling place with many taverns and inns still open and full of people.
Sir Maximilian reels when he sees a man casually walking while a patch of Mithril Disease has taken hold on his face—a death sentence. That’s nothing short of a death sentence for anybody here.
“I’m sorry, can I help you?” The man looks weirded out by the Knight Commander staring wildly at him.
“Sir, I have a very unsettling, and potentially disrespectful question,” Sir Maximilian says, putting his manners aside and pointing at the patch of silvery skin on the man’s face. “You seem to be suffering from the disease. Yet, you don’t seem to be… panicking? What Rank are you?”
“Bronze,” the man says with a smile. “Why would I be worried, sir?”
Sir Maximilian frowns.
“The mithril disease will… are you not worried about dying?”
“Dying?” The man laughs. “What? I just go every night at six to the hospital in the neighborhood and get healed. Apparently, this was the Knight Commander’s idea.”
“Healed?” Sir Maximilian asks, ignoring the fact that someone apparently borrowed his name.
“Yeah, by a few different people every time. Why are you so surprised?”
Sir Maximilian looks back at Janus, who is clearly as confused as he is.
“Would you mind pointing us at the hospital, sir? I work with the Knight Commander. I’d like to check a few things out.”
Sir Maximilian enters a very common looking apartment that has been called ‘hospital,’ and, ignoring the chatty people, all with the mithril disease, he goes straight for the door that seems to hold the healer.
He opens it wide and sees an unfamiliar young man.
“Oh,” the young man says in front of a turned patient, wielding a blinding sword of light.
Sir Maximilian doesn’t recognize the appearance of the young man, but he immediately recognizes the Skill.
“Garros Blackmere,” Sir Maximilian frowns. “How can you be here?”
“Huh?” The patient turns and Garros immediately dispels the Rainbow Skill.
“My friend,” Garros says to the patient, “we’re done with today’s treatment. You can go.”
The patient turns toward Garros and then Sir Maximilian, shrugging, feeling like this is none of his business, and scrambling to get out.
When the door closes behind Sir Maximilian and Janus, before anything can be said, a door of darkness opens through the wall of the room and a smiling Jacob Cloud enters with raised hands.
“You’ve caught me, it appears.”
The Knight Commander rubs a hand over his face, looking around the room, taking a seat and gesturing with his hand.
“Explain.”
“And that’s how we did it.”
Sir Maximilian is in awe of the sheer guts on Jacob Cloud to pull off such a plan.
One of the Dark Champions has a Rainbow Skill that allows them to move people from everywhere they have memorized up to four places. Sadly, even the Rainbow Skill is subject to the rules of the Dungeon, so they can’t move people safely outside.
Instead, what Jacob Cloud has been doing is…
“You had your people take training breaks so that he could come and heal everybody,” Sir Maximilian frowns. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Oh,” Jacob smiles with a pained expression. “I knew it was just a matter of time before you found out. I feared that if I told you when you were trying to relegate me to the sidelines, you would have forced us to use the Dark Door only to move people in and out of the Dungeon. And if you did, I would have had to kill you, sir.”
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“How dare you say something like that?!” Janus screams at Jacob. “Do you know the grade of insubordination—“
“Oh,” Jacob says, raising a hand. “I just needed some time to show that I’m not an incompetent brat like you think. So, I made sure to engage in a few ventures that would benefit everybody. But I was never going to let people die. I would much rather let every single Knight and Adventurer die than innocents. That’s what people from the Academy should do. And I will fight both of you right now if you put civilian lives behind the operation itself since the operation, all that being a Knight is, is protecting those who cannot protect themselves and fighting injustice.”
“And you would mark yourself with treason, killing a superior, and going against everything and everybody for this?” Janus asks between his teeth. “You don’t think we want to save people? But you’re ready to go to war with the Academy over a few thousand lives when this Skill could have been put to much better use?!”
“Maybe with time I’ve grown very bloodthirsty, I suppose,” Jacob Cloud says, with the Champions and the Dark Champions slowly coming out of the Dark Door one by one. “But I would go to war, sir, for just one civilian life. And if you want to die here, being an Imperium Rank in front of around twenty-something Rainbow Skills means pretty much nothing.”
Janus looks horrified by this. He has never once in his life met someone crazy enough to actually prove they would go through something like this.
What Jacob Cloud just threatened them with would put him against every single Knight in the world. Killing a Knight, a Knight Commander at that, in the middle of an operation like this, even if he survived to tell it, would put an enormous target on Jacob and his allies’ backs. He would become public enemy number one until his inevitable execution once they caught him.
To be so unruly, to essentially only follow the orders of Sir Maximilian in theory and not in practice—Jacob Cloud has actually already done enough to put a normal person on the gallows.
Janus slowly turns to Sir Maximilian while summoning his sword, ready to fight to the death. He expects the Knight Commander to be furious, but when he catches his face with the corner of his eye, he remains stunned.
The Knight Commander is smiling.
“I understand now why the Headmaster favors you, Cloud. Now it all makes sense. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who is crazier than the Headmaster himself, more inflexible, and can probably pull it off.”
Sir Maximilian shakes his head.
“Explain your reasoning to me now.”
“You mean why I did this? I’ve said already, the civilians—“
“Yes, but why did you organize them like this? Convenience?”
“Oh,” Jacob nods, “I see now what you mean. The mithril disease is actually much less scary than one might think if you can just cure it by swinging Garros’s Rainbow Skill at it. It always affects the weakest. It’s simple-minded like that. So, if we just pool the sick people in the same district and keep healing them every night, the mithril disease just reinfects them in an endless cycle. This means that there won’t be any new infected, allowing us to avoid deaths. If the mithril disease spread to different people, we would have to hunt them down all over the city. Instead…”
Three people suddenly come out of a different dark door.
Sir Maximilian doesn’t recognize them at first, then Jacob Cloud snaps his fingers and their disguises drop.
“Thalric Ashenvale and Lyssaena Ashenmere,” Sir Maximilian says with a frown.
“Yeah, they’re too weak to help with the Dungeon,” Jacob says. “But they’re my students now. So, I have them scout the entire city every day just to make sure nobody gets sick. With their noble status, people trust them, tell them everything, and help them out too. That’s how we made this hospital. As of now, nobody’s dying of mithril disease anymore. And it has been like this since Garros showed himself able to cure this sickness.”
“You used the door to move him around so that no civilians would die,” Sir Maximilian says with a tone that fails to hide his admiration.
If the Knight Commander has to be honest about how things have been going down up to this point, he feels like he has been outsmarted by the Cultist at every twist and turn.
The only person involved in the Dungeon who has shown himself above the petty squabbles of power, fully focused on fighting the Dungeon and saving the citizens’ lives without fail…
“Let’s go back to the Ashenvale estate, Cloud. We have to talk.”
“Of course, sir,” Jacob says. “And we have made a few discoveries.”
Sir Maximilian is back with Jacob Cloud in the war room. It’s only the two of them right now.
“An underground… underground?” Sir Maximilian frowns at the definition.
“There’s a second set of rooms below the main ones. It’s because the Legendary Miner, Rafnov, cursed the Primordial Gods. Now, when they spawn Primordial Dungeons, there’s a Rafnov’s Bounty in each, that converts half of the power of the Dungeon into resources that we could use to grow stronger as we keep fighting.”
“That is great news if true,” Sir Maximilian says, putting both hands on the desk and rising from his chair.
“They were supposed to be isolated and devoid of monsters,” Jacob says.
“Supposed to?” Sir Maximilian immediately catches on.
“We went down and found in the very first one a patrol of ten Nightmare Lancers of Apocalypse, eight Nightmare Archers, and sixteen Nightmare Soldiers.”
Sir Maximilian frowns at that.
“How is that possible? The Primordial Dungeons only gather so many monsters before the Core. How could there be so many?”
“No idea, sir. But if the Juggernaut is any indication, this Primordial Dungeon seems to be swelling with monsters right and left,” Jacob says. “And I wouldn’t count on such a patrol to be the smallest we’d find. By far.”
Sir Maximilian doesn’t know what to say.
“We don’t have the men. One Lancer is enough to threaten an Advanced True Diamond Rank. I would say that, roughly, if one Advanced True Diamond Rank fighter met twenty different Lancers in a one to one fight, they would die to one of these encounters. These are hard-to-predict monsters. I will never understand why.”
“About that,” Jacob clears his voice. “I do have an answer, sir.”
Sir Maximilian raises his eyes to meet the deep blue irises of the young man.
Jacob doesn’t like what he’s about to tell the man. But, with Sir Maximilian being a veteran of seven Primordial Dungeons and the Knight Commander, he doesn’t think it’s good to keep it hidden from him.
When he first used the Primordial Grimoire on one of those creatures, it has been very, very hard to keep his cool. But it has definitely confirmed that having Garros save civilians has been a great idea, and not just because of piety.
“The reason why the monsters are so hard to predict is that they contain souls. Monsters, as we know them, as Asmodeus’s creatures, and even the God of Shadows’ creations, the Undead, are soulless monsters. They can acquire sentience. But not a soul.”
“The Cult of Apocalypse grew souls?” Sir Maximilian asks, confused. “How?”
“They didn’t grow them,” Jacob says with a defeated tone that alerts Sir Maximilian. “They stole them. They’re made with the souls of the ones killed by the Cult.”
That is a piece of information Jacob could have honestly lived without. Knowing that the Cult snatches the souls of the dead in order to twist them, damn them, and turn them into those flesh-eating, mindless creatures is something that would make even the strongest stomach churn.
“They’re… souls of… people?” Sir Maximilian struggles to comprehend.
“The Cult is able to, through the power of their Primordial God, extract souls from those the Nightmares kill. Every single Nightmare is a person that was killed and their soul captured and twisted into an abomination that can repeat this process.”
“I always knew they were disgusting bastards, heartless pieces of shit,” Sir Maximilian, in a way that doesn’t sound like him at all, swears. “But this? They’re taking souls?”
“If I had to venture a guess,” Jacob says. “Even though I can’t know for sure without looking at the Dungeon Core of the Original Primordial Dungeon, they can probably transport such a core, implant it somewhere, and use some artefact or device to pour the souls of the men and women they harvested through the Nightmares or personally. Now, it makes so much more sense why they would want the Minor Nightmare of Apocalypse to consume Thalric and Helena Ashenvale, Lady Ashenvale’s children. It is some kind of messed-up ritual to turn the Nightmare into an even stronger monster to harvest more souls.”
“So, are you saying, while there should be a finite amount of monsters in the Dungeon… they have, what, seeded with however many souls they gathered before this operation?”
“Yeah,” Jacob nods. “And they intended to kill hundreds of thousands in Ashenmere, create more Nightmares—outside of the Dungeon this time. Oh, right — the Nightmares inside the Dungeon can only exit if we all die.”
Sir Maximilian’s eyes go wide.
“They could all come out?”
“If we all die, yes. That’s a hidden Dungeon condition, apparently.”
“How do you know all of this?” Sir Maximilian asks.
“Rainbow Skill,” Jacob replies without hesitation. It’s not the moment to withhold things. “And one more thing: I am pretty certain that they fully believe that they can still do it. I should not have this knowledge, sir. So, they can probably swarm all our fighters now. Nightmares can’t stay together too long when there’s not enough Mana in the air. But they can be redirected to hunt teams down. Oh, and in Rafnov’s Bounty territory, Nightmares have much more Mana available to them. So, there could be big groups there that can just stay together indefinitely. And if we don’t get to Rafnov’s Bounty ourselves without getting everybody killed, we don’t have a chance.”
Sir Maximilian has heard enough.
“Cloud, you clearly are much better suited than me at leading this operation,” he says. “You’ll make decisions from now on. I will still review them, but you have proven me wrong enough. It’s time for a change.”
Lady Kisanna Ashenvale, working with some of the Dungeon Core’s functions, is arranging for the ruins to be swarming with Nightmares the moment the teams go back to them. It doesn’t matter whether they have had few deaths so far — with enough people dying at once, they’ll start panicking. The stronger the Dungeon gets, the more people the mithril disease will affect. It won’t matter whether they have a way to heal some of them. With thousands of True Diamond Rank souls in their hands, Lyra, the Original Primordial Dungeon, will infect tens of thousands at once.
“They’re about to fall into my trap,” she cackles. “It doesn’t matter who healed the mithril disease. They won’t be able to heal back from death.”