Chapter 17: seriously, im not in the mood for a cute one-liner. Im serious.
Lower Wind Month, 21st Day, 600 AGG
Draudillon didn't know how long she sat inside the bloody slaughterhouse.
'What were their last moments like?' she wondered before shoving the thought out of her head. It was a question she didn't really want to know the answer to. 'I should get up.'
She didn't.
'Why am I even here?' Draudillon brought her forehead to her knees and curled up into a ball. 'What did I think I was going to achieve by seeing this for myself?'
Because she was responsible. Her fault. All of it, her fault. Every piece of flesh, every drop of blood, every scrap of skin that passed through this hellscape may as well have been torn, spilled, and ripped off by her own hands.
'Uncle was right,' it would've been better for her to annihilate their souls to fuel a spell that would kill every single one of the beastmen fuckers. 'Any death is preferable to being cut apart like cattle.'
She had grown soft, and this was the result. And now, there was nothing she could do to change it. Even Yuriko would be unable to resurrect this many people without any references to gather their identity from. Many of them likely lacked the requisite life-force as well.
Some things were forever.
The Gatekeeper re-entered and looked at her with its blank, eyeless gaze of fire. Draudillon found it supremely ironic. Here she was, commanding beings that ought to judge the sinful when she herself was chief among sinners by virtue of her incompetence.
She squirmed as the Gatekeeper gently picked her off the ground and carried her out the door, out of a smaller hell, and into a larger one. How many abattoirs dedicated to the processing of her people had stood in Caldevera before they came?
The summoned angel floated towards one of the couple warehouses in the city and set her on the ground as it opened the door.
"Draudillon!" Yuriko ran towards her, eyes filled with worry. "You-You're all covered in blood! Are you okay?! You were g-gone for so long, so I got worried—!"
"It's not mine," she numbly responded, walking past the angel and towards the cowering crowd of beastmen. She stopped a few meters in front of them and appraised the demihumans with a hate-filled glare. "You didn't kill them?"
"I," Yuriko swallowed heavily. "They have families a-and stuff. Like a lot of them have kids they needed to support, and this was the only job they could get. And all of th-them already surrendered—"
"The people they killed had families too," Draudillon frostily replied in a voice that heated up as she continued. "The people they killed had children too. Where was the mercy for my people when they surrendered and begged for their lives? They've lost their loved ones, their homes, their dignity. Would you deny them their justice as well?!"
"I…" Yuriko lowered her head in shame.
"I'll do it myself. You don't have to watch," Draudillon's eyes and voice softened just the slightest amount. "This wasn't something I should have dragged you into in the first place."
'Need to go back and grab a knife or something,' she thought detachedly.
"No," the angel raised her head, an anguished but shakily determined expression on her face. "I, I'll do it. You didn't drag me into this. It's my fault that this happened for so long, s-so I should take responsibility."
Yuriko walked to Draudillon's side—her gait like one destined for the gallows rather than of the one doing the executing—and raised her hand towards them, palm facing the ground.
"W-W-Wait! Please d-don't!" the beastmen began begging, some bringing up their families, others pleading how they were just trying to make a living, and yet others incoherently breaking down. "We—We'll do anything y-you want us to!"
"No, no. Fuck this," the dragon queen's body tensed as a beastmen with the appearance of a wolf attempted to get up all while snarling at them. "You bitches are gonna—"
"I'm sorry," Yuriko whispered so quietly that Draudillon nearly didn't hear her despite being right by her side. "『Widen Magic - Fire Storm』."
Columns of divine fire streaked through the roof up towards the heavens and engulfed the group, their howls and screams of torment drowned out by the roaring of the resplendent flames.
When the inferno flickered out, there was nothing left but piles of ashes laying on the warehouse floor, blown around by the wind coming from the scorched holes in the ceiling. Yuriko snapped her head away, a haunted look in her eyes, and immediately began heading elsewhere.
"Wait—" Draudillon made to follow her before the angel cut her off. "I… I just need some time, alright?"
Yuriko halted in her steps and replied in an unsteady voice. "Everything's fine. I'm not mad at you or anything. I just—just give me some time to think about stuff."
"I'm so sorry," Draudillon could feel her eyes grow wet. Gods, what had she done? Did she really sacrifice their friendship for something as ephemeral as vengeance? Despite Yuriko saying otherwise, she couldn't help but fear.
"You don't have anything to apologize for," the angel's wings unfurled from nothingness and flapped experimentally a few times before she took to the air. "I'll be back."
Draudillon helplessly watched as the angel disappeared into the distance, the buildings welcoming her into the city's embrace.
"L-Lady!" a small group of curious residents that must have wandered out of wherever Yuriko had initially put them ran up to her, eyes shooting wide at the sight of her blood-covered appearance. They didn't seem to recognize her true appearance. "Have—Have the beastmen… have they truly been driven off?"
Draudillon looked at the piles of powdery residue with a heart-aching regret. "They have. You have our word that they will never harm any of you again."
"Gods," one of the men fell to his knees, hands clasped together in gratitude as he wept. "A-A miracle! This must be a miracle from the gods and Her Majesty!"
Draudillon forced a smile onto her face. For now, she needed to be happy for her people.
Happy. She could do that. It was what she wanted all this time, wasn't it?
Then why did the word taste like ashes in her mouth?
Hours.
Draudillon felt like she had been standing in the charred warehouse for hours. The people just kept on trickling in, and with each person that entered, the deeper the nausea in her stomach burrowed.
She suddenly felt like she shouldn't be there, shouldn't be there receiving her people's gratitude when she did nothing to earn it, shouldn't be standing next to a pile of ashes that she forced the person she cherished to create.
"I need to go," she announced over the din of scattered conversations. "Th-There's things I have to handle."
The group parted for her, whispered words of undeserved thanks stabbing into her ears. Draudillon quietly slipped away and turned to the Cherubim Gatekeeper that was still following her. Having it nearby calmed her down. If it was still willing to stay near her then maybe Yuriko didn't hate her.
"Could you…" she swallowed the lump in her throat. "Could you take me to her? Please."
To her relief, the angel picked her up without a moment's hesitation and flew in the general direction where Draudillon had seen the angel vanish.
People were beginning to cautiously leave the facilities where they were being held, gawking at the sheer number of angels flitting about. The sight brought a small smile to Draudillon's lips; now she could only hope that they might find the strength to put their shattered lives back together.
Maybe she would be able to fix what she broke too.
The Gatekeeper gently deposited her on the ground before the ramshackle door of a rundown house on the outskirts of the city. Draudillon vaguely remembered this area being part of the slums. It seemed that the beastmen hadn't gotten around to repurposing it.
'I should look into passing new building codes and reforms after all of this,' she tried to distract her attention from what she needed to do as her hand hovered in front of the door. Draudillon shook her head and lambasted herself for her own hesitance. 'Gods, just go in, you fool!'
She opened the door.
Yuriko was sitting on the dusty floor, facing a cold and dilapidated fireplace, her pale halo the only source of light in the room. Draudillon stepped towards her, her footsteps slow and unsure.
"Thanks for coming to find me," the angel muttered as she took a seat on the ground next to her. "I thought… I thought being alone would help, but it just made things feel worse."
"I shouldn't have forced you into that position," a pang of pain wracked Draudillon's chest at the despondent look on Yuriko's face. "It—It was wrong."
"Not your fault. I killed them," Yuriko turned her head side to side before retching. "They begged me for mercy, and I killed them. G-God, they were just, just civilians."
"I'm sorry," Draudillon whispered. She didn't know what else to say. "I used you like a tool. I shouldn't have done that."
"No," the angel shook her head. "I knew what I was getting into. I chose this. This—all of this—it's my fault. If only I did something sooner—"
"I told you before," Draudillon laid a cautious hand on Yuriko's knee. The angel made no move to stop her. "None of it is. I'm the one responsible for my people. I'm the one responsible for letting all the horrible things we saw today happen.
"I," the dragon queen gulped as she continued. "I lost myself back there. I'm sorry."
"I don't know if there's a person who wouldn't have," Yuriko tried to smile. "I-I—God, what h-have I done?"
She broke down sobbing. Draudillon fiercely enveloped her in a tight hug. The angel hugged back, her arms clinging to her like a drowning man to dry land.
"S-S-Sorry," she wept into Draudillon's clothes. "U-Ugh, I'm—so weak. This sh-should be easy, but I just—I just can't."
Draudillon ran her hands through Yuriko's hair and murmured into her ears. "You're not weak. You're not."
"I," Yuriko started dry heaving again. "I can st-still smell them burning. Does this—any of this ever get easier?"
Draudillon thought about how she assigned countless adventurers to quests that could result in nothing but certain death.
She thought about how thousands—tens of thousands—of soldiers pledged to her had died in vain in defense of Almersia and Caldevera and countless unnamed villages, their bodies desecrated under the maws of their despoilers.
She thought about how she couldn't do anything for her people already slaughtered and eaten, their remnants tossed away into vats of refuse.
"Pray that it doesn't," her voice cracked as tears ran down her cheeks.
"Pray that it doesn't."
"How odd," Fluder pondered. "The concentration of undead is surprisingly lower than I thought it would be."
"Weird," Evileye frowned. "Is it really? Feels like a fuck-ton to me."
"The ones you've initially dealt with were likely summons rather than naturally spawned undead," Fluder theorized even while he casually blew apart a group of zombies. "『Fireball』. How very, very strange."
"Hm," the vampire spellcaster felt a wave of unease at the Court Wizard's tone. "Good for us, I guess."
"We're getting close!" Lakyus shouted from the front. "Keep your eyes open! That Elder Lich might've left us some nasty surprises."
"Elder Lich?" Fluder muttered to himself. "To draw this much attention to themselves… what were they trying to accomplish? The amount of miasma present is miniscule when keeping in mind the scale of the disaster here."
"Don't think too hard about it," Evileye replied in a hard voice. "Undead are fundamentally different beings from us. People who can understand them aren't right in the head."
"Spellcasters like us are a step above normal people, no?" Fluder raised an eyebrow. "『Protection from Arrows』." A hail of decrepit arrows bounced off Lakyus. "It is our duty to understand the arcane mysteries others cannot."
"Some things shouldn't be understood," an entire kingdom, reduced to hordes of shambling corpses. "Too much thinking about the 'can' and not the 'should.'"
"We live in a world hostile to humans, Lady Evileye," Fluder's eyes gleamed with some indescribable emotion. "Our enemies have no compunctions, so why should we?"
"..." Evileye didn't deign to respond to that. It was an argument she'd heard countless times from when she wandered away from Inveria, from her time with the heroes who confronted the Demon Gods, and even from her journeys as part of Blue Roses. Some people simply couldn't be persuaded because in the end, were they really wrong?
The world was a brutal place, especially for naturally weak species like humans. Faced with that sort of obstacle, it was only natural that people would walk even the most depraved paths for the power to uphold righteous causes.
But where did one draw the line? Evileye didn't want to find out. It was a question that could lead to the destruction of entire nations.
'He's here to figure out the process behind whatever ritual caused this,' the realization washed over Evileye like an ice-cold bucket of water—cold resistance aside. 'How the fuck do we deal with this?'
Fighting him in a straight up fight would be… doable but getting rid of him was a non-option, at least if they didn't want to become fugitives. Maybe they could tell the Bloody Emperor? It was a choice with dubious chances of success; the Emperor wasn't going to believe them over the man who served his family for generations.
'This is the worst possible outcome,' Evileye felt like a sickening taint was eating away at her unbeating heart. Here was a problem she could do nothing about, at least not without putting the lives of her comrades at risk. 'This bastard is going to get what he wants, and we can't do a single thing about it.'
"We're here," Lakyus stopped before the shattered gates of the cemetery. The graveyard had a bewilderingly anemic amount of undead. "Looks like most of them had spread out over the city." the templar-priestess didn't let down her guard. "Better safe than sorry though. Evileye, buffs?"
"On it," Evileye casted『Resist Energy - Fire』, 『Protection from Evil』, and 『Mage Armor』on the two frontliners, then 『Cat's Grace』on Tia and Tina. "Alright, let's go."
"Allow me to assist as well," Fluder waved his staff. "『Stoneskin』,『Stoneskin』, 『Fire Shield』, 『Mass Bear's Endurance』."
'Show off,' Evileye resisted the urge to snort. At least this meant Fluder wasn't planning on stabbing them in the back if he had decided to expend this much mana on buffing them.
"Where the hell are all the undead?" Gagaran scowled uneasily as she pulverized the skull of a skeleton with an easy swing of Fel Iron. "Thought there'd be more at the damn source, y'know?"
"Incredible," Fluder whispered with a disturbing amount of awe. "The crypts… We must go to the crypts!"
"We can do that after we get the enchantments set—Hey!" Lakyus shouted at the excited archmage who dived into the depths of the crypts. "Shit, I knew he was going to do this!"
"Forget it," Evileye shook her head with a heart filled with heavy acceptance. "Let's just get this over with. You start setting up the 『Hallow』. We'll set up camp and keep an eye out for anything suspicious."
"Got it," Lakyus sighed after taking one last worried look in the direction Fluder had vanished. "Evileye, Gagaran, Tia, Tina. Take shifts and don't overwork yourselves. Don't bother trying to contact him, Evileye. I doubt he'll respond."
"Wasn't planning on it," Evileye raised her hands. "『Twin Magic - Crystal Wall』, 『Crystal Wall』."
Three jagged, crystalline walls shot out of the ground, forming a triangular enclosure around the group. With this, most basic undead should be kept at bay without additional effort on their parts.
"We're getting paid back for the stuff you need to cast the enchantment, right Lakyus?" Gagaran asked the templar-priestess who was busy organizing the reagents needed for the spell. "Those materials don't look cheap."
"It's not," Lakyus agreed, absorbed in her task as she was. "And don't worry; I already charged the Adventurer's Guild for all the stuff we needed."
"As expected—"
"—Of the evil boss," Tia and Tina carefully watched the skies. They hadn't encountered any flying undead yet, but it was a case where energy wasted on caution was well worth the alternative of getting swarmed from the skies.
"Hey, that makes me sound like some sort of miser," Lakyus pouted as she finally finished all the preliminary set up and got into a comfortable position. "Okay, I'll be at this for a day then. You guys be careful."
"Leave it to us," Gagaran began to unpack their camping supplies. "Reminds me of that time we had to spend the night in those ruins."
"I hated it," Evileye immediately responded. "Stunk worse than the sewers under—"
'Inveria.'
"Shorty?"
"Point is, it sucked." Why did she have to think of the fallen kingdom now? That bastard Fluder really brought out some unpleasant memories, huh? "Place brings up shitty memories."
"Tell me about it," Gagaran finished setting up a tent. "Camping here just feels messed up."
Tia and Tina jolted and looked towards the direction of the catacombs. "He's coming back."
"That was fast," Evileye commented in a casual voice even as she tensed up, prepared to cast a myriad of offensive and defensive formations. "Guess he isn't the Imperial Court Wizard for nothing."
"It is good to see that all of you are safe," Fluder floated from above and into the midst of their little encampment. "There were some rather interesting residues left behind, but nothing traceable."
'Shit, can't tell if he's hiding anything,' the old man looked genuinely upset. 'What did he find in there?'
"So what did you find?" Evileye asked in as informal a manner as she could muster. "Unholy artifacts? A secret dungeon? An army of undead stored underground for another wave?"
"There were remnants of what I presumed to be Zurrernorn cultists," Fluder replied with a thoughtful expression. "The bodies were rotted away by negative energy, so I assume they must have failed in what they were attempting…"
Evileye kept quiet about the insane woman and Elder Lich they encountered a week earlier.
"What about that Elder Lich we ran into then?"
'Gods fucking dammit, Gagaran.'
"Elder Lich…?" Fluder seemed to be slowly coming to a realization. "No, wait… Of course. Of course! Fuhahaha!"
All of Blue Roses—except Lakyus, who was engrossed in her ritual—uneasily looked at the overwrought archmage. None of them but Evileye had an inkling of an idea why.
"I must thank all of you," the Imperial Court Wizard bowed to them and took out a black-bead necklace that he carefully laid on the ground. "That's a Force Necklace. You can throw a bead to detonate and entrap the area where it landed. My gift to all of you for assisting with the Empire's investigation."
"Uh, thanks?" Gagaran looked at the wizened old man in confusion. "Wait, so you're just going to leave now?"
"Do the rest of you truly need my aid?" Fluder chuckled as he floated back into the air. "I will be overseeing the Empire's operations and informing the Emperor of new… developments. Until then, may all of you stay in good health." With those parting words, the Tri-Arts Caster flew off into the distance.
"Weird," Gagaran shook her head. "I guess the necklace is cool at least." The muscular warrior picked up the necklace and dangled it in front of Evileye. "What do you think, Shorty?"
Evileye was still blankly staring in the direction where the madman had vanished, her mind racing with horrid possibilities.
"Evileye—" Gagaran's lips curved downwards with concern as she tapped the top of the vampire's head.
"—What's wrong?" Tina nudged the stock-still vampire. "You've been staring—"
"—At the old man the whole time," Tia had a sheen of worry and curiosity in her eyes.
"A long time ago," Evileye suddenly spoke up and everyone except Lakyus straightened up, knowing that something of import was about to be discussed. "There was a human kingdom. And one day, I—someone cast one ritual or another and turned everyone in that kingdom into an undead."
"Okay, so that's pretty similar to what happened here?" Gagaran frowned. "I'm guessing there's more."
The vampire nodded. "All of that negative energy was dumped into one person and turned that person into an undead. A being free from the limitations of ordinary mortals.
She stared at her fractured reflection in the crystalline walls. "What if… What if what happened here was a recreation of that? And that Elder Lich we saw…"
"You're not saying…" Gagaran slapped a gauntleted hand to her face. "Shit. You are."
"So Fluder—"
"—Knows that now?"
"There's no way he's going to do something like that, right?" Gagaran worriedly asked Evileye. "I mean, he's the Imperial Court Wizard! He can't just run around kidnapping a city's worth of people and then—sacrifice them!"
"He probably could," Evileye shrugged with a nonchalance she didn't feel and continued as a hint of dread crept into her voice.
"But who said they had to be human?"