DEMON CORE : [A demon-king dungeon-core litRPG]

Chapter 3: Chapter 3: A rising tide comes to wash away all evil

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Chapter 2: Chapter 2: THE DEMON-SICKNESS

Chapter 4: Chapter 4: I’m coming back to you, no matter where you hide

Empty head. Full eyes.

Shaushka sits where she always sits, down on the ground in the back alley, just behind the big bakery, across from the park, as she does what she always does — Quietly observe.

It’s not that she can afford to buy anything here at the bakery. To say that she doesn’t have enough money isn’t wrong in and of itself, however it implies that she has any money to begin with. But that’s why she doesn’t go inside of the bakery and bother the people there. Instead, she sits just outside of it, just next to it, in the alley.

Here, she can smell the baking of hot cakes and fresh breads for free, when the baker starts his work so early in the morning. She can immerse herself in it entirely, in the aromas and the warmth of the oven on the other side of the wall, all without ever paying a single coin.

While doing so, however, she doesn’t imagine anything. Her head is simply empty. She doesn’t imagine the delightful image of herself nibbling on a steaming bun or breaking off a crunchy corner of a fluffy pastry, full of sweet fillings, which was left in the oven long enough to get a deep browning on its exterior.

She just smells the smells and looks at the park across the street with eyes that are fuller than her thoughts.

— Shausuka stares blankly towards the distance.

Quietly, motionlessly, strangely perhaps, as she has often been told, she simply sits there on the stones of the ground and gazes towards the sky that sits atop the distant horizon, which she can barely see towards. Her lower lip hangs open somewhat, just barely touching the upper, as she, with wide eyes and an empty head, watches the world.

Ah.

It is different today though.

The baker isn’t baking. There is a smell of burnt things in the air.

The park, once green, is dead and gray and desolate.

The elf blinks, a droplet of water striking the tip of her nose.

Oh.

It looks like it’s going to rain today.

Huh.

She crosses her legs, only one of them covered by her old, torn robe that is essentially missing the whole lower left quarter of itself. It had been torn off a long time ago.

— It is a very soft robe. She likes wearing it. She likes touching it. She likes looking at it.

All of these things are ideal, as it's her only one anyway.

The elf blinks, still gazing vacantly towards the park, over the dead bodies that lay in the middle of the street. Something is different today.

The rain, beginning to fall, rains down on them too.

…Huh…

Empty head. Full eyes.

Shaushka sits there, not really sure why the world is different today.

Is the baker sick?

She hopes not. The baker makes the world smell nice. People like him are important.

A shadow looms over her head.

With full eyes, Shaushka looks up at the thing, the mass, that creeps and crawls down the alleyway that she’s sitting in, having climbed over her head, holding itself aloft between the two walls of the houses on either side.

Ten-thousand hands, dripping with blood and rot, hang suspended above her head, wiggling and rustling like a disturbed nest of hissing spiders.

Shaushka slowly blinks.

The horrific entity, observing her for a moment, then simply creeps and crawls onward, ignoring her entirely as it moves out into the street, covering and coating the hundreds of dead corpses. It steals their fingers, leaving most of the rest of the carcasses behind as it travels through the carnage, growing larger and larger with every passing moment.

“…Huh…”

Shauska watches it vanish down the way, fresh screams filling the air.

Her eyes, full, her head, empty, return back to the sight of the park down across the street.

It looks different today, doesn’t it?

Shaushka, her mouth open just a tiny sliver, stares and waits for the baker to show up today.

But he never comes.

Eyes full. Head empty.

As for the sides of the room, on either side of this path…

“…Did I make this?” asks a voice from behind himself as Swain steps inside, examining the throne-room.

Both sides of the room, separate from the main path, are entirely covered in statues that meld down into the floor. Near the entrance, their screaming heads, their kicking legs, their writhing torsos are submerged, as if they were ripping themselves out of a body of water. The further that one goes into the room towards the throne, the higher the statues that make up every bit of terrain appear to have managed to pull themselves out of the floor. All of them claw and tear towards the focal point of the room.

The humans will be here soon.

The terror that he summoned will keep them busy for a while. But he doesn’t have that many soul-points, the primary resource for his magical casting, left, and with him almost defenseless like this, when they get here, the strong ones who survived the initial surge of his power, the game will be over before it even starts.

“Imagination is a powerful thing,” replies Swain, looking at the dancer as he sits down on the throne and stares around at the harrowed stone faces, which scramble and claw his way with expressions of fear, hunger and longing desire in their eyes. “- Cartouche.”

“Did you mean it?” she asks, stepping forward towards him. The dozens of eyes on his body shift her way, looking at her. “What you told me? Is it really something that’s…” She looks down at her hands, pulling her fingers inward as if she were holding something in them. The mouths on the side of the demon-king’s body open themselves.

“- I don’t lie,” states the demon-king. Cartouche looks back up towards him, staring at his hands that tensely grip the edge of the throne, crumbling off a piece of the stonework. “Lies are an ugly thing.”

She looks at him quietly and then nods.

Swain exhales, sitting back down. The eyes on his body all lose their tense glares and begin drifting around the room again. The humans will be here in an hour, maybe. They need to buy some more time.

It’s an odd thought, isn’t it? ‘The humans’?

It wasn’t that long ago, minutes, that he himself was one and yet, somehow… everything has changed so quickly. His mind, his body, his demeanor. Everything from the first breath of his longing heart to the last whisper of desire in his essence have led to something entirely new.

The demon-king’s eyes rise back up towards the dancer, wearing the scraps of her half-burnt clothes, standing before his throne. She blinks, feeling herself being stared at and then looks around the empty throne-room to see if she’s the thing being watched. Observing her, Swain gets his idea for their survival.

“Dance a little more, would you?” asks the demon-king, resting his head on his elbow to watch her.

She nods. “Uh, I mean, sure,” she says, raising her arms to stretch herself out. “It’d be easier if I had music. But I’m a professional,” states Cartouche.

Swain’s gaze drifts to the side. He uses one of his free ability points. He has a lot of those to spend, but now isn’t the time to sit here and browse through his ten thousand potential choices for new abilities.

The game being played, the beauty of the art of this new complot, it takes priority.

Swain reaches into one of the mouths on his body, pulling out a series of wiggling, wormy essences that had once belonged to people of a familiar disposition as himself — Musicians.

The souls drift down towards the floor, oozing out of his hands like a piece of half-digested meat, dripping with bile, as they splash against the cold stones.

A moment later, they pull themselves together into an amalgamation of cool, sickly blue-tinged shapes that resembles a group of four people, carrying instruments.

Swain rests his head back idly on his hand, leaning against the throne, as the musicians start to play and as the dancer starts to dance, beginning the second act of today’s play.

The dungeon rumbles, the ground quaking violently and as it does so, the shaking of his many eyes makes it look like the statues that fill the room join in on the haunting waltz.

Being quick thinkers that they are, some of the mid-level adventurers had made a magical barrier of sorts to keep a few people safe from the corrupting spell.

Ruhr looks down at the mug she was drinking from. The contents have evaporated, leaving only hot metal behind. She looks at the container curiously. It reminds her of a mimic that she had once seen in a dungeon, pretending to be an old water bottle.

The demon-king…

She looks back up towards the group of panicked low-level adventurers, standing inside of the small, magical shield that a couple of mid-level priests are holding together by the skin of their teeth. But they’re almost out of soul-points.

That’s the difference between mid and high-level adventurers. A mid-level adventurer has the reaction times to keep themselves and those around them alive in rapidly changing situations.

A high-level adventurer knows that just because you can, that it doesn't necessarily have a point.

She sets the mug down, walking away as the shield begins to flicker, the priests running out of magic. The people inside of it beg desperately them to keep it up.

She supposes that they haven’t realized there’s a protective spell around the city now.

Ruhr closes the door behind herself as she leaves the adventurer’s guild and looks around the city.

— Guardsmen are already at work, carrying the dead to the sides of the road, in order to clear the ways. Fires rage, gnawing through hundreds of houses, born from unattended stoves and the heating effects of the demon-king’s magic around sensitive alchemical materials.

A group of soldiers run past her, down the way she wants to go, pulling a cart full of water behind them to try and control some of the flames.

One of them sees her, stopping. “Ruhr!” says the man, pulling his colleague on the shoulder. “Look!” he says excitedly, the other man looking over in confused annoyance until he also recognizes her.

Ruhr sighs, her head drooping. Being a high-level adventurer is one thing. But ranking up at the guild to a very prominent rank, such as she has, comes with a sort of pseduo-celebrity status that is more annoying than helpful, unless you’re looking for a house to buy in an exclusive neighborhood.

The woman lifts a leg, planting her boot on a small crate outside of the guild and points at herself with her thumb. “That’s Ruhr, the river-sorceress!” she barks, somewhat theatrically, while looking at them. Nobody ever gets that right. Titles are important. She needs to establish a brand if she's going to get a new rank any time soon.

“Please! Help us get these fires under c-”

Ruhr holds her left palm open, running the fingers of her other hand over it as if she were flicking off a few droplets of water.

Ruhr stands there, smiling a proud smile as she watches the water die down, together with the hundred flames that had lined the street.

Sure, the street is mostly gone too, all of the stormwater drains blocked by debris and corpses, but the fires are out.

“There’s no need to thank me,” says Ruhr, swiping a strand of her azure blue hair out of her face. She looks smugly down towards the fearful guardsmen, who have perhaps gotten more than they were expecting. “All in a day’s work for RUHR!” She points to herself, holding her head high to look towards the sky. “THE RIVER-SOR-”

- Ruhr stops, opening her eyes and staring at the dark cloud above their heads.

It skitters.

A mass hangs there, looking at them, twitching, squirming. A mass of squirming hands and fingers, all crawling and reaching in excitement — in greedy hunger.

The monster, the… thing, looming above the three of them falls down.

A serpent made entirely out of wild, raging water sprouts out of her arm and sinks its teeth back into herself, throwing her far away, causing her to gracelessly tumble and roll down the wet, destroyed road and out of the monster's reach.

Ruhr, coming to a stop at the end of the street, watches in disgusted horror as the two guards vanish into the mass, their bodies held against it as thousands of fingers reach into their ears and open, screaming mouths, pulling them back against the horrific body, as it rips off their hands. Like an octopus, eating its struggling prey alive, piece by piece.

It takes their hands and their heads and leaves the bodies behind, before then working its way down the street towards her, consuming and gorging itself full on corpses. Hands skitter and break open doors and windows as it eats any survivors in the area.

Screams come from inside of the adventurer’s guild.

Ruhr rises to her feet.

More high-level guardsmen and adventurers make their way forward towards her, running in from the distant cathedral square.

She looks around herself at the others here, before turning back to the monster that now has them in focus.

She’s been working her whole life in order to buy a nice house in this city so that she can retire and now… The woman tsks, grabbing the collar of the royal-guardsman next to her. “You. You’re with me now. Get your men.”

“H- huh?” asks the man.

She doesn’t have the rank or station to ask, let alone demand anything like this. Even as a high-tier adventurer, she’s clearly below anyone with noble bloodlines on the societal ladder.

The monstrosity, having finished gorging itself on what it could reach back there, tumbles and rolls and skitters towards them.

Ruhr looks at him with an annoyed side-glance. “We’re going to kill the demon-king.”

She pushes him away and then turns around to walk away, leaving the soldiers and others here to deal with this particular problem present here.

After a moment of confused yelling, many heavy boots run after her, unable to decide which place is perhaps worse for them to be.

Swain rises to his feet, clapping as he walks down the steps of the throne. It’s time to make some more concrete preparations.

Cartouche flourishes, lowering herself in a half bow, with her hands at her sides. The ghosts quiver, their spiritual bodies rippling like disturbed water as he walks past them.

“An excellent performance,” says the demon-king, walking to the door of the throne-room. The eyes on his body look her way. In a way, he’s envious of her. Not because of the grace that she possesses that he had never had, but because she, through the medium of dance and development of her personality, was and is able to share her art with the world.

His poetry had always been for himself, always, except for once.

Swain stares out into the emptiness that lies beyond the throne room. Large, grand chambers and complicated, labyrinth-like hallways now span the area from where he is to the top of the dungeon, near the graveyard.

- But that’s okay.

For now, he has so many other things to share with the world.

Using one of his ability-points, he takes a new ability to advance his capacity to summon monsters for the dungeon.

The mouths all around the demon-king's body dribble and then release a spew of spectral ooze out around him, violently vomiting out a mass of souls that all fly, screaming down into the darkness of the dungeon. The souls all collect and press themselves together in predetermined shapes. They take the shapes of slimes, of minotaurs, of dragons, of zombies and skeletons and giant serpents, with teeth the size of men. The souls come together, forming into shambling ghouls and screaming harpies that sit high on the rafters, below the tall ceilings of the dungeon floors. They turn into treasure-chests, lined with fanged teeth and into screaming spirits and into shrieking banshees.

Hundreds of monsters of hundreds of species, all with varying ranks, elements and attributes, rise all around and inside of the dungeon, filling its halls with horrific shrieks, moans and cries.

Swain exhales, his shoulders falling slack, a visible vapor leaving his core mouth as he watches the rooms and corridors of the dungeon come to life with gestalts of living terror.

The demon-king turns around, facing back towards the throne, having two steps left in this plan of his.

Cartouche watches him as he forms the horrific gestalt in the middle of the throne-room.

Perhaps sarcastically, perhaps not, she claps.

The demon-king looks her way and she stops, her hands stuck together in front of herself. Cartouche clears her throat and then holds them behind her back. The dancer turns her head, looking at the monster that he had just summoned, as it approaches the throne by itself.

“Cartouche,” says the demon-king, turning around to leave.

“Huh?” The dancer looks after him, watching him walk off between arching towers of fangs and meat that fill the dungeon. “Oh, right!” She runs after him, the metal of her bangles jingling.

“Tell me about your old life,” says the demon-king, wandering past a massive, rotting corpse of an undead dragon. “Tell me something that I haven’t seen.”

“Huh? My what?” she asks, walking next to him and then slowing down to walk behind him, as if she were unsure of where exactly is proper, or perhaps safe, to stand.

“— I need inspiration,” replies the demon-king, looking down at the palm of his hand as he walks amidst the monsters. A drooling, smiling mouth sits across his palm, like a gash. The eye next to it looks up his way.

Cartouche looks up towards the rotting maw of the dragon and then quickly runs after him, trying to piece her story together in a way that is… presentable.

Shaushka has moved on from behind the bakery.

She supposes the baker isn’t coming today.

Maybe he’s ill?

With wide eyes, she wanders down the road, stopping to look down the way as a series of odd explosions ring out in the distance, down near the main square.

— The wind blows through the street.

A solitary leaf flies past her face and her eyes follow it, her mouth slightly ajar as it carries off into the distance.

Today, her plan will be to follow the leaf. She’s decided.

With full eyes and an empty head, Shaushka wanders down the street, following the leaf as the wind blows it around, back and forth, around many bends, sometimes getting stuck here or there.

When it gets stuck, she kneels down and sits there, watching, waiting.

Then the wind comes again and the leaf moves.

Ah.

Rising back up to her feet, she follows it.

Ruhr leans back against the wall, her chest heaving. It’s focused on her. Gods know why.

She was hoping to just leave and let the others deal with it, so that she could take care of the bigger fish in the pond, but…

— Many broken, crooked fingers quietly creep around the edge of the alleyway, like a curious child, peeking around a corner as it spots them. The bony fingers all tapping excitedly against the wall.

Ruhr grabs the guardsman and the two of them keep running as the monster collects itself back together, thousands of hands and fingers crawling around like a swarm of insects as they reconverge and consume new flesh from the corpses in the rubble.

He stops, seeing that the alley ahead of them has collapsed in on itself, creating a burning dead end.

Ruhr grabs a hold of him from behind. “SHIELD!”

“What?”

“SHIELD!” yells Ruhr at the guardsman, who lifts his shield just as her hand faces down against the ashy stones.

The two of them rise up over the rubble, propelled upwards by a stream of violently surging water, a hissing, screaming entity smashes into the ruins. It reaches up after them as they gracelessly fly over to the other side. The guardsman screams in terror as they awkwardly flail around in mid-air for a moment, before they manage to lower his tower shield down below themselves. They crash down towards the stones below.

Water leaks out of her hands, splashing down below them as a serpent, made entirely out of liquid, spins itself around into a tight coil that they land on top of, sinking down into.

The water vanishes, running off into many storm drains around them and the two of them slowly sink down to the stones of the street.

Ruhr tries to catch her breath, looking back up over her shoulder, watching as the many hands of the demon-king relentlessly crawl up over the edge of the rubble, crawling around the flames, creating a solid mass with many holes inside of itself.

A hand pulls her up, the guardsman tears her to her feet as the two of them keep running towards the cathedral. It's not far from them now. She can already see it. Bodies lie everywhere here. There isn’t one clear patch of road, rather, it’s all meat. Ruhr lifts her scarf up to cover her mouth, hiding her face, as if it were deeply scarred by the fires of this place. But she only does so to keep out the smell of cooked people.

Ashes and fires rage here too, but not on the houses, rather on the mountains of bodies that have already been collected.

They’re burning the dead. But not fast enough. There are still too many corpses laying here. There are hundreds, thousands of them.

Soldiers and priests all line up around the front of the spiring cathedral, already long since in alarm. A man in a long, ornate purple robe stands at their front.

The two of them sprint towards the line, the darkness behind them skittering as dozens of hands lift themselves up into the air ahead of them, glowing with a shine that is distinct from the firelight. All of the high-level priests left outside of the cathedral, the soldiers, the guardsmen and any other adventurers, who had survived, join in on a second collective spell, much like the first that had been used to protect the city.

While the strength of an individual’s magic is certainly a fearful thing in many cases, advanced casting techniques often require combinations of effort. The most advanced of these methods are not combined spells, such as a poison and water caster combining their talents to make a foul tide, but rather, the channeling of powers to one, single, extremely capable individual at the lead. Like the incredible waters of a strong river, flowing through a single funnel, it collects with extreme magical pressure that, while useful, is very damaging to the body that gets overloaded.

Ruhr and the guardsman dive forward as the magic of the casters and all of the others present here moves not into a flurry of individual attack and defensive spells, but instead all flows towards the man at the center, the man in purple, the bishop.

The old man with a face that betrays the truth of his years and experiences, holds his hands in prayer.

Something wet grabs her shoulder from just behind her, another finger touching her ear.

— The world flashes with light.

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Ruhr lands, looking back behind herself. A severed, blackened hand falls down off of her shoulder. Her eyes turn back towards the monster, the thing with too many fingers. Massive magical chains, spanning from the bloodied floors all the way to the dome that now surrounds the city, criss-cross in every odd direction, piercing and wrapping themselves around the monster. This is the effect of the grand spell that had just been cast.

But like it had done with the fires, the horrific creature simply spreads itself thinner, wider. Its many hands skitter between the gaps of the chains that it is too agile and adaptive to be held by, like a swarm of ants, this particular tool isn’t sufficient for the task of constraint.

More chains shoot out of the stones, out of broken windows of houses, out of storm-drains. Anywhere a seal could have been hidden in haste and they all shoot up towards the sky, as if they were massive pillars of an ancient temple, holding the heavens aloft.

Ruhr watches as the monster spreads itself out more and more, crawling towards them as a widened, flattened, entity.

“Ruhr, I believe,” says the man next to her. “The river-wizard?” She looks at the bishop, as the guardsman she had escaped with helps her to her feet.

“- Sorceress,” corrects Ruhr.

“Sorceress,” repeats the bishop. “Would you mind?”

Ruhr looks at him, before turning back to the monster, understanding.

It, the monster, is spread too thin now. The chains were never meant to lock it into place. They were meant to pull it apart, to make it adapt and spread itself out incoherently.

Ruhr plants her feet wide in a stable stance, holding her hands out in front of herself.

“I’m not responsible for any water damage,” she says.

“Noted,” replies the bishop, lowering his hands to press them against her back, the collective magics now flowing through her.

The chains all begin to dissipate, fading away into nothingness.

Her body shakes, the soaked, filthy hat flying off of her head as the ground quakes beneath them and her fingers try to force themselves shut, like the legs of a dying spider.

The world is swallowed by water, cold darkness consumes every flame and smoldering ember and haunted eye.

A few thousand and then some hands are washed away, unable to cling together, they are strewn all around the flood, washing down storm drains, washing into cribs and into fallen heaps of rubble, too far apart to reconnect to what they once were a part of.

Shaushka sits, squatting down with her hands on her knees as she stares at the leaf.

- It got stuck on a house, down in a sheltered ditch.

Blankly, she sits there and looks at it.

It was a nice leaf.

But she supposes that this is simply it. The leaf’s days are over.

Smiling, content, she nods to the leaf.

— The leaf nods back.

Blinking in confusion, the elf rises to her feet and scratches her cheek. It’s best not to worry about such things.

The world grows dark.

She turns her head, looking up towards the sky.

…Ah.

“It’s different…” mutters Shaushka to herself, watching with wide eyes and an empty head, as the waters the size of a mountain crash down towards the city.

There usually isn’t this much water in the sky when it rains.

She tilts her head.

It must be a lot of rain.

The wave crashes down over the city and her.

Ruhr pants, her chest violently heaving as her legs finally give out on her. She’s entirely drained in body and in spirit.

The seals all fade away. The hands all vanish. The water crashes down over what was left of the city, causing untold destruction and death — A price that had to be paid for this result.

All of them stand there in tense silence for a time, waiting for something to happen, as if the dripping of water that rains back down over them, as if the hissing of quenched fires — As if any of these things could whisper them a secret that would allow them to return to the past, which despite the closeness to this moment, feels impossibly distant.

Ruhr rises up to her shaking legs, doing her best to bask in the glow of her new-found success that she is fairly confident that she’s earned. The guardsman from before, who she had escaped with, helps her up again.

“Thanks,” says Ruhr, nodding to him.

“Zacarias,” nods the guardsmen back to her.

People all around them begin to chant. Ruhr smiles a smug smile, hiding any weakness that might be very present in her body, as she lifts a leg to plant a boot firmly on a small crate that had washed over her way from the tide, perfectly towards her. “Thank you!” she says. “This was nothing!” laughs the woman, somewhat theatrically. “— For RUHR! THE RIVER-SORCERESS!”

She laughs as people crowd all around her.

A single piece of paper floats down from the sky, landing at her feet. It looks like a washed out piece of writing, but the ink is illegally smeared now.

The demon-king sits there, his hands folded as he watches so many things happen at once around himself.

A window appears before him, notifying him that the terror he had summoned has been defeated. His eyes all narrow themselves down in annoyance. It had died much faster than he was expecting.

No matter.

The plan is already in motion.

— The ground beneath him shakes. The smell of burnt forest pines is present in the midnight air.

Swain holds his hand out to the side as a ghost that he had summoned flies in, handing him a pen and scorched piece of paper.

Ruhr stands there, downing one of the many dozens of potions she’s been given as she recovers. People are running around, cleaning up the area and doing whatever can be done. But the destruction is so absolute that nobody really knows where to begin.

She sighs in relief, throwing the glass bottle over her shoulder. It strikes against the ground, shattering.

A man clears his voice next to her. Ruhr straightens up, having forgotten the bishop was there. “Sorry,” apologizes Ruhr. “I got lost in the moment.”

The bishop, surrounded now by attendants, looks at her. “Ruhr, the river-sorceress. You know what I have to ask of you now, yes?” he asks. “Your strengths, your presence, these are all signs that you are who we ne-”

Ruhr nods, crossing her arms. “- You want me to kill the demon-king?” she asks, interrupting the bishop. His attendants gasp in shock. A day ago, this would have been enough for her to be dragged away.

“— I want you to kill the demon-king,” repeats the bishop, apparently not too bothered.

She tsks. Not that this wasn’t her plan all along, but now, it’s not something that she wanted to do. It’s something that someone else wanted her to do. There’s an important distinction. Then again, this is her big break. Killing the demon-king is one thing. But killing the demon-king with witnesses?

“Take as many people with you as you need,” says the bishop, gesturing to the surviving soldiers and paladins. “But go, now. Immediately.”

“Sure thing,” replies Ruhr. She opens the menu from before.

She nods. He’s set up shop at the edge of the city.

“What rotten luck,” she says. “That he’d be right here.”

“No,” replies the bishop, shaking his head. “It is most fortunate for us,” he says, walking back to the cathedral. Sensing her curious gaze, he lifts his eyes to the barrier around the city. It’s starting to wane. “I need to return to the cathedral to hold the spell up. Hurry, Ruhr, the river-sorceress. There isn’t much time left.”

Ruhr nods and then elbows Zacarias, walking off down the road. The guardsman rounds up several other elite soldiers and they march out of the city, towards the south-east.

The location of the demon-king's castle isn’t hard to find.

The ground around them shakes as Cartouche continues her work, accompanied by the haunting orchestra.

Demon-Magic is… incredibly powerful.

Swain recalls seeing casters in his old life, adventurers, walking back and forth to the dungeon every single day of their lives in order to earn scraps of money, scraps of power, scraps of hope. They’d invest their sweat, blood and tears and at the end of many days, come out empty-handed.

But on some, they would have a token prize in their fingers.

This was often enough to alleviate the pain for a day, perhaps two. But then the money would run out and people would return. They’d return to the drink, like his father had. They’d return to the cruelty, like the woman that replaced his mother had done, they’d return to the dungeon, like so many other people had done every single day of their lives.

The ugliness of it is that these things were all truly escapable. They were static threats, poisons, that the sufferers returned to over and over, because it was the only way forward that they saw.

The man scratches with the pen against the paper.

It is good that they are all dead now. They didn't have the vision required to move the world to a better place. That's why it turned out this way.

Because in this new world, in this era of the demon-king, the threats to the living are no longer static, stationary, simple things.

He crosses out a line on the page and throws it over his shoulder. It was wrong.

A ghost hands him a new sheet.

Holy-water violently crashes down through the tunnels, visible beneath the gravesite. She hasn’t even stepped into the dungeon itself and she can tell with her seasoned eyes that this is a bad one.

The noises, the smells, the… sensation of the hairs on her neck standing up on end, electrified — All of these things signal to the primitive lizard brain in her mind that this is a bad place. This is a place that swallows people and makes them its own.

But the dungeon itself, as a physical construct, is new, in comparison with the older, established dungeons of the world.

It’s still lacking defenses. It’s lacking traps and complicated mechanisms. It’s lacking an intricate internal and external design that comes only with organic growth and time. It’s lacking a magical ‘instancing’ mechanism, that would separate each individual group of humans into separate dimensional versions of the dungeon, making a large-scale raid very difficult.

They caught it early. The demon-king hasn’t had time to prepare yet.

She holds her hands down to the hole, flooding it a second time, which the hundreds of soldiers gathered here really don’t seem to mind her doing.

Hundreds of experience-point windows appear all at once, as just as many disgusting, crawling, jaggedly toothed creatures perish in the pure waters that she's flooding the underground with.

This new augmentation of hers, this ‘purity’ sub-element is interesting. It’s mixing in with her core water specialization, giving her a rather unique ‘holy-water’ blend of magic, for a lack of a better phrase. It couldn't be a more useful tool to attack a place like this.

Ruhr nods to Zacarias. The man hoists up his shield and heads down first, many of his men following after him before she walks down too, in their midst and they fight their way towards the throne-room of the demon-king.

Swain watches them from afar, using his new ability.

They’ve entered the dungeon, hundreds of them. They’ve easily cleared the first floors without even stepping into them.

— The world around them rattles, shaking from some movement. His pen, disturbed, breaks its smooth flow and creates an ugly smear across the page.

The demon-king lets out an annoyed exhalation, throwing the paper over his shoulder. He takes a new one, as the ball of paper strikes the wall and rolls back past his feet.

He lifts his gaze, watching the dancer dance. She never seems to lose her enthusiasm for it, despite him being the only member of the audience.

A true artist.

Ruhr chugs down another soul-potion, shattering the empty bottle against the stone floors as she marches on forward.

She wipes her wet forehead with her yellow scarf, adjusting her hat, as she walks on forward.

Usually, monsters of such ranks as ‘A’ or any of the ‘S’ and above tiers are reserved for the strongest dungeons of the world and still then only down on the deeper floors, such as past floor forty, which is a significant depth.

But here they are on floor… three or four and already —

A fetid, rotting maw, the size of a carriage, peaks around the bend, poison leaking from its fleshless lips.

Zacarias pulls up his shield, stopping the attack.

The poison mist, stemming from the undead dragon's breath disperses all around them. Ruhr lifts her hands over his head, getting ready for her next spell.

It can’t be far now.

He can’t be far now.

Instead, he’s writing his poem not to summon something, but instead because… it’s fun.

The demon-king watches the dancer dance her heart out for the sake of it, and he writes, doing the same with his pen, its sway perfectly following her movements across the small floorspace as if they were both working on the same exact metaphysical canvas together.

Ruhr and Zacarias look at each other.

“Heave!” orders Zacarias, looking back to his men.

Two dozen soldiers, having fastened a long chain to the left chamber door, the size of several castle walls, all pull together in strained unison. It barely budges. “Heave!” A second try. It moves an inch, creaking loudly, water dripping off of its surface. “Heave!” The soldiers pull a third time, moving the gigantic door open a few feet, just wide enough for men in armor to walk through.

A lingering essence of despair leaks out of the sealed chamber like putrid mist. Several of the soldiers, having made it this far down, seem to lose their resolve now, letting go of the chain and backing only far enough away that they don’t stray from the mass of protective swords and shields, lest there be anything else left creeping in the darkness behind them all.

Ruhr shakes herself out, cracking her neck as she adjusts her hat and steps inside of the demon-king’s throne-room as the first one in. Zacarias walks in behind her, readying his shield.

The two of them warily eye the area as they step inside.

Thousands of screaming, horrified statues fill the room, all of them clasping their faces in shrieking horror.

The soldiers enter after them.

Ruhr lifts her gaze to the end of the room that they’re walking towards, towards the ornate, horrible throne upon which sits a being of pure, writhing darkness. It has the shape of a man, but it isn’t a man. It watches them approach.

The demon-ki-

Ruhr stops, grabbing Zacarias.

The entity on the throne doesn’t move to greet them, to attack them, to do anything.

Everyone stands there in tense silence for a moment, as if waiting for the pin to drop to signal the start of what can only be a true nightmare.

— The demon-king giggles.

Ruhr narrows her eyes. She knows that sound.

The woman cautiously steps forward, her hands ready to cast a spell in an instant.

The shadowy entity on the throne, the armor, rattles in a quiver of odd joviality as she moves towards it, the soldiers backing her up with their shields and lances at the ready.

She holds out a hand with her palm facing upward and runs her fingers across it, flicking off several droplets of nervous sweat.

An embodiment of water in the shape of a serpentine maw lashes forward and bites the demon-king in the neck.

A long, squirmy, protruding neck shoots out of the body and cries in pain, the fake shell of a body rattling in surprise.

Ruhr spins around, running back towards Zacarias as the dungeon begins to quiver, shaking violently. “SHIELD!” she yells at him, scrambling as stones begin to fall around them from above. “- SHIELD!” screams Ruhr, sprinting for her life.

The dungeon collapses.

Swain looks down away from the menu and at the poem in his hands instead. He feels happy with this one.

It sounds… right.

— The wagon shakes as they roll over a bump in the road.

The show must go on, as these people here would have said.

“Cartouche. If you please,” asks Swain, sitting on an old, wooden chair that has seen many generations of men and women sitting on it before him. “Show me one more time.”

Cartouche flourishes with her arm and begins her dance anew, the dancer seemingly never growing tired of performing her act for someone asking to see it.

The dungeon reconstructs itself, attaching itself in an entirely impossible manner to the exterior of the wagon that rolls down the way, pulled on by the undead, down through a fallow forest.

- But a little creativity makes the impossible possible.

That’s what art is for, after all.

Shaushka lays down sideways in the storm-ditch that she had been washed into by the oppressive wave.

That was a while ago.

But she is still laying here.

She doesn’t think that she’s hurt.

The elf looks down at herself for the first time, wiggling her bits and bobs. Everything still works.

That’s good.

Slowly lifting her eyes back upward, she looks at the old leaf that had led her here. It’s stuck, crumpled up and washed against a stone just next to her.

— A strong breeze comes and tears it away.

“Ah!”

Shaushka sits upright, watching the leaf vanish into distant eternity, where it will never be seen again.

With an empty head and full eyes, she stares after it.

What an odd day.

But it was beautiful. There have been so many things to see.

The wet elf sits there for a while down in the full ditch, before then rising back up to her feet.

She wanders back towards the bakery and towards her alley, aimlessly stepping over a headless corpse, wondering if the baker has returned to his work yet?

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Chapter 2: Chapter 2: THE DEMON-SICKNESS

Chapter 4: Chapter 4: I’m coming back to you, no matter where you hide

Chapter 3 Chapter 3: A rising tide comes to wash away all evil. 
 
Empty head. Full eyes.
 
Shaushka sits where she always sits, down on the ground in the back alley, just behind the big bakery, across from the park, as she does what she always does — Quietly observe.
 
It’s not that she can afford to buy anything here at the bakery. To say that she doesn’t have enough money isn’t wrong in and of itself, however it implies that she has any money to begin with. But that’s why she doesn’t go inside of the bakery and bother the people there. Instead, she sits just outside of it, just next to it, in the alley.
 
Here, she can smell the baking of hot cakes and fresh breads for free, when the baker starts his work so early in the morning. She can immerse herself in it entirely, in the aromas and the warmth of the oven on the other side of the wall, all without ever paying a single coin.
 
While doing so, however, she doesn’t imagine anything. Her head is simply empty. She doesn’t imagine the delightful image of herself nibbling on a steaming bun or breaking off a crunchy corner of a fluffy pastry, full of sweet fillings, which was left in the oven long enough to get a deep browning on its exterior.
 
She just smells the smells and looks at the park across the street with eyes that are fuller than her thoughts.
 
— Shausuka stares blankly towards the distance.
 
Quietly, motionlessly, strangely perhaps, as she has often been told, she simply sits there on the stones of the ground and gazes towards the sky that sits atop the distant horizon, which she can barely see towards. Her lower lip hangs open somewhat, just barely touching the upper, as she, with wide eyes and an empty head, watches the world.
 
Ah.
 
It is different today though.
 
The baker isn’t baking. There is a smell of burnt things in the air.
 
The park, once green, is dead and gray and desolate.
 
The elf blinks, a droplet of water striking the tip of her nose.
 
Oh.
 
It looks like it’s going to rain today.
 
Huh.
 
She crosses her legs, only one of them covered by her old, torn robe that is essentially missing the whole lower left quarter of itself. It had been torn off a long time ago.
 
— It is a very soft robe. She likes wearing it. She likes touching it. She likes looking at it.
 
All of these things are ideal, as it's her only one anyway.
 
The elf blinks, still gazing vacantly towards the park, over the dead bodies that lay in the middle of the street. Something is different today.
 
The rain, beginning to fall, rains down on them too.
 
…Huh…
 
Empty head. Full eyes.
 
Shaushka sits there, not really sure why the world is different today.
 
Is the baker sick?
 
She hopes not. The baker makes the world smell nice. People like him are important.
 
A shadow looms over her head.
 
With full eyes, Shaushka looks up at the thing, the mass, that creeps and crawls down the alleyway that she’s sitting in, having climbed over her head, holding itself aloft between the two walls of the houses on either side.
 
Ten-thousand hands, dripping with blood and rot, hang suspended above her head, wiggling and rustling like a disturbed nest of hissing spiders.
 
Shaushka slowly blinks.
 
The horrific entity, observing her for a moment, then simply creeps and crawls onward, ignoring her entirely as it moves out into the street, covering and coating the hundreds of dead corpses. It steals their fingers, leaving most of the rest of the carcasses behind as it travels through the carnage, growing larger and larger with every passing moment.
 
“…Huh…”
 
Shauska watches it vanish down the way, fresh screams filling the air.
 
Her eyes, full, her head, empty, return back to the sight of the park down across the street.
 
It looks different today, doesn’t it?
 
Shaushka, her mouth open just a tiny sliver, stares and waits for the baker to show up today.
 
But he never comes.
 
Eyes full. Head empty.

A pair of heavy, decorative doors of incredible weight, which are as massive as strong, proud towers, swing open wide as he presses against them, his large arms moving them ajar with ease. The demon-king enters into the room at the very end of the new dungeon, an ornate, darkened chamber with a single throne placed at the end of itself, on which nobody yet resides. There is one, single, straight corridor of flat stonework that leads towards the throne from here, where he now stands.
 
As for the sides of the room, on either side of this path…
 
“…Did I make this?” asks a voice from behind himself as Swain steps inside, examining the throne-room.
 
Both sides of the room, separate from the main path, are entirely covered in statues that meld down into the floor. Near the entrance, their screaming heads, their kicking legs, their writhing torsos are submerged, as if they were ripping themselves out of a body of water. The further that one goes into the room towards the throne, the higher the statues that make up every bit of terrain appear to have managed to pull themselves out of the floor. All of them claw and tear towards the focal point of the room.
 
The humans will be here soon.
 
The terror that he summoned will keep them busy for a while. But he doesn’t have that many soul-points, the primary resource for his magical casting, left, and with him almost defenseless like this, when they get here, the strong ones who survived the initial surge of his power, the game will be over before it even starts.
 
“Imagination is a powerful thing,” replies Swain, looking at the dancer as he sits down on the throne and stares around at the harrowed stone faces, which scramble and claw his way with expressions of fear, hunger and longing desire in their eyes. “- Cartouche.”
 
“Did you mean it?” she asks, stepping forward towards him. The dozens of eyes on his body shift her way, looking at her. “What you told me? Is it really something that’s…” She looks down at her hands, pulling her fingers inward as if she were holding something in them. The mouths on the side of the demon-king’s body open themselves.
 
“- I don’t lie,” states the demon-king. Cartouche looks back up towards him, staring at his hands that tensely grip the edge of the throne, crumbling off a piece of the stonework. “Lies are an ugly thing.”
 
She looks at him quietly and then nods.
 
Swain exhales, sitting back down. The eyes on his body all lose their tense glares and begin drifting around the room again. The humans will be here in an hour, maybe. They need to buy some more time.
 
It’s an odd thought, isn’t it? ‘The humans’?
 
It wasn’t that long ago, minutes, that he himself was one and yet, somehow… everything has changed so quickly. His mind, his body, his demeanor. Everything from the first breath of his longing heart to the last whisper of desire in his essence have led to something entirely new.
 
The demon-king’s eyes rise back up towards the dancer, wearing the scraps of her half-burnt clothes, standing before his throne. She blinks, feeling herself being stared at and then looks around the empty throne-room to see if she’s the thing being watched. Observing her, Swain gets his idea for their survival.
 
“Dance a little more, would you?” asks the demon-king, resting his head on his elbow to watch her.
 
She nods. “Uh, I mean, sure,” she says, raising her arms to stretch herself out. “It’d be easier if I had music. But I’m a professional,” states Cartouche.
 
Swain’s gaze drifts to the side. He uses one of his free ability points. He has a lot of those to spend, but now isn’t the time to sit here and browse through his ten thousand potential choices for new abilities.
 
The game being played, the beauty of the art of this new complot, it takes priority.

Swain reaches into one of the mouths on his body, pulling out a series of wiggling, wormy essences that had once belonged to people of a familiar disposition as himself — Musicians.

The souls drift down towards the floor, oozing out of his hands like a piece of half-digested meat, dripping with bile, as they splash against the cold stones.
 
A moment later, they pull themselves together into an amalgamation of cool, sickly blue-tinged shapes that resembles a group of four people, carrying instruments.
 
Swain rests his head back idly on his hand, leaning against the throne, as the musicians start to play and as the dancer starts to dance, beginning the second act of today’s play.
 
The dungeon rumbles, the ground quaking violently and as it does so, the shaking of his many eyes makes it look like the statues that fill the room join in on the haunting waltz.

Ruhr stands, leaning back against the wall as the voices collect around her inside of the adventurer’s guild. Bodies lay strewn over tables, spread across the floor. All of the low-level adventurers just… died. Goo and viscera drips out of melted eye-sockets.
 
Being quick thinkers that they are, some of the mid-level adventurers had made a magical barrier of sorts to keep a few people safe from the corrupting spell.
 
Ruhr looks down at the mug she was drinking from. The contents have evaporated, leaving only hot metal behind. She looks at the container curiously. It reminds her of a mimic that she had once seen in a dungeon, pretending to be an old water bottle.
 
The demon-king…
 
She looks back up towards the group of panicked low-level adventurers, standing inside of the small, magical shield that a couple of mid-level priests are holding together by the skin of their teeth. But they’re almost out of soul-points.
 
That’s the difference between mid and high-level adventurers. A mid-level adventurer has the reaction times to keep themselves and those around them alive in rapidly changing situations.
 
A high-level adventurer knows that just because you can, that it doesn't necessarily have a point.
 
She sets the mug down, walking away as the shield begins to flicker, the priests running out of magic. The people inside of it beg desperately them to keep it up.
 
She supposes that they haven’t realized there’s a protective spell around the city now.
 
Ruhr closes the door behind herself as she leaves the adventurer’s guild and looks around the city.
 
— Guardsmen are already at work, carrying the dead to the sides of the road, in order to clear the ways. Fires rage, gnawing through hundreds of houses, born from unattended stoves and the heating effects of the demon-king’s magic around sensitive alchemical materials.
 
A group of soldiers run past her, down the way she wants to go, pulling a cart full of water behind them to try and control some of the flames.
 
One of them sees her, stopping. “Ruhr!” says the man, pulling his colleague on the shoulder. “Look!” he says excitedly, the other man looking over in confused annoyance until he also recognizes her.
 
Ruhr sighs, her head drooping. Being a high-level adventurer is one thing. But ranking up at the guild to a very prominent rank, such as she has, comes with a sort of pseduo-celebrity status that is more annoying than helpful, unless you’re looking for a house to buy in an exclusive neighborhood.
 
The woman lifts a leg, planting her boot on a small crate outside of the guild and points at herself with her thumb. “That’s Ruhr, the river-sorceress!” she barks, somewhat theatrically, while looking at them. Nobody ever gets that right. Titles are important. She needs to establish a brand if she's going to get a new rank any time soon.
 
“Please! Help us get these fires under c-”
 
Ruhr holds her left palm open, running the fingers of her other hand over it as if she were flicking off a few droplets of water.

The two guards duck to the side as a shadow of a wave rises out immediately over the tops of the houses, easily three to four stories in height. It crashes down the road, breaking foundations and crushing damp bodies together into heaps in the gutters. Roofs, damaged by the smoldering, tear off and come apart.
 
Ruhr stands there, smiling a proud smile as she watches the water die down, together with the hundred flames that had lined the street.
 
Sure, the street is mostly gone too, all of the stormwater drains blocked by debris and corpses, but the fires are out.
 
“There’s no need to thank me,” says Ruhr, swiping a strand of her azure blue hair out of her face. She looks smugly down towards the fearful guardsmen, who have perhaps gotten more than they were expecting. “All in a day’s work for RUHR!” She points to herself, holding her head high to look towards the sky. “THE RIVER-SOR-”
 
- Ruhr stops, opening her eyes and staring at the dark cloud above their heads.
 
It skitters.
 
A mass hangs there, looking at them, twitching, squirming. A mass of squirming hands and fingers, all crawling and reaching in excitement — in greedy hunger.

The monster, the… thing, looming above the three of them falls down.
 
A serpent made entirely out of wild, raging water sprouts out of her arm and sinks its teeth back into herself, throwing her far away, causing her to gracelessly tumble and roll down the wet, destroyed road and out of the monster's reach.
 
Ruhr, coming to a stop at the end of the street, watches in disgusted horror as the two guards vanish into the mass, their bodies held against it as thousands of fingers reach into their ears and open, screaming mouths, pulling them back against the horrific body, as it rips off their hands. Like an octopus, eating its struggling prey alive, piece by piece.
 
It takes their hands and their heads and leaves the bodies behind, before then working its way down the street towards her, consuming and gorging itself full on corpses. Hands skitter and break open doors and windows as it eats any survivors in the area.
 
Screams come from inside of the adventurer’s guild.
 
Ruhr rises to her feet.
 
More high-level guardsmen and adventurers make their way forward towards her, running in from the distant cathedral square.
 
She looks around herself at the others here, before turning back to the monster that now has them in focus.
 
She’s been working her whole life in order to buy a nice house in this city so that she can retire and now… The woman tsks, grabbing the collar of the royal-guardsman next to her. “You. You’re with me now. Get your men.”
 
“H- huh?” asks the man.
 
She doesn’t have the rank or station to ask, let alone demand anything like this. Even as a high-tier adventurer, she’s clearly below anyone with noble bloodlines on the societal ladder.
 
The monstrosity, having finished gorging itself on what it could reach back there, tumbles and rolls and skitters towards them.
 
Ruhr looks at him with an annoyed side-glance. “We’re going to kill the demon-king.”
 
She pushes him away and then turns around to walk away, leaving the soldiers and others here to deal with this particular problem present here.
 
After a moment of confused yelling, many heavy boots run after her, unable to decide which place is perhaps worse for them to be.

Swain rises to his feet, clapping as he walks down the steps of the throne. It’s time to make some more concrete preparations.
 
Cartouche flourishes, lowering herself in a half bow, with her hands at her sides. The ghosts quiver, their spiritual bodies rippling like disturbed water as he walks past them.
 
“An excellent performance,” says the demon-king, walking to the door of the throne-room. The eyes on his body look her way. In a way, he’s envious of her. Not because of the grace that she possesses that he had never had, but because she, through the medium of dance and development of her personality, was and is able to share her art with the world.
 
His poetry had always been for himself, always, except for once.
 
Swain stares out into the emptiness that lies beyond the throne room. Large, grand chambers and complicated, labyrinth-like hallways now span the area from where he is to the top of the dungeon, near the graveyard.
 
- But that’s okay.
 
For now, he has so many other things to share with the world.
 
Using one of his ability-points, he takes a new ability to advance his capacity to summon monsters for the dungeon.

Swain exhales, his shoulders falling slack, a visible vapor leaving his core mouth as he watches the rooms and corridors of the dungeon come to life with gestalts of living terror.
 
The demon-king turns around, facing back towards the throne, having two steps left in this plan of his.

Cartouche watches him as he forms the horrific gestalt in the middle of the throne-room.
 
Perhaps sarcastically, perhaps not, she claps.
 
The demon-king looks her way and she stops, her hands stuck together in front of herself. Cartouche clears her throat and then holds them behind her back. The dancer turns her head, looking at the monster that he had just summoned, as it approaches the throne by itself.
 
“Cartouche,” says the demon-king, turning around to leave.
 
“Huh?” The dancer looks after him, watching him walk off between arching towers of fangs and meat that fill the dungeon. “Oh, right!” She runs after him, the metal of her bangles jingling.
 
“Tell me about your old life,” says the demon-king, wandering past a massive, rotting corpse of an undead dragon. “Tell me something that I haven’t seen.”
 
“Huh? My what?” she asks, walking next to him and then slowing down to walk behind him, as if she were unsure of where exactly is proper, or perhaps safe, to stand.
 
“— I need inspiration,” replies the demon-king, looking down at the palm of his hand as he walks amidst the monsters. A drooling, smiling mouth sits across his palm, like a gash. The eye next to it looks up his way.
 
Cartouche looks up towards the rotting maw of the dragon and then quickly runs after him, trying to piece her story together in a way that is… presentable.

Shaushka has moved on from behind the bakery.
 
She supposes the baker isn’t coming today.
 
Maybe he’s ill?
 
With wide eyes, she wanders down the road, stopping to look down the way as a series of odd explosions ring out in the distance, down near the main square.
 
— The wind blows through the street.
 
A solitary leaf flies past her face and her eyes follow it, her mouth slightly ajar as it carries off into the distance.
 
Today, her plan will be to follow the leaf. She’s decided.
 
With full eyes and an empty head, Shaushka wanders down the street, following the leaf as the wind blows it around, back and forth, around many bends, sometimes getting stuck here or there.
 
When it gets stuck, she kneels down and sits there, watching, waiting.
 
Then the wind comes again and the leaf moves.
 
Ah.
 
Rising back up to her feet, she follows it.

“- DAMN IT!” yells Ruhr, holding her hat as she runs, her yellow scarf billowing in the wind as she quickly rounds the next corner just ahead of herself, pulling herself in by swinging around the bend by the tips of her fingers. She reaches out behind herself, yanking the man there into the alley with her just in time as the thundering crawler, the monster with ten-thousand fingers crashes down after them, tearing another person who hadn’t caught the corner away, as it fails to stop its momentum.
 
Ruhr leans back against the wall, her chest heaving. It’s focused on her. Gods know why.
 
She was hoping to just leave and let the others deal with it, so that she could take care of the bigger fish in the pond, but…
 
— Many broken, crooked fingers quietly creep around the edge of the alleyway, like a curious child, peeking around a corner as it spots them. The bony fingers all tapping excitedly against the wall.

A torrential wave of water crashes down through the alley, ripping the brickwork off of the walls and causing the houses to crumble down inward from the sustained pressure. The violent wave carries the masses of debris, striking straight into the thing.
 
Ruhr grabs the guardsman and the two of them keep running as the monster collects itself back together, thousands of hands and fingers crawling around like a swarm of insects as they reconverge and consume new flesh from the corpses in the rubble.

“This way!” shouts the guardsman, the last of the troop that had left with her. He nods his head to the right and Ruhr follows him, the sound of skittering at their heels as they make their way down an alley. “This leads to the cathedral district! We can get help th -”
 
He stops, seeing that the alley ahead of them has collapsed in on itself, creating a burning dead end.
 
Ruhr grabs a hold of him from behind. “SHIELD!”
 
“What?”
 
“SHIELD!” yells Ruhr at the guardsman, who lifts his shield just as her hand faces down against the ashy stones.

Water leaks out of her hands, splashing down below them as a serpent, made entirely out of liquid, spins itself around into a tight coil that they land on top of, sinking down into.
 
The water vanishes, running off into many storm drains around them and the two of them slowly sink down to the stones of the street.
 
Ruhr tries to catch her breath, looking back up over her shoulder, watching as the many hands of the demon-king relentlessly crawl up over the edge of the rubble, crawling around the flames, creating a solid mass with many holes inside of itself.
 
A hand pulls her up, the guardsman tears her to her feet as the two of them keep running towards the cathedral. It's not far from them now. She can already see it. Bodies lie everywhere here. There isn’t one clear patch of road, rather, it’s all meat. Ruhr lifts her scarf up to cover her mouth, hiding her face, as if it were deeply scarred by the fires of this place. But she only does so to keep out the smell of cooked people.
 
Ashes and fires rage here too, but not on the houses, rather on the mountains of bodies that have already been collected.
 
They’re burning the dead. But not fast enough. There are still too many corpses laying here. There are hundreds, thousands of them.
 
Soldiers and priests all line up around the front of the spiring cathedral, already long since in alarm. A man in a long, ornate purple robe stands at their front.
 
The two of them sprint towards the line, the darkness behind them skittering as dozens of hands lift themselves up into the air ahead of them, glowing with a shine that is distinct from the firelight. All of the high-level priests left outside of the cathedral, the soldiers, the guardsmen and any other adventurers, who had survived, join in on a second collective spell, much like the first that had been used to protect the city.
 
While the strength of an individual’s magic is certainly a fearful thing in many cases, advanced casting techniques often require combinations of effort. The most advanced of these methods are not combined spells, such as a poison and water caster combining their talents to make a foul tide, but rather, the channeling of powers to one, single, extremely capable individual at the lead. Like the incredible waters of a strong river, flowing through a single funnel, it collects with extreme magical pressure that, while useful, is very damaging to the body that gets overloaded.
 
Ruhr and the guardsman dive forward as the magic of the casters and all of the others present here moves not into a flurry of individual attack and defensive spells, but instead all flows towards the man at the center, the man in purple, the bishop.
 
The old man with a face that betrays the truth of his years and experiences, holds his hands in prayer.
 
Something wet grabs her shoulder from just behind her, another finger touching her ear.
 
— The world flashes with light.

Seals of intricate magical designs appear all around the ground, having been hidden beneath many corpses that had been left on the street on purpose for this act. All of them glow to life as the roots of the magical sigils, all running down past the bishop’s feet, signal their presence to the world with a radiance.
 
Ruhr lands, looking back behind herself. A severed, blackened hand falls down off of her shoulder. Her eyes turn back towards the monster, the thing with too many fingers. Massive magical chains, spanning from the bloodied floors all the way to the dome that now surrounds the city, criss-cross in every odd direction, piercing and wrapping themselves around the monster. This is the effect of the grand spell that had just been cast.
 
But like it had done with the fires, the horrific creature simply spreads itself thinner, wider. Its many hands skitter between the gaps of the chains that it is too agile and adaptive to be held by, like a swarm of ants, this particular tool isn’t sufficient for the task of constraint.
 
More chains shoot out of the stones, out of broken windows of houses, out of storm-drains. Anywhere a seal could have been hidden in haste and they all shoot up towards the sky, as if they were massive pillars of an ancient temple, holding the heavens aloft.
 
Ruhr watches as the monster spreads itself out more and more, crawling towards them as a widened, flattened, entity.
 
“Ruhr, I believe,” says the man next to her. “The river-wizard?” She looks at the bishop, as the guardsman she had escaped with helps her to her feet.
 
“- Sorceress,” corrects Ruhr.
 
“Sorceress,” repeats the bishop. “Would you mind?”
 
Ruhr looks at him, before turning back to the monster, understanding.
 
It, the monster, is spread too thin now. The chains were never meant to lock it into place. They were meant to pull it apart, to make it adapt and spread itself out incoherently.
 
Ruhr plants her feet wide in a stable stance, holding her hands out in front of herself.
 
“I’m not responsible for any water damage,” she says.
 
“Noted,” replies the bishop, lowering his hands to press them against her back, the collective magics now flowing through her.
 
The chains all begin to dissipate, fading away into nothingness.
 
Her body shakes, the soaked, filthy hat flying off of her head as the ground quakes beneath them and her fingers try to force themselves shut, like the legs of a dying spider.

The world is swallowed by water, cold darkness consumes every flame and smoldering ember and haunted eye.
 
A few thousand and then some hands are washed away, unable to cling together, they are strewn all around the flood, washing down storm drains, washing into cribs and into fallen heaps of rubble, too far apart to reconnect to what they once were a part of.

Shaushka sits, squatting down with her hands on her knees as she stares at the leaf.
 
- It got stuck on a house, down in a sheltered ditch.
 
Blankly, she sits there and looks at it.
 
It was a nice leaf.
 
But she supposes that this is simply it. The leaf’s days are over.
 
Smiling, content, she nods to the leaf.
 
— The leaf nods back.
 
Blinking in confusion, the elf rises to her feet and scratches her cheek. It’s best not to worry about such things.
 
The world grows dark.
 
She turns her head, looking up towards the sky.
 
…Ah.
 
“It’s different…” mutters Shaushka to herself, watching with wide eyes and an empty head, as the waters the size of a mountain crash down towards the city.
 
There usually isn’t this much water in the sky when it rains.
 
She tilts her head.
 
It must be a lot of rain.
 
The wave crashes down over the city and her.

Ruhr pants, her chest violently heaving as her legs finally give out on her. She’s entirely drained in body and in spirit.
 
The seals all fade away. The hands all vanish. The water crashes down over what was left of the city, causing untold destruction and death — A price that had to be paid for this result.
 
All of them stand there in tense silence for a time, waiting for something to happen, as if the dripping of water that rains back down over them, as if the hissing of quenched fires — As if any of these things could whisper them a secret that would allow them to return to the past, which despite the closeness to this moment, feels impossibly distant.

People immediately all break into cheers around the plaza, everyone who had managed to survive, now being finally sure that this statement is really true. They rush over towards her and the bishop, even given the massive breach of decorum that this would have been only yesterday.
 
Ruhr rises up to her shaking legs, doing her best to bask in the glow of her new-found success that she is fairly confident that she’s earned. The guardsman from before, who she had escaped with, helps her up again.
 
“Thanks,” says Ruhr, nodding to him.
 
“Zacarias,” nods the guardsmen back to her.
 
People all around them begin to chant. Ruhr smiles a smug smile, hiding any weakness that might be very present in her body, as she lifts a leg to plant a boot firmly on a small crate that had washed over her way from the tide, perfectly towards her. “Thank you!” she says. “This was nothing!” laughs the woman, somewhat theatrically. “— For RUHR! THE RIVER-SORCERESS!”
 
She laughs as people crowd all around her.
 
A single piece of paper floats down from the sky, landing at her feet. It looks like a washed out piece of writing, but the ink is illegally smeared now.

The demon-king sits there, his hands folded as he watches so many things happen at once around himself.
 
A window appears before him, notifying him that the terror he had summoned has been defeated. His eyes all narrow themselves down in annoyance. It had died much faster than he was expecting.

No matter.
 
The plan is already in motion.
 
— The ground beneath him shakes. The smell of burnt forest pines is present in the midnight air.
 
Swain holds his hand out to the side as a ghost that he had summoned flies in, handing him a pen and scorched piece of paper.

She sighs in relief, throwing the glass bottle over her shoulder. It strikes against the ground, shattering.
 
A man clears his voice next to her. Ruhr straightens up, having forgotten the bishop was there. “Sorry,” apologizes Ruhr. “I got lost in the moment.”
 
The bishop, surrounded now by attendants, looks at her. “Ruhr, the river-sorceress. You know what I have to ask of you now, yes?” he asks. “Your strengths, your presence, these are all signs that you are who we ne-”
 
Ruhr nods, crossing her arms. “- You want me to kill the demon-king?” she asks, interrupting the bishop. His attendants gasp in shock. A day ago, this would have been enough for her to be dragged away.
 
“— I want you to kill the demon-king,” repeats the bishop, apparently not too bothered.
 
She tsks. Not that this wasn’t her plan all along, but now, it’s not something that she wanted to do. It’s something that someone else wanted her to do. There’s an important distinction. Then again, this is her big break. Killing the demon-king is one thing. But killing the demon-king with witnesses?
 
“Take as many people with you as you need,” says the bishop, gesturing to the surviving soldiers and paladins. “But go, now. Immediately.”
 
“Sure thing,” replies Ruhr. She opens the menu from before.

She nods. He’s set up shop at the edge of the city.
 
“What rotten luck,” she says. “That he’d be right here.”
 
“No,” replies the bishop, shaking his head. “It is most fortunate for us,” he says, walking back to the cathedral. Sensing her curious gaze, he lifts his eyes to the barrier around the city. It’s starting to wane. “I need to return to the cathedral to hold the spell up. Hurry, Ruhr, the river-sorceress. There isn’t much time left.”
 
Ruhr nods and then elbows Zacarias, walking off down the road. The guardsman rounds up several other elite soldiers and they march out of the city, towards the south-east.
 
The location of the demon-king's castle isn’t hard to find.

The ground around them shakes as Cartouche continues her work, accompanied by the haunting orchestra.
 
Demon-Magic is… incredibly powerful.
 
Swain recalls seeing casters in his old life, adventurers, walking back and forth to the dungeon every single day of their lives in order to earn scraps of money, scraps of power, scraps of hope. They’d invest their sweat, blood and tears and at the end of many days, come out empty-handed.
 
But on some, they would have a token prize in their fingers.
 
This was often enough to alleviate the pain for a day, perhaps two. But then the money would run out and people would return. They’d return to the drink, like his father had. They’d return to the cruelty, like the woman that replaced his mother had done, they’d return to the dungeon, like so many other people had done every single day of their lives.
 
The ugliness of it is that these things were all truly escapable. They were static threats, poisons, that the sufferers returned to over and over, because it was the only way forward that they saw.
 
The man scratches with the pen against the paper.
 
It is good that they are all dead now. They didn't have the vision required to move the world to a better place. That's why it turned out this way.
 
Because in this new world, in this era of the demon-king, the threats to the living are no longer static, stationary, simple things.
 
He crosses out a line on the page and throws it over his shoulder. It was wrong.
 
A ghost hands him a new sheet.

Holy-water violently crashes down through the tunnels, visible beneath the gravesite. She hasn’t even stepped into the dungeon itself and she can tell with her seasoned eyes that this is a bad one.
 
The noises, the smells, the… sensation of the hairs on her neck standing up on end, electrified — All of these things signal to the primitive lizard brain in her mind that this is a bad place. This is a place that swallows people and makes them its own.
 
But the dungeon itself, as a physical construct, is new, in comparison with the older, established dungeons of the world.
 
It’s still lacking defenses. It’s lacking traps and complicated mechanisms. It’s lacking an intricate internal and external design that comes only with organic growth and time. It’s lacking a magical ‘instancing’ mechanism, that would separate each individual group of humans into separate dimensional versions of the dungeon, making a large-scale raid very difficult.
 
They caught it early. The demon-king hasn’t had time to prepare yet.
 
She holds her hands down to the hole, flooding it a second time, which the hundreds of soldiers gathered here really don’t seem to mind her doing.

Hundreds of experience-point windows appear all at once, as just as many disgusting, crawling, jaggedly toothed creatures perish in the pure waters that she's flooding the underground with.
 
This new augmentation of hers, this ‘purity’ sub-element is interesting. It’s mixing in with her core water specialization, giving her a rather unique ‘holy-water’ blend of magic, for a lack of a better phrase. It couldn't be a more useful tool to attack a place like this.
 
Ruhr nods to Zacarias. The man hoists up his shield and heads down first, many of his men following after him before she walks down too, in their midst and they fight their way towards the throne-room of the demon-king.

Swain watches them from afar, using his new ability.
 
They’ve entered the dungeon, hundreds of them. They’ve easily cleared the first floors without even stepping into them.
 
— The world around them rattles, shaking from some movement. His pen, disturbed, breaks its smooth flow and creates an ugly smear across the page.
 
The demon-king lets out an annoyed exhalation, throwing the paper over his shoulder. He takes a new one, as the ball of paper strikes the wall and rolls back past his feet.
 
He lifts his gaze, watching the dancer dance. She never seems to lose her enthusiasm for it, despite him being the only member of the audience.
 
A true artist.

Ruhr chugs down another soul-potion, shattering the empty bottle against the stone floors as she marches on forward.

These are high-tier monsters. This dungeon can’t be so long, but for it to field monsters of this grade already, on these early entrance floors, is truly a sign of the frightening power of the demon-king.
 
She wipes her wet forehead with her yellow scarf, adjusting her hat, as she walks on forward.
 
Usually, monsters of such ranks as ‘A’ or any of the ‘S’ and above tiers are reserved for the strongest dungeons of the world and still then only down on the deeper floors, such as past floor forty, which is a significant depth.
 
But here they are on floor… three or four and already —
 
A fetid, rotting maw, the size of a carriage, peaks around the bend, poison leaking from its fleshless lips.
 
Zacarias pulls up his shield, stopping the attack.

The poison mist, stemming from the undead dragon's breath disperses all around them. Ruhr lifts her hands over his head, getting ready for her next spell.
 
It can’t be far now.
 
He can’t be far now.

Swain writes, pleased with his flow. With twenty-five percent of his soul-points remaining, he could summon a level twenty-five terror at best, if he uses all of them. But that would be unwise, because he’d be defenseless until they regenerate.
 
Instead, he’s writing his poem not to summon something, but instead because… it’s fun.
 
The demon-king watches the dancer dance her heart out for the sake of it, and he writes, doing the same with his pen, its sway perfectly following her movements across the small floorspace as if they were both working on the same exact metaphysical canvas together.

A grand, massive door stands before them, blocking the way. Hundreds, thousands of bodies lie behind them, torn apart and mutilated. Melted and broken and gnashed and gnawed, both humans and monsters. All of the screams, all of the terrible cries have become silent, leaving only about half of those who entered here remaining alive. It was a rough, but fast fight through.
 
Ruhr and Zacarias look at each other.
 
“Heave!” orders Zacarias, looking back to his men.
 
Two dozen soldiers, having fastened a long chain to the left chamber door, the size of several castle walls, all pull together in strained unison. It barely budges. “Heave!” A second try. It moves an inch, creaking loudly, water dripping off of its surface. “Heave!” The soldiers pull a third time, moving the gigantic door open a few feet, just wide enough for men in armor to walk through.
 
A lingering essence of despair leaks out of the sealed chamber like putrid mist. Several of the soldiers, having made it this far down, seem to lose their resolve now, letting go of the chain and backing only far enough away that they don’t stray from the mass of protective swords and shields, lest there be anything else left creeping in the darkness behind them all.
 
Ruhr shakes herself out, cracking her neck as she adjusts her hat and steps inside of the demon-king’s throne-room as the first one in. Zacarias walks in behind her, readying his shield.
 
The two of them warily eye the area as they step inside.
 
Thousands of screaming, horrified statues fill the room, all of them clasping their faces in shrieking horror.
 
The soldiers enter after them.
 
Ruhr lifts her gaze to the end of the room that they’re walking towards, towards the ornate, horrible throne upon which sits a being of pure, writhing darkness. It has the shape of a man, but it isn’t a man. It watches them approach.
 
The demon-ki-
 
Ruhr stops, grabbing Zacarias.
 
The entity on the throne doesn’t move to greet them, to attack them, to do anything.
 
Everyone stands there in tense silence for a moment, as if waiting for the pin to drop to signal the start of what can only be a true nightmare.
 
— The demon-king giggles.
 
Ruhr narrows her eyes. She knows that sound.
 
The woman cautiously steps forward, her hands ready to cast a spell in an instant.
 
The shadowy entity on the throne, the armor, rattles in a quiver of odd joviality as she moves towards it, the soldiers backing her up with their shields and lances at the ready.
 
She holds out a hand with her palm facing upward and runs her fingers across it, flicking off several droplets of nervous sweat.

An embodiment of water in the shape of a serpentine maw lashes forward and bites the demon-king in the neck.

A long, squirmy, protruding neck shoots out of the body and cries in pain, the fake shell of a body rattling in surprise.
 
Ruhr spins around, running back towards Zacarias as the dungeon begins to quiver, shaking violently. “SHIELD!” she yells at him, scrambling as stones begin to fall around them from above. “- SHIELD!” screams Ruhr, sprinting for her life.
 
The dungeon collapses.

Swain looks down away from the menu and at the poem in his hands instead. He feels happy with this one.
 
It sounds… right.

Swain smiles, as do his hundred mouths, as he looks at the poem and then towards Cartouche, who stands down on the other side of the wooden wagon, belonging once to the traveling fair that she had worked at. The bodies of the animals that pull them, as well as the corpses of the fair-workers, have been crudely reanimated by him.
 
— The wagon shakes as they roll over a bump in the road.
 
The show must go on, as these people here would have said.
 
“Cartouche. If you please,” asks Swain, sitting on an old, wooden chair that has seen many generations of men and women sitting on it before him. “Show me one more time.”
 
Cartouche flourishes with her arm and begins her dance anew, the dancer seemingly never growing tired of performing her act for someone asking to see it.
 
The dungeon reconstructs itself, attaching itself in an entirely impossible manner to the exterior of the wagon that rolls down the way, pulled on by the undead, down through a fallow forest.
 
- But a little creativity makes the impossible possible.
 
That’s what art is for, after all.

Shaushka lays down sideways in the storm-ditch that she had been washed into by the oppressive wave.
 
That was a while ago.
 
But she is still laying here.
 
She doesn’t think that she’s hurt.
 
The elf looks down at herself for the first time, wiggling her bits and bobs. Everything still works.
 
That’s good.
 
Slowly lifting her eyes back upward, she looks at the old leaf that had led her here. It’s stuck, crumpled up and washed against a stone just next to her.
 
— A strong breeze comes and tears it away.
 
“Ah!”
 
Shaushka sits upright, watching the leaf vanish into distant eternity, where it will never be seen again.
 
With an empty head and full eyes, she stares after it.
 
What an odd day.
 
But it was beautiful. There have been so many things to see.
 
The wet elf sits there for a while down in the full ditch, before then rising back up to her feet.
 
She wanders back towards the bakery and towards her alley, aimlessly stepping over a headless corpse, wondering if the baker has returned to his work yet?

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