CHAPTER 3
Busy People
The sound of footsteps echoed in the darkness. Amid the broken magic-stone torches that lined the hallway, two animal people stopped and surveyed the carnage.
“…There’s nothing left,” said the sturdy boaz, while the skinnier cat person by his side clicked his tongue in frustration.
The two upper-class adventurers of Freya Familia stood in the shadowy wreckage of another destroyed factory, an ocean of silence beneath the moonlit sky.
“A whole squad of tier-twos, taken out before we even got here,” spat the cat person, Allen. “Figured they were just pushovers, but these guys are tough shit.”
Before his eyes lay a sea of bodies.
“All these wounds were made by the same blade. Was this all done by one person? It’s unlike the work of any the Evils we’ve met so far.”
Going by the slash marks, it was probably a large greatsword of some kind. An unblockable, unavoidable swing that tore through shields and armor, severed limbs and heads. The room was awash in blood, but miraculously—or more likely, intentionally—not a single victim had breathed their last. As familia members investigated the wreckage, healer and herbalist girls ran between the fallen guards, performing first aid before carrying them off to be treated.
Ottar cast his eyes about the scene, whittling down the possibilities in his mind. What had happened here this night was not a battle; it was a slaughter.
“Well, whoever they were, they were stupid strong, just like you,” said Allen over his shoulder, standing among the fallen adventurers.
“What?”
Confused, Ottar walked over to his compatriot and beheld what he saw.
“This…”
A huge hole had been torn in the walls of the factory, as if made by the jaws of some great beast.
“These are adamantite walls,” Allen explained. “Not many people can bust a hole through them…”
“No finesse, just brute force,” said Ottar, examining the edges of the massive rift. Was this how the attacker had gained access to the factory? Or was it how they made their escape? Either way, it clearly hadn’t taken much effort. The hole was crude, like the attacker simply couldn’t be bothered to use the door.
“Never heard of the Evils havin’ a freak like you on their side,” said Allen.
“A new recruit, perhaps,” stated Ottar, his solemn voice disappearing into the gaping hole.
The clouds in the air were like torn cotton. The moon was faint in the pale sky, and a single figure stood atop the city walls.
He was huge, at over two meders tall, and though his face was cloaked in shadow, the man exuded a threatening aura from every pore.
At the same time, it was almost comical the way his cloak and hood struggled to conceal his monstrous frame, but no one would dare laugh at him, for his greatsword, stuck into the flagstones at his side, still dripped with the blood of his most recent victims.
The man was clearly dangerous. His silent eyes surveyed the town below.
“What are you doing?” came a voice.
A man with dull, silvery hair emerged from the shadows cast by the clouds.
Sadistic, inhuman, fanatical. One glance was all that was needed to know this was not an honest and upstanding individual. But now his face wore a twisted frown.
“I am looking,” the man replied. “This place is just like I remember it. Perhaps you could call it…nostalgia.”
The giant spoke calmly, still looking over the city. There was no emotion or passion in his voice. It was like he was simply stating facts.
This seemed to bother the silver-haired man, who wrinkled his brow. At this point, the giant finally turned to face his visitor.
“And who are you again?”
“…Olivas. Apostle of chaos, Evils commander! And now, your compatriot!”
The silver-haired man, Olivas Act, raised his voice as he greeted the giant. His disdain for his supposed ally was quite evident.
“And as such,” he went on, “I would like to pose a question. Why did you let those fools live?!”
“.….…. ”
“That factory was guarded by second-tier adventurers, threats we should seek every opportunity to eliminate! With your strength, it should have been a total massacre!”
It was Olivas who had sent this man out earlier that night. It had been meant as a test, which he had handily passed. However, Olivas couldn’t believe it when he heard the giant hadn’t taken a single life, and thus came to demand an explanation in person.
“If you shrink at the thought of murder, then what am I to think—”
“Have you ever eaten ants?”
The completely unexpected question caught Olivas by surprise.
“Wh-what…?!”
“Spiders, then? Wasps? Scorpions?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Have you ever had to survive off the flesh of monsters? Slake your thirst with their ash?”
The giant turned back to the city. Olivas trembled with rage. He didn’t know how to react to the man’s inexplicable line of questioning, and yet his forceful tone had stunned Olivas into silence. He had come here to upbraid the man, but now Olivas found himself on the back foot instead.
“I have,” the giant said at last. “I have eaten everything, save my brothers-in-arms.”
This unsettling revelation sent a shiver down Olivas’s spine. “What?!” he exclaimed.
“To me, eating and killing are much the same. We do both to extend our own lives. While the means may differ, the results do not. The only difference is whether we bathe in blood or drink it.”
The man had eaten much in his storied life. Ants, spiders, wasps, scorpions. Monster flesh and ash. And he didn’t consider the dead to be his comrades, so once they died, he thought it was only natural their corpses were fair game.
“Wh-what are you trying to say?” asked Olivas, his voice quivering with a sense of primal dread.
“It is my appetite that has brought me here,” the giant said, without turning around. “I have the right to choose how I sate it. Your diet, on the other hand, is feeble. You only devour women and children and avoid those stronger than you. All you’ve ever tasted are other maggots like yourself.”
“Grrrh?!”
“Feast on maggots, if that’s all you know. But if that’s what you want to feed me, then at least give it to me all at once so I can get it over with.”
Olivas couldn’t find the words to respond. He was a Level 3 adventurer, and one of the top members of the Evils to boot. Yet the man before him saw him as nothing more than a lowly worm.
A chill gust of wind fluttered the giant man’s cloak as he continued. “Maggots taste terrible. I would rather tear out my own throat than let them become my flesh and blood.”
Olivas looked ready to snap, but a wide grin crept across his lips.
“…Ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
His fear turned to awe. Sweat coated his brow, and his heart started pounding as though he had been bitten by a wild animal. Never until that moment had he been more ready to trust the man before him with his life.
“A maggot? A maggot! Me, a Level Three, no more than a maggot to you! Not even a beast?! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Olivas could already see how this man would propel the Evils to greatness. With him at their side, no piddling adventurer could possibly pose a threat to their glory.
“…Very well,” he said. “You may leave these maggots to us, for now. However, I expect not to be disappointed when the time comes.”
There was a strange excitement in Olivas’s voice. He promptly turned and left without another word.
The man was alone once more, staring out across the city. Beneath his hood, old scars ravaged his face.
He spoke as though to the town itself. “A thousand years of history died here. The disappointment may be too much for me to bear…”
“Destroyed an adamantite wall?”
A new day had dawned, and once again, the sky was full of clouds. It was a little past noon when Hermes got the news.
“Yes. We heard as much from Ottar and Allen of Freya Familia. They surmise there must be a warrior of great skill working with the Evils.”
The one who brought Hermes this information was a blue-haired young girl on the cusp of womanhood named Asfi Al Andromeda.
She was fifteen years old. Level 2, but very close to her next Rank Up. Brilliant and talented, with a honed mind. An egg that would one day hatch into a fine aide.
Hermes shrugged emphatically. “That’s saying something coming from the most powerful adventurers in the city,” he said. “I don’t even want to think about how strong our suspect must be.”
As always, the attitude on the streets was as gloomy as the skies above. People walked with their eyes down turned, grim expressions on their faces. Women and children cast paranoid glances over their shoulders as they hurried about their business.
The streets Hermes walked now were no different. As he listened to the report from his follower, he searched for signs of change in the city itself.
This had always been Hermes’s way. A messenger, an arbitrator, a neutral observer. He needed to keep his fingers on many different pulses if he wanted to maintain his reputation as a purveyor of information, and right now the information he sought wouldn’t be in any report or documentation. It could only be found in the slight perturbations in the atmosphere outside.
Asfi served as his escort for this excursion. “Also,” she went on, “Astrea Familia has reported contact with what they believe may be a high-ranking Evils commander on the eighteenth floor of the Dungeon. However, they were not able to apprehend the suspect.”
“Ah, our rising stars,” said Hermes with a smile. “They’re well on their way to rivaling the likes of Freya and Loki. Haven’t you made friends with one of their members lately, Asfi? The Gale Wind or something like that.”
“I wouldn’t say friends…More like kindred spirits…”
It was only by chance that Asfi had first met Lyu. In the wake of a certain Evils’ attack, Asfi had been sent to provide aid using her magic items. Even at this young age, she had already made a name for herself as a crafter. Arriving on the scene, she encountered a noisy bunch of girls who turned out, of course, to be Astrea Familia. Three of them—a red-haired human, a far-eastern beauty, and a prum girl—were teasing a fourth, a masked elf named Leon. When Asfi approached, Leon glared up with tears in her eyes and demanded…
“What? Have you come to look down on me, too?!”
But Asfi only flashed the merciful smile that could only come from enlightenment.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?”
“…You mean…you too?”
It was the birth of an alliance between two long-suffering attendants.
Not a day went by where Asfi wasn’t pushed around by the likes of Hermes, or the captain, or Hermes, or also Hermes. The fact there was another soul out there gave her strength. Lyu must have also seen something in that smile, world-weary far beyond Asfi’s years, and sensed a kinship.
So despite Lyu being as unwelcoming as a stray cat, she and Asfi quickly warmed up to each other. While they weren’t close enough to be comparable to her friendship with Ardee, she could at least call Asfi a fellow sufferer. Recently, the pair had even begun to share information.
“You do both have the same mood,” said Hermes flippantly. “Impossible to take a joke. Maybe I’ll go pay their goddess a visit. As your patron deity, eh?”
“Please don’t ruin what little trust I’ve managed to build,” sighed Asfi, roused from her happy reminiscence by her god’s mischievous remark. She placed a finger to the bridge of her silver-rimmed glasses, pushing them up her nose. “Besides, their goddess is much like Lyu: purehearted, noble, and nothing like you.”
Just as Hermes and Asfi were debating her merits on the other side of town, the goddess in question was over in district one, scurrying through the streets in quite a rush. She finally arrived at her destination: the terrace fronting a cozy-looking teahouse.
“Sorry I’m late!” she exclaimed, out of breath, to the two other goddesses waiting there.
“What time do ya call this?” demanded the first, an androgynous-looking redhead. “Somethin’ tells me you’re gettin’ a little too big for your boots, huh?”
“Is hooliganism in fashion these days, Loki?” remarked the other, a silver-haired beauty sipping tea from a cup.
Loki and Freya. The two most influential gods in Orario.
“Were you looking after the children again?” Freya inquired. She was dressed head to toe in a robe to avoid bewitching the people on the street with her beauty.
“Yes,” replied Astrea, taking her seat. “I was just over at the orphanage. Then we all went over to the market to hand out soup.”
“Oh, here we go,” Loki groaned, leaning back in her chair. “Is that what y’all call justice these days? Virtue signaling? Not that we’re exactly the perfect role models, but you should really try to act more like a goddess sometime.”
Astrea gave a strained smile. “Everybody needs a hobby, don’t they? Like how you enjoy getting drunk and complaining.”
A pair of deep blue eyes, dark as the night, peered back at the mischievous trickster god.
“Besides,” Astrea went on. “My children are out there fighting for the good of this city. I can’t stand by and do nothing.”
“That’s exactly what I hate about ya. You’re so sweet, I’m gonna be sick. You remind me of Artemis, ’cept at least she has the decency to get violent once in a while.”
It didn’t seem like she was just joking around anymore. The venom in Loki’s words was all too real.
“How’re we supposed to be fair to everybody when we ain’t omniscient no more? That ain’t justice, it’s just self-satisfaction.”
Astrea’s nonplussed smile was her only response to Loki’s brazen comment. However, she was accustomed to scorn, and nobody knew what constituted justice better than she did. Therefore, Loki’s words didn’t bother her in the slightest.
“Well, I think it’s rather romantic,” said Freya. “Struggling endlessly for an ideal that can’t be attained. Perhaps I should try it for myself and see what all the fuss is about.”
“Ugh, I’m surrounded by idiots,” lamented Loki. “What’s the world comin’ to when the gods kids look up to are a Goody Two-Shoes and a nymphomaniac?”
Astrea simply continued smiling. “Quite right, quite right. But if I may, to what do I owe the pleasure of this invitation? My familia is far below your great houses in terms of influence, as you are both surely aware.”
“Just a little tea and gossip,” Loki reassured her. “You’ve been keepin’ up patrols; perhaps you could fill us in on a few things we slackers mighta missed?”
“We’re also more than a little interested in your affairs,” Freya agreed. “Your followers, in particular, are quite excellent. Why, if they weren’t already yours, I’d love to take them for myself.”
“Seriously, you gotta learn how to reel it in!” Loki reprimanded her. “You keep up this obsession with ownin’ everythin’, and you’re gonna butt heads with Ishtar one day!”
But Astrea calmed her. “I shall take that as the compliment you surely intended it to be, Freya. However, if that is the case, then what about Ganesha? His children are just as committed to maintaining order as mine. Why not talk to him?”
The two goddesses responded to that in unison.
““Because he’s annoying.””
“Oh…”
Judging from Astrea’s smile, she had already known the answer.
Why does he shout? If you asked him, the man would say only this:
“I am Ganeshaaaaa!!”
At the end of the day, there is no reason.
“I am Ganeshaaaa!”
“Whoa, shut up! But hey, I feel better already! Thanks, Ganesha!”
“I am Ganeshaaaaaa!”
“Shut up already! Ah, but suddenly my worries seem so insignificant now! Thank you so much, Ganesha!”
“I! Am! Ganeshaaaaaaa!”
“Shut the hell up! Oh, but look, you scared that mugger right off! Cheers, Ganesha!”
“We are Ganeshaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”
“““Seriously, shut the hell up!! But wow, we feel our strength returning!! Thanks again, Ganesha!!”””
Day after day, the elephant-masked god took to the streets, spiriting the townsfolk with his rousing voice.
But man, was it annoying.
Ardee and Shakti watched him from afar.
“What do you think, sis?” asked the younger sibling with a beaming smile on her face. “Should we stop him, or not?”
“Don’t talk to me. Just…don’t talk to me…”
Freya almost felt as though she could hear the god’s voice even now, echoing across the city, but she paid such feelings no mind. “Let us begin,” she declared. “Loki, did you give Hermes his task?”
“Yeah, I did,” Loki replied. “Well, when I say I, I mean my familia. Perseus dropped by to give her report just before I came here. Apparently, they’ve figured out what the Evils are up to outside Orario. It’s just as Finn guessed: They’re recruitin’ an army of followers—but the god ain’t givin’ any of them a Falna, and they’re all just noncombatant worshippers.”
Just then, Astrea’s face began to pale.
“And these worshippers of the Evils…”
“Yep, they’re rilin’ people up,” Loki answered. “Violence, extortion, threats, you name it. Anything that will help expand their influence.”
Meanwhile, in another part of town, Hermes and Asfi were walking through the streets.
“Using violence to spread faith has always given me the creeps,” said Hermes. “Even us gods find it off-putting.”
“And pitiful?”
“You said it, not me.”
Hermes flicked the brim of his traveling hat.
“Anyway, if Orario’s civil unrest starts spreading, then our reputation as the capital of the world is gonna plummet. We still haven’t regained the goodwill that we lost along with Zeus and Hera.”
“All those judgmental eyes,” Asfi said. “I’m worried. The others tell me not to let it bother me, but I’m not sure I can…”
“That’s because you’re a sensitive girl, Asfi! But don’t worry! In just seven years, you’ll be a jaded, weary PA, and it’ll all wash over you!”
“I will not! And what’s a PA anyway?”
Hermes’s oddly specific prediction gave Asfi the chills. Behind her silvered frames, the girl’s eyes turned serious.
“Seriously…Now, if that’s enough digressions, I had one further matter to raise. Among the worshippers of the Evils, we’ve identified one group in particular we should keep an eye on.”
“Where are they located?” asked Freya, after Loki had finished relaying the information she learned from Hermes’s assistant.
“Far south of Orario,” Loki replied, “in a place called Dedyne.”
“Dedyne…that name brings back memories,” said Freya, turning it over in her mind. “Memories I’d sooner forget.”
“From what Hermes’s kids sniffed out,” Loki went on, “they’ve been keepin’ their business on the down-low, nothing high-profile so far. But they’re up to somethin’, that’s for sure. Apparently, the place is crawlin’ with activity, almost like…they’re preparin’ for somethin’.”
The three around the table absorbed this unsettling new info.
“…What could they be up to?” asked Astrea, tipping her head. “What could the Evils be doing in the lands outside Orario?”
Asfi frowned as she summarized all they knew.
“Ignition pieces from Orario, holy tree branches from the elven villages, and now, something down in Dedyne, too…Our enemy is planning something, but what?”
Hermes scanned the streets with his eyes, but his mind was on his assistant’s words.
“Hmm, lots of dots, but not many lines,” he said. “Nothing jumps out at me. Guess we just don’t have the information to draw a solid conclusion.”
Beneath the brim of his hat, his citrine eyes narrowed as the god smiled.
“Looks like you have some more work to do, Asfi,” he said. “Get out there and find us some actionable intel, Vice-captain.”
“I’m only vice-captain because you forced me to be! Falgar was much more suited to this!”
“And you should be captain, but for now, Lydis is in that role. Try to get along with her, won’t you?”
“I can’t work with someone like that!” shouted Asfi, growing increasingly frustrated. “She tires me out! She’s like a female version of you, Hermes! Just the other day, she was all, ‘Hey, hey, I’m Lydis! That means you have to do all the boring work, Asfi! Buh-bye!’ and ran away!”
Asfi’s imitation of her direct superior was complete with gestures and poses. “It’s honestly scary how much of her brains went into her beauty!”
She sounded like she was being forced to interact with a creature of another species. Tears collected at the corners of her eyes.
Asfi’s skill had earned her a reputation she found hard to live up to. Even at her tender age, she felt the weight of the world bearing down on her, perhaps even more so than Lyu.
Hermes closed his eyes for a moment, then in a clear, dashing voice, he declared:
“You should see how she looks in bed. That makes it all—Guhhh?!”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than Asfi’s right fist found its mark in his cheek.
“Scum!” she swore, her face bright red. “I can’t believe you would seduce your own familia! You’re a disgrace!”
Her fists of judgment reduced the god to a smoldering wreck. Ah, Hermes. You know what your problem is? You keep making innuendos in front of impressionable young girls who haven’t had a chance to mellow out yet!!
“I-it was a joke! A joke! I just went to wake her up one time, that’s all!”
“That still means you went into her bedroom, you perv!!”
“Gwaaaaaaaagh?!”
Hermes’s tortured scream could be heard several blocks away.
It was only a short while later that Asfi finished doling out punishment, her shoulders heaving with exertion.
“Haaah…haaah…Still, there’s one more thing I wanted to ask…”
She glared at the dying god with murder in her eyes. Inches from death, Hermes got on his knees and begged.
“I’ll answer! Anything! So lower your bloodied fists! Have mercy!!”
Asfi relaxed her posture, turned to the side, and took a deep, calming breath.
“…The Evils have been oddly active of late, whether it’s stealing goods or gathering followers. But who in the world is supplying them?”
“Well, that’s simple,” replied Hermes, scooping his hat off the floor and replacing it atop his head. “They’re getting them from all the merchants who come to do business with Orario.”
“Wha—?!”
Loki explained as she refilled her glass.
“Some people wanna bring anarchy to Orario. There’s nothin’ they’d love more than to see the Guild collapse.”
Her face screwed up in bitterness. And it wasn’t just from the wine.
“Because, while everyone is free to haggle over Drop Items,” observed Astrea, “free trade of magic stones is entirely prohibited.”
“Exactly. The Guild controls all Dungeon-related business. To some merchants, they’re nothin’ but a pain in the ass.”
It was Freya who laid out the logical conclusion. “So they believe that by overthrowing the Guild, all those profits can be theirs.”
Orario’s magic-stone industry made it the center of the world. The economic benefits were incalculable. This was all made possible by the limitless supply of magic stones upon which the city sat. Could any merchant contain their jealousy, imagining the business ventures that golden goose could make possible? The answer, of course, was a big fat “No.” These were merchants, after all. People who saw business in war, people who put a price on life and death itself.
“There’s not much I can say except…it really is sad,” said Astrea. “They’re so blinded by profit, they would plunge Orario into chaos.”
“Damn right,” said Loki. “I ain’t got enough sighs for those fools. Wish they’d look at the big picture once in a while.”
She opened a single scarlet eye and asked a question.
“If the Guild falls, who’ll manage the Dungeon? If adventurers die out, who’ll beat the Black Dragon? Who’ll save us then?”
It was Freya who summed everything up. “If Orario falls, the world goes with it. Even a child can see that.”
The silver-haired goddess gave a thin smile, like a witch.
“So blinded by desire that they bring about the destruction of the very world they live in…What a fitting way for mortals to meet its end.”
“But this raises a question,” said Hermes. “Namely, why are merchants only investing in the Evils now?”
“Hmm? What do you mean?”
“There have been plenty of other chances to wage war on Orario. If it were me, I would pick eight years ago, after Zeus and Hera fell and the Age of Darkness began. Orario was in chaos then, even more so than it is now. Yet we never saw any merchants buddying up with the Evils. Why now?”
“I…I suppose you have a point,” replied Asfi, looking puzzled.
“Now, this is just a guess, but what if they’re poised to replace adventurers entirely?” suggested Hermes.
“Replace them…?”
“Remember the first thing you told me? What kind of person could possibly be capable of breaking through an adamantite wall?”
Asfi gasped. “Then the reason merchants are only investing in the Evils now…is because some powerful force is backing them?”
“It’s a bit of a leap, but it would explain everything we’ve seen so far,” said Hermes. “And sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.”
The intuition of a god. The most reliable and unreliable force on this earth. Asfi gulped.
“A force beyond any adventurer…strong enough to rule Orario in the Guild’s absence. Could such a thing really exist?”
“Ya have to admit, it does make a lotta sense,” said Loki.
In fact, there was no other possibility worth fearing. Without saying as much, Freya gave her support to Loki’s theory. And she also shared her suspicions as to the identity of the culprit.
“The Evils’ strange actions of late. The collusion between them and the merchants…and a powerful leader able to coordinate it all.”
“It’s all connected,” said Astrea. “Even the goings-on outside of Orario.”
She glanced at the other two goddesses. They both returned her nod.
“There has to be one, doesn’t there?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Meanwhile, across the city, Hermes came to the same conclusion.
“Yep, there’s gotta be. Coordinating the whole thing from behind the scenes.”
Then, all four deities chanced to look up at the same ashen sky.
““““There’s a god behind all this.””””
“Hey! Leon!”
Lyu turned at the voice.
“Eren?” she said, recognizing the man who called.
“What a surprise to see you.” He smiled back. “Still on patrol? No rest for the righteous, eh?”
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