Chapter 12: Chapter 12 — Determination
The corpses of all the hybrids lay strewn across the stone floor, finally reduced to a sepulchral silence.
Hah... A heavy sigh, thick and laden with ash, escaped my rigid lips. I felt a piercing regret settling into the pit of my stomach.
If I had understood the truth of the illusion a little sooner, perhaps I could have stopped my party in time. But it was too late; Dorko, Domack, and Samira destructive magic had already finished them all.
An infinite, suffocating grief crushed my chest as I gazed upon those poor people—innocent souls who had suffered an unimaginable ordeal only to end up dying in the most painful and grotesque way possible.
I walked with unsteady steps toward the remains of the twins, Oliver and Ethan. I crouched slowly over the blood-soaked floor and, with a gentleness I didn’t believe I possessed in this hostile world, I passed my fingers over their eyelids to close their eyes.
"I swear I will avenge you..." I whispered, my voice broken but firm.
"Master..." Runi’s small voice resonated beside me. The magical creature floated over my shoulder, watching me with eyes brimming with deep concern.
I rose slowly. The mystical pain of the vision transformed into black fuel, an icy fury that froze my doubts. I locked my gaze forward, sweeping through the dungeon mist until fixing it directly on the damn son of a bitch who had ruined their lives.
The Lich was still there, motionless on his bone throne, watching everything with the indifference of someone observing ants.
I filled my lungs and let out all the accumulated bile:
"Hey, you putrid piece of shit, edgy bootlicker and son of a fucking bitch! Is that all you’ve got?" My shout echoed off the crypt walls, laden with absolute contempt. "Don’t tell me you can only send others to fight your battles while you hide in the back like a fucking coward."
The Lich didn’t even flinch. His skeletal face remained impassive, and a dry laugh, like the crunch of dead leaves, vibrated through the air.
"A noisy insect..." he hissed in a sibilant, disinterested voice. "Why would I, the great Dollmun, lord of flesh and pestilence, dirty my hands with an insignificant human? Your insults do not shake the foundations of my eternity. You will become raw material for my children once more."
He wasn’t taking me seriously. Of course—to him, I was just a low-level adventurer who had gotten lucky with a couple of summons. I had to change tactics if I wanted him to bite the hook.
I remembered the vision: this bastard had a colossal God complex. His arrogance was his greatest shield, but also his breaking point. I had to come up with something he couldn’t ignore—something that would prick his mystical curiosity and destroy his pride.
"An insignificant human?" I let out a forced laugh, crossing my arms with rehearsed arrogance. "Wow, what blind eyes you have for an undead. Do you really think I’m a common adventurer? Dollmun... you stand before a Spiritist. A soul summoner of the highest rank, a Grand Master of the astral currents that not even your damn forbidden books have any record of. That’s why my summons sweep away your cheap spawn like garbage."
A lie. A lie the size of a cathedral. My real rank in this world was a joke and my power came from a gacha system, but he had no way of knowing that.
The bluff worked. I could see how the Lich’s eye sockets, burning with scarlet fire, narrowed with a sudden, cold fixity upon me. The air around us grew noticeably heavier.
"A Spiritist...?" Dollmun murmured, and for the first time, his voice dragged a hint of suspicion. "An exotic specimen. Your cursed flesh and your soul-transmuting essence would make a fine catalyst for my next queen..."
"Then get off that trash throne and come get it!" I interrupted him, stepping forward and clenching my jaw. "I challenge you to a duel to the death. One on one. No servants, no hive tricks. If I win, you’ll be my eternal bitch and you’ll undo every one of your curses. And if I lose... you can keep my Grand Master body and run whatever sick experiments you want on my soul. What do you say, useless? Are you going to fight like a man or send another of your abominations to hide your ass like a fucking loser?"
It was a risky play. If I lost, my plan B was simple: my team would intervene and massacre him in seconds. But my pride—inflamed by the rage of seeing what he had done to that family—demanded that I break his face myself. I wanted to shatter his fucking ego.
"YOU DARE INSULT AND CHALLENGE ME!" The Lich’s roar shook the dust from the ceiling.
Rumble...
"Huh? That must mean you’d rather keep sitting there like a fucking coward," I taunted, brushing a nonexistent speck of dust from my shoulder. "Wow, I didn’t know the dark lords of this world were this pathetic."
"I am a lord of flesh and pestilence, not a dark lord, you piece of ignorant filth!" he bellowed, losing his composure entirely.
"What was that? You’d rather get fucked in the ass? Oh, what a shame—on top of rotten, you’re a freak," I shot back with a mocking grin that finished dynamiting whatever shred of composure he had left.
Fwoooosh...
A dense aura, black and red like stagnant blood, enveloped Dollmun’s body completely. The mystical concealment spell he used shattered from the sheer force of his rage, revealing his true, disgusting, putrefied appearance.
His exposed flesh was crawling with fat worms writhing between his dried tendons; his scarlet eyes were completely bloodshot, and when he opened his jaws, he displayed teeth so sharp and crowded they looked like those of a starving great white shark.
CRACK!
The Lich squeezed the stone handles of his throne with such force that the solid rock split and crumbled beneath his bony phalanges. The damn idiot had fallen hook, line, and sinker for my provocation.
"Fine... I will make your death the longest symphony of agony this era has ever seen, you damned insect," Dollmun hissed, rising from the throne in a floating leap. "I shall claim that Spiritist soul of yours piece by piece."
---
"Master, are you certain of this?" Samira asked, stepping forward with her hand already on the hilt of her sword.
"But, Master!" Dorko and Domack said in unison, planting their axes, ready to strike. They all stared at me with distraught faces, fearing for my life.
"Yes, I’m certain. And do not intervene under any circumstances, unless I order it," I replied without taking my eyes off the monster. "Besides, don’t worry about me. After all... I was trained by that hell of a woman standing right beside you."
I pointed at Samira with my thumb. The imposing warrior froze for a microsecond; her cheeks flushed an intense red before she masked it with a sidelong smile and looked at me with eyes charged with a flirtatious, dangerous confidence.
"Make him suffer, Master," she murmured, stepping back.
"Oh, I’ll make him suffer alright. That bastard is going to pay for every tear of those children."
SNAP!
Dollmun snapped his skeletal fingers.
The world distorted in a violent blink. The dungeon space stretched and the walls collapsed inward, dragging the Lich and me at sonic speed toward what appeared to be his private sanctum—a hidden, special place deep within the crypts.
It was a circular chamber, surrounded by pits of black fluids and a sacrificial altar carved from obsidian. My summons had been left outside, trapped on the other side of the laboratory’s mystical barrier. We were completely alone.
Drip... drip...
Dollmun extended his right hand toward the void. The air corrupted itself with an electric hiss and, from the dense black-and-red mist emanating from his body, he materialized an enormous combat scythe.
The handle was of polished bone so dark it seemed to absorb the chamber’s light, and the curved blade flickered with an aura of cursed energy that made the air itself bleed.
Shiiing... hissss...
[Gacha System Interface — Emergency Activated]
I fixed my eyes on the Lich’s weapon. It was lethal. If that thing so much as grazed me, necrosis would consume me in a second. I needed firepower—something that could counter that filth. Mentally, I opened the system window frantically.
"System, give me something fast. Generate a weapon that is the exact counterpart to this darkness. Something that burns his pestilence," I ordered in my thoughts, feeling the invisible gears of the infinite gacha beginning to spin in response to my desperate determination.
[Emergency Request Processed. Extracting from Mystical Inventory...]
FLASH!
A blinding light burst directly around my hands, dispelling the red mist Dollmun was hurling in my direction. When the flash settled, the system had granted me a pair of reinforced combat gauntlets, completely wrapped in an aura of white light—pure and radiant.
The heat they gave off made the Lich’s corrupt mana evaporate with a purifying crackle at the slightest contact.
Crackle... sizzle...
I cracked my knuckles, letting the sparks of sacred light dance between my fingers.
Snap... fwoosh...
"Let’s see if your worms can withstand this, you piece of filth."
GRRRROOOAAARRR!
Dollmun roared, raising the cursed scythe, and lunged at me with the speed of black lightning.
WHOOSH—
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