In the highest spire of the Grand Koneu Church, beneath a mural of the god Coe cradling both a sword and a mirror, the old priest sat in a plush armchair much too grand for someone with back problems. A thick tome lay open on his lap, its pages filled with prophecies, sacred rites, and what he insisted were "deeply spiritual doodles" in the margins.
He swirled a goblet of holy wine—very holy, very aged, and very stolen from the communion shelf—and let out a peaceful sigh. The sun poured through stained glass, casting a rainbow of color across the polished floor and making his white robes shimmer with divine flair.
"Ah... the Chosen Ones," he murmured, flipping a page. "Cael, the ever-watchful... paranoid, perhaps, but thorough. That kind of anxiety saves kingdoms." He chuckled softly to himself.
He turned to the next page and took a sip of wine. "Alaric, so full of awe. So full of... boundless, uncontainable energy. He'll probably try to tame a dragon by complimenting its scales."
Another sip.
"Lys," he said fondly, tracing a diagram of a bow etched in the margin. "Curious, thoughtful. The glue that holds chaos together—when she isn't contributing to it."
A smile tugged at his lips.
"Renna... now that one's a walking existential crisis wrapped in a trench coat. But resilient. A spirit that bends, but won't break."
He paused before reaching the last name, raising an eyebrow.
"Ah yes… Thorne." The priest took a long, thoughtful sip. "Arrogant, loud, physically incapable of reading paperwork—but brave. Very brave. Possibly because he doesn't understand fear. Or instructions."
He set the goblet down with a soft clink and closed the book, letting it rest on his chest as he leaned back. "The world may see them as misfits," he mused aloud. "Untrained, unhinged, and undoubtedly unqualified. But destiny doesn't choose the polished."
He closed his eyes.
"It chooses the available."
And with that, the old priest chuckled again, sipping his wine with the calm, unshakable confidence of a man who had just sent five complete strangers into the wild with zero training and 110% hope.
"May Coe bless them all," he whispered, "especially whoever's cleaning their laundry."
The peaceful air was shattered by a BANG as the chamber doors slammed open so hard the stained glass trembled.
A young acolyte—a scrawny, wide-eyed believer with a floppy hat two sizes too big—came sprinting in with panic in every step. He was breathless, soaked from the waist down, and absolutely reeked of something that could only be described as "fermented regret."
"H-HOLY PRIEST!" the boy cried, slipping halfway across the polished marble floor before catching himself on the edge of the priest's armchair.
The old priest didn't even flinch. He slowly turned a page in his tome and took a long, slow sip of wine. "This better not be about the communion biscuits again."
"It's the Heroes, sir!" the acolyte gasped. "Th-they've—uh—they've blown up the entire sewer system!"
The priest blinked. Slowly.
Another sip.
"…They did what?"
"There was a slime! And then shouting! And someone yelled 'let it rip'—which I think was supposed to be a battle cry? And then the sewer exploded and now half the marketplace smells like… like war crimes, sir!"
The priest stared at him. His wine goblet wobbled in his hand.
"Alaric tried to dry off the slime with fire magic from his sword which he doesn't know how to use," the acolyte went on. "But the gas pockets—BOOM! Cael is screaming about water pressure conspiracies, Lys is taking notes like this is a field trip, Renna summoned her weapon just to swat rats, and Thorne—Thorne tried to ride a slime like a mount."
The priest closed his eyes.
He took the deepest breath a man on the brink of spiritual collapse could muster.
Then, with the serenity of someone internally crumbling, he whispered, "…Of course. Of course they did."
He stood up slowly—wine still in hand—and turned to face the mural of Coe. He raised his arms in a dramatic, beseeching motion.
"Oh great Coe, god of duality and disappointment. Why must your chosen ones be so… explosively enthusiastic?"
The acolyte, now nervously mopping up sewer juice from the floor with his own sleeves, whispered, "What should we do, Father?"
The priest took one last, mournful sip.
"…Send flowers to the Adventurer's Guild."
Then he sat back down, pulled a new bottle of holy wine from under his chair, and muttered,
"I'm too old for divine slapstick."
The priest poured himself a generous refill of holy wine—more generous than holy—and stared blankly at the flickering candle on his desk.
"The land… is doomed," he muttered with the soft resolve of a man who had seen his prophecy fulfilled in the worst way possible.
He didn't mean it metaphorically. He meant it literally.
This was not the kind of gentle, poetic doom passed down through cryptic omens or ancient scrolls. No, this was the kind of doom that involved raw sewage erupting through cobblestone streets because a group of dimensionally displaced disasters tried to "assert dominance" over a slime colony.
He turned his head slightly, his gaze now locked onto a dusty old tapestry—depicting brave, noble heroes standing atop a cliff, sunlight pouring behind them, weapons raised to the heavens.
"They're nothing like you," he whispered to the tapestry. "You didn't accidentally flood the temple archives by trying to 'test water spells indoors.' You didn't duel over who got to lead the team by arm-wrestling on sacred ground."
From somewhere in the cathedral below, a distant BOOM rang out, followed by a faint, triumphant voice echoing somehow louder than the boom, "THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR CALLING ME SECONDARY DPS!"
The priest didn't flinch.
He simply reached into the folds of his robe, pulled out a tiny wooden plaque etched with the words 'In Coe We Trust', and gently turned it face-down.
"I have summoned five agents of entropy," he sighed. "May Coe have mercy on us all."
A single pigeon flew in through the window, landed on the ledge, took one look at the priest, and promptly flew away again. Even the birds knew.
And so, with the fading light of day casting long shadows across the church, the old priest leaned back, clutched his wine like a life raft, and whispered one last, sacred truth into the silence, "Maybe the Demon Lord should win."
Somewhere, far beneath the city of Koneu, the true heroes of prophecy were knee-deep in the noble art of… absolute sewer destruction.
"WHY IS IT SO FAST?!" Renna screamed, hurling a ball of fire that exploded against the slimy tunnel wall, splashing ooze and a very deceased rat onto Thorne's already-tattered cloak.
"I AM A HERO! I DO NOT DO PLUMBING!" Thorne roared, lunging forward with his lance in what could only be described as dramatic overkill. The lance missed the giant sewer slime by a mile, shattered a pipe behind it, and unleashed a geyser of questionable brown liquid that made everyone reevaluate their life choices.
Alaric, wide-eyed and thoroughly enchanted, was riding on the back of a dead rat the size of a sheep. "Guys! GUYS! THIS IS AMAZING! Look at the trajectory of this thing's guts! It's so magical—LOOK AT THAT ARC!"
"Alaric, that's not magic! That's bile!" Cael shouted, ducking just in time to avoid a flying rib bone. "Do you know how many diseases we're catching right now?! This is a microbial nightmare! This is how plagues start!"
Beside him, Lys was trying to freeze the big slime using an ice spell she barely remembered from a book she skimmed for five minutes. The slime simply bounced off the spell and picked up speed.
"WHY IS IT FASTER?!" Renna shrieked again.
"Did it absorb the ice?!" Cael shouted, already calculating their odds of survival.
"I think it's evolving!" Alaric cheered.
"That's bad, Alaric!!" Lys snapped, trying to cast the spell again.
Meanwhile, Thorne had abandoned all pretense of strategy and was now spinning his spear like a blender, slicing every minor slime and rat within a ten-foot radius into goo and fur confetti. "GET OUT OF MY WAY, YOU FUNGAL PEASANTS! I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE WINNING A TOURNAMENT, NOT PLAYING MOP-KNIGHT!"
BOOM!
Another section of the sewer collapsed.
Another pipe exploded.
Another rat spontaneously combusted from Renna's panic-fireball.
When the massive sewer slime finally exploded from one of Cael's wild guesses at magic theory—"Throw your weapon and scream something Latin-sounding!"—it blew a hole the size of a wagon through the wall, sending the entire group tumbling into a lower, even less pleasant level of the sewers.
They landed in a pile.
Alaric looked up, face covered in slime and pride. "Well… at least it's clean now!"
Cael, twitching, looked at the bubbling walls around them. "Do any of you… have any idea what we've just done to the city's infrastructure?"
Silence.
Then Thorne coughed, stood up, raised his spear proudly and declared:
"You're welcome, Koneu."
Somewhere above ground, a manhole cover blew ten feet into the air.
And Koneu's sewer system would never be the same again.
The group stood in the aftermath of what could only be described as a borderline war crime against underground architecture. Bits of sludge slowly dripped from the ceiling like rain mourning its purpose. Cracked pipes hissed with steam, shattered walls somehow still held together by pure narrative convenience, and yet… the floor sparkled.
Like, actually sparkled.
The sewer gleamed with a weirdly ethereal cleanliness, as if it had just been deep-scrubbed by a battalion of soap elementals.
Alaric was the first to speak, brushing imaginary dust off his now perfectly polished armor. "Guys… I think we did it!"
Renna blinked, covered in singe marks and dried slime. "You mean… it's over? We're done?"
Thorne struck a pose with his lance, chest out, chin high. "Of course it's over. Victory was inevitable. I was here."
Cael stood silently, looking around at the immaculate floor, the strangely minty air, the complete lack of surviving slimes, rats, or even a lingering puddle. He opened his mouth like he was about to go full paranoia mode again—about sewer physics, about ecosystem collapse, about pipe pressure values—but instead…
He blinked.
He looked left.
He looked right.
"…Huh," he said simply.
Lys gave him a sideways glance. "That's it? No frantic monologue? No theories about explosive slime pheromones?"
Cael looked genuinely lost. "I… I don't know. I feel like I should. But—" he kicked a nearby stone. It skipped once and landed in a pristine gutter. "—It's really clean."
"Like, five-star spa clean," Renna agreed, inspecting her reflection in a puddle. "Why does it smell like lavender down here?"
"Probably from one of my fireballs," she added proudly.
The group began to walk back toward the entrance tunnel, which had somehow repaired itself just enough to not raise any questions.
Nobody spoke of the dozens of collapsed walls.
Nobody questioned the glimmering floor tiles that definitely hadn't been there earlier.
Nobody asked why every single enemy down here had exploded rather than simply perish.
They were tired.
They were victorious.
They were… hygienic.
And in the end, Cael just nodded. "Yeah. Sewer's clean."
No one said another word.
Somewhere above, a flock of birds flew by peacefully.
A rat spirit ascended with a whisper of unfinished revenge.