An invisible wall.
One that felt strangely smooth to the touch.
As a warrior, the assault captain had an instinctive sense for danger that had rarely steered him wrong.
Right now, it was telling him nothing.
"So… is this some kind of mechanism?"
He knocked on the invisible surface. Rock solid. He ran his palm along it.
"Swinging a sword at this would feel awful — and it'd probably ruin the blade twice as fast."
"It definitely wasn't here before."
He continued working his way along it, searching for a gap or an edge. The longer he looked, the more a thought formed.
"…Maybe I should bring this to the commander. Actually — couldn't I use this as an excuse to push for a retreat today? I'm completely exhausted."
He grinned to himself.
Suddenly, the invisible wall looked almost charming.
He glanced upward.
A massive, bulging eyeball materialized out of thin air directly above him.
Staring straight down at him.
"Ugh—"
Before the shock had even finished registering, something long, wet, and impossibly slippery wrapped around him entirely.
Beside the bonfire, the mood within the Light Eagle Corps had gone completely still.
Under normal circumstances, a moment like this was exactly when Eliphis would fulfill his role as commander — reading the atmosphere with characteristic precision and delivering something inspiring, some vision of ambition that reignited everyone's drive.
But now he sat in silence, lost somewhere inside his own thoughts.
Everything concerning Wolnir connected to something deeper. There was no attention left over for anyone else.
Since the commander himself wasn't speaking, nobody else — not even Sali — felt it was their place to step forward and try to fill that space.
Nobody knew how long it lasted before Eliphis finally surfaced.
The mercenaries looked toward him.
He looked back at them — taking them in, one by one, these loyal people who had burned through their own life force to give him ammunition against an enemy he still hadn't managed to bring down.
He was about to call for a retreat, a night to resupply and regroup, another attempt tomorrow —
Then he noticed something.
"Where's Gulen?"
Gulen was the assault captain's name.
The mercenaries exchanged glances.
"He stepped out for some air a little while ago," Sali said. "I'll go find him."
The bonfire's protection only extended so far. Once someone stepped outside its radius, they were fair game for anything nearby.
That said, Gulen wouldn't have wandered far. And with his strength, the local monsters posed no credible threat to him.
"That idiot probably got distracted by something."
Sali clicked his tongue and walked out beyond the firelight.
The darkness accepted him.
And he didn't come back.
The remaining mercenaries stared at the place where he had been.
Even the slowest among them understood that something was wrong.
The cavalry captain immediately volunteered to take a team and investigate.
Eliphis shook his head.
"I'll go myself."
The dungeon was full of things that didn't behave the way they were supposed to. If he let the cavalry captain go and the cavalry captain didn't return either, this would turn into one of those situations where people kept going out one at a time to rescue the previous person and kept not coming back.
He had read enough of those stories to know how they ended.
Under Eliphis's direction, the entire remaining Corps moved out together.
One of the mages cast a tracking spell keyed to something Sali had used earlier. Footprints appeared in sequence on the ground ahead of them, trailing into the dark.
They followed quickly.
Then stopped.
"They just… stop?"
The tracks ended without explanation.
Less than two hundred meters from the campfire — Sali's footprints simply ceased to exist.
No signs of a struggle. No indication of what had happened. He had been walking and then, apparently, had not been.
Eliphis gestured for full alertness.
His hand moved automatically toward the sword at his hip.
His fingers closed on empty air.
"Hm?"
He looked down.
His waist was bare.
Lost to Wolnir, perhaps. Or somewhere between there and here.
He took a rapier from the nearest mercenary and made do.
With narrowed eyes, he swept his attention methodically across the surroundings.
Then, without warning, he drove his staff into the ground.
Water surged outward in a wide circle from the impact point, spreading in every direction. Wherever it struck an unseen object, ripples would form — a simple, elegant detection method.
The water revealed nothing.
He followed immediately with a dedicated Reveal Invisibility spell.
Still nothing.
"What exactly is happening here?"
Every element of this place was wrong in ways he couldn't quantify.
Perhaps they had stayed too long in one area and triggered the dungeon's spawn system.
Skeleton warriors came from multiple directions simultaneously.
The mercenaries engaged them. Eliphis intercepted a reinforced Carthus Warrior personally — and while he outclassed it completely, he fought it with a particular focus that had nothing to do with efficiency. Every strike carried the accumulated frustration of losing to Wolnir. He practically tortured the thing to death before it went down.
Combat has a way of narrowing human attention to what's directly in front of it. Everything in the periphery gets dimmer.
One mercenary took a skeleton warrior's blade across the chest — deep, bone-deep, blood spraying wide. Protected by the others, he fell back and reached for his healing potion.
His pouch was empty.
"…Where's my potion?"
He looked up to borrow one from the companion who had just been shielding him.
His companion was gone.
Not retreating. Not fallen. Just — gone. The boots were still on the ground, still warm, sitting upright exactly where a person would stand.
The person was not in them.
A skeleton's blade found him before he could make sense of it.
When he revived at the bonfire, the confusion only deepened.
His missing companion hadn't revived there either.
Elsewhere on the field, Eliphis finished venting the last of his frustration on the skeletons and turned his attention to the broader battlefield.
He was about to clear what remained with a wide-area spell.
Something caught in the corner of his eye.
He turned.
Half the arrows in the archer captain's quiver had vanished.
His eyes narrowed.
He thought of the footprints that had stopped mid-step. The mysterious creature he'd estimated at twenty meters in length. The thing that had felt like a tongue.
So that's it.
So that's where Gulen and Sali went.
"I've found you."
He had wondered what that creature actually looked like since the first moment he'd almost caught it.
He wasn't going to let this opportunity pass.
He reached for his staff —
"…Where is my staff?"
The smile vanished completely.
He abandoned the search, called lightning instead, and sent a bolt crackling toward the area his instincts pointed him at.
Crack!
The mercenaries startled at the seemingly unprovoked attack.
Then one of them screamed.
His body lifted off the ground.
Something invisible shook him violently by the ankles, scattering every item on his person across the stone floor.
Then it hurled him headfirst into a wall.
He slumped, unconscious.
"There's a monster!"
Only then did the full picture snap into place for everyone.
The archer captain abandoned his ordinary arrows and reached for the enchanted ones.
"…They're gone."
He blinked at his quiver.
"I didn't use that many."
"They were stolen," Eliphis said, already past him.
Reversing the rapier in his grip, he drove it into empty air with the precision of someone throwing at a specific target.
The next instant —
A roar split the cemetery open.
A dragon's roar — unlike anything the mercenaries had heard before, not in pitch or volume but in something that lived underneath those qualities, something that pressed directly against the nervous system.
Even Eliphis's body went rigid for a moment.
When the roar faded and control returned, genuine shock had reached his eyes.
No question.
That had been a dragon.
Tiny arcs of electricity threaded through the air where the sound had been. The visible world ahead of them shimmered, and then —
The invisible creature appeared.
It was a dragon.
And yet it had none of the majesty the word implied.
It looked, in practice, like an enormous purple lizard.
Ugly.
And somehow, inexplicably, a little bit endearing.
Chameleos.
An Elder Dragon from the Monster Hunter world, legendary for stealth and camouflage that had no equal — capable of approaching prey in perfect silence and seizing it with a tongue of extraordinary length and dexterity. Poisonous and acidic mist followed it wherever it moved. Its hide was notoriously difficult to damage meaningfully.
Not impressive to look at. Still an Elder Dragon.
One of the rare wandering surprise encounters Wade had seeded into the dungeon — placed specifically for entertainment value and appearing only under exceptional circumstances. According to his configuration, Chameleos generally didn't attack adventurers unprompted. It stole from them. Every theft was, from its perspective, like opening a blind box.
Wade had deliberately allowed that.
However, Chameleos was also deeply and specifically petty.
The Light Eagle Corps had struck it earlier.
It remembered.
Which was why it had chosen this particular moment, with this particular group, to make its displeasure known.
Nobody underestimated a dragon.
Especially one that had been robbing them blind for the better part of an hour without anyone noticing.
Battle positions formed immediately. Eliphis's lightning bolt served as the opening signal.
The mercenaries charged.
The instant engagement began, Chameleos's tongue skewered two mercenaries simultaneously like meat on a single skewer. The poisonous mist drifting through the air killed three more before they'd taken a step. The handful who actually reached it swung with full commitment.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The dull, miserable sound of weapons bouncing harmlessly off a surface that had no interest in being damaged.
The cavalry captain's spear tip snapped.
"This hide is absurd!"
Chameleos was slow. That much was immediately apparent. But slow didn't mean patient, and it certainly didn't mean stupid. It swept its tail in a wide arc — tremendous wind pressure radiated from the motion — and used the instant everyone was fighting to stay standing to simply step back. Then it spat one precision blob of poison.
As they recovered their footing, it fired a second.
Touching the poison at all meant death. The mages scrambled for detoxification spells. Eliphis erected anti-poison barriers around the group in rapid succession.
Then Chameleos spread its wings and took flight.
Poisonous mist billowed downward from its body in dense curtains.
Using the downdraft from its landing to drive the mist outward, it transformed the cramped cemetery in seconds into something resembling a bathroom filled entirely with fog.
"Hold together!"
"We have anti-poison barriers — keep pressing the att—"
"Wait!"
"That's not poison mist!"
"That's acidic mist — the barriers won't stop it!"
One mistake in battle is sometimes all it takes.
The acidic mist swallowed the mercenaries. Even partial inhalation produced overwhelming, immediate pain throughout the entire body. One by one they went down — not dead, but utterly incapable of continuing.
The lance captain, collapsing, threw his weapon toward Eliphis with the last of his strength in a single clean arc.
Eliphis's rapier had snapped in the first exchange with Chameleos.
From the moment Chameleos had revealed itself to the moment the mercenary corps stopped being functional as a fighting force —
Less than several minutes had passed.
Eliphis took stock.
He was the only one still standing.
"You…"
"…damned beast."
He caught the thrown spear, summoned wind to drive back the lingering mist, and grew wings of light from his back.
His speed multiplied.
He launched himself around Chameleos in a relentless, furious sequence of strikes.
Glorious scratching session.
Tail sweeps. Tongue lashes. Claw swipes. Draconic charges. He dodged everything — focus absolute, reactions precise — and whenever acidic mist reached him, he downed one of the Bedford Family's Sein-brand antidotes and continued without pause.
Cold sweat had appeared on his forehead.
A thought surfaced that he very much wanted to suppress.
…I might not be able to beat this.
He could accept losing to Wolnir. Wolnir was the Overlord. Wolnir was ancient power condensed into bone and darkness and the concentrated weight of an entire age of conquest.
But losing to a dragon whose primary skill set revolves around stealing things?
His pride made a sound like something fracturing quietly.
His eyes sharpened.
He found an opening.
Snapping his wings out, he lunged directly for Chameleos's head — a move that bore a strong resemblance to the Crucible Wings technique, and which made a certain kind of sense on paper when the target was slow and large.
What it didn't fully account for was the one part of Chameleos that wasn't slow.
Its tongue.
Splurt.
The tongue found him before he arrived, coiling around his waist with practiced efficiency.
And then —
"Next, we present today's main feature."
'Captain Eliphis vs. Chameleos.'
"Excuse me — where is Captain Eliphis?"
"Oh."
"He's inside Chameleos's mouth."
Accompanied by the sound of loud, industrious chewing and swallowing —
Eliphis returned to the campfire.
Alone.
One mercenary who had revived there earlier very nearly left his own skin behind when he appeared.
The others — not dead, merely collapsed from severe lactic acid poisoning — were still there, slowly recovering.
The revived mercenary constructed a smile with visible effort.
"Commander…"
"So even you had to come back for a resurrection?"
Smack.
Eliphis knocked him unconscious with one clean slap.
His expression was difficult to look at directly.
The memory of the interior of Chameleos's mouth was not something he intended to revisit voluntarily.
He picked up the nearest available weapon and went straight back out.
This time, he would settle things with that creature permanently.
When he arrived —
Chameleos was gone.
Along with it: every piece of armor and equipment the mercenaries had been wearing when they fell.
Only scattered weapons remained where they had been, left behind presumably because Chameleos had decided they weren't worth taking.
No traces. No lingering mist. No indication of which direction it had gone.
It had simply left.
"…"
The sound of Eliphis quietly punching the cemetery wall, once, carried into the surrounding dark.
Losing to Wolnir was one thing.
But being systematically bullied by a dragon who had wandered in for the entertainment value of going through their pockets —
What is the meaning of life.
"Damn it."
Some time later, Eliphis led the surviving mercenaries out of the dungeon.
They walked in silence. After losing most of their equipment and a non-trivial portion of their clothing to Chameleos, there was a certain enforced honesty to the group — specifically, they were all being honest with each other about what they looked like right now.
Nobody spoke. Not one word.
The assault captain Gulen and vice-captain Sali were still unaccounted for.
Nobody had the energy left to care at this particular moment. If they'd died, they'd revive eventually and catch up. If anything, that was the preferable outcome — at least they'd be back with everyone else.
Any pair of functional eyes could read the atmosphere around Eliphis.
Nobody went anywhere near it.
The mercenaries were, to put it plainly, a little frightened. It had been a very long time since they'd seen their commander like this.
The archer captain exhaled quietly to himself.
His treasured bow was gone. Somewhere inside Chameleos, presumably.
The disappointment sat heavily.
Still — the retreat itself should pass without incident. The path out held nothing significant. By the time they returned to camp, perhaps the commander's mood would have settled somewhat.
He was being optimistic. He knew it even as he thought it.
"You have been invaded by the "Black Swordsman"!"
The archer captain's eyelid twitched.
Of course.
The single thing they least needed to happen had happened.
Before Eliphis could react, the archer captain seized a weapon from the nearest available mercenary and turned to face the slowly materializing Dark Spirit.
"You fool—"
"I'll handle this one."
Eliphis watched him without expression.
He allowed it.
The archer captain charged without hesitation.
As the distance closed, the Black Swordsman came into full focus.
A powerfully built figure clad head-to-toe in thick black armor. A beast-like helmet that concealed the face entirely. Through the eye slits burned crimson light — steady, cold, patient.
The greatsword in his hands reminded the archer captain of Elsa's weapon in scale, though not quite matching it. What it inspired, even at a glance, was something beyond what the size alone accounted for.
An ancient, oppressive aura radiated from the Black Swordsman in every direction.
One look told him everything he needed to know.
Another terrifying opponent.
His attack was a fraction of a second away from landing —
The Black Swordsman left the ground.
A spinning leap, executed with a kind of economy that made it difficult to categorize. It resembled a Wolf Leap. It also resembled a Lion's Claw. But looking at it more closely, it felt like something that had moved past technique into a different register entirely — something that had returned to pure, absolute simplicity on the other side of mastery.
Boom.
Blood hit the ground.
The archer captain went down instantly and didn't move.
The Black Swordsman turned toward Eliphis.
Eliphis held his gaze.
"Commander!"
"Get a weapon!"
A mercenary's shout came from behind him.
He didn't turn.
He still had magic.
The Black Swordsman looked at his unarmed opponent.
Then, from somewhere, produced an exquisitely crafted Noble's Estoc.
He tossed it in a clean arc toward Eliphis.
The elegant rapier rolled to a stop on the ground at his feet.
Something changed in Eliphis's expression for the first time in a while.
He thought of Wolnir.
He thought of Chameleos.
He thought of every absurd, degrading, inexplicable thing that had happened to him since the moment he had walked into Sein Dungeon.
The corner of his eye twitched.
He crouched and picked up the rapier.
"I'm going to use you to vent every last bit of it."
"So you had better be able to take it."