"Awwooooo—!"
The wolf howls were drawing closer. Some kind of beast, it seemed, was about to close in on them.
But nobody in the Skyrim Group had any attention left to spare for beasts right now.
Their own captain had just exploded.
Thick smoke billowed outward, swallowing whatever was happening to Luluwo at its center — but her presence still registered faintly through it, alive.
Tami had already started forward to pull her free when a question stopped him cold.
Where had those arrows even come from?
The thought hadn't fully formed before crossbows began cocking, one after another, from the treeline nearby.
An ambush.
No time to work out who wanted them dead. There was nowhere to take cover on an open cliff, and nobody had brought shields.
"To the mages — now!"
Without their staves, Ais-Aim and the rest of the mage contingent would be casting at a fraction of their usual strength. But right now, weakened magic was still their only real shot at survival.
"Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!"
A steady stream of enchanted arrows tore in.
The mages combined their efforts into a shared barrier — held reasonably well at first, until the enchanted arrows began detonating on contact. After that, the flickering only sped up. Everyone had to pour every scrap of remaining mana into holding it together.
"What the hell is going on?! Who's doing this to us?!" Mira shouted.
She had no real weapon on her. All she'd managed was to wrench a few iron skewers off the fire pit and twist them into something resembling a weapon.
Bows and crossbows required deliberate hands to wield. Whoever was attacking them had to be an intelligent species.
"Worry about that later — think about how we're getting out of here," Belto said, tossing aside the glasses that had shattered in the shockwave.
"I'll go pull the captain out. You and Mira cover Ais-Aim and the others — nobody gets close."
"Okay!"
No weapon in hand, but Tami clenched both fists anyway.
Back in his hometown, he'd earned a genuine reputation as the local troublemaker — his fists had made an impression on every eight-year-old within a ten-mile radius.
"To get off this cliff, we'll have to break through their formation. Once they realize the bows aren't working, they'll rush us directly. When that happens, don't panic — look carefully for a gap in their line."
Before he'd finished the sentence, Belto had already burst clear of the magical barrier.
The unknown attackers noticed him immediately — roughly half the arrows redirected onto him alone.
"I really thought retiring from the front line meant I was done fighting."
Belto clicked his tongue.
Moving at full speed, he dropped into a low slide, letting most of the volley pass overhead, then swept a grill up off the fire and used it to knock aside several more arrows mid-flight.
Reaching the supply cache, he hauled a heavy backpack up onto his shoulders as an improvised shield.
The grill, by that point, had been shot full of holes. He crushed it in one hand, spun, and hurled the wreckage into the treeline.
A scream rang out from the forest — layered under something that sounded distinctly animal.
Beastmen doing the attacking?
No time to dwell on it.
The smoke from the earlier explosion had mostly cleared, revealing most of Luluwo's body still on the ground.
"Captain! Are you alright?"
Belto pulled a healing potion from inside his clothes and uncorked it, still a full meter away from her.
Then the smoke shifted.
Right as the potion splashed across Luluwo, a massive, fur-covered fist swung up directly in front of Belto.
!
The blow caught him full in the head.
He rolled several times before finally skidding to a stop.
"Cough — cough — pfft!"
Belto spat blood, head spinning, vision swimming as he forced himself to look forward.
The smoke had fully cleared now.
The attacker stood revealed.
A small giant — well past three meters tall. Its skin had gone entirely beast-like, dense fur covering the whole body, a marking shaped like the character 王 — "king" — stamped across its head, giving it the general look of a tiger beastman.
No — closer examination showed something stranger still. Its fists and feet were sheathed in snake-like scales. Octopus-like tentacles sprouted from its back.
A demon?
Belto froze for a beat.
Only demons carried appearances this alien. And yet the presence radiating off this thing didn't read as demonic at all.
Closer to a magical beast, honestly.
What exactly is this thing?
For now, "beastman" would have to do.
The creature's mouth worked, as though it wanted to speak — and then forcibly clamped shut instead.
Before setting out, their captain had apparently warned them: too much talking risked exposure. Silence was mandatory.
Solid advice, in fairness.
Combined with the creature's massive frame, that enforced silence produced a genuinely oppressive presence.
"I'll help!"
Tami shouted.
"Don't! Handle your own side!"
Belto shouted back.
The arrow volley had stopped. One after another, strange "monsters" emerged from the tree line, crushing their own bows and crossbows and swallowing the fragments whole. The enchanted arrows had all detonated already, leaving nothing but scorch marks in the dirt.
Each beastman carried the traits of at least three different animals. They roared and charged the group from multiple directions at once — chaotic at a glance, but there was a deliberate shape underneath it once you looked closely.
Nothing mindless about this.
Belto had no room left to analyze it further. A fist was already closing in on him.
Connect cleanly, and internal organs would shatter.
BOOM!
A violent shockwave scattered stone fragments across the cliffside.
The beastman's confident sneer vanished.
"Eh?"
Stunned.
Belto had caught the punch bare-handed.
His arm shook badly under the impact, but he'd genuinely stopped it cold.
"Heh. No weapon on me — but I know a thing or two about hand-to-hand combat."
He settled into a convincing martial stance, carrying himself with the confidence of a genuine master.
"Tch."
The beastman's tentacles wrapped around its own fist. With a furious roar, it lunged again.
"Wow — Senior really can stay calm through anything!"
Tami glanced back once before locking his focus fully forward.
The situation was bad. More than twenty enemies. Any single beastman could hold Tami in a stalemate on its own, leaving him no attention to spread elsewhere. Mira was managing two at once — anything beyond that pushed past her limit.
Fortunately, nobody who'd made it into the Skyrim Expedition Group counted as ordinary. Even the notoriously frail mages held up remarkably well under sustained pressure.
After all, apart from Tami, every newcomer had been personally selected by Luluwo from among the invaders they'd encountered over time. Their moral compass might've been debatable, but their combat instincts absolutely weren't weak.
So while the Skyrim Group was clearly getting overwhelmed, nobody had died yet. Everyone was fighting with real caution — this wasn't the dungeon, and death out here was permanent.
Unfortunately, that fortune wouldn't last.
Fighting bare-handed against beastmen wielding their own bodies as weapons put the unarmed group in a genuinely desperate spot. Slowly, they were being driven straight back toward the cliff's edge.
The gap between fighting unarmed and fighting armed was enormous.
"AAAH!"
Belto slammed into Tami, sent flying. His face had already gone swollen and bruised.
The beastman leading his assault had taken damage too — but its regeneration had already erased almost every visible trace of it.
"What do we do?" Mira's composure cracked, just slightly.
Watching the grinning beastmen close in, weaponless, left her feeling deeply exposed. She'd already lost her left arm just taking one of them down.
Tami, meanwhile, had been seized mid-rescue attempt — struggling hard as the others tried to reach him, only to get surrounded themselves in the process.
"Tami..."
Belto forced himself upright through the pain.
He swore, right then, that if he made it through this — he was going back to the front line. Training in the dungeon, relentlessly, until he'd reached Sword Saint Gapar's level.
He wasn't coming back out until he did.
At that moment, the beastman leading the charge made a hand signal.
One of the others produced something and pointed it directly at Tami.
A Recording Crystal?!
Were they planning to film him getting torn apart?
"You bastards!"
Tami hung suspended in the beastman's grip, dangled like an oversized doll. The reason he'd been singled out was simple — he'd already killed one of them single-handedly.
Only he and Mira had managed a kill so far. The mages, cut off from their staves, could barely manage enough force to knock a beastman out cold.
If nothing changed, the Skyrim Group wasn't walking away from this.
"ROAR!"
The beastman opened its jaws and bit down into Tami's shoulder, tearing away a bloody chunk before pinning both his arms.
It intended to tear him apart while he was still alive.
"Tami — no!"
Clatter!
Something dropped near the beastmen's feet.
Round. Faintly glowing. Radiating something that read distinctly as magic.
Every set of eyes snapped toward it.
An Alluring Skull.
The beastmen froze in place for several full seconds.
Then the ones nearest to it lunged, entirely without control.
They began fighting each other for it, eyes flooding bloodshot in an instant.
The lead beastman recoiled in genuine alarm and tried to intervene — only to get pulled into the same compulsion the moment he crossed some invisible threshold, lunging for the skull himself.
Then —
More skulls began falling from above.
Clatter, clatter, clatter!
Scattering across the ground in every direction.
This time, none of the remaining beastmen could resist either. They pounced like starving dogs catching the scent of something irresistible.
"W-What's happening?"
Tami, freed by the sudden chaos, stared in genuine shock.
Then he spotted something. His whole expression lit up.
"Captain!"
"Stop standing there — RUN!"
Not far off, Luluwo shouted the order, still shaking an emptied sack of Alluring Skulls in one hand.
Everyone snapped back to their senses and broke into a full sprint.
The beastmen's animal instincts ran stronger than whatever human reasoning they'd retained — uncontrollably drawn to the skulls' pull. The Skyrim Group's fully human members remained entirely unaffected.
"Captain — are you okay?"
"You — cough, cough — do I look okay to you?!"
Luluwo's dress had been almost entirely destroyed in the earlier blast. A charred, gaping hole sat across her chest, large enough to see straight through.
"I'm half beastman myself, you idiots! Any of you take a hit like that, you'd already be dead!"
Despite the bravado, her condition was clearly dire. She limped hard with every step. At this rate, even a wandering Curse Frog could probably grind her down to nothing.
Right now, all she wanted was to reach Bedford City and find help. Fighting these beastmen again held zero appeal.
Small mercy that Tami had grabbed the wrong supplies today.
What exactly were these things?
She hadn't caught wind of any beastman bandit activity recently. And their appearances were genuinely strange, on top of everything.
She glanced back.
The beastmen remained fully absorbed in the skulls, no signs of pursuit.
Thank god. Praise Sein. Praise Shopkeeper Maldron.
If she survived this, Maldron was getting an absolutely enormous gift package.
Right as the group made for the treeline, Luluwo caught something.
Instinct threw her body sideways. She kicked Tami clear at the same moment.
Whoosh—!
A streak of black light cut past.
Blood sprayed suddenly from her throat.
Her body went slack, collapsing to the ground.
Lying there, one hand pressed to the wound, only one thought surfaced clearly.
Why does every single attack keep coming for me?
Everyone froze, then scrambled back toward her.
When they looked up — a fully black, subtly twisted humanoid figure stood not far off.
Under the moonlight, it stood upright, human-shaped in outline. But its whole body seemed to shift with the same fluid, writhing motion as slime. A mask covered where its face should have been — the only fixed point on an otherwise formless shape.
Belto needed one look. His body went rigid.
This thing operated on a completely different level from the beastmen.
"In the end, guess I'm doing this myself."
The shadowed figure paused mid-thought.
"Ah. Wasn't supposed to talk."
Its body twisted at an unnatural angle.
Several daggers surfaced from across its form all at once.
"Dodge!"
Belto didn't get the word fully out.
Black light flashed.
The tendons in everyone's hands and feet snapped cleanly, one after another.
Same as Luluwo, they all dropped.
The whole group, disabled in an instant.
The attacker had relied entirely on the element of surprise — his targets were already injured and weaponless — but the raw capability behind that single motion left no room for doubt.
A tentacle extended from his body, retrieving the fallen Recording Crystal, angling it toward the group.
Then a second version of himself split away, its shape shifting into an ordinary-looking beastman.
He intended to finish the job the beastmen had failed to close out — and hand his commander proof the mission had gone as ordered.
"What exactly do you people want from us?" Belto ground the words out through his teeth.
As far as he knew, the Skyrim Expedition Group had never gone looking for enemies.
The shadowed figure said nothing.
Its silence carried a weight that felt distinctly, indescribably malicious.
Inside, though, thoughts moved fast.
Why? Because you got too close to Captain Guts.
Commander Eliphis has been dangerously short on power lately. Originally, we intended to keep Captain Guts' human identity intact — but now she'll need the Demonfall Egg too. It's our best chance of overcoming Sein Dungeon.
If we can show her exactly how miserably all of you died, her negative emotions will spike hard. And once she falls, her power should climb further still — even more delicious than it already is.
Besides — the commander cares about his people. What you've all been doing has clearly displeased him.
The Assassination Squad was a shadow unit buried inside the Light Eagle Corps.
Every member carried their own Demonfall Egg, and every one of them was absolutely loyal to Eliphis.
Normally, they stayed embedded within various ordinary squads, invisible. The moment Eliphis gave an order, they mobilized instantly.
Not even the other captains knew the squad existed.
Eliphis could, technically, manipulate Elsa's negative emotions himself using his own talent. But naturally arising negative emotion carried far more potency with the Demonfall Egg than anything artificially cultivated.
And Elsa's raw talent was, genuinely, unmatched.
He had no intention of wasting even a fraction of it.
On top of that, recent events inside Sein Dungeon had left him with a real, gnawing fear of insufficient firepower. He'd originally planned to trigger her transformation a full year out.
Now, he had no choice but to move the timeline up.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Captain Guts looks like after the fall, too. She's already this captivating now. I can't even imagine how much more delicious she'll become.
With that thought settled, he decided to draw this out — put the Skyrim Expedition Group through the most brutal treatment he could manage.
"Heh heh."
He couldn't stop the laugh from slipping out.
He'd explained nothing directly, and yet everyone present could feel the pure malice radiating off him.
Nobody could stop the shiver that ran through them.
Decided. We start the blood sacrifice with the most irritating one first — Luluwo.
He'd already noted she wasn't actually dead. Already noted she was quietly doing something, too.
But nothing that registered as a real threat.
The shadowed figure laughed again, low and strange, and began closing the distance.
Smack.
Something detonated overhead.
The sky burst into brilliant color.
Fireworks?
The figure looked up.
A firework bloomed across the dark sky, painting it in fantastical light.
And the one who'd launched it —
Luluwo. Still flat on the ground.
She raised her head. Smiled.
"Should've caught it sooner. Why would wolves be howling out here, in the middle of nowhere, tonight of all nights?"
What wolf howling? Wait — could it be — no, they should be inside Sein Dungeon today. I confirmed it myself.
"One arrow, straight through the clouds — and the Farron Guard comes running."
"AWWOOOOO!"
A wolf's howl tore through the forest, rising straight into the heavens.
At that exact moment, the shadowed figure's head snapped upward.
There —
A gleaming Farron greatsword spun through the night air, descending straight for his skull.
The Farron Undead?
No.
Darrick — absent for a genuinely long stretch of time — had arrived.