Chapter Fifty-One: Emerging from the Darkness Is...

Darker than darkness itself is the human heart.

Within the Dark Guild, which had thoroughly embraced the tenets of the Dark Forest Doctrine, this maxim—penned by the founding Guildmaster—was universally accepted as absolute truth. Every member concealed their identity with deliberate care, interacting with others warily, trusting no one in the slightest. For the sake of power and status, they would unhesitatingly trample those around them, using them as stepping stones to be discarded once spent, leaving no trace of threat behind.

Yet there was one who could scoff at all this, who had the right to do so.

That was the Guildmaster of the Dark Guild, the enigmatic figure known as Ash.

As the one who had passed down this maxim, he had every reason to sneer at the foolish and laughable intellect of humanity—yes, humanity itself.

The current Guildmaster, Ash, was not, in fact, a member of the human race as commonly understood.

More precisely, none of the Guildmasters after the first few, in all the history of the Dark Guild, could be counted among humanity. After their predecessors had defeated one formidable foe after another lurking in the shadows, achieving unrivaled supremacy, each and every one of them became something other than human.

Among the rich legacies left by their predecessors, there was one bequeathal that was deliberately interwoven into the inheritance and thus passed on to each successor.

That was personality.

—The Wisdom of the Serpent.

This artifact, crafted in the era of the ancient kings by alchemists from the skulls of greater fiends, possessed the power to copy the user’s personality and, under certain conditions, overwrite that of the inheritor. The first Guildmaster, at the end of his life, chose this method to achieve a kind of immortality, to perpetuate his wicked wisdom through the ages.

But he never anticipated what sort of monstrous horror would be birthed from the repeated copying and overwriting of personalities. The second, third, fourth, fifth... generation after generation of cunning and evil accumulated, until at last, something unprecedentedly terrifying was born—a true fiend.

It had no name, nor did it need one, for it was... the Dark Guild itself.

Ash was its most important vessel, yet that body was far too frail for its purposes. Its will, its soul, parasitized countless human hosts. The increasingly rampant fiendification in the Lower Districts was too often blamed solely on the expanding Mist of the Nameless, but few realized that a significant portion of these hosts had become its vessels, its extensions, its sustenance.

It was a fiend born from the evil within humanity, entrusted with the mission of ending humankind.

Yet its will was too powerful, so mighty that the frail human form could not bear its spirit. It was as if an invisible membrane kept it from fully descending into the material world; it could only exert subtle influences upon those it possessed, nudging the course of fate.

Naturally, it was not content with this.

It longed for a perfect vessel, one able to contain its spirit fully, to command the world and all things within it at will. Thus, in answer to its desire, the vast force of the Dark Guild in the Lower Districts stirred.

The creation of artificial fiends began.

Monstrous hybrids, grafted from the flesh of greater fiends and humans, were conceived in this context, and it was not long before the first prototype was completed.

This was the Dark Earth Mother.

This being was, in its heart, the vessel most aligned with its own essence. Though by modern standards, much of the technical process was crude, at the time it represented the limits of human capability, and there was no reason to refuse such a body.

And yet—

It was rejected.

Blind, mad chaos rebuffed its entry; the body, too powerful, instinctively resisted the invading spirit, leaving the mind of the deranged human to reign over the magnificent vessel. Bound by human limitations, that soul could not master the chaos incarnate, and could only give in to bestial instinct—devouring the matter of the mines endlessly, spawning batch after batch of grotesque, ravenous monsters.

It had failed.

Such a monster, with the power of endless consumption, could not be allowed to remain. Even this formless fiend deeply feared it. Thus, it used special means to cast this uncontrollable fiend into a deep, unending Emerald Dream, sealing the creature at the outer fringes of the Dark Guild.

And now—now, it seemed someone had their sights set on it.

Ash, the human interface for the will of the Dark Guild, paused before the holographic display of the Ildan Mine. A surge of anger rose within him, his sharp nails slicing into his frail flesh, crimson blood trickling down his fingers. He lifted his head, and in his deep brown eyes a fire seemed to burn: “To lay hands on what is mine—unforgivable—”

This was no accident; the intruder had come well-prepared.

Not only was their route precise, but they had the strength to breach the defenses it had so carefully arranged. Hundreds, even thousands, of man-eating monsters guarded the way. Anyone capable of slaughtering them all could not be ordinary. They must be either one of the Glorious, those upper-district inheritors of the Ancients’ blood, or a Swordbearer of the Order, those who worshipped light and order. Otherwise... perhaps only the Mask remained.

The image of that not-unfamiliar bronze mask flitted through Ash’s mind, and for a rare moment, apprehension crept across his ashen face. If there was any one in the Lower Districts that warranted his caution, it was the one known as the Shadow King of the Lower Districts—the Mask—and that traveler who could return from the Deepest Night.

To neutralize this threat, he had even stirred up unrest upon hearing that one of Michelangelo’s minor underlings had died, deliberately dispatching his own killer to target a youth from the Upper Districts, hoping to draw the gaze of the Upper Districts to the Mask, expose his identity, and eliminate him in the most physical sense.

Alas, he had failed, and even his strongest killer, Fog Night, had vanished into the mists.

This infuriated him greatly, for—

The killers were also his property, prepared as spare bodies for himself. Their importance perhaps even exceeded that of the Dark Earth Mother, who slumbered in the Emerald Dream.

If necessary, he was prepared to release the Dark Earth Mother.

After all, it was only a half-finished product. Though its potential rivaled that of a greater fiend, anything he could not control was, in his eyes, a half-finished product—one that could be discarded at any time. Even if it pained him to do so, the heart of a fiend was ever stone-cold.

When the unknown intruder broke through the fourth wave of monsters, the malformed fiend born of the Dark Guild’s sins finally steeled itself—if conventional defenses would not suffice, only the killers and the Dark Earth Mother remained as options. Given the choice, it would always favor the more complete killers over the half-finished Earth Mother.

Thus, awakening the Dark Earth Mother became a reluctant necessity.

May it be possible—he hoped—to subdue the Mother of Monsters once she reawakened.

His humanoid interface let out a very human sigh, then, among the dense array of controls in the hall, entered a sequence of secret codes and pressed his palm upon the console. "In the name of the Dark Guild, emergency combat status is declared. Authorization granted: release the ultimate defense weapon, the Dark Earth Mother."

All was calm. Nothing seemed to happen in the hall; the silence was such that even the drop of a pin could be heard.

Ash betrayed not the slightest surprise, for this was as it should be. He was but the transmitter of the command; the ones to receive and execute it were not present here, but scattered throughout the Dark Guild—throughout the entire subterranean world.

Hidden deep within the unseen framework of steel beneath the earth, the highest authority of the Dark Guild’s god was executed with precision by its agents. The linked engines roared to life, belching fire and steam, countless mechanical arms moving with intimidating purpose. The clash and roar of metal shattered the long-standing stillness of the lower world—and then, the supreme command reached the deepest end of the mines, into that barren, suffocating darkness.

A thunderous boom!

It was as if something had been roused from slumber; the world quivered violently, a shower of crushed stone raining from above. Had there been light here, it would surely have blotted out the sky, but... in this strange void, the debris seemed to be swallowed by something, leaving not even the faintest splash.

Command confirmed.

The flow of anesthetics ceased.
—A mechanical arm released its hold.

The flow of tranquilizers ceased.
—A mechanical arm released its hold.

The flow of sedatives ceased.
—A mechanical arm released its hold.

Awakening protocol initiated.

With a deafening din, the cavern echoed with the sound of machinery. Hundreds, if not thousands, of mechanical arms released their grip on "something."

And then... the world fell silent again.

A deathly, absolute silence devoid of all life. No wind, no water, not even sound inhabited the empty cavern—existence itself seemed to have been devoured by a great void.

This was—

The Dark Earth Mother!

Countless crimson eyes blossomed in the cavern’s recesses like flowers after the rain. A titanic form, vast enough to fill the mine, stirred to life. Endless darkness writhed, as though some unspeakable being had begun to move. The entire underground world, both hollow and full, was now filled with a revolting, ominous cacophony.

—The mothers of all man-eating monsters had awoken from the dark.

And they were given souls!

At last, the monsters of the deep shed their bestial name; only now did they truly become fiends.

To celebrate their rebirth—mindless as they were—these fiends would pay homage to the glory of darkness with blood and slaughter, offering up death and the wails of despair to the great Mother of Life.

So they howled, they surged, they began their hunt.

From this moment, the Ildan Mine became, in every sense, a cave of death.

No one would survive.