Dungeon? This Tree? Why Don't You Join Me for Lunch? (Dungeon Core)
Chapter 110: The Castle

Chapter 110: Chapter 110: The Castle

It was like no other. I had never seen something like this before.

It was a fortress with a wall that had three entrances. That is to say, from what our spies were telling us, the wall was actually three walls one in the other!

The gates were no gates! Or at least I thought so.

Those were murder holes!

I looked at the map. I didn’t need Nick to explain to me where he was running off to.

His pride was not going to let him leave this castle, which was one of many, without conquering it and purging it.

But...

"If we are fast, we can cross the moat here, at this murder hole," he wasn’t even calling it a gate! And it was no gate, anyway!

It was the entrance of the sewer.

"And if they hadn’t placed poisonous gas inside of the sewer," what was he saying? Did people really do that? "Then we can pass through here," he pointed at another murder hole! There was an opening for crossbow bolts right next to it, darn it! "And from there scale the walls to avoid the killing zone."

He pointed at the second main gate.

"Nick," I murmured. Knowing that he was not going to let me do this. That he was not going to take me along.

But I was older than him. Had more patience.

"Let us build a tunnel under the fortress," it was a weak attempt.

We were at war. People were starving to death.

But I was clutching at the little doll seller, who couldn’t tell me her name, because she had no tongue.

Nor could she write. Which spoke volumes about the way Solas had ruled his kingdom.

About what my not paying my taxes had done to my fellow countrymen.

"No, we can’t," Nick shot the idea down. It was something of a dream of mine. To win a war as bloodlessly as possible.

But I knew that it wasn’t to be.

Because Nick was on the warpath.

"We move out!" I had already heard the plan. And my mind rune was shit.

It was underhanded of them to use me, obvious drake me, as a decoy but back then I didn’t realize that.

No, the only thing I was thinking of was the fact that my three Boliari men were going to invade a castle by themselves.

As Aron was blowing up the sewer behind them.

Titan was spreading poisonous gas.

And I was keeping a barrier around the castle, so there wouldn’t be any survivors.

I watched on, as they moved without looking back.

Nick placed the barrier and hooked me up without so much as a wave of his hand, and then the screams began.

My new daughter was crying. I gave her a flower, for I didn’t have a doll.

She began to whimper.

"We love you," I told her.

I had no idea since when she was a mute. Or if she could even hear anything.

She was just a small girl who was going to see the entire ugliness of the war front in all of its bloody glory.

Something I didn’t want for her to see, but I didn’t want to part with her, either.

"And your fathers are going to make sure that everyone has parents, just like you do!"

I had to tell her this. Even if I was robbing her of her choice to stay or go, she had followed calmly enough.

Then again, I had given her food. Glowing golden mushrooms, candy, everything she could possibly want!

"Look," there was a trickle of mana that was being filtered through me and given by Titan. I looked on, as the mushrooms finally got that one, final, one percent I had dreamt of, but never gotten.

That one percent which could turn someone from a cripple to a perfectly healthy person.

"Titan is healing you," that was a human sacrifice.

One using demons.

Methuselah told me to never use those. That they were evil. That I was going to mar my soul if I did use it.

But I... I...

The little girl grew a tongue right before my eyes. Her missing teeth grew back.

Her eyes, brown and pretty, blinked up at me.

"Papa?" She had not been a mute her entire life. No, she was there, my little girl.

Healthy.

A fountain of blood came out of the castle. How many demons had died at once I wondered, for them to produce a fountain of blood?

She looked at it. At that macabre building, where Tom had once played a princess.

Had it been a better place, back then? Had it been a more peaceful place?

"Papa?" she repeated as she placed the flower down on the ground. "What’s your name?"

I realized with a start that everything I had told her up to now had been for nothing.

She had been deaf, mute...

The only window to the world had been her eyes. And those eyes had seen much.

"Sylvan, my dove," I wanted to compare her to the symbol of peace. To wash away the shame that she had been through so much.

"Oh! That’s a pretty name! My name is Cassiopeia!"

It was a grown-up name for a child. A name I had heard before.

"And you, Sylvan," a name I knew to fear.

I let her go as if burned! That was no child!

"Are a fool. But a kind one."

That was the oracle! The one whose prophecies always come true!

"And you will die for your children," she turned to dust right before my eyes.

Titan rushed out of the castle seconds later. His blue eyes were wild, his nostrils flared.

"Sylvan! Sylvan, are you ok?"

I wasn’t.

I was 5,000 years old. An oracle who has never been wrong just told me I was going to die.

"For my children," for Pan, Mordred and Mortimer. The sons I had ignored for all of their lives. "Yes, gladly."

I was scared.

I was brave.

"But before that," I had no idea, but my grandfather Crassus had said the same about Theanore. "I will live."

We nymphs may fall on our backs. But, hey, when one does that, one sees the sky...

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