"Oh hey, there's a glowing item!"
The moment the mercenaries spotted the light, spirits lifted across the group. Grins spread from face to face.
But it wasn't the excitement of finding treasure.
It was the satisfaction of believing they had outsmarted the dungeon's trick — congratulating each other on their own cleverness before anyone had taken a single step toward it.
"What's this supposed to be? They really think we don't know how dungeons work? We're not idiots."
"Exactly. A glowing item placed this obviously? Even a fool knows something's waiting there."
"Haha! Not falling for that one!"
A mage cast Light, and something strange happened.
The moment the light source appeared, the darkness around it grew thicker. Denser. It devoured the light continuously, swallowing illumination almost as fast as it was produced.
"How about this — buff me with everything you've got, and I'll go test how dangerous this trap actually is."
Erka, whose combat strength ranked second only to Elsa within the squad, gave himself a confident thumbs-up — the signature pose of a certain Saiyan prince, complete with the same swagger.
Being "second only to Elsa" didn't carry the weight it sounded like. The gap between them was roughly the gap between ten and one.
Even accounting for that, Erka was a genuinely formidable fighter by any ordinary standard.
"Be careful regardless. Erka — take two more with you," Sali ordered.
He had briefly considered sending Elsa.
Then he remembered how dependent everyone had become on her presence, and abandoned the idea entirely. If they died to an unavoidable trap, better it be the result of their own effort than a failure that traced back to relying on her too heavily.
Buff after buff lit across Erka's body in rapid succession. Red. Green. Every shade imaginable.
"Oh yeah! I feel incredible!"
He clenched both fists as muscle rippled visibly beneath his armor. For a brief, glorious moment, he genuinely believed he could burst out of his own clothing through sheer accumulated power — that he could trade blows with Sword Saint Gapar himself and walk away standing.
"You're buffed. Go," the mage said, nudging him forward.
Filled with that borrowed confidence, Erka and his two enhanced companions advanced toward the light.
Before approaching, they had already cast Detect Dangerous Lifeforms across the area. The result came back clean. No danger detected.
Even so, they stayed cautious — danger in this place didn't always wear a monster's shape.
But Detect Dangerous Lifeforms had a known blind spot. It only registered creatures whose threat level fell within a certain range relative to the caster. Two categories slipped past it entirely.
The first: anything far weaker than the caster.
The second: anything far stronger.
The darkness surrounding them was so absolute that Erka could barely see the weapon in his own hand. The closer he got to the light, the heavier his unease became — a pressure with no clear source.
A few steps out, he broke into a sprint and snatched the glowing object off the ground in one motion.
An old book, radiating something distinctly ominous.
[Grave Warden Pyromancy Tome]
A pyromancy tome belonging to the Grave Wardens of the Catacombs of Carthus. Deliver it to a pyromancy master to learn black-flame pyromancies.
It is said that after Overlord Wolnir fell into the Abyss, the Grave Warden pyromancers discovered the power of black flames.
This actually seems like solid loot.
He had intended to grab it and pull straight back. Instead, the knowledge contained inside it flooded directly into his mind, and he froze where he stood.
When he came back to himself, he turned and waved the tome excitedly toward Sali, eager to share the find.
Then he noticed something.
Why did everyone look terrified?
They appeared to be shouting at him.
He couldn't hear a single word.
Confused, Erka looked down at them — and that was when Sali realized Erka couldn't hear them either. He immediately switched to a universal mercenary hand signal.
Run. Don't look back.
As anyone who has ever known an idiot can confirm, there's a universal law that governs all idiots: the harder you tell them not to do something, the more they absolutely have to do it.
The instant Erka saw the signal, his head turned on its own.
What's the big deal? It's just a giant hand grabbing me.
"…"
Wait.
Since when was I being grabbed?!
That explained why his perspective kept climbing. He was being lifted.
The darkness deepened further.
Yet strangely, visibility across the group suddenly improved — a holy radiance spreading through the chamber, the kind of light capable of pushing back even Abyssal corruption. The mercenaries' vision cleared.
In a typical story, holy light cutting through darkness meant good winning against evil. A divine figure descending from above. The villain falling. The heroes embracing in triumph while everyone celebrated.
But this was Sein Dungeon.
There was one minor complication.
What if the light dispelling the darkness came from the exact same source that had summoned the darkness in the first place?
Erka, enduring the glare, finally located the source.
Three enormous bracelets.
And bracelets implied an owner.
Conveniently, that owner was already emerging from the dark.
The ground shook. Black sludge spread across the floor in slow, deliberate waves.
The Abyss.
The genuine, dreaded Abyss — a force capable of pulling the entire world into darkness if given enough room to work.
Every mercenary in the chamber made the equivalent of a Sanity Check the moment the sludge came into view.
None of them rolled a critical failure.
None of them rolled a critical success either.
Every single one of them felt fear settle into their bones. The weaker-willed among them began trembling outright.
From within the Abyss, a gigantic skeletal hand emerged.
The hand holding Erka.
The bracelet circling its wrist shone with the same brilliant light that had been illuminating the chamber.
The light that had let them see clearly.
Belonged to the thing that was now holding one of their own.
"AAAAAAHHHH!"
Erka screamed.
Held closest, he was the first to see its full face clearly.
No action was required from it.
Death miasma erupted from the skeletal hand, swallowing him whole. He screamed again and again as every defensive spell layered onto him shattered in rapid succession, one after another, like glass under a hammer.
Human power meant nothing here.
Nobody was foolish enough to attempt a rescue.
Sali's whole body shook. He forced his breathing steady and began organizing what defenses he could.
Honestly — he had no idea how to fight something on this scale. Especially once the creature's full body finally cleared the darkness.
In that moment, fear in the chamber reached its absolute ceiling.
What stood before them looked, to every set of eyes present, like death itself given form.
A colossal skeletal body wrapped in lethal miasma. Whatever garments it had once worn had long since rotted away. Yet the crown resting atop its skull gleamed, untouched by time, brilliant and undimmed.
The crown that represented the single greatest achievement of an entire life.
The Overlord's crown.
Only its upper body had cleared the darkness, and already the pressure radiating off it was suffocating. When its hollow, darkness-filled eye sockets settled on the mercenaries —
There was no question left about its identity.
[Overlord Wolnir]
Sali's legs buckled. He took an involuntary step back.
By the time he remembered that visible fear was poison for morale, half the mercenaries around him were already on the ground, staring up at the giant with completely empty expressions.
A thought from earlier surfaced unbidden.
"Even if the final boss is Wolnir himself, I'll still go take a look."
His wish had come true.
He had, in fact, met Wolnir.
"I take it back…"
I was being casual! You didn't have to actually show up!
Elsa dropped into a low stance, every line of her body radiating hostility toward Wolnir. Against his sheer scale, she looked almost comically small. Almost harmless.
"Pull yourselves together!"
Sali tore open every Inspire scroll he had left in a single motion. Magical radiance washed over the group, struggling to repair the damage Wolnir's mere presence had inflicted on their minds.
"For the Commander — we fight this with everything we have!"
He moved among the fallen mercenaries personally, hauling each one back to their feet by force.
"Even if we lose, we bring back every scrap of intelligence we can on this enemy!"
Eliphis's name was enough. The mercenaries clawed back a fraction of courage and began to rise, drawing breath to shout their battle cry —
Then the screaming started. From somewhere behind them.
The two mercenaries who had gone with Erka.
They had stood too close to Wolnir for too long, and the psychological pressure had finally cracked something in their judgment. Panicking, they had bolted — directly behind him.
And what was behind Wolnir?
The Abyss.
Of course it was.
Their final screams echoed once through the dark before the darkness took them entirely.
One of the remaining mercenaries swallowed hard.
"V-Vice-Captain… if it eats you whole like that — can you still come back?"
Sali went rigid.
"…I don't know."
This wasn't merely touching the Abyss. This was being consumed by it completely. Within every story told about Sein Dungeon, the Abyss had always been treated as a forbidden, world-ending force — something where even brief contact could unravel a person's sanity.
What happened when someone was swallowed whole?
Would the Teleport Crystal even still work?
His hesitation alone crushed whatever fragile morale they had just clawed back.
There was no time left to think it through regardless.
Wolnir wasn't going to politely wait for a strategy.
His massive frame shifted. Death miasma surged outward in a wide arc, and for one brief instant he looked less like an enemy and more like the very concept of the First Dead given motion.
The mercenaries scattered, scrambling to dodge. Those who didn't make it screamed once and went silent.
That was the moment real desperation set in.
There was no retreat left.
Only the fight.
And maybe — just maybe — a chance.
One of Sali's arms had already been touched by the miasma. He cut it off without hesitation and immediately began barking orders.
"Stay away from him! Don't get pulled into the Abyss!"
"Mages — everything you've got, now!"
"Everyone else — protect the mages!"
A wall of spells surged toward Wolnir all at once. Several mercenaries burned through scrolls they had been saving for years. A fully-formed water dragon crashed against the giant skeleton with the force of a small siege engine.
And Wolnir didn't move.
Not even slightly.
To him, their combined assault registered as nothing more than a faint breeze. No visible impact whatsoever.
To the mercenaries, that absence of reaction was its own kind of proof — proof of exactly how far outmatched they were.
"That's impossible — the magic isn't doing anything?"
Sali's eyes went wide.
Adventurer reports had told him that even the Farron Undead Legion would stagger, just briefly, under sufficiently powerful magic. Hadn't Wolnir himself eventually fallen to that same Undead Legion?
Why was magic accomplishing nothing here?
The answer, in mechanical terms, was simple enough: his poise value was absurdly, almost comically high.
Unfortunately, nobody present had any concept of poise values or game mechanics. All they had was the raw, terrifying fact of it.
Wolnir swung one massive hand.
A simple attack. Nothing elaborate.
And not one person present could withstand it. The mercenaries went flying like leaves in a gale.
Only one figure leapt — upward, into the attack rather than away from it.
Elsa.
She swung her greatsword with everything she had, bringing it down against Wolnir's skull in a single, committed strike.
The impact rang through the chamber like the world cracking open — the kind of force that split mountains, that fractured bedrock.
Wolnir trembled.
Or perhaps he didn't.
Because the very next second, he resumed moving as though nothing whatsoever had touched him.
Then he reached out and grabbed her.
Again — no visible effect.
Why was everything they threw at him completely meaningless?
The power gap was simply too vast to bridge with effort alone.
Elsa twisted, trying to break free.
Thick clouds of death miasma erupted from Wolnir's body and swallowed her entirely.
BOOM.
Her greatsword hit the ground alone.