"Being kicked around like a ball, covered in filth, chased by strange weapons, and having worms vomited all over you. Now let me ask you something — do you still like Sein Dungeon?"
"I… I…"
In his dazed, half-conscious state, Fingri caught the vague shape of a voice. He couldn't even tell whether someone was genuinely asking him a question or whether his mind was simply manufacturing one.
Nobody could reasonably form a positive opinion of something that had just tortured them this thoroughly. After everything he'd been through, anyone who resisted the urge to flip Sein Dungeon off entirely would already deserve some kind of moral commendation.
And they wanted a thumbs up on top of that?
Fingri hesitated, genuinely unable to settle on an honest answer.
The core problem was that all of it — every last humiliating second — had happened because he'd walked in of his own free will. And honestly, he'd survived considerably worse in his career, particularly in the stretch right after being cut from his old party.
Strangely, the specific brand of suffering Sein Dungeon had just delivered carried a faint, unwelcome nostalgia.
While he was still working through the question —
He woke up.
"Where am I?"
Fingri rubbed his eyes and stared up at an unfamiliar ceiling. Still inside the Cathedral of the Deep, apparently — lying on a soft, cotton-stuffed mattress comfortable enough to knock anyone out cold.
He didn't need to ask whose handiwork this was.
The moment he sat up, someone shouted:
"Mr. Fingri's awake!"
Tusk and the others rushed over immediately, their concern genuinely warm. Fingri answered a round of questions before turning to Matilda.
"What happened after?"
He'd blacked out somewhere around the dozenth exchange of being volleyed through the air like a shuttlecock, so the rest was a blank. Privately, he suspected that if Matilda had just let go of him at some point, the fall alone probably wouldn't have killed him.
Instead, she'd held on so tightly that she'd ended up getting knocked around right alongside him.
He was absolutely not going to say that out loud, though. She'd been trying to save him. Pointing that out would just poison the team dynamic for no reason.
After sorting through everyone's overlapping accounts, the picture came together. The Dragon Shout's raw destructive force had bled off during travel — by the time it actually connected, only the blunt impact remained. Which meant he and Matilda had essentially just been knocked out from repeated blows, nothing more sinister.
Aleya had led a surprise assault on the giants from behind, breaking their attack rhythm and pulling the two of them free. Matilda had gone down too, initially — but somehow, on impact with the ground, she'd come right back around. And once she was conscious again, the only emotion left in her was pure fury at having been used as a badminton shuttle.
She'd led the charge to finish off both Giant Slaves permanently.
Then, out of sheer stubbornness, she'd carried everyone across the second gate herself. If she couldn't make it across with the group after everything she'd just been through, what had any of it been for?
"So we're currently — we've already crossed every gate. Resting on the first floor for now."
Matilda gestured to the side. The entrances into the room they occupied had all been sealed off with plants grown by Aleya, keeping the outside monsters shut out.
"Everyone's just been waiting on you to wake up so you could take us up there, Mr. Fingri," Tusk said.
The high platform. The one they'd all been chasing.
Aleya assembled a large clock out of woven straw, showing that less than an hour remained before the dungeon closed for the day.
"Alright."
Fingri forced his exhausted body upright.
"We've come this far. We're going up to see it, no question."
Once the plants blocking the entrance were cleared, a wave of bloated, worm-faced creatures and Slaves poured in. Everyone was already braced for it — Fingri simply planted himself at the doorway and swung wildly, more than sufficient for handling the low-tier chaff.
The Giant Slave that had guarded the stairs to the high platform was gone, replaced by a single Worm-faced creature that occasionally cast a spell in their direction without posing any real threat.
Wading through the mud, they came across an item none of them had seen before —
[Bewitching Branch]
Consumes mana to charm an enemy struck by the branch. A charmed target temporarily becomes an ally.
The Empyrean Miquella is beloved by all things, and therefore possesses the power to compel affection from others by force.
"Who exactly is Miquella?"
Nobody could figure it out, so they let it go.
Once they reached the platform and successfully charmed a Cathedral Knight into fighting alongside them, awe and regret hit almost simultaneously. The effect was genuinely miraculous.
Which raised an obvious follow-up.
What if it worked on something bigger? Someone like — Wolnir?
Just thinking about it got everyone's pulse up.
Bone Fang made a decision on the spot: tomorrow, they'd come back, hunt down another Bewitching Branch, and test it directly on the Overlord.
For Fingri, the climb had been worth it. The view from the platform delivered.
Setting aside the crowd of Cathedral Knights and Deacons scattered around, the scenery alone made it obvious this was the heart of the Cathedral. From here, the entire structure spread out below in full view.
A massive fixture — pulpit or altar, impossible to say which with certainty — rose at the center of the platform. Rows of benches faced it in orderly lines, candlelight flickering dimly across the whole scene.
Fingri could picture it easily.
The Archbishop standing here, delivering sermons. The Church's highest-ranking members seated below, listening with full attention. And beneath the platform, tens of thousands of ordinary believers on their knees, absorbing whatever their god had to say.
Something occurred to him.
"We've been wandering this place for a while now, and we still haven't figured out exactly who this Cathedral even worships."
Gwyn? The title Lord of Sunlight felt fundamentally out of place against this atmosphere. The whole space was gloomy, sinister — this felt more like architecture built for something considerably darker.
"Forget it. Leave it to the lore hunters."
They'd assumed the pulpit was the end of the platform. Instead, a hidden path opened up behind it, descending somewhere deeper still.
The farther down they went, the more the cold and dread intensified. Statues lined both sides of the path — almost human, but not quite, and the uncanny valley effect grew strong enough that everyone started feeling genuinely unsettled.
The moment they stepped onto that path, an invisible weight settled over the entire group. Conversation, which had flowed easily just minutes earlier, cut off without anyone consciously deciding to stop.
Everyone exchanged glances.
"Why'd you go quiet?"
"Was about to ask you the same thing."
Atmosphere was a strange, elusive thing. When it shifted this abruptly, everyone felt it in the same instinctive place, without needing to be told.
The air itself seemed to churn slowly, thick and viscous. Pressure built at the edge of every mind — hard to describe precisely, but if a single word had to cover it —
Suppression. Or terror. Somewhere between the two.
The earlier spectacle of Fingri and Matilda getting batted around like shuttlecocks had been genuinely funny, in its own way — funny enough that everyone had briefly forgotten what the Cathedral of the Deep actually was.
The Road of Sacrifices, crawling with cannibals. Crucifixion Woods, home to mutated werewolves. The graveyard, wandering with half-human, half-worm corpses.
The horror had been accumulating this whole time, quietly, underneath the jokes.
"BZZZZZZ—!"
A piercing buzz erupted without warning. Even Fingri flinched and clapped both hands over his ears.
It went on and on. By the time everyone was grimacing through the pain splitting through their skulls, it finally began to fade.
Then, from some unplaceable direction, orchestral music started up.
Faint. Indistinct. As though it had traveled a long way to reach them — from somewhere else in space, or time, or both.
Unmistakably church music. Solemn. Dignified. Elegant. Devotional in a way that ached with sincerity.
Objectively far more pleasant than the buzzing. And yet somehow it had the opposite effect — stirring something buried in the back of everyone's mind, deepening the dread saturating the Cathedral rather than easing it.
Black mist bloomed in front of Fingri's eyes. He turned.
The path behind them was already lost to fog.
No going back now.
The phenomenon matched his earlier guess precisely. Whatever waited behind this platform was the Cathedral's boss.
Who, though?
That Lord of Cinder — Aldrich, Saint of the Deep?
"Don't be afraid, any of you. I'm here. Nothing's happening to you on my watch."
Fingri offered a round of steadying words before taking point.
Their footsteps carried across the stone floor with a strange resonance — each one landing like a step onto a living, beating heart.
White, inhuman statues emerged from the black mist one by one, stiff necks slowly rotating to track the adventurers as they passed.
The deeper they went, the clearer the orchestral music became. Genuinely masterful composition — the kind that could unravel an artist's sanity from pure exposure.
Then something else surfaced inside it.
A sound like —
Biting.
They'd heard that exact sound plenty of times already, on the Road of Sacrifices. The unmistakable wet sound of teeth working through human flesh.
Right as the mage reached for a Flash spell to light the space —
BOOM!
A single candle flame ignited out of nowhere.
Everyone turned toward it instinctively.
By its flickering light, a richly dressed Deacon emerged from the dark — short, obese, eyes burning red. The hunger for flesh sat completely undisguised on his face, saliva running from the corner of his torn mouth.
"Just one? That's not even—"
Before the sentence finished, a second candle lit.
A tall, gaunt Deacon stepped out beside the first, face withered down to bone-tight skin.
"I have a bad feeling about this."
Fingri's instincts had never once steered him wrong.
A third.
A fourth.
Candle flames kept igniting, one after another, and each new light landed like a fresh pulse against everyone's chest.
Eventually the lights weren't just ahead of them.
They were beside them.
Behind them.
At some point — nobody could pin the exact moment — they had been fully surrounded. The combined light illuminated the entire space at once.
Deacons of the Deep, ringed in every direction.
And their number had crossed one hundred without anyone noticing it happen.
"They're genuinely committed to this…"
Fingri had a full paragraph of commentary ready to go.
Then he saw the object at the center of it all, and every word died in his throat.
What the Deacons surrounded wasn't a pulpit. Wasn't a relic. Wasn't scripture.
It was a coffin.
Enormous. Overflowing with black sludge that dripped continuously over its edges.
The orchestral music reached its full climax.
And the Cathedral of the Deep's boss —
[Deacons of the Deep]
— arrived.