One. Two.
Three.
Four.
Ten.
A hundred.
"For the love of every god in existence…"
Tusk's mouth had fallen open wide enough that he looked like he'd swallowed something whole.
"I have never seen a boss fight this massive in Sein Dungeon."
The Deacons of the Deep.
The plural in that name suddenly felt almost too accurate.
Just moments earlier, someone had joked that using Deacon-tier enemies as ordinary trash mobs inside the Cathedral seemed almost beneath them.
Nobody had that joke left in them anymore.
Matilda shot Fingri a look.
Hadn't he said something like this not long ago?
"If I were designing it, I'd put hundreds — thousands, even — of Deacons in one spot. Now that would be interesting. Sein's current design is far too boring."
Congratulations. He'd gotten exactly what he'd asked for.
Fingri offered an awkward smile, eyes locked on the enormous coffin at the center of the Deacon formation.
He could sense the residue of something powerful that had once occupied that coffin. That presence had departed at some point, leaving only the black sludge coating its exterior — sludge that shared the exact same aura as the black slime creatures scattered across the Cathedral's first floor.
Its name:
[Aldrich's Corrupted Flesh]
Only then did the earlier bonfire vision resurface in his memory.
That coffin — it was Aldrich's. Saint of the Deep.
If that was true, the presence of hundreds of Deacons here made complete sense. They were standing guard over their saint's coffin.
Suddenly they didn't look pathetic at all.
There was something quietly, unsettlingly religious about them.
And within the Cathedral's atmosphere, that religious quality had curdled into something else entirely.
Terror.
Hundreds of glowing red eyes fixed on the adventurers at once. Nightmare given physical form.
Compared to previous bosses, the Deacons individually lacked the crushing majesty of a single powerful enemy. But in aggregate, they were genuinely frightening.
They raised their ceremonial weapons in unison. Fireballs — large and small — bloomed across the air and descended like a meteor shower.
Normally, the slow crawl of these fireballs would have earned a laugh. But with dozens upon dozens converging simultaneously, the sheer scale flattened any humor into pure pressure.
"Aleya!"
Fingri didn't need to explain further. She had already grown a wall of frost-covered trees between the group and the incoming barrage — some far-northern species, apparently, extremely effective against fire magic.
Her plant-assisted fighting style bore some resemblance to Stella's aunt Wienma's technique. The difference was that Aleya needed actual seeds to work with, while Wienma could conjure plants directly from nothing.
A clear gap in raw capability.
Fireballs detonated continuously. Despite the heat, the deep cold clinging to the Cathedral refused to fade.
Every eye turned to Fingri.
"Could the win condition simply be killing every Deacon?"
He scanned the group. Individually, each Deacon was genuinely weak — Bone Fang could handle them one-on-one without much difficulty. High numbers, low individual threat. As long as everyone tracked the magic carefully, the Deacons of the Deep might actually turn out to be one of Sein's easiest bosses.
"Ranged first. Avoid melee unless you have no choice. Mages — frost barriers against the fireballs. And everyone — know your limits. Safety first, always."
Fingri clapped a hand to his chest and delivered the confident smile of a dependable adult.
"We'll handle the real trouble!"
Combat erupted instantly.
Aleya split the battlefield with growing plants, funneling most of the Deacons toward the Hasavi Party and leaving only a small cluster for Bone Fang.
With numbers already past a hundred, counting had stopped being useful. But once combat began, Fingri noticed something quickly. Sheer quantity hadn't produced a qualitative shift. The Deacons were fighting independently, essentially a large group of individually weak monsters gathered in one room rather than a coordinated force.
Adventurers could carve through them and back out with relative ease. Area attacks weren't in short supply either.
At this rate, victory should come quickly.
Fingri dropped a Deacon with every swing. Matilda flattened two with every punch. Corpses flew through the air, and the intimidating headcount steadily thinned.
Everything looked to be going smoothly.
Then panicked screaming erupted from Bone Fang's isolated section.
"What happened?"
Fingri leapt over to check and nearly swore aloud.
He turned to Aleya.
"What happened here? Didn't you only leave them a handful?"
Aleya nodded, confused. She'd isolated roughly a dozen Deacons with Bone Fang, intending for them to clear that small number and rest safely inside their sealed pocket.
"Then look at this and tell me what's going on!"
Aleya leaned over.
Her scarecrow body nearly fell apart from shock.
The isolated pocket she'd sealed off was now completely packed with Deacons — Bone Fang squeezed together like sardines in a can.
"When did there get to be this many?!"
The visual impact left her genuinely speechless. When she finally spoke again, her voice had regressed into something startlingly childlike.
With that many bodies crammed into that little space, Tusk's group couldn't fight properly, and the Deacons couldn't cast properly either. The whole thing degraded into fists, teeth, and whatever else anyone had available.
Fingri dove in to pull people out.
He managed to save four, Tusk included.
Everyone else had died in the crush.
"[Great Fireball]!"
Fingri cast the spell, intending to wipe out the packed Deacons in one motion.
His brain damage meant his spellcasting remained fundamentally unpredictable, though — the mid-tier Great Fireball warped mid-cast into a Royal-tier spell instead.
[Sea of Flames]
Blazing fire swallowed the Deacons instantly. At the same moment, Fingri's vision blacked out — the spell had drained a catastrophic amount of his mana, and he nearly toppled into his own flames.
Nobody understood, even now, why so many Deacons had suddenly materialized. There was no time left to figure it out.
Counting the ones just incinerated, there should only be single digits remaining.
Fingri felt something shift. Drinking a mana potion, he glanced toward Aldrich's coffin.
Without the Deacons' candlelight, the arena had gone dark again.
Then —
Tiny points of candlelight began blooming through the darkness, one by one.
Clink.
His hand shook. The potion slipped free and shattered on the stone.
"Wait — wait, wait — are you serious? They can resurrect too?"
The arena flooded with light again.
Which meant only one thing.
The Deacons of the Deep had come back.
Every last Deacon they'd wiped out stood before them again, completely unharmed.
And somehow, there seemed to be even more of them than before.
A streak of red light darted between the crowd — not particularly hidden, but not obvious either. Easy to miss unless you already knew to look.
"Undead? No — something's off. There's a piece we're missing."
Fingri fixed his attention on the coffin. Was it feeding the resurrection?
Before he could give the order to attack it, the Deacons began clustering into groups of three, weapons raised in unison.
Then —
Red flame. Black Deep energy. White Force. Every category of "magic" bloomed across the arena simultaneously, moving with startling speed. The previously sluggish spells now closed distance with genuine urgency.
The sky filled with magic.
The Deacons of the Deep had unlocked their combination attack.
[Sein Dungeon — Deacons of the Deep Mechanic #1: Once every Deacon has died at least once, their combination skills unlock.]
"Fall back!"
The Hasavi Party specialized in combat and defense — but with magic saturating the entire sky, even Matilda couldn't guarantee her armor would absorb all of it. They pulled back into a defensive posture out of pure necessity.
The Deacons supported each other, weaving stronger, faster combined spells across the entire offensive and support spectrum. Slow individually, devastating once chained together.
But that wasn't the real problem.
The real problem was a dark-purple magic type unlike anything the original Dark Souls had ever featured. Its effect was simple: it accumulated Fear. Much like the Headless Ape's roar, sustained exposure eventually put an adventurer into the same state Leon had experienced that day.
[Mechanic #2: Dark-purple magic accumulates the "Fear" status.]
Wade had added this specifically to counter defensive players — particularly shield-and-spear builds. It forced total, unbroken concentration through the fight: tracking ordinary magic and identifying the dark-purple threads simultaneously.
Sustained mental strain was, in itself, a resource drain. And given how individually weak the original Deacons were, once Fear reached its cap, the resulting hallucinations fit this location a little too perfectly.
"AAAAAAAH!"
One of Bone Fang's shield-bearers, trusting his magical shield completely, refused to dodge and simply tanked hit after hit head-on — gulping stamina potions between each blow.
If anyone was going to succumb to Fear, it was going to be him first.
His vision filled with black ocean.
Except it wasn't ocean.
It was something identical to Aldrich's Corrupted Flesh.
Wait — that was Aldrich. Saint of the Deep himself.
He watched, paralyzed, as the figure devoured him bite by bite.
What kind of saint was this? Nothing but a cannibalistic monster wearing sanctity like a costume.
The sound of flesh tearing. The sound of teeth grinding. Every horrible noise layered together into something that felt engineered to unravel a mind directly.
Only then did he understand.
The Road of Sacrifices existed because of this.
"What happened to you?!"
Tusk found his companion collapsed and rushed over — the man's body was shaking violently, foam pooling at his mouth, on the edge of death.
Meanwhile, across the battlefield, Matilda hurled Fingri into the air. He landed a direct hit on the coffin with Carian Piercer, immediately followed by —
[Gavel of Haima]!
The coffin shuddered. Every Deacon's body trembled with it.
"Did that do something?"
Before he could celebrate, the Deacons resumed moving normally. They hadn't even reacted.
His attack had, however, knocked loose a portion of the Corrupted Flesh clinging to the coffin's surface — it hit the ground, writhed into a rough humanoid shape, and joined the assault.
Wrong guess.
The coffin wasn't the source of the resurrections.
"Then what in the world is causing it?"
The fight had run long enough that the Deacons' magic kept intensifying further. Deep magic rained across the arena continuously now. Their whispers echoed through the Cathedral in a constant, eerie undertone, the atmosphere growing heavier by the second.
Matilda's armor was riddled with dents — too much damage too fast, outpacing her passive regeneration. Both of Fingri's blades had been ruined. His last packet of Repair Powder was already spent. Aleya stared into her rapidly emptying seed pouch with something close to genuine heartbreak.
The worse things got, the sharper Fingri's focus became. He hunted for the way out of this.
Then —
He caught the red streak again. It emerged from a Deacon he'd just killed and fled directly into the crowd.
"They didn't resurrect that time?"
He looked around. Every other Deacon he killed produced an immediate replacement from the darkness. But the one with red light glowing in its chest — once that one died, no new Deacon appeared.
"The red light! Kill whoever's carrying the red light!"
Everyone trusted the call without question. They started hunting through the crowd. Once they knew what they were looking for, the light became strikingly obvious. One Deacon after another stopped respawning. The area available for the red light to flee into shrank steadily.
"Die!"
Tusk locked onto it and closed the distance in a heartbeat.
But the Deacon standing before him looked distinctly different from the rest. The others wore red or purple robes. This one wore pure white, complete with a white mitre, staff raised in a gesture of clear authority.
[Mechanic #3: Once Deacon numbers drop below half, the Archdeacon appears, and the red aura permanently attaches to him.]
[Mechanic #4: Once the Archdeacon appears, all remaining Deacons of the Deep collectively charge a battlefield-wide ultimate attack with an instant-death effect.]
Both mechanics tracked fairly closely to the source material. The only real deviation was timing — the ultimate had been moved up considerably.
The Deacons raised their weapons in perfect unison. Black energy poured from their bodies, gathering overhead into dense, oppressive storm clouds.
A profound sense of impending catastrophe settled over every adventurer at once.
Something very, very bad was about to happen.