Vale lost sight of Salome, but that wasn't the only thing he lost.
Every single one of his senses had been taken from him. He was blind, deaf, anosmic, ageusic, and numb.
Not only did he feel like he was returned to the void, but feeling itself was taken from him. He wasn't seeing black or white; he wasn't seeing anything.
At this phenomenon, his existence felt dwarfed… not even. He didn't feel small; he felt nonexistent.
He'd called the inside of the Dungeon Core a void before… but now he knew just how wrong he was. That white expanse had something in it. He could look around. He had a sense of up, down, left and right. He could see his body. But, right now, he was nothing.
Thankfully, this experience was transient.
A moment later, his numbness was alleviated, and he felt the ground quake.
The next sense to return was his sight, which turned the empty nothingness into a black world that stretched far in every direction.
Then… he spotted a weird formation that shone in the darkness despite giving off no light. There was a round table with seven throne-like chairs surrounding it. Then, there were two people sitting in those chairs.
Finally, the rest of his senses returned, and a deep, almost metallic voice greeted him:
"Welcome… Lust."
Vale threw his head around in a frenzy, looking for Salome, but quickly figured out she wasn't near him. Or more so, he wasn't near her. He'd been taken somewhere. Still, if he were alive, it meant his core was alive and…
'Legion.'
He checked the page and saw all nine workers, Toy and Salome's names still there.
Vale breathed in deeply and tried to calm his anxious, rapidly beating heart.
The voice spoke again.
"Come…"
Vale slowly began sauntering toward the table. As he got closer, he was able to make out the two figures.
One of them was a slender girl sitting on a light blue throne. She was slumped over, her head resting on the table so he couldn't see her face, but she had sleek, blue hair that fell all the way to the floor and long, pale ears that poked out from the strands. As for what she was wearing, it was a tight-fitting blue dress.
As for the other one, he was most definitely the source of the voice. If it even was a he.
The throne he sat on was fashioned from onyx, with faint red gleams peeking through gaps in its surface.
His entire body was shrouded in dark metal armor.
The pauldrons had massive spikes, his gauntlets were shingled and made to look like claws. Vale couldn't see the lower half of the armor because of the table, but he assumed that not a single piece of skin was visible.
Finally, he wore a helmet with two gigantic horns that looked almost like pincers, reaching to the top of his throne, and glowing red eyes that peered through the slits in the helmet.
Yet, Vale couldn't see skin underneath — just darkness.
If intimidation were given form, it would be this man in front of him.
The man in the metal armor placed a hand on the table and began slowly tapping his finger, causing a rhythmic metallic echo.
"You may call me Wrath."
Vale approached the edge of the table, which had a weird crystal structure in the center, and scanned the ornate chairs surrounding it, which couldn't be described any other way than as a throne.
As for the five unclaimed chairs, there was a purple and gold, orange, yellow, green, and… pink.
Vale put the context clues together and slowly sat in the pink throne, looking toward the man in armor whose glowing red eyes peered from the hollow depths of his helm.
"For your own safety, don't speak and just listen, Lust."
The man who called himself Wrath stared directly at Vale while gesturing toward the sleeping blue-haired girl.
"Don't worry about your dungeon, Sloth right there took care of the current threat…"
Vale let off an internal sigh of relief, but did his best to make no changes to his facial expression.
While he couldn't entirely trust Wrath's words, it wasn't like he had the liberty to doubt. The proof of his breath was enough of a reason to trust that fact…
The skeptical aspect of his current predicament was what they'd called him here for. While they'd apparently saved him…
'Why? How?'
Vale knew that nothing cost more than something free.
There had to be a reason they saved him.
And, even more, an explanation for how they knew he was in trouble and where he was, when he didn't know that information himself.
Wrath leaned back in his chair and looked Vale up and down.
"You're quite masculine for Lust," Wrath said as he rubbed his metallic gauntlet along the underside of his helm. "The previous Lusts were all female… I'd at least expect a male one to be effeminate and androgynous…"
'Previous?'
Vale couldn't help but tilt his head in confusion, no matter how much he wanted to hide any reaction. He would have much more liked to question the man, but 'when someone who is decked out in gothic metal armor and calls themselves Wrath and warns you not to talk, you should probably listen.'
Wrath leaned a little to the side, and the air around him changed. It felt as if he smiled, but of course, no expression could be gleaned from the hollow darkness under the armor.
"Ah… perhaps you are due for an explanation… Where do I start…"
Wrath held up his right hand and slowly gestured toward all seven chairs.
"I don't know what world you came from, but the world you find yourself in now is called Pandora, and you are one of the most vile existences to the natives of this realm… a master of one of the Seven Vice Dungeons: the Dungeon of Lust…"
"The other six dungeons are mine, Wrath; hers, Sloth; as well as Gluttony, Greed, Envy, and… Pride. We, masters, are each very incarnations of a vice who, by our nature, sow terror throughout the world… A perspective terror, of course…"
Wrath's glowing gaze slowly drifted toward the sleeping girl equidistant from them.
"Pay close attention to what I'm about to tell you, or consider yourself dead."