The Hundred Reigns 110: The Cocagne Affair (10)

Previous Chapter

-------

A/N: in between planes so posting at a bit earlier because I'll go radio silence for a few hours (going to Mexico for author meet up until the 23rd). Enjoy.

--------

Infiltrating the colosseum proved as simple as walking through the front door. 

The arena was a public building, after all, so he entered the reception hall alongside the crowd climbing up the stairs on their way to the stands. Today’s fight would involve a wolf shifter gladiator fighting a troll to the death, a bloody spectacle that would delight the rich and the masses alike. Merchants and nobles with purses full of coins bet with bookies on who would win, who would die quickly or slowly, and who would live…

It was difficult for Simon to contain his disgust. Spending time around Eole—and watching her being beaten and sold at an auction like a piece of meat—had already soured him on the institution of slavery, but watching people bet coins on the lives of others only furthered his scorn. This place inspired people to revel in their baser nature. 

I will show them blood, Simon told himself as he took a corner far away from the main hall. The Shadowguard’s intel on the arena’s layout was so far correct, and eventually led him into a small archway leading to a set of stairs leading down rather than up. Two guards stood watch there, far away from the main hall’s activity. Simon quickly checked that there was no other witness.  

“Halt,” one of the guards said, his spear raised at Simon. “Spectators aren’t allowed past this–”

“Petrify,” Simon cast with a wave of his hand. 

The two men’s flesh turned to stone in an instant, their faces frozen in expressions of fear and surprise. Simon walked down the stairs without a sound, put on his Overlord Class outfit, then cast a Fiendmask to hide behind his Belias demon disguise and followed that up with his new Nightveil spell. The latter’s effect cloaked him in a shadowy shroud of miasma that obscured his features and had the benefit of not being dispelled when taking damage like what happened with Fiendmask. The two spells combined turned him into a dreadful, otherworldly figure straight out of the Abyss. 

According to Remedia’s information, everyone in the arena’s lower levels was either a slave or a slaver. The first group he would liberate, to ensure they shared the tale of the massacre, and the latter he would slay. A simple enough task on paper.

He saw light at the bottom of the stairs to find another set of guards below with torches and playing cards. “Who goes there?” One asked upon hearing Simon’s footsteps, his hand reaching for his sword before freezing upon seeing his baleful visage. “What is that thi–”

Simon immediately activated his Dreadful Aura, his malice and ferocity hitting the four of them like a tidal wave. Their faces twisted in terror for the second right before his magic snuffed the life out of them. Their corpses fell upon the ground, their souls trapped in black gems. 

Was this how it felt to be Elios Magnos? To end another mortal being’s existence with a mere footstep? It was both a terrible and intoxicating feeling, to hold so much power over life and death.

Simon touched these fresh corpses and quickly animated them as zombies with Deathmastery.

“Stand guard and kill anyone trying to climb down these stairs,” Simon ordered his undead thralls under the light of torches. “Bring me back their corpses.”

And thus death began to stalk these cursed halls.

There were two pathways ahead of him—one of which should lead to a smuggler’s cove he would use to make his escape later—so Simon sent half his undead to secure his exit as he walked down the other tunnel, guided by distant noise. He swiftly arrived in what appeared to be an underground arena far less classy than the one above. Dozens of patrons shouted at two beasts kept trapped in a pit: a wing-clipped wyvern and griffin ferociously clawing at each other. He could smell their blood and feces from here. 

Screams welcomed Simon’s appearance, and he answered them with Hellthunder. His lightning coursed through the air, throwing spectators into the pit so they could participate in the gruesome spectacle they so relished. Most simply perished from fright due to Dreadful Aura’s effect, dropping miasma gems like flies… with one exception.

Simon spotted a guard unlike the others near a set of closed doors, or rather, he recognized him. That stranger was the spitting image of the smiling butcher that guarded the Cobweb’s hideout in Rosanne, a perfectly bland and nondescript figure with lips stretched unnaturally wide. He didn’t blink at the massacre nor recoil in fear of Simon’s Dreadful Aura. 

Was he that Valnean butcher’s twin? Or did the Prince of Spiders change the faces of all his operatives so they all looked the same? 

“You shouldn’t be here, sir,” he said, his ghastly grin unwavering. “I must kindly ask you to leave.”

Simon pointed his finger at the stranger. “Ectoplasmer.”

A monstrous, howling purple spirit of pure miasma erupted from his finger and struck the smiler in the chest, snuffing his life out in an instant. His corpse fell to the ground without a word, his face forever frozen in a ghastly grin…

For about a second before it crumbled away. 

Simon immediately noticed something was wrong with this man from the lack of soul gem created by Deathmastery, but what happened to the corpse only confirmed this intuition: the figure’s flesh and bones decomposed in seconds into dust and snow that swiftly melted away into nothingness. No traces that the stranger had ever existed remained. 

What was that… that thing? He recalled that Eole could tell the Valnean butcher wasn’t human, but Simon didn’t know of any living creature that crumbled to dust and snow upon death. The absence of a soul or miasma leaving the body only added to the mystery. 

Either way, Simon quickly collected all soul gems in the area in case he could extract something from them, left the wyvern and griffin to eat their new meals for now, raised most of the corpses as undead to raise further chaos, and then observed the door the stranger was guarding. He knew the other passages led to cells holding slaves, but this one hid an area that Remedia’s Shadowguard infiltrators had been unable to explore. Only Cobweb members were allowed in.

I should ensure none of the ruffians escape or destroy evidence of their criminal activities, Simon thought. I will free the slaves afterwards.

The door was locked, but Simon’s enhanced strength let him simply punch it off its hinges. A horrible stench assaulted his nostrils the moment he crossed the threshold: a nauseating blend of rot and feces. It reminded him of Duchar’s laboratory, except the necromancer usually at least managed to cover those smells up with alchemical concoctions. 

The next room opened into a chamber whose ceiling reached nearly fifteen feet tall, with walls of dressed stone and torches lighting it dimly. Simon identified the source of the smell as a pit in the center, and he only had to take a look at the swarm of flies hovering above it to understand what it contained. 

These barbarians didn’t bury the dead.

Duchar would call this wasteful, Simon thought as he checked the pit. A year spent hanging out with demons and necromancers had numbed him to such horrors, but the state of the bodies disgusted him still. They had been hacked to pieces to make it easier to pile them up. 

It wasn’t just beastmen in the pit either. Human bodies had been thrown inside, too. 

Simon heard noise coming from the next room over, alongside the sound of a door locking. He simply punched it open and stepped into the most bizarre room yet. 

It looked like some kind of laboratory at first view, smelling of wax, blood, and chemicals. A sturdy series of catwalks stretched around a set of four cylindrical vats filled with blood, within which floated what appeared to be dead, malformed shifters and scalefolk. One was akin to a ram-like satyr; the second a fish-tailed mermaid with grafted goat horns; the third had a scorpion tail; and the fourth would have resembled a kish woman if the wings didn’t look sewn onto her back. Shelves holding entire lineups of bloody bottles were marked with familiar symbols.

Zodiac signs.

Simon was so disturbed by the implications that he nearly missed the thumping sound of corpses hitting the floor. He looked up at the catwalk where half a dozen people—likely Cobweb agents or bandits—had fallen dead at the very sight of him… with a single exception. 

“You shouldn’t be here, sir,” a perfect copy of the smiling butcher from earlier said from atop a platform up on the catwalk, standing next to a familiar, yellow-painted door with a black handle and an eye symbol carved on the wood. “You should leave before our security team escorts you off the premises.”

Simon answered the not-so-veiled threat by casting Devil’s Arm, extending his hand towards the catwalk and grabbing the stranger by the throat. He didn’t resist, even as he was lifted above ground with inhuman strength. 

“What is going on here? Who are you?” Simon quickly realized he was asking the wrong question. “What are you?”

“I am not at liberty to give you that information,” the smiling… thing replied politely. 

“You will die if you don’t.”

“Oh, that will not be a problem,” the creature replied, his grin widening. “I was never alive in the first place.”

Simon scowled and resorted to using the password he used in Valne. “I am Wolf Cellar, looking for red widow meat,” he said, “The emperor over the sea told me that the blue widow spun a pretty web of pain.”

“I am sorry, I am not familiar with this procedure. Have you tried another shop?”

Simon grunted in annoyance and answered with a Mindflayer spell, blasting the stranger’s head with dark thoughts that would stun and horrify any normal person… yet his psychic energies flew straight past that creature as if it wasn’t even there. 

This thing registered as akin to a piece of furniture to his senses. Shocking him with Hellthunder didn’t cause any reaction either. He either didn’t feel pain or didn’t care.

“Petrify.” Simon turned the smiling thing to stone for later, in case Remedia could extract something from it. He tried to store it in his Inventory in case statues counted as objects, but was swiftly disappointed. “Let’s check that door.”

He grabbed the handle and turned it… only to find himself staring at a wall behind the threshold. He closed and reopened the door twice, to no avail. 

Something’s wrong, Simon thought as he left the door closed for now. There’s some trick to this. Maybe a code or a hidden condition.

With little to no clues to examine for now, Simon grabbed all the soul gems he could gather and moved on to check the bloody bottles. Besides Zodiac signs, each of them was numbered in a way that likely linked them to whatever test subjects or slaves those samples had been extracted from. The mutated shifters’ resemblance to certain creatures also bothered Simon. 

Were they… were they trying to locate or homegrow Zodiac Fiend hosts? The Cobweb had already trapped the Crab in a book, so they could be trying to weaponize or bind the others to their service. Silk tried to steal control of Asterion in a previous reign, after all. 

But to what end? Profit? Did they intend to sell tamed archdemons as weapons to the highest bidders, or did the Prince of Spiders play for higher stakes–

Click.

Simon’s head snapped towards the platform atop the catwalk. The yellow door’s knob was turning.

Someone had unlocked it from the other side. 

Simon renewed his Shadowshield and Energumen buffs right as it opened. He could see a brief glimpse of a corridor full of doors beyond the threshold; the very same one he took in Valne to meet with Silk and the Prince of Spiders for the first time. 

A man stepped out of that maze.

He was blonde and with blue eyes, but that was all Simon could glimpse. Every inch of the stranger’s skin, except for a tuft of hair and the upper part of his visage, was cloaked in a black body suit which Simon recognized as a slightly customized variant of the Ninja Vassal Class outfit. His arms and ankles were armored, his chest was protected by mail, his head covered by a mouth mask and a dark blue turban. His curved saber was sheathed, and Simon spotted some strange, metallic contraption akin to a small metal tube attached to a handle at his belt. 

“What is going on here?” he asked in a foreign tongue that Simon’s Perks immediately translated. Definitely a Valnean dialect. He closed the door behind him the moment he spotted Simon. “Ugh, did the boys mess up your summoning or something?”

A teleportation network, Simon guessed. A lot of things were starting to make sense now. They use those magic doors to travel across the continent somehow. That’s how they can move about so quickly and manage a global organization.

“Who are you?” Simon asked, taking the Ninja slightly aback. 

“The name’s Renal, big boy.” Simon recognized it as the alias of a Cobweb agent whose badge allowed him to infiltrate the Rosanne adventurer guild. “Since you can talk, I suppose you can’t be a reasonable shadow demon thingie and just crawl back to the Abyss?”

“Not until you tell me what you’re trying to do here,” Simon replied, raising a finger at the man. “Why are you interested in the Zodiac Fiends? Why do you seek to collect their crystals?”

“You’re too well-informed for a demon just catapulted into this plane of existence.” Renal squinted behind his mask and then slammed his hands together in a series of hand signs. “Summoning Scroll: Earth Spider–”

Simon proved quicker on the draw and tried to Petrify him, but the ninja shrugged off his spell and quickly struck the ground with his palm. A complex script of runes materialized on the floor and then conjured a monstrous creature. An ox-sized, three-eyed spider with sharp mandibles and blades for legs quickly crawled down the catwalk, poison dripping from its fangs. 

Simon immediately acted by blasting them both with Mindflayer. His psychic energies erupted in a cone that struck the spider and then its master; while the former shrieked and simply recoiled for a second, Renal was hurled back against the yellow door and left stunned. His body turned invisible at the very moment of impact and disappeared from view. 

The spider shrieked and pounced at Simon, who caught its blade-arms with his bare hands. His own inhuman strength, which allowed him to break walls with a punch, was put to the test by the creature as it pushed him towards the exit. It viciously slammed him against a wall and attempted to bite off his head, until Simon repelled it across the room with a Chaos Wave. The monster hit one of the vats, shattering it and spilling its contents all over the floor. 

Simon barely had time to recover when projectiles coming out of nowhere began to bounce off his armor with violent force, dispelling his Fiendmask but not Nightveil. The sound of crackling lightning echoed across the hall, followed by the impact of something exploding against his chest in a blast of electricity coursing through his flesh and bones. 

Thankfully, being allowed to practice with the Mage meant Simon had been able to forge his elemental-protection rings in this reign, so he quickly summoned the appropriate one from his inventory. The next projectile did nothing against him. 

Lightning damage negated by Ring of Cursed Thunder!

That invisible prick! Simon unleashed a blast of Hellfire at the platform on the catwalk and set it all ablaze in an attempt to smoke out Renal. He quickly saw his outline rushing across the flames and flying down the catwalk. What’s that device he’s using, some manalith propeller?!

The spider smashed the ground and caused the floor beneath Simon’s feet to crumble. He barely had time to step to the side and avoid falling into a widening pit. An invisible blade struck him in the belly, piercing through his armor and drawing blood.

Instadeath & Poison negated by Unyielding Essence. 

Simon grunted as he called upon his cows’ lifeforce to heal his wounds and quickly retaliated. “Countdown.”

Two ‘five’ spectral numbers appeared; one floating over the spider’s head, the other over an empty spot to Simon’s left. 

I have you now, Simon thought as he summoned the Overlord scepter into his hand and slammed it at the invisible Renal. The blow flung him across the room with a crack and dispelled his camouflage. Your time is up. 

Renal managed to land on his feet with catlike grace, one hand holding his bleeding chest, his eyes looking up at the number above his head with fear; doubly so when it climbed down from five to four.  

“Fuck!” he cursed, once again slamming his hands together. “Elusive Eclipse, Shadow Clone!”

Renal’s features began to shift and blur, while his shadow rose into the form of a perfect, physical copy of the Ninja. The real one still had his cursed Countdown number floating above his head, which made it easy to tell them apart.

Simon moved to blast the original with Hellthunder, but the monstrous spider’s mouth fired a web string at his hand and then pulled hard. This threw off his aim, his lightning missing Renal by an inch as he and his copy dodged in a blur of speed.

The spider tried to web up Simon’s entire hand, but he countered by casting Devil’s Arm and extending it. His claw-nails sank into the spider’s eyes and grabbed it by its now bleeding sockets, with the creature barely having time to screech out in pain before Simon tore off its skull and splattered it against a wall.

A flash of pain followed a dash of steel, then a second and a third. Renal and his clone blinked in and out of sight, their curved sabers lacerating his Nightveil and armor. The clone’s attacks felt as real as those of the original.

Critical hit! Critical hit! Critical hit!

They’re too fast for my eyes to follow! Simon cursed as he swung his scepter at empty air and received another strike for his trouble. His mediocre Agility and average Perception had met their natural enemy… but he didn’t need to see his foe to fight back. Mindflayer!

His fury erupted into a blast of psychic energy that dispelled the clone and threw Renal to the ground. The Ninja held his head as Simon’s malice wormed its way into his mind.

“Let’s see you run now,” Simon said as he raised his scepter high.

He brought it down and kneecapped Renal in a violent smash.

The Ninja screamed in pain as Simon then lifted him by the throat, his limp, bloody legs dangling above the floor.

“You have less than two minutes to live,” Simon warned the Ninja. His Countdown had descended down to two. “Tell me what I want to know and I will let you live.”

“C-can’t…” Renal coughed blood. “They… they’ll kill me…”

“Death at your masters’ hands is a possibility, but death at mine is a certainty.” Simon looked up to the number. “One minute.”

Renal coughed. “They’ll… do worse.”

His Countdown hit zero, snuffing out his life in an instant.

We are not done, ruffian, Simon thought as he forced Renal’s soul to coalesce into a soul gem he put in his Inventory. You will answer me.

Level 51 Overlord Perk: Warmonger VI (Passive): You automatically form a telepathic link with your mount, and any spell that you cast on yourself will also apply to them, so long as the two of you remain in physical contact. 

No doubt this Perk had been stolen from the Rider. Dassein had to be sneezing somewhere in Telluria. 

A strident sound interrupted Simon’s thoughts. He looked up at its source to find that the yellow door from earlier had begun to ooze mana. The eye symbol on its surface was closing its eyelid, the wood cracking around it. A tremor began to shake the room in ever-increasing shockwaves. 

Realizing the danger, Simon immediately rushed to the exit right as the ceiling began to collapse behind him.

The Cobweb had decided to literally bury all the evidence. 

------

Next Chapter