Chapter 105: Maid vs The World

In a dungeon on the Southern continent, a young woman was skinning bodies of every kind with a dagger.

Monsters, animals, human beings.

They were laid out along the stone floor across the whole length of the room, and she moved from one to the next without hurrying, kneeling over each in turn, separating the bones from the body and taking care not to mix them up between corpses.

The clean bones piled up on her right, sorted by size, in neat little stacks. Everything else gathered on her left.

When she was done with the last one, she gathered up everything that wasn’t bone and threw it into her dungeon core, which swallowed it without a sound.

"Phewww~ Finally done!"

She stood up and ran a hand across her forehead, pleased with her work, smearing a streak of blood over it in the same motion that dried slowly on her skin.

Then she lowered that hand, still holding the knife, over the bones.

"Bone Awakening."

The skeletons rose in front of her.

They assembled themselves, piece by piece, straightened up on the stone and stood there in ranks, turned toward her, doing nothing but looking at her.

"Good. Go and join the oth—"

She was cut off by the notifications appearing in front of her.

She then opened the global chat.

A smile spread across her lips as she read.

It didn’t stop where smiles stop. It kept climbing, baring her teeth all the way back, pulling her cheeks up until the bottoms of her eyes creased.

She brought both bloodied hands to her face and pressed them there, fingers spread, the flat of the knife coming to rest against her right cheek. The blood, still warm, slid slowly along her jaw and ran down her neck.

She rocked forward and back, once, twice, and a breath escaped her.

"Soooo, you’re on the same continent as me, Maid~~"

~~

Still on the Southern continent, on the top floor of a tall and rather sophisticated tower, with an enormous letter H across its face.

A man in his forties, white hair, a scar over one eye, in a black suit tight across a frame as muscular as it was large, was listening to a fly.

The room was silent. The windows looked out over the entire city, far below, and nobody else was on that floor.

When it had finished speaking, he opened a wooden box on his desk and took out two cigars, trimming the ends one after the other.

He then put them both in his mouth.

A flame appeared at the end of his hand and lit them together.

He drew in a great lungful of smoke, then let it out slowly, and the office gradually disappeared behind a thick layer that climbed to the ceiling and spread out across it.

Already feeling a headache coming on, he spoke to himself, cigars still between his teeth.

"Looks like the hero association is going to have a great deal of work ahead of it..."

~~

In an office as luxurious as they come, surrounded by servants, a man with crimson red hair was listening to what a fly had to say.

Everything in that room was made to be seen. Gilding ran along the mouldings up to the painted ceiling, light fell through tall windows onto a parquet floor without a single mark on it, and the servants stood against the walls, motionless, at equal distances from one another.

When the fly had finished, his finger began tapping against the desk in rhythm, a habit of his whenever he was thinking.

"Then I suppose that goes some way to explaining Frarken’s failures and incompetence."

He went on tapping, and not one servant moved, leaving him to his thoughts.

Then he stood, all at once.

He did it without an abrupt movement, without a rustle of cloth, rising in one continuous motion, chin high, and he simply held his arms out to either side without saying a word.

The servants were on him immediately.

They drew the coat over his shoulders and closed it at the front, adjusted the collar, smoothed the sleeves. One fastened his watch at his wrist. Another pinned the brooch to his lapel and turned it a quarter turn so it would hang straight. A third was already kneeling in front of him.

He spoke while they worked, without so much as looking at the man he was addressing.

"I am going to Prometheus’ Zenith. Contact the other Hands, and the Upper Hands as well. We have a great deal to do."

The man bowed, one arm folded against his chest, and held it as long as was proper.

"It shall be done as you wish, Your Majesty."

The man with crimson hair turned his head toward him, his eyes full of an irritation that made him flinch.

"I am only a third prince. Do not call me that again."

The man bent lower still, almost at a right angle, eyes on the floor.

"Yes. Forgive me, Your Highness."

The servants finished at that moment and stepped back together, returning to their places along the walls.

"Good."

And with that he left his office, heading for the place where he had called a meeting with the most extremist humans on the continent, some of whom were also among its most influential.

~~

In the largest forest of the Southern continent, a woman with oddly long, pointed ears stood before a great tree, listening to a small fly whispering in her ear.

When the fly had finished, she raised her eyes toward the tree. Or rather, toward its branches.

Her people lived up there.

The dwellings were tiered all the way up the trunk, pale wooden houses set into the forks, linked together by walkways and stairs that wound around the bark and climbed until they vanished into the foliage. Lanterns hung along the railings, lit not long ago. Higher still, figures moved from one branch to another without using the bridges at all.

The light came down in patches through the leaves and fell across all of it in shifting pools.

She seemed suddenly wistful, remembering something, a small soft smile appearing on her lips.

"So it’s really happening..."

~~

On the Southern continent, at the heart of the merchant capital, stood the central office of the adventurers’ guild association.

It was from here that the orders governing every branch on the continent went out. Ranks were assigned here, contracts validated here, major quests drafted here before being sent everywhere else.

The building rose across five open levels around a central well, with the registration counters at the very bottom, the sorting rooms and archives on the middle floors, and the galleries where parties waited on their assignments. The noise of the tables rose constantly from the ground floor and lost itself somewhere beneath the glass roof.

At the very top, in the room on the last floor, a woman was listening to a fly.

She wore a dark haori open across her shoulders, the empty sleeves hanging down her back, and beneath it a fitted outfit cut for moving fast. Her hair was pulled up high and held by a single metal pin. A fine scar ran from her chin and disappeared into her collar.

At her waist, a katana. One. In a black scabbard without a single decoration on it.

She didn’t move while the fly spoke. Her hand stayed resting on the grip, thumb against the tsuba, motionless.

When it had finished, nobody saw a thing.

Not the clerk standing beside her, not anyone else in that room.

The fly simply fell to the floor, in a hundred cut pieces, which scattered across the wood.

The katana was already back in its scabbard.

She turned to the clerk.

"Draft an urgent quest, open to all, no rank requirement, and put it out everywhere. All the Southern branches first, then the other continents, through every channel we have. I want it posted in every guild in the world before the end of the week."

The man already had something out to write with.

"Then pull staff from the branches in the kingdom of Artenzia and move them up to Evangel. Find us a building there, buy it if you have to, and make it a main branch."

He was writing without looking up.

"Supply lines recentralise on it as of now. Food, potions, replacement weapons. And sign the contracts with the local merchants immediately, before prices multiply over the coming weeks."

"How long should we plan for, President?"

She turned her eyes back to the floor below.

"No idea."

She set a hand on the railing.

"An invader, is it...? And on the very territory that man has his eye on, no less?"

A pause.

"It seems things are going to start moving from here on out."

~~

On an entirely different continent, in another dungeon that looked more developed, and above all faster.

As though time itself, around this man, had been sped up. His summons, everything else, all of it moved quickly around him.

White wolves crossed the galleries carrying materials on their backs, and the coloured crystals set along their skulls left trails of light behind them, so fast were they going. They set down their loads, went back, returned, and the cycle began again without a pause.

The walls themselves were rising visibly somewhere at the far end.

The man was not sped up. He stood in the middle of all of it, still, at his own pace.

He turned his eyes to a notification hovering in front of him and couldn’t stop himself from laughing at the top of his lungs.

"Hahahahaha!"

He laughed for a long time, head thrown back, and when he finally stopped it was to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye.

"The other side of the coin, Maid! I do hope you take it well all the same~!"

And he started laughing again at his own words.

A laugh full of arrogance, full of himself, the laugh of a man who finds himself funny and knows that he is.

A laugh of pure pride.

~~

Several other places of equal importance were informed at the same time, whether by a fly or by a notification from the Dungeon Lord system.

The rumour would then be passed from mouth to mouth, travelling even across continents, delivering the information to the entire world.

Creating a global quest against common enemy number one.

Maid.

Or, to her friends, Freya.