Artist
Artist
Prison City Olpasbet. A barony within the Kallus Empire, rendered nominally imperial territory after the recent civil war—no longer truly answerable to the empire in any practical sense.
A sprawling city carved through an entire mountain range, and unlike its pleasure-city cousin Asan, its gloom was the unregulated sort. The kind that festered.
As Aslan approached the city for the first time in a long while, he noted what had changed.
For one, something resembling a wall now framed the entrance. Its defensive value was uncertain, and who might be mad enough to attack this place was anyone's guess, but it stood there all the same.
Civil war.
Given the open hostilities that had raged between the Kallus Empire and its counties not long ago, the fortification was almost certainly a precaution. Olpasbet had never lacked for surplus labor. Building it wouldn't have been the hard part.
The other difference was the thinning crowd. The main gate felt conspicuously quiet. When Aslan had first set foot in Olpasbet, the press of bodies trying to enter had been considerable. The contrast was stark.
That, too, was the civil war. Or maybe the murder of Count Sholukund. Both felt probable.
Aslan watched Maria exchange pleasantries with the gate captain, eyes placid. Words went back and forth. A purse clinked into her hand—coin tallied for the prisoners' value.
Beside her, Richard fumbled through a clumsy performance, plucking a few coins from the purse. The gatekeeper waved him off. When the offer was pressed a second time, the man—a middle-aged gate officer by the look of him—accepted the silver with the resigned air of someone helpless to refuse, then called out without so much as glancing at the prisoners behind them.
"Open the gate!"
A deep, grinding groan answered as the massive gate began to swing inward.
Prison City Olpasbet. A prison from which escape was said to be impossible. In all its history, no one ever had.
Aslan was sorting through a particular set of emotions when a voice murmured beside him.
"Man... back here again."
The scarlet-haired girl spoke barely above a whisper, and Aslan nodded as if she'd voiced his own thoughts.
Olpasbet. Prison city and grave of law and order. Gazing at the city he'd returned to after so long, he felt an ache that was hard to name—something close to nostalgia.
Just as Eternal Dominion always began here across hundreds of playthroughs, so too had Aslan's own journey properly started in this place. Returning meant he was still moving forward, and that carried a quiet satisfaction all its own.
If only for one difference.
"Would've been nicer without these rags and this damn collar."
The girl had it right. The mana-restraint collar locked around their necks and the tatters hanging off their bodies.
"Cool and breezy suits me fine. Not like the pipsqueak uses magic anyway."
"That's not the point. I've got garbage around my neck."
Tiyamal's retort came with a rasping chuckle. The dragon-kin wore little more than a strip of leather covering perhaps a fifth of his torso and trousers on the verge of splitting apart.
The rest of the party behind him seemed less amused. Their expressions ranged from grim to miserable.
Fay, radiating subdued menace through a mask of blankness, picked at the rags wrapped around her body and pressed her lips into a thin line.
"Stupid lizard doesn't understand Fay's feelings. Fay... lost her favorite dress. Lost her sword. Fay is just some common cute elf now. Not Fay."
The spirit girl's voice was listless. Stripped of the dress Aslan had first given her and the sword she'd carried, the elf looked visibly depressed.
At least she didn't seem physically uncomfortable—unlike Ereta or Rumel, whose faces told different stories.
Ereta looked nearly anxious. Rumel had diluted that same anxiety into something closer to mortification—discomfort laced with shame.
Aslan turned his head and understood immediately why.
"...Ngh. D-don't look, please."
Rumel's body was on near-full display. The rags couldn't cover a woman of her height; they clung where they could and left her thighs and parts of her buttocks bare. When she hunched forward and tugged the cloth down to hide them, the movement crushed her generous chest against the fabric, exposing the curve of her flesh.
Tug up to cover her chest, and her rear showed plainly. Pull down for modesty there, and the line of her cleavage and the small mole at its center became painfully distinct. Even pulled as low as it would go, the fabric still couldn't hide the healthy fullness of her thighs.
"I said don't look..."
There was no way out of the dilemma. Rumel hid her eyes behind one hand as if she could hide from Aslan's gaze altogether.
...That just somehow makes it lewder.
The opposite effect. Covering her eyes only made her look more obscene.
As Rumel squirmed in utter distress, Tiyamal clicked his tongue and shrugged off his upper garment.
"Here, wrap this around you. Should let you cover at least one part decently."
"Thank you, Sir Tiyamal...."
Rumel accepted the ragged tunic and managed to shield her lower body. The sigh she let out was thick with relief.
Most of the party was unhappy or uneasy about their current state. But it was a necessary discomfort.
Infiltrating the city disguised as captives for sale was the simplest method of entry.
It wasn't the only one. They could have tried finding the escape route—the one Aslan had once used with Angie, Harod, and two other prisoners whose names he could no longer recall.
He'd rejected that option. Rumel had sent him pleading looks, insisting that someone of noble standing shouldn't have to wear rags. He'd pushed the plan through anyway.
The escape route was likely impassable by now. The Collector had shown up immediately after Aslan and Angie broke out, and the Baron of Olpasbet's allegiance to the War God had been flagrant. They'd have sealed it.
No alternative entry points existed. Direct assault was out of the question—strong as they were, they couldn't fight a whole city.
That left only one approach.
So they'd become prisoners. Mana-restraint collars around their necks and rags barely covering their bodies, all for the sake of Aslan's plan.
Maria finished her diplomatic murmuring with the gate officer and returned. The party followed her guards into the city.
The place felt bleaker than Aslan remembered. Olpasbet had always drawn a certain clientele—wealthy types with morbid tastes who liked to stroll past the prisoners and amuse themselves. What greeted them now was lifeless. Hollow.
The emptiness was filled mostly by garrison soldiers. Unlike the city's old lively-malignancy, these men wore expressions of fear.
Something had happened. Aslan was still trying to read the situation when a man surrounded by guards approached from where the road widened ahead.
Middle-aged, with something like a horsewhip at his belt and a mace in his hand. The look of a warden was unmistakable.
Maria greeted him with a smile.
"An honor to meet you, Lady Meland. Would these be the, ah..."
"Yes, prisoners brought for sale. Caught them roaming the Bandit Forest."
"Hmm. Prisoners... though the composition is a touch... eclectic."
Bandit Forest had plenty of bandits. Capturing prisoners there wasn't strange. The strange part was what kind of prisoners they were. A rare elf and a dragon-kin mixed in, and more women than men. The warden's brow furrowed with suspicion.
"Is there a problem?"
But you couldn't press the point against a woman who was both royalty of a kingdom and the head of a trading company spanning the entire northern continent—not when she met your suspicion with smooth indifference.
The warden forcibly erased his frown.
"None at all. I'll take charge of them from here."
"Thank you. May we take our leave, then? I'd like to enjoy the city a little."
She leaned into Richard with an easy smile, all soft-eyed charm. The warden smiled back and bent at the waist with the transparent air of a man who'd drawn his own conclusions. Exactly as Maria intended.
"Of course. Please, enjoy your stay."
He straightened up. Maria flicked a glance at Aslan and vanished deeper into the city, her guards trailing behind.
Only once the last of them were out of sight did the warden click his tongue and herd Aslan's group forward. He tossed out the usual threats—don't even think about trying anything, seen plenty of your kind before—none of them worth remembering.
Aslan performed meekness and simmering resentment in equal measure without making it obvious. The performance suited the warden's temperament; the man kept his hands to himself and marched the supposed prisoners straight to a cell block.
The cell block they reached differed little from the one Aslan remembered. Iron bars driven into hewn rock, mine tunnels branching off erratically, and prisoners collapsed in exhaustion or barely catching their breath before the next shift.
Once they were inside that gloom, the warden stopped talking and withdrew. The garrison soldiers peeled away to their own duties.
With no ears nearby, Aslan exhaled and turned.
To Ereta. Her shoulders were drawn tight. She was chewing her lip, eyes rolling with an unease that hadn't left her since they'd entered the city.
"Ereta. What's wrong?"
Every street, every conversation—she'd worn that look the whole way. As if something inevitable was bearing down on her.
At his question, she flinched. Bit her lip, started to shake her head, stopped.
"Is something happening?"
She lifted only her eyes. The rags clung to her body, outlining the line of her thighs, but what Aslan felt looking at her wasn't anything prurient. It was closer to pity.
"I... I'm not sure. I just... I feel anxious, like something's wrong..."
A vague answer. Vague enough to leave Aslan frowning.
For a moment he wondered if it was her Luck stat reacting—but no. He remembered Ereta's in-game stats. Her Luck had always been low.
Maybe she was afraid the Spider would be devoured the way the Poison-spitting Dragon had swallowed the Giant. That was probably it. Just a formless worry. He was about to offer some reassurance when—
"Hey. Kid."
Tiyamal's voice cut in, just as noise erupted outside the cell.
A heavy sound, like a gate opening. Then the tramp of many feet.
If it were only travelers arriving, the garrison soldiers wouldn't be scrambling past the bars with their weapons clutched tight and dread in their faces. Aslan looked toward the corridor that led to the gate and watched.
The reason became clear soon enough.
A procession rounded the protruding corridor and came into view.
At its head walked a figure Aslan knew intimately. A character from the game—there was no way he wouldn't recognize him.
An old man in a threadbare surcoat that resembled a sorcerer's vestments, over black plate armor sculpted to evoke human bone. Across his back hung an ornate mace and shield. He moved with an unhurried ease that blended dignity and madness in equal measure.
Aslan knew exactly who the old man was. Ereta knew too.
She had reached the bars, gripping them, her pupils trembling.
"Artist."
The word escaped on an exhale, barely audible to anyone not standing beside her.
She was right. The old man was the Artist—high priest of the Poison-spitting Dragon, now the focal point of the apocalypse in motion.
Aslan watched the train of priests and followers filing behind him and nodded to himself. Ereta's anxiety made sense now. That had to be it.
The thought lasted only moments before it fell apart.
The priests and faithful advanced. The Artist's procession drew farther along the corridor, and its tail end came into view.
At the rear, among the baggage carts, there were cages.
One of them was made of white iron.
Something was inside it.
Something so damaged that even Aslan, who had already seen it once in person, barely recognized it at first glance.
It held fire within its body, the flames roiling visibly through a semi-translucent white form. It had too many legs, and its bulk divided into three distinct segments. In other words—
"...Mother?"
—the Fire-weaving Spider.
Aslan heard the word slip from Ereta's lips and studied the ruined shape thrashing inside the cage. Every leg severed. Flickers of guttering flame the only thing still stirring within a body the size of a large dog.
An evil god so diminished now that it couldn't even be called a lesser deity anymore. Thrashing weakly in a cage—that was all it had left.
It had abandoned its divinity. Manifested in Geladrion to save its daughter. And this was where it had ended.
Ereta's eyes shook violently, her breathing gone ragged. The cage drifted slowly past the corridor and out of sight.
Only when it was gone did she clutch her chest, stagger, and collapse.