The Profaned Flame burned around Eliphis, forcing visions of things he'd never once wanted to remember, no matter the circumstances.
Simultaneously, Sein Dungeon received a massive infusion of mana from him.
"Excellent."
To the dungeon, adventurers' emotions carried different tiers of quality. The higher the quality, the more mental energy a single emotion could release.
Based on his ongoing observations, Wade had compiled a running tally of exactly how much mana different emotions produced.
The single highest-quality emotion was fear — or, more precisely, terror, fright, panic, and their neighboring negative cousins.
Second: happiness, sitting alone among the positive emotions.
After that came anger, greed, jealousy, sadness, and a long tail of other negative states.
Every remaining positive emotion ranked below the entire negative category.
Worth noting — despite sitting close together in rank, fear generated nearly three times the value of happiness. Fear was, without question, the most valuable emotional resource available.
So why did happiness rank so highly on its own?
Even Wade had found that genuinely puzzling.
Initially, he'd assumed fear and happiness were mutually exclusive — keep adventurers afraid, and that alone would drive the dungeon's early operating model.
Then, after running experiments on a few enthusiastic volunteers, he'd discovered the two emotions were actually complementary.
Who ever said you couldn't feel afraid and happy at once?
Whether an adventurer experienced fear followed by happiness, or happiness followed by fear, the resulting mana output far exceeded what either emotion produced independently.
Which reshaped the dungeon's entire operating philosophy.
Beat the adventurers down, then offer something sweet.
Bitter first, sweet after.
Or sweet first, bitter after.
Whatever squeezed the most out with maximum efficiency.
Thanks, of course, to a small pool of enthusiastic and thoroughly selfless volunteers who'd donated themselves to the cause.
Their names:
Stella. Luluwo. Leon...
Occasionally, Sein extended genuine mercy — rewards and other gestures designed to deliver a pure hit of happiness, deepening an adventurer's bond with the dungeon.
And wherever pure happiness existed, pure terror tended to follow eventually. Adventurers indulged too consistently would inevitably forget exactly how frightening life under Sein's rule was supposed to be.
If Wade wanted to abandon any remaining pretense of decency, he could feed every adventurer a Happiness first, let them ride the absolute peak of joy — then unleash a Darkrai on them for the most terrifying nightmare imaginable.
Something told him, though, that going down that road would eventually leave every adventurer genuinely mentally unwell.
And right now, what Eliphis was experiencing was purely, unambiguously fear.
"This is..."
He stared into the dim, blood-streaked interrogation room and froze.
Glancing down, he found he'd become a child.
Two horrifically disfigured corpses hung from the torture rack.
His biological parents.
A memory. From childhood.
"Hey — you're next."
The heavyset interrogator licked his lips, tongue lolling out in a grotesque grin.
Eliphis stepped back on pure instinct.
He hadn't actually come from a noble background. Everyone assumed the couple currently living in the Royal Capital, presented as his parents, had simply been ordinary farmers.
In reality, those two "farmers" were people he'd casually abducted off the roadside. Once mentally subjugated, they'd become his "parents" — a fabricated pedigree, necessary if he wanted access to the Royal Capital's upper circles.
His actual biological parents had come from the Warrior Nation. Once their homeland fell under demon attack, they'd had no choice but to flee. Chance and misfortune had eventually landed them here, as refugees in the Kingdom.
Along the way, they'd been captured and sold into slavery — eventually purchased by a minor nobleman with genuinely repugnant tastes.
Which was how they'd ended up in this exact room.
Staring at it now, Eliphis's expression carried something beyond simple disgust.
A faint trace of nostalgia, even.
The sleazy interrogator grinned wider, closing the distance.
But Eliphis felt no real anxiety.
Because, according to memory, he'd escaped this particular scene once already. Back then, the perverted nobleman had burst in suddenly and adopted him on the spot.
He'd never understood why. Whatever the nobleman's real intent had been, something even more repugnant had almost certainly been at stake.
The nobleman had raised Eliphis as his own son — going so far as to erase all memory of his real parents with hypnotic magic. Afterward, both the nobleman and the interrogator had personally taught him every torture technique they knew.
He remembered resisting, at first.
But the sensation of inflicting torture had proven more addictive than any Blood Healing Potion. He'd surpassed both teachers before long.
Eventually, mid-interrogation, his unique talent had awakened. In the same moment his real memories returned, the nobleman's entire household fell fully under his control.
His good fortune hadn't lasted, though.
The nobleman had gone out hunting for a fresh victim and provoked exactly the wrong person. A mysterious organization descended on the estate in the dead of night.
Everyone except Eliphis was killed.
As for why he'd been spared—
"What luck. He actually carries a Unique Talent. Didn't expect to complete the mission here."
"Still got a pile of weapons waiting for us. One person's not enough."
These people had apparently been hunting for individuals with unique talents.
Why? Were they harvesting talents to charge weapons with?
Eliphis had never learned more than that.
At the time, unable to fully use his own talent yet, he'd barely managed to escape them.
That was the moment he'd understood the importance of building stable power of his own. A hunger for a kingdom he could genuinely call his took root somewhere in that realization.
From there, he'd wandered from place to place, eventually building the Light Eagle Corps.
As for those mysterious hunters — he'd continued investigating them ever since. And still, to this day, come up with nothing.
Back in the present, Eliphis watched the interrogator inch closer and instinctively looked toward the doorway.
He remembered — the nobleman would step in before the interrogator ever laid hands on him.
Nothing to fear here. Just a memory.
"Here we go, here we go. Let me take real good care of you."
The interrogator's fat, foul-smelling hand reached toward him.
Eliphis stayed perfectly composed — already half-rehearsing the lecture he'd give this man afterward.
That composure lasted right up until he found himself strung up on a cross, dangling like a chick.
"Huh?"
Wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
Wasn't this out of order?
Why wasn't it following the sequence he remembered?!
Perhaps because his body had genuinely shrunk down to a child's, his mind had regressed along with it. His emotions felt strangely, thoroughly out of his own control.
Watching the interrogator strip his clothes away, piece by piece, fear climbed inside him without permission — overwhelming even the urge to be sick.
Was he actually about to be tortured here?
He could stomach ordinary torture.
But this interrogator, specifically —
Absolutely not.
As the fat hand closed in, his face flooded with genuine terror.
And every thought racing through his mind spilled out loud into the space around him.
"Don't touch it!"
"Hee hee, even a little one's cute~"
The interrogator waved a pair of pliers, delighted.
Behind him: scalpels, needles, hammers, durians — an entire arsenal of unsettling implements, each promising its own particular surprise.
Eliphis had once genuinely enjoyed watching interrogators work on other people.
But with the roles reversed, he found himself certain of exactly one thing — even facing death, he wanted absolutely no part of this.
No wonder the Profaned Flame's illusion had settled on precisely this scene. This was the single thing buried deepest in his aversion.
"Hee hee hee."
The interrogator flexed a set of impossibly nimble fingers.
Such perfect hands. Practically made for this work.
He extended a long, greasy tongue, licked his lips, and grinned with real menace.
"Hee hee — I want to eat a hot dog~"
"NO!"
Not just the interrogator, either.
Shadowy figures of every person he'd ever tortured, everyone he'd caused to die, rose up around him now. They twisted forward in unison, all eyes locked on him.
Every one of them driven by a single, shared purpose.
Eat hot dogs.
The child-shaped Eliphis wanted, desperately, to cry out for help.
Then it hit him — he couldn't actually name a single person he trusted.
So he called out to the one person in the Light Eagle Corps whose combat power stood above everyone else's.
"Guts! Save me!"
In that exact moment —
"Eliphis?"
Elsa, freshly revived at the kitchen bonfire deep in Irithyll, suddenly raised her head, gaze drifting toward the distant cathedral.
For one brief, strange moment, she'd genuinely felt as though he'd called out to her.
She sat with it a while before lowering her head again.
"Probably just my imagination."
Her whole attitude could be summed up in three simple words: Couldn't care less.
Ever since she'd registered his betrayal, resentment had settled steadily into her chest, alongside real anger. Whatever his reasoning, she was furious about it.
Time spent with the Skyrim Group had gradually filled in the gaps in her own emotional register. She was no longer the blank, flat person she'd once been. Her thoughts and feelings now landed roughly the same as anyone else's.
At most, old habits still left her a little slow to react.
Credit, in large part, to Luluwo's relentless social instincts and Tami's unstoppable sunny cheer.
Having returned to something closer to "normal," Eliphis's behavior looked wrong no matter which angle she examined it from. What she'd once accepted as entirely reasonable now struck her as genuinely bizarre.
Stranger still — every single member of the Light Eagle Corps seemed to think there was nothing wrong with him at all.
Which meant the problem, presumably, had to be her.
Unable to find anyone within the Light Eagle Corps she could genuinely connect with, Elsa slipped back into the same quiet, withdrawn presence she'd carried before.
And every single day, nothing made her happier than heading out to find the Skyrim Group instead.
Deep down, she'd already begun quietly drifting away from the Corps — an organization that had, functionally, always treated her like a beast of burden. The only real reason she'd stayed this long was gratitude for everything Eliphis had once done for her.
Now, his actions had turned her fully, completely into a slacker.
She couldn't even be bothered to roll over.
For a fleeting instant, a thought surfaced.
Maybe I should just leave the Light Eagle Corps.
Even Elsa herself was startled by it.
Elsewhere, Wade found himself equally "startled."
"What exactly is going on with this guy?"
Watching the sheer volume of mana pouring in without pause, then glancing at Eliphis writhing beneath the Profaned Flame, Wade genuinely started worrying he might have broken something.
"What did he actually see, to end up like this?"
His gaze toward the man softened into something close to sympathy.
Poor kid. His life must have genuinely sucked.
Out of pure humanitarian instinct, he was on the verge of having Sulyvahn's clone put Eliphis out of his misery entirely —
When the surrounding mercenaries rushed back in.
Nothing to be done about it now.
Deal with the mercenaries first. Free Eliphis afterward.
"You've genuinely got some great companions," Wade said, and meant every word of it.