"Everyone — you've worked incredibly hard these past few weeks!"
Late at night, at Light Eagle headquarters, Aston bowed deeply before the assembled mercenaries — every one of them someone who had poured themselves into dungeon exploration without complaint.
This was a squad-captain-level figure.
The fact that he was bowing to ordinary mercenaries would have been unthinkable not long ago. The atmosphere within the company had always been friendly, but not friendly enough for a superior to bow to people below him.
The mercenaries' reaction told its own story.
A handful scrambled to help him straighten up, but there was nothing enthusiastic about it. The entire hall felt drained of life.
Tomorrow was the day the Light Eagle and the Skyrim Group would publicly reveal their exploration results. Tonight was supposed to be a victory banquet.
None of the mercenaries had ever attended a celebration this quiet.
Performers danced and sang on stage. The audience watched without expression, occasionally pushing food around their plates. Their eyes had the particular emptiness of people who had been through something they didn't want to discuss.
Aston took it all in.
He couldn't even summon the energy for a sigh anymore. Whatever spirit he had been forcing himself to project drained out of him completely.
The Mercenary Corps' humiliating defeat over the past few weeks had already become common knowledge throughout the Royal Capital.
Not the competition itself.
Something else.
"Captain — look! Someone's projecting an image into the sky!"
Footage was being broadcast directly onto the night air above the city.
Aston needed exactly one glance.
His eyes went bloodshot.
"Take some men and find whoever's responsible for that!"
The footage was simple enough. Several hooded figures, lobbing dung-stuffed pies at mercenaries already on their knees, beaten and helpless.
That was the crushing defeat in question — the war against the invaders.
Ever since Aston had placed an order with the Invaders' Guild, the frequency of invasions targeting the Light Eagle had exploded overnight. It crippled their exploration progress. At one point, the entire effort had practically ground to a halt.
But the damage to their confidence had been worse.
Much worse.
Because every single time they fought an invader, they came out of it feeling completely outclassed. Those hooded troublemakers fought dirty — every dishonorable tactic in existence, deployed without a hint of shame. If it improved their odds, they would absolutely pile on from behind like a pack of hyenas, no honor code, no hesitation.
And they were specialists. Specifically at fighting people inside dungeons. An invader's full potential only emerged when the terrain itself became a weapon.
What stung most was the simple, undeniable fact: in open-field combat, the mercenaries would have flattened these people without breaking a sweat. Inside the dungeon, somehow, the mercenaries became the ones being toyed with.
Worse — the invaders seemed to know the Catacombs of Carthus better than the mercenaries who had been mapping it daily for weeks. Someone was clearly feeding them information from outside.
Had to be.
With that kind of map knowledge, the invaders had tailored their loadouts to the terrain itself. Nearly every one of them carried Force, and they used it specifically near cliff edges — turning shockwaves into one-way trips to the abyss.
That stretch became, without exaggeration, one of the darkest chapters in the Mercenary Corps' recent history.
Finally, after the company's strategists had thoroughly mapped the invaders' behavior patterns and developed real countermeasures —
The invaders simply vanished.
Nobody could find a single one.
In their place came something worse: mysterious individuals projecting footage of every humiliating moment, broadcast into the night sky for the entire city to enjoy.
Damn it.
Why were invaders like this?
Aston had genuinely considered storming the Invaders' Guild headquarters. They had already relocated and were ignoring his messages entirely. The frustration nearly made him cough blood on the spot.
He had no clear idea where things had gone wrong. The only explanation that made sense was that someone had outbid him and flipped the invaders to the other side.
But who?
His eyes burned with anger.
He already had a suspect.
He had absolutely no proof.
All he could do was swallow it.
The repeated blows had gutted morale across the company, which was why Aston had forced himself to throw this banquet on the eve of the results. Despite everything, he genuinely believed they still held the advantage — because of one secret weapon.
The undiscovered Second Route.
Even now, no adventurer had said a single word about it publicly. It remained entirely theirs.
Surely that would be enough.
"Eat, drink, all of you! The dark days are behind us. Tomorrow we wash away every bit of this!"
The mercenaries made an effort.
The atmosphere never came close to lifting.
This was, by a comfortable margin, the lowest point of Aston's life.
Meanwhile, the other captains sat back and watched the entire spectacle with quiet enjoyment, making no effort to help whatsoever.
The Mercenary Company, apparently, was not nearly as unified as it presented itself.
The night passed.
Results day arrived.
There was no need for some grand public ceremony where both sides revealed their findings face-to-face — the Skyrim Group, notably, was still inside the dungeon at the time. Instead, both parties submitted their intelligence reports to The Deno Weekly, the kingdom's largest newspaper, headquartered in the Royal Capital.
A special edition would compile everything. Shared discoveries grouped together. Unique discoveries listed separately for direct comparison. To prevent leaks, both submissions arrived the same day, and the editorial staff worked themselves to exhaustion to get the special issue printed before nightfall.
People had been waiting for this.
The moment broomstick couriers touched down outside the bookstores, crowds surged forward to grab copies. The scene grew chaotic enough that guards had to step in and maintain order.
Most of the spectators were there for one reason: to watch adventurers embarrass themselves. To plenty of Royal Capital residents, "adventurer" was simply a more polite word for "unemployed drifter," and most adventurers came from backgrounds that couldn't compare to the capital's nobility.
And the Light Eagle?
The kingdom's celebrity military force, commanded by the famous Eliphis himself.
From a purely class-based perspective, Royal Capital residents naturally backed the mercenaries.
Incidentally — products from Sein Dungeon could now be shipped directly to the capital through the portal network. Sales of the actual dungeon-sourced items had done reasonably well, since the items themselves were genuinely useful. But derivative products — Bedford Family merchandise, adventurer-made trinkets, anything along those lines — had bombed completely.
The reasoning among nobles was simple: it all smelled too much like the countryside.
"I've been waiting all day. What took so long?"
Inside a noble estate, a portly aristocrat snatched the newspaper from his servant and dove in immediately.
"As expected of Lord Eliphis's forces. Even dungeon exploration produces results like this."
The Light Eagle's discoveries had been listed first.
There were a lot of them.
His satisfaction grew with every line.
"More than a hundred shared discoveries, over twenty unique finds, and an entirely new route!" He let out a low whistle. "What could possibly top that?"
With a smile that was already mocking, he flipped to the Skyrim Group's section.
"Hm. Matching over a hundred of the Light Eagle's discoveries — not as useless as I'd assumed. I'll give them that much credit. Perhaps I'll summon them sometime. If they're presentable, maybe one of them could even serve in this household."
He chuckled.
"Heh. Joking, of course. Household staff should come from around the capital."
He kept reading, almost lazily.
For some reason, the Skyrim Group's section seemed to go on considerably longer than expected.
"Hmm — solid work on the main route. Reached the lower levels too. Unfortunate, but—"
He stopped.
Pages flipped rapidly.
A moment later, he exhaled.
"Ah, that startled me. They found a new route, but their depth there is far shallower — barely into the middle layer before they stopped. Nothing compared to the Light Eagle's achievement. That's why it wasn't counted among the shared finds."
He continued.
"Well. I've seen enough. Nothing remarkable about this group. Still inferior to the Light Eagle, clearly."
He tossed the newspaper aside and started to rise.
Then froze.
His hand shot back out, snatched the paper, and began flipping through it with sudden urgency.
"My lord?" the servant asked. "Is something wrong?"
"The… third route."
His mouth fell open.
"They found a third route! One the Light Eagle never even discovered — and they pushed all the way to the lower levels with it!"
The servant had nothing to say to that.
"And — more than fifty unique discoveries. That's over double the Light Eagle's total!"
His eyes sharpened. He put on his reading glasses and went through every single unique entry, one by one, his expression growing steadily more serious.
When he finished, he let out a long breath.
"I underestimated them. This group has genuine potential — more than I gave them credit for."
He thought for a moment.
"Contact them."
"Politely."
"Ask whether they might be interested in… sponsorship. From a great noble house."
At Light Eagle headquarters, Aston's fist came down on a stone table.
The table didn't survive.
The newspaper in his other hand had been crushed beyond recognition.
His eyes were bloodshot.
"How did they KNOW?!"
"How do they know all of this?!"
"I had people watching them the entire time!"
"DAMN IT!"
Furious shouting rolled through the building. Nobody dared get within ten feet of him.
Not long after, his enthusiasm for destruction outpaced his structural awareness, and his house collapsed — burying him under the rubble.
A second tragic cry followed, slightly more muffled than the first:
"DAMN IT!"
Elsewhere, Sali read his own copy of the newspaper, eyes narrowing slightly as he muttered to himself.
"The Pinwheel… the Secret Flame-Kindling Ritual… High Lord Wolnir's true objective…"
"How did they find all of this?"
"And our hidden Second Route. We never told a soul about that."
Nearby, Elsa stretched out in a chair, eating snacks, eyes pointedly fixed somewhere else entirely.
"Sigh. I really shouldn't have given Aston that much trust."
Sali shook his head.
"If I'd known it would go like this, I'd have stepped in earlier."
"The commander's back in a few days. We'll see how he handles Aston then."
There was no question about the outcome.
The Skyrim Group had won.
While the Light Eagle stewed, Bedford City erupted into celebration. Mages launched fireworks that bloomed across the night sky in brilliant colors. The Culinary District filled the air with the smell of roasting food and spilled wine. People gathered for exactly one reason — to celebrate the Skyrim Group's overwhelming victory.
"Tami, you've got real talent! We won this whole thing because of you!"
Luluwo was, by any reasonable measure, drunk.
She threw an arm around his shoulders and shouted like they'd been friends for a decade. Whatever reserved elegance she'd carried when they first met had evaporated completely.
"N-no, that's not true. Captain, your contributions were way bigger than mine."
Tami scratched the back of his head.
"Don't be modest. The night you told me there were two extra routes through the Catacombs, I nearly fell off my chair. I didn't think anyone could out-explore me. You're the next Kent!"
That didn't sound like the compliment it was probably meant to be.
In the middle of the celebration, Tami laughed along with everyone while his mind drifted back to that night.
After finally escaping Sen's Fortress alongside Elsa, the two of them had collapsed and fallen asleep on the spot. By the time they woke up, they'd already been ejected from the dungeon. They went their separate ways home, and Tami had reported everything — every single thing — to Luluwo.
She had gone quiet for a long moment afterward. Then, with genuine disbelief in her voice:
"Okay. Let me make sure I have this straight."
"After getting separated from us, you discovered a new route, soloed an elite monster, unlocked the Secret Flame-Kindling Ritual, had some kind of heartwarming painted-world bonding experience with the captain of the Light Eagle's assault squad, AND walked away knowing about another hidden route they'd been keeping under wraps."
"All of that. In one afternoon."
"Uh… when you put it like that, it does sound a little unbelievable," Tami admitted.
Even he was a little surprised, hearing it summarized out loud.
Luluwo was quiet for a moment.
Then she clapped a hand on his shoulder and asked:
"How would you feel about staying with this group for the rest of your life?"