Chapter 324
The white spirit's cries pitched shrill enough to send a genuine shiver down every spine — but the fanaticism woven through the words was worse than the sound itself.
The thing was less a spirit than a mind twisted entirely toward one purpose, cycling through worship of Sulyvahn and nothing else. Its cries swept over them like a bitter winter, and for a second it genuinely felt as though the Spicy Pepper had stopped working — the bone-deep cold clawing back in from the outside.
"Wait — the pepper wore off!"
Watching frost crawl back across everyone's skin, Leon caught the timing and dug back through his pack, handing another fruit around.
Everyone ate.
"Knew it. There's no way my powerful mind was going to produce a bunch of flowery emotional descriptions purely off some ghost screaming."
Maru kept blowing air out of her mouth against the pepper's heat.
"Don't dress up the fact that your vocabulary's too thin to describe an actual feeling."
Leon received a furious flurry of scratches in reply.
The group edged carefully around the spirit, its presence reinforcing what they already suspected — that Irithyll's religious atmosphere ran deep, and that Pontiff Sulyvahn commanded reverence at a genuinely abnormal level.
Whoever this Pontiff was, he wasn't ordinary.
Combined with the fragmented lore they'd already picked up across various item descriptions, a picture was forming — someone deliberate, calculating, an ambitious mastermind pulling multiple threads at once. And with Irithyll being his territory, that oppressive presence bled into everything around them.
The alleyways here branched dark and endless in every direction, narrow gaps between buildings offering only slivers of sky. Genuinely oppressive.
And yet Leon found himself more comfortable in it than out on the main avenue.
How to describe that, exactly.
Irithyll's open scenery was undeniably magnificent — beautiful in a way that pressed against the chest. But this tangled network of narrow alleys had far more of a "Sein" quality to it. For someone who'd been grinding through the dungeon since day one of its transformation, dark and cramped environments were, unexpectedly, the setting that felt relaxing.
Sometimes I genuinely wonder if something's gone a little wrong upstairs.
BANG!
Steel clashed against steel out of nowhere.
Of course Sein Dungeon wasn't going to waste an obvious opportunity to fill these alleys with monsters. The cramped terrain could restrict a swing badly — but it worked both directions.
"Terl — Savage Charge!"
"OOOOOH!"
Terl gathered his weight behind his shield and charged straight down the alley. Wherever he passed, the cries of Invisible Hollows rang out — crushed flat under raw momentum.
"Working! Keep going!"
Leon and the others jogged in his wake, hoping — briefly — that they could just keep this momentum straight to the exit.
Unfortunately, as Terl's charge started losing steam, a tall, slender figure dropped from above and carved a deep gash across his back in a single motion.
A Pontiff Knight.
Shield in one hand, a curved sword in the other — the blade looking as though something had chewed through it repeatedly, light and fast but visibly fragile.
Maru saw it and lunged.
It stepped clear of her attack without effort.
"This thing's reaction time is insane!"
A second Pontiff Knight dropped in behind them.
The consequence of using parkour to skip enemies: those same enemies had simply trailed them the whole way, arriving late and angry.
Leon's usual habit — probing a new enemy type carefully before committing — wasn't available here. The moment the Pontiff Knights registered on-screen, the Fire Witches on the bridge could triangulate their position off them, and what followed was predictable —
BOOM!
Fire pillars erupted overhead while the Pontiff Knights closed in from front and back simultaneously.
One option remained.
Fight it out directly. Dragging this any longer meant getting burned alive.
The Pontiff Knights' offense hit hard — essentially Carthus Warriors with speed multiplied several times over. Even Leon struggled with the initial exchange.
Then he found his window. Raised his shield, timed a Parry.
Second successful parry —
CRACK!
The curved sword shattered outright.
The chewed-looking blade had lower durability than a normal weapon to begin with — but he hadn't expected total failure after only two parries.
Actually — that tracks. Similar logic to how the White Ape's sword hadn't been able to penetrate his own armor before. Weapons varied.
Once the curved swords' weakness surfaced, the counterattack turned decisive.
Terl found his own approach too: trade blows directly. Don't flinch from the hits. The Pontiff Knights carried small, fragile frames — one solid hit from Terl staggered them completely, and from there it was a matter of absorbing whatever came back and grinding them down.
The Pontiff Knights collapsed and dissolved. With no visible target left, the Fire Witches stopped casting too.
Crisis, temporarily resolved.
"Hiss — those wounds actually hurt."
Leon pressed a hand to his bleeding arm. He'd started noticing a pattern since the Catacombs of Carthus — every new region's monsters seemed to be quietly stepping up in strength, the Road of Sacrifices being the one exception.
Which was, functionally, a good sign. Adventurer strength kept climbing through bonfire progression, so scaled monsters made sense.
In reality, this traced back directly to Balance of Strength. The system had recently expanded into influencing item drops too — the exact same monster type could yield different loot depending on individual difficulty scaling, and item distribution across the map varied along the same axis.
"Wait — we can just enter the houses?"
While threading the alleys, Leon and the others discovered that although the nearby house doors had been boarded shut, brute force cracked them open easily enough.
Not much glowing loot inside worth flagging. They still ended up spending considerably more time than planned sweeping through every house along the route.
The two genuinely valuable finds:
[Magic Stoneplate Ring] and [Flame Stoneplate Ring] — each boosting resistance to their respective elemental damage type.
Beyond that: various souls of assorted sizes. Useful, not exciting.
The bulk of the interiors, though, was miscellaneous household goods — Irithyll-style tableware, bottles, jars, jewelry, ordinary domestic clutter mixed with genuine luxury pieces. Exactly the kind of thing collectors and nobles from outside would be desperate to get their hands on.
Looked like Wade had built these interiors with exactly that market in mind. Sooner or later, some noble would be paying adventurers a premium to sneak in and haul this stuff out.
Continuing through the alley, Leon eventually reached its end. He leaned around the corner cautiously.
The Fire Witches on the bridge sat far behind them now.
Had they already cleared this whole stretch?
Something felt off. The bridge those Witches occupied was obviously reachable through the buildings — yet nothing they'd passed through connected up there.
They'd only explored the right-side alleys. Maybe the left side connects to the bridge directly.
He filed that away and turned his attention forward.
At the road's end: an enormous iron-barred gate stretching skyward, sealing off a large altar plaza — close enough to the central cathedral to feel significant.
On the altar rested something that looked like —
A corpse?
Not the point.
The point was a golden glowing loot marker sitting directly on that corpse.
A legendary drop.
Leon's breathing thickened for a second before the locked gate brought him back down.
He pushed against it.
[Cannot be opened from this side.]
"Knew it…"
He briefly considered Flight — clear the gate entirely — but had no way of confirming whether that would just despawn the loot marker outright.
"So there's a real path in somewhere."
Right as he settled on that, Maru spoke up.
"I hear someone calling for help. East."
"East?"
They followed the sound. A pack of mutated hounds surrounded a house, barking furiously. A child's crying carried from behind the door.
Another NPC?
Leon dealt with the hounds and knocked.
"D-did you save me?" A small, trembling voice.
"Yes. Why are you in here — separated from an adventuring party?"
"Adventurers? No. I came looking for my brother. He's an apprentice knight of the Darkmoon Knights. I've never heard of 'adventurers'…"
As suspected. NPC.
Once Leon confirmed that, the questions came steadily. The boy was terrified, but with patience, useful details started coming out.
"The Darkmoon Knights hunt down those who oppose the gods. My brother's an apprentice with them… he hasn't written home in a long time. I left home in secret to look for him. I never expected Irithyll to have already turned into—" His voice cracked. "If it weren't for a strange man dressed like an onion, I'd already be dead."
"Onion?"
Siegward. That had to be Siegward.
Leon knew exactly who this was — the Onion Knight from the well outside the Cathedral of the Deep. He'd handled Patches, returned the man's armor.
Darkmoon Knights sounded familiar too, come to think of it — a related blessing had turned up in the underground labyrinth beneath Raya Lucaria, sitting alongside the Gravelord and Sunlight factions. According to what they'd pieced together, the Darkmoon Knights were an order sworn to the Blade of the Dark Moon, loyal to Dark Sun Gwyndolin — an order that had apparently vanished under mysterious circumstances at some point.
Which meant this boy's brother might have —
Leon set that thought aside. How exactly a lone child had managed to enter Irithyll at all was another mystery entirely. He clearly couldn't survive alone in a city this hostile.
Leon asked, gently, whether the boy needed help.
He had a growing suspicion this was heading toward another Warrior Jar-style questline.
"I don't dare go outside. And please don't break the door — I need it to hold. Could you bring me a set of armor from the bad people out there? If I wear it, I might be able to sneak out disguised. Or if you know somewhere safe, please tell me. I can trade information for it."
"What information?"
"That massive iron gate to the west — if you can open it, that's the shortcut to where the most terrifying person in this city lives. I know a secret path in."
"Alright. Stay here, we'll be back."
"We'll definitely come back to help," Leon said. "By the way — where did that Onion Knight go?" Maru cut in.
She'd taken a genuine liking to the honest-seeming Onion Knight.
The boy didn't know, shaking his head with real regret.
His request — armor from the "bad people" — meant Fire Witch or Pontiff Knight equipment. Which meant real farming time. Both enemy types dropped decent gear at correspondingly low rates.
A full set was going to take a while.
What is this, exactly — is Sein Dungeon deliberately padding out playtime with quest design?
The group backtracked and took the alley on the road's opposite side, eventually reaching the bridge and killing all three Fire Witches. Along the way, they also cleared two more Pontiff Knights and a mess of Invisible Hollows.
Total drop:
[Fire Witch Gauntlets].
One piece.
Even Maru — arguably the most empathetic member of the group toward these phantoms — couldn't help herself:
"Maybe we table the equipment hunt for now. Explore first. We'll pick up the rest whenever it happens naturally."
Probably the only sane call. Grinding this out to full sets could eat the entire remaining schedule and then some.
Taking stock of their surroundings, they identified their current avenue as the southern branch of a crossroads. North sat blocked by the iron gate. That left east or west.
Standing at the intersection, decision paralysis hit hard.
They resolved it by throwing a stone.
East won.
They passed the boy's house on the way. Pontiff Knights — creatures that would've registered as legitimate elites in other regions — turned up everywhere here. Irithyll had clearly traded raw monster volume for individual monster quality.
Initially, the eastern avenue mirrored the southern one closely. But deeper in, something started feeling wrong.
The road kept widening.
The temperature kept dropping — noticeably, even with the pepper's effect active.
By the time the road had roughly doubled its original width, even the least perceptive member of the party would've caught the implication.
Anyone who'd spent time in Sein Dungeon knew: an unexpectedly open area meant one of two things. Either a ranged monster had already locked on —
Or —
The wind howled. Frost caught brilliant moonlight and scattered it across the ground. Heavy footsteps landed, accompanied by breathing that carried an unmistakable animal edge.
An oppressive presence settled over the plaza, thick enough to make hearts tighten.
A massive four-legged shape shed its invisibility slowly, deliberately.
The hammer in its grip radiated cold. Its body sat somewhere between human and beast — but the truth underneath was simpler.
A Pontiff Knight, transformed.
[Vordt of the Boreal Valley]
Wade hadn't gotten the name wrong at all.