Chapter 216: A City Talks
Before sunrise, screens across Mythal lit up one after another.
Televisions switched on in kitchens still dark. Phones buzzed on nightstands. Digital billboards downtown swapped their ads mid-cycle, all of them settling on the same headline.
BREAKING NEWS
UNDEAD KINGDOM DUNGEON CLEARED
Morning anchors picked it up within minutes, drone footage looping behind them. The black Gate. The gray mist curling across the street. Veteran hunters standing well back, refusing to approach. Kai and Sera walking through without hesitation.
"Officials have confirmed this is the first recorded dungeon in Mythal featuring an intelligent undead civilization," one reporter said.
Her co-anchor picked it up. "Unlike previous dungeons, the Fallen Kingdom displayed multiple environmental hazards, coordinated enemy formations, and an intelligent boss capable of speech."
The screen switched to a map, a decade of cleared dungeons marked across it. An analyst circled the newest addition.
"The Fallen Kingdom." He paused. "This one doesn’t fit."
A younger reporter leaned in. "What do you mean?"
"It behaved less like a dungeon," he said, "and more like an abandoned nation."
The newsroom went quiet for a second before someone remembered to cut to commercial.
...
Later that morning, Sora opened her stream, and the viewer count climbed before she’d even said hello.
"Okay." She laughed, watching the number keep moving. "I wasn’t expecting fifty thousand viewers before I even said hello."
The chat was already unreadable, scrolling too fast to follow. She pulled up the leaked drone footage and started replaying it, pausing constantly.
"This." She pointed at the Lich mid-frame. "It wasn’t just attacking."
"It was adapting."
She rewound to the moment Kai switched fighting styles, then let it play forward. The Lich shifted its tactics half a second later.
She rewound again. Sera swapped positions mid-fight. The Lich reacted almost instantly.
Sora leaned closer to the screen. "This boss..."
"...was learning."
The chat exploded.
IT WAS A REAL COMMANDER!
BEST BOSS SO FAR!
HOW IS THIS ONLY B-RANK?!
She replayed the moment Rootbreaker collided with the Lich’s staff, freezing the frame right on impact.
Sora smiled. "I don’t even need to edit this."
"The internet already has."
She pulled up a video app. The clip had already crossed a few million views, splintered into a dozen different titles.
The Strongest B-Rank Fight.
Kai vs The Lich King.
The Most Intelligent Dungeon Boss.
She laughed. "...The algorithm works fast."
...
Across the city, nobody could stop talking about it.
Inside an office building, a cluster of employees had abandoned their break room chairs entirely, crowding around one screen.
"I’ve cleared eight B-Ranks," one man said. "I’ve never seen undead fight like soldiers."
His coworker nodded slowly. "That wasn’t instinct."
"That was strategy."
At a university lecture hall, a dungeon history seminar had devolved into an argument.
"Undead Kingdoms only exist in fiction," one student insisted.
Another turned their laptop around, footage still playing. "...Apparently not."
At a fitness center across town, a hunter stopped mid-punch against a practice dummy.
"I want to fight that dungeon."
His friend laughed. "No."
"You want to survive five minutes inside it."
The whole gym laughed with him. Even the café down the street had the fight looping on its wall-mounted screen, customers pausing mid-bite every time the Lich appeared.
...
At the public park, the game had already changed.
Not superheroes. Not dragons.
One kid wore a crown made of folded cardboard, wobbling every time he moved. "I’m the Lich King!"
Another swung a toy broom at him. "No! You have to say the line first!"
The boy cleared his throat, dramatic, chin lifted. "The King... still waits."
The other kids cheered.
Two older ones immediately claimed roles. "I’m Kai!"
"I’m Sera!"
The first grabbed a plastic shovel off the sandbox ledge. "This is Rootbreaker!"
The second held up a trash can lid like a shield. "I got the new shield!"
They charged the cardboard king together, who collapsed dramatically onto the grass at the first tap of the shovel.
Then a little girl crossed her arms. "No! The skeletons come back!"
She flopped onto the grass too, and three more kids crawled over to join her, groaning and twitching back to "life," one of them making low spooky noises under his breath.
"No, you’re too fast!" someone shouted. "The Lich has to make the green sun first!"
They restarted the whole thing from the beginning.
A father nearby laughed, watching the chaos unfold. "When I was young, we played space explorers."
His wife smiled, filming on her phone. "They’re pretending to fight undead kings."
Within the hour, the clip had a few hundred thousand views of its own, the comments filled with nothing but laughing emojis.
...
Downtown, inside one of Mythal’s largest entertainment companies, a very different meeting was underway.
The leaked footage played across a conference room screen. Nobody spoke until it finished.
Then a director stood up. "...Forget giant monsters."
"Forget alien invasions."
"I want this."
Someone across the table blinked. "You want permission to film inside a dungeon?"
"No." He was already pacing. "I want a movie."
"The Fallen Kingdom."
A concept artist grabbed a tablet and started sketching without waiting to be asked. Ruined castle. Green rain. The black Gate. A skeleton army. The Lich King’s cracked crown.
A producer raised a hand. "What about Kai and Sera? We can’t use real hunters."
"We won’t," the director said. "We’ll create original characters inspired by them."
Another executive leaned forward. "Why stop there? What if it’s a streaming series?"
The room lit up. Ideas started flying across the table, half-finished sentences colliding with each other. Television. Animation. A video game tie-in. Someone even floated a virtual reality experience before anyone had agreed on the movie.
A marketing executive grinned. "We might have the next blockbuster."
The room laughed.
No one realized they might be right.
...
By afternoon, every platform in Mythal had been buried under it.
#FallenKingdom
#BlackGate
#LichKing
#KaiAndSera
#TheKingStillWaits
Memes appeared almost instantly. One showed a skeleton holding a coffee cup, captioned "Just got revived again." Another was a still of Kai mid-swing, captioned "Local Hunter refuses to let undead stay dead."
Reaction channels piled on. Theory videos. Dungeon historians breaking down every environmental hazard frame by frame. Power scalers arguing rankings in the comments for hours. One creator spent forty full minutes explaining why the Lich had intentionally tested Kai before fighting seriously, and the replies underneath argued about it long after the video ended.
...
Inside Mythal Hunter Headquarters, the mood was quieter, but no less focused.
Senior hunters gathered around the tactical display, watching the fight loop again. And again.
One commander finally crossed his arms. "The environmental hazards. Bone pillars. Green rain. Intelligent undead. Resurrection." He shook his head. "No B-Rank should contain all four."
"It shouldn’t," someone said quietly. "But it did."
A younger hunter spoke up. "So how did those two clear it?"
Silence settled over the room.
Finally the oldest hunter present answered, arms folded, eyes still on the screen. "They never fought the dungeon."
"They solved it."
Everyone turned toward him.
"Every mechanic," he said. "They understood it. Then adapted." He nodded once at the frozen frame of Rootbreaker meeting the Lich’s staff. "That’s why they won."
Nobody argued.
...
That evening, Kai and Sera left the Association in ordinary clothes. No armor, no weapons, just trying for a quiet walk through the city.
It didn’t feel quiet.
A sporting goods store had already updated its window display. "Ready for Your Next Dungeon?" A café further down had the Lich fight looping on its television, a group of teenagers arguing loudly over the ending.
"No, Sera broke the barrier."
"Kai landed the last hit."
"That still counts!"
Further along, another group was debating whether the Lich could have beaten some dungeon boss from three years back.
Kai slowed. "...They’re talking about us."
Sera smiled. "You just noticed?"
"I thought they were talking about the dungeon."
"They are." She nudged him forward. "They just keep mentioning us."
A group of kids raced past before he could answer, one of them brandishing a foam sword overhead.
"The King still waits!"
The others screamed with laughter, collapsing dramatically onto the sidewalk and pretending to claw their way back up.
Kai watched them vanish around the corner toward the park. "...That line spread fast."
Sera laughed. "I told you it would."
Kai sighed. "...I really hope nobody starts saying it every time they see me."
Almost on cue, a college student walking the other way spotted him, grinned, and raised a fist without breaking stride.
"...The King still waits!"
His friends burst out laughing and kept walking, already pulling out their phones.
Kai turned slowly toward Sera.
She couldn’t stop laughing either.
"I think you’re too late," she said.
They kept walking, the lights of Mythal glowing warm along the street, while somewhere far above the city, news helicopters were still circling, still replaying footage from the Fallen Kingdom on a loop that showed no sign of slowing down.