Ch 182 – Responsibilities of a Leader
Now outside of the Hidden Temple with the Djinn's presence completely absent, Deacon let out a weighty sigh that seemed to drain what little energy he had left as his eyes remained fixed on the three bodies of his closest friends at his feet.
Sinking down to sit on his ankles as the lit archway behind him lost its glow and flickered out, leaving nothing but empty sandstone where moments ago there had been a portal that led to Solomon’s Fourth Temple, Deacon gently set Bonehead's half-skull down on the platform beside him before wrapping his arms around his shins and grabbing his opposite biceps, pressing his forehead hard against his knees as though he could somehow fold himself small enough to disappear entirely.
"Deke?" Bonehead said aloud after a few moments of heavy silence, but he was met with no response—Deacon only buried his head deeper into his knees, his entire body curling tighter in on itself.
"Deke, it's not — this wasn't your fault, man," Bonehead tried again, cursing himself for his current lack of limbs.
Deacon didn't answer him, but his hands began to tremble where they gripped his arms, his palms tightening their hold until his knuckles would have gone white if anyone could have seen them.
"We— you, couldn't have expected this to have happened," Bonehead pressed on, apparently determined to break through whatever spiral Deacon was currently drowning in. "Your uncle assigned us to clear out the tunnels; he couldn't have expected us to come across what we did, none of us could have."
"It doesn't matter what we could have expected, or what my uncle could have expected," Deacon interrupted, his voice muffled against his knees but still carrying clearly across the massive cavern they were now in as he tightened his grip on his arms. "I let Esmerelda, Sam, and Jass die."
"...This wasn't your fault, Deke," Bonehead pushed again, his tone placating in a way meant to soothe, but the response he got was like throwing water on sizzling oil.
Deacon rose from where he sat like a whip cracking, moving from curled up on the ground to standing over Bonehead in less than a second, and the fury radiating off him made the air feel thick.
"This was MY FUCKING FAULT!" he shouted as he stared down at Bonehead's half-skull while stabbing his finger repeatedly into his own chest hard enough to hurt, anger rising in his tone with each word. "From the very moment I felt something off in the air of those tunnels – hell, we all did. I should have called for everyone to fall back to the teleporter and regroup, should have insisted we clear out the other wings of the cavern first before pushing deeper!"
He was breathing hard now, his chest heaving as everything he'd been holding back came pouring out in a torrent. "I shouldn't have been so dismissive of the danger just because we survived the horde of antlions, shouldn't have let us all just start dissecting corpses in the middle of a Hidden Quest Zone that we ALL AGREED felt fucking weird from the start!"
"I should have been wary of the fact that we still hadn't come across the two optional objectives we could have killed," Deacon continued, his voice getting louder and more ragged with each sentence. "Not to mention that one of them had apparently already died sometime after we took our first rest in the tunnel… What kind of Party Leader doesn't put those pieces together and realise something was seriously wrong?"
"It was a fucking General Rank!" Bonehead shouted back, using what mana he could gather to wrap around his half-skull and lift himself into the air until he was level with Deacon's face. "One that was higher level than all of us. And a mutant at that! Which made it even more dangerous than a normal General would have been!"
"We should have all died by its hands the second it snuck up on us and got the drop on our formation!" Bonehead continued shouting, levitating himself closer to get right in Deacon's face despite not having a body to back up the aggressive posture.
"The fact that three of us made it out alive is already a fucking miracle!" Bonehead pressed, his shadow-flame eyes burning intensely as he stared Deacon down.
"And how in the fuck is that a miracle, huh?" Deacon shouted back at him, meeting those burning eyes with his own crimson slitted gaze that held nothing but anguish and self-hatred. "How is Sam and Jass dying a miracle? How is Esmerelda being confined to a glass bottle just to survive a fucking miracle?"
"Why aren't you mad at me?" Deacon's voice cracked on the question as guilt and self-loathing bled into his rage-filled tone, making it sound less like anger and more like a desperate plea. "If—if I had just—"
"If you what?" Bonehead pushed, refusing to back down even an inch. “What could you have done in that situation that you didn’t already do? Even the best of our generation would have died in our place!”
"If I had gone berserk as I did at the end, but earlier— if I'd just done that from the start instead of trying to fight smart, this wouldn't have happened," Deacon said, the words tumbling out in a rush as though he'd been holding them back and they'd finally burst through the dam.
"You don't know that," Bonehead retorted immediately, his tone brooking no argument. "And while I may or may not have been out of commission during most of that fight — I wasn't completely unconscious the whole time, I could still sense some of what was happening around me."
"I could hear the sound of something meaty pounding against the dome barrier that surrounded Jass and me, just as loudly as I could hear your roaring and grunts and the cracks of your bones breaking," Bonehead continued, his voice dropping slightly as he recounted what he'd perceived. "I could sense just how faint your life force felt, even from just a few feet away, how close you were to death, a literal sliver away from it and then back to full health the next minute after that."
"And it doesn't take a genius to put together the pieces," Bonehead said, his tone turning knowing and slightly accusatory. "How you went from nearly dead to appearing completely healed and naked with tattoos covering your entire body, not to mention why that so-called tall hot Floor Guardian woman was willing to heal my skull and core and do something to save Esmerelda's soul when she had no reason to help us otherwise."
"You signed a devil's deal with her, didn't you?" Bonehead's question came out flat and certain, not really a question at all. "That's the only reason the three of us are even standing outside this dungeon right now instead of all five of us rotting inside of it."
Deacon fell silent at Bonehead's deduction, unable to deny it because his friend had hit the nail directly on the head, and he lowered his gaze back to the platform beneath his feet rather than meet those knowing shadow-flame eyes.
"Why do you even want me to be mad at you?" Bonehead asked after a moment of heavy silence, his tone shifting to genuine confusion. "Do you have some fucked up masochistic streak that makes you want me to be angry at you? Do you think me getting mad at you would somehow bring Jass and Sam back to life?"
Whipping his head back up with gritted teeth and furrowed brows, Deacon shouted, "Then why the fuck are you so calm about everything? Ever since you woke up from whatever unconsciousness you were in, you've been so fucking calm about... all of this!"
His gesture encompassed everything — the bodies, the situation, the fact that their friends were dead and their corpses were inches away from them.
"Do you think I can fucking help it!" Bonehead shouted back at him with heat finally entering his voice for the first time since he’d “awakened”.
"I'm a fucking undead! Practically all of my emotions are fucking muted; the only feelings that I can express outwardly are ones that I trained myself to be able to do so over the course of years, and even then, that takes a lot out of me! You know this!"
"Do you think I don't hate every fucking second of what's happened so far?" Bonehead continued, and now self-loathing was beginning to lace his tone in a way that made Deacon's anger falter. "I want to rip that fucking antlion apart piece by piece. I want to scream and cry until my throat is raw, but I fucking can't do any of that because my body won't let me express how fucking pissed off I am!"
"I could have saved Jass," Bonehead said after pause, turning his head to look at her corpse, his voice trembling slightly on her name before regaining his bite, "but my bones were too fucking weak and they turned to dust just milliseconds away from the Health Potion I'd raised just above her lips spilling into her mouth — I was right fucking there, I had it in my hand, and I still failed!"
Deacon physically winced back as though Bonehead's words had struck him, the pain in his friend's voice cutting deeper than any blade could have.
"So, it's not just you who failed," Bonehead said more quietly. "I failed just as badly as you did — my water barrel, if I hadn’t… she would have…”
Just as Bonehead’s emotions reached their peak within his core, they were immediately met with an iron fist that clamped down on them, dulling everything until the anger, self-loathing, and vitriol drained away. Taking a few seconds to gather himself after his core suppressed his emotions, Bonehead continued, “The fact that we aren’t all dead is… This wasn’t on you. Not all of it, I’m just as, if not more, guilty than you.”
Deacon looked back down at his feet and at the lifeless bodies of Esmerelda, Sam, and Jass arranged there on the platform, and something in his chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself.
"...But you are not… were not the Party Leader," Deacon muttered after a long silence that stretched between them like a chasm, his voice barely audible and completely drained of the anger that had been fueling him moments before. "Anything that happened, good or bad, lies on me — that's what being Party Leader means."
He knelt beside the fallen forms of his friends, staring at each of them in turn before gently placing one of the three translucent dice the Djinn had given him atop each of their chests, and one after another their bodies began to shimmer and compress, shrinking down and being pulled into the small see-through dice where both he and Bonehead could now see miniature versions of their bodies and all their gear preserved inside.
“The fuck it does,” Bonehead shot back.
Picking the dice up off the ground with trembling hands, Deacon clipped them carefully to his hip where they hung beside the Soul Bottle containing Esmerelda's soul, and then he reached for his Spatial Sling Bag and Echoform Reliquary in its dual short sword form that had been placed together off to the side, courtesy of the Djinn as she teleported them out.
Pressing his lips into a thin line while his eyes were shut, Deacon took a moment to steel his nerves before taking a step forward.
"Hey! Where are you going?" Bonehead asked, moving to hover in front of Deacon to block his path as he began walking toward the massive sandstone brick steps that led down from the platform. "We aren't finished talking about this."
"We are," Deacon muttered, his crimson and vertically slitted eyes growing gloomier and more distant by the second as he moved past Bonehead to continue his descent down the stairs. "Besides… we have to go and deliver our friends’ bodies back to their families. That takes precedence over our bullshit emotions."
Lord Ferros Barrenthal sat at his desk in his private study, the shards of a Life Orb, specifically the one that had been tethered to his youngest son – Samuel, lay scattered within his trembling gloved palm.
"How could this have happened?" he muttered to himself, his voice hollow as he stared at the fragments that still held traces of his son's life force, even though the orb itself had been destroyed when Samuel's heart stopped beating.
His youngest son had been on the Tenth Floor, according to his sources and informants, a relatively safe area where the most dangerous thing Samuel should have been doing was bettering his spells and upgrading his skills in his Knight Order’s dorm or practice field... So how in all the hells could he have gotten killed?
There were no creatures on the Tenth Floor at a level equal to Samuel’s skill that should have been capable of killing him in a straight fight. While Samuel was far from a proper noble’s son, given his lack of concern for how others viewed him and how a noble should conduct himself, he had possessed incredible talent. More so than his peers, and even more than anyone in House Barrenthal had records of for generations.
So how could he have died?
Was it due to a pack of Elites? While uncommon, they did exist.
The Knight Orders made sure to periodically hunt down and eliminate any Elite rank monsters around this time of year, specifically to prevent needless deaths of younger Climbers, especially since this Floor was supposed to be for skill development under guided supervision, at least for the non-nobles who needed that kind of hand-holding.
So how could Sam have died?
Were the ones to kill him other nobles settling some kind of grudge? But his House hadn't antagonized any other Houses recently that he was aware of, at least not to the degree that would warrant assassination of a youngest son...
Was this the work of Robert Heart and his growing coalition of Houses?
But why would they move against House Barrenthal now, before even making an overture about joining their cause? It made no sense to kill Samuel for his thoughts on which side he would choose in the war, as it was well known that he sided with the commoners.
Not to mention, his eldest son, Callen, was the Heir Apparent and already had a sterling reputation with the other noble houses, already engaged to the youngest daughter of House Bluelilly.
Samuel was crass and dismissive toward other nobles, yes, but he was practically their Household's dirty laundry that everyone already knew about — it wasn't a secret that could be exploited or a weakness that needed to be eliminated, just an embarrassing quirk of a youngest son who wanted to stand out.
So why—?
Lord Ferros was pulled abruptly from his spiralling thoughts by the sharp ringing of his manaphone, the sound cutting through the silence of his study like a knife.
He reached for it automatically, assuming it would be his wife calling. She kept a copy of Samuel’s Life Core on her dressing room desk as well and would have felt it shatter at the same moment he had.
But his expression grew even grimmer as he read the caller ID and saw that it was his brother contacting him instead, the man who had sworn never to speak to him again after what had happened between them all those years ago.
His brother would never break that vow unless it was for news so terrible that he had to make a call regardless of his ego, which could only mean one thing.
His daughter, and my niece; Jasmine, who was also a member of Samuel's Party, was dead as well.
… The commoners, the very ones he’d warned his son about not being skilled enough to be around him, had killed his son.
Hours blurred past Deacon as he made it back to the main cavern and now stood just before the teleporter pad, staring at it blankly as though his mind had disconnected from his body and he was operating purely on autopilot, going through the motions of what needed to be done because the alternative was collapsing completely.
"You okay, Deke?" Bonehead asked from where he was tied to Deacon's hip, resting just beside the bottle holding Esmerelda's soul, though his tone suggested he already knew the answer to that question.
"No," Deacon answered softly as he stepped onto the teleporter pad and began inputting the return code with mechanical precision, his fingers moving through the sequence without conscious thought. "I don't think I ever will be—not after this."
With that said, a flash of blinding white light flooded their vision for just a moment before the living and dead members of what remained of the Ravenlight Party materialized within the hidden teleporter room in the lounge of the Sovereign Blade’s Knight Order.
As Deacon stepped off the teleporter pad, the wall in front of him shifted automatically, granting him entrance into the lounge and allowing him to see his uncle. Without a word needing to be exchanged, Deacon immediately knew that his uncle sensed something was wrong.
He looked as though he had aged decades since the last time Deacon had seen him just days earlier, standing rigid with a manaphone pressed to his ear. The moment the teleporter activated, his head snapped toward Deacon, his expression making it seem as though he were seeing a ghost.