One day prior, inside the bustling grand hall of the Adventurers' Guild.
The moment Solenne had approached the two enigmatic newcomers, Rael Voss and Vhal’Zar, she had quietly activated her [Divine Eyes].
It was a supreme gift bestowed upon her directly by Goddess Vale. When activated, the physical world completely dissolved into an absolute, abyssal void. She could not see flesh, clothing, or facial expressions; she could only perceive the raw, naked fire of a person's soul. Usually, this allowed her to read anyone like an open book.
But the moment her gaze locked onto the two men, an unnatural, freezing shift in the atmosphere occurred. Before she could even process the blinding, monstrous scale of the souls before her, two distinct, overlapping voices resonated directly inside her mind.
“Hmm?” both muttered simultaneously.
Rael spoke in an incredibly casual, sarcastic tone, “Ah, Your Highness... you certainly possess a very unique skill.”
Immediately after, the knight, Vhal'Zar, let out a dangerous, low groan, “So, we are granted absolutely no privacy at this table, huh?”
Horrified, Solenne instantly deactivated the skill, the colorful reality of the guild tearing back into her vision. A cold sweat drenched her spine. Her hands trembled so violently that she had to hide them beneath her long, white sleeves.
‘They... they detected it? Instantly?!’ her mind screamed in sheer panic.
This was a divine spell woven by a deity! It was mechanically impossible for a mortal to perceive its activation, let alone trace it back to her the exact millisecond it was cast. Inside her chest, a primal, frantic voice began to ring: Run... you must run away from them right now!
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed her Royal Guards shifting their weight, preparing to forcefully subdue the two men for their perceived insolence.
‘No... stop! You fools cannot handle them!’
Suppressing the instinct to flee, Solenne bit her inner lip, forcing her facial muscles to smooth out into a perfectly serene, diplomatic mask. She quickly raised her hand to halt her guards, swallowing the lump of terror in her throat as she whispered, “Ah... please, forgive my sudden lapse, gentlemen. I simply meant to ask... may I have the honor of meeting you two gentlemen again at a more convenient time?”
Her priority had instantly shifted. She needed to retreat, find a secure location, and seek an immediate divine oracle from her Goddess to identify what these two monsters were.
The man named Rael merely gave her a knowing, effortless smile. “Well, suit yourself, Your Highness. My friend and I will be staying in the guild's library for a while. If you wish to look for us later, you already know exactly where to find us.”
The Saint then left.
She was truly terrified that something so unusual had happened, but instead of being completely conquered by fear, she tried to think logically. ‘Maybe I just overreacted. Maybe there is something I don’t know. Perhaps they possess some kind of artifact that can detect my [Divine Eyes]. Yeah, that’s it! They must possess some kind of powerful artifact. Yeah, that must be it!’ She repeated the thought desperately, trying not to lose her sanity.
After escaping the guild hall, Solenne and her convoy retreated to the most secure, heavily fortified luxury lodge in Greenvale.
Locking herself inside her private room, the Saint immediately fell to her knees, clasping her hands together in desperate prayer. She poured her mana into the ritual, waiting for Goddess Vale to manifest in her consciousness as she always did.
One hour passed. Then two. Then five.
For hours, Solenne remained in a deep, agonizing state of prayer, but the divine connection remained terrifyingly empty. The complete lack of a response began to grate on her frayed nerves. Impatience and anxiety crept into her heart.
"What... what am I supposed to do now?" she muttered, staring at the unresponsive altar. "This is completely unprecedented. Why isn't she answering me?"
Knock! Knock! Knock!
One of her Royal Guards stepped inside, bowing deeply. "Forgive the interruption, Your Highness. But there is a prominent local figure downstairs requesting an urgent private audience with you."
Solenne frowned, her voice laced with confusion. "A local figure? Who is it?"
"He introduces himself as Baron Vance, Your Highness," the guard reported carefully. "He is the secondary powerhouse of this city... or more accurately, the absolute ruler of its criminal underworld."
Solenne’s golden eyes instantly turned ice-cold. Under normal circumstances, a Holy Saint would never defile her presence by associating with a degenerate crime lord. But right now, with her Goddess inexplicably silent and two unregistered anomalies in the city, desperation overrode her morals.
"I see," Solenne said coldly, rising to her feet. "Lead me to him."
Before this day, Goddess Vale had always appeared flawlessly in her dreams whenever a threat loomed. If Solenne had just possessed the patience to wait a little longer, she would have avoided the trap. But blinded by panic due to the Goddess's first-ever delay, she walked straight into the meeting with Baron Vance.
Sitting in the shadows of the lodge, the Saint and the ruthless underground Baron began to weave a dark, covert plot: they would pool their resources to spy on the two mysterious adventurers, culminating in the disastrous decision to send Vance's elite assassin into their bedroom.
While Rael merely chose to subdue and quietly spare the lone spy sent to his bedroom, the situation in Vhal’Zar’s quarters was an entirely different, bloodier story.
Saint Solenne was incredibly fortunate that her lingering guilt and tight budget had limited her to hiring only one investigator for Rael. Baron Vance, however, was not so lucky. Driven by greed and paranoia, the underworld boss had deployed five of his most ruthless, high-tier assassins to infiltrate the knight's room.
It took Vhal'Zar less than a breath to slaughter them all.
With a wave of his hand, four of the intruders were instantly incinerated into microscopic gray ash. However, Vhal'Zar intentionally left the fifth assassin's corpse intact. Channeling a fraction of his dormant, forbidden necromancy, he forced his dark mana into the fresh vessel, reanimating the corpse on the spot.
[Greater Undead: Shadow Vanguard]
The resulting creature was no ordinary, shambling zombie. It was a high-tier wraith woven from pure shadows, exponentially faster and far more lethal than the assassin had ever been in life. Kneeling before his creator, the undead awaited his decree.
Vhal'Zar didn't care who had authorized the attack, nor did he care about the politics of this mortal city. In his eyes, these insects had foolishly stepped on the griffin's tail, and the price for provoking his master was absolute annihilation.
"Go," Vhal'Zar commanded coldly. "Erase the organization that birthed you. Leave no stone unturned."
Armed with eternal unlife, the shadow undead embarked on its bloody crusade. Because its existence was directly tied to Vhal'Zar's practically bottomless pool of mana, the creature was entirely immortal. Throughout the night, Vance's men desperately tried to fight back. They severed its limbs, crushed its chest, and detonated explosive magical scrolls directly in its face. But it was completely meaningless. The wounds simply stitched themselves back together instantly within the shadows. Baron Vance and his syndicate had nowhere left to run, and nowhere left to hide.
By the eclipse of the night, the entire underworld syndicate was eradicated. Even the lone elite assassin whom Rael had spared hours earlier was tracked down and slaughtered by the shadow wraith to ensure a clean sweep.
Slipping back through the window of the inn just before dawn, the blood-drenched undead knelt reverently before Vhal’Zar. "Oh, my supreme Lord... your holy mission is complete. What is your next decree?"
Looking out at the rising sun with cold, indifferent eyes, Vhal’Zar uttered a single, lifeless word. "Destroy yourself."
Without hesitation, the shadow plunged its own claws into its chest. As it collapsed, Vhal’Zar retracted his dark mana, causing the corpse to dissolve into harmless black dust, ensuring it would never regenerate again.
Later that morning, just a few hours before she would eventually meet Rael at the tavern, Saint Solenne paced around her private room, her anxiety mounting.
‘How strange... Why hasn't the investigator reported back to me yet?’ she mused, her brow furrowing. ‘Did Baron Vance take my gold and scam me?’
Unable to shake the terrible feeling in her gut, she ordered a small platoon of her Royal Guards to accompany her to the Baron’s private estate on the upper crest of the city. But the moment they pushed past the unguarded iron gates and entered the grand foyer of Vance's palace, they were met with a scene of absolute, unadulterated horror.
The palace walls were heavily painted in thick, drying crimson. The polished marble floor was a literal sea of blood, littered with countless severed limbs, decapitated heads, and bisected bodies thrown haphazardly across the room. The stench of death was suffocating.
Solenne staggered backward, her face draining of all color as panic seized her throat. "What... what in the heavens happened here?!"
Through the heavy silence of the slaughterhouse, a faint, ragged wheeze caught her attention. Spotting a heavily mangled guard clinging to a pillar, Solenne rushed over, frantically channeling her divine mana.
[Great Heal]
A warm, golden light enveloped the dying man, temporarily stabilizing his failing organs. "Hey! Stay with me! What happened here?! Who turned this palace into a wasteland?!" Solenne demanded, her voice trembling.
The dying guard’s eyes rolled back, his vision fading into darkness as he choked out his final, terrifying words, "The... the assassin... he fought back... we couldn't kill him... he was immortal... cough!..."
With a final, violent shiver, the light in his eyes completely extinguished. He was gone. The divine healing was far too late to salvage a shredded soul.
Solenne slowly collapsed to her knees, staring blankly at the dead man as her mind raced, piecing together a terrifying—yet completely incorrect—conclusion.
She vividly remembered her secret meeting with Baron Vance yesterday. Vance had boastfully presented a specific, elite assassin to her, bragging that the boy had been nurtured from early childhood to become a mindless, incredibly lethal weapon who blindly followed direct orders. Out of guilt for resorting to underhanded tactics, she had only hired that one specific assassin, giving him a strict command to gather intelligence on Rael and Vhal'Zar.
Clutching her head in sheer terror, a wave of immense guilt and horror washed over her.
‘No... oh merciful Goddess, no...’ Solenne wept internally, her body shaking. ‘The assassin I hired from the Baron... something must have gone horribly wrong. Did he encounter a cursed artifact in their room? Did he lose his mind, awaken an immortal curse, and come back to slaughter his own creator?!’
She truly believed that her desperate, impatient decision to hire a single spy had accidentally birthed an unkillable, rogue monster that had completely wiped out the city's entire underworld syndicate overnight.
Back then, standing in the blood-drenched ruins of Baron Vance’s estate, Solenne had mistakenly believed she had accidentally unleashed an immortal, rogue monster upon the city. Driven by intense guilt and suffocating fear, she had braced herself that afternoon to meet Rael and Vhal’Zar in the guild's library, fully prepared to submit and confess her sins. To her immense relief, they had shown her mercy, acting like ordinary, easygoing travelers.
But now, snapping back to the absolute reality of the present moment...
Solenne looked out at the massive, smoking crater surrounding them and realized how catastrophically she had miscalculated.
Artifacts? A rogue assassin? No. This was not the work of some cursed item. This was pure, unadulterated, reality-warping power residing within the monster knight, Vhal’Zar. His raw strength easily eclipsed the Demon King’s highest-ranking vanguard commanders.
Recalling the spell Vhal’Zar had just woven—the way the sky had shattered like cheap glass to reveal a mountain-sized skull radiating cosmic darkness—Solenne felt her knees go weak. She trembled violently, staring at the face of the absolute apocalypse.
But just as she thought the entire region was about to be swallowed whole, a sharp, thoroughly irritated roar shattered the terrifying atmosphere.
"Hey! You absolute moron!! Don't you dare use that spell out here!!!"
Solenne’s jaw dropped in sheer, unmitigated shock as she watched Rael aggressively berate the terrifying monster over there. Up until this exact second, she had secretly assumed that Vhal’Zar was the true powerhouse hiding in the shadows, using a fake master-servant dynamic to disguise his identity.
But she was dead wrong.
Vhal'Zar didn't just serve Rael to cover his identity; he was completely obedient, utterly terrified of displeasing him. Rael was the one who held the absolute leash over this deity.
Thud!
A sudden, desperate impact against the empty air broke Solenne from her spiraling thoughts.
She snapped her head around to see the crying, heavily soiled form of the Succubus Queen, Vespera, frantically banging her fists against an invisible wall right in front of Rael. Only then did Solenne realize a terrifying truth: a flawless, absolute barrier had been encasing the carriage, the horses, and the guards this entire time.
Initially, she had assumed Vhal’Zar had cast it using his god-like magical control. But looking at the battlefield layout, Vhal’Zar had been standing hundreds of meters away in the epicenter of the blast. Mechanically, it was impossible for him to maintain a barrier over them from that distance.
There was only one logical conclusion. The casual E-rank standing right beside her, with his hands calmly tucked into his pockets, was the one who had effortlessly shielded them from a city-destroying [Abyssal Nova] without even blinking.
"Please! Please! Make him stop! I'll do anything!" Vespera wailed through the invisible glass, her tears mixing with the dirt on her face.
The ultimate decision of life and death for a high-class Demon Commander now rested entirely in his hands.
Yet, instead of executing the demon or forcing her into a contract, Rael slowly turned his golden eyes toward the paralyzed Holy Maiden. A casual, almost bored smile crossed his face as he gestured toward the weeping Succubus.
"Well... she’s all yours now," Rael said smoothly, his voice completely unbothered by the cosmic weight of his words. "What choice do you want to make here, Saint?"
Solenne froze, completely paralyzed as the sudden, crushing weight of absolute authority over a Demon Queen was handed directly to her on a silver platter.
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