The heavy doors swung open slowly, accompanied by hymn-toned music and a low, humming female voice.
As the group stepped inside, the cleanest, most orderly space they'd encountered anywhere in Sein Dungeon seemed to shift, subtly, in its very atmosphere.
The sacred, solemn weight of the place made it feel as though a god waited within, expecting reverence.
Directly opposite their entrance stood an archway leading toward the cathedral's rear. For a brief moment, everyone's gaze passed straight through it, revealing distant mountains beyond — numerous peaks clustered beneath a cold sky, and, for a fraction of a second, the shadowy silhouette of something dragon-shaped flickering across them.
Mountains where dragons dwell?!
Before Eliphis could get a better look, the archway was swallowed by rising white mist. The doorway behind them followed suit — every path back sealed off entirely.
So — where, then, was the boss?
At that moment, something unfamiliar surfaced within the background music.
The crackle of burning flame.
The howl of a bitter, freezing wind.
The first came from the burning heart of the Profaned Capital; the second, from the frigid air of the Painted World of Ariandel. None of the adventurers had any way of knowing that, of course. All they registered was a shift in the room's mood.
Once those two foreign sounds bled into the hymn, the divine solemnity that had gripped the space a moment ago noticeably weakened.
Sali couldn't say for certain whether he was overthinking it, but he had a distinct, uncomfortable feeling — as though whoever had woven these two sounds into the moment had done so specifically to desecrate the sacred, to strip a god of its dignity in the most humiliating way possible.
Right as he found himself wondering why he was suddenly so good at reading between the lines, a dangerous presence began building off Eliphis, standing at the front.
Because the enemy had started to appear.
At the center of the cathedral, dark-purple light churned and surged. Sali caught an aura eerily similar to the one he remembered from the Church of the Deep.
That sludge-creature again?
The aura shared real similarity, but this dark-purple light was far more beautiful than that muddy corruption — something elegant threaded through its menace.
Then that elegance snapped into something wilder as crimson flame ignited alongside it.
Between the two colors, a hazy figure slowly gathered shape.
The instant it fully appeared, everyone felt simultaneously scorched by heat and frozen by wind, all at once.
The hymn built toward its peak beneath the woman's rising voice.
The dark-purple phantom stepped forward, out of the flame.
That single step landed like a physical blow against everyone's chest, freezing the whole group in place for a moment.
The name surfaced in every mind the instant they laid eyes on him.
[Clone of Pontiff Sulyvahn]
A clone the elusive Pontiff had left behind, guarding this space. His true location remained unknown — but this clone carried strength nearly identical to the original.
None of the adventurers could sense anything particularly strange in that fact on its own.
Wade, though, watching from behind the scenes, found something faintly lacking in the moment — introducing Dark Souls III's actual mastermind here, secondhand, through a proxy, felt a little short on grandeur.
Not unlike having the Queen of the Full Moon debut as a Mimic instead of the genuine article.
But Sulyvahn was already established as capable of producing clones. A guardian clone standing watch over the cathedral was reasonable, wasn't it? Perfectly consistent, even.
Every mercenary snapped to full alert.
Even as "merely" a clone, the pressure radiating off him wasn't inferior in the slightest to what they'd felt facing Wolnir for the first time.
Eliphis reacted too — his brow furrowed, and deepened further, the moment his eyes fixed on the twin greatswords in Sulyvahn's grip.
Pontiff Sulyvahn.
Ever since the Outrider Knights had first surfaced, this name had come up again and again. Equipment, weapons, items, even the geography of Irithyll of the Boreal Valley itself — nearly everything connected, in some fashion, back to this Pontiff.
Naturally, that had drawn everyone's attention. "Pontiff" alone carried real weight as a title.
So what, exactly, did they actually know about him by now?
They knew Sulyvahn ruled over Irithyll — an ambitious schemer who'd dispatched forces well beyond the city's borders for purposes still unclear. Outrider Knights turned up everywhere.
They knew Sulyvahn had entered some manner of cooperation with the Church of the Deep — with Aldrich, Saint of the Deep, specifically — a partnership that had let Aldrich leave the Church entirely.
None of that, on its own, proved much of anything.
But the Pontiff's eye — capable of transforming people into beasts — had given everyone a clear enough sense of the scale of his ambition. The twisted creatures scattered throughout the dungeon prison bore his fingerprints too.
Even the boy's tragedy connected back to him, somehow.
A man like that could never be described as good.
Later, someone had discovered that Sulyvahn had been a sorcerer before ever becoming Pontiff — humble origins, apparently, climbing his way upward through sheer effort.
That detail had earned him genuine admiration from Eliphis.
And alongside that admiration, the Light Eagle Corps had also thrown considerable preparation into specifically countering this former sorcerer. Every anti-magic tool at their disposal. They'd even spent a genuine fortune securing a shield enchanted with Thops's Barrier — an item rare enough these days that people hesitated to burn even one on the Queen of the Full Moon's Mimic.
Eliphis himself had spent the intervening stretch studying countermeasures against every category of magic he could think of, drilling the mercenaries in formations and coordinated tactics.
This time, the preparation had been genuinely thorough — even more so than for Wolnir.
He'd been confident that, combined with the anti-magic formations he and his people had built, they could stand up to some of history's most renowned magical masters.
But —
But —
Staring at Sulyvahn's phantom, the corner of Eliphis's eye twitched, faintly.
The Assault Captain beside him voiced the shared thought out loud.
"Why's he carrying two swords?! Isn't he supposed to be a sorcerer?!"
The sheer visual weight of those two blades — one wreathed in flame, one flickering with purple light — had completely overwhelmed everyone's attention, to the point they'd nearly missed Sulyvahn's genuinely strange appearance otherwise.
His face carried no discernible features at all — just densely packed branches covering where features should be, with clear tree-like characteristics running through the rest of his body.
"Could those swords actually be modified magic staves? Letting him cast spells while fighting in melee?" Sali guessed.
At this point, any theory sounded plausible.
Sein Dungeon's monsters seemed to specialize in exactly this kind of jarring contrast.
The notion of Pontiff Sulyvahn as some kind of swordsmanship savant landed on everyone roughly the way it would if the outside world's own head of the Church of Light suddenly pulled a massive club out mid-sermon.
Eliphis made a quick hand signal — the cue for the mages to raise magic-resistant barriers.
The cathedral was enormous, and they sat a considerable distance from Sulyvahn. Which meant, obviously —
At this range, only magic could actually reach them.
Eliphis had already worked out the general behavioral pattern of Sein's elites and bosses: they attacked the moment they appeared. Even holding swords now, the enemy had been a sorcerer once.
There was no way he'd abandoned magic entirely.
Surely Pontiff Sulyvahn hadn't fully given up spellcasting and planned to sprint the full length of the cathedral just to hack at them with two swords.
Surely not.
As the mages opened their barriers, the physically stronger mercenaries readied dragon-restraint chains, and the captains prepared their finishing techniques.
Sulyvahn's clone took a single step forward.
Every mercenary's nerves pulled taut.
He raised a hand.
The unmistakable prelude to a cast.
The corner of Eliphis's mouth curled upward.
An instant later, a massive tide of magical power surged through the cathedral like a storm-driven sea.
Definitely an extraordinary spell.
At Eliphis's command, the mages immediately pushed their barriers' magic resistance higher — at the cost of making them noticeably more fragile against physical impact.
Didn't matter. Block the magic, and the trade was worth it.
Once his spell hits the barrier and breaks against it, I'll close the distance and put a blade through his heart.
Eliphis kept his eyes locked on Sulyvahn's shape, hunting for the opening the enemy would inevitably reveal.
Then —
"Where'd he go?"
Sulyvahn had vanished.
Not quite accurate, though. He'd simply reappeared — directly in front of everyone — in the space of a single blink.
An extraordinarily pure Flash spell.
Only once the mercenaries registered his tensed arms, the swords brightening in color, did the realization land.
Buddy. You're seriously a mage who fights in melee too?!
The Profaned Greatsword erupted in surging Profaned Flame. The Greatsword of Judgment lit with purple magic — the judgment of the Darkmoon itself.
Either power alone would've made anyone's pulse spike.
And this wasn't a casual strike.
A full-committed blow.
Eliphis registered the reversal in under a second.
Their plan — opening magical barriers preemptively — had been read and exploited. The enemy had bait-and-switched them: fake out a cast, let their attention lock entirely on magical defense, then close distance and swing.
A phantom, carrying this much tactical intelligence?
That didn't track with any established magical logic this world operated under.
Eliphis spread both hands, desperately circulating what mana he could pull. But at this range, with this little time — there was no way to form a barrier in time.
"BOOM—!"
Profaned Flame and Darkmoon magic swallowed the entire cathedral instantly.
For scale — this single attack landed roughly equivalent to Wolnir's own Wrath of the Gods.
In other words, Sulyvahn's clone had opened the fight with a genuine battlefield-clearing ultimate.
Once the flames finally cleared, though, the clone didn't press the advantage. It pulled back instead — deliberately gifting the survivors a brief window to recover.
Why design the encounter this way?
Wouldn't unloading everything at once and simply ending the fight outright have been more efficient?
Because emotion — or more precisely, the harvestable mana emotion generated — needed time to build and properly ferment.
Sali's eyes slowly opened.
Am I dead?
Dying beneath that strike wouldn't have surprised him in the least. He could've accepted it without complaint.
But finding himself still alive, and taking in the scene ahead of him, his eyes went wide.
"Elsa!"
Everyone snapped their eyes open and looked forward.
Elsa stood directly in front of the entire group.
Had Sali not called her name, none of them would have recognized her at all.
Her body had been burned beyond recognition — standing motionless, like a charred, hollow puppet.
Judging by her posture, she'd thrown herself in front of everyone the instant Sulyvahn's clone had charged, raising her sword against the blow.
"Thud—"
Elsa collapsed to the ground.
No way to tell, at a glance, whether she was alive or dead.
Not the faintest trace of life registered from her.
"Captain Guts... she took the full hit in one shot!"
Not technically an instant kill, though.
The attack had been aimed primarily at Eliphis. Elsa had simply thrown herself into its path.
Without enough time to raise a full barrier, Eliphis had instead used the opening — pushing the incoming flame and magic sideways, onto Elsa, letting the exchange work in his favor.
That was the actual reason he'd walked away nearly unscathed.
And the actual reason Elsa now lay entirely unable to continue.
Fear detonated through the group like a bomb going off.
Sein Dungeon happily received the adventurers' generous, unprompted donation of raw emotional mana.
Right then, Eliphis clapped his hands together.
"Clap!"
Every mercenary's expression went briefly, uniformly blank.
Then — as though touched by a Calm spell — composure snapped back in across the board.
He clapped again.
This time, excitement surged through the group, as sudden and complete as a Frenzy spell taking hold. Fear toward the phantom evaporated, replaced by overwhelming fighting spirit.
"Hahaha! Charge! Kill him!"
"He one-shot Captain Guts! Take him down myself, and I could make captain too!"
Frenzied emotion released mana as well — just at a somewhat reduced rate compared to genuine negative emotion.
And every bit of this had been noted by Wade, observing quietly from behind the scenes.
"Sacrificing one of his own strongest fighters, deliberately... what exactly is Eliphis playing at?"
Wade genuinely couldn't parse the reasoning.
Even accounting for shared damage between Eliphis and Elsa, none of it explained why she'd been left this thoroughly incapacitated.
Some tactical calculation of his own, maybe?
One thing, though, Wade understood clearly enough.
"Eliphis has some method of directly manipulating his mercenaries' emotions. He's actively interfering with Sein Dungeon's income."
And with that — Sulyvahn's clone's hostility toward Eliphis spiked instantly to its absolute maximum.