Haimer had no words for Loki's performance — the giddy antics of a drunkard reborn into a new body. He rolled his eyes, couldn't be bothered to match her energy, brushed her hand off his shoulder, and kept walking deeper into the Soma Familia compound.
The further in they went, the worse the surroundings became.
The stone-flagged corridor was slicked with unidentified viscous liquid that clung to the soles of their boots with every step, making a wet, sucking sound.
The air carried not just the sour reek of fermenting ale, but layers of sharp, acrid vomit beneath it. And underneath all of that, the most pervasive smell of all — an alcohol fragrance so rich and concentrated it bordered on sickeningly sweet.
There was something wrong with that scent.
It was enticing, beguiling, the kind of smell that hooked you through the chest — but breathe it in for more than a few lungfuls and your head began to throb in hard, rhythmic pulses, your nerves pulled wire-tight, and a strange, maddening impulse crept in: the urge to put your skull through the nearest wall just to feel something solid.
And it wasn't only the smell.
In the shadowed alcoves lining both sides of the corridor, bodies had begun to accumulate — Soma Familia members sprawled in every direction, piled without order or dignity.
Men and women. Old and young.
Without exception, every single one of them had been reduced to skin and bone, eyes sunken deep into dark hollows, the whites of their eyes laced through with vivid red threads.
As Haimer and Loki passed, not one of them moved. They simply lay there like puddles of rotten mud.
A few had their faces pressed to the damp stone, tongues extended, lapping desperately at the thin brown residue seeping out of the cracks between the flagstones — like dogs dying of thirst.
These were supposed to be Adventurers. They looked like nothing so much as hollow shells with the soul already scraped out.
Loki took in the scene and let some of the animation drain from her face. She clicked her tongue.
"This lot. Every last one of them — finished."
She stepped over an arm that reached out to grab at her boot, and the contempt in her voice was pure and uncomplicated — no sympathy, not even a trace of it.
"The Divine Wine Soma brews — for mortals in the Lower World who don't have the spiritual fortitude to handle it, the kick is just too savage." "Once a single drop touches your lips, you can never go back. You spend the rest of your life being sucked dry by the craving, wriggling like a worm."
Loki put her hands behind her head and turned her mouth down at the corners.
Haimer swept his gaze across the figures on the ground.
"There's nothing wrong with losing yourself in a craft."
"For a creator, pursuing absolute perfection — that impulse belongs in every discipline."
"But."
"When what you create turns around and begins to govern the world around you — and even governs you, and the people beside you."
"That can only mean the craft itself has gone crooked."
Loki blinked, turned her head toward Haimer, a flicker of genuine puzzlement in her red eyes.
"Gone crooked?"
"A tool is created, at its core, to be used — to serve." Haimer spoke as he walked.
"But if a finished work, rather than serving its user, strips them of their reason — transforms them into fuel to sustain the work itself."
"Then that work has ceased to be a tool. It has become a monster that devours reason."
As he finished speaking.
Haimer and Loki came to a stop before a heavy iron-banded wooden door.
The door sat slightly ajar. From within came a scent still more potent and concentrated — pure, without any of the adulteration of the corridors — and the deep, rolling gurgle of something fermenting and churning in vast wooden casks.
Haimer raised a hand and, without much force at all, pushed the door open.
The hinges let out a long creak.
The brewery beyond was cavernous. Tall oak barrels filled the space in every direction.
A man in a coarse robe stained through with wine and earth, his hair in wild, unkempt disarray, stood with his back to them beside a great vat, gripping a long wooden paddle and stirring the liquid within with total, absorbed concentration.
— The chief deity of the Soma Familia.
— Soma.
At the sound of the door, Soma didn't turn. His low voice carried the flat irritation of a man interrupted in the middle of something that mattered.
"Did I not say? The delivery date isn't for a while yet. The new batch of Divine Wine is still fermenting."
"Zannis, take your people and go. Don't bother me."
At that, Loki immediately split into a wide grin.
"Who's this Zannis? It's Loki, Soma!"
At that familiar voice, Soma's hand stilled on the paddle.
He turned.
His long black hair fell across most of his face — but when his eyes found the flat-chested, red-haired goddess in the doorway, and then the black-haired, black-eyed man standing calmly beside her.
Soma's entire body locked up. The wooden paddle nearly slipped from his fingers and into the vat.
"Loki…"
Soma's gaze settled on Haimer.
What was this man doing in his reeking, smoke-fogged brewery?
At the same moment.
Soma Familia Headquarters, Underground Level One.
The passage leading to the private vault was dim, lit only by torches bracketed into the wall every few metres. Besides the heavy smell of alcohol, the air carried the close, damp must unique to underground spaces.
Lili — transformed into the shape of a Canine boy — pressed herself flat against the corner of the corridor.
She eased half of her furry head around the edge and peered into the passage ahead.
There.
Standing before the stout iron-barred gate that sealed the private vault were two powerfully built Familia members. Longswords hung at their hips; though they sagged against the wall and yawned with the glazed look of men going through the motions, their positions effectively blocked the entire passage with no gap left to slip through.
Worse still.
The fragrance of Divine Wine seeping through the iron bars was a hundred times more intense and pure than anything in the corridors above.
— The scent of Divine Wine at its highest possible concentration.
Lili had been forced to drink it once before.
And.
Because she had gone so long without touching it.
The instant that scent threaded into her nostrils, her mind began to come apart at the seams. Vivid, kaleidoscopic hallucinations strobed across her vision. Every part of her screamed for even a single drop against her tongue.
"Mm…"
Knowing it was the Divine Wine pulling at her, Lili clenched her jaw until her teeth ground together, drove her fingernails into her own thighs, and used the pain to drag her dissolving consciousness back by force.
She could not fall here.
Kami-sama's words were still ringing in her ears. This was the one and only chance to wash off the filth.
And from the look of things, forcing her way in was not going to work. Her combat ability was pitifully weak — she stood no chance against any of these Adventurers.
She thought back to last night, in the hall.
— No need to become anyone. Just find a blind spot in their line of sight, and change the voice with magic.
Lili drew in a long, slow breath and pressed down the craving for Divine Wine.
She closed her eyes. In the space behind her eyelids, she rapidly reconstructed from memory the particular cadence of Captain Zannis's voice — that habitual, imperious, ice-edged sneer.
Then.
Still tucked behind the corner, Lili cleared her throat.
"You two — what are you still doing standing there?!"
Zannis's voice rang through the corridor, threaded with impatience.
Lili had captured every dimension of Zannis when he was furious — a ten-out-of-ten reproduction.
She had even replicated the particular stresses and inflections he used out of habit, down to the last detail.
The two guards in front of the barred gate jolted as if struck, snapping to attention at once, eyes darting frantically through the murk.
"C— Captain?!"
One of the guards called out in a strangled stammer, straining to find Zannis's silhouette in the dim light.
"Idiots!"
"Loki — and that black-haired deity everyone's been saying is extremely dangerous — have already forced their way into the compound and gone round to the back-yard brewery to find Kami-sama!"
"The men at the front couldn't stop them!"
"What?!"
"So why are you still standing there?! Move!"
Lili kept driving them with Zannis's voice, biting off every word.
"Get yourselves to that brewery right now!"
"Stop those addicts who haven't had a drink in too long from causing a scene and disturbing the two of them! If anything goes wrong and those two important people lose their tempers, I will personally have you both reassigned to gathering Magic Stones on the thirteenth floor of the Dungeon!"
At that threat.
The colour drained from both guards' faces in an instant.
After all.
In the entire Soma Familia, who didn't know that guarding the private vault was the cushiest posting there was.
No need to risk your life in the Dungeon. A little something extra to pocket every day.
For men who had spent their time lording it over the compound and squeezing whatever they could out of the lower-ranked members — being sent down into that monster-riddled place, given how little they'd trained in recent years, was a question of whether they'd even come back alive.
Staying here and standing watch meant just that — standing watch — and occasionally shaking down some half-starved lower-ranked member for anything worth taking.
"But, Captain…"
The younger of the two guards on the right was still wavering, glancing back at the heavy brass padlock on the gate.
"If there's no one guarding the vault…"
"Soma-sama's mechanisms are inside — what are you frightened of?!"
Lili raised her volume, cutting off his thought before it could finish forming, giving him no time to reason his way out of it.
"That iron door is forged from tempered steel. The key is on me. Who's getting in without the key?!"
"Once we've sent those two nuisances on their way, I'll see you handsomely rewarded!"
"But every second you waste standing there, I will not forget!"
Having delivered that, Lili deliberately stamped her feet several times on the spot — mimicking the heavy, furious footsteps of Zannis storming away.
At that, the two guards stopped thinking altogether.
"Yes, yes, yes! Captain, please calm down, we're going right now! Right now!"
Both men bowed their heads repeatedly, grabbed their swords, and broke into a run toward the brewery upstairs, terrified that being even one second slow might genuinely get them sent to the Dungeon.
Only once the sound of their footsteps had vanished completely.
Lili stepped out from the corner. She let out a long breath and realised her back was already drenched in cold sweat.
Still.
She had actually pulled it off.
And she had actually dared to do it.
Not only dared — she'd done it without leaving a single crack.
Lili stared at her own hands, a dazed, hollow look on her face.
So she wasn't someone who could only take a beating in the mud after all.
But this was no time to stand around daydreaming.
Lili hurried to the heavy steel gate, now unwatched.
Just as she'd said in her performance as Zannis, there was indeed an enormous brass padlock hanging from the door.
Not that it posed much of a problem.
These past years, scraping together ten million Valis for her exit fee had taught her every underhanded survival skill the back-alleys had to offer.
Picking a lock was the most basic of them.
With that thought, Lili stepped up to the iron-barred gate and fished a thin metal wire from her pocket.
With practiced ease, she bent the forward end into a small, precise curve.
Slid it into the keyhole.
Then pressed her ear tight against the cold surface of the lock, held her breath, and listened carefully to the faint, delicate sounds of the pin tumblers shifting inside.
A gentle movement of her fingers.
…
A moment later.
Click.
A clean, crisp snap.
The padlock sprang open.
Lili lifted the lock free, put both hands against the iron-barred gate, pushed it open with all her strength, and slipped inside the vault.
And then.
In a single glance.
Lili froze where she stood.
Compared to the scent in the corridor outside.
The fragrance inside the vault had reached a density that defied belief.
Wooden shelves covered every wall, lined with finished Divine Wine bottles of every variety, each one labelled.
But none of that was the most dangerous thing here.
At the centre of the vault, atop a raised stone platform.
A single exquisite bottle sat alone.
Inside it, Divine Wine — clear and luminous as a jewel.
Merely approaching it, the fragrance pouring off that bottle seized Lili's heart in a closed fist.
No wonder Zannis, for all his role as the Vault Keeper, never touched Divine Wine himself, and would absolutely never allow anyone who had tasted it to come anywhere near this room.
In the presence of a Divine Wine like this, anyone who had ever tasted it before would have their soul completely unmade — would be willing to offer up even their very soul to the liquid in that vessel.
The scent reached Lili and her pupils lost their focus. The world in front of her eyes began to warp and bend at the edges.
Her body moved on its own, one step at a time, drifting toward the platform.
She reached out with trembling hands and lifted the bottle filled with Divine Wine.
All she had to do was pull the stopper.
Just one sip.
And she could reach paradise…
The thought roared through Lili's mind, expanding until it filled every corner.
But.
The next instant.
Lili squeezed her eyes shut.
Both rows of her teeth drove down, directly and savagely, into her own tongue.
The force was enormous. The tongue split instantly. Blood welled up and ran freely.
"Lili… will absolutely drink…"
"…Absolutely will not… become that kind of… thing… again…"
She opened her eyes. The blankness in their depths receded for a moment, clarity returning.
She didn't dare look at the bottle of Divine Wine in her hands. Guided only by a hazy half-awareness, she locked both arms around it and clutched it against her chest.
Then, stumbling and lurching, she turned and ran for the vault door.
Even as small droplets of bright red blood slid from the corner of her mouth and fell, one by one, to the stone floor — blooming into small dark-red flowers where they landed.
It hurt. It hurt badly enough to push tears to the edge of her eyes.
But Lili felt, in that moment, that she had never been this clear-headed in her entire life.
At the same moment.
In the back courtyard of the brewery.
A lean, bespectacled man had appeared.
— The captain of the Soma Familia, Lv.2.
「Vault Keeper」 — Zannis Lustra.
Loki had turned up a large wooden wine cup from somewhere and was ladling herself a full measure straight from a cask of already-fermented Divine Wine.
She sat on an empty barrel with no regard for appearances, tipped her head back, and poured it down her throat in great gulping swallows — then let out a deeply satisfied belch.
Haimer, for his part, had not joined in that particular entertainment.
He'd pulled a wooden chair over from nearby — one that looked reasonably solid — sat down, crossed his right leg over his left, and settled into a casual lean.
"Speaking of which — the corridors on your way through had quite a collection of people lying about."
"Thin as kindling, every last one of them, faces pressed to the floor licking at the flagstones. A stranger would think this was a refugee camp in Orario."
"People who fall so easily to Divine Wine — what use are they?"
"Can't resist even this much temptation, driven entirely by craving — those children don't deserve a second glance from me."
There was, in those words, something of the particular loftiness one might expect from a deity — purely concerned with the making of things, with no interest in the wreckage the made thing leaves behind.
"A small temptation?"
"Is that what you think."
Haimer, hearing that, let out a quiet sigh and raised a hand — pointing directly at Loki sitting to one side, wine cup lifted, cheeks flushed red, eyes already going glassy and unfocused.
"But since you say mortals lack the willpower to hold themselves together."
"Take a look at this one here."
"A deity who has lived for countless ages in the Heavens, who descended to the Lower World — takes one drink of your wine and loses all semblance of composure."
"And you still expect the children of the Lower World to hold out against a temptation like this?"
"Quite the lofty position you occupy."
"Ha?!"
Loki, who had been revelling in the afterglow of the alcohol, had just finished a great, thunderous belch when she caught those words — and immediately looked at Haimer with a distinctly put-out expression.
"Hey! Hey! Hey!"
"Haimer, you're here to have a word with him — why am I suddenly the bad example?!"
Loki had put away several large cups by now and her words had begun to slur.
Haimer had already given up acknowledging Loki's protests. He simply sat and looked quietly at Soma.
Zannis, for his part, adjusted the gold-framed spectacles on his nose and said nothing.
After all, of the two great figures who had forced their way in, he couldn't afford to offend either one.
The chief deity of the Loki Familia — ranked alongside the Freya Familia as the mightiest Familia in all of Orario — that went without saying.
As for the black-haired deity sitting in the chair with that harmless air about him — he was, if anything, even harder for Zannis to make sense of.
After all.
Not only were there the fearsome rumours that had been swirling through Orario these past few days.
Last night's incident had already spread everywhere like wildfire.
— The chief deity of the Haimer Familia had brought monsters up from the Dungeon and walked them openly through the city streets in broad daylight.
Something like that happening was tantamount to grinding millennia of the Lower World's ironclad law — humans and monsters do not coexist — into the dust underfoot.
And yet.
What made it even more inexplicable to Zannis was this:
Faced with behaviour that directly and brazenly challenged every baseline that the surface world stood on.
Every major Familia in Orario — including even the Freya Familia — had chosen silence.
Even the Guild, which was usually the first to enforce the rules, hadn't issued so much as a single statement of censure.
It was the sort of thing that defied explanation no matter how long you thought about it.
Still, whatever the reason.
If the chief deity of the Haimer Familia could now openly bring monsters from the Dungeon to live on the surface without even the Guild able to do anything about it — that meant the Haimer Familia's chief deity was already operating in Orario beyond the reach of any institutional restraint.
With that thought, Zannis let his gaze drift carefully and unhurriedly back and forth between Haimer and Soma.
A sourness was collecting in his chest.
After all, they were both deities in the Lower World.
By contrast — wrapping himself in a coarse robe all day, shutting himself inside a wine cellar, looming over a collection of wooden barrels with a stick and stirring — the man looked exactly like a vagrant brewing a pot of gruel under a bridge.
Zannis fixed a cold look on the back of Soma's dishevelled head, and a flicker of contempt rose involuntarily in him.
Though.
That feeling lasted only a few seconds.
Thinking it through more carefully, Zannis decided Soma actually suited him rather well.
After all.
If the deity was too sharp and capable, where would there be room for him — the captain — to have any say?
It was precisely because Soma didn't involve himself in anything that Zannis could use a little Divine Wine to keep those below him obedient enough, and watch a healthy flow of Valis pour into his own pockets every day — a far more comfortable life than those Adventurers scrapping for their lives on the front lines.
And besides.
The most widely circulated story about this deity Haimer on the streets lately was, of course, the business of bringing Dungeon monsters to the surface.
Everyone outside was saying the deity had used some unfathomable form of mental domination to forcibly control those monsters.
But Zannis didn't see it that way.
…
Because behind the scenes, in the course of his various money-making ventures, he'd had extensive dealings with the captain of the Ikelos Familia — the one called 「Rampager」 — Dix.
Helping him move all manner of black-market goods that couldn't see the light of day, and doing the books and laundering money on the side for Ikelos Familia's chief deity — Ikelos.
Whatever dirty business Dix was up to behind closed doors, Zannis knew it in extraordinary detail.
When he'd learned that Dix had been capturing monsters in the hidden corners of the Dungeon — including some who inexplicably possessed human reason — and then moving these rare goods through secret passages to sell at extortionate prices to nobles from city-states outside Orario who had particular appetites for them.
Faced with a venture so absurdly profitable it might make a man rich overnight.
Zannis had been watching with envious eyes for a very long time.
So.
When word reached him that the chief deity of the Haimer Familia had arrived on the surface with a group of Dungeon monsters — and that those monsters had displayed no aggression whatsoever in the face of streets full of Adventurers.
He had formed his own suspicions about the monsters Haimer had brought up the previous night.
— Those were almost certainly the living goods Dix had been moving through his underground black market. Monsters with human reason.
For now it was only suspicion.
But if it turned out to be true.
Then things became very interesting indeed.
After all, he'd heard Dix boast in person — those monsters didn't just have reason; some of them could speak human language in a way that beggared belief.
Though Zannis privately struggled to believe that a deity from the Heavens, of all things, would be so bored as to become some kind of crusader for justice on behalf of monsters who'd crawled out of the Dungeon.
But whatever this deity Haimer's motives might be.
Once he extracted, from those monsters' own mouths, a clear account of every last unsavoury thing the Ikelos Familia had been doing in the dark.
That would be a grudge well and truly planted between Haimer and the Ikelos Familia.
With a powerful deity now actively involved.
Even Dix — who strutted about imperiously under normal circumstances — would have to tuck his tail and lie low in that Daedalus Street slum for a while, not daring to show his face.
Thinking of Dix — who was always raking in obscene profits — getting a fat bruise on his nose, Zannis felt a quiet surge of private satisfaction.
Whatever happened.
This fire, no matter how it burned, wasn't going to reach him, Zannis.
He'd only been providing a fence for stolen goods from the shadows, taking a cut as the middleman.
Clean hands. No direct contact. No evidence.
He was supremely confident in his ability to keep himself hidden.
Unless Dix lost his mind and exposed him voluntarily, there was absolutely no way anyone would think to suspect a support-type Familia captain who never even went near the Dungeon front lines.
Thinking it through to this point, Zannis felt the contempt he'd been holding for his deity who knew nothing but brewing grow a shade heavier.
"Brew your wine. Brew that worthless wine of yours for the rest of your life."
"In the end — deity or Adventurer — as long as you've got a grip on what they want, they're all just pieces on the board to be used."
…
With that thought settled, Zannis retracted his inner calculations and arranged his expression into a smile of impeccable, elaborate deference.
"Haimer-sama."
"That you and Loki-sama have honoured us by condescending to visit this humble, rundown brewery of ours — it is a distinction beyond anything our Familia could have hoped for."
Zannis inclined his head by precisely the right degree, his tone pitched to perfect, studied courtesy.
"However, as you have just seen for yourself — the moment anything touches on brewing, Soma-sama loses all track of himself, and it is only inevitable that he has been somewhat remiss in attending to the two of you."
"For anything you require, you need only instruct me, Zannis, and it will be seen to."
"After all, all the large and small affairs of this compound are ordinarily managed by me. Soma-sama does not concern himself with such mundane matters."
The words were crafted with considerable skill.
Enough to make Loki's eyes light up.
"Really?"
"Since you say you have that much pull around here — could I have someone sent over next time to bring a few barrels of your finest Divine Wine back with them?"
Loki's eyes were practically glowing.
Haimer, meanwhile, sat in his wooden chair and paid Zannis's fawning words not the slightest attention.
"Managing?"
"Managing a group of living children into insects that lick muddy water from the floor — that's a rather distinctive approach to management you've got there."
At that, the expression on Zannis's face stiffened.
The smile he'd been holding up dropped, as if it had been painted on with cheap glue that was already failing to hold.
He pushed his gold-framed spectacles up his nose and swiftly reassembled himself into the picture of a refined, deeply distressed gentleman.
"This… Haimer-sama, you jest."
"Those members — they lack the willpower themselves, unable to resist the lure of Divine Wine. It causes me considerable concern as well."
"But in order to keep the Familia functioning, I have had no choice but to apply certain firm measures to keep them in line."
"You understand, of course — in a place like Orario, without strength and without money, a Familia simply cannot survive."
"I am only trying to make sure everyone has enough to eat."
With three easy sentences, Zannis had laundered all responsibility for the exploitation of the members clean away, laying the blame entirely on the members' own weakness.
This time, Haimer finally turned his head.
Black eyes came to rest on Zannis.
Every hair on Zannis's body stood up.
"Indeed."
Yet Haimer didn't actually counter Zannis's words. He simply followed along their current.
"Lacking willpower is, certainly, its own sin."
"If you've already given up even the struggle to keep living, then you deserve nothing better than to be a puddle of mud, or—"
At those words.
Zannis's eyes lit up.
But Haimer was already rising from his chair, taking two steps toward the brewery's entrance.
"However, I did not come here today to listen to your views on management."
"I came to collect a child."
"Collect… a child?"
Zannis blinked.
He looked around the reeking, smoke-fogged brewery by reflex, his head full of confusion.
Apart from the few of them present, what child was there in this place?
Could this deity — who had, without apparent effort, taken in even monsters as his own people — have set his sights on some particular wretch among their ranks of addicts?
While Zannis was still tangled in bewilderment.
The heavy iron-banded wooden door, left slightly ajar, was slowly pushed open from outside.
The hinges let out a long, slow creak.
A small figure appeared in the doorway of the brewery.
— A Pallum girl. Liliruca Arde.
Her arms were locked around an exquisite bottle, holding it to her chest with all the strength she had.
Inside the translucent vessel, an amber liquid caught the sunlight and refracted it into colours that made the throat tighten with want.
There was no need to pull the stopper.
The moment she stepped across the threshold of the brewery, a fragrance a hundred times more concentrated and pure than every cask in the yard combined rolled out and swallowed the whole courtyard whole.
"Kami-sama."
Lili's voice had gone thick and indistinct.
To hold out against that terrifying pull, she had bitten through her own tongue until it bled.
The drops of blood traced their way down her chin and fell.
"Drip… drip…"
Like a scattering of glaring red plum blossoms against the stone.
Lili didn't look at Zannis — who was standing to one side with his eyes nearly popping from his skull. She clutched the bottle, walked to where Haimer stood, and tilted her face up to meet his gaze.
"Lili…"
"Lili did it."
And when she placed that bottle — the one that had required extraordinary courage even to hold near her nose — steadily into Haimer's hands.
A perfect silence fell over the entire courtyard.
Even Loki, catching the dense, heady fragrance pouring off that bottle, went still for a moment.
Good lord…
That was something else entirely.
____
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