Trix led his team of three up the Fortress of Ruin, his mood sour. Behind him, Adam grumbled while he walked, while Pam kept equipping and unequipping her iron sword, her face set in a grimace. The unprecedented appearance of a new Chosen One had taken them all by surprise.

There wasn’t supposed to be anyone who would come after Haruki, who was supposed to be the last Chosen One to set foot in Briarwood Rebirth. No more victims, that was what the NPCs had promised them ever since the timer began its countdown.

Even if the Chosen Ones never found a way out, even if they had to be trapped here forever after the countdown stopped, there would be no more who would come after them and lose what they had lost. Marge had expected them to keep their word. Trix had had his suspicions, but having them confirmed just made his mood worsen.

They reached the 99th floor of the dungeon, having already scaled the Fortress of Ruin for 12 hours. It wouldn’t normally take this long to reach the top of the tower, but the End of Ruin event meant that all their portals within the dungeon had been reset, and all the enemies were overpowered variants of what they had been in story mode.

Upon setting foot on the floor, the shadows in the room began to rumble. Like boiling water, they bubbled and popped and hissed at the team, the inky depths dark and bottomless. Out of the hissing, bubbling mess emerged raggedy flags and the sheen of armour. Fleets upon fleets of shadowy Ruined Soldiers, hundreds of elite enemies all clustered in the same room together.

Upon each shadowy face was a tarnished silver mask, one that glinted blue green in the dancing firelight of the torches. Like a moth spreading its wings and laying flat on their faces, the symbol of the Decay.

The same mask looming over a smiling child.

Trix scowled at the memory, and pulled out his hammer.

With his team, he mauled through what seemed to be an endless wave of monsters, each hammer strike boring through shadowy figures and tearing them to ribbons. The arms that grabbed at his clothes and his beard were endless, no matter how much he swung and destroyed them, more would come.

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But the team never tired. They never could. Not in body, and certainly not in mind, for they had a mission to attend to, and they would see it through to the end.

Trix swung his hammer, and pondered angrily how he had gotten into this situation. Back then, he had just been a volunteer at a charity foundation, granting wishes to kids with terminal illnesses. Now? He was a vice captain of the Chosen Ones’ Alliance, and had been for five long years ever since he had been kidnapped and brought here.

The man behind the silver mask, his eyes filled with nothing but contempt and disgust.

According to Marge, only those who had cleared the final boss would be transported into the game. She saw the event as the gateway that led to this world, and they’d all just happened to stumble into it by accident. Trix thought differently.

There was someone behind it all, and he knew who it was.

He turned to see that the rest of his team had finished dispatching the other guards, and nodded to them. Adam strode up to the double doors at the end of the hall, looking at him for his approval.

The End of Ruin event had protected the little bugger long enough with the 99 floors of obstacles. It let him hide away in his tower like the coward that he was, but that would end now.

Trix would have his answers.

A silvery moth mask shattered, under Trix’s own anguished blows.

Trix nodded, and Adam slammed the doors open.

Inside, the Decay flinched, his movements frozen in whatever he was doing before they’d arrived.

Slowly, he turned around.

“Greetings, Chosen Ones,” he said in that nasty, slippery voice of his, his silver mask as impassive as always. “To what do I owe this…”

“Pleasure…” Trix could hear the disgust in the Decay’s voice as he uttered those words. The same disgust that had had one of them killed. Permanently.

He scoffed.

“You know full well what we come for,” he snarled, and stormed into the room ahead of his companions. “And I intend to get it.”