"How... How will I get out now?"
Vert's mind quickly gets over accidentally murdering his only friend since she is back now and he puts his concentration towards the problem at hand.
Vert decides it will be best to try to use his hands to try to find a solution. Putting his hands upon the door, Vert gives the door a gentle push.
He expects for the door to not budge but surprisingly, the door gives way to the God's shove and the skull-covered door opens again. Vert has a blank look on his face.
"Huh?" he says in an annoyed tone.
"THAT'S ALL I NEEDED TO DO?!"
Vert shouts loudly as he cannot believe that after all this time, the door just suddenly opens. Emeralda rubs her ears due to the ringing in them caused by the God's shouting.
"Hey! Dumbass, don't be yelling like that! Mind your manners!"
"When brought back, did you acquire a talent called 'Sassiness to the max' because I wish you would have learned 'As quiet as a mouse'." Vert says back to Emeralda while walking over to where he murdered all of the humans.
The dungeon has already begun to eat their bodies and Vert pays them no heed as he continues down the hallway. The fact that the door just opened is still bothering Vert but he doesn't plan on questioning it.
The sound of Emeralda's small feet running across the cold stone floor follow Vert as he goes deeper down the hallway.
Soon, they reach a massive, round room that has 8 tunnels leading to it, including the one Vert and Emeralda came from.
"Where are we?" Vert asks aloud to no one in particular.
"We are in the Room of Destiny." Emeralda says matter of factly. Vert raises an eyebrow at the name of the room and the fact that Emeralda knows its name.
"How do you know?"
"I heard the hero saying it as he followed me and tried to capture me again."
Emeralda walks to the middle of the room and Vert follows her closely.
"What do you know about this place then?"
Vert never thought to ask Emeralda about his stony tomb and now that he knows that she knows something, Vert can't help but be curious.
"This place is an ancient dungeon that has been around since the beginning, at least as far as we know. There are 7 bosses on the 100th floor. You are one of them, the one called 'The God of Death'."
"What about the other bosses?"
"I don't know, the hero was only focused on beating you." Emeralda has an apologetic face since her knowledge that Vert needed has come to an end but Vert smiles at her.
"Thanks pet." Vert says as he pets Emeralda's head once. Emeralda knocks his hand off of her head but blushes a little at the patting.
Vert ignores this and begins to send his senses down the hallways of the other 6 'bosses'. Vert has become curious about his origin.
'Maybe they are my family, or even my friends... I need to find out.'
Vert looks over the 6 closed doors and tries to figure out which one he wants to enter first. Vert's logic is that he will just directly ask them if they know him or what not. Sure it is not a tactful way of finding information but what else did you really expect. Vert and tactful don't correlate, or even tasteful for that matter according to some people.
A door covered in mice and locust made of rock catches Vert's eyes. Vert walks up to the door and lays a hand on it. A strange attraction from within the room is forcing Vert to only focus on this door.
The stench of death is strong within the room, which is especially appealing to the supposed God of Death. Vert slightly pushes the door and it very slowly creaks open. The God of Death is met with a blast of seemingly green magic smoke that tries to out at his skin.
Vert ignores this green smoke and heads into the door. A certain child looking dragon tries to follow him but the second she touches the green smoke, she can feel like it is tearing her flesh off her bones. Looking down, she is correct in this feeling and the tip of her finger has had its flesh removed.
Emeralda looks away from her finger to where Vert was once standing yet can no longer see the powerful being. Panicking, Emeralda assumes the worst.
“Hey! Idiot! Don’t just go running into danger you don’t know what will happen!”
“Be quiet pet and stay there, I’ll be back soon enough.”
Vert snappy response catches Emeralda off guard and she stomps her foot on the ground in anger. She doesn’t rebut what Vert said though and walks back to the room of destiny. Vert on the other hand is walking further into the room with the green smoke.
He can’t see much since the green smoke keeps getting thicker and thicker as Vert continues further. He can sense something within the green smoke alive, yet it is running away from Vert.
Speeding up his pace a little, Vert comes closer and closer to the source of life within the green smoke. When he gets about twenty five feet away from it, the green smoke becomes so thick that Vert can barely see his own feet.
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Sick of the smoke, Vert flexes his arms and pulls back for a back. As he sends the punch flying forward, a massive surge of wind follows his powerful fist. When the fist reaches its destination, a large blast of wind blows the smoke away from Vert’s punch.
With the smoke being blown away, Vert sees the slight visage of a man wearing a suit, and the leather mask of a crow. The man notices that Vert has seen him and smoke pours out of the man’s body and once again fills the room.
Vert smiles as he has finally seen what his target looks like, and when he goes to try to talk with the man, the smoke seems to get a darker green whenever Vert opens his mouth. The smoke that Vert breathes into his lungs start to burn Vert’s insides and he can feel a sharp pain coming from his chest.
‘Shit! When the smoke didn’t hurt earlier I figured I was too strong for it. It appears that the person controlling it was waiting for me to take a deeper breath so he could maximize the damage… Interesting.’
Vert might not be the brightest bulb ever, but he is a genius when it comes to fighting. Noticing the tides turning on him, Vert tries to vie for peace as to try and avoid battle. Sounds come out from the speakers on Vert’s gauntlets.
“Hold on. I am just like you, I have been stuck in here for a long time and wish to merely talk.”
The man in the suit doesn’t hesitate with his quick response.
“I know. I know who you are too. Don’t expect me to go down easily.”
Vert raises an eyebrow at the obvious provocation and hostility coming from the man. Though he is currently at a slight disadvantage, Vert feels he could easily squash this man with a simple right hook.
Figuring that he is truly better to talk with his fists than to try diplomacy, a soft beat erupts from Vert’s gauntlets. What sounds like a harp being plucked following it, the two blend together harmoniously.
Vert sings along with the beat and even sways his head side to side along with it. A gentle yet lonely sounding voice erupts from within Vert as he sings along with the song. The song that talks about not wanting friendship and being alone catches the man in the suit off guard, the man can feel Vert gaining in power and strength.
Not wanting to go down easily, the man in the suit summons hundreds of rats and bugs from the walls of the cave. The rats look half rotten and half alive as their red eyes lock onto Vert. The bugs drop from the ceiling onto Vert, gnawing on his skin and trying to kill him. The rats scurry over to Vert’s lower half of his body and try to rip him apart.
They are unsuccessful as the body of the God of Death is not something that a simple rat could penetrate. They try this for 30 seconds, hurriedly trying to do something that would stop Vert, everything can feel that Vert’s power is about to reach a crescendo. The man in the suit pulls out a cane, which he then pulls a sword out of and rushes at Vert. He is a step too late.
Vert reaches the crescendo of the song and the power he had been building up explodes outwards with the saying of one sentence.
“Give me reasons we should be complete.”
These words cause an explosion of raw power to explode out of Vert and send everything that was attacking him on his power to explode into a mess of blood and bug juice. The man in the suit is sent flying backwards from the sheer force of the blast.
The man in the suit is unable to regain himself and flies through the air towards the back wall. Unfortunately for him, Vert is extremely fast and catches up to the man in the suit while he is still flying uncontrollably.
“You should be with him, I can’t compete.”
Another beat drop follows these words and Vert’s fist is sent directly into the crow mask of the man. The sound of bones breaking is drowned out by the music, but Vert definitely felt it under his fist.
The man is still sent flying backwards, however this time the speed is much faster. By the time the man hits the wall, he is going so fast that most people wouldn't even register what happened until after the man hit the wall.
When the man actually hits the wall, a loud and sickening splat sound echoes throughout the hall. The man’s body nearly explodes completely from the impact and the man dies like a bug squashed onto the windshield of a speeding car.
Vert continues singing his song while approaching the man. He notices that the man is dead, however something is different this time compared to when he killed people before. A slightly transparent version of the man starts to rip itself out of the man’s body.
The smoke has completely disappeared by now and Vert is able to see as clear as day as to what is going on. A small thought pops into the back of Vert’s head, telling him that he can do something with this thing.
Vert quickly sprints forwards and manages to grab the throat of the transparent being before it completely leaves the body. The transparent being tries to fight back but to no avail, Vert’s firm grip seems inescapable.
“What do you want with me!” the soul screams. Vert thinks for a second, but is unable to get an answer.
“To be honest… I don’t really know. My instincts told me to just grab a hold of you before you disappeared.”
The man in the suit seems to not be surprised by this and actually seems to relax for a second. Emeralda walks in at this time, noticing that the green smoke is gone even though Vert told her to stay behind.
She sees Vert just stand there with his hand clutched around nothing in front of the splattered body of the man and she tilts her head in confusion.
“What are you doing, did you hit your head during the fight?”
“No I didn’t pet, I currently am holding some transparent form of the man I killed.”
Emeralda thinks for a second before she finally realizes what Vert is talking about.
“Do you mean the man’s soul?”
Something inside of Vert clicks when he hears the word soul. It is like he had knowledge about what this was but didn’t know where to find it until someone mentioned that word.
'That’s right, this is a soul. If I remember correctly, I can force souls to work for me.'
When thinking of this, a wide and devilish smile spreads across Vert’s face. The man’s soul seems to panic as it had relaxed earlier when it assumed Vert had yet to be able to control souls. The soul was only half right, as Vert had the ability but just didn’t know it.
Dark chains that radiate the power of death fly out of Vert’s back and wrap themselves around the soul. The soul tries to struggle, but unfortunately it is no match for Vert’s raw talent when it comes to death magic.
The chains completely engulf the soul, and soon a question appears within Vert’s head.
‘Would you like to devour this soul or resurrect it?’
Vert thinks for a second about which would be the best choice for now. He really needs information about this world and though devouring the soul and gaining some information sounds nice, if he resurrects the soul he gains a servant and also a person to question about what is happening.
‘Resurrect.’ Vert responds to the monotone sounding voice within his head. The chains start spinning at a rapid rate and makes a cocoon-like enclosure. Soon the chains stop and shatter, out coming a man that looks the exact same as the one that Vert just got done fighting.
Vert receives mental information about the man from his connection to the man’s soul. His name is Frederick Hauser, and is known as the Plague Doctor, or the God of Disease. The man is not very strong physically, but was once known as a genius. That is because of his ability to gather information through insects and rodents, while also being able to damage people without them realizing by giving them a disease.
This person now works for Vert and their soul is now completely controlled by him. The Plague Doctor bows to Vert and exudes undying loyalty for his new master. Vert smiles devilishly at his newly found ability.