After looking at me with narrowed eyes, I gulped down my saliva. Siti was holding my arm, and her hands tightened as well. Since she had vouched for me, if it was revealed who I truly was, she would go down with me. In a way, our lives were now tied together, and so my impulsive nature would end up reflecting on her as well. After a brief moment of darkness, Calypso’s smile returned.

“You’re feisty. I like that. If I wanted a woman who didn’t challenge me, I’d use some miasmic creature like her.” She chuckled.

“Miasmic… are you saying a dungeon creature? How can she be a dungeon creature? She was a Bandit King, and she has a sister!”

Once again, I spoke impulsively, but at the moment, my only concern was finding out what happened to Salicia. I realized I was rather poor at being deceitful. Perhaps, the actor part of me had been the part that was lost in Alerith.

“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. “So, you know her history? I suppose since she ended up enslaved to that noble I killed, you had chances to talk to her when she visited town?”

I nodded. “She-she was kind to me.”

“I doubt that.”

I knew the lie sounded fake, but thankfully, Calypso thought I was lying about her being nice, not lying about how we met.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Please, I need to know what happened to her.” I found myself begging impatiently.

I remembered a time when I could take time and be more tactful, but that part of me had died when I lost a piece of my soul. The current me just didn’t have the patience or tact to slowly probe her for information. I needed to know what happened.

“Very well.” She chuckled. “Since you are new, I’ll allow you to be willful just once. I do like to spoil my girls. Salicia was a young warrior. A long time ago, I ransacked her village and killed her family. She trained and became a bandit with the intent to increase her rank and one day kill me. Of course, I knew her plan all along, which is why I killed her instead.”

“K-killed? But she’s right…” I looked at the puppet that stared ahead with no emotion.

“There are only a handful of ways to kill someone permanently without the risk of resurrection. The easiest way, and the way she attempted, was to lure me into a dungeon and ambush me. I killed her instead, and left her for the dungeon to eat.”

“It was a few years later when I returned to the dungeon that I was in for a surprise. You see, most people who die in dungeons, their souls are trapped forever in the dungeon, where they are eaten and converted into miasma to feed the dungeon curse. However, particularly resilient souls sometimes persevere. Rather than get eaten, the miasma corrupts their souls. These corrupted souls are called Karma.”

“Karma?”

I had only heard of the word very recently, but looking at my own skills, and the recently appearing Mimic job. Trying to understand what she said, I came to a sudden realization and gasped.

“You don’t mean…” “That’s right.” She nodded. “Salicia soul remained in the dungeon. Three years after I left her corpse there, she came back… as a dungeon boss!”