The giant underground chamber was circular in shape and as immense as the grand hall of the Bright Castle. Its walls were built out of the same grey stone slabs as the mighty walls of the Dark City, but unlike them, the walls of the chamber were covered with whispering streams of cold, nebulous black water.
In the center of it, a vast mountain of human bones rose from the ground, reaching almost halfway to the distant ceiling. Thousands… no, hundreds of thousands of people must have perished to create it.
With a harrowing realization, Sunny finally understood where the people who built the ancient city and the impregnable wall surrounding it had disappeared to.
They were all here, piled onto each other in this vile monument of death. This horrid dark chamber was their final resting place.
An old memory suddenly surfaced in his mind.
Back beneath the branches of the Soul Tree, Cassie had seen a vision of a bloodsoaked hill formed from countless corpses. On top of it, a tiny black seed was floating in a pool of blood.
Was there a similar mountain of bones hiding under the soil of the Ashen Barrow? Was that how the Soul Devourer had been born?
Sunny shifted his gaze, only now noticing the veins of crimson coral growing from the harrowing hill of white bones, almost like muscle tissue of some colossal creature. Following the coral pillars up, he finally saw that the dome of the immense chamber was broken, with pale sunlight streaming through the breach and falling on the ghastly visage below.
A giant stone hand was reaching down through the broken dome, its palm open, as though trying to caress the mountain formed from the bones of those people who had once populated this dark, forsaken land.
Looking at the stone hand, Sunny suddenly realized where they were.
The vast underground chamber was situated directly underneath the headless statue of the graceful woman who had once saved them from drowning in the black waters of the cursed sea.
One of her hands was raised toward the heavens, as if trying to embrace them. The other had broken off and fell down thousands of years ago, lying in the mud at the base of the giant statue.
…Reaching into the depths of hell, that was the hand Sunny was looking at right now.
It was also their way out of here.
"Doofus! Wake up!"
Brought back to reality by Effie's yell, he shuddered and looked around with a new understanding.
So the exit the huntress had told them about was the breach in the dome of the underground chamber. With Kai's Aspect Ability and the help of the golden rope, escaping through it was not going to be a problem.
But… where was this Lord of the Dead that she had mentioned? From Effie's colorful description, Sunny had expected to see a giant monster slumbering in the heart of the catacombs.
If memory served, her exact words were "a big fat bastard of a Nightmare Creature".
But he couldn't see anything.
Unless…
His eyes narrowed.
And just at that moment, the mountain of bones suddenly moved.
***
When the mountain moved, everything suddenly made sense.
At first, Sunny thought that the unknown creature was sleeping inside the ghastly hill of bones. But then he realized that no, it wasn't.
The mountain itself was the Nightmare Creature.
This was the Lord of the Dead.
Each of the countless bones piled on top of each other in the underground chamber was a part of its body.
For a moment, Sunny was paralyzed by fear.
'Fat bastard?! That is what you call a fat bastard?!'
But then, the disparate pieces of information clicked in his mind, assembling into a vivid chain of cause and effect.
'Of course. Why didn't I realize sooner?'
The mountain of bones, the horde of immortal skeletons, the Lord of the Dead… it all connected.
The Nightmare Creature in front of him was a Fallen Tyrant.
Tyrants were a fifth step in the evolution of Nightmare Creatures, and the name of that class was not coincidental. The fifth step represented rule and authority.
That's why the blind monstrosity he had faced on the slopes of the Black Mountain was named a King, and that's why the abomination in front of him was named a Lord.
Classes differed from each other in terms of pure might, but most of the distinction between them was caused by a more fundamental reason. Higher classes possessed characteristics that, while not directly affecting the quantity of their power, gave it a qualitative change.
For example, while beasts were mindless, demons and those above them were intelligent. That's why a demon, even if it was only slightly stronger than a monster, was in fact ten times more dangerous.
The characteristic of the Tyrant class was that these Nightmare Creatures were capable of creating and controlling large amounts of lesser creatures. The Mountain King's Larva that Sunny had slain during his first trial, which was born when a tiny worm living inside the Mountain King's body entered the corpse of a dying slave, was one such lesser creature.
However, this power had its limitations. The minions created by a tyrant couldn't be of the same rank as it. That's why the Larva was a dormant beast, while Mountain King itself was Awakened.
Similarly, while the skeletons that the cohort had faced were Awakened, they had to be created by a Fallen Tyrant.
…And something told Sunny that their immortality was tied to the Lord of the Dead, too. If someone wanted to destroy the undead army, they would have to destroy the abominable bone colossus first.
Said colossus, meanwhile, was slowly waking up right in front of Sunny. And if when it did…
'Damnation!'
Nervously gripping the Midnight Shard, he glanced at Nephis.
The golden rope was already in her hands, and she was passing it to Kai.
Before the beautiful archer could take it, though, the mountainous creature suddenly rippled.
A moment later, a twisted pillar of bones shot from its body, flying in their direction with the force of a siege ram…