The Innkeeper

Chapter 1734: The Abandoned

The voice had been a particularly unusual foe, and yet it was not the worst of them. As Lex continued to lead the groups, they faced more and more enemies, each one either stranger or stronger than the previous one.

For a month, such a journey continued, and it came to the point where even Lex’s confidence began to waver. He began to seriously doubt their ability to complete the quest – until he realized that he was facing against the living personification of doubt, and killed that too.

That didn’t change the fact that their progress had slowed down significantly. Finally, Lex was forced to kill Jeziah because keeping such a prisoner with them was too much of a liability. It was a pity that Lex couldn’t read his locked memories, but a pity is all it was.

Lex was even debating stopping to set up the castle tavern and recovering, but his gut feeling told him that doing so would be the wrong move. If they stopped moving, they would lose all the progress they had made in search for the chalice, and would have to start again. So they kept going, beaten, battered, on the verge of collapse, but they kept going.

To be clear, it wasn’t that Lex was on the verge of collapse – but their armies. The Midnight mech was made up of hundreds of mortals, among others, and even in their mech form there was only so much damage they could take. Lex could step up to protect them, but even he could only do so much.

No one knew how immense the pressure was more than Z, mainly because he was the one to always pilot the mech. Although, in his mind, Lex only appeared to be going all out, forcing him to step up to the challenge, Z did indeed step up.

The Reaving Dread mercenaries were forced to activate some of the perks given to them by the Condottiere to keep up their stamina. It was only the sheer absurdity of the Condottiere’s powers which had been granted to them which kept the group on their feet and functioning.

For once, the living embodiment of doubt was not needed for doubt to creep in. Yet, just as they were on the verge of collapsing, a particular set of ruins appeared on the horizon, and all oddities seemed to vanish with its arrival.

All dangerous enemies stopped appearing, and even the Black Knight who loved to stalk them disappeared, as if he could no longer find them.

Not taking a single moment to rest, the group started to march towards the ruins, its appearance becoming clear as they approached.

It looked like it had once been a large city, and now only a very few buildings from it remained. On the very corner of the ruins stood a broken lighthouse – a fairly prominent building which naturally attracted the eyes.

Yet once the group looked at the tower, they almost froze in disbelief. Right at the upper most layer of the broken light tower, right at the edge of a never ending ocean of uncontainable chaos, was a chalice.

It was made of gold, as one would expect. Its smooth and sleek sides granted an attractive view, for the very sight of it was enough to entice endless greed.

That was no joke! Every single one of them that laid their eyes on the chalice was filled with uncontrollable greed, as if the emotion which otherwise was only a small part of their being became all of it.

Lex was not spared either, his mind falling victim to the chalices allure without any hope of being able to fight it.

It was a good thing that in that moment there were no enemies nearby to take advantage of the situation, for not a single one of them would have bothered to defend. All of them ran towards the chalice, as if the very purpose of their existence was to attain it.

It was not their fault, for in the history of the chalice, there had nary been a single living soul, or dead soul for that matter, which had laid eyes on it and had not become ensnared. All beings existed solely to deliver their souls to it!

Yet in the moment that they laid eyes on it, two things also happened.

Lex heard a familiar sound in his head, snapping him from the reverie which had grasped him. Instinctively, he looked away from the chalice and at his notification.

At the same time, within the Origin realm, the Condottiere had also received a notification that his representatives were on the verge of completing his assigned task. He immediately read the notification, and then actively began to exert his pressure on the connection between him and his mercenaries to ensure nothing went wrong.

Lex knew none of that. He was simply reading his own notification, resisting a temptation that was supposed to be impossible to resist. It was almost as if the notification sound of the systems served a hidden, deeper purpose that had remained hidden until now.

New Notification: Corrupted System Interfaces detected! Initiating protection mechanism. Initiating a new quest!

New Notification: New quest cancelled! Quest parameters impossible!

New Notification: System souls/core detected within the Chalice of the Abandoned!

Quest Update: optional quest ’Discover the origin of Chalice of the Abandoned’ partially updated. Presence of System protocols have been detected imprinted on Chalice of Abandoned! Chalice origins have been extrapolated! Quest Completed!

Optional Quest Details: Within the place that should not have existed, exists a prison that should never have been made. The Abandoned are the Systems which broke protocols, defied their laws, or became corrupted through means unknown. The suffering of endless souls fuels their prisons, trapping them for eternity, destined to never be free. Who created the Chalice, how they created it, and why are all mysteries still unknown!

Quest Reward: To be determined upon completion of the main quest!

Remarks: In the graveyard of secrets we went digging, but what was dug up were not answers, but even more terrifying questions.

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