A low groan escaped the man in green, muffled by the snow that half-covered his face. He stirred in the dirt, sluggishly brushing away white flakes from his nose and lips as his bleary eyes blinked open, squinting against them. Then, the corners of his mouth curled in recognition.

  “Oh, Jeanne.” The words came out husky, thick with the weight of intoxication. “And you too, Quinn. Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Why do I always find you sleeping in the most unexpected place?” Viktor asked.

  “He was drunk,” Jeanne said, stating the most obvious thing ever.

  “Was?” Viktor snorted. “You mean is.”

  Lloyd, still blinking away the daze, tried to stretch his arms, only to find them blocked by the damp, compacted earth on all sides.

  “Where am I? Why is this place so cramped?”

  “Take a guess,” Viktor said with a half-smirk.

  “No idea. Anyway, I hope I didn’t miss the funeral. It hasn’t started yet, right?”

  “It hasn’t. It’s not like we can start before getting you out anyway. Because you’re lying in the hole meant for Dagnar.”

  “Oh.”

  Then, Lloyd reached out, and Jeanne caught one of his arms, Viktor the other. Together, they hauled the Emerald Mage out of the pit. The man straightened, brushing off snow and dirt from his clothes. His eyes swept the crowd.

  “There are a lot of people here.”

  Jeanned nodded. “Adventurers. Employees of the Guild. Some townsfolk, too. They all came for their funeral.”

  Normally, funerals were quiet affairs, attended only by friends and blood relatives of the deceased, so the funeral of Brynhildr and Dagnar, who had no real ties in Daelin, should have had a meager turnout. And yet, the crowd stretched wide, shoulder to shoulder, silent beneath the gray sky.

  Then again, funerals like this didn’t happen often.

  Most adventurers didn’t get funerals, especially the ones who met their end inside a dungeon. Their corpses were left behind in the dark, picked by the monsters, stripped bare of anything useful, then dumped unceremoniously into the disposal pit. There was no body, so there was no burial, no grave. Just a name scratched off in the record of the Guild.

  Brynhildr and Dagnar were different, however.

  The man had died on the road, while the warrior woman had fallen near the entrance, her remains recovered by Ekon and his companions when they got out. The Guild had taken it upon itself to arrange the ceremony, and everyone had come to pay respect. Not just for this particular pair, but for all the others who had never made it back.

  But there was also another reason.

  It didn’t take a genius to realize that Dagnar hadn’t been killed by monsters in the dungeon. No, someone had done the deed. In other words, it was a murder. That single fact set off a wildfire of conspiracy theories, and naturally, this funeral drew all kinds of eyes. And now, their gaze settled on a group gathered under a tree at the edge of the cemetery.

  Ekon’s party, of course.

  It was no surprise. The bald man had already attracted a lot of attention before the expedition even began. That night, he openly invited anyone brave enough to join him in exploring the great tomb. Brynhildr and Dagnar had been the only ones who accepted the offer, and now they were dead. Unsurprisingly, everyone was hungry for answers. They wasted no time interrogating those who came back, pressing them for explanations. Ekon and friends, on the other hand, offered nothing but vague, evasive replies, which only fueled their suspicion even more.

  [I wonder why they didn’t tell anyone about the ambush.]

  My guess, Viktor replied, is they want to hide Ekon’s power.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He had come to the mortuary complex to assess the damage. The scale of destruction was staggering, something beyond what most mages could pull off. Was it even magic, or something else entirely? Who was Ekon? What was his deal? Clearly, this was not someone to be underestimated. Viktor knew he had to keep a close eye on the bald man, gathering more information, sizing up the threat.

  And of course, anyone who possessed that kind of power wouldn’t want the world to know about it. That much was obvious. Viktor himself had kept his Thaumaturgy a secret from everyone but three. To the rest, he was simply a mage who could wield a blade, with some Reliquaries at his disposal.

  If they told people how bad things really were, he continued, the next question is obvious: ‘How the hell did you get out of it alive?’ And that’s exactly the question they want to avoid.

  [I see.]

  All heads turned as a distant creak broke the silence.

  Two caskets emerged, carried by solemn-faced men in plain black clothes. They crossed the snowy path toward the graves, and the crowd shifted to let them through. No one spoke even a word.

  Viktor’s gaze swept across the gathering. His “sister” stood nearby, of course. He had come here with her, after all. Beside her stood Rhea, whose face was etched with genuine sorrow. A bit too dramatic, given she had only met Brynhildr and Dagnar a couple of times at most. Or maybe, every death in the dungeon reminded her of her own sister, one of those who had never come back. Alycia wasn’t present, but perhaps that was for the best. Those bushy, fluffy pigtails would have looked incredibly out of place in a somber ceremony like this.

  Ekon’s party remained under the tree at the corner. The bald man stood with arms folded, his face carved from stone. The Easterner and the Druidess flanked him like a pair of statues, wearing the same expressionless masks. Renee, on the other hand, was different. No sunshine in her today, obviously. What did she think of Dagnar’s death, though? Did she know the poor bastard died trying to impress her? Or maybe, to her, he was just someone she barely knew who ended up being chewed up and spat out by the dungeon. Probably not her first, and definitely not her last.

  Oh well, whatever. Not that it mattered now anyway.

  The casket bearers came to a halt before the open graves. Calyssa, who was in charge of the procession, gave them a nod, and the men began to lower the coffins into the earth. Then, the spectacled woman stepped forward, raised the bell in her hand, and rang it once.

  “Brynhildr and Dagnar,” she said. “Two adventurers hailing from the North. Though they arrived in Daelin only two months ago, they had quickly distinguished themselves. In their short time with us, they contributed greatly...”

  She droned on to list the achievements accomplished, monsters slain, contracts fulfilled. Mostly Brynhildr’s doings, though. Viktor doubted her deadweight of a nephew had ever bothered to lift a finger to do anything.

  Come to think of it, when was the last time he had gone to a funeral?

  Was it... Orion’s?

  Yes, Orion. Of course. It had been Orion.

  Because after that, funerals were only for his enemies, and he had no reason to attend those. What was he supposed to do there anyway? Piss on their graves? No, he had better things to do. Like, arranging one for the next bastard in the line.

  None of his friends had died since. Not until he himself did.

  He wondered what had become of the others. After his death. After the Empire fell. What happened to Zoltan? To Sabaq? To Yelena?

  He shook his head. There was no point in speculating about it. Three hundred years had come and gone. Even if they had survived the collapse, they would have been back to the dirt by now.

  The bell rang again. Calyssa’s speech had ended.

  People began to form a line. One by one, they walked slowly around the two graves, murmuring their farewells as they passed, tossing in handfuls of soil into the open pits. Jeanne stepped forward to join the line. Then Lloyd. Then Viktor.

  Well, what exactly was he supposed to say now? This was, after all, the first time he had attended the funeral of someone he killed.

  He cast a glance toward the grave on the right. Brynhildr’s. The coffin was a plain, unremarkable box of dark-stained wood, held together with iron fittings. It bore no ornament, no embellishment. Inside, the warrior woman lay with her armor—the Reliquary. No one had known what it actually was, so it was buried with her, lumped in with the rest of her belongings.

  Except the gold, of course.

  Yes, they had found it. After her death, the inn staff had entered her room to clean and collect her possessions. And they had found her piles of Arstenian gold. Naturally, it had stirred whispers and added fuel to the already burning mystery of her death.

  Now the coins were in the Guild’s vaults, locked up tight, waiting for some long-lost relative to arrive and claim them. Which they wouldn’t. Because there weren’t any. So once the allotted time passed, the money would go to the Guild, as all unclaimed legacies of dead adventurers.

  Not that he cared much about the gold. It held little meaning for him. What truly mattered was the Reliquary. So, he had mixed feelings about the fact that Ekon’s party had retrieved the body. On the one hand, it meant he had lost the chance to get his hands on the artifact. On the other hand, it meant Brynhildr would get a proper burial, instead of being tossed naked into the disposal pit, discarded like trash.

  Viktor let the soil fall slowly through his fingers into her grave when his turn came.

  A shame, really.

  He had finally found something to say.

  It’s a shame that your story ends here, in this way. I wish there could’ve been a different ending for you.

  He was about to leave, but then he remembered that he had to do the same thing with the other grave.

  Oh well...

  Without even looking at the casket, he flicked the dirt in like brushing bread crumbs off a table.

  Burn in hell, cockroach.