[Frozen Prison — The Room of Truth]
Consciousness did not return to her like the waking of a slumbering beast. Rather, it was a violent, suffocating surfacing, akin to a drowning victim breaking through the ice of a frozen lake, gasping for air that tasted of death.
The first thing that assaulted her senses was the stench.
It was a cloying, visceral miasma that clung to the mucous membranes of her throat—a vile cocktail of rusted iron, pungent medicinal herbs, and the unmistakably sweet, copper tang of old, coagulated blood. It was the olfactory manifestation of a place where hope was not merely lost, but methodically dismantled.
The being known as the Extra Seat of the Slane Theocracy—Antilene Heran Fouche—opened her eyes.
Her vision swam, the world a blur of shadows dancing in the flickering illumination of magical torches that burned with a corpse-fire blue. She attempted to raise a hand, to wipe away the grime obscuring her sight, but her limbs refused to obey. A dull groan of metal answered her intent.
She was suspended vertically, her wrists and ankles shackled by heavy, obsidian chains.
They were no mere iron restraints. Faint, muddy pulses of light throbbed along the links—a high-tier suppression magic. It felt as though liquid lead was being pumped through her arteries, sluggishly suffocating her martial arts and siphoning away her stamina. Even her innate regeneration, a gift of her God-kin bloodline, felt distant and muted.
Her Divine-class equipment was gone. She was clad only in a single, ragged tunic, a thin layer of fabric that offered no protection against the biting, unnatural chill of the chamber.
Where...?
Then, the memories struck her with the force of a siege spell.
The Royal Capital of the Elves. The Dark Elf child with the mismatched eyes that held no fear. The wooden staff that had descended with the crushing weight of a collapsing mountain.
I lost.
The realization was a pill so bitter it nearly caused her to vomit bile. She, the Overlord of the New World, the Guardian of Humanity, the apex predator... had been handled like a misbehaving infant and beaten into absolute, pathetic submission.
"Ara ara? It seems our little guest has finally decided to return to the land of the living."
The voice was wet and cloying, a high-pitched falsetto that scraped against her exposed nerves like a rusted file. Antilene forced her heavy head upward.
Standing before her was a nightmare given flesh.
It was a bloated, corpulent mass of greyish skin, vaguely humanoid in shape but distorted beyond the boundaries of sanity. Where fingers should have been, slimy tentacles writhed with independent life. Its face was a grotesque canvas of stitched flesh and sunken, beady eyes that gleamed with a sadistic light. It wore a leather apron stained with viscous fluids of varying colors—fluids Antilene prayed to the Six Great Gods were merely alchemical reagents.
It was a monster. A demon. A torture specialist.
Yet, for the first time in centuries, the fires of battle lust did not ignite within Antilene's chest. The urge to test her scythe against this creature's neck was absent. In its place was a hollow, freezing void.
Fear.
(I am in their stronghold. The Sorcerer King's domain.)
The name of that Undead sovereign echoed in her mind, sending a tremor through her very marrow. A being capable of commanding subordinates of that Dark Elf's caliber. A being who had seemingly orchestrated the destruction of the Re-Estize Kingdom, manipulated the Baharuth Empire into vassalage, and maneuvered the Theocracy into ending their war with the Elves, only to strike a fatal blow at the precise moment of their exposure.
It was a masterstroke. A scheme woven with a divine intellect that spanned not merely years, but perhaps millennia. It was a stratagem so perfect, so absolute, that it felt less like a plan and more like the inevitable turning of fate's gears.
She averted her gaze from the abomination, staring instead at the damp, blood-stained flagstones. A terrible clarity began to wash over her, dissolving the armor of arrogance she had worn since her birth.
Regret. It welled up in her chest, hot and suffocating.
For decades, she had lived a life of selfish indulgence. She had frittered away her days solving a Rubik's Cube, mocking the Cardinals' anxiety, and wallowing in boredom. She had claimed she was waiting for a man strong enough to defeat her, that her only desire was to bear the child of a superior being.
What a foolish, transparent lie.
It had been nothing more than a political aegis. By setting the requirement for marriage at "defeat the Extra Seat," she had ensured that no human in the Theocracy could ever touch her. It was a calculated front to prevent the Cardinals from utilizing her as a mere broodmare to propagate the God-kin bloodline. She had viewed her duty not as a sacred charge, but as a shackle to be resented.
She had played petty games in a sandbox, blind to the fact that a true Supreme Being was moving nations like pawns on a chessboard.
Be careful what you wish for, a cruel, mocking voice whispered in the recesses of her mind.
Because she had lost, the shield of the Slane Theocracy was shattered.
The faces of the Cardinals flashed through her mind. Those old, wrinkled men who nagged her incessantly, who looked at her with a complicated mixture of fear, reverence, and desperation. She had despised them. But now, in the silence of this torture chamber, she understood the burden they carried. They were desperate men holding back the tide of human extinction with trembling hands.
They had relied on her. The millions of citizens—the farmers, the merchants, the children playing in the streets of the Capital—they all slept soundly at night because they believed in the invincible might of their nation. Because they believed in the God-kin.
(I failed them. I failed them all.)
Unbidden tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, hot and stinging.
She had led the wolf directly to the flock.
The Dark Elf—Mare—had witnessed her trump card: The Goal of All Life is Death. The Sorcerer King was not a fool; a magic caster of his tier would undoubtedly trace that thread back to its source. He would deduce the existence of Surshana's legacy. He would know of the God-kin.
"The Theocracy..." she rasped, her voice dry and cracked like parchment left in the sun. "They... don't stand a chance."
It was not a question. It was a verdict.
If beings like that Dark Elf were merely subordinates, guardians of a floor, then the Sorcerer King was a god in the truest sense of the word.
And not a benevolent deity of the Six, but a living calamity. A disaster against which there was no defense, no negotiation, and no escape.
The Theocracy's scriptures, their accumulated magic items, their faith... it would all burn. The people she had looked down upon, the human bloodline she was sworn to protect—it was all going to be erased from the map.
And it was her fault.
If she hadn't been so arrogant... If she had treated the threat with the gravity it deserved... If she had simply killed the Elf King and retreated the moment the anomaly appeared...
(Mother... is this the hell you lived in? No, this is worse. I wasted my life hating that man—the hatred you forced upon me—blind to the true monsters lurking in the dark. And now, the price of my vanity will be paid in the blood of millions.)
She closed her eyes, a single tear cutting a clean track through the grime on her cheek.
"Oh? Are we crying already?"
The bloated torturer—Neuronist Painkill—giggled. The sound was wet and shivering, like slime sliding over stone.
"We haven't even started the fun part yet! Ainz-sama has given me very, very specific instructions to extract everything you know. Every. Little. Thing."
Neuronist waddled closer, her movements unsettlingly fluid for her bulk. She selected a long, thin spike—a ribbed needle designed for maximum agony—from a tray of horrors. The metal glinted maliciously in the torchlight.
"You have memories of a certain item, don't you? A World Class Item... Downfall of Castle and Country?"
Antilene's heart stopped. The blood froze in her veins.
They knew.
"Don't worry," Neuronist cooed, bringing the needle agonizingly close to Antilene's dilated pupil. "We have an eternity to discuss it. And since you are strong, you are quite durable, aren't you? You have plenty of HP to spare. You won't break easily. That makes me so very, very happy."
Antilene did not scream. Not yet. She simply stared into the darkness of the ceiling, her heart filled not with fear of the physical pain to come, but with an overwhelming, crushing sorrow for the world she had doomed.
(Forgive me. Captain. Cardinals. Everyone. The monster is coming, and I am the one who opened the door.)