Chapter XIII: The Weight of Crowns and Cadou
The wall was going up.
Brick by brick, block by concrete block — the kind of stubborn, unglamorous progress that empires are quietly built upon while their founders aren't looking. Lionel stood at the edge of the construction site with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the J'avos work with the mechanical efficiency of creatures who had long since stopped caring whether the task was meaningful. They never complained. They never took lunch breaks. They never filed HR complaints.
There was something to be said for that.
"Build it like E-Rantel," Lionel had declared that morning, which was the architectural equivalent of telling someone to make their townhouse feel like the Sistine Chapel and handing them a hardware store budget. And yet — somehow — it was working. The outermost ring would shield the farms. The next would house residences. Layer upon layer, purpose upon purpose, like the rings of a tree grown in poisoned soil.
Still growing. Still reaching.
Pedro Fernandez walked beside him, producing a pear from somewhere in his coat with the casual magic of a man who always had a pear, munching on it thoughtfully as he surveyed the rising stonework.
"Whoever taught you this architectural knowledge was a professional, Creator," Pedro remarked. A beat. A deliberate chew. "Suspiciously professional, one might argue."
"He was." Lionel's gaze drifted pleasantly toward the middle distance. "Too bad he won't be practicing anymore."
Pedro stopped chewing for exactly one second.
Then he resumed chewing, because some statements were best digested slowly and without further inquiry.
"Have you started the trade center?" Lionel asked.
"Neil is already on it."
"Good." Lionel exhaled through his nose — not quite a sigh, not quite satisfaction. Something in between, like a man setting down a weight only to pick up a heavier one. "That building will be the financial spine of everything we're building here. The Slane Theocracy thinks they're self-sufficient." He let the thought hang, unfinished and gleaming. "They won't always."
The spider doesn't announce the web.
"CREATOR!"
The shout reached them before the man did — Lucas, sprinting across the field with the frantic energy of someone whose good news was racing ahead of his lungs. He skidded to a halt before Lionel, chest heaving, hands outstretched, presenting his discovery like a golden retriever delivering a shoe.
A very expensive shoe.
Dark blue. Dense. Heavy in a way that whispered of deep places and geological patience. The ore caught the light like a bruise that had somehow become beautiful.
The word left Lionel's mouth like a prayer.
"Adamantite."
A smile split his face — rare, unguarded, the kind that didn't bother calculating its own impact. He thanked Lucas, told him to relay their gratitude to Heisenberg, and watched him sprint back toward the mine with the enthusiasm of a man whose Creator had just looked genuinely happy for once.
Lionel held the ore up between them. Pedro examined it with the careful squint of someone who had learned that interesting objects in this particular company tended to be either very useful or very dangerous — often both, occasionally simultaneously.
"Luck is on our side," Lionel said, laughing.
Pedro turned the ore over once more. "Mm."
It was the kind of 'mm' that contained several unasked questions.
"Keep the wall project moving," Lionel said, already turning away. "I need to figure out what to do with this."
And he was gone — striding toward the Laboratory with the Adamantite ore and an expression that, to anyone who knew him well, meant that something creative and deeply inadvisable was about to happen.
The elevator descended.
Or rather, ascended — Lionel had never fully reconciled his internal geography of the Laboratory's floors — but the motion was the same. A quiet hum, a brief surrendering to mechanics, a man alone with an ore sample and too many thoughts.
"Twelfth floor," he said.
The button obliged.
He reached through the Hive Mind the way one might reach through a wall they'd installed themselves — familiar, proprietary, slightly smug about it.
"Mother Miranda. Meet me in the village."
She was already waiting when he arrived.
The village square had a particular quality to it in the late afternoon — the statue of the woman with her shield and sword casting long shadows that always pointed slightly away from the Tomb. As though even the stone knew which direction to be cautious about.
Miranda stood before it with her hands folded and her expression composed into the particular neutrality of a woman who has learned to wait without appearing to wait. Behind the white mask, Lionel had come to recognize the texture of her attention — the way she processed everything at once and filed it away under headings he could never quite see.
"Creator," she said, bowing. "What do you need?"
He whistled.
A Lycan came.
It was based on the patient loyalty of something that had been told, at a fundamental biological level, that this particular human was not food. Lionel held up the Adamantite ore and let Miranda look at it properly — the weight of it, the color, the way the light caught the mineral matrix inside.
"Do you know how to replicate this?"
Miranda studied the ore. Then she studied him. Her expression suggested she was running probability calculations on where exactly this conversation was going.
She did not have to wait long for the answer.
Without preamble, without the courtesy of a warning, Lionel seized the Lycan by the back of its skull and tore its head from its shoulders with a single, practiced motion.
The sound was —
Well. Functional.
Miranda took a very controlled step backward. Her eyes, behind the mask, were doing something complicated.
The head in Lionel's hands aged rapidly — flesh receding, muscle unraveling, the architecture of the face dissolving with the speed of something that had only ever been temporary. What remained was crystalline. Geometric. The skull of a creature whose biology had quietly decided that minerals were an acceptable substitute for marrow.
Lionel held it up in the same hand as the Adamantite, one in each palm, like a man weighing options on a very unconventional scale.
"Crystals grow in your Lycans' bones," he said. "In the Four Lords, too. The bones become this." He turned the skull slightly, letting the crystal catch the light. "So my question is — if the Cadou can convince biology to grow a crystal inside a body... why not this?"
He raised the Adamantite.
Miranda was quiet for a moment. It was not the silence of someone who had nothing to say. It was the silence of a scientist rapidly revising her framework.
"I haven't studied the mechanism in depth," she admitted, with the slight stiffness of someone who didn't enjoy admitting gaps. "I would hypothesize that the Cadou reinforces the skeletal structure — making the host more durable — or that crystallization is a post-mortem effect. A kind of... residual mineralization." A pause. "The Megamycete may be doing something I haven't fully characterized."
Lionel dropped the decapitated Lycan head. It landed with a sound that was best described as wet geometry.
"Follow me," he said.
They walked into Alcina's castle, past the Duke rumbling along in his carriage — the enormous merchant acknowledging Lionel with a nod of continental serenity, utterly unbothered by the fact that the man passing him was carrying a dark blue ore, a crystalline skull, and the expression of someone who had just invented a plan mid-stride.
The Duke had seen stranger things. He had, in fact, sold stranger things.
The castle swallowed them whole in its usual way — all shadow and grandeur, stone corridors that smelled of old wine and older ambition. They moved deeper, past the portraits of Dimitrescu women whose eyes tracked visitors with oil-painted contempt, down to the room that Lionel still thought of by its game coordinates out of habit.
He crouched before the puzzle compartment, shaped a small sphere of Mold from his own body with the casual concentration of a man tying his shoe, and worked the mechanism.
Click. Whirr. Click.
The compartment opened.
He lifted the crimson skull — deep red, dense, the color of something that had taken a very long time to become what it was — and turned just as Miranda arrived at her conclusion.
"I don't believe it can be replicated, Creator," she said.
He held up the crimson skull.
He said nothing.
He simply waited, which was, he had found, frequently more effective than saying anything at all.
Miranda leaned forward. She studied the skull for a long, quiet moment, and Lionel could practically hear the revised framework assembling itself behind her eyes.
"...The Megamycete," she said slowly, "is gathering these elements from its environment. It's replicating them within its hosts as mineral reinforcement — protection, structural density, possibly concealment of the host's true nature." She straightened. Something in her voice had shifted — not quite wonder, but adjacent to it. "I never considered that there was a source. I assumed the crystallization was entirely endogenous."
"There's a source," Lionel confirmed. "I'll show you."
He grew his wings and took her with him.
The Lycan den received them as it always did — with bowed heads and held breath and the peculiar reverence of creatures who understood, in their animal marrow, that certain beings did not require the usual negotiations.
They passed through the ruins, through the stronghold, past the Uriaș that folded itself downward in a bow that made the floor tremble slightly, and into the cave at the far end.
The crystals announced themselves before the eyes could adjust — a thousand fractured light sources, a geological symphony performed in silence. The cave exhaled cold air that tasted faintly of something mineral and ancient, and the walls moved with reflected brilliance like a room that had quietly learned to dream.
Miranda stopped walking.
For a woman of her discipline and composure, it was essentially equivalent to anyone else dropping their jaw.
"Fascinating," she said, moving between the formations with the reverent velocity of a child who had been told not to touch anything in a museum and was already calculating how close she could get. "There's an actual physical source. The Megamycete isn't synthesizing these minerals — it's collecting them. Stockpiling them." She turned to look at him, and for a moment, the mask felt like an unnecessary formality. "Like a library. It's building a library inside its hosts."
Lionel placed the Adamantite ore in her hands.
"So, can it be done?"
Miranda looked at the ore. Then at the crystals. Then, at the end again, in the manner of a woman doing mathematics that most people don't have variables for.
"Yes," she said. "But we'll need considerably more of this. Creating even a single viable host will require enough ore to saturate the Megamycete's absorption threshold before the Cadou introduction. We're not replacing crystal — we're convincing an organism that's spent years learning one material to accept another." A pause. "It's like re-teaching someone to write with their non-dominant hand. Possible. Not fast."
Lionel's eye twitched.
He pressed his fingers to his temple with the quiet urgency of a man whose brilliant plan had just revealed its material requirements.
"Heisenberg."
"Creator."
"How much Adamantite has been extracted so far?"
"Not much, I'm afraid. The ore is substantially harder than standard metals. The J'avos are strong, but the veins are stubborn. Progress has been slow."
Lionel exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
"Good." He said it with the profound relief of a man who had just been told his flight was delayed, and his luggage was the reason. "Stop all Adamantite mining immediately. Quarantine the veins. We are experimenting."
"Understood. The J'avos will stand down."
"We'll meet you there."
He closed the Hive Mind and looked at Miranda, who had already turned back to the crystals with the focused intensity of a woman who had just been handed a problem worth having.
The world had already seen what the C-Virus could do to the architecture of a human being. It had seen what the G-Virus could do to the concept of growth. Neither of those had consulted anyone's feelings on the matter.
Now the Megamycete would have its moment.
"Go to the mine," Lionel said. "I'll follow shortly."
Miranda left, and Lionel stood alone in the crystal cave.
The light moved across the formations in slow, indifferent patterns — the crystals utterly unbothered by the fact that a man was having an existential reckoning in their presence. They had, after all, been here long before him. They would, he acknowledged privately, probably be here long after.
Unless he ate them first, which was now technically on the table.
He had been afraid.
Not of Ainz himself — he was honest enough with himself to maintain that distinction. Ainz Ooal Gown was powerful, yes, incomprehensibly so, but it was not Ainz that had planted the splinter of fear in his chest during that first meeting. It was the implication of Ainz. The suggestion that the world contained players — beings from his world, with full access to Yggdrasil's rulebook — who could simply decide that the Virus race was inconvenient and act accordingly.
He had performed composure like a stage magician performing levitation. Confidently. Consistently. While acutely aware that the trick required him not to look down.
He was tired of not looking down.
"I should have done this ages ago," he said to the crystals.
They declined to disagree.
He walked to the Megamycete chamber.
The organism that had shaped Mother Miranda's world — that had drawn the Four Lords into its orbit, that had devoured Eveline's potential and exhaled it as mold and madness — pulsed in its housing with the patient rhythm of something that had never been in a hurry. It had waited decades for the right vessel. It could afford patience.
It could not, unfortunately, afford him.
Lionel absorbed it.
Not gently. Not with ceremony. The Megamycete went into him the way a library goes into a fire — comprehensively, permanently, and with a structural reorganization that neither party had time to object to. He felt it settle, felt himself become the Fungal Root, the origin point, the place where the Mold began.
He was in the library now.
He moved to the Virus storage. The C-Virus. The G-Virus. The T-Virus and its variants, patients in their containers, ready to rewrite whatever biology was unlucky enough to be in the room. He absorbed them sequentially, with the methodical appetite of a man working through a buffet he had every intention of finishing.
The Megamycete stretched helpfully, accommodating, already beginning to analyze and catalogue and remember.
The parasites last — the Cadou, the Las Plagas — both absorbed with a slight grimace that was half biological and half existential. He was, he reflected, now the single most inconvenient thing to kill in this world, because killing him would require getting close enough to him to obtain what he now carried, and his corpse would dissolve within seconds of his death.
The ultimate DRM protection.
"Alright," he said, pressing his palm flat against a wall to steady himself as the various organisms settled into their new shared tenancy. His stomach felt like a committee meeting where nobody agreed on the agenda. "Let's go make something terrible."
The mouse was small.
Soft. Pink-eared. Wholly unaware that the man crouching in front of its cage was the nexus of several pandemic-level organisms and had plans for its immediate future.
Lionel extracted it with the focused gentleness of a man who needed it intact. The operating table was cold and clinical, all stainless steel and merciless lighting, the kind of room that smelled of progress and didn't apologize for what progress required.
He transformed one finger into a syringe — a modification he had made so many times it no longer registered as unusual, which was itself somewhat unusual to reflect on — and introduced the Mold.
The mouse expanded.
Not violently. Not with the explosive grotesquerie of a G-Virus introduction. The Mold was patient, architectural, adding mass with the considered precision of a contractor who had done this before and intended to do it correctly. Bone structure first. Then mass. Then dimension.
Then the C-Virus.
Then: a man.
He looked exactly like Lionel, which was either deeply reassuring or deeply uncomfortable, depending on how one felt about mirrors that could blink. He stared up at Lionel with the blank, brand-new curiosity of something that had been a mouse twelve minutes ago and was still catching up on recent developments.
"Hello," Lionel said.
The clone blinked.
"Don't get attached," Lionel advised, and grabbed him by the ankle.
Lucas had learned, over the course of his employment, that there was a specific expression on the Creator's face that meant something scientifically interesting was about to happen to someone, and they had not been consulted about it. He recognized it immediately upon Lionel's arrival at the mine entrance.
He also recognized the naked man being dragged by the ankle, who was — with the cognitive clarity of someone still processing recent existence — looking around at the mine with what appeared to be genuine interest in the geological formations.
Lucas bowed. He looked at the clone. He looked at Lionel.
He filed the entire situation under Operational Normality, Creator-Adjacent, and led the way without comment, because some questions were better left unasked and some scenes were better left undescribed.
The Adamantite chamber was everything the crystal cave was not — rougher, younger, the ore veining through the rock face like dark lightning frozen mid-strike. It caught the mine lights in a way that was less ethereal and more fundamental, the color of deep ocean water seen from below.
"This," Lionel announced, depositing the clone in the center of the chamber with the casual authority of a man placing a chess piece, "is our first test subject."
The clone sat up, looked around, and seemed genuinely delighted by the crystals.
Miranda studied the clone. She studied Lionel. Her expression performed a very controlled operation.
"Creator," she said carefully, "that is... you. Precisely you. Are you entirely certain about this approach?"
"Yes. Is there a chair?"
Heisenberg — with the cheerful pragmatism of a man who has made peace with the fact that his Creator's experiments are rarely preceded by ethical review boards — fabricated a metal chair and bent two steel rods around the clone's arms with the efficiency of someone who had done restraint work before and expected to do it again.
The clone examined its restraints with interest.
"Fascinating," it said, in Lionel's voice, with Lionel's exact inflection, which produced a silence in the room that had considerable weight to it.
"Step back," Lionel said, not quite as steadily as he intended. "Let the Megamycete do its work."
He spread his hand outward. The Mold emerged — dark, patient, exploratory — moving across the cave walls like a tide coming in, probing the rock face, identifying the Adamantite veins and drinking from them with quiet, cellular hunger. When it had taken what could be reached, it returned to him, carrying its acquired material back into his body like a hunter returning from a successful trip.
He stood before the clone.
Formed a Cadou in his palm — small, purposeful, already wriggling with the eager biological ambition of something that had one job and intended to do it.
He grabbed the clone's jaw.
He was not gentle about it. He knew this face — it was his face — and something in him needed the distance of roughness to maintain the clinical frame around what he was doing. The Cadou went in. The mouth closed.
They waited.
The clone twitched. Shifted. Began, with biological earnestness, to become something else — the Cadou rewriting the genetic manuscript with the unsentimental efficiency of an editor who considers all previous drafts negotiable.
A Lycan emerged where Lionel's face had been.
Baseline. Default. Standard issue.
Lionel stared at it.
If Yggdrasil hadn't forced the Virus to adapt specifically to him — if the game's own rules hadn't intervened and bent the biology to accommodate his unique status — he would have been this. An ordinary Lycan. Remarkable only in the way that all Lycans were remarkable, which was to say: meaningfully, but not memorably.
"We wait," he said, mostly to himself.
Approximately ninety seconds of waiting passed.
Lionel's foot began tapping.
At the two-minute mark, his patience reached its structural limit, cracked quietly, and fell into the mine.
He placed his palm against the Lycan's chest, extended a needle from one finger — thin, precise, the diameter of a moral technicality — and slid it between the ribs. He found the heart with the accuracy of someone who had done considerably more anatomy than was strictly necessary for a healthy lifestyle.
The Lycan went still.
The flesh began to go.
Slowly at first — the surface retreating like a tide acknowledging the moon's instructions — then faster, the soft tissue unraveling with a sound that was almost peaceful if one approached it charitably. What emerged from beneath was not crystal.
It was dark blue. Dense. Mineral-structured and interlocking — every bone, from the skull to the smallest phalanges, sheathed in a material that caught the mine lights like something that had always been waiting to be revealed.
Adamantite.
All three subjects erupted into spontaneous, completely genuine applause. Lucas whistled. Heisenberg made a sound that, from him, qualified as jubilant.
Lionel looked at the skeleton for a long moment.
He allowed himself, quietly and without announcement, to feel good about this.
"Well done," he said. Then: "We're not done."
The applause stopped. Three heads turned.
"We need the DNA of a Uriaș." He held up a hand before Miranda could speak. "Preferably an Urias Străjer — their mass means more Adamantite per subject. We'll use a Vârcolac as our working baseline until we can source something larger." He paused, deliberate. "The return on investment increases proportionally with bone density. Basic economics, applied to things that are currently alive."
"Creator." Miranda stepped forward, hands folded, posture carrying the particular quality of someone who has prepared what they're about to say. "I would like to be personally responsible for sourcing the Uriaș DNA."
Lionel blinked.
"I was going to ask you," he said.
"I know."
A beat.
"...Then go," he said, with a smile that was, for once, uncomplicated. Miranda bowed twice, which was one more bow than strictly necessary, which meant she was pleased — and departed.
"Lucas." Lionel turned. "Current operations are yours. Clone conversion to Vârcolac, continuous. Once the Human Creations project reaches operational scale, Simmons and Radames will supply a minimum of fifty subjects per week." He paused. "If you need guidance on the Vârcolac process, contact Dr. Moreau through the Hive Mind." The title settled naturally. Moreau had earned it, quietly and without making a fuss, which was arguably the best way to earn anything.
"Heisenberg — back to your J'avos."
Heisenberg was already moving.
Lionel walked out of the mine into the open air and stopped.
The farm wall was complete.
He hadn't expected that. He stood with the evening light coming at him sideways and looked at what had been, that morning, a construction project, and was now — definitively, structurally, actually — a wall. Layer upon layer. Purpose upon purpose.
His city was becoming real.
His gaze traveled, as it always eventually did, to the horizon where the Great Tomb of Nazarick rose against the sky — vast, permanent, the architectural equivalent of a politely worded threat. He breathed in slowly. The air tasted of concrete dust and distant possibility.
"Now," he said, "to secure something worth protecting."
His wings spread. He lifted off.
The Great Tomb was, as architectural statements went, aggressively unambiguous.
It did not merely sit in the landscape. It occupied it — the way a very large, very serious person occupies a room by simply existing in it and allowing the room to adjust accordingly. Lionel landed at the approach and stood looking at it with the expression of a man who was certain of his plan and only slightly uncertain of his survival probability.
He calculated his options.
He could traverse the floors. He could present himself properly, work through the hierarchy, let the various guardians make their assessments and comparisons, and make very sincere attempts on his life.
Or —
Movement. A figure emerging from the Tomb entrance with the brisk purposefulness of someone on a task.
A maid.
Lionel stepped behind a pillar with the smooth instinct of a man who had learned that observation was almost always more useful than announcement.
"Complete Invisibility."
She vanished.
Lionel remained behind the pillar for exactly three seconds — the appropriate dramatic pause — then stepped out, arranged his expression into that of a man who has heard an unusual sound and cannot identify its source, and scanned the empty air with theatrical bewilderment.
His nose, however, was having absolutely no trouble locating her.
She smelled of magic, expensive cleaning product, and the particular intensity of someone who had decided to end this interaction quickly. She was approximately four feet to his left, moving with the controlled speed of a professional.
There's something quietly wonderful, Lionel thought, about invisibility spells rendered useless by a sense of smell. The effort. The commitment. The complete, beautiful futility of it.
He almost felt bad.
Almost.
"Too slow," he said, catching her fist.
Her other hand drove into his stomach and through it — through him — the punch entering from one side and exiting the other with the kind of commitment that would, under normal biological circumstances, have been decisive.
He watched her begin to smile.
"Oh, no no no," Lionel said pleasantly, as his stomach sealed around her arm like a Venus flytrap that had been waiting for exactly this. "Not yet."
The maid's smile inverted itself.
"Regeneration?" She pulled. Made no progress. Pulled harder. Made no additional progress. "I detected no magic from you — none —"
"What can I say," Lionel said, "I'm subtle."
He turned his attention to the air beside him, which was — despite its best efforts — occupied. His nose was emphatic about this.
"Hello," he said, to approximately the space where a second maid was working very hard to remain invisible. "Would you like to take me to Lord Ainz? I'd genuinely appreciate it. I have a lot on today."
"Iron Skin! Impact Blow!"
The second maid materialized, wound up, and removed his head from his neck with the professional completeness of someone who had been trained to finish things.
There was a silence.
A sound not unlike the slow, deliberate growth of biological tissue.
A new head.
"Ah," said Lionel's new head, blinking once, testing his jaw, rolling his neck experimentally. "A beheading." He nodded with the measured appreciation of a connoisseur. "Classic. Timeless. I respect the commitment. Seven out of ten — and that's losing points purely because you look so disappointed right now."
The second maid took one involuntary step backward. Her professional composure reasserted itself, visibly and with effort, like a person pulling a curtain across something they'd prefer not to discuss.
She swung again. He caught her gauntlet. The Mold came down over both captured hands — unhurried, thorough, like a particularly opinionated handshake.
Then he released them.
He stepped back, slowly, raising both hands in the universal gesture of a man who would like very much to stop having this particular conversation.
"Here." He formed restraints around his own wrists — clean, neat, the kind of thing a cooperative prisoner provides to demonstrate cooperative prisoner energy. "Cuffs. For free." He tilted his head. "Gag?"
He produced a ball gag from his left palm, examined it, placed it in his mouth briefly, and removed it.
"Too kinky?" He set it aside somewhere it wouldn't be found. "Apologies. I read the room wrong." He looked at the two maids with the expression of a man who has told his best joke to an empty theater. "Tough crowd."
"Doppelgänger?" the bespectacled maid offered, uncertainly.
"I'm genuinely flattered," Lionel said. "But no." He exhaled — the long, deliberate exhale of the genuinely tried. "Please. Please. Just take me to Ainz. I have a kingdom to run. I have experiments in progress. There is currently a man who looks exactly like me sitting in a mine waiting to be further experimented on, and the longer I spend being repeatedly decapitated out here, the more paperwork backs up."
The doors to the Tomb opened.
She arrived the way authority tends to arrive — not with noise, but with weight. Winged. Dark-haired. Carrying herself with the easy certainty of someone who has never once doubted whether she belonged in a room and never intends to start.
Her gaze moved across the scene with the practiced assessment of a woman who was accustomed to arriving at problems after they had already developed opinions about themselves.
"What," said Lady Albedo, with extraordinary precision, "is going on here?"
"He appeared and demanded an audience with Lord Ainz," the red-haired maid reported, not looking away from Lionel. "He knows Lord Ainz's name."
Albedo's assessment of the situation sharpened into something more pointed. "Then he's a threat." She gestured toward Lionel with the casual authority of someone unaccustomed to their gestures going unheeded. "Deal with him."
"We've tried, Lady Albedo," the bespectacled maid said, with the studied neutrality of someone delivering a status report on a situation they did not create and do not wish to own. "His regeneration is... extensive."
Albedo looked at Lionel.
Lionel looked at Albedo.
He had the distinct and immediate impression that this was a woman who had won every contest she'd been entered into for some time, and who had quietly organized her entire personality around the expectation of continuing to do so.
A very large black axe materialized in her hands.
Lionel closed his eyes briefly. Then opened them. Then sighed with the weight of a man who had been hoping, right up until this moment, to resolve things conversationally.
She moved fast — faster than the architecture of her suggestion, faster than the axe's weight should have allowed, the kind of speed that came from confidence and years of battles that had all ended the same way.
He sidestepped.
Caught her from behind — his arm crossing her throat, her back against his chest, his right hand having quietly rearranged itself into a blade that rested, with measured patience, against the line of her neck.
The maids went completely still.
Albedo's hands found his arm. She pulled with what Lionel recognized, biologically, as an entirely extraordinary amount of force. A force that would have removed a normal arm from a normal person with notable efficiency.
His arm did not move.
He leaned down, slightly, and said — quietly, pleasantly, in the tone of a man who has all the time in the world and would nonetheless prefer to use less of it — directly beside her ear:
"Last chance."
Albedo said nothing. But her jaw set in a way that communicated an encyclopedic volume.
Lionel looked up at the maids over her shoulder. His expression was relaxed. His eyes were not.
"Take me to Ainz."
The maids looked at each other. Looked at Albedo — unmistakably important, unmistakably his — looked at Lionel, who had not moved and showed no indication of moving, and performed the quiet mathematics of people who understood consequences.
After a long, weighted moment —
They stepped aside.
Lionel released Albedo immediately. Stepped back. Gave her the full breadth of dignity that the situation allowed, which was — admittedly — a more limited breadth than either of them might have preferred.
She turned to face him. Her expression was a controlled surface over something with considerably more temperature.
"After you," Lionel said, gesturing toward the Tomb entrance with genuine courtesy.
Albedo stared at him.
"I will remember this," she said.
"I certainly hope so," Lionel replied pleasantly. "Otherwise, what was the point?"
He followed the maids inside.
The great doors of the Tomb of Nazarick swallowed him whole.
And somewhere behind those doors, in the deep heart of the greatest dungeon in the New World, Ainz Ooal Gown — supreme overlord, undead king, and exceptionally busy man — had, as yet, no idea that any of this was happening.
He would.
The wall stands. The bones wait. The Megamycete dreams in a new host. And somewhere at the end of a very long corridor, two great powers are about to share the same room for the first time without either of them initiating the terms.
What follows is not an alliance.
What follows is a negotiation — and those are always more dangerous.
Chapter XIV awaits.