Chương 56: 24-1.Erosion, Dungeon, and Carrion

We returned to the kitchen one after the other, and the heat hit us square in the face the moment we stepped through the door. Standing outside moments before, I'd only registered the pale morning sky and the bite of cold wind. But stepping back into this space thick with meat broth, charcoal smoke, and damp timber—something felt wrong in a way the cold never could.

Like walking in from snow expecting warmth, only to find yourself wrapped in something denser, something that clung to the inside of your lungs and refused to let go. I hated that feeling. What I hated more was that Alvira clearly felt it too. She walked in ahead of me, her gaze sweeping the kitchen in a single, clinical arc—the kind of look that wasn't admiring the décor. She didn't say a word. I didn't either.

Forcing a joke into a moment like this would be roughly equivalent to asking the bereaved at a funeral if they'd considered adding dessert. Deeply inadvisable. Possibly fatal.

"Oh, you're back." Jessi was the first to look up, half a sausage still clamped between her teeth. Her tone was so breezy it bordered on offensive—like she hadn't noticed the air had gotten several degrees heavier since we left.

"How'd it go? I was half-expecting you two to come back with an engagement announcement."

"You've decided I'm not leaving this table with my dignity intact today, haven't you."

"Not at all." She blinked with weaponized innocence.

"I'm just showing proper concern for young master's future happiness."

"If your concern involved slightly less public execution of my dignity, I'd be far more moved." I pulled my wooden plate back and sat down. The meat had been cold before we left—now it had achieved something closer to the structural integrity of weather-beaten building materials. I cut off a piece anyway and shoved it into my mouth. No choice. If we actually had to move on this, I couldn't exactly fuel myself on anxiety and sarcasm alone.

Lucas looked at me, then at Alvira, clearly picking up that something was off.

"W-what's wrong?" he whispered.

"You both look... bad."

"Relax, we haven't reached the writing-your-will stage yet." I swallowed the chunk of meat that had nearly filed my teeth down to stumps.

"We've just revised our assessment of Castle Wassach in a somewhat less optimistic direction." Lucas's expression went stiffer than the white bread on his plate.

"Don't say it like that."

"Fine, different phrasing." I considered for a moment.

"The situation is: I originally assumed this place came with the standard assortment of nobles and soldiers. I'm now starting to suspect it may include bonus features that have no business being inside any respectable castle."

"That's not better at all!" Lucas hissed. Jessi, for her part, seemed genuinely intrigued. She chewed thoughtfully on her fork and asked, muffled:"Are the bonus features edible?" I looked at her. Alvira looked at her. Matthews kept his head down and continued drinking his soup, with the serene acceptance of a man who'd long since made peace with the fact that someone on this team would always evaluate impending doom by its nutritional value.

"No," I said. Jessi's face fell with genuine disappointment.

"Then there's not much worth discussing."

"Your crisis evaluation system is disturbingly efficient sometimes."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment." Alvira pulled out the chair beside me and sat down. She didn't touch anything on the table—just rested her hands on her knees and went quiet in a way that was distinctly unlike her. The kind of quiet that felt less like peace and more like a drawn bow. When an elf goes silent, it's rarely because she's suddenly discovered her gentle side. It's because she's listening, watching, or exercising restraint that deserves its own medal.

I tapped the rim of my plate with the back of my knife—a small, clean sound.

"Keep this quiet," I said, low.

"Especially for now. And absolutely do not breathe a word about last night to anyone outside this table." Lucas nodded immediately, with the urgency of someone afraid the castle walls themselves might be listening. Matthews finally set down his wooden spoon and looked at me.

"You're going to investigate." The old soldier's questions always landed like a blade laid flat on a table—no threat in it, no decoration. Just the edge, right there in front of you. I didn't answer immediately. The kitchen was still loud around us. Servants moved past with steaming pots, someone in the corner was working through bones with a cleaver—the rhythmic thwacking somehow more irritating than it had any right to be.

The light through the windows was cold, bleached white, falling across the oil stains and knife marks on our table and making everything look too clear, too precise, too stripped of anything human. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. Last night, I'd been able to write off Conrad's performance at the banquet as exactly that—bad theater.

But sitting here now, turning it over in the grey morning light, I was becoming less sure the problem was only that old bastard. It was the whole castle. Too orderly. Too still. Still in the way of something slowly seeping through cracks, held down by sheer, grinding pressure against the stone. I set my fork down and looked up.

"Yes. But we're not all charging out right now like a band of mercenaries with snow for brains, kicking down every door we find." Jessi raised her hand.

"For the record, I think the door-kicking approach has a certain directness to it."

"What you call directness, I generally file under pre-death cardio."

"Young master, you've been getting meaner lately."

"Environment shapes character." Alvira spoke then, her voice flat and unhurried.

"She's not entirely wrong about one thing." I turned to look at her.

"About which part? The door-kicking?"

"No." She raised her eyes. In the morning light, those pale irises were cold as ice over shallow water.

"We can't afford to wait too long." A brief silence fell around our corner of the table. The words weren't heavy on their own. But coming from her, they settled into the air like frost over something already freezing. I held her gaze and said nothing. Alvira didn't repeat what she'd said outside. She simply pressed one fingertip against the table and said quietly:"The feeling here is getting heavier. Heavier than last night." Lucas blinked.

"F-feeling?"

"Think of it as an elf's bad premonition," I said, stepping in before she had to explain and send Lucas into a spiral he wouldn't recover from before dinner.

"And her bad premonitions tend to outperform weather forecasts."

"That is not a reassuring comparison," Alvira said coolly.

"I'm not smiling about it either." Matthews looked at Alvira, then back at me.

"Who are you bringing?" Before the question had fully landed, Jessi's hand shot up.

"Me!"

"Swallow first, then volunteer."

"I already did."

"That's somehow worse. I have no idea how you managed that." Lucas's expression had gone rigid.

"W-wait, are we actually going?"

"We're preparing," I said.

"The difference between reconnaissance and suicide is that the former involves thinking first."

"And if thinking it through still leads somewhere dangerous?" I looked at him for a moment.

"Then at least we walked into danger with our eyes open, instead of stumbling into it blind. Having a choice at all is something of a luxury these days." Lucas opened his mouth, closed it again, and quietly tightened his grip on his cup until his knuckles went white. I knew he was scared. Anyone who claimed otherwise would be lying. Honestly? I wasn't exactly thrilled with our current predicament either.

The fragments of conversation I'd caught last night, that disaster of a talk with Erina up in the spire, Alvira's mention of the "emptiness," and the suffocating weight that seemed to bleed from Castle Wassach's very stones—all of it sat in my stomach like swallowed iron filings. Too sharp to digest, impossible to spit back up. But this was precisely when you couldn't let it show. Because the moment one person cracks, the whole team cracks with them.

I was about to say something else when a small disturbance rippled through the far end of the kitchen. Not a shout. More like two or three people stopping what they were doing at the same moment, then immediately pretending they hadn't. That unnatural pause lasted only a heartbeat—but it was enough to make my fingers go still on the knife handle. I looked over. A few servants were carrying freshly ladled stew toward the door.

The young apprentice at the front had gone pale—the kind of pale that looked like a recent scolding, except the sweat on his temple didn't fit that story. He was moving fast, head down, and nearly walked into the wall. The older maid beside him caught his arm, her lips moving in what looked very much like don't look. Don't look at what? I narrowed my eyes and followed the direction he'd been so carefully avoiding. There was only a half-open side door leading into storage rooms and corridors beyond.

No figures visible behind it. Just a long, narrow shadow stretching across the floor, reaching quietly into the places the light couldn't touch. Perfectly ordinary. Too perfectly ordinary. I pulled my gaze back and found Alvira already looking at me. She'd noticed too. Neither of us said anything. Jessi, to her credit, had picked up on something. She glanced left, then right, and lowered her voice.

"Is there something there?" I looked at her.

"Since when are you this perceptive?"

"Since you two made that face. You both looked like you'd just spotted free extra servings."

"... I'm beginning to think every crisis in your head eventually routes back to the dining table."

"Isn't that practical?" Matthews rapped his knuckles once against the table, cutting cleanly through our nutritionally bankrupt but deeply on-brand exchange.

"Not now," the old soldier said. I nodded. Right. Not now. Not here in the kitchen, not with a room full of servants watching, not when we still didn't know the patrol routes, corridors, or where a single door in this castle actually led. But that vague sense of wrongness I'd been carrying since last night had just stopped being vague. It had just reached my feet. This wasn't suspicion anymore. This wasn't just Alvira's instincts. This was the castle's own people, already afraid of what they'd seen.

I pushed back my chair and stood. I slid my half-eaten meal to the far edge of the table.

"Finish up. Then get ready." Lucas looked up.

"R-ready how?"

"Not war-ready." I kept my eyes on the knife on the table and kept my voice as normal as I could make it.

"Weapons on you, nothing that clanks, memorize the routes. And starting today—no one goes anywhere alone. Not for any reason." Jessi puffed out her cheeks.

"Young master, isn't that warning a bit late? You were the one wandering around by yourself last night."

"I was lost."

"That sounds very made-up."

"Because it is made-up." Alvira made a sound beside me—barely audible, somewhere between amusement and a verdict on my moral character. But she reached out and picked up a small piece of bread, and that tiny motion settled something in my chest. She was still eating. Which meant things were bad, but not draw-your-bow-right-now bad. I looked out the window. The sky was brighter than before. But the light didn't make Castle Wassach look any more like a normal place.

If anything, it only made the stone walls and towers and high windows more visible—more undeniably real. This is where you're going, the light seemed to say. Every corridor. Every room. All of it exists. And that, more often than not, was the worst part. I pulled my coat up and said quietly:"One more thing. Don't tip off Valdorin. Not yet." Lucas froze.

"Not even her?"

"Not yet. Not now." I paused.

"If we go to her with nothing but feelings we can't explain, she'll spend the first ten minutes wondering if I had bad wine last night." Jessi nodded vigorously.

"I can testify to that. Young master definitely looked mentally compromised last night."

"Shut up." Alvira didn't object. She just added quietly:"Once we have something worth bringing to her. Then we talk." I looked at her. Nodded. That was it exactly. Whatever Castle Wassach was hiding, the most dangerous thing about it right now wasn't the thing itself. It was the fact that it was still wearing the skin of normal. And as long as that skin held, we had to be more patient than it was.

The kitchen noise rolled on around us—ladles against pots, doors swinging, servants weaving between tables, the smell of meat and smoke hanging in the air like it always had. Just another morning. Just another ordinary hour in an ordinary place. I knew better. Standing on a frozen lake, you can't hear the cracks forming beneath your feet. That doesn't mean the ice is thick enough to hold you. And we were about to walk out onto it ourselves.