Is It Wrong To Skitter In A Dungeon? Chapter 62: Preta (Patreon)

Chapter 62: Preta

Limping through Knossos, Taylor felt like shit. Her temporary Level Up had faded, leaving her as a Level 3 again. With her Endurance lowered to its ‘normal’ stats, her wounds hurt a lot more, and her natural Falna-boosted healing slowed down a lot as well. She could still stand, but Taylor definitely needed a couple more potions in order to do so.

‘Though I definitely felt something back when I killed Dix,’ she thought to herself. ‘I think I may have reached Level 4 back then.’

Honestly, if beating a Level 5 who’d prepped out the wazoo to counter her specifically didn’t warrant a Level Up, the parahuman didn’t know what would. She hadn’t felt the pressure of the gods in Tenkai looming down on her, but she’d been pretty messed up and out of it for a while, so she’d find out later when she went to Hestia for a stat update.

Until then, though, she was stuck at her current power level, and silently prayed she wouldn’t run into Revis or Valetta. There didn’t seem to be any other high-ranked adventurers aside from them, and with the Ikelos Familia essentially wiped out, there were few opponents in Knossos that could pose a threat.

‘Though the strange feeling is definitely worrying,’ Taylor thought to herself. The strange ‘noise’ was like static, like what the Hybrid Creatures possessed, but it was louder and contained something else, just below the surface. A two-toned scream, not unlike the bizarre duality Syr and Soma’s auras possessed.

More unusually, the aura was probing her. Taylor could feel it trying to poke and prod at her brain, but it was rebuffed every time by her Skill – or perhaps it was directly interference from Queen Administrator. Whatever the case, while it could not get through the mental defenses, the static was annoyingly loud, and trying to ‘pull’ her in a certain direction.

For now, Taylor did her best to ignore it, and instead kept marching forward towards the large chamber filled with monsters and people, not all of whom from the latter were adventurers.

Admittedly, the two locations were both in the same direction, but she’d come across the mass of Violas and Virgas first and she’d see where she’d go from there.

The monsters were already under the parahuman’s control, but she was still a ways away from them, and she wasn’t moving very fast.

At her side, Chris chittered, and she shot him an annoyed look. He just stared back, before gesturing at Debbie with his head.

“Fine, quit looking at me like that,” Taylor grumbled before walking over to the Dungeon Worm, hoping onto her back. “Let’s pick up the pace.”

The swarm began to move a little faster, and a few minutes later they reached their destination. The chamber was dark, no light whatever, save for what spilled in from the torches lining the hallway.

The stench of urine, feces, blood, and terror filled the room, and as Taylor dismounted Debbie, she felt her boots squish into noisome fluids she did her best not to think about.

“T-taylor?” a trembling voice called out in disbelief, and the parahuman squinted into the gloom.

“Persephone!” Taylor replied, nodding at Demeter’s captain.

Her hum was unmistakable, and over a dozen other adventurers and an equal number of non-Falna bearing members of the Demeter Familia. They were trapped in the room, their bodies bound tight by the Violas and suspended in the air.

“How… no, that doesn’t matter!” Persephone shouted. “You have to get out of here!”

“It’s fine, the monsters are under my command,” Taylor replied, and with a thought ordered the Violas to gently put the people down. They were weak from dehydration and hunger, and even the adventurers couldn’t recover that easily.

“That… that doesn’t matter!” Persephone gasped out as Taylor helped her stand on her feet. “It’s Enyo! The leader of Evilus! He’s-!”

“Dionysus, right?” Taylor queried, and she gasped in shock.

“How did you…?” Persephone wondered.

“He’s been acting very suspiciously for a while, now, and the other members of our coalition have suspected him for a while,” Taylor replied. “Also, his captain had the same aura as Revis. She wasn’t an elf anymore, but a Creature. A monster-mortal hybrid.”

Taylor then looked around, nose wrinkling as her swarm detected several headless corpses rotting in the dark. “What happened here?”

“Lady Demeter felt something was off with Dionysus for a while now,” Persephone explained. “He wasn’t acting right. She believed he was being blackmailed or threatened, and when she went to confront him, discovered his connections to Evilus. In order to silence her… he kidnapped us, and held us hostage.”

Persephone looked sorrowfully in the direction of the bodies. “He murdered a dozen of us, forcing Lady Demeter to laugh the whole while. In the end, he only spared us because he ‘got bored.’ However, he kept the rest of us alive to force Lady Demeter to take the fall for him.”

“He’s going to blame her for the actions of Evilus? How would anyone believe that?” Taylor wondered incredulously.

“Frightened people do stupid things, and Dionysus told Lady Demeter to stop sending food to the city,” she replied.

That brought a frown to Taylor’s face. Orario had a population of a million, and relied heavily on the agricultural Familias, with the Demeter Familia being the largest. A single day or two without deliveries of grain, fruit, and vegetables wouldn’t hurt them, as plenty of rations were still stockpiled from Rakia’s invasion, but the absence would be noticed eventually, and fingers would be pointed accusingly at anyone who seemed culpable.

“That makes sense,” Taylor admitted. She then looked over the rest of the Demeter Familia’s survivors, and noted how disheveled they looked.

“How long have you been down here?” Taylor asked.

“Not sure. No sun to tell, but at least several days,” she replied. “She heard rumors of the operation being planned by you all, and wanted to speak with Dionysus before the assault on Evilus.”

Taylor sighed. That had been a mistake. ‘She should have gone to one of the other coalition members if suspected something was up. It wasn’t a secret we were working together.’

Lambasting Persephone for her goddess’s failures wouldn’t solve anything, and so Taylor held her tongue, though if the way her fellow captain flinched, she knew what the parahuman was thinking.

“What’s going on out there?” Persephone asked, looking over Taylor and noted how beat-up she was. “Where are the others?”

“We split up,” Taylor replied. “As for my current appearance, that’s due to a fight I had with the captain of the Ikelos Familia.”

Seeing the concerned look the other Level 3 was giving her, Taylor shrugged. “Don’t worry, he’s dead.”

Persephone pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything, and instead looked at her Familia members. “How are we going to get out of here?”

“We’ll find a way out. Possibly linking up with the other Familias in the process,” Taylor assured her. “The ones who aren’t able to walk should ride Debbie.”

“I’m not sure they’ll be eager to be close to a monster after what happened,” Persephone pointed out, sparing a glance towards the immobile monsters that had previously kept them prisoner.

“Tough,” Taylor huffed. “They can ride or they can limp. It’ll be safer, and faster, if they take the former option.”

The other captain sighed but nodded, seeing she was right, and started to organize the departure. Some Pink Silk bandages helped bolster the injured members, and water made them perk up a bit.

“Come, let’s leave this place,” Taylor suggested, and together they all left, with a single Viola and Virga following in their wake. The rest all died when Taylor commanded the Virgas to die, and their acidic blood exploded out of them, coating the room and dissolving everything within down into a slurry.

“Do you have to keep them?” Persephone asked, glaring at the newly tamed monsters, and Taylor nodded.

“It will make it easier to study them if I have a specimen close at hand,” Taylor replied.

The two creatures were fascinating based on the limited amount of information she’d gained. Despite having a mouth, the Viola didn’t actually need to breath, or even eat, it could sustain itself via photosynthesis, though that method didn’t see much use as it rarely got to go to the surface.

As for the Virga, the acid was potent, but what really interested her was that it reminded her a lot of caterpillars, and not just in body plan.

‘I bet if I feed it enough Magic Stones, it will evolve into some sort of moth or butterfly-like monster,’ Taylor mused.

The group traveled down the corridor, still heading towards the strange static-laced scream that was in the distance. Not that the others knew this. Only Taylor and her swarm were aware of why they were heading down this particular passageway.

Her swarm noticed something up ahead, though. It was a T-junction, one route leading deeper into Knossos towards the hum, but the other went towards an exit. And somehow, Taylor knew where they led.

‘It seems that when Dix showed me his past, I memorized the blueprints his father showed me,’ she thought to herself, concerned. Having those memories inside of her made her annoyed, and reminded her of when she’d had access to countless other thoughts and feelings as Khepri.

Shoving all of ‘that’ away, Taylor instead focused on the other things she was able to sense in the direction of the hum.

“I’m detecting people down that way,” Taylor said, pointing towards the path that went further inside.

“Evilus?” Persephone asked nervously.

“No… they’re civilians. None of them have a Falna,” Taylor replied. There were lice in the hair of the people she’d noticed with her swarm, but some of the things the limited amount of information she’d gleaned told her made her very angry.

“We should rescue them,” the Demeter Familia captain said, despite still being shaky on her feet. However, Taylor wasn’t about to disagree.

“Yes. This way,” Taylor ordered, and the group move on to their new destination.

The room that the parahuman led them to was little more than a jail. Entry was barred by a locked door made of orichalcum, which if that didn’t tell you it hid something important, nothing would. Thankfully, just like every other part of Knossos, Dix’s eye acted as a master key and the lock clicked softly before swinging open, revealing the disgusting sight beyond.

The room wasn’t all that big. Twenty-five square feet, and perfectly square. Someone had tried to give it a semblance of civility and elegance by including beds with soft sheets and pillows, rugs to cover the floor and tapestries to decorate the walls, perfumes to make the air breathable, and Magic Stone lamps to provide a semblance of night-day cycles, but no amount of silks and finery could hide the fact it was a cell meant to keep people trapped.

There were two such women tucked away inside the jail: one looked heavily pregnant, while the other lay on a bed staring at the ceiling. Both were clad in tattered nightclothes with their hair filthy and riddled with lice and other vermin.

The former was doing her best to hold onto a child with white hair and a single glowing red eye, a tiny trowel in their hand that they tried stabbing into the floor and wall in an attempt to excavate the room further. Meanwhile, the other prisoner didn’t even seem to have noticed the door to their room had been opened.

The pregnant woman still had a bit of life in her, staring hopefully at the two captains as she tried to restrain the squirming child, but the other woman was lying on her back, dead to the world with vacant eyes.

Taylor stared into the cell, feeling nauseous, and Persephone looked horrified at the state of the two women.

“We have to help them!” Demeter’s captain exclaimed, and Taylor nodded, stepping forward into the room.

“Are… are you going to save us?” the young pregnant woman asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“It’s okay, you’re safe, now!” Persephone exclaimed, rushing into the cell to help the two women and child.

“Thank you… thank you…” she sobbed, tears falling from her eyes as Persephone used a potion to help her out.

One of the other Demeter Familia members joined Persephone, and inspected the dead-eyed woman with a worried expression.

“It’s not good,” she said with a shake of her head. “Her time down here has broken her mind.”

“She’s been down here the longest,” the pregnant woman – no, she couldn’t be older than sixteen – said, shooting her a sympathetic look.

“And the child?” Taylor asked. “Is it hers?”

“No,” the pregnant woman replied softly. “Her children… they did not make it. This child here lost his mother, and it is safer to keep him here, than out there.”

Taylor nodded in understanding, sparing the boy one more glance before turning away. He looked similar to a young Barca, Dix’s half-brother she’d seen in the smuggler’s memories.

Since she knew how the Perdix family had continued it’s lineage, she suspected that the unborn child was also Barca’s. Dix… Dix was a piece of shit, but he also hated his family’s legacy. He would never sire a child if they might also share the same cursed fate. So all of the children here were Barca’s.

‘We will need to make sure they are taken care of,’ Taylor thought to herself. ‘And perhaps investigate if there is a way to help break the curse afflicting their bloodline.’

Part of the curse was tied to that damned book of blueprints Dix’s vision had shown her, but there was also the unusual red eye itself which couldn’t be natural, either.

‘I’m sure Hestia won’t mind taking care of some more people.’ If anyone could help mentally unwell people recover and become somewhat normal, then it was the Goddess of Hearth and Home. She had done it for Taylor, after all.

“Timor, take the boy,” Persephone instructed one of her companions. “Reila, Sasha, help the women.”

The three Level 1s of the Demeter Familia hurried in and did as they were told, the man of the group picking up the white-hair brat who squirmed unhappily, while the women of the trio picked up Barca’s victims.

Yet as they loaded the new passengers onto Debbie’s back, Taylor’s swarm she’d left scattered about pinged newcomers approaching them. Half a dozen figures were rushing down the hallway, and they were dressed in familiar white robes were equally familiar explosives strapped to their vests.

“Hurry up,” Taylor urged, glancing back down the way they’d come. “We need to keep moving. Some people have found us.”

“Evilus?!” Persephone asked in horror, and Taylor nodded. She didn’t have time to explain further, though, as she sensed the group of cultists storming down the hallway.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of them,” Taylor assured the other captain. “Keep going, I’ll catch up when I’m done.”

Persephone nodded, uncertain about having their strongest fighter leave, but also paradoxically reassured by that as well. She then took charge and ushered her group onwards, the swarm protectively surrounding them.

After watching the Demeter Familia move on, Taylor turned around and glared down the passageway where the Evilus goons were coming from.

‘They must have found out that the hostages are gone,’ she thought to herself with a scowl, stomping off to vent some of her rage by taking them out herself. None of the cultists were stronger than Level 2, but they all had suicide vests, which they likely hoped would be enough to take out Persephone and herself.

‘Assuming they even know I’m down here,’ Taylor mused as her swarm buzzed eagerly.

Secretly inserting some flies and other tiny bugs into their clothes, her insects gnawed through the triggering devices, disabling them. She could have just blown them up remotely, and ended the problem that way. But she was pissed off and needed to hit something.

The first cultist didn’t even have a chance to react as a knife came flying into his eye. Before the body touched the ground, the next person to die did so due to Taylor’s Geisteel knife piercing his heart as she leapt out of the shadows.

The other cultists finally reacted, trying to corner Taylor and then blow themselves up, but when their bombs didn’t work, they panicked.

This cost them, and Taylor punished them by shattering the legs of one with a leg sweep, then crushed their throat with her foot. At the same time, insects poured forth and burrowed into another cultist’s mouth and nose. She choked to death.

The two remaining Evilus members tried to fight, but were not prepared for it. They hadn’t even managed to draw their weapons, having expected their suicide vests would be enough. A blade piercing through one of their throats followed by a kick to the stomach that shattered ribs ended their futile resistance.

“Wh-why?” the cultist with a crushed chest whimpered as Taylor loomed over her. “W-we just wanted… our families…”

“If you wanted to see your dead family members again, you should have thrown yourself into the Dungeon instead of trusting a god to keep their promises,” Taylor retorted. She didn’t allow them to speak another word and parted the cultist’s head from her shoulders a second later.

Over in less than a minute, Taylor sighed a little at how easy it had been. There truly was an enormous gulf between someone at Level 1 or 2 and somebody at Level 3.

Wiping her blade off on their robes, Taylor quickly checked them for anything useful. Aside from the Kaenseki Stones that made up their bomb vests, they had nothing of interest, and after grabbing the explosive rocks, hurried back towards Persephone and the others.

‘They’ve stopped,’ Taylor noticed, concerned. Why had they stopped? The reason ‘why’ soon revealed itself to be a pair of double doors taking up the entire corridor. Interestingly, the psychic static she’d been feeling this whole time was coming from whatever was behind it.

“Step back,” Taylor suggested as she rejoined the party.

Holding up the eye to the doors, it began to creak open, revealing yet another large, shadow-filled chamber. Yet as light spilled in, revealing more of what was inside, Taylor wished that it hadn’t.

‘It’s oddly colorful,’ was the first thought that struck the parahuman.

Her mind immediately associated it with the vivid hues of the Poison Dart Frog and other animals who used bright colors to warn predators of poison, and it screamed ‘DANGER!’ at her.

The thing was hideous. Gold, green, and pink tendrils of flesh twisted together into a sickeningly meaty pillar. It resembled a grotesque tree, its ‘roots’ and ‘branches’ clinging to and crawling up the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Protruding from the ‘trunk’ was a vaguely humanoid figure, its flesh green and gold, the latter resembling clothing that grew from its body for the sake of preserving its modesty. It was also clearly a woman, if the breasts, face, and hair were any indicator.

Every so often, a mouth would open on the side of the body, never in the same place, and a hand would reach out and shovel Magic Stones into it. Said crystals were piled up in teetering mounds within ready reach, though the creature didn’t seem to care about being messy as it mindlessly grabbed handfuls.

And the entire time, the thing was… singing. Yes, now that she was closer, the bizarre static-laced screamed was actually some kind of twisted song. She had no idea what it meant, or if it even had a meaning, but the entity was engrossed in the music it was making and the feast of Magic Stones, and paid no attention to anything else around it.

‘This thing…’ Taylor thought to herself, staring in disbelief at it. ‘This is a Demi-Spirit?’

Such a name did not suit it at all. Taylor had met spirits before. The Gnomes who ran the banks and library, the Salamander who lived with Hephaestus… all of them were odd, but still recognizably of the world, if that made sense.

Their auras were the music of the planet itself. They were extensions of nature. Free-willed and sapient, but very much playing by different rules. Magic itself seemed to flow joyously around them, refreshed and purified. Just as plants recycled carbon dioxide and released oxygen, so too did spirits serve to regulate the magical energy of the very world.

This thing? It was wrong. Maybe at some point it had been an actual spirit of some sort, but the Dungeon had somehow corrupted it, and their aura was no longer harmonious, but a discordant shriek that actively disrupted the flow of magic around it, actively drawing energy in and corrupting it.

“Preta,” the parahuman muttered under her breath, the name belonging to a mythical entity of India and Shakti’s home she’d once mentioned: Preta, a Hungry Ghost. An existence that devoured endlessly, never satisfied, and only spread misery.

Whether or not it was a real thing was something Taylor wasn’t sure of, not when actual magic and gods roamed about. But ‘Preta’ was certainly something better than ‘Demi-Spirit’ in her opinion.

The quivering, twitching mound of flesh seemed to hear her soft utterance, and the humanoid torso turned towards the source, revealing four silver eyes that zeroed in unerringly on Taylor.

“Aria?” it asked, looking at Taylor in bewilderment. But then its expression turned ugly, and it began screaming.

“QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR!” the Preta shrieked, unnatural limbs growing from its lumpen flesh.

“Back! Back!” Taylor shouted, urging the Demeter Familia to vacate the area as fast as possible.

“What do we do?!” Persephone asked fearfully, staring at the abomination as Taylor’s swarm countered it.

“We need to leave!” Taylor retorted. “None of us are a match for that thing! We must retreat!”

Persephone nodded weakly and began shouting at her Familia members, organizing them and sending the group away from the chamber and back the way they’d come from.

Thankfully, it seemed the Preta was focused on the parahuman above all else. Unfortunately, this was a double-edged sword, as Taylor was not in top form. She dodge a hand that tried to grab her and cut it off with her blade, then stabbed another through the wrist, but the damage was minimal.

The severed hand dissolved into greyish mud, while the limb she had stabbed possessed no blood or any nerves, so she couldn’t even cause it pain.

The Viola bit a hand before it could latch onto her, and then yanked it off, but this didn’t do anything expect direct the Preta’s attention towards it. Soon, six more hands shoot towards the green flower and grappled it, but instead of pulling it apart, they melded together into a sort of fleshy cocoon, enveloping the monster.

“What?” Taylor gasped in disbelief, before wincing as she felt the Viola die as it was sucked dry, literally. The Preta’s deformed hand-cocoon drained the magic from whatever they were surrounding, and her newly Tamed monster collapsed into ash as its Magic Stone was depleted in just a few seconds of contact.

This impromptu snack did not slow the abomination down at all, and it kept hurling fleshy tendrils at Taylor, forcing her to sacrifice more and more of her swarm to stop them.

‘I’m running out of bugs,’ Taylor thought bitterly with a scowl. To say nothing of the lack of monsters she now had. Between the loses against Dix, and then here against the Preta, she only had Debbie and Chris left, with her control over the Virga faltering due to the Demi-Spirit's presence.

“QQQUUUEEENNN!”

‘And then there’s that,’ Taylor grimaced, eyes darting towards the Preta’s chamber. How did the damned thing know her passenger’s name?!

She didn’t know, but she had her suspicions. But she had problems to deal with before that. Taylor hastily raised the red eye she’d stolen from Dix and ordered the doors to close once more.

To her relief they began to swing shut, the Preta having no control over the magic that infused the doors. That wasn’t to say the former Spirit didn’t try to stop the doors from closing on her, and she shoved her arms through desperately, blocking them and temporarily stopping the doors from getting sealed.

Seeing this, Taylor ordered Chris to kill the Virga. With a squelching noise, the Virga exploded, acidic blood spraying everywhere that caused the Preta to shriek in shock as its limbs melted away. With its body no longer blocking the way, the doors slammed shut, the Preta and its ravenous influence no longer a threat.

Unfortunately, she could hear the Preta slamming its many fists against the doors, and tried to break them down. And while the doors were made of orichalcum and nigh unbreakable by anyone under Level 8… the walls they were mounted into were not nearly as indestructible.

“KEEP GOING!” Taylor shouted, urging Debbie to go even faster as she rushed back to the Demeter Familia!

She stumbled, nearly tripping and falling in shock when she felt an explosion of power in the distance. She felt as if she was suddenly bereft of value and lost… no, not lost, homeless. That there was nowhere for her to go… the strange experience ended as quickly as it came, but Taylor recognized what it was, for she had felt it twice before.

‘That was a god!’ Taylor realized, her mind throbbing violently with the aftereffects. A god had just ascended to Tenkai! And it felt familiar…

Suddenly, the echoing scream that had been throbbing in her head all day since entering Knossos shifted in pitch and tone. The Preta began to sing more clearly, and her voice was joined by five others, creating a screaming symphony that was as beautiful as it was horrific.

Worse, was that this song was no longer a purely psychic affair, and Taylor could hear it with her ears. If the way the Demeter Familia began to twitch and moan, they could hear it too, and that… well, whatever it was, likely wasn’t good.

Behind her, the elements of the swarm Taylor had left to watch over the chamber died as the golden doors were smashed apart as a surging tide of rainbow-colored flesh spilled out, rapidly enveloping everything in its path.

The Preta’s body expanded, and began to cling to the walls, floor, and ceiling, filling the passages of Knossos and transforming it from a manmade labyrinth into something far more antediluvian.

‘A ruinous garden of flesh,’ Taylor thought to herself as she beheld what her swarm managed to relay regarding what was happening behind her before the bugs were consumed.

The native of Earth Bet was reminded of the tale of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and felt that this unholy amalgamation of spirit, flesh, and Dungeon essence was trying to create its own false Tower of Babel.

Almost as if to acknowledge her thoughts, a second explosion of power rocked through the underground structure, and a second god was sent hurtling back to the heavens in as many minutes.

This time, Taylor immediately recognized the god who’d ‘died,’ as the grinding and scraping that accompanied the waves of divine power definitely belonged to Thanatos. She knew what his essence felt like after ripping it from the Falna of his Familia members, after all.

‘Well, at least one of the objectives was completed,’ she thought to herself, frowning, before glancing back at the encroaching tidal wave of Preta-meat.

“There’s a door up ahead!” Demeter cried out fearfully, and Taylor yanked her attention away from what was behind them and focused on what was in front.

Indeed, there was a door at the end of the corridor, a big door that Taylor hastily opened with Dix’s eye. To her immense relief, she felt her power seep out and latch onto nearby flies and roaches that were nearby, informing her that this door was one of the secret entrances to Orario the alliance hadn’t managed to uncover.

“We’re almost outside!” Taylor shouted, trying to reassure the rest of the group. “If we make it out of Knossos, we’ll be fine!”

She desperately hoped that was the case. Taylor had no idea if the Preta’s corrupted flesh could follow them out of the labyrinth, but it was the best option they had.

True or not, the information invigorated the party, and even though they were tired and hungry, the adventurers who were running alongside her pushed themselves harder and the ones riding Debbie clung tighter and urged them on by shouting encouragements.

With that, Taylor and the Demeter Familia managed to rush out of Knossos just in time, as behind them the Preta had been starting to catch up.

Once they were all through, Taylor hastily ordered the doors to shut, and only a few groping tendrils made it through before the portal slammed shut, sealing the abomination inside.

“That… was too close,” Persephone panted, before shooting Taylor a grateful look. “Thank you… for everything.”

“Just doing what needed to be done,” Taylor replied. “Now, we need to…”

Before she could finish her sentence, a third explosion rang out in the distance, and multi-hued pillars of flesh shot up above the rooftops a few blocks away. They didn’t spread far and seemed to stop growing shortly after appearing, but that they’d appeared at all was a sign things had definitely gone wrong down in Knossos.

“That’s… that’s bad, isn’t it?” Persephone said nervously.

“Without a doubt,” Taylor agreed, glaring at the protruding corruption. She needed to find Bell and the others and make sure they were safe.

‘And then Dionysus gets to be the third god to be sent back to Tenkai for his betrayal,’ the parahuman vowed. The God of Wine would regret every atrocity he’d had a hand in!

Taylor felt Queen Administrator pulse in agreement. They would have vengeance… and answers.