Chapter 229: The Truth of Disaster (Part 1)
The room stayed silent.
Nobody interrupted as Kai started slowly.
He walked them through entering the Forgotten Archive.
Meeting the Candidate.
Learning that the man had been the final Authority Holder of a civilization that no longer existed anywhere but inside a memory. Everyone listened without a single question. Not because they fully believed him yet.
Because they trusted him.
When Kai finished explaining who the Candidate had been, Mayor Ko leaned back slowly.
"...That shouldn’t be possible."
Silence.
He rubbed his forehead. "For five months we’ve searched every ruin. Every dungeon. Every historical record we could get our hands on." He looked up at Kai. "There are no records that hunters existed before our world awakened. None."
Lily nodded immediately. "He’s right." She crossed her arms. "If civilizations like this really existed, they left behind absolutely nothing."
Elden added quietly, "Not even myths."
"Not even fairy tales," Lily said.
Sera spoke softly. "...It’s like someone erased them."
Kai nodded. "The Candidate said almost no one ever found the Archive."
Mayor Ko exhaled slowly. "So our civilization isn’t the first."
The room went quiet again, everyone sitting with that thought on their own for a moment. Not only was humanity walking blind into something unknown.
Someone else had already walked this exact road, long before them, and failed at the end of it.
...
Kai kept going.
He explained what the Candidate had shown him.
Previous cities growing, thriving, every B-Rank Dungeon making them stronger. Hunters reaching heights Kai still couldn’t fully picture. A few small smiles crept across the table as it sounded familiar.
Kai noticed. "...It reminded me of us."
Silence settled again.
"But everything changed," he continued. "After the hundredth B-Rank Dungeon, one gate changed. Not immediately. Not while anyone was watching for it."
"One ordinary dungeon turned crimson."
Everyone in the room went completely still.
Kai began describing exactly what he’d witnessed.
"The air around it twisted. Wrong, in a way I still can’t fully explain." His voice stayed level, but quieter now. "I felt it myself. Even though none of it was real anymore. Even though those people turned to dust longer ago than I can even imagine."
"Hunters near the gate froze in place. One of them grabbed his own head. His fingers dug in deep enough that blood ran down between them." He paused. "Another started laughing. High. Broken. Wrong."
"Someone else started screaming. No wound on him anywhere."
"Weapons turned on allies. Families shoved each other trying to get clear." His jaw tightened slightly. "The celebration collapsed into complete chaos in less than a minute."
His voice dropped lower.
"I watched one hunter drive his sword through his closest friend. No hesitation. No anger. Nothing at all in his face."
"I watched another slam his own head against the stone, over and over, until he stopped moving entirely."
Nobody interrupted. Nobody could have.
Kai finished quietly. "The Candidate called them Disaster Dungeons."
Silence stretched long enough that it started to feel physical.
Finally Raze asked, voice unusually careful, "...Every one of them becomes like that?"
Kai shook his head. "No."
"Only the hundredth."
...
Kai continued, describing how the crimson light had spread outward from the gate afterward. Flowers withering with grass dying in widening rings, and animals fleeing in every direction at once.
The sky darkening, not from clouds gathering overhead, but from something the world itself seemed to be rejecting on instinct. The room stayed silent through all of it. Even Raze had nothing to say this time.
Kai went on. "I asked him, then you cleared it?"
He paused.
"He looked at me and said, ’We tried.’"
Silence.
Kai explained the rest slowly. Thousands had entered first. Then tens of thousands. The greatest hunters that civilization had ever produced. Entire armies. Authority Holders leading from the front. Months passing. Then years.
Nothing worked. No one who went in ever came back with answers about what waited inside.
Only fewer people, every single time.
Eventually, nobody came back at all.
The room felt smaller than it had a few minutes ago. Heavier.
Mayor Ko finally asked, "...Then what came out?"
Kai lifted his eyes to meet everyone at the table.
"Tiamat."
...
The room went completely silent.
Kai didn’t answer right away. He closed his eyes for a moment, pulling the memory back into focus before he spoke again.
Then he described her. Not as a monster. Not as some overgrown dragon.
As a disaster wearing a shape.
"Blue hair with golden eyes, and four dragons floating behind her the whole time." His voice was steady, but something underneath it wasn’t. "She didn’t roar or attack right away. She just walked, like nothing in the world had the right to slow her down."
He described the memory of the standing army, an entire civilization’s greatest hunters gathered in one place, millions of people watching from behind them, the strongest force Kai had ever witnessed in his life.
Waiting.
Nobody at the table moved.
Nobody breathed.
Then Raze laughed, leading everyone to turn toward him.
He rubbed a hand over his face. "...Sorry." Another short laugh slipped out despite himself. "Not because it’s funny. My brain just refuses to process it properly." He looked at Kai. "Four dragons?"
He held his face and groaned.
"What the hell," he added, quieter.
Kai nodded slowly. "...That was my reaction too."
Raze leaned back in his chair, exhaling hard. "Yesterday I thought we were doing pretty well."
A tiny smile passed around the table for exactly one second.
Then it vanished.
"They believed they could stop her," Kai said, looking around the room. "They couldn’t."
Nobody at the table said a word.
Mayor Ko sat frozen with his reports still in hand, Lily’s fingers had gone still against the table’s edge, and Sera, Mara, and Elden all just stared at the space where Kai’s voice had trailed off.
The image of one woman calmly walking toward an entire civilization’s worth of prepared defenses sat far heavier in the room than any battle description could have managed on its own.
Kai exhaled slowly. "...And that wasn’t even the worst part."
Every head at the table came up at once, eyes locked on him, waiting for whatever came next.