Chapter 230: The Truth of Disaster (Part 2)
The room stayed silent after Kai’s final words. "...And that wasn’t even the worst part."
Nobody spoke.
Finally Raze broke the silence, leaning forward. "Then we kill it."
Everyone looked toward him.
"If one hunter can’t," he said, "then ten. If ten can’t, a thousand. If a thousand can’t, the entire world."
Silence.
Kai shook his head slowly. "They tried."
Raze frowned.
Kai described the first civilization which had thousands of hunters and entire armies. Legendary weapons and classes far beyond anything Kai had ever personally witnessed.
He described the memory of them charging together, the ground shattering under their combined steps, mountains splitting down the middle, the sky itself burning under the weight of their skills. For one brief moment inside that memory, Kai had honestly believed they might actually win.
Then one of the dragons behind Tiamat opened its eyes, and the battlefield disappeared beneath a wave of blue flame. Entire formations vanished, not defeated in any way that left bodies behind.
Just gone.
Kai’s voice dropped quieter. "They weren’t weak. They were stronger than us."
Silence.
Raze leaned back in his chair. "...Damn."
For the first time since Kai had known him, Raze had nothing to say after that.
...
Lily spoke up next. "Fine. If brute force doesn’t work, we don’t fight. We seal it."
Kai nodded quietly. "They tried that too."
The room went still again.
Kai described another civilization entirely. Barrier Masters. Spatial Classes. Reality manipulation on a scale Kai still struggled to picture properly. Thousands of formations layered together until an entire continent had effectively become one enormous prison.
For a full year, it had worked.
A few small smiles appeared around the table.
Then Kai continued quietly. "The prison shattered."
Not exploded. Not attacked from outside.
It had simply stopped being able to hold her.
Lily lowered her head. "...Seriously?"
Kai nodded. "The Candidate said the prison delayed Disaster. It never stopped it."
...
Mara asked quietly, "What if we don’t fight at all? What if everyone just leaves?"
Everyone turned toward her.
She hesitated for a second before finishing the thought.
Kai closed his eyes. "They tried that as well."
He described the empty city. Families leaving in orderly lines. Hunters escorting long columns of civilians toward the horizon. The final Authority Holder standing at the gate until the last caravan had passed through before finally turning away himself.
Tiamat had arrived to find nothing but empty streets, empty homes, empty walls standing for no one.
Nobody died.
Mara smiled through what looked close to tears. "...Then they lived."
Kai nodded. "They did."
Hope crept back into the room for a moment.
Then Kai finished quietly. "The city’s Authority disappeared."
Mayor Ko understood immediately, his expression shifting. "...No."
Kai nodded. "The Authority Holder survived. But the city itself ceased to exist."
Mayor Ko said, almost to himself, "So civilization dies anyway."
Nobody argued with that.
...
Lily asked another question right after. "What if we simply never clear the hundredth dungeon at all?"
Kai looked at her. "They tried that too."
He explained the stagnant civilization, the months that passed peacefully, the celebration that never quite gave way to disaster because they simply stopped moving forward at all. Equipment stagnated. Research stalled out entirely. Hunters plateaued and stayed there.
Meanwhile a neighboring city kept progressing, and slowly, quietly, merchants left, researchers left, guilds relocated, talented students packed up and went elsewhere for better opportunities.
The city died anyway. Not from monsters.
From standing still long enough that the rest of the world simply passed it by.
Mayor Ko closed his notebook slowly. "...Evolution."
Kai nodded. "The city itself evolves. Or it doesn’t."
...
Kai went on to explain the lower-dungeon strategy next, staying in C-Rank, staying in D-Rank, growing slowly instead of chasing the higher ranks at all.
Elden interrupted before Kai finished the thought. "...No."
Everyone looked at him. He’d already worked out where it ended.
"Our strongest hunters would occupy every lower dungeon in the city." He stood slowly. "My students would have nowhere left to grow."
Kai nodded. "The Candidate called it a bottleneck."
Silence.
Elden sat back down slowly. "...We’d destroy our own future trying to protect it."
...
Sera spoke up for the first time in a while. "What about the dragons themselves? Are they separate from her, or is she controlling something that could be cut off?"
Kai paused, thinking back through everything the Candidate had shown him. "I don’t know. Every memory I saw treated them as part of her. Nobody ever managed to separate one from the fight long enough to find out."
Sera frowned slightly, filing that away without pushing further.
Mayor Ko asked next, "Did any civilization try negotiating? Communicating with her at all, rather than fighting or fleeing?"
Kai shook his head slowly. "The Candidate never showed me anything like that. I don’t know if it was ever tried, or if it was tried and simply isn’t part of what got preserved." He paused. "That’s actually a good question. I should ask him directly next time."
Mara added quietly, "What about the dungeon itself, before it turns crimson? Is there any warning at all, something a city could watch for?"
Kai considered that one for a long moment. "The Candidate didn’t say. From what I saw, it looked completely ordinary right up until it wasn’t."
That answer settled uneasily over the table, several of them clearly turning the idea of no warning at all over in their minds.
...
For the first time since the meeting had turned serious, Kai smiled. "There was one thing they left behind."
Everyone looked up.
"The Forgotten Archive."
He explained what it held. Ancient weapons. Research. Blueprints. Failed experiments. Abandoned theories. Relics from more than one civilization stacked together in the same place.
Lily’s eyes brightened with every sentence. "Wait. Blueprints?"
Kai nodded.
"Research journals?"
"Yes."
"Monster studies?"
"Yes."
"Failed experiments?"
"Everything."
She stood up immediately. "We have to go."
Mayor Ko nodded. "If those records survived intact, they’re worth more than any treasure this city has ever recovered."
Elden gripped his notebook tightly. "I want to see how they trained their hunters."
Raze grinned. "I want to see the weapons."
Mara smiled. "I want to see all of it."
For the first time since Kai had said the word Disaster out loud, the room felt genuinely excited again.
...
Kai raised one more point. "The Candidate can recreate memories. He said we can test ideas inside them."
Everyone listened closely.
"We can build something there," he continued. "Test formations. Try strategies. If they fail, we learn from the failure and try again."
Lily froze. "...You mean we can fail without anyone actually dying?"
Kai nodded. "We can build weapons. Test formations. Try strategies. If they fail, we learn."
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Mayor Ko said quietly, "Every civilization before us had to gamble with reality itself to test anything." He looked around the table. "We don’t."
That single sentence seemed to shift something in the room, the weight of everything they’d just heard settling into something closer to resolve than dread.
...
Nobody spoke for several moments after that.
Finally Mayor Ko stood. "Everything changes starting now."
He looked around the room. "We continue strengthening Mythal. We lower equipment costs. We train more hunters. We prepare evacuation routes. We don’t stop progressing, no matter what else we’re doing at the same time."
He turned toward Kai. "And the Archive."
Kai nodded. "I’ll return there. The Candidate said countless plans remain buried down there, waiting."
Lily blinked, then turned toward him slowly. "...Hold on."
Kai looked over.
"You already explored that place. With Sera. And you never told me?"
Kai scratched his cheek. "...It slipped my mind."
Lily stared at him. "It slipped your mind?"
Sera couldn’t hold back a small giggle beside him. Mara laughed outright. Raze snorted loudly enough that he had to cover his own mouth. Even Mayor Ko allowed himself a small smile.
Elden raised a hand immediately. "I’d like to come as well."
Kai chuckled. "Good. I was going to invite all of you anyway." He looked around the table at each of them in turn. "I’ll need every one of you down there. The plans left behind weren’t made by one person or one perspective. They were made by entire civilizations working on the same problem from different angles."
He paused. "So we’ll need more than one way of looking at it too."
Everyone nodded.
Mara asked, "What should we do until then?"
Kai’s smile faded slowly into something more focused. "Keep doing exactly what we already planned. Strengthen the weaker hunters. Share equipment. Build the mentor teams. Improve survival rates across the board."
He looked toward the window, the city still moving on the other side of the glass, entirely unaware of everything that had just been said in this room. "Because when Disaster comes, the weakest hunters will be the first line protecting the evacuation."
Silence fell in the room.
Everyone understood exactly what that meant.