Chapter 54: Lydia Grey; The Genesis
Ursula studied him for a moment, then let out a scoff that broke into laughter, longer and louder than the moment really called for. She finally looked back at him. "S-Class Disaster. Fitting name for a crazy girl. Now tell me everything about her. How did she get this powerful?"
The Supreme Saint considered her for a while, a faint smile crossing his face as he searched through his own memory, and then began.
---
Lydia Grey was not the kind of adventurer bards wrote about. She had no clan, no noble patron, no gleaming sword.
She was an orphan from the Grey District, where children took the name of the stone of their streets. C-Rank. Twenty years old. Leader of a party called the Grey Hounds, made up entirely of other orphans with nowhere else to go.
In the guild hall of the low quarter, she was a fixture. If you needed someone to carry your bags, hold a line for two seconds while you ran, or use her own body as a shield, you called Lydia.
Her Unique Skill was Attraction and Repulsion. The instructors at the academy had laughed at it when it first manifested, when she was twelve. "A trick skill," they’d called it. Good for pulling a coin across a table, or pushing a door shut. Low damage. High mana cost.
Lydia made it useful anyway. She learned to push at the exact instant a charging boar’s front feet left the ground, tripping it mid-stride. She learned to pull a falling ally back by the belt before they hit the ground. She learned to hold a corridor for thirty seconds through constant pushing alone, a human airlock built from sheer will. She always finished a quest with a bloody nose and drained mana veins, smiling through it, saying, "It’s fine, I can walk."
That was why, when the call came from the palace, it was her party that stood up.
Three weeks earlier, the Royal Dungeon — the Maw — had cracked. Not a normal dungeon break. The Maw was a wound cut into the kingdom of Dulthmune itself, a mile-wide hole south of the capital that constantly birthed low-level monsters. Normally the Royal Knights culled it once a year.
This time, though, the inner seal on Floor 12 had failed. Scouts reported a Broodmother had nested there. Left alone, within a fortnight the monsters wouldn’t number in the dozens — they’d number in the thousands, enough to overrun the southern grain fields and starve the capital by winter.
The Knights said they needed a full week to mobilize a column. The Guildmaster begged for volunteers to go in and drop the ancient Dwarven Floodgate on Floor 12 instead. It was a suicide mission by design — sealing the dungeon from the inside meant whoever pulled the lever had to be standing on the wrong side of the door when it closed.
Lydia volunteered before the Guildmaster finished the sentence.
"My kids in the Grey District eat from those fields," she said. That was all the explanation she gave.
Her party — Aldric, Mira, Jon, and Brenn, all orphans, all C-Ranks — followed because she was their leader. No one else stepped forward.
They entered the Maw at dawn with five days of rations and standard lanterns.
Floor 12 wasn’t stone. It was meat. The walls pulsed. The air hung hot and wet, thick with flies. At the center of the massive cavern stood the Floodgate — a twenty-foot dwarven door of black iron, still half-functional — and behind it, fused into the wall, the Broodmother. A mountain of wombs, eyes, and mouths, birthing wolf-sized horrors that hit the ground already screaming.
The plan was simple. One person would sprint past the Broodmother to the manual wheel on the far side and turn it, dropping the Floodgate. The rest would hold the line, then slip through as it closed.
Lydia, as leader, took the wheel position.
What happened next was pieced together later, from what Aldric told the guild when he returned alone with the rest of the party, weeping, filthy.
"We got overwhelmed," he said. "The Broodmother woke up. Lydia said she’d hold it. Told us to hold the door for her."
And she did.
Witnesses from her party would retell the story in taverns for years, each version slightly worse than the last.
Lydia planted her feet in the middle of the cavern, facing down a river of monsters, threw both hands forward, and screamed.
"REPULSION!"
The air itself bent. A hundred newborn monsters were hurled back ten meters, as if they’d struck glass. The Broodmother shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and lunged.
Lydia didn’t stop. Blood already ran freely from her nose — her skill was never meant to be sustained continuously, and every second burned away a minute of her life.
"GO! PULL IT! HOLD THE DOOR FOR ME!" she screamed, voice cracking.
Aldric, Mira, Jon, and Brenn reached the Floodgate and turned the massive wheel. Gears untouched for three centuries screamed in protest as the black iron door began its slow descent.
Lydia stood twenty feet back, holding off a nightmare with nothing but pushed air.
"Come on, Lydia! Run!" Mira screamed.
Lydia unleashed one final, massive Repulsion, clearing the space ahead of her, and sprinted. Three steps from the door. Two steps. Her hand outstretched.
The gap had narrowed to four feet.
Aldric looked at Jon. Jon looked at the flood of monsters closing behind her. If she made it through, they’d come through with her — the gate wouldn’t seal in time, the mission would fail, and the southern fields would fall.
Aldric made the call. He threw the locking bar.
The Floodgate slammed shut with a final, echoing boom. Dust settled over her outstretched fingers on the other side.
For a moment, only the grinding of the lock broke the silence.
Then, from behind the door — her fists. Thump. Thump. Thump. Weak at first.
"Open it! OPEN IT! You said you’d hold it! ALDRIC!"
Thump. Thump.
"PLEASE!"
Then the thumping stopped, and the screaming began from the monsters’.
Aldric swore they heard her using her skill until the very end — the air on their side of the door thrumming with push after push after push, until, finally, nothing.
They returned to the capital and reported their leader lost, the Floodgate sealed, the mission a partial success. The Guildmaster handed them twenty silver in hazard pay and sent them home to rest.
No recovery team was sent. C-Ranks died in the Maw every month. No letter reached the orphanage. No memorial stone was raised. In the guild ledger, beside Lydia Grey’s name, someone wrote in thin ink: *Presumed Deceased. No remains.*
That should have been the end of it.
Seventeen days later, the Floodgate was found open.
Not opened. Ripped.
A patrol of Royal Knights sent to confirm the seal found the twenty-foot black iron door lying ten meters inside the cavern, twisted like paper. The metal around the locking bar had been bent outward — from the inside. The Broodmother’s chamber sat silent, its massive head caved in, apparently by something driven through it with impossible force.
In the center of the chamber, in a dried lake of black blood, two bare footprints led out.
Lydia Grey walked into the low-quarter guild hall on a Tuesday afternoon, during the lunch rush.
Tion, the apprentice clerk, saw her first and didn’t recognize her. A girl in rags that had once been leather armor, now stained so black with old blood it looked like plate. Her hair matted. Her eyes empty in a way that quieted the entire hall.
She set a blood-crusted monster core on the counter — a Broodmother core, the size of a child’s head, still faintly pulsing.
"The Maw is sealed," she said, voice hoarse, as though she’d been screaming for days straight. "Quest complete."
Tion stammered, pulled her file, saw the words Presumed Deceased, then looked back up at her face and saw Lydia Grey — but wrong. The Lydia he remembered always looked down, always apologized for existing. This girl looked straight through him.
"Mi-Miss Grey... your party said—"
"My party locked me in," she said, flat, almost bored, like reading off a supply list. "They held the door. Just not for me."
The hall went dead silent.
Aldric had been drinking in the corner. He rose, pale.
"Lydia?"
She turned and looked at him, and he took a step back.
Because the girl who’d once pulled him out of ditches with her skill was now pushing him without lifting a finger. Aldric flew backward into the wall, chest caving as if struck by a horse, and slid down it.
She didn’t run. She walked over, placed her bare foot on his chest, and pushed. The stone beneath him cracked.
The guards arrived — three B-Ranks. They dropped to their knees the moment she looked at them, clutching their heads as though the air itself had turned to lead. One later said it felt like his own blood was being pulled from his body.
Over the following month, the rest of the Grey Hounds vanished, one by one.
Mira was found in her locked apartment, her body crushed into a perfect sphere, as though every direction had pushed inward at once. Jon was found in the river, his heart burst from all his blood being drawn to a single point in his chest. Brenn was found frozen mid-step in the training yard, unable to move, unable to breathe, as if the world itself had simply stopped pushing and pulling around him — for three seconds, or for eternity, no one could say.
Each time, Lydia was seen nearby — buying bread, sitting on the orphanage roof, nothing more.
Finally, she walked into the palace itself. No stealth, no ambush. Straight through the front gate. The Royal Knights’ swords tore from their hands before they could swing — Attraction. Their armor crushed inward around them where they stood — Repulsion. She left them alive.
She stood before the King on his throne, still in her blood-blackened rags, and set four guild cards down on the steps.
"I am Lydia Grey. Leader of the Grey Hounds. I sealed the Maw when your knights wouldn’t. My party committed treason — they locked me behind the Floodgate to die. I’ve executed them for desertion."
The King, a man who’d faced down dragon attacks without flinching, asked her, "And who gives you the right to execute?"
She answered, "The one who survived."
The King’s own Court Mage, an A-Rank, attempted to bind her. He began the chant. She looked at him and used a skill no one in that room had ever seen. For three seconds, the entire throne room went utterly still — no wind, no heartbeat, no flow of magic anywhere. His spell simply parted around her as it reached her. Then she pointed both hands at him, and no one saw exactly what she released — only that his body folded inward, collapsing to a single point, and vanished.
She walked out afterward. No one tried to stop her.
The royal decree came the next day.
It didn’t name her a criminal. It didn’t name her a hero.
It classified her.
**Designation: Black Assassin.
Threat Level: S-Class Disaster.
Order: Do Not Engage. Do Not Bounty. Do Not Speak Her Name In The Maw. If Sighted, Do Not Provoke.**
All of it had happened roughly four months earlier. Since then, the story had spread through every known kingdom, and yet no bounty was ever placed. She moved freely, unchallenged, across every border.
Those who’d crossed paths with her said she claimed no interest in humanity, no interest in saving anyone — only in her own survival, absolute and unquestioned. She’d given her life for them once, and not a single monument had been built for it. Had that been the end of her, she’d have faded from history as nothing at all.
---
The Supreme Saint rose and looked down at Ursula. "I can’t fault her for it. No one really can. It’s not the first time humanity has taken someone’s kindness and repaid it with cruelty." His expression sobered. "And sadly, it won’t be the last."
He turned and walked deeper into the cave. Ursula watched until his footsteps faded entirely before finally lowering her gaze again.
The story hadn’t changed anything for her, not really — but it left one question she still had no answer for. If Lydia had truly chosen self-preservation above everything else, why had she saved the dragon at all? And what, exactly, did she actually want now?