Why?!
When the words Sulyvahn's Revenant materialized as magical text before their eyes, the whole group froze.
And especially — especially — when the word "Big brother" rasped up from beneath that gaunt, corpse-like face, confirming exactly what everyone had already started to suspect.
The little boy.
But why?
How had he turned into a monster?
Where did the thread even connect?
The shock rolling through Maru right now matched, at minimum, the moment she'd watched the Warrior Jar explode in front of her back in the Catacombs.
Watching an actual person transform into a monster hit harder, if anything.
If Wade had wanted to be genuinely merciless, he could have shown the full sequence — the boy happily suiting up in front of everyone, setting off to find his brother, then screaming as his body twisted and reformed mid-stride.
Would've landed considerably harder that way.
The abruptness they'd gotten instead still worked reasonably well, though — depended on the viewer, in the end.
When the Warrior Jar had gone off, Maru had screamed.
This time, her brain crashed entirely before the scream could even form.
Her expression slowly rearranged itself into something recognizable from a famous painting.
The Scream.
"Drew!"
Leon needed exactly one word.
Drew understood instantly, stepping onto an erupting fire pillar to close the distance and slap a green light across the top of her head before her emotional state could spiral further.
[Calm]!
A green glow bloomed above her.
For the moment, Maru achieved complete detachment from worldly concerns.
Her half-formed scream snapped shut mid-breath. Her expression went flat.
Terrifyingly calm.
"Save… save…"
The boy's broken voice tried to reach them.
Drowned out immediately under an animal roar.
Same as the Pontiff Knights, he'd become one of Sulyvahn's Revenants now.
No version of this ended with saving him. A clean death was the kindest available option.
Under Calm, Maru's gaze sharpened. Her Twinblade caught the light as she spoke.
"Fine. It's time I save you."
Sulyvahn's Revenant moved with a Pontiff Knight's light, agile footwork while simultaneously wielding a Fire Witch's staff. Towering flames erupted underfoot across the whole area.
Bang!
Maru closed the distance and unloaded a rapid slash sequence with her Lightning-Grease-coated Twinblade. The Revenant matched her fluidity with the curved sword, deploying freezing mist from the blade edge while the staff spat continuous flame in the same breath.
Hot and cold, layered together.
A genuinely well-integrated fusion of two monster templates.
Its raw output ran considerably above baseline, too — power comparable to a full Outrider Knight.
"Take this!"
Terl surged through the flame sheet behind a magical shield large enough to cover his whole frame, catching the Revenant off guard and sending it flying into a nearby wall. It got back up fast.
Apparently, whatever strengths it had inherited from both source monsters, it had also inherited both their embarrassing lack of poise. Losing the Pontiff Knight's shield on top of that dropped its defensive output further still.
Drew borrowed a technique from the elf aunt he'd encountered earlier — summoning plant-type constructs at the Revenant's landing point, hoping to pin it down.
The flames pushed his plants back almost immediately.
[Fire Witch Gauntlets]
Cold-hearted gauntlets belonging to Irithyll's merciless Revenants, channeling the Profaned Flame.
The witches who commanded the Pontiff Knights were said to have begun as holy knights before being bewitched by the flame itself.
The fire the Revenant carried wasn't ordinary combustion — Profaned Flame, sourced from Giant King Yhorm's own homeland. A vastly diminished fragment, obviously, compared to the mass burning through the Profaned Capital — no mind-corrupting effect at this scale.
Purely in raw destructive terms, though, unquestionably top-tier.
"Tch. Shouldn't have borrowed a technique I don't actually understand."
Drew took the setback in stride. From here on, he decided, he'd stick honestly to what he actually specialized in.
Miasma.
Thanks to Calm, Maru could keep fighting at her full standard level — not because her will had broken, but because the emotional interference had been surgically removed. They were professional adventurers. Under ordinary circumstances, surrender wasn't in their vocabulary.
Discomfort with the situation, though, was unavoidable regardless.
Whether it was the Warrior Jar before or the boy now, Sein Dungeon was doing this on purpose. Deliberately, calculatedly getting inside people's heads.
Knowing his companions well, Leon wasn't going to let Maru keep grinding through this while emotionally compromised. He took over the lead, pushing hard to end the fight fast.
An ordinary elite wasn't a serious threat to this party. Sulyvahn's Revenant carried no genuinely broken abilities beyond its fused kit — a small time-manipulation trick, maybe, but with the surrounding monsters already cleared out, half of what made that trick threatening had evaporated already. No crowd to run through meant Marathon lost most of its bite.
Ten minutes, barring surprises, should've closed it out.
Then —
[You have been invaded by the Darkmoon Knight "Rigfen"!]
"Again?"
In a lull mid-fight, Leon watched Fingri materialize as a dark-blue phantom for the second time and genuinely couldn't work out the intent.
Once was an accident, sure. Twice, though, that read as deliberate.
If Fingri actually meant to interfere mid-boss-fight, that spelled genuine trouble.
But that didn't track with the guy he knew.
Fingri, for his part, looked equally confused.
"I — why am I here again?"
He genuinely hadn't intended this invasion. He and his group had just delivered the church location to the boy and were on their way toward the shortcut, clearing monsters as they went.
No reason at all to invade someone.
He'd just been playing around with the Blue Eye Orb — repeatedly selecting Invade, then Cancel, over and over, purely for the sensation of flip-flopping his own decision.
Bad luck. The final Invade selection landed him squarely in Leon's world.
"There's genuinely no other adventurers left anywhere in Irithyll?!"
Fingri stepped clear immediately, signaling no hostile intent — pure accident, nothing more.
The others let his presence slide and refocused on the Revenant.
"What kind of monster is this? Never seen it before."
Fingri surveyed the scene, recognizing the location as the boy's house immediately.
But what exactly was this thing — half Outrider Pyromancer, half Pontiff Knight?
"I'll help too."
In the spirit of friendliness —
Or, more accurately, gathering intel —
Fingri joined the fight against the Revenant, peppering questions about its origin between exchanges. His addition dropped the fight's overall difficulty considerably.
Leon caught him up on the full story.
"WHAT?! This is that kid?!"
Fingri's jaw dropped far enough that he could've walked directly onto an adjacent film set and read for a background extra role.
"What happened?! How did this even happen?!"
"We don't know either."
Maru landed the finishing blow. The Revenant collapsed, unable to rise again.
"Brother…"
One arm reached upward, toward nothing.
Its final breath left as its body dissolved into ash. The equipment they'd originally gifted the boy scattered across the ground as glowing pickups.
One new addition among them.
[Pontiff's Left Eye (Fake)]
A magical ring granted by Pontiff Sulyvahn to his knights. Sustained attacks drain life force from targets. This particular version is a replica, widely popular among Irithyll's common citizens — a symbol, it's said, of their reverence for the Pontiff.
Gazing into the black eye of the Pontiff's Left Eye produces emotional exhilaration and an escalating desire for combat to the death. Eventually, the knight degrades into a beast-like berserker. This is why the Pontiff only distributes the genuine version to knights actively deployed to battle.
The replica's berserker trigger has been dampened, its combat output reduced along with it. Extended wear, under sufficient provocation, can still produce the transformation.
"If wearing monster equipment turns you into a monster, does that mean we're at risk too?" Fingri's concern was genuine.
Fortunately, dungeon-sourced armor hadn't achieved anywhere near the market penetration of weapons — the actual circulation was comparatively low.
Leon sank into serious thought, checking every equipment description they'd collected for anything that had changed.
Nothing had shifted.
But every piece consistently referenced Pontiff Knights and Fire Witches as Sulyvahn's Revenants specifically. And the creature the boy had become had carried the same label.
Was Sulyvahn's core ability specifically the transformation of humans into "Revenants" — a power somehow baked directly into the equipment itself?
Plausible.
Which raised the question of the Left Eye replica's function. Its description ran nearly identical to the genuine right eye — both capable of triggering berserk transformation.
"Could the Left Eye's trigger condition include wearing monster armor specifically?" Leon theorized aloud. "The boy somehow ended up with a replica ring. Once he put the armor on top of it, that combination pushed him into transformation."
"Sulyvahn doesn't seem like a good person," Maru said, flat and cold.
Sein Dungeon had left the entire chain deliberately unexplained. Everything the group currently understood was pure inference, built on fragments and guesswork.
The more they turned it over, the more questions multiplied.
Everyone would walk away with their own theory. More competing theories, if anything, made the puzzle richer — the same way Dark Souls lore scholars had always pieced together fragmented truths from scattered item text.
Wade clearly had no intention of dropping an official explanation anywhere.
Eventually, adventurers would probably start parsing every single equipment description word by word, turning the whole thing into an involuntary reading-comprehension exercise.
"Whatever the actual cause, it looks like giving equipment to children specifically turns them into monsters."
Fingri felt a wave of genuine relief that he hadn't given the boy in his own world any equipment. Just directions to the church.
Thank god. He's not going to turn into anything. He's safe inside those walls.
He mentioned this to Leon's group, sounding — briefly, quietly — proud of the decision.
Maru cut through it.
"Won't something happen to a kid that small, traveling there alone?"
Fingri froze solid for a good thirty seconds.
The longer he sat with it, the worse the unease got. He offered a quick goodbye to Leon's group and pulled back into his own world.
"You're back again?" Matilda's stare carried a clear, unspoken judgment for her team lead's habit of vanishing without warning.
"Sorry, sorry!" Fingri pressed both hands together. "Everyone — back to the church with me, please. I need to confirm the boy actually made it there."
"Our boss genuinely cares this much about an NPC's fate. What an upstanding guy," Tusk laughed.
Bone Fang, compared to Maru, hadn't gotten nearly as emotionally invested. The boy's story simply hadn't landed the same way for them yet.
Then again —
Patches had gotten a genuine reaction out of the group, in fairness. That fight had run hot.
They abandoned the shortcut route and doubled back to the western avenue, heading for the Church of Yorshka.
Despite the freezing snowfall, Fingri's palms had started sweating.
Why?
Because watching what had happened to the boy in Leon's world had left him unable to stop worrying about the version in his own.
But he'd already cleared every monster from this stretch of the avenue personally. The boy shouldn't run into anything dangerous.
Right?
Wait — why does that sentence read exactly like a death flag?!
Stop. Setting. Flags.
As the Church of Yorshka's rooftop finally came into view, a familiar scent reached him.
Foul. Animal.
Sulyvahn's Beast.
Sure enough — the massive shape stood in the middle of the street ahead. Back turned toward them, head lowered, working through something clenched in its jaws.
Fingri recognized the wound pattern scattered across its body immediately.
His own twin blades' work.
The same Sulyvahn's Beast that had escaped the lake.
"Hey — what a coincidence. Convenient, actually. Let's finish this one off properly—"
He was already grinning, drawing his weapon, when he saw exactly what the Beast was eating.
A bloodied corpse.
Not tall.
The proportions of an underdeveloped child.
Blue Bug pellets scattered around it in the snow.
Fingri's expression went rigid. His pulse hammered against his ribs.
"Hey — hey, wait. No. No way."
"ROAR!"
The Beast noticed the newcomers and turned, delighted, charging toward what registered as an even better meal.
Swish—
A single flash of sword-light cut through the air.
Fingri reappeared directly behind the Beast, already crouched beside the corpse.
The body was mangled beyond recognition. Even fully intact, he wouldn't have been able to confirm it — he'd never actually seen the boy's face.
"Grr?"
The Beast turned in confusion.
An instant later, countless wounds tore open across its entire body simultaneously. Blood sprayed in every direction. It didn't get out a single sound before its whole frame shattered into pieces.
Fingri didn't so much as glance up.
He stayed fixed on the unidentified corpse. Gently moved it aside.
A purple glow sat beneath it.
Picking it up, he found a page containing a miracle.
[Miracle: Homeward]
A miracle originally taught to traveling clerics, eventually spreading to anyone willing to learn it. Returns the caster to the last bonfire they rested at.
Originally, this miracle returned the user to their true homeland. The Undead Curse warped that function over time. Or perhaps — is the bonfire itself the true homeland of the Undead now?
Handling the page taught him the miracle automatically.
The activation conditions ran differently from every other miracle he knew — no mana cost, but usable only once within some fixed window. A day-long cooldown, maybe?
Could it be used outside the dungeon? If so — could it pull him straight home to Firelink Shrine directly?
No time to work through it now.
He hurled a fireball onto the corpse, reducing it fully to ash, then gestured for the group to keep moving toward the church.
They still had no confirmation this was actually the boy. Could've been coincidence.
Maybe, once they actually reached the church, they'd find a perfectly well-behaved kid waiting to thank them.
Their footsteps carried them closer.
Fingri kept his eyes on the ground the whole way.
Heavy snowfall had built a thick, unbroken layer across the road. Their own footprints stood out sharp and clean with every step.
The snow in front of the church, though, sat completely smooth.
Untouched.
Not a single print anywhere.
Fingri's stomach dropped.
He broke into a full sprint and burst through the entrance.
The Church of Yorshka looked exactly as they'd left it. The main doors, left open, had let drifting snow blow in, dropping the interior temperature further.
And the entire space —
Completely empty.
"No—"