“You gave us a big scare!”
“Your soul felt very weak for a few days.”
I got a flood of Slave Communication as soon as I opened up the channel to my girls. It looked skill didn’t use mana, or at least not enough mana that my miasmic infection would cause trouble. I was very happy to see them all, but I kept a cold expression, and quickly told all of them to pretend like that didn’t know me.
Lydia quickly explained what happened while Calypso was still introducing the group of us. After I got captured, they must have reasoned out who had me, and remembered the invitation she had sent right before we had ended up caught in Reign’s mansion. Calypso had heard about our bandit exploits up in the north, and invited us to join her Bandit army.
It sounded promising, but now I knew why the Bandits up north seemed so scared and squeamish when discussing her. Calypso had been systematically killing off all the Bandits and turning them into dungeon monsters. It was a real-life case of the body snatchers. I could just imagine a Bandit running into his old acquaintance, only to find this copy oddly different. He was a soulless puppet in her army.
I hated puppets and dolls. Thankfully, these looked like real people, but it was still at a point where I felt afraid. In fact, these days I struggled to feel anger or hate, so that only made the fear more palpable. The worst thing of all is that the majority of these dungeon monsters never realized they weren’t the real one.
Salicia was a prime example of this. She hadn’t known she was a monster. In her mind, she was Carmine’s sister. Even Carmine, who hadn’t seen her sister since she was a child, didn’t know that this wasn’t her sister, and she was a Paladin who was best at detecting such things! Then again, how often did you scan the mana flow of a person you talked to and recognized to make sure they were still them.
If someone wanted, they really could replace everyone with a copy of themselves forged in a dungeon. Maybe I was a copy. Maybe, the real Deek was on Earth, and I was just some copy of him. He never left Earth, and I, for some reason, was spontaneously created from miasma, and up until now, no one had noticed. The fear grew even more inside me. This wasn’t a helpful way of thinking. This is something that might cause me to feel despair if I dwelled on it too much.
Calypso quickly finished with her introductions. I didn’t know if this was fate, or if Calypso knew what was going on. She didn’t seem to notice that I had a bond with these women. Of course, that was for the best. If she knew my true connection to them, she definitely wouldn’t allow us to get together.
“I will bring you to the entrance of the dungeon.” Calypso told the girls once she finished introductions. “You will guide Deedee here down to the bottom of the dungeon and then you will destroy it. That is your mission.”
As she said this, she winked at me where the rest of my party couldn’t see. I didn’t know how to respond. In her mind, she was confident the party wouldn’t successfully make it. They were going down to die. She hadn’t realized she just put together a practiced dungeon diving team. The situation was simply too perfect. I would guide the girls down, but instead of being defeated, we’d take out Calypso and destroy this dungeon!