Comforting a little girl is nothing hard, Aquarina is still 8 years old, so after a few pettings she got better. In fact, she was really missing hugging me and receiving my affection, so she ended all cheery after a bit, smiling radiantly. And about Zack, well, he was as rowdy as he has always been, but he expressed his concern and also relief that I was "alright".
"Are you really okay though?" Asked Zack concerned.
"Yeah, I am alright, you don't have to worry about a single thing, Zack! I am ok!" I said, giving him my thumbs up. Although my body was still a bit stiff, it felt as if I was an old grandma forcing myself to walk while Naturia helped me with her healing every thirty minutes.
When we began having breakfast, the conversation got way serious once more, with the rest of the adults having gathered and also expressing their happiness after seeing me alright, they immediately began to talk about what happened. They were especially curious about what we saw and fought against, the cultists.
"The cultists?" I asked.
"Yes, those robbed people, we were able to find four knocked out, but there were more, right?" Wondered my father.
"Yes, there was another one… a woman. She was a demon and had a long and sharp tail. She used a strange magical spear that she could summon and unsummon at will. It was very dangerous." I sighed.
"We never saw her…" Shade said. "She must have escaped while everything was going on…"
"So there are people that ended managing to escape… This is a pain, especially because those guys killed themselves before we could capture them." My father sighed.
"What? What happened?!" I asked.
"Aquarina and Zack knocked them down but didn't killed them. However, when things finally settled down and we captured them, they activated a Spell Jewel they swallowed, and exploded…" My mother muttered. "Not even I can just revive a person that explodes into tiny pieces everywhere, especially when their souls flew away just as fast as they died."
I didn't thought they would go so far for their goals. To go as far as killing themselves so they wouldn't be able to talk nor be tortured for information… Not even the powers of the heroes can ask the dead about such things if their souls and bodies are gone.
"I'm sorry, I know we shouldn't be talking these gruesome things with you kids here, but you've gone through it all, I feel like you needed to know. You've matured a bit head of time as well, so I believe you can handle this conversation." My father said, all three of us nodded. We were no strangers to death after everything we had gone through.
"…But from what we investigated; they were all Demons." Said my mother.
"This sucks…"Nepheline said. "I never thought there would be a group of demons so hell bent into doing terrorist attacks like these… they even somehow manipulated the dungeon to make a Dungeon Break, and there was a small fragment of the Demon King there, right? How did they even got that?"
"So they were demons… Is that why they were saying they wanted retribution? They really seemed… obsessed with killing the people of this fiefdom." I said, recalling what they had said in that time. It was really scary how insane they acted.
"We had investigated with Shade and the underworld organization we got; we have barely found some things. They're not old, or perhaps they never showed themselves before… but apparently, there's a secret cult hidden in the fiefdom that some call "Abyss Calling". This cult seems to have been peaceful and silent until just now. Perhaps they had been waiting the right moment." My father said.
"I do remember something… They were praying to an Evil God… The Evil God of Dungeons. Could Demons have the ability to communicate with this God somehow through prayers?" I wondered.
"It… is a possibility." My father said. "Evil Gods are a territory we have barely stepped over. They could be said to be the real masterminds before many tragedies and the hate between tribes, but we can do very little against them. They're very powerful, they're gods after all. They hide in their Divine Realms, and control the world with their strings from afar, even as we fight, we might even be manipulated by them to do their bidding. Those demons are probably being manipulated. To think they would go as far as summoning a True Demon, which is a monster of a very high tier capable of absolute destruction if let loose…"
"True Demons… are they that scary?" Asked Aquarina.
"You only fought one that was very weakened, True Demons, when fully summoned, are usually Tier 7 in strength at minimum. Their powers are also alien to us, their demonic essence and everything else… they're very dangerous, my daughter." Shade replied to Aquarina, as the girl slowly began to grow more worried.
"Ugh, it is really troublesome…" She sighed.
"So not only this cult has connections with the Evil God of Dungeons, but are in possession of special items that grant them the ability to create True Demon Summoning Rituals." Said my mother. "They are not merely just thugs anymore, and if their intention is to just kill everybody in the fiefdom, then we have to put a stop to them."
"Yeah, we already began an investigation." My father said. "We'll do everything we can to find them and stop them…"
To think that people would go to such lengths just because they hate one another so much. The demons are resentful of the humans for all the atrocities they had suffered, while the humans hate the demons for the same, and their invasion… At the end, none of both sides is in the right or wrong, they're all justifying themselves based in what the opposite party did to them, but both parties did terrible things to one another.
There's not a good and a bad party, both are just… equally fucked. But if demons want to go to the extent of killing innocents, then, just as the humans are being stopped in the shadows by my parents, they'll have to put a stop to these cultists, which might be able to employ even more dangerous means than humans…
Ah, I wonder how the kids in the orphanage are doing.