FINAL CORE : [A holy dungeon-core litRPG]

Chapter 99

Not every one-hundred year crisis involves a Demon-King.

Each of them is unique in its own way. Even the several Demon-Kings who have been present in our world were vastly different from one another, and as such, so too were the consequences of their risings. Great wars and revolutions have been labeled crises by the global system that governs our world, as have the births of more benign dark forces and terrible illnesses that plagued the landscape.

What defines a crisis is its potential to upend our entire world in an unprecedented way. Most often, this is assumed to mean total death and destruction, but this has not always been clear to be the case. While we have never failed to master a crisis for as far back as recorded history goes, given the nature of some particular events, it is not impossible to assume that life would go on as usual, just differently, had history taken a different turn.

~ On the nature of a crisis, Fitzwillick Freibold’s journaled musings on the historical landscape

~ [Isaiah] ~

Heavy rain cascades down from the sky in a powerful stream, a never-ending surge of water running down the pearl-white body of the tower. Lightning crashes through the skies as an autumn storm rips through the world. Isaiah is in flight, gliding over the island amidst the frighteningly strong gale of the unusual storm, pressing through its feathers. Red and Gray are flying alongside it on either side as they scour the island, just to make sure that nobody is caught outside in the forest.

Red yells, cupping her mouth with her hand. “Why don’t you just get rid of the storm, chief?!” she loudly suggests.

Isaiah shakes his head. Yes, it has the ability to interfere with the weather of the world. But this storm, as heavy as it is, is a perfectly natural occurrence. Who knows what unforeseen consequences there might be for not adhering to nature’s desires? If it diverts the rain clouds to move somewhere else, they might flood that area instead of evenly distributing their load over the landscape. Or the storm might simply reform over the human city nearby. Besides, it’s beautiful in its own way, isn’t it? As much so as any sunrise or sunset.

They glide through the night, keeping an eye out for any wayward adventurers or pilgrims who have gotten into harm’s way. The storm is a spectacle. But it is nonetheless potentially deadly.

Lightning cracks toward the north, striking into the forest. Red tugs on Isaiah’s arm and points towards the site, and the three of them diverge, flying towards the smoldering site.

~ [Bishop Schweig] ~
Human, Male, Bishop Location: The City, Cathedral Square

The heavy storm crashes down around the man, water drenching his purple-sashed robes as he stands at the head of the altar, looking down over the formation of thousands of soldiers who have gathered on his call, coming from all corners of the nation to express their devotion to the faith through both swords and blood.

Winds howl, surging through the mass of drenched people who stand in armor beneath the banners of the holy-church and the crusade. Water pools down their bodies, running down the square to vanish into a midnight that might never stop, despite the heavy ticking of the tower that can be felt here at all hours of the day, signaling the forward progression of time towards the untold end of revelations.

“Brothers!” yells Schweig, his voice projecting out over the storm as he stands there at the head of the new band of cardinals, the man from the east still present. His ascension to bishop is complete, and he is now the head crown of the holy-church in all regions of the nation, in official title now rather than in sheer secretive power as before. “The gathering of our hearts here in this hour is proof of the presence of the gods, whose domain we still reside within,” he says, looking out over the crowd of thousands of eyes, souls whose purposes have been found in the humble beliefs they carry with their hearts. “The hundred-year crisis has once again emerged, ready to take our world, corrupt it, and tumble it down a path of godlessness.”

He points out over the city, towards the tower. “Once again, as with the Demon-Kings of generations prior, a malignancy has grown, jutting out of the beautiful flesh of our world.” The crowd's murmurs and stamping fill the air, pushing aside even the crashing of the rain and lightning. “The saliency of this storm is proof that the gods, unable to reach down to us any longer, weep for our helplessness as a people without their guiding love.” The man swipes his hand through the rain, water arcing down his arm. “Now, as our father’s fathers did, the time has come for us to prove ourselves to the eyes of the heavens, which are watching us with such frightful gazes!” he calls around at the crusade, his voice projecting down corridors and walls, down through the cathedral halls, and into the city. “Let us prove to them that their children are grown and capable, that we are avid stewards of this great world that they gave us to thrive in.”

He reaches down, taking a banner-rod from one of the front men. “Once more, the garden of our souls must be pruned! A new day dawns! HALLOW!”

The word echoes down through the storm a thousand times over, as it is repeated by men and elves, by dwarves, and orcs of every origin and build, all of them united by the single guiding thread of their faith that spans from between heaven and the world.

Bishop Schweig smiles, his face pelted with rainwater by the storm that never ends, as the crusaders surround the boxes they have brought with them, plunging their swords through the wood and into the containers inside of which their elder brothers and sisters are held within, no screams ever filling the courtyard, apart from the chanting of the word over and over as blood pours from the wet-stained wood, quickly washing away in the rain down the stones.

The crusade moves to march against Isaiah.

— Only one voice separates itself from the fold, who all begin to look around themselves in confusion. A loud, sharp, feminine cackling echoes through the night, causing the hairs on every neck in the courtyard to stand on end, causing children to huddle closer to their parents with fearful eyes, causing old bones to quake and young eyes to warily, sharply watch the darkness for the oddity that approaches.

“WITCH!” shouts a voice as a woman, Witch Perchta, descends down from the sky, flying unnaturally in the storm, holding a hand sideways in front of her mouth, as she laughs a cold, smug laugh. The crowd tears away, pressing themselves as far away from the spot that she hovers above as possible, leaving a gap in the world below her. It’s as if an ocean had simply parted and decided to ignore a single spot of land in the midst of itself. People scream. People press and struggle their way away as she lands on top of a bloody crate, just before the cardinal.

“You’ll find,” says Witch Perchta, turning her gaze to the bishop, whom she can see stepping forward with magic gathering around his hands. “- That here in the South, the night is often longer than you’d expect.”

She lifts a finger, pointing it at him crookedly. “Cardinal,” says Perchta.

(Schweig) has used: [Redwater]

A spell shoots out of his hands, red vapors blasting towards the witch and then simply dissipating as she just swipes it away with one hand as if it were a puff of smoke.

“Witch Perchta!” barks Schweig in rage at the woman, who he recognizes as the witch who once lived in his very own domain in the north. She escaped during the witch-hunts and he had allowed her to do so, being perfectly content with the foul rot that she was living in his competitor’s region in the south.

Perchta slowly rises back into the air and then circles around the altar, circles around him. All of the onlookers in the crowd, all of the onlookers on the high-status seats, the other cardinals — all of them retreat away as far as they can, watching from a safe distance as the witch flies a slow, calm circle around him, as the rain begins to fall ever more steadily, staining the ground with oddly dark spots.

“It’s been a while, Cardinal,” says Perchta, leaning in towards the man to whisper into his ear from the side.

Bishop Schweig spins around, striking his fist where she was.

— Or at least he wants to. But as he tries to do so, he notices that his body seems to have locked up in a strange way. It won’t do as he asks of it.

“You know, I really liked living in the north,” says Perchta. “I had a lot of friends back then,” she explains. The woman grabs the man's head with both hands and tilts it towards herself. “Before you called for the witch-hunts,” she hisses, her eyes going wide in the flash of lightning to come.

He wants to give the order for the crusade, for the hundreds and thousands of strong, capable fighters here to attack her. But nothing moves anywhere except for the running water and the fabric that moves in the wind.

“I’ve had enough of everyone getting mixed up in my life,” she says. “So I figured, why don’t I have a little hunt of my own?” she asks, tilting his head back and up towards the sky. Black, oily rain pelts down into his eyes that he can’t close and into his mouth that she pulls open with a hand as she whispers into his ear. “You know, for old times' sake,” says Witch Perchta.

The crack of thunder and lightning splits the sky, illuminating the beginning of the heavy rain. Rain cascades down all around them, as if brought on by her provocation, which, in a sense, it was.

(Perchta) uses: [Curse]{Curse of the Sunless Day}

“Have a nice retirement, Bishop,” says Perchta, her voice hissing like a jackal’s.

A window appears within his muddy vision and within the eyes of every single one of the thousands of crusaders and other people still remaining in this city. Before every person in the entire nation appears a message, making very clear the nature of the night that they find themselves in.

! [Critical System Notification] ! THE ONE-HUNDRED YEAR CRISIS: THE WILD-HUNT

Engaged in a massive, cooperative breach that spans each of the oldest dungeons in the nation, every single dungeon in the world is now engaging in a dungeon-break, flooding their monsters out of their gates and into the night.

This will persist until the death of crisis leader ‘Witch Perchta’ or the destruction of the ‘Tower of Isaiah’.

Time Remaining: UNKNOWN Difficulty: IMPOSSIBLE Priority: HIGHEST

Perchta cackles, flying off into the night as red glows fill the world.

~ [Dungeon Core Yovel] ~
???, ???, Dungeon Core Location: The City

It’s time.

The old bat actually pulled it off.

Yovel cracks its neck, standing at the entrance of the dungeon-gate and holding a hand against it. The blue aura of the foggy entrance freezes stiff for an instant, crystallizing as if ice were flowing across the surface of a lake, and then, an instant later, it shifts into a vivid, bright crimson.

Red ripples run over the fog as it begins to violently churn like the ocean in a storm.

Yovel steps out through the dungeon-gate, leaving its dungeon for the first time in hundreds of years.

It stands outside the gate an instant later, looking around through the rain at the city that has come to be built around its precious home. This place used to be a beautiful meadow near the ocean. There were trees and hills, there were animals, and an abundance of communion existed with nature and even with the few humans who were here before.

But then they kept growing.

They kept taking more, building more, growing more and soon, the understanding that they had shifted from one of mutual cooperation and coinhabitence of the world, to one of an owner and own of the subjugated.

Yovel looks through the rain toward the distant dungeon-core – the tower, beyond the city. It has yet to learn this simple lesson that all dungeon cores are forced to learn eventually.

Humans cannot be trusted.

They’re disgusting, greedy, horrific monsters — worse than anything it has ever been able to dream up in the deep, dark depths below the world.

Confused faces look Yovel’s way as it steps out of the dungeon — adventurers, people of the city, a few soldiers, and so on. Tonight is a busy night in the world, as Perchta said.

Yovel lifts a hand and holds it there, savoring the moment as its thumb and middle finger meet.

— And then it snaps them.

Roars and screams fill the night, its vision filled with nothing other than twisting, writhing flesh with teeth and claws as thousands of monsters pour out of the dungeon, streaming into the city, teeth tearing through flesh and claws breaking into the marrow of bones.

All across the world, every dungeon-core within the confines of a human city begins a coordinated strike at the same time, letting loose thousands of monsters at once, so that the world might once more belong to those who had once owned it in those days so very, very long ago, and those thousands of monsters will stream towards the south, lashing and crushing their way across the world to move towards the tower of Isaiah.

Two birds with one stone.

The wild-hunt begins.

~ [Isaiah] ~

! [Critical System Notification] ! THE ONE-HUNDRED YEAR CRISIS: THE WILD-HUNT

This will persist until the death of crisis leader ‘Witch Perchta’ or the destruction of the ‘Tower of Isaiah’.

Time Remaining: UNKNOWN Difficulty: IMPOSSIBLE Priority: HIGHEST

“Red! Gray!” orders Isaiah, grabbing them and pulling them back with it, as the three of them quickly fly back towards the tower.

Razmatazz

If you would like to learn more about der Wilde Jagd, the wild-hunt, here are some trivias that I actually wrote for Dungeon Item Shop. But I think I can just reshare them with you here!

~ [Note for occultists]{THE WILD-HUNT} ~

Don't you dare make a Witcher comment, reader. The wild-hunt is an ancient mythological idea stemming from the Germanic peoples.

In order to understand Perchta and to learn about the wild-hunt, you first need to know who Frau Holle is. This is only the short version, but know that there is a whole bundle of knowledge about her that I will be leaving out because this would end up longer than several chapters otherwise.

Frau Holle (Frau = German: woman/lady. Holle being her name. Though she is also often called Hulda/Holla/Mother Holle/Mother Frost, among other things) is a white-robed, female goddess of Germanic origin and is often mistakenly said to stem from a brother’s Grimm fairy-tale, written in 1812. However, this is wrong.

In reality, her roots go back far, far deeper than that, likely stemming from an old pantheon of proto-Germanic gods who existed even before Odin, Thor, Loki and the likes. Frau Holle is one of those ancient beliefs that we’ve talked about before, the kind that became over-written by the catholic church after their arrival in the Germanic area and now, she exists in a half-state of common folklore and forgotten mythology. Frau Holle is ancient. She goes way, way, way back, likely being one of the oldest proto-Germanic deities that is well known to this day

For those of you familiar with Scandinavian folklore, she is assumed to be related to the Hulder. But that isn’t relevant right now. If you are familiar with the american mythology of the ‘White Lady’, commonly seen in hitch-hiking ghost-stories, the white-robed Frau Holle also likely a strong candidate for the root of this mythos. But that also isn't relevant.

Frau Holle dwells at the bottom of a well, she is the one who is said to have taught the first people to make linen out of flax. More darkly, she is the goddess who dead children's spirits find their way to, after passing untimely deaths. Frau Holle, because of this dark association, eventually ended up becoming a patron spirit of midwives, but I won't go too deep into that. But you should know that it's there. Is it relevant?

Maybe.

Finally, her magic is based on spinning and weaving specifically and she has an undeniable association with witchcraft in the folklore of German Catholicism.

Stemming from her mythology, come the three variations of her character that have spread around several regions of Europe.

Spilleholle, Perchta and Gauden

But we’ll talk more about them tomorrow! =)

Continuing our trivia from yesterday, there are three common variants of Frau Holle. These are spread across various regions and as such, are adaptations based on her character, but all of them have their own ‘thing’.

Perchta, who Fresh is based off of, is the variant of Frau Holle that finds itself originating from Switzerland, Bavaria and Austria. (See Fresh’s hair-color and complexion). The brother’s Grimm lore, if we can trust it, states that Perchta was a white-robed goddess of alpine paganism who did little sewing herself, but rather oversaw spinning/weaving/tailoring, most often the kind that was undertaken by children (*cough*). Most often this happened around Xmas, but Fresh is busy all year round.

The name, Perchta, refers to Berchta (Bertha → Berchthold) “the bright one” and she, as well as the original root Frau Holle, are considered ‘guardians of beasts’. This offshoot likely originated from a mixture of Alpine and Celtic mythology. Resulting in what we have now. Another possible root of the name is the old-high-German word ‘pergan ‘ which literally means hidden or obscured.

Note that these names are very loose. If you head further east, the myth takes on a different spin again. But we’re focusing on the Germanic area in this story.

And now, since we are talking about German fairy-tales here, so you know what’s coming next.

When Perchta would enter a home and find that the children weren’t busy with their work, she would slit their stomachs open, remove their entrails and fill their bodies back up with pebbles and straw. But on a happier note, there was/is a literal ‘Cult of Perchta’ who left food and drink for her regularly, in the hopes that they would be blessed by her. (Leaving cookies out for Santa, anyone? I’d bet my left foot there’s a connection here if you dig down deeper.) But this practice was banned in 1468. I doubt anyone will stop you from doing it now though...

Speaking of feet. Perchta is also said to have weird feet. Is that relevant? Probably not, this isn’t that kind of story. You guys don’t pay me enough for that. You could though. You know where my Patreon is.

There are even more deviations of her character than that. In much of the old mythology, Perchta is either a kind, beautiful woman or she’s a bit of a grisly thing, having fangs, tusks and horse tails which she uses to drive out demons and ghosts. But this gets confusing, as I said, there are 10000 variations of the myth in every region. Particularly if we start talking about the Perchten, which is the name for her followers (who still exist to this day in the mountain regions of Austria!) who dress up as such on purpose, for their celebrations.

She’s a conflicting figure to summarize. In some variations she’s kind and misunderstood, in others she’s cruel and strict and fearsome.

But this leads us up to the next interesting part of her mythology, the fact that she is the leader of die Wilde Jagd.

The wild-hunt.

Die wilde Jagd, the wild-hunt is a term commonly used in northern European folklore. A wild-hunt is basically as the name describes, a hunt of the wild things. But rather than being the ones being hunted, they are the hunters. Souls, revenants, spectres and ghosts, werewolves, horses with fiery eyes, undead dogs and fairies, valkyries and elves are often thought to be the common participants of the hunt. In northern Germany, the goal of the hunters is said to be the pursuit and capture of one or more female demons. Though in other versions, there is no prey at all and they simply ride through the night because it’s cool.

The leader of the hunt, depending on where you look in the world, can vary. In Scandinavian lore, it’s often Odin. In Germanic lore, it’s Holle/Perchta. In Christian lore, it’s the devil. But in Brittany, it’s oddly enough, king Arthur. Ireland, the Netherlands, Wales, Slovenia, France, no matter where you go, there is a different leader of the hunt. Usually, this is a figure that is already of some cultural/mythological significance to the region.

Given the German fairy-tale inspirations for this story, we’re obviously going with the Germanic interpretation of the fable.

In alternative German myth, the leader of the hunt is said to be the rider of a white horse. It’s an interesting connection, especially if you are familiar with Revelations. Though this version stems from the German book ‘The Rider on the White Horse (1888)’ which came far after the birth of the original myth, I myself choose to discard it and count it as ‘non-canon’.

Should you encounter a wild hunt, or more aptly said, should one find you, then the best thing to do is to stay right in the middle of the road and let them ride around you. (Remember our crossroads trivia? Sometimes making no choice is the best choice) Alternatively, if you help the hunt in some way, you will be rewarded with either gold or the leg of a dead animal/person.

Note: The leg is literally cursed and impossible to get rid of. The only way to lose it is to ask the leader of the hunt for salt. They won’t have any, so they’ll take their unsalted leg back. That being said, seeing the wild hunt is said to bring great misfortune no matter what. So even if you get away, you might just get Final Destinationed later.

If you hinder the hunt, you will be ‘punished’ but if you think it’s a punishment really is up to you. In short, you might likely be taken to either the fairy-kingdom or the underworld (What happens there is undefined). Though, in some other interpretations, you will be ‘allowed’ to join the hunt. (Permanently). You get a cool flying horse with burning eyes and you get to ride around in a horde of ghosts and monsters for the rest of forever, so it doesn’t sound too bad in all honesty. I just hope you aren’t afraid of heights. This is likely the best result you can hope for.

Interestingly enough, there are multiple documented, written attestation of Christian monks from 1000-1127AD, recorded in the Peterborough Chronicle, which is a ‘serious’ collection of history from the time, who claim to have seen the wild-hunt with their own eyes. These sightings ran all around northwestern Europe and the south-east of England.

The wild-hunt is said to exist for many reasons. The one I find most interesting is the banding together of literal monsters to hunt demons. Apparently there is little friendship to be had there between them. All in all, it’s a huge chaotic mess, but a lot of fun at the same time, provided you get the ‘good ending’

Thank you kindly for reading!

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