Galaxy's First Ruler

In front of Aldrich, El Cid had somehow sat up, but this tiny effort had consumed the last ounce of strength he had left.

The black-armored Boss couldn't move his head to look into Aldrich's eyes anymore. Aldrich could feel a red gaze on his waist as the Boss Crawler spoke.

"Kill me."

The two words felt less like a plea and more like a command. Aldrich gave the Boss a look and then sat down on the blackened ground in front of El Cid, crossing his leg. The ring that had almost vanished after his transformation, could be seen once again. Aldrich sent a tiny trace of Mana, which he had left, and took a golden jar of wine and two cups out of the FIR.

"Care to have a drink with me?"

A slight breeze passed between Aldrich's and El Cid's faces as their eyes met. The Boss's chest heaved up and down, and Aldrich, receiving no response, poured the wine in the cups.

"I AM MANTIS…"

Aldrich looked beyond the Boss and saw the hollow-eyed Mantis running towards him, shouting his name. Without using the Skill Change, Aldrich's strength wasn't enough to kill a Viscount Ranked Undead in one kick. The Rumok on his hand was about to give out a blinding flash of light when a slight tremor originated in El Cid's unmovable fingers.

The lone undead that had survived and brought down a Devil, stopped in his tracks and slowly approached the Boss. It was like all the emotions had been sucked out of undead and Aldrich could only call this kind of being a puppet and nothing more. The undead Mantis grabbed the Boss Crawler's helmet and lifted it out. And for the first time in countless years, a Dreamer saw the true face of this legend.

El Cid's face wasn't brimming with the shine of a young knight. His eyes with red pupils were sunken into his skull. His cheeks were collapsing in his mouth, and the face, which should have been glowing white and golden, was pale and purple.

Aldrich stared at the hole in the middle of the Boss Crawler's head and handed the undead Mantis a cup of wine. Aldrich took a sip, and in front of him, El Cid controlled Mantis to take a sip of his own. A slight redness came over on the Boss' face as soon as the drink went down his throat.

Aldrich's FIR was full of such wine jars not only because they were a specialty of House Venomous Rose but also because they were a rich source of Mana. But this Mana wasn't enough to bring any changes in the Boss. It was to just make El Cid able to speak, and Aldrich wanted answers out of him.

Aldrich spoke as he looked at El Cid's disheveled black hair and the trace of a light beard on his frail face.

"El Cid, the Undefeated King, died of the famine and deprivation caused by the siege of the castle. His wife, Queen Jimena, ordered his corpse to be fitted with his armor to boost the morale of soldiers. As the soldiers cried and howled, the King returned from the dead, along with an army of undead, and crushed Valencia's besiegers. History speaks of the incident as 'Won the Battle but lost the War'. But it didn't clearly say who won the battle and who lost the war."

Mantis' hand, carrying the cup, stopped amid its trajectory to Boss Crawler's mouth as if it wasn't the hand of the undead, but El Cid's own. As Aldrich's words rang around the two of them in the annihilated Plaza, El Cid gulped down the entire cup of wine in one go.

Tink!

The wine cup fell on the ground, and El Cid blurted out with the broken breath.

"I… hope you have poisoned this wine."

Aldrich amusingly shook his head and took a light sip of the wine. His mind went down to the death of the Devil and he couldn't help but bring this topic to light.

"A brilliant strategy you used there! First, you let a Viscount Ranked Changeling take control over you. And you even gave the Undead Changeling your swords. Given Changeling's nature, it thought it was you and attacked me. But that was just one layer of the cunning plan, isn't it? At the expense of getting weakened, you took advantage of the fact that the Changeling could only handle one body at a time."

Aldrich glanced at the Undead Mantis and continued.

"You hid Mantis in the Changeling's stomach, anticipating that I would go for the rest of the Undead before killing you first. And as I came close to Changeling and let my guard down, the hidden Mantis came out and snatched my tiny Baron life essence like a piece of cake. Amazing!"

The Boss Crawler didn't speak but only stared as Aldrich broke down his planning piece by piece. Aldrich could feel the deep shock hidden in those emotionless eyes. He knew that what had happened was due to a series of luck, as the Boss didn't know about his Shared Vision. But he had to crush all the traces of El Cid's hope for him to know what he wanted.

Aldrich gulped the last wine drops out of the cup and smirked.

"But this planning and wonderful execution is nothing but a pretense, right? The key question isn't how you came up with the plan, but when you came up with it. Was it after I had ripped apart the space-time here? No! Hmm, was it after the first time I had killed your undead? NO!…"

Aldrich leaned forward and stared into the red pupils as if seeing within El Cid's soul.

"… Or was it the moment when you received Record's notification allowing you to use your Legend's authority and upgrade the Dungeon's difficulty?"

For the first time, El CId's weak but calm eyelids shivered and the mask on Aldrich's face overlapped with that of the purple-haired Devil's face in his eyes. As Aldrich waited for the answer, the Boss Crawler's words came out, containing a tinge of horror.

"... Kill me."