"Prince? I haven't been one of those for a long time" The man sitting on the throne furrowed his brows as he looked at the guest.
"So, you're uh… the king? Man, how much have I missed?" Seth thought to himself that there must have been a tonne of changes he never saw.
"Yes, that's correct I'm the current king of the Reverie kingdom, Llloyd Reverie!"
"Not much a kingdom left though…" Seth whispered under his breath, unfortunately Lloyd's hearing was well enough to hear it and glared daggers at him.
"We may be in this state right now, but we will rise again without a doubt! Those abominable monsters will pay for what they did!"
"Speaking of monsters who were they? I've seen the mess they made out there, it's pretty bad" Seth quickly popped the question at first mention of them.
The king grimaced though.
"I don't know honestly"
"What? How do you not know who destroyed your own kingdom!"
"It's not destroyed! Just in a temporarily weaken state!" The man yelled in denial.
'Yeah, sure and I'm not a skeleton, I just temporarily hopped out of my skin and blood'
Lloyd let out a breath of air in an attempt to calm himself before regaining his composure.
"Like I said I'm not sure what exactly those monsters were that attacked us, we vaguely know who was behind them but even then, at most we can put a name to their organisation and that's it, we never managed to catch any of the higher ups or anyone of importance"
"So, it was an organisation? Not another kingdom or such?"
"Hah! As if any other kingdom or empire near us had the guts to attack us!"
Lloyd's face turned serious after ridiculing others in his head.
"Those things weren't human; they didn't have human shape, nor did they act like humans"
Seth waited for more, Lloyd seemed like he'll spill the beans if he kept silent and that thought was correct.
"It started way before I even became a king, we had countless reports of people disappearing within the kingdom and our borders it was a massive headache and I remember my father's health declining while dealing with it, the other countries had the same problem and they each blamed one another seeing it as a plot to undermine them"
Lloyd sighed remembering his fathers face and complexion during those times, he was known as a powerful king yet when everyone and their mother was putting pressure on him, even he turned pale over time.
"We did our best sending out soldiers and investigators to every scene of disappearance or any clue as to suspicious individuals but at most all we found was scraps or tails those damned lizards cut off, the only information we managed to scrape together was that they were wantonly kidnapping anyone that showed potential"
"Potential? Potential in what?"
"Anything, anyone that had skills that put them above others in any way whoever they were, they had no qualms even taking small children, there were countless parents grieving for their lost child that seemed to have been spirited away from under their noses"
"Wait…"
'Isn't that what happened to me?'
"What? Do you know something?"
"Maybe? I mean as you can see-"
Seth removed his helmet revealing his skeletal face
"?!" Lloyd eyes gaped open in surprise
"-I'm not exactly a living person and the reason for that is back during the time I was an adventurer, I was drugged during a dungeon expedition and taken somewhere, then used for what I can only call experimentation before being left for dead"
"You… How the hell are you alive?"
"I wouldn't call this living" Seth chuckled in self-deprecation.
"An undead that talks like a living human and retains their memory? That's impossible as far as I know…" Lloyd went quiet in thought for a few seconds, he murmured to himself before looking once more at Seth staring into the glowing lights in his eye sockets.
"When did you die?"
"How the hell am I supposed to know? I don't even know the current year!"
"Try to remember, something that would be a major event or such that could help you identify the time"
"A major event…?"
'I mean to me it definitely wasn't that long ago, I spend a while in that darkness, but I still have fairly clear memories; The only problem is that I was pretty much a bare bones adventurer… wait a minute'
An image imprinted in his mind resurfaced, his first day in the capital, the faces of the family when he returned the missing cat and the massive procession soon after with the very person sitting in front of him now leading the army.
"It was about 2 years before I think I died, but do you remember taking out a behemoth?"
"A behemoth? Hmm I think I've handled quite a few in my time as ruler…"
"It was back when you were a prince, I remember seeing you leading about 100 soldiers all returning in tatters"
"Back when I was a prince?! There was only one I took on during that time… to think such things were happening even back then!"
"You didn't know about the kidnappings at that time?"
"No, it was only about 5 years or so before I became king that they came to light, when I took that behemoth out with my personal army back then I was barely 25 or so… that was at least 15 years before then"
'So, he became king at 40? The old king must have been in his mid-sixties… something must have happened to him.'
"But now that I think back to that fight it was certainly odd"
"Odd?"
'Isn't a behemoth 'odd' in the first place?'
"I know what you're thinking" Lloyd said with a slight smirk.
"Behemoths certainly weren't normal back then so they could be called 'odd' but that isn't what I mean, it had some ridiculously high regenerative capabilities as well as what seemed to be a special ability"
"Special ability? That's not that odd right? After all beasts that grow mana cores become monsters that have abilities like us, and behemoths are their apex"
"Yes, but that's not what I mean, have you ever seen a monster capable of controlling projectiles?"
"Uh, what?" Seth said with a dumbfounded face.
"The basic way to take out a behemoth is barraging it with cannons or a continuous rain of arrows, yet the moment we did that they stopped in mid-air and turned towards our army, we may have come back with 100 but we started in the 1000's!"
'Seriously?! I don't remember hearing such a thing… I guess it was suppressed by the kingdom'
"We had to charge in with heavy equipment and hack it to death, but its regeneration didn't help so we ended up setting it alight with oil and flames until its flesh no longer grew back, that thing was beyond a monster"
"Such a thing appeared in the kingdom?"
"No-one or no village it came across lived to tell the tale, that's why I went to deal with it personally and we didn't want panic to set out, so we kept it a secret, but from what you just mentioned I feel like that thing wasn't a natural occurrence" Lloyed rubbed his bearded chin in thought.
"Back then we chalked it up to a mutation and after that we had to deal with the kidnappings so it was put to the back of our minds, but after everything has happened and with you mentioning it, I can see a link between the two things"
"Such as?"
"The behemoth and the monsters that attacked us both had the same type of special abilities, all of them seemed to be aimed towards utter destruction"
"What do you mean? They weren't only normal abilities?"
"No, let's put it this way, an ability or spell controls or enhances the body or environment through the control of mana, however these abilities seemed to directly affect the result or reality itself"
Lloyd's brows dipped when he thought back to the siege on the castle and how helpless he and his army was.
"Some entirely suppressed fire and explosions just being near and sent them back at is, some took out weapons and used them to start a slaughter by letting them fly through the air, some even directly took control of any magic itself and created impossible results driving massive wedges into our formations."
Seth stayed silent at Lloyds narration, even he felt it was kind of unbelievable since as far as he knew this worlds spells or such all followed a fair logic.
"There is one thing in this world that seems to defy the very laws that bind us, and I'm guessing you have one" Lloyd stared intently at Seth
'Me? I don't have anything special as far as I know?' Seth pondered under the stare as he racked his head thinking of his assets, it soon hit him like a tonne of bricks.
"Wait? No way? Blessings?"
Lloyd grimly nodded his head.
"But I thought they were only granted to humans?"
"Not just humans, other races as well, but never monsters; It's not only that do you know the one rule about blessings"
"Rule?" Seth cocked his head in confusion.
"They are never used for offense, they only exist to augment or assist the holder, they are never used as weapons!" A chill ran down Seth's exposed spine, if this was true then what the hell were the abilities the said monsters used? Blessings were granted by the divine, for something to rival them but break that rule means…"
"They were granted by another divine?" Seth muttered not even daring to believe it himself.