CHAPTER XVI: The Collector's Compendium
"Every kingdom is built on bones. Mine just happen to still be moving."
The Hive Mind hummed — a cathedral of stolen consciousness, a library written in gray matter and grief.
Somewhere in that vast, voiceless dark, Deborah's voice arrived like a knife through silk.
"Creator."
Lionel didn't move. He stood at the window of what passed for a war room, hands clasped behind his back, watching the horizon bleed amber at the edges — a wound the sun refused to close. The world outside was quiet in the particular way that things are quiet before they aren't anymore.
"Your Black Scripture pawn has returned. He brought additional Knights — manpower, by the look of it — and another member of the Black Scripture alongside him."
Another one.
The smile came slowly, the way mold does — patient, inevitable, spreading from the corners of his mouth before the rest of his face had agreed to it.
The collection grows.
"Where are they now?" he asked, his voice carrying the precise temperature of a man who already knew the answer didn't frighten him.
"Camped along the outer walls. They appear to be waiting — either for our attack, or our surrender."
Surrender. Lionel almost laughed. Almost.
The Slane Theocracy was, at its most charitable, a lit candle standing very bravely in front of a bonfire and calling it a standoff. Brave. Foolish. Deeply, profoundly human — which, in Lionel's experience, meant the same thing.
"Understood. Thank you, Deborah."
He withdrew from the Hive Mind the way one pulls a thread from embroidery — clean, precise, leaving the pattern intact — and turned away from the window.
"Ainz."
The air between them had the texture of something unfinished.
Ainz Ooal Gown — Overlord, undead sovereign of Nazarick and all it surveyed — stood with the composed stillness of a man who had long since stopped being made of anything that could fidget. His pauldrons caught the light. His eye sockets did not.
They had been in the middle of something. Lionel was already wrapping it up.
"Something has come up at my base." He gestured for the girls to fall in behind him. "I need to return immediately. But please — keep me informed of whatever you find."
A beat.
Ainz's empty gaze tracked across the three Dimitrescu sisters, who were in various states of readiness — Bela, already bristling with restless energy; Cassandra, eyeing the room as if she was calculating which parts of it could be taken apart for sport; Daniela, existing in that permanent half-dissolve, somewhere between solid and suggestion.
"What kind of problem?" Ainz asked carefully. "Is there anything we — anything the Nazarick can offer?"
He wants reciprocity, Lionel noted, without judgment. Smart. An alliance only flows in one direction until it doesn't flow at all.
"Black Scripture complication." Lionel's wings unfurled from the Mold at his back — the dark, veined membranes expanding slowly, as ink dropped in water, like something that should not exist outside a nightmare agreeing, reluctantly, to obey physics. "Nothing that requires your hand. But I do appreciate the offer."
He paused.
"Actually — speaking of the Black Scripture." He tilted his head, the question arriving with the casual precision of a scalpel. "Have you encountered and defeated any of their members?"
Ainz considered. "I fought a woman. Powerful — by the standards of this world, at least." A pause, longer than necessary. "Her name was Clementine."
The name dropped into Lionel's memory like a stone into still water, and the ripples came back with information attached.
Clementine. Former member. Defected under — yes. Yes.
"Girls." He didn't look away from Ainz. "Return home. I won't be long."
The sisters bowed — a synchronized, fluid motion, like three flowers bending to the same wind — and departed without protest. Which meant, Lionel knew, that Cassandra was very interested in whatever was about to happen and had decided to be obedient specifically so she'd be trusted later.
He filed that away.
"Clementine," he said, once they were gone, "was indeed a former Black Scripture operative. She defected." He met Ainz's gaze — or where his gaze would have been, had he still possessed the biological hardware for it. "Would you tell me where the body is? I'd very much like to complete my collection."
The word collection landed in the room the way such words sometimes do — weighted, specific, trailing implications behind it like a coat with very full pockets.
Ainz was silent for precisely one breath.
"The Guild took possession of it after the incident. As part of their effort to identify those responsible."
"Wonderful." Lionel was already ascending. "Thank you."
He was airborne before the gratitude had finished echoing.
∷ E-Rantel ∷ Population: Complicated
E-Rantel smelled, as it always did, of commerce and quiet desperation — bread baking somewhere above the smell of horse, and above that, the particular sharpness of a city that had survived too many things and was trying not to think about it.
Lionel landed on a rooftop and became nobody.
Not invisible. Nobody. There is a difference — invisibility is an absence; nobody is a presence that the eye refuses to hold, a figure that the brain files under not my problem and moves on from immediately. He walked down from the roof and into the streets wearing the shape of a homeless child — small, gray-faced, carrying the specific weight of someone who has not eaten recently and has made peace with that fact.
The guards will know where she is, he thought, drifting between market stalls and foot traffic like smoke between furniture. Someone always knows. That's the tragedy of information — it refuses to stay put.
He found the guard in an alleyway.
Young. New. Taking a break with the exhaustion of someone who had been standing at attention for four hours and had recently discovered that their feet were, in fact, capable of complaint.
Lionel stepped into the mouth of the alley.
"Excuse me, sir?" His voice was a child's voice — thin, careful, slightly hoarse. "Would you mind terribly if I pried open your head and took what I needed?"
The guard stared at him.
Bless him, Lionel thought. He heard something completely different.
"Sorry, kid." The man's face softened with the reflexive pity of the decent. "I'm new here. Haven't even been paid yet."
Oh, the irony. Lionel almost felt something adjacent to guilt. Almost.
He pounced.
The guard's eyes went very wide — and then they went somewhere else entirely.
Lionel dragged him deeper into the dark, into the part of the alley where the shadows had given up pretending to be shadows and committed fully to the role of void. He released his child's shape like a coat shrugged from the shoulders — the height returned, the wings folded back, the jaw reset — and crouched over the still form.
The finger he pressed into the man's ear was not, for long, a finger.
It thinned. It stretched. It moved — a pale worm finding a warm tunnel, navigating by instinct, by hunger, by the specific biological imperative of things that exist only to consume knowledge. The wet sound it made was the sound of library pages being turned very quickly, all at once, without permission.
Then: stillness.
Lionel stood. The worm returned. He processed what had been delivered.
A warded room. Teleportation-resistant. Heavy guard rotation. Two bodies. High-value classification.
He stared at nothing for a moment.
"She's dead," he said aloud, to no one, in genuine philosophical bewilderment. "She is a dead woman. In a box. Why is she more protected than the food supply?"
He straightened his coat.
"Right." He looked down at the guard. "Thank you for your service. And your brain. Mostly your brain."
He put on the man's face.
"Deborah."
"Creator."
"Have Alcina and her daughters entertain our guests from the Slane Theocracy. The Knights are fair game. The Strongest Human and the new Black Scripture member are not to be damaged. Are we clear?"
"As crystal, Creator."
He stepped out of the alley wearing someone else's life and went to find a dead woman.
"Hey! HEY!"
A guard materialized from the foot traffic like a bad decision given legs, waving both arms with the energy of a man who had been waiting for someone to wave at.
Lionel turned.
New face. New voice. New problem.
"It's your rotation, rookie! Where have you been?"
"I — " Lionel blinked. He let confusion do the work. "Sorry. I lost track of where we're stationed. Which — " He let the sentence trail off with exactly the right amount of sheepishness. "Which post is it again?"
The guard stared at him with the precise expression of a man counting to ten to avoid saying something professionally inappropriate.
"Follow me," he said, through his teeth. "Rookie."
The word landed like a light insult, and Lionel accepted it graciously, because the alternative was killing another person, and he was trying to be efficient about this.
∷ The Warded House ∷ Where the Dead Wait in Quiet
They passed through E-Rantel's innermost veins — past the warehouses swollen with winter grain, past the smithies where iron sang against iron, past the places the city hid its necessities — until they arrived at a building that wore its plainness like armor.
It looked like an extension of the Adventurers' Guild. It was not.
"Two bodies. High-value. Cemetery incident." The senior guard kept his voice administrative. His eyes were less so. "Do not engage. Do not enter. Do not think too loudly near the door." He glared. "Am I understood?"
"Understood," said Lionel, wearing a dead man's face.
Perfectly, sir.
He took his position. Nine other guards circled the perimeter in a rotation that was, admittedly, quite thorough. Someone had put real thought into this. Lionel made a note to feel professionally complimented.
He waited. He watched the rotations. He timed the gaps.
Then he called the nearest guard over.
"Question," he said.
"What," said the guard, in the tone of a man who had been answering questions for six hours and was now paying them out of a very small reserve.
Lionel leaned close. His finger elongated. Thinned. Hollowed itself to a point.
"Do you think," he whispered, almost gently, "that this could pierce your armor?"
"Huh—"
The word became a sound that was not a word. The Cadou eggs entered the man's bloodstream with the quiet efficiency of a very small catastrophe.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then everything happened.
The convulsions came first — a shiver that became a shudder that became a transformation, the body arguing with itself about what it was supposed to be, losing the argument in real time. The growl that erupted from the man's throat was not a human sound. It had never been a human sound. It was the sound of a door being forced open that was meant to stay closed.
The Lycan threw its head back —
— and howled.
The other guards spun. Confusion cracked across their faces like ice in spring. None of them had seen what Lionel did. None of them had the context for the shape their colleague was currently becoming.
Lionel screamed. Short. Sharp. Perfectly calibrated terror from a man who had absolutely not done this on purpose.
"GET INSIDE, ROOKIE — NOW!" A guard seized him by the collar and threw him through the door as though he were a package being delivered to safety. "We'll handle this! GO!"
The door slammed.
The screaming started outside.
Lionel stood in the dark room and looked around at the stone walls, the two stone beds, the two lanterns burning with the steady unconcerned patience of things that do not know what is happening outside and do not need to.
He moved to the second bed.
He looked down.
She was exactly as Ainz had left her — or rather, as Ainz had made her. A broken thing. A collection of damages that told the story of a fight she had lost comprehensively and without mercy. Teeth. Spine. Organs. All of it wears the evidence of overwhelming force with the mute dignity of wreckage.
There you are.
Lionel smiled — not cruelly, precisely, but not gently either. The smile of a collector who has just found the missing piece of something.
"You've kept me waiting," he told the body.
He picked her up. He walked back out.
The courtyard was quiet.
Not peaceful — quiet. There is a profound difference between the two, and E-Rantel had just learned it. Every guard was dead. Not fled, not unconscious — dead, in the specific, definitive way that things are dead when a Lycan has been given sufficient time and motivation.
The Lycan in question was still there.
Still eating.
It looked up at Lionel. Lionel looked back at it.
"Good boy," he said, after a moment's consideration.
It went back to its meal.
No sample, he thought, already rising into the air, already climbing. Dissolves on death. But the bones calcify into Adamantite, so — technically — the investment paid out. Eventually.
He tucked Clementine under one arm like a very disturbing parcel and flew home.
Behind him, E-Rantel would spend the next several hours trying to understand what had happened. They would not succeed. Some things resist understanding the way water resists being held — not because they are impossible, but because the shape of them doesn't fit human hands.
∷ The Kingdom ∷ : A Small Empire in Progress
He descended through smoke and the particular silence that follows large-scale violence.
The outer grounds of his Kingdom looked, from above, like a battlefield — which they were, technically, though the battle had been considerably less evenly matched than the word usually implies. Five hundred and some Theocracy Knights lay in arrangements that suggested they had not died in any sort of formation. They had died in the specific, scattered configurations of men who had encountered something categorically beyond their operational parameters and had made the very human decision to run, which had not helped.
Alcina Dimitrescu stood among the bodies the way a chess piece stands on a board — present, composed, belonging entirely to her environment. Her dress was, somehow, still impeccable. This was either a testament to her grace or to the absolute thoroughness of her efficiency.
Probably both.
"Where is the other Black Scripture member?" Lionel landed, folding his wings.
Alcina turned. Wordlessly — with the satisfaction of a woman presenting a completed assignment — she revealed the man pinned against her side, held with the firm, slightly-too-warm security of someone who had been told don't damage it and had taken the instruction very seriously.
The man was struggling.
The man was failing.
"Thank you, girls." Lionel studied him as Alcina and her daughters dipped their heads in synchronized acknowledgment. Something about this new captive nagged at him — the set of the jaw, the shape around the eyes —
He looked down at Clementine.
He looked back up.
Oh.
"Do you know this woman?" Lionel set the body down in front of the man with the careful reverence one uses for something precious and the mild theatrical flair one cannot quite suppress.
The brother's eyes fell to her.
And then the brother — this trained, hardened, elite warrior of the Slane Theocracy — went completely still in the way that only grief can make a person still, as something had reached through his chest, grabbed the engine of him, and squeezed.
Then the stillness became fury.
"That traitor," he said, each word its own small stone, "is nothing but trash to the Slane Theocracy." His eyes came back up to Lionel's, burning. "She's better off dead."
The silence after this was not empty. It was full — stuffed with what Lionel did not say, with what the body between them represented, with the weight of a sibling relationship that had clearly ended very badly for everyone involved.
Lionel crouched beside Clementine.
"Don't say that." His voice was almost gentle. Almost paternal. The almost was doing a great deal of work. "She is a valued piece. Just as valuable as you." He placed his palm over her mouth, and the Mold came — not rushing, not violent, but patient. Inevitable. The dark substance seeped from his skin like ink from a cracked well, winding between her lips, filling the dark spaces, finding every break and beginning the quiet, terrible work of repair.
"You're a monster," the brother breathed. "You're defiling her corpse. The Slane Theocracy will burn everything you've built to the—"
"Hm." Clementine sat up.
The brother stopped speaking.
The brother stopped, in fact, doing most things, because the brain requires a certain amount of processing time when it receives information that directly contradicts its understanding of physical reality, and his brain was currently submitting a very urgent request for clarification.
Clementine rolled her neck. Stretched her fingers. Ran her tongue across her newly-restored teeth with the considering expression of someone testing unfamiliar furniture for sturdiness.
Then she found her brother's face in the crowd, and she smiled.
It was her smile. Exactly her smile. Sharp at the edges, unrepentant at the center — the smile of a woman who had never once believed that manners were more important than fun, and had arranged her entire life around proving it.
"Don't be so dramatic, brother." Her voice was exactly as it had always been. "Lionel is a merciful leader."
The brother had gone the color of old ash.
Lionel rose. He turned. He manufactured a worm from Mold between his fingers, turning it over thoughtfully, as one might turn over a pen before signing a very important document.
"Now," he said, with the brightness of a man announcing a pleasant surprise. "Your turn."
The screaming echoed.
It always does, in a Kingdom without proper soundproofing — Lionel made a note to commission some — and it moved through the walls and the air and the consciousness of everyone present, carrying with it the specific resonance of a mind being rewritten. Not erased. Not destroyed. Simply... redirected. Like a river that has met a new landscape and accepted, with some initial protest, its new course.
The protest faded.
The man stood.
Walked forward.
Knelt.
"Thank you for reuniting me with my sister, Creator."
His face was calm. His eyes were clear. He looked, if anything, rested — the particular peace of a person who has been relieved of the exhausting burden of opposing forces too large to oppose.
Alcina regarded the three humans — the Strongest Human, Clementine, and the brother — with the quiet assessment of a woman cataloguing wine.
"What do you intend for your collection now, Creator?"
"Leave them here." Lionel looked across his Kingdom — the trading house finished and fitted, the walls standing, the Mold threading through the foundations like roots. "The Theocracy will grow cautious if their heroes keep returning without their soldiers. These three are among the most powerful humans this world has produced. They'll serve as protectors." He glanced back at the walls. "I'll have a Guardhouse built. Just there — behind the wall."
They moved inside.
Neil and Pedro were waiting with the readiness of men who had been waiting for some time and had spent the interval improving their posture. They bowed.
"Creator. All tasks are completed. Are there further instructions?"
Lionel pointed across the open ground, opposite the trading house, which stood wide-doored and tall-ceilinged, accommodating both Alcina's height and the Duke's considerable architecture without appearing to strain.
"Build something like a Guild Hall," he said. "For the collection."
"At once, Creator."
They bowed and went.
Lionel turned to Alcina.
"Thank you. For today." He met her eyes — a long way up, those eyes, amber and ancient and evaluating everything constantly. "I'll call on you when trade negotiations begin. You have a certain... presence... that tends to clarify discussions."
Alcina's mouth curved. Just slightly. "It is nothing, Creator."
She turned. The daughters moved with her.
"Deborah. Five hundred dead Theocracy soldiers outside. Convert them to J'avos. Stand-by formation."
"Understood, Creator."
"Come, girls—"
"Alcina."
She paused.
Lionel had the expression of a man who has just remembered something important in the specific way that makes him appear slightly guilty about having forgotten it.
"May I borrow your daughters? Briefly." He looked at the three sisters. "I believe I still owe them something."
The three sisters turned to look at him.
Then at each other.
Then back at him.
Bela's eyes lit up like a city's worth of windows catching the sunrise simultaneously.
"The Tomb," Cassandra breathed, reverent in the way she was never reverent about anything else.
Alcina regarded her Creator for a moment — that long, amber, evaluating regard — and then stepped aside without a word.
Permission granted.
Lionel's wings spread wide against the sky.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go see what Ainz has been hiding."
The girls dissolved into flies — three dark clouds of them, rising in spirals, catching the light and fracturing it — and followed him into the blue.
∷ The Tomb of Nazarick ∷ , Where Every Surface Has a Title and Every Room Has an Agenda
The Tomb was on high alert.
This communicated itself in the specific atmospheric way that high alerts do — not through signs or announcements, but through the quality of the silence, the deliberateness of every shadow, the sense that the walls themselves were paying attention and had opinions about what they were observing.
Ainz opened a gate from the outside. Practical. Efficient. Controlled.
The Dimitrescu sisters stepped through and immediately became what they always became in new spaces: children on the morning of something wonderful. Bela's head was on a constant swivel. Cassandra looked like she was already taking mental notes. Daniela drifted between solid and dissolution, her attention scattered across everything at once.
"Lionel." Ainz was already moving toward him. "We have a problem."
Of course we do.
Lionel assessed the room, assessed Ainz, assessed the quality of the word problem as Ainz had deployed it, which was not the light, administrative problem of scheduling or supply, but the heavier kind. The kind that had weight.
"Would you mind if they explored?" He nodded toward the sisters. "They'll only distract us otherwise."
"Of course." Ainz paused. "I'll have Alpha accompany them."
Alpha arrived. Knelt. Directed at Lionel, the particular gaze of a woman who has met him once before and has filed the experience under exercise extreme caution. She accepted her orders from Ainz without visible objection.
The sisters followed her — Bela practically vibrating, Cassandra calculating, Daniela trailing like smoke that had decided to tour the premises.
"Behave," Lionel told them.
Cassandra looked back at him with an expression that could only be described as technically compliant.
He turned to Ainz.
"What is it?"
Ainz held up his hand.
The ring caught the light.
"The Shooting Star," Lionel said, recognizing it immediately — recognizing also, with the specific discomfort of a man who had spent considerable resources acquiring his own, the implications of it being present in this conversation.
"I used it." Ainz's voice was the voice of a man delivering a fact he would prefer were not a fact. "I wished to cure Shalltear of whatever was controlling her."
A pause.
"The wish was rejected."
The throne room was very large. It had, until this moment, not felt particularly large. Now it felt like the kind of space that the universe uses when it wants a revelation to have room to land.
Lionel took one step backward.
Then another.
If the Shooting Star can't cure it—
Then something in this world is—
"World-class items," he said. Not a question.
"Yes," Ainz confirmed. "This world contains World-class items."
The silence that followed had texture.
It was the silence of two men who had come from a world where World-class items were known quantities — rare, expensive, incomprehensibly powerful, but known — and who were now sitting with the fact that this world contained them as naturally as it contained forests and rivers. Unannounced. Uncatalogued. Waiting.
Most World-class items won't affect the Viruses, Lionel reminded himself, with the discipline of a man who has decided to be rational and is enforcing this decision firmly. Most. But 'most' is not 'all.' And 'all' is the only number that actually matters when your existence is the variable.
"Thank you," he said, quietly. He meant it. "Give me a moment."
Ainz nodded.
Lionel turned away and entered the Hive Mind.
The message he sent was not gentle. It did not ask. It moved through every Subject he possessed like a current through water — total, simultaneous, arriving everywhere at once with the force of something that would not be ignored.
"High alert. All operations continue. No one — no one — approaches the Kingdom walls without my explicit order. This is not a precaution. This is a wall."
His hand found the remote in his coat pocket.
He pressed every button.
Across the fields surrounding his Kingdom, Tyrants stirred. They were not fast, as such things are measured — but they were inexorable, which is a different quality and, in the long run, more frightening. They moved into position with the patient momentum of geological events.
"Piers. Surface. Command the Tyrants."
"Understood, Creator."
He exhaled. Long. Measured. The breath of a man choosing to be composed about something he is not entirely composed about.
He pulled out of the Hive Mind.
"Do you know which faction holds these items?"
The memories of the Black Scripture agents told him nothing — he had checked them before the question was even finished leaving his mouth. The answer was not there.
"Unfortunately, no," Ainz said.
Albedo arrived.
She moved through the throne room with the purpose of someone who had been organizing the Tomb's operations and was now returning to find an additional person present whom she had not personally authorized, which was — going by the quality of her expression — a source of specific irritation.
"Albedo." Ainz straightened. "Good timing. Let's go to the treasury."
He began to teleport.
Then, remembering, he glanced at Lionel, who was already standing by with the expression of a man who has been politely waiting and would appreciate not being left behind.
The treasury was an exercise in abundance that bordered on the philosophical.
"You still have Yggdrasil gold coins," Lionel said, looking at the stacks — towers of currency from a world that no longer existed, arranged in the treasury of a world that didn't accept them. There was something almost poignant about it. The most expensive paperweights in existence. "I stockpiled gold as well, back then. Mostly decorative now."
The three of them stood before a wall of pure darkness.
Not shadow. Not absence of light. Darkness — a material thing, a presence, the visual equivalent of a closed statement.
Ainz faced it.
"Glory to Ainz Ooal Gown."
Characters bloomed across the surface — luminous, precise, in a script that Lionel didn't know and hadn't needed to know until this exact moment, which was slightly annoying. Ainz translated them aloud, and the wall... contracted. Drew itself inward. Became a sphere. The sphere vanished in the way that things vanish when they have decided to stop existing in a particular location without fanfare.
Beyond it: a long corridor. Weapons from Yggdrasil, lining both walls, were displayed with the reverence of relics.
They've built a religion in here, Lionel thought, walking forward, his eyes moving along the displayed arms. A whole theology. Every room a shrine. Every object is a scripture.
We never did anything like this. It was always just — work. Logs. Experiments. Manufacturing. No ceremony.
I think I missed something.
"Our destination is the mausoleum at the far end," Ainz said.
"There's a mausoleum?" Albedo said.
The surprise in her voice was genuine — and interesting. Even the floor guardians had not been here. Lionel was walking through a space that Nazarick's own inhabitants had never seen.
I'm being shown something that hasn't been shown to anyone else yet, he thought, looking at the weapons. That's either an extraordinary sign of trust or the setup for something I'm going to regret.
Probably both.
"If there's a mausoleum," Ainz continued, "then what do you know of Pandora's Actor?"
Pandora's Actor. The name arrived like a well-chosen title — evocative, slightly ominous, carrying more weight than two words should by any reasonable measure.
I like that name.
"I've known of him since I was appointed supervisor," Albedo said, "but I've never met him." She glanced behind Ainz with the precision of a woman who knows exactly where everyone in a room is at all times. Her gaze found Lionel. It was not warm. "He rivals the floor guardians in power and intellect. He was created by Lord Ainz himself."
"Th — that's right," Ainz said, with the energy of a man walking very carefully across ice.
"And he administers our finances," Albedo added.
They arrived.
There was a chair. There was a figure in it. The figure stood —
Lionel's body moved before his mind did.
He was back — three full steps, both hands raised, Mold surging through his arms and hardening his fingers to blades, the C-Virus activating with the urgency of every threat-response he had ever developed, firing simultaneously. Cracks spread across his face like frost on a winter window. Smoke rose from his shoulders. His cells were dividing at a rate that his coat was beginning to object to.
"You clever—" The word he chose was, technically, an insult, deployed with the energy of a man who is also slightly impressed and cannot fully suppress that impression even while being furious. "You lured me in here — you planned this — you've had him in that form this entire—"
He recognized the figure.
Tabula Smaragdina. Another member of Ainz Ooal Gown. Standing in the treasury of Nazarick with the posture of someone who had been expecting this reaction and was satisfied by its accuracy.
"I can take BOTH of you—" Lionel's voice ricocheted off the stone walls. "—right now, if that's what we're doing, I have absolutely NO objections to—"
"That is enough." Ainz's voice cut through the escalating chaos like a bell. Clear. Final. The voice of authority that is not asking.
"Pandora's Actor."
The figure changed.
The shape of Tabula Smaragdina dissolved — not dramatically, not with great ceremony, simply released, the way an actor releases a character when the scene is over. What replaced it was a tall, lean man in a decorated military uniform, standing at a precision that made standard attention look casual.
"Thank you for making the journey," he said.
He stepped forward, placed himself before Ainz, and executed a salute with the kind of full-bodied commitment that suggested the motion had been rehearsed, cherished, and was being deployed at its absolute maximum value.
"My Creator — Lord Momonga!"
The enthusiasm in those two words — the joy in them, the devotion, the complete lack of irony or self-consciousness, the total absence of any question as to whether this level of feeling was proportionate or appropriate —
Lionel stared.
The blades retracted.
The smoke stopped.
His arms fell to his sides.
"Oh," he said, very quietly. "Oh no."
He knew this feeling. He had had this feeling. He had stood in front of a room full of confused recruits and vibrated with this exact frequency of passion, this specific brand of theatrical, genuine, wholehearted —
His palms were sweating.
His knees felt uncertain.
The dark past, some part of him whispered. It's looking at you from across the room. It's wearing a war uniform, and it's SMILING.
"Are you all right?" Ainz asked, turning to find that Lionel had gone slightly pale.
"I'm fine," Lionel said.
He was not fine.
▲▼▲▼▲
Eight years ago. Give or take. In a world that no longer existed.
The conference room smelled of dry-erase markers and ambition.
Lionel stood at its head with both arms spread wide, his lab coat billowing in the entirely windless room (he had positioned himself near the air conditioning vent specifically for this purpose), beaming at the eight people who had answered his recruitment post.
"Welcome," he announced, "to Umbrella Corporation."
He descended from his chair — which was on a small platform, which he had built himself, which he refused to acknowledge as a platform — and walked around the table with the energy of a man who had been rehearsing this speech for three weeks and was getting his money's worth.
"We are scientists! By heart! By mind! By the specific, burning conviction that the things we can grow in a petri dish are worth more than anything this civilization has yet produced! He stopped. He raised a fist. The fluorescent light caught it. "We will rebuild the Viruses! We will give glory to everything Umbrella stood for! And we will make this world—"
He threw his head back.
"—kneel!"
The laugh that followed was not entirely voluntary. It came from somewhere deep and genuine and somewhat unhinged, and it echoed off the drop ceiling, and three of the eight recruits exchanged a glance that said, very clearly: we have made a decision we need to reconsider.
▲▼▲▼▲
In the treasury of Nazarick, in the present, Lionel lay face down on the stone floor.
No one had knocked him down. He had arrived there of his own volition, in the way that a person sometimes arrives at the floor when their legs stop cooperating, and dignity has filed for emergency leave.
He lay there.
He breathed.
Somewhere above him, Ainz, Albedo, and Pandora's Actor existed in a tableau of varying confusion.
"...Creator?" Pandora's Actor inquired. The concern in his voice was entirely genuine, which somehow made everything worse.
"I'm fine," Lionel said, into the floor. "I just need a moment."
I swore, he thought, I SWORE I would take that to my grave.
I had a plan. The plan was: die with dignity. Do NOT let anyone who doesn't already know find out about the platform. Or the laugh. Or the THREE WEEKS OF REHEARSAL—
The floor was very cold.
It was, in this moment, his best friend.
"...Should I — " Ainz began.
"I said," Lionel replied, very clearly, into the floor, "I need a moment."
Ainz Ooal Gown, supreme sovereign, possessor of a World-class item, looked at Albedo.
Albedo looked back at him.
"We can give him a moment," Ainz agreed, carefully.
Pandora's Actor remained at full attention because Pandora's Actor, it turned out, was exactly the kind of person who remains at full attention during floor-related incidents, which was either enormously respectful or, Lionel reflected from his horizontal position, the funniest thing that had ever happened to him.
Possibly both.
Probably both.
Fine, he thought, his cheek pressed against ancient stone. Fine. The collection is growing. The Kingdom is rising. There is a dead woman I have successfully reanimated and a brother who is now at peace and approximately five hundred new J'avos standing by for orders.
And somewhere out in this world, there are World-class items. Unknown ones. The kind that don't have names yet in any database I can access.
So.
We have work to do.
He stood up. He straightened his coat. He turned around.
"Right," he said, with the precise composure of a man who had absolutely not just been lying on the floor. "Where were we?"
End of Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVI Notes: Thank you — genuinely, deeply — for 2,000 reads. That number arrived faster than I had any right to expect, and I want you to know that every comment, every vote, every person who came back for the next chapter is the reason this story keeps going. Lionel thanks you as well. He is not on the floor about it. He is fine. He just needs a moment.
See you in Chapter XVII.