[DING!]

[Combat Complete!]

[Calculating rewards...]

[+82,000 Death Tokens]

[+250,000 EXP]

[+4 Nightmare Cores]

[+20 Dread Cores]

[Level Up!]

[Lightning Apostle: Level 8 → Level 9]

[Current Progress: 177,800/250,000]

Jack's vision swam with notifications, each one appearing in rapid succession as the system tallied his gains from the fight.

Fighting Nightmare-class demons in groups was dangerous, but the rewards made the risk worthwhile.

He turned his attention back to the surviving miners. They hadn't moved from where they'd pressed themselves against the cavern walls, their glowing eyes tracking every movement Jack made.

Fear radiated from them in waves so thick that Jack could almost taste it.

Jack walked toward the nearest miner, his Lightning Spear still crackling with residual energy.

The demon flinched as Jack approached, its hands raised in a gesture that might have been surrender or prayer.

"I asked you a question," Jack said, his voice carrying across the silent cavern. "You work for Pho?"

The miner nodded frantically. "Yes! Yes, we all work for Pho. Please, we're just miners. We don't fight. We just dig crystals."

"How long?" Jack asked.

"How long what?"

"How long have you been mining this cavern for Pho?"

The miner swallowed hard, its throat working as it tried to find words. "Decades. Some of us have been here for decades. Pho claimed this site long before the war started."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "Before the war?"

"Yes, Soul Warden. The Aurion and Thal'Gorin used to mine the surface. Shared the deposit, divided the profits. It was peaceful." The miner's voice carried a note of longing, as if remembering better times. "Then Pho arrived."

"And?" Jack prompted.

Another miner, this one braver or perhaps more desperate, spoke up from across the cavern. "Pho wanted the whole operation. All the Aethrium. He found a way down here and started mining. But it wasn't enough. He wanted everything."

"So he what?" Jack's voice dropped to something dangerous.

"He instigated the war," the first miner finished, the words coming out in a rush. "The gift. The weapon that humiliated Vok'thar. Pho arranged it. After Seryth commissioned the weapon, Pho had it swapped out."

Jack's jaw tightened. The pieces were falling into place now. The whole conflict, four years of demons killing each other, all orchestrated by one demon who wanted control of a mining operation.

"And then?" Jack asked, though he could already guess the answer.

"Then he bought out the independent miners, hired new ones, and took over the operation while both clans were too busy killing each other to notice." The miner gestured at the cavern around them. "We've been mining nonstop ever since. Pho sells the Aethrium to both sides, fueling the war while profiting from it."

"He's been playing both sides," Jack said, more to himself than the miners. "Keeping the war going so neither clan can find the mine."

"Yes, Soul Warden. And now..." The miner's voice faltered. "Now you've let his assassin escape. Pho will know. He'll come himself or send more demons. Stronger ones."

Jack considered this. The fastest demon had escaped, which meant Pho would indeed know what happened here. But that was fine.

Jack had wanted to send a message, and nothing said 'stay away from me' quite like slaughtering his men.

"How many demons does Pho control?" Jack asked.

"Thousands. Miners, guards, and everything in between. Elite units he keeps in reserve." The miner's eyes darted to the corpses littering the cavern floor. "Better than the ones you killed."

Jack filed that information away. Pho was more dangerous than he'd thought, not just because of his personal power but because he commanded a private army. Taking him down would require planning, not just brute force.

But first, Jack had other priorities.

He walked among the corpses, activating his system storage to collect them one by one. Nightmare demon bodies were valuable, their materials alone could make gear and Jack wasn't about to leave that kind of resource lying around.

Each corpse vanished as he touched it, absorbed into the dimensional space where he kept his collected materials.

The surviving miners watched this process with growing horror, as if Jack's casual collection of bodies confirmed every nightmare story they'd heard about the Soul Warden.

When the last corpse vanished, Jack turned his attention to Kyren.

His reanimated servant stood exactly where Jack had left him, light blade still humming with power, hollow eyes fixed on nothing in particular.

The demon's burnt and broken body should have been a grotesque sight, but after watching Kyren fight, Jack saw it differently now.

This wasn't just some random demon he'd raised. This was something special.

Jack activated Flawed Sight, focusing on Kyren for the first time since reanimating him.

[Target: Kyren]

[Rank: Dread]

[Level: 55]

[Strength: 170]

[Stamina: 90]

[Agility: 180]

[Vitality: 254]

[Endurance: 125]

[Magic: 180]

[Mana: 2,000]

[HP: 15,000]

[Skills: Solar Flare, Flash Burn, Master Swordsman]

Jack's eyes widened. Dread-class. Level 55. Stats that exceeded his own in nearly every category. And that final skill, Master Swordsman, explained everything about how Kyren had moved during the fight.

'I managed to get someone this broken for basically nothing,' Jack thought, staring at the stat display in disbelief. 'I just grabbed a random corpse from the battlefield and happened to resurrect a master swordsman?'

The sheer luck of it was almost absurd. Kyren alone was probably worth more than all the other demons Jack had killed combined. A Dread-class warrior with those stats could have turned the tide of entire battles.

"Kyren," Jack said, and the hollow eyes immediately focused on him. "What are your thoughts on all this?'

For a moment, Kyren didn't respond. Then his hollow voice echoed through the cavern.

"War is inevitable among demons, my lord. We are creatures of conflict. But this war..." Kyren's gaze moved to the blue crystals covering the walls. "This war serves no purpose beyond one demon's greed. It dishonors those who die in it."

"You sound like you've seen a lot of wars," Jack observed.

"I have, my lord. Centuries of them."

"A master swordsman with your stats could have ended it quickly."

Kyren's light blade flickered, as if responding to some internal thought. "I normally don't fight, my lord. I am a teacher. Was a teacher," he corrected himself. "If I fought, the war would become one-sided. My students would lose the opportunity to grow stronger through combat."

Jack frowned. "Your students?"

"I trained warriors for the Aurion. Young demons who wished to master the blade." Kyren's hollow eyes seemed almost wistful. "Demons love to fight and grow stronger. It is our nature. Low-grade demons are not difficult for me to kill because of my skill level, but where is the growth in that? Where is the challenge that forges true strength?"

"So you held back," Jack said, understanding dawning. "You let weaker demons fight so they could improve."

"Yes, my lord. I did not wish to ruin my students' fun, as you might say." Kyren paused. "Until I encountered an enemy I could not defeat. Then holding back became... impossible."

The way Kyren's voice had changed on that last word, the slight dimming of his light blade, suggested a story that might be too painful even for an undead demon to fully recount.

Jack checked his quest log.

[Active Quest: Uncover the Truth]

[Objective: Discover the real reason behind war]

[Status: Incomplete]

Jack stared at the notification, confusion warring with frustration. He'd discovered that Pho instigated the war.

He'd learned about the manipulation, the motive, the whole scheme. But the quest was still incomplete.

'There must be more,' Jack thought. 'Something deeper I'm missing.'

He looked around the cavern, at the blue Aethrium crystals covering every surface, at the tunnels branching off in multiple directions, at the sheer scale of the mining operation Pho had built here.

And he remembered what the system had told him earlier. Surface deposits detected. Significantly larger deposits are located 47 meters below his current position.

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