Nosphaleen blinked. There was a heavy darkness all around that made it hard to see much of anything, but she felt something familiar almost instantly.
She ran up to the bar, trying to squeeze her face through.
“Father? Father? Is that you?”
Sylas felt the trembling of the Will before he even heard anything else. Honestly, even he hadn’t expected this.
But this wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing either. Technically speaking, Nosphaleen was his slave right now, and there was also no telling just how strong her father was in the grand scheme.
Logically, Nosphaleen’s father would likely be quite powerful since she was quite something as well. Also, if he was here in a real dungeon, he had likely done something to land himself here. Because of that, it would make sense that his daughter would be further punished and sent to be one of the challenges in the Frostbane Dungeon.
Nosphaleen had obviously been set up to die back then. Sylas had killed several Clypsians that day before sparing her through their peculiar cancerous Gene method.
All of that lined up perfectly, but that still wasn’t enough.
If Nosphaleen’s father had great standing, then good, Sylas could probably use a more aggressive approach. But if he was middle-rung, then Nosphaleen might not be the helping hand he was looking for—it might just end up with her father being pushed out as well.
The complexities of the situation spun in Sylas’ mind as he continued to observe.
“Nos? Is that you?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s me!”
Nosphaleen grabbed the bars excitedly, tears streaming down her face. Though she tried her hardest, she still couldn’t see her father well enough. The darkness of the dungeon seemed to be a heavy spell placed on the entire region, so suffocating that only really the likes of Sylas’ Will could see through it so well.
Otherwise, it would have been even more difficult to understand what was happening here.
Luckily, Nosphaleen’s Will had also grown considerably under Sylas’ care. While she wasn’t at the same level as Sylas, or even remotely close, between their connection and her own talent, she was still able to make out what was happening just the slightest bit.
“You didn’t die? Nos, where have you been? Is that really you?” The Clypsian male couldn’t seem to believe it.
When his daughter was taken away to the Dungeon along with the others, some had returned, but most didn’t. He had thought the worst, assuming that his daughter was long dead and gone.
He didn’t know how to react to this change, and a large part of him still felt like it was some sort of cruel illusion.
“Father, father. This is Sylas. He’s the one who saved me. He entered the Dungeon that day and managed to take me out. I’ve been with him ever since, and he brought me here with him today.”
Hearing this, the man finally started to calm down. He could hear the inconsistencies in Nosphaleen’s story, and bits and pieces of a narrative began to come together… all of which culminated in a certain understanding.
Just now, Sylas had felt every bit like a Clypsian. But the moment his daughter appeared, he felt like a completely different Race, one that he didn’t quite recognize.
Honestly speaking, his daughter didn’t feel entirely like a Clypsian anymore either. There were only bits and pieces of that part of her that remained, as though it was being masked or swallowed up by something else.
That didn’t bother the man too much. His daughter was still his daughter. His question was…
What had Sylas done to her? And what did it mean for his daughter to have been “with” him all this time? What did that entail?
The Clypsians didn’t have such rigid social constraints around male-female pairings and sex in general. They were quite a promiscuous Race, even in captivity. Or maybe especially in captivity.
But that didn’t mean that they were fine with forcing themselves onto one another, and that definitely didn’t mean they would allow such a thing to happen to their loved ones.
And even in the case that this wasn’t what Nosphaleen was implying, he could feel that there was something almost… subservient about the way she spoke of Sylas.
Nosphaleen hadn’t even called Sylas master like she usually did this time, and yet her father had picked up on it nonetheless, the weight of such a thing already bending heavily on his heart.
“Nosphaleen is my contracted partner,” Sylas suddenly said calmly.
The words came from nowhere and abruptly interrupted the conversation between father and daughter.
“In order to take her out of the Dungeon, I had to suppress her Clypsian Genes and bolster what portions of Mesmeryx Genes were in her, as I have a Beast Taming Profession. Since then, she has been by my side. Does that answer your questions?”
Nosphaleen fell into silence, as did her father.
“… Will you release her?”
“No. She is useful to me. As all of you can be.”
Sylas could practically hear the sneer that came after.
“So you aren’t much different from the Sylphs at all.”
“Wrong. I’m much stronger than the Sylphs.”
“Is that why you’re chained here?”
Crack.
Sylas flexed his wrist and the chains that bound his arm shattered, crumbling to pieces that scattered across the ground.
“Chained?”
Sylas slowly stood, one chain link after another shattering. The craftsmanship of the Sylphs was truly pathetic, and they were only more lax thinking that he was a normal F-Grade.
If even disciples of Petals of the Seeing Thorn wielded E-Grade Treasures that were glued together by F-Grade Runes, one could imagine how much more pathetic the Treasures of the Sylphs were.
Maybe they had stronger ones, but they didn’t think it would be necessary to waste them on Sylas. How could they know his eyes had just evolved and he could unwind their Runes with a thought?
At that point, it was a simple matter of gathering his poison and weeding into the unprotected metal before shattering it.
Sylas stood to his full height. Now, he felt like he had observed enough.
“For now, I don’t even have the time to bring you back to Earth, or the patience to enslave you all. But what I can do is help you escape if you have someone that can deal with the D-Grade. I would say the choice is yours, but that would be a lie.”