"Gods," Jake said.

"They must have put this place here. They put something in the deepest part of it and built the rest around it and whatever they used to build it with—you and your men were part of that material."

The general received this without visible surprise, which said he’d reached the same conclusion through whatever thinking the years inside the fortress had permitted him to do.

"I’ve seen others like you," he said.

"People who came through this place carrying something different from the soldiers and the creatures the dungeon sends against intruders. People from somewhere else, wearing this world but not entirely of it."

He looked at Jake with the focused attention of someone who had learned to read people across a very long time.

"None of them made it past floor 2, but you and your group have passed through the floors like it was nothing, and you," the general stared at Jake, pausing for a few seconds, then he said, "have a different aura around you, like you’re not part of this world."

"You feel different from the others I’ve seen. More than one thing simultaneously."

"My father was from another world," Jake said.

"My mother was from this one."

"That explains some of it," the general said.

"Not all of it."

He moved toward Jake and Jake held his ground, reading the general’s posture and finding no threat in it.

He stopped two meters away and looked at Jake with the eyes of a man who had been waiting for the right person to walk through his fortress for a very long time.

"Free us," he said.

The words were plain and the plainness of them made them heavier than elaboration would have.

"My men and I have been soldiers in this place since the day it stopped being what it was and became what it is," the general said.

"We were soldiers in life and we’ve been soldiers after it, and what we were when we were alive—the men who stayed at the walls, who made the calculation and held to it—that’s still present in us but buried under what the dungeon made us."

He paused, his expression becoming somber as he continued, "I don’t want to be a dungeon mechanism. I want to be the man who chose to stay."

"I’d have to kill you," Jake said.

"Yes."

"You’re offering yourself."

"I’m asking," the general said, and the distinction mattered to him enough that he made it carefully.

"I’m not ordering it or demanding it. I’m asking. On behalf of myself and every man and woman inside these walls who died holding that simple calculation and deserved to rest when the holding was done."

"We have been in this hell for forever, and I just want my soldiers free from this curse."

Jake held the general’s gaze and felt the gravity of the moment. Some choices changed everything, and this was one of them.

Jake had witnessed the soldiers’ suffering in their final days and the agony they still endured. Even imagining it made his chest tighten. No one should have to live through years of such torment.

The system pulsed.

[ TASK UPDATE: IRON WARROOM ]

[ FINAL CONDITION IDENTIFIED ]

[ TO FREE THE WARROOM’S BOUND SOULS AND ACCESS THE DIVINE ARTIFACT: THE WARROOM GENERAL MUST BE RELEASED THROUGH RAIKARNDEL SHADOW TECHNIQUE ]

[ REQUIRED ABILITY: FATHER’S VOID SHADOW RELEASE ]

[ EFFECT: SEVERS THE BINDING THAT ANCHORS SOULS TO A LOCATION — REQUIRES A MINIMUM CLASS II ]

[ THIS ABILITY HAS NOT BEEN USED BEFORE — SYSTEM WILL GUIDE FIRST APPLICATION ]

[ AFTER RELEASE: DIVINE ARTIFACT BINDING WILL DISSOLVE — ARTIFACT BECOMES ACCESSIBLE ]

[ WARNING: VOID SHADOW RELEASE DRAWS FROM BOTH MANA POOL AND SHADOW RESERVES SIMULTANEOUSLY ]

[ ESTIMATED COST: 800 MANA + SIGNIFICANT SHADOW RESERVE DRAW ]

Jake read through it and looked at his current mana pool.

[ CURRENT MANA: 3,640 UNITS ]

Enough. More than enough, the pool’s exceptional depth absorbs eight hundred units with room remaining that would still leave him functional after.

He looked at the general.

"I know how to do this," Jake said.

"I trust that you are the man for this."

He straightened, and for a moment the years fell away. Jake saw the man he had once been—the commander who stood his ground when others faltered, who bore impossible decisions and never looked away from them.

"Do it cleanly," he said.

"That’s all I ask."

Jake raised his right hand and reached for the shadow ability the system was showing him, feeling it in his bloodline the way the other abilities had felt when he first accessed them.

The Void Shadow Release formed at his palm in a darkness that was different from his shadow serpents and his shadow step and every other shadow ability he’d accessed before—deeper, with a quality of finality to it; shadow matter combined with the voiding compression of his warlock abilities into something that the system had no existing record of being used because the man who’d developed it had taken it to another world when he left this one.

The general looked at it with recognition, and the recognition was not fear.

"There it is," he said quietly, and he sounded like a man arriving somewhere he’d been trying to reach for a long time.

Jake released the ability.

The darkness reached the general, and he accepted it without resistance. The binding that had held him for countless years unraveled beneath the shadow technique’s voiding touch. In the next moment, the soldier who had walked out last through the gate was finally free.

In his final moment, he wore the same expression he’d had while watching the distant village lights beyond the fortress walls - a man who knew the cost had been real, and so had the lives it bought.

Then the marble room was quiet and the walls began to change, the dungeon’s architecture losing the coherence that the general’s bound presence had maintained, the structure settling toward the honest ruin of a place that had been empty for centuries rather than the false vitality of a place kept operational by forces it hadn’t agreed to serve. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

The group’s eyes cleared around Jake, one after another, the white receding as the room released them from wherever the passage had taken each of them.

The far wall opened where Mana Sight had long sensed something hidden. A small alcove emerged, holding a dark object no larger than a fist. The mana pouring from it felt older than the covenant system itself.

The divine artifact.

Jake crossed the room and reached into the alcove and picked it up, and the weight of it in his hand was the weight of something very old meeting something still becoming, and the system’s response to the contact was immediate and extensive.

[ DIVINE ARTIFACT ACQUIRED ]

[ IRON WARROOM TASK: COMPLETE ]

[ SOULS RELEASED: 230 ]

[ REWARDS PROCESSING... ]

Jake closed his fingers around the artifact and looked at the room around him—the group returned to themselves, the walls settling into honest ruin, the dungeon’s long occupation of this space concluding—and felt the simple weight of a calculation that had been made six days in a fortress and had held long enough to matter.