Brand-Bound: Hallowed Be The Menu [Rivals-to-Lovers Slowburn Fantasy Romance]

General Perarde, the Hammer of Faith, peered into the ruins of the ecumenical council hall. Dozens of dead, aged clerics line the council chambers.

"So, this new guy really did it, huh?" Baldr, Arbiter of the church, quipped. "Curious."

The four Arbiters stood in the entranceway. Perarde's shield, a solid chunk of demonbone, covered most of the aisle. There would be no escape in that direction.

"You again?" Jelena subtly reached for her flintlock.

"Who are you?" Perarde asked, stone-faced.

Baldr gazed at the party.

"Scent is familiar. The young Stalwart from the dire-worm pit," Walter said.

There was a pause as Baldr looked around. "Who?"

"How did he recognize me from that long ago?" Calaf said under his breath

The party had met each Arbiter at various points in the chaos of last year's pilgrimage season. They had a deadly history with each.

"Do you not see?" A mithril ruan strings strummed. "It's the wanted band of thieves who stole those relics along the path."

This was Klavier, the team bard. A non-combat role, but no less vicious than the rest.

Walter and Baldr looked at each other, eyebrows arched.

"Who?" Balder asked with a sigh.

"Ah, them." Walter's voice was neutral.

A standoff ensued. Jelena slowly backed the party away towards the still-open back door to the council chambers.

"You, uh, got any auxiliary arbiters waiting in the wings to ambush us?" Jelena asked.

"Oh, heavens no," said Klavier. "We are loosely affiliated with those ruffians. They ask us to command them, but for the most part they are but a force multiplier."

"That's the new guy's idea," Baldr added.

A demonbone gauntlet shot up, demanding silence. Perarde snarled.

"Well, one of the realm's most wanted criminals, amidst a massacre of the ecumenical council?" Perarde eyed the party slyly. "At least the perpetrators were captured in short order."

The implication was clear: they were to be framed as the assassins of the ruling council.

Jelena angled an accusatory finger. "Hey, you said yourself that the new archpope did this. Bede, or Breakspear?"

"Yes, but with the competition dead, the new archpope's ascension is fait accompli," Klavier hummed.

"Offering him prisoners for a triumph will smooth over the transition," Baldr added.

Walter climbed up to the right wing of the council halls, while Baldr began to stalk the left side. Calaf backed towards their escape route slowly, his shield up. It was a good plan, parlaying information out of the Arbiters. But now that the party was in the Arbiter's sights, they had to flee the Demon Lord's Fall as quickly as possible. Lose them in the fumaroles, maybe.

"Wait!" Zilara said, then paused for effect.

"Twinbrands," Walter growled.

Zilara nodded. "I know what you are."

The Arbiters in the wings stopped. They looked to Perarde. Even Klavier ceased applying his buffs. The bard's lips pursed.

"Oh?" Perarde brandished his sword. "Kill them all."

The General spoke plainly, even bored.

It was times like these that Calaf really wished they had some of those Escape Ropes.

As soon as Calaf's heavy boot crossed a threshold near the back door, Perarde struck. His mighty golden claymore dented Calaf's shield. Even with the experience of several levels and a rank up to Paladin, Calaf's constitution had no chance against the Hammer of Faith. Two blows sent Calaf's shield flying aside, reeling.

He was wide open. Perarde brought his sword to bear for a third blow, a thrust aimed squarely at Calaf's neck. Enkidu leaped between them, parried the claymore, then sent Perarde reeling back himself.

"Go!" Enkidu said, as Baldr and Walter jumped in from the wings.

Calaf did not need to be told twice. Jelena was already at the door, flash-bangs ready to lob into the council chamber. Enkidu fought off all three of the martial arbiters, aided by the narrow confines of the aisle. Jelena chucked the grenades in, and Enkidu rolled away before they burst.

"Children's toys," Perarde tsked, as the battle with Enkidu continued.

"Get up to the Archpope. C'mon," Jelena said in a huff. "We can still do this."

Even if they escaped the Grand Cathedral, there was no guarantee that this new Archpope Breakspear wouldn't just cut off Calaf and Zilara's ability to breathe, same as the council. They had to confront him. They had to find out how this ability worked before they could combat it.

A looping hallway, exposed to the winds of the Fellmarsh, ran along the 'crown' of the dead demon's skull. The thick wall of bone to their left ought to shadow the round council chambers amidst the demon king's brainpan.

That target marker held steady many floors above their heads.

"Stairs, maybe a quarter-league ahead," Zilara said, keeping up with the adults in their mad dash.

The wall ahead of them burst outward. Enkidu went flying with such force that the party thought he flew right off the edge of the cathedral balcony. But a quick grab on the edge of the chiseled archway allowed the wild man to pull himself up.

"Keep going," he said, kicking Walter back through the ruined wall when the Arbiter attacked.

Onward, they continued.

Arbitral auxiliaries were nowhere to be seen. Most likely, they were clearing up on the lower floors. With the council dead, the cathedral guards had no other alternative command authority beyond the archpope. The party had intentionally taken off in the opposite direction from where Oromund fled. Hopefully that would be enough to allow him to escape with their civilian charges.

Enkidu continued to keep the Arbiters at bay. Sounds of their battle wafted through the halls. Unnervingly, demonbone left no echoes.

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"Ah, Breakspear will have a guard with him, won't he?" Calaf said. "Can we even do this?"

"Just keep going," Jelena said.

Fighting off auxiliaries would be orders of magnitude more survivable than taking on the official Arbiters. Enkidu remained standing, though with Klavier the bard buffing each arbiter to be twice as fast, he was struggling on the 3-versus-1.

A stairwell wide as the main road north from Riverglen ran up along what would've counted as the Demon King's left temple. The trio loped up the stairs three at a time, and still scarcely any progress was made. To think that the earliest members of the church had chiseled all this out of their ancient foe by hand.

Calaf looked back when they were about halfway up. The ground could scarcely be seen through a Fellmarsh haze. Oromund should have fought his way to the ground floor by now. Hopefully, he was out. Hopefully, they'd meet again.

Onward, they trudged. If Enkidu and the Arbiters were still duking it out, they neither saw nor heard any sign.

A tower with a spiral pattern and no discernible entrance loomed, poking out the top of the Demon King's head. It was as if Roland's spear had grown into a pillar and blown up a thousand times the size. It was clearly made of plateau-quarried stone, a shade darker than the sun-washed demonbone.

Where have I seen that before? Calaf plied his memory. Answers came to him like a stampede of charging dire-boar.

The Battletower. The Southern Spire. Even the old lighthouse of Port Town. That was it: these three towers were of similar make. The old gospels described the prison spire south of Riverglen as made of pure rock. It had undergone heavy revisions by more human architects in the intervening years.

There at the base of the tower sat a gaping wound, the spot where the Demonkiller Spear pierced the fiend-lord's weak point. It had been filled in with gold in the interim, forming a starburst pattern melded in with the bone. Beyond that was a simple chair, the plain wooden archpope's seat. Calaf got the impression it wasn't meant to be here. The wide, flat area atop the Demon King's skull formed a natural plaza. Wind continued to howl, but it was relatively thin at this elevation.

A lone figure sat upon the austere throne.

"Hello," Bede said simply.

"No guards?" Jelena asked.

"Unnecessary." The archpope maintained a hard-to-read expression

Zilara peered at the archpope. The target marker they'd tracked remained above his head. Then, the archpope pulled out his inventory and equipped a ring. The marker dissipated in a blink.

"He's got one of those rings that block statuses," Calaf whispered.

"The child from the Riverglen library?" Bede leaned forward. "And that knight who was escorting her. You weren't there on official church business, were you?"

Photographic memory. Calaf grimaced. Might be good to know.

"I'm lapsed," Calaf admitted.

Bede let out a barely perceptible chuckle. "I'm sure."

"We goanna fight him?" Zilara asked. She summoned her Menu, then… "Hmmm?"

"What is it?" Jelena asked.

The holy child frowned, then whispered. "I can't select him."

Calaf, too, pulled out his Menu. Bede was present, but the [Attack] options were greyed out.

"Figuring it out?" Bede asked.

"The What." Calaf shrugged. "Still working on the Why and How."

"'How' is easy." Bede pointed a ring-covered hand, thumb pointing, back towards the tower. "Signal tower. Edits and imbues the Holy Menu with signals that can render targets immune to being attacked, or vice versa. Centuries in the making, a project older than the church. You see, for my ancient predecessor, one of the archbishops of the second century, discovered a hidden computing machine when he was but a mere bishop—"

"We already figured all that out," Jelena said, hand on her hip.

"Oh, good." Bede leaned back. "So the Holy Priestess Mia's former prison was an amplification tower, by which the Demon King's influence was to spread even further to the wildlands of the south. Oh, Branded can travel anywhere, but the specific tweaking of monster levels, variables, and the like? Only possible in a limited range from this corpse here. Getting that south spire up to snuff has been my job for the past several years."

The archpope kicked the floor as if to demonstrate.

"Thirty-two percent of previous archpopes have died violently during their term. It's one of the most dangerous professions in the realm," Bede said, then presented his hand. "So, first thing I did when I activated the control matrix was to prevent any Branded from being able to hit or strike me. It's all controlled by one of these rings, see? I can remove all buffs. Grant any form of debuff. Deactivate glamour. Force targets to select items--conclave voting ballots, for instance--en masse. Triple the armor weight of your Paladin here. Don't even have to move from this chair."

Jelena grinned cheekily. "Well, that's quite the plan. Only one factor you neglected."

The relic thief granted Calaf a sly grin. The Paladin looked back. Was she really going to…?

Bede sighed. "Which is?"

"My bad habit for episcopicide." Jelena quickly drew her flintlock, aimed it from the hip, and fired square at Bede's chest.

In the time it took to pull the trigger, a golden barrier erupted from the tarnished splotch on the floor. The weak point in the Demon King's armor did not so much explode as disintegrate within the rapidly formed barrier. Figures leaped at inhuman speeds out of the resulting hole and danced around in a vicious, artful sword fight. It was Enkidu, surrounded and sorely outmatched by a trio of Arbiters. Klavier the bard climbed up out of the new skylight, again with an inhuman leap.

In time, Enkidu and the arbiters withdrew to opposite sides of the pit. The Arbiters eyed Bede sitting there, implacable, off to their right.

"I'll be fine," Enkidu said, at Zilara's prompting.

"Hey." Baldr whispered. "You the new guy? We've been meaning to talk to you."

"Talk is about all you can do." Bede motioned for them to try the Menu.

The Arbiters did so, expressing no small amount of nonplussed amusement at the edit.

"There goes my plan to apply a barrier to the jugular then take over the joint," Baldr muttered.

"Finally, someone's finished what the old lord started," Klavier said, strumming his ruan.

"Sounds like the greybeards are all dead, 'cept you," Baldr said. "Stacking the council with lickspittles was a considerable investment on our part. Centuries in the making. Evidently, we cannot attack you, so you've got the cards for now. Still, there's more than one way to skin a dire-cat, y'hear?"

"Upholding the old lord's will is our only concern," Perarde said, brandishing his sword at Jelena's group.

Just like that, the Arbiters and Bebe's interests were allied. Which left their sole opposition…

"Don't need to wait for my permission." Bede motioned towards Jelena and company.

Calaf brandished his shield. There was still one thing from the gospels that didn't make sense…

"Wait!" Zilara yelled, temporarily calling a parlay on the fight. "I know what they are!"

Perarde moved forward, but Calaf and Enkidu blocked him.

"Turn off the glamour again," Zilara goaded the archpope. "C'mon, just watch this."

Archpope Bede tapped his foot once, and it was done.

Spoofing rings and glamour rings were deactivated all at once. Where before stood Paladin Perarde, Hammer of Faith; Baldr, the Barriermeister; Walter, Church Hunter; and Klavier the Bard, now, there was…

A mighty horned devil, still wielding a golden claymore. Its demonic chitin was further enhanced by Paladin's demonbone armor formed from its fallen comrades.

Red eyes flared from beneath the bone-helm.

Another figure with a jagged thorn-crown, its natural armor all in gold, sat to Perarde's left:

"Feels good not to have to keep up that awful spell." Baldr stretched overlong limbs.

A taller demon, lankier than the jailer demons of yore but with a sword seemingly growing out of its arm, stood in the back.

And an even more slender fiend with a wispy chitin. It looked not unlike the Piper Demon, eliciting the greatest chill of all down Calaf's spine.

Where once there were armor-glad Arbiters of the church, now four gnarled and chitinous demons stood atop the highest point of the Demon Lord's Fall.