"Well, the pay for two cats was the death of my village and the ones of my siblings that may or may not have survived at all," laughed Gab. His bone-chilling laugh could clearly be heard, echoing from the walls, sending even chills running down the spines of his cats. These two immediately moved closer to him.

Gab immediately hugged these two as tears immediately began streaming down his cheeks like waterfalls. Till now, he had suppressed the thoughts relating to that event happening before his adventures into the unknown world. Gab was good at distracting himself with cursing the hardships of his present, which always helped him when it came to the big questions regarding his family.

Did his siblings even survive? If they did, how the hell is he going to find them. He neither knew where they were nor if they even were alive. The world has more people than he could count. Where does someone start searching if they can't even answer the most basic questions? Such as: "are they even alive, and if yes, where should we search for such a person?"

Maybe one should put naive thoughts such as reuniting with one's sibling aside. After all, isn't just mere wishful thinking?

Such a thing would never happen if it wasn't for the plot armor provided by the author.

But Gab didn't dare ask himself these questions, and his current predicament helped him avoid these questions till now.

After all, one can't ask these questions themselves if one fights daily without any long breaks for survival. This situation made it perfect to instinctively put aside these matters.

His position also didn't make things easier and put further pressure on him. Gab regularly feared that if he were to show an ounce of weakness, some of his fellow comrades might use it to challenge his position. Pressure was a double-edged sword for him since it also forced Gab to put his siblings aside, for the time being, to focus on the present.

After all, it's easy to ignore the voices in your head if the noises in the environment drown them. That's why he surrounded himself with people so that he was never alone for a damn hour.

By now, he lost any semblance of time. If one were to ask him: "How long has it been since you all got separated?"

He couldn't give any proper answers to it. It could be days or weeks or months. The time in the dungeon distorted his sense of time. After a short while, he stopped thinking about it.

And whenever thoughts about his siblings still came up, he always brushed them aside while reassuring himself that they were fine.

He didn't know that one of his siblings ended up as a guinea pig, losing his mind as it got filled by the thoughts of hunger and devouring and assimilation. Neither did he know that his other brother Raph.

The latter ended up as a vessel for an old god that hadn't touched the surface of the world in thousands of years. The fate of his other sibling called Michael was comparable to the ones of Raph and Luz.

「Unfortunally, I, the narrator, am not allowed to tell you, my dear readers, more about his fate since the author forbids it. But I can tell you that the author plans to write about his fate in a separate book. This will be his first try at splitting his original book into five different ones, focussing on one sibling at a time. If the first one doesn't get well-received, he'll be absorbing it into his main book. 」

"Gab… You will find them… You will definitely find them…No matter what everyone else says, they are definitely alive. I mean, they are your siblings…They were probably enjoying their time, so don't worry. I mean, Raph got sold to other mages. They wouldn't treat a fellow mage that badly, right?" muttered Gab to himself, but it took him more than an hour before he could reassure himself completely.

"I never knew that my dear general had such a side," muttered a girl watching him with curious eyes from like two meters away.

Her comment startled the young Gab, who didn't realize that she was observing him the whole time.

"Hehe. I'm sorry that you have to see me in such a pitiful state. But unfortunally, even I, the great, also sometimes cries like a child," Gab answered with a chuckle while wiping away his tears.

Enota chuckled at his words before throwing something fancy towards him.

Gab grabbed it and realized that Enota threw a handkerchief at him. But before Gab could say thanks to it, Enota sighed loudly: "Normally, I wouldn't care about why you are crying. But since we are in the dungeon, your story will probably be more interesting than listening to the echoes of water droplets falling down from stalactites."

With a chuckle and an ugly smiling face with tear stains on his cheeks, Gab replied: "Thank you for the handkerchief."

After he wiped away his tear stains, Enota immediately stated: "I'm waiting, my dear general.~"

"Fine, I've planned you on telling either way on how my siblings and I got separated from each other. It's quite a tragic one," sighed Gab as he changed his positions. The heads of his two cats were resting at that moment against his leg while purring loudly.

"Tell me. I like tragedies since the lives of most people are in reality tragic, unlike the idyllic the old fairy tales one's parents would read them," commented Enota.

She sat there quietly with sparkling eyes and a hunger for an entertaining, emotional story.

And so Gab began with his story.