Silent City

38. The Eradication

    It had been two and a half weeks since the infection was eradicated. Hornet had slept for a total of 12 hours within that time.

While Hornet didn't necessarily need to sleep due to her pale blood, she was far more productive when she did. But there was no time for sleep now. She had hundreds of thousands of clueless citizens roaming aimlessly around the entirety of Hallownest, wondering how they ended up here and why they were borderline naked. There was no time to waste in resting.

She had heeded Grimm's advice and informed the Mantis Lords first. The three of them assembled a force of Mantis warriors to find and lead the confused victims back to a safe area. It would have been much more difficult if it wasn't for one convenient fact.

Now that Pale King was truly dead, his palace returned itself to the ancient basin since it no longer had anyone to subconsciously keep it in the dream realm. It also could have been due to the fact that the Goddess of Dreams was now destroyed. Either way, when Hornet came across it as she traveled throughout the kingdom searching for people, she was ecstatic. The feeling was short lived, though, because upon entering the palace, she found it filled with every imaginable kind of environmental hazard. She was quick to report this to the Mantis Lords, who were equally quick to express their opinions on the Pale King's unorthodox and unusual fetish for buzzsaws. Hornet agreed, and recalled long ago when she watched a young Hollow Knight traverse the treacherous landscapes that characterized the white palace. Because of this, she thought it best to keep them away from the palace until it was completely reconstructed.

Nobody was particularly willing to help Hornet remove each and every completely functional buzzsaw from the Pale King's horrid palace, so she reluctantly enlisted the help of her other sibling. She had been trying to ignore them for as long as she could, since it would be an understatement to say she now feared them. She avoided giving them orders for a while, but giving orders would be unavoidable if they were going to deconstruct the palace together. So she swallowed her fear, and she and Ghost spent a whole six days baby proofing the palace.

In a way, it was almost peaceful. The monotonous droning of the buzzsaws was strangely mind-numbing, and when she worked in the palace she cleared her mind of most of her thoughts. Prior to this, she had been bombarded with questions concerning where people would be staying, what their jobs would be, what had happened, and how they could help out. In the palace, she could at last think about the answers to these questions.

Ghost had traversed the whole castle before they began to remove the hazards; this was to find all of the switches used to cut power to the saws so that they could actually be removed. Hornet found that watching them jump through the dangerous hallways until she couldn't see them anymore was almost comforting. They moved the same as they did before, they fought the same as before, and they even looked up into her eyes the same way as before. Slowly, she was growing used to them again. Their time in the palace together worked wonders for Hornet's mentality. Now, when she looked at them, she looked at them with pride and recalled the moments they spent together before the Pantheon of Hallownest. Still, their relationship could never be the same as it was before. Hornet couldn't forget that every time she called them "little Ghost," she was addressing them wrongly. They were the Lord of Darkness now.

The once-infected citizens of Hallownest began to move into the White Palace once it was cleared of spikes and buzzsaws. It was beginning to be used as a rehabilitation center, as well as a temporary living space for Hornet, Ghost, the Hollow Knight, and a few other special guests. At this point, citizens had come flooding in and Hornet was once again swamped with work. She spent day after day running back and forth, giving people jobs to do and transporting as much food as possible from the only few food sources left in Hallownest. Luckily, they did have some outside help.