Episode-545
Chapter : 1089
“Your sentries are still watching an empty building, Captain,” Lloyd replied, his voice dangerously quiet. “You were so focused on your puppets, you failed to notice the man who was watching the puppeteer.”
The realization dawned on Graph’s face, a wave of dawning, horrified comprehension. The spider. The silent, insignificant detail he had dismissed. He had been under surveillance the entire time. His perfect, clandestine operation had been a transparent farce, and he had been the fool at its center. His shock curdled into a new, more dangerous emotion: the cornered fury of a predator that has been outmaneuvered.
He let out a low, guttural growl, a sound that was not entirely human. “So,” he snarled, a bloody, defiant grin splitting his face. “The little lord has claws after all. You have played your hand well.” He coughed, spitting a glob of blood onto the grass. “But the game is not over.”
A profound, and horrifying, transformation began. Graph’s body, already large and powerful, began to contort and swell. The sound of cracking bones and tearing muscle filled the night air. His skin grew pale and waxy, and his features seemed to melt and reshape themselves into a new, distorted, and demonic configuration. His jaw elongated, his teeth sharpened into needle-like points, and his eyes… his eyes began to glow with the same sickening, malevolent green light Lloyd had seen in the spider’s vision.
But the greatest, most defining, and most terrifying change happened on his back. With a sound of tearing flesh and popping vertebrae, two massive, leathery, bat-like wings erupted from his shoulder blades, unfurling to their full, magnificent, and unholy span. They were the wings of a demon, the ultimate and undeniable identifier of a true Devil Worshiper who had completed the final, damning pact.
“Since my identity has been revealed,” Graph hissed, his voice now a layered, demonic rasp, “there is nothing left to hide.” He rose to his full, monstrous height, a creature of nightmare clad in the tattered remains of a soldier’s armor. His distorted face, now a parody of his former stoic features, twisted into a sneer of pure, malevolent power. “Allow me to reintroduce myself, Lord Ferrum. I am Graph, Apostle of the Seventh Circle. And your miserable life is now forfeit.”
With a powerful downstroke of his new, demonic wings, he launched himself into the air, a black silhouette against the cold, silver moon. He was a creature of the abyss, and he was now free.
Lloyd watched the transformation not with shock, but with a cold, clinical fascination. His [All--Seeing Eye] was active, recording every gruesome detail of the metamorphosis, analyzing the surge of demonic energy, the restructuring of the man’s DNA, the grafting of an abyssal entity onto a human soul. It was horrifying, yes. But it was also data.
He looked up at the flying, winged devil, and a slow, cold, and utterly unimpressed smile touched his lips. Wings, he thought. How delightfully primitive. You have revealed your greatest strength. And in doing so, you have revealed your greatest, and most fatal, weakness. You have taken to the sky, a realm with no cover, no terrain to exploit. You have just made yourself the perfect target.
He had seen enough. The time for analysis was over. The time for a final, absolute, and very public execution had arrived.
He reached into his soul, into the wellspring of his Austin bloodline, and called upon a power he had not yet truly unleashed. He had spent his System Coins. He had practiced in the time-dilated forge of his Soul Farm. His control, which had been that of a novice, was now that of a master. His Blue Ring Eyes, once a simple tool of binding and sealing, had been reforged. They were now A-Grade. And they were thirsty.
The whites of his eyes turned to a perfect, starless black. His irises erupted into two luminous, intricate, and terrifyingly complex rings of azure light. The very air around him seemed to hum, to bend to his will.
He looked up at the flying, gloating devil. And with a single, focused thought, he gave the command.
From the empty air all around Graph, they appeared. Not a dozen. Not a hundred. But a thousand. A thousand small, three-inch-long, impossibly sharp nails forged from pure, solidified, bluish-white Void energy. They materialized in an instant, a shimmering, deadly cloud that surrounded the flying demon from every possible angle.
Graph froze in mid-air, his triumphant sneer dissolving into a mask of pure, uncomprehending shock. He had prepared for a fight with a lord, a spirit user, a swordsman. He had not, in his darkest, most paranoid nightmares, prepared for this.
Chapter : 1090
Lloyd’s voice, cold and clear and carrying with an unnatural resonance, cut through the night. “The sky does not belong to you, Apostle.”
And then, he closed his fist.
The thousand ethereal nails, all at once, shot forward. They did not fly; they simply moved, a silent, instantaneous storm of azure death that converged on the devil from every direction. It was not an attack; it was an inevitability.
Graph let out a roar of panic and rage, his demonic wings beating frantically as he tried to evade, to summon a shield of darkness. But it was too late. He hadn’t realized that he was facing a power that was not just strong, but conceptually, fundamentally, and absolutely superior.
The direct attack hit him like a physical manifestation of a god’s wrath. The nails of pure energy tore through his leathery wings, shredding them to ribbons. They punched through his demonic hide, through his armor, through his flesh. He screamed, a high, thin, agonizing sound as he was riddled with a thousand points of cold, blue light.
He fell from the sky, no longer a proud devil, but a broken, bleeding pin-cushion, trailing smoke and ribbons of his own tattered wings. He crashed to the earth with a sickening, wet thud, his magnificent flight brought to a brutal, bloody, and ignominious end. The Apostle had just learned a very hard, and very final, lesson about the true hierarchy of power in the world.
The silence that followed Graph’s brutal, plummeting fall was profound. He lay in a crumpled heap, a grotesque parody of a fallen angel, his magnificent demonic wings now little more than tattered, smoking rags. His body was a mosaic of deep, cauterized puncture wounds, each one weeping not blood, but a thin, black, viscous ichor that sizzled on the cold grass. The thousand ethereal nails had done their work with a horrifying, surgical precision, leaving him alive, but only just. He was broken, bleeding, and utterly, comprehensively defeated.
Lloyd did not gloat. He did not posture. He simply walked over to the fallen devil, his footsteps the only sound in the night. He stood over the broken form of his enemy, a figure of calm, absolute, and terrifying authority. The A-Grade power of his Blue Ring Eyes still pulsed, the luminous azure rings in the starless black of his sclera a declaration of a power that was beyond the man’s comprehension.
“You have made two critical errors, Apostle,” Lloyd said, his voice a low, clinical lecture. “First, you underestimated your target. A common, and often fatal, mistake for the arrogant. Second, and more importantly, you chose to take to the air. An open battlefield with no cover, no terrain. You made yourself a target against an opponent who does not need to aim.”
He knelt beside the gasping, bleeding creature, his expression not of anger, but of a doctor examining a particularly interesting specimen. “Now,” he continued, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. “You are going to tell me everything. You are going to tell me who gave you this power. You are going to tell me the name of your master. You are going to tell me the full extent of my dear uncle’s involvement in this… enterprise. And you are going to give me the name of the man who designed this plague.”
Graph let out a wet, rattling laugh, a sound like gravel being shaken in a jar of blood. “Go to hell, little lord,” he coughed, a fresh trickle of black ichor running from his lips. “My master’s name is not for your mortal ears. And your uncle… your uncle is a fool, a pawn. He knows nothing of the true game.”
Lloyd sighed, a sound of genuine, weary disappointment. “I was hoping you would be more cooperative. I find these next steps so… tedious.”
He raised a hand, and from the air, a single, six-inch ethereal nail materialized, hovering an inch from Graph’s glowing green eye. “I can do this the easy way, or I can spend the rest of the night dismantling you, piece by piece, nerve by nerve. I have a rather… creative imagination when it comes to deconstruction. Your pain will be a magnificent, glorious spectacle. But in the end, you will talk. They always do.”
For a moment, Lloyd saw a flicker of genuine, primal fear in Graph’s demonic eyes. But it was quickly replaced by a new, more terrible resolve. A fanatical, self-destructive light.