Episode-563
Chapter : 1105
“Hammers are useless against smoke, as Lord Kyle says,” he continued, his voice a low, dangerous hum. “So, we must forge a new kind of weapon. Not a hammer, but a scalpel. Not a legion, but a small, elite, and utterly ruthless unit of hunters, whose sole purpose is to wage this new, silent war on our behalf.”
He painted a picture for them, giving a tangible, terrifying form to his abstract concept. “Imagine a group of men and women, hand-picked not for their noble birth or their skill in a tourney, but for their specific, lethal, and often… unsavory… talents. Men who can move like ghosts through a crowded city. Women who can hear a whisper of treason from a league away. Mages who specialize not in fireballs, but in illusions and curses. Individuals who can kill a target in a locked, guarded room without leaving a single trace that they were ever there.”
He could see the horror and a dawning, terrible fascination warring on their faces. He was describing a monster of their own creation, a tool that was as dishonorable as it was undeniably necessary.
“This unit,” he declared, his voice dropping, drawing them in, “would exist outside the official military chain of command. It would have no banner. It would have no public name. It would operate in absolute secrecy, its victories never celebrated, its losses never mourned. It would answer to one authority, and one authority alone: this council, through me.”
Lord Boros of the Blackwood, a man whose honor was as rigid and unbending as the ancient trees of his domain, could no longer contain his disgust. “Assassins,” he spat, the word a curse. “You are proposing we create our own den of cutthroats and spies, like the Altamirans. We are Ferrums. We meet our enemies on the field of honor.”
“And what honor is there in watching your people be consumed by a plague you cannot fight?” Lloyd countered instantly, his voice sharp, devoid of any deference. “What honor is there in your legions standing guard over an empty town where five thousand souls have been unmade? The enemy has thrown away the rulebook of honor. To cling to it now is not nobility; it is suicide. It is a beautiful, magnificent, and utterly pointless form of suicide.”
His brutal, unvarnished truth silenced the hall once more. He was not just challenging their strategy; he was challenging their very identity, and he was winning.
“This unit will not replace our legions,” Lloyd continued, his tone softening slightly, shifting from a brutal lecturer to a pragmatic commander soothing the fears of his subordinates. “They will be the shield that allows our legions to maintain their honor. Their task will be to hunt the puppet masters, not just the puppets. To identify and eliminate the enemy’s commanders, their sorcerers from the Seventh Circle, their spies within the Altamiran court. They will sow the same chaos and fear in the enemy’s heart that they have sought to sow in ours. They will be the darkness that holds the greater darkness at bay.”
He stopped his pacing and stood before them, his audacious, heretical proposal laid bare. “They will be our ghosts. Our phantoms. Our silent, unseen protectors. We will call them… the Wraiths. They will be the necessary evil that allows our kingdom, and our honor, to remain good.”
The hall was utterly, profoundly silent. The lords stared at him, their minds grappling with the terrible, seductive logic of his proposal. He had offered them a path to victory, but it was a path that led through a dark and morally treacherous landscape, a path their ancestors would have recoiled from in horror. He was asking them to become the very thing they despised in order to survive.
It was Arch Duke Roy who finally, irrevocably, broke the silence. He had been a statue throughout his son’s revolutionary speech, his face an unreadable mask of stone. He rose to his feet, his full, formidable presence filling the room with an absolute, unquestionable authority that dwarfed any of their personal misgivings.
“The decision is made,” he declared, his voice a final, unarguable judgment that was both a sentence on their old ways and a benediction on the new. “My son will have his Wraiths. This council will grant him any resources, any men, and any authority he requires to forge this new weapon.” He looked around the room, his gaze a hard, challenging fire. “The old ways of war are dead. A new, darker age has begun. And we will meet it with a new, darker steel.”
The council was over. The lords, their objections silenced by both Lloyd’s irrefutable logic and their Arch Duke’s absolute command, gave their reluctant, heavy assent. The first, and most critical, battle of the new war had been won, not with a sword, but with words, in the heart of their own war council. Lloyd had not just been given command of a unit; he had been given permission to fundamentally, and irrevocably, change the very soul of his house. The Lions of the North were about to learn how to hunt like wolves.
Chapter : 1106
The air on the ninth level of the Soul Farm was thick with the cloying, sweet scent of decay. It wasn't the honest rot of a forest floor, rich with the promise of new life. This was a predatory, vampiric sweetness, the perfume of life being actively, hungrily consumed. It was a scent that promised only emptiness, a fragrance that clung to the back of the throat and chilled the soul. Lloyd stood at the edge of the clearing, his breath misting in the unnaturally cold air, his jaw tight with a frustration so profound it felt like a physical weight in his chest. Before him, the Unbeatable Orchard stood in silent, malevolent mockery.
There were only three of them. Three gnarled, ancient trees whose bark was the color of old bone and whose leafless, necrotic branches clawed at the perpetually twilight sky of this biome. They didn't look like much. They looked dead, like petrified monuments to a long-forgotten blight. But Lloyd knew better. He had learned through two previous, costly encounters that they were more alive, and more lethally stubborn, than anything he had faced in this dimension. The first attempt had been a cautious probe with a single spirit, resulting in a hasty retreat. The second had been a two-pronged test of their defenses, which had been met with contemptuous ease. This time was different. This was not a test. This was a judgment.
"Execute Protocol Gamma-Seven," Lloyd commanded, his voice a low, hard-edged thing that cut through the oppressive silence. He wasn't speaking to a person, but to a perfectly synchronized unit of gods and monsters that answered to his will alone. This protocol was his masterpiece of combined arms, designed to inflict maximum damage from four distinct vectors simultaneously, overwhelming any singular defensive system. It was built on the assumption that nothing could withstand a simultaneous assault from fire, lightning, water, and chaos energy.
The response was instantaneous and cataclysmic.
From his right, Iffrit, his nine-foot-tall demon of fire and magma, roared a silent, spiritual challenge that vibrated through their shared bond like a volcano preparing to erupt. The demon king took two thunderous steps forward, his massive flame-wreathed zanbatō carving a molten arc through the air. A tidal wave of pure, annihilating fire, a moving wall of crimson and orange, erupted from the blade and washed over the nearest tree. The very air shimmered and screamed under the thermal assault, an attack that could have leveled a fortress and glassed the ground it stood on. Through his connection, Lloyd could feel Iffrit’s absolute confidence, the certainty of a primal force of destruction that had never met an object it could not unmake.
Simultaneously, from his left, Fang Fairy became a blur of azure light. Her form, a graceful fusion of a storm goddess and a predator, crackled with contained power. With a gesture of divine elegance, she unleashed a concentrated barrage of lightning. Not a single, clumsy bolt, but a hundred smaller, faster, and lethally precise Lightning Darts that converged on the second tree in a screaming, high-voltage swarm. Each dart was an armor-piercing round of pure energy, designed to bypass any physical defense and strike the core within. Her intent was cold and precise, a surgeon’s focus in a storm of violence.
Behind him, his two newer, stranger spirits moved. Abyss, the great white shark made of swirling, hyper-pressurized water, surged forward. It didn't swim through the air but warped it, its conceptual pressure turning the ground before the third tree into a soupy, grasping mud. Then, it unleashed its own attack—a focused jet of water moving at supersonic speeds, a liquid spear designed to pulverize, not cut. It was an attack meant to shatter stone and steel, and Lloyd could feel Abyss’s grim determination to prove its worth.
And beside Lloyd, Doppelganger, his doppelganger of silver light and shadow, mimicked the fourth tree that wasn’t there. It raised its ethereal arms and unleashed a torrent of pure, chaotic energy—a mimicry of the life-draining power the trees themselves possessed. It was a conceptual attack, an attempt to fight poison with its own spectral reflection, to see if the orchard's defense was proof against its own foul magic.
It was a perfect, four-pronged assault, a symphony of destruction targeting each enemy with a different elemental fury. It was overwhelming. It was magnificent. Lloyd felt a flicker of grim satisfaction. Let them regenerate from this.
And it was utterly, pathetically, useless.