Episode-586
Chapter : 1151
The question was a thunderclap in the oppressive silence. It was an accusation of a crime that had no name, a genocide committed not for territory, but for raw materials.
Viscount Rubel’s wild, ecstatic laughter had ceased. The manic energy seemed to drain from him, replaced by a new and far more terrifying stillness. He looked down at his nephew, at the quiet, unassuming boy who had just named the unnameable sin at the heart of his new kingdom.
For a long, terrible moment, Rubel did not answer. He simply stared, and a slow, cold, and exquisitely cruel smile spread across his face. It was not a smile of glee or triumph. It was a smile of pure, unadulterated, and monstrous pride. It was the smile of a creator showing off his masterpiece.
He did not need to speak a word. The smile was the only confirmation Lloyd needed.
The ice in Lloyd’s soul, the cold, strategic core that had governed his actions, finally, irrevocably, shattered. It was replaced by a fire. A white-hot, silent, and absolute inferno of pure, cleansing rage.
The people of Gazef. The market town his father had praised for its hardy, good-natured people. The children who laughed in the streets. The merchants who sold their wares. The families who had lived and loved and died there for generations. They had not vanished. They had been harvested. Their bodies and souls had been repurposed, turned into the mindless, soulless puppets in his uncle's unholy army.
This was no longer a war for a throne. This was no longer about a blood-debt for a fallen father. This had become something far more primal. This was an act of extermination. A pest control operation on a biblical scale.
Rubel, still smiling that terrible, silent smile, raised a single, armored hand.
"Kill them," he commanded, his voice a flat, bored thing. "And bring me their heads. I wish to use them as bookends."
The sea of red eyes fixed on them. The army of five thousand, the stolen souls of Gazef, began to advance.
"Ben," Lloyd said, his voice a low, dangerous whisper, the sound of a blade being unsheathed.
"I know," Ben replied, his own voice a guttural rumble of contained fury.
They did not speak of strategy. They did not speak of odds. Their two minds, their two souls, were now united in a single, absolute purpose.
To burn this unholy kingdom, and its mad king, to the ground.
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The advance of the five thousand was not a charge. It was a tide. A slow, inexorable, and silent wave of death that flowed through the streets of Ashworth, its singular purpose to drown the two living sparks of defiance in the center of the square. The air grew thick with the soul-crushing pressure of five thousand individual auras of despair, a psychic tsunami that could shatter the will of an ordinary man before the first blow was even struck.
Lloyd and Ben were not ordinary men. They were twin rocks against which the tide was about to break. There was no discussion, no last-minute strategy session. Their two minds, honed by a hundred years of shared conflict and a lifetime of war, were already moving in perfect, deadly sync.
"The kings," Ben stated, his voice a flat, tactical assessment. "They are the primary threat. The legion is a distraction, an attritional tool. We must neutralize the command structure first."
"Agreed," Lloyd shot back, his own mind already a step ahead. "But we can't let the legion pin us down. We need a wall. A firewall."
His command was not spoken; it was a pure, focused burst of intent sent through his spiritual bond. Iffrit! Incinerate!
A cataclysm of fire erupted in front of them. The nine-foot-tall demon king of annihilation materialized in a silent, violent explosion of crimson light. Without a word, Iffrit slammed his colossal, flame-wreathed zanbatō into the cobblestones. The ground screamed and split, and a fifty-foot-high, two-hundred-foot-wide wall of roaring, molten plasma erupted from the fissure, a curtain of pure annihilation that instantly vaporized the first hundred legionnaires and held the rest of the charging army at bay.
The firewall was not a static defense. It was a living, churning inferno, a testament to Iffrit’s overwhelming, Transcendent-level power. The skeletons that pressed against it were instantly unmade, their bones turning to black ash, their cursed spirits snuffed out.
"That will hold them for a time," Lloyd said, the heat of the inferno washing over him. "But not the kings."
Chapter : 1152
As if on cue, a shadow passed over them. High above, a new horror had taken to the sky. It was one of the new King-Level knights, a skeletal creature fused to the back of a vast, leathery, draconic beast, its wingspan blotting out the sickly grey light. It was a Nazgûl from a forgotten nightmare, and it was diving directly at them.
Before Lloyd could even issue a command, a second, silent force moved. Fang Fairy! Intercept!
From the shadows behind Lloyd, a blur of pure, azure lightning shot into the sky. Fang Fairy, in her graceful, storm-goddess form, moved with a speed that was not physical but conceptual. She met the diving dragon-knight in mid-air. There was no grand explosion. There was only a silent, brilliant flash of blue-white light. The dragon-knight and its mount simply… ceased to be. A silent, perfect, surgical strike that had erased a King-Level threat from the equation in less than a heartbeat. Fang Fairy then became a phantom, a flickering ghost of lightning that began to dance at the edges of the battlefield, her mission to hunt and neutralize the enemy command units—the Crown-Rank and Commander-level knights—before they could organize a coordinated assault.
With the immediate aerial threat gone and the main legion held at bay by the firewall, the battlefield was momentarily, impossibly, clear. It was just them, and the nine remaining kings who were now beginning to advance through the flames of Iffrit’s wall, their cursed forms immune to the conventional heat.
"Now," Ben said, his voice a low growl. "Our turn."
He did not wait for an answer. He became a force of nature. His two magnificent steel golems, which had stood as silent sentinels, roared to life. They charged into the inferno, their polished steel bodies glowing cherry-red but remaining unharmed, their purpose to engage and pin down the advancing kings.
Ben himself became the eye of a new storm. The blade storm of a thousand metallic shards he had used before was a child’s toy compared to what he unleashed now. He tore the very iron from the foundations of the surrounding buildings, weaving it into a flowing, liquid-metal fortress around himself and Lloyd. But it was a fortress that attacked. Great, lashing tendrils of semi-molten iron, each one the size of a battering ram, shot out to smash and crush the elite guards that were beginning to slip around the edges of the firewall. He was a one-man army, a master of a destructive art form that was as beautiful as it was terrifying.
The battle for Ashworth had become a war of gods. Iffrit, a king of fire, holding back an ocean of the dead. Fang Fairy, a goddess of the storm, hunting the enemy elite in the shadows. And Ben, a demigod of steel, waging his own personal war against the very fabric of the city.
Lloyd stood at the center of it all, a quiet, still point in a universe of absolute chaos. His spirits were engaged. His ally was engaged. And he, the commander, the strategist, was free to do what he did best.
Hunt.
His gaze swept across the battlefield, his mind processing the complex, multi-layered conflict with a cold, divine clarity. He identified his target. The Silent Judge, the same conceptual horror that had nearly broken his father-in-law, was advancing on one of Ben's golems, its aura of absolute law causing the golem’s movements to become sluggish and heavy.
Lloyd smiled, a cold, predatory thing. The Judge fought by imposing rules. It was time to introduce it to an opponent who played by none at all. He took a single, silent step. And vanished.
The battlefield was a symphony of cataclysmic violence. Ben's two steel golems were locked in a brutal, desperate struggle against four of the King-Level Curse Knights. One golem, a masterpiece of articulated power, was trading blows with the Crimson General, their duel a magnificent, terrible dance of red and silver. The other was being systematically dismantled by the combined assault of the Silent Judge, a resurrected Weeping Executioner, and a new, hulking brute of a knight whose armor seemed to be forged from solidified bone.
Ben himself was a fortress under siege. The remaining five kings were focusing their power on him, their cursed abilities crashing against his flowing, liquid-metal defenses in waves of black and crimson light. His blade storms were still a whirlwind of death, but they were being slowly, inexorably pushed back. The sheer, overwhelming power of seven King-Level entities attacking in concert was a force that even he could not hold off forever.
He was a mountain, but the ocean was rising.