Episode-595
Chapter : 1169
While the two cousins forged their impossible cage of physics in the main square, the skies above Ashworth and the sprawling city below had become the canvas for a dozen separate, world-breaking duels. The arrival of Arch Duke Roy Ferrum’s forces had not been a simple reinforcement; it had been a declaration of absolute dominance. The twelve most powerful lords of the Ferrum council, the heads of the great branch families and each a King-Level master who had ruled their own domains for centuries, were the apex predators of the North. They had descended like twelve vengeful, roaring comets upon the ten King-Level Curse Knights who had so recently been toying with Lloyd and Ben.
The clash was a symphony of glorious, righteous annihilation.
High above the central spire of the Unholy Palace, the duel between Lord Midford and the Crimson General continued its deadly, silent ballet. Lord Midford, the stern, white-bearded patriarch of the Sunstone Ferrums, was a figure of radiant, unshakeable authority. His spirit, a magnificent, angelic knight in golden armor named ‘Sol Invictus’, did not meet the General’s impossible speed with speed of its own. It met it with inevitability.
The Crimson General was a blur of motion, a living needle of absolute death that stitched a thousand deadly cuts into the fabric of reality every second. It moved between heartbeats, its black sword a conceptual attack that didn't cut, but simply unmade. Yet, every single one of its strikes was met. Not by a frantic parry, but by a calm, perfectly positioned shield of solidified sunlight that simply was where the General intended to be.
Lord Midford had seen a hundred years of war. He had fought against assassins who could walk through shadows and berserkers who could shatter mountains. The General’s speed, while breathtaking, was simply a variable in an equation he had solved long ago.
"You are fast, demon," Lord Midford's voice boomed, resonating not through the air but directly in the spiritual realm. "But you are predictable. You follow the path of least resistance, the most efficient line of attack. You are a river, and a river can always be dammed."
With a slow, deliberate gesture, he raised his hand. Sol Invictus mirrored the motion, and the sky itself was filled with a thousand lances of pure, solidified sunlight, a cage of golden spears that tracked the General's every impossible movement. The demon was forced to weave and dodge, its perfect, efficient lines of attack now broken into a frantic, chaotic dance of avoidance.
The Crimson General, for the first time, felt a flicker of something akin to frustration. This was not a battle of skill or speed; it was a battle of philosophies. Its own philosophy of perfect, lethal efficiency was being systematically dismantled by the old lord's philosophy of absolute, unyielding control.
"Let us end this dance," Lord Midford declared. He brought his hands together, and the thousand lances of light converged, not on the General, but on a single point in the sky. They did not explode. They wove themselves together, creating a miniature sun, a sphere of such intense, concentrated holy power that it burned away the very corruption in the air around it. "Face the judgment of the dawn. [Solar Prison]!"
The miniature sun pulsed once, and a wave of golden, gravitational force erupted from it. The Crimson General, caught in the wave, was not burned, but was inexorably pulled towards the light. Its impossible speed was negated, its movements becoming sluggish and heavy as if it were moving through molasses. It was a fly caught in the amber of a dying star. With a final, silent scream of defiance, it was pulled into the heart of the Solar Prison and, in a flash of pure, silent, golden light, was utterly and completely annihilated. One king was dead.
On the ground, a different kind of war was being waged. Lord Hargrave, the veritable mountain of a man who led the Granitehold Ferrums, was single-handedly holding his own against two King-Level knights: the resurrected Weeping Executioner and the hulking brute whose armor was forged from solidified bone. Hargrave’s spirit, a colossal, six-armed golem of living granite named ‘Old Man Mountain’, was a force of nature. Its every blow was a miniature earthquake, its every step a tectonic event.
Chapter : 1170
The Weeping Executioner’s aura of absolute despair, a psychic plague that had broken the will of Lord Kyle’s elite guard before a sword was even swung, washed over Hargrave and his golem. It found nothing to take root in. Lord Hargrave’s will was not a complex, emotional thing. It was a simple, brutal, and unshakeable fact, as solid and as stubborn as the granite of his own mountains. The despair found no purchase; it was like rain trying to erode a diamond.
"Is that all you have, phantom?" Hargrave roared, his voice the grinding of tectonic plates. "A sad story? I have seen miners with more grit in their little finger than you have in your entire being!"
Old Man Mountain’s six arms became a whirlwind of destruction. Two arms caught the bone-armored knight’s massive club, the impact shaking the entire city block. The other four descended upon the Weeping Executioner. The phantom tried to phase through the attack, but the golem’s fists were infused with Hargrave’s absolute, grounding will. They did not just strike the physical form; they struck the very concept of the Executioner. The phantom was solidified, its ethereal form made brutally, painfully real for a single, devastating instant.
The four granite fists struck it like four simultaneous meteor impacts. The Weeping Executioner, the conceptual horror, was shattered like a cheap piece of pottery, its essence scattered to the winds. The bone-armored knight, its partner suddenly gone, roared in fury and pushed against the two arms that held it. With a final, mighty heave, Lord Hargrave’s golem lifted the knight into the air and, with a brutal, simple, and deeply satisfying motion, ripped it in half. Two more kings were dead.
The symphony of annihilation was not limited to the old guard. A new generation of Ferrum lords was earning their own legends in the crucible of Ashworth. Lady Zamira Ferrum, the newly ascended head of the Shadow-cat branch, was a stark contrast to the radiant power of Lord Midford and the brute force of Lord Hargrave. She was a huntress, and the corrupted city was her hunting ground.
Her opponents were a pair of King-Level knights, twins of a sort, known as the Silent Stalkers. They were spectral, serpent-like beings who moved through the spiritual plane, their attacks manifesting as sudden, unavoidable strikes of pure, corrosive venom from unexpected angles. They were the perfect assassins, impossible to track, impossible to defend against.
They had underestimated the huntress.
Lady Zamira stood calmly in the center of a ruined plaza, her eyes closed. Her spirit was not a single, colossal entity, but a pack. Ten magnificent, panther-like creatures made of pure, solidified shadow, their eyes burning with a cold, intelligent violet light, moved silently at her command. They were not on the physical plane but were stalking the same spiritual paths as the assassins.
"You think the shadows are your ally?" Zamira whispered to the empty air. "You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it."
A spectral, venomous claw materialized from the ether, aimed directly at Zamira's back. Before it could strike, two of her shadow panthers materialized around it. One's jaws clamped down on the ethereal limb, its shadow-forged teeth strong enough to bite a ghost. The other raked its claws across the point of manifestation, its attack severing the Stalker's connection to the physical world with a silent shriek of feedback.
The other Stalker materialized on a rooftop, preparing a second, more powerful attack. It found itself surrounded by the remaining eight panthers. They were a flowing, silent river of shadow and claw, a perfectly coordinated pack of predators. The hunt was swift, brutal, and utterly one-sided. The second assassin was torn apart in the spiritual realm, its essence devoured by the shadow pack until nothing remained. Four kings were now accounted for.
Across the city, similar stories were unfolding. The full, awesome, and long-slumbering might of the Lions of the North had been unleashed, and it was a force that the corrupted, borrowed power of the Curse Knights could not hope to withstand. The lieutenants of the Abyss, the ten mighty kings who were to be the unholy praetorian guard for their new puppet, were being systematically, contemptuously, and absolutely dismantled.
As the last of the ten kings fell, a psychic shockwave of despair—not from an enemy aura, but from their own shattering morale—rippled through the remaining Curse Knight legion. Their command structure was gone. Their invincible leaders were dust. The unshakeable belief in their master's power, the one thing that gave their unholy existence purpose, was broken.