Episode-804
Chapter : 1607
The Lloyd who had walked into the crypt was a broken man burying a friend. The Lloyd who walked out was something else entirely. He was a calamity waiting to happen.
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The heavy door of the study clicked shut, and the lock turned with a definitive thud. Lloyd was alone.
He hadn't turned on the lights. The curtains were drawn, blocking out the gray afternoon. The room was pitched in shadow, illuminated only by the faint, ghostly blue glow of the System interface hovering in the air before him.
He sat in his leather chair behind the massive oak desk. He didn't lean back. He sat rigid, his posture perfect, his hands clasped on the wood.
Three days.
For three days, the door didn't open. Servants came and knocked, bringing trays of food. Lloyd ignored them. They left the trays in the hallway. The food went cold, then stale. He didn't eat. He didn't drink. He didn't sleep.
Sleep was dangerous. Sleep meant dreaming, and dreaming meant seeing her face shattering into a million pieces.
So he stayed awake. He stayed in the dark.
He wasn't wallowing. He wasn't crying. He was working. His mind, the supercomputer of a genius engineer and a veteran strategist, was running at five hundred percent capacity. He was replaying the last few months of his life. He was dissecting every interaction, every battle, every decision.
He replayed the fight with Jager. He replayed the encounter with the Curse Knight. He replayed the moment Lucifer descended.
He analyzed the data.
Fact: The Devils are physically superior. Lucifer crushed elite guards with gravity. A King-Level Devil is a natural disaster.
Fact: Current magical defenses are useless. The Lodestone of the Abyss inverted the laws of physics and stripped Roy of his power. Magic is a variable they can control.
Fact: Negotiation is impossible. They view humans as cattle or pests.
Fact: Containment is a failure. They can teleport. They can infiltrate. They can corrupt.
Lloyd stared at the blue light of the System. He looked at his stats. He looked at his skills.
Useless, he thought. All of it. Tricks. Parlor games.
He had been so proud of his soap empire. He had been so proud of his clever little traps and his social maneuvering. He thought he was playing 4D chess while everyone else was playing checkers.
But Lucifer hadn't played chess. Lucifer had flipped the board, set the table on fire, and shot the other player in the face.
I was trying to win the game, Lloyd realized. But you can't win a game against someone who wants to burn the casino.
He stood up and paced the room. The darkness didn't bother him. His [All-Seeing Eye], even in its passive state, mapped the room perfectly.
He thought about the nature of the enemy.
"Invasive species," Lloyd whispered to the empty room.
That was the key. They weren't a rival nation. They weren't a political faction. They were an invasive biological and spiritual threat. Like a virus introduced to a population with no immunity.
When you have a virus, you don't try to reason with it. You don't try to contain it in one organ and hope it stays there. You don't sign a peace treaty with smallpox.
You eradicate it. You burn the fever out. You kill every single cell of the infection until the host is clean.
The shift in his mind was seismic. It was the sound of a bridge collapsing.
The bridge between "Lloyd the Builder" and "Lloyd the Destroyer" fell into the abyss.
He stopped pacing. He looked at the wall where a map of the continent hung. He couldn't see it in the dark, but he knew where the Abyss was. It wasn't on the map. It was underneath it.
"Defense is a losing strategy," Lloyd said. "If you defend, you have to be lucky every time. The enemy only has to be lucky once. Jasmin... she was my luck running out."
He clenched his fists.
"No more defense. No more reaction. No more 'Shadow War.'"
The Shadow War implied a conflict of spies and secrets. It implied a delicate touch. It implied that he wanted to keep the world intact while he fought.
He didn't care about keeping the world intact anymore. Not if it meant harboring the infection.
Lloyd walked back to the desk. He sat down. He didn't feel tired. He felt energized. It was a cold, manic energy, like the hum of a high-voltage wire.
He reached out and tapped the desk.
Chapter : 1608
"Ken," he projected his voice, knowing the bodyguard was standing vigil outside the door. "Come in."
The lock clicked. The door opened.
Light spilled into the room from the hallway, blindingly bright after three days of darkness. Lloyd didn't blink. He sat in the beam of light, looking like a spectre. His face was gaunt, his eyes sunken, his skin pale. He looked like a man who had died and forgotten to lie down.
Ken stepped in. He looked at Lloyd, and for a moment, the bodyguard hesitated. He didn't recognize the man in the chair. The warmth was gone. The humor was gone. The sarcasm was gone.
There was only a void.
"Master?" Ken asked softly. "You called."
"Close the door," Lloyd said. His voice was rasping, dry from days of silence. "And sit down. We have work to do."
Ken closed the door, plunging them back into semi-darkness. He sat opposite Lloyd.
"How are you holding up?" Lloyd asked. It wasn't a question about feelings. It was a status check on a piece of equipment.
"I am functional," Ken replied, matching the tone. "The house is secure. The funeral... is over."
"Good," Lloyd said. "Because we are done with funerals. I don't plan on attending another one."
Lloyd leaned forward. The blue light of the System reflected in his eyes, making them look inhuman.
"I have been thinking, Ken. About our strategy. About how we've been fighting."
"We have been successful, mostly," Ken ventured. "We stopped the assassins. We saved the Prince."
"We lost Jasmin," Lloyd cut him off. "That is not success. That is a catastrophic failure of the highest order. And it happened because we were playing by their rules. We were waiting for them to attack. We were reacting."
Lloyd picked up a quill from the desk. He snapped it in half.
"That ends today. I am changing the operational parameters of our organization. The 'Shadow War' is officially terminated."
Ken frowned. "You want to stop fighting?"
"No," Lloyd said. "I want to stop fighting a war. I want to start an extermination."
"Extermination?" Ken repeated the word. It hung heavy in the air.
"Yes," Lloyd said. "We are reclassifying the Devil Race. They are no longer 'enemies.' Enemy implies a peer. Enemy implies a being with rights, with a motivation we can understand. They are not peers. They are a pathogen."
Lloyd pulled a fresh sheet of paper. He began to write, his hand moving with jerky, precise motions.
"From this moment on," Lloyd said, "we do not use the word 'Demon' or 'Devil' or 'King.' Those are titles of respect. They grant them legitimacy. We will refer to them as 'Targets.' Specifically, 'Species Enemy Alpha.'"
He wrote SEA on the paper and circled it.
"Our goal is no longer to protect the Kingdom," Lloyd continued. "The Kingdom can rot for all I care. Our goal is no longer to protect the House. The House is just stone. Our goal... our singular, absolute goal... is the total, biological negation of Species Enemy Alpha."
Ken stared at him. "You want to kill them all?"
"All of them," Lloyd said calmly. "Every soldier. Every King. Every spawn. I don't care if they are in the North, the South, or hiding in a hole in the ground. I want them gone. I want to burn their dimension to ash. I want to salt the earth of the Abyss so that nothing ever grows there again. I want to make them a myth that scares children, and then I want to kill the myth."
"That is... ambitious," Ken said. "They are infinite, Master. They come from another plane."
"Then we will close the door," Lloyd said. "Or we will go through it and kill them in their own house. I don't care about the logistics yet. I care about the intent."
Lloyd looked at Ken. "I need to know if you are with me. This isn't going to be a noble war, Ken. We aren't going to be knights. We aren't going to be heroes. We are going to be butchers. We are going to use poison. We are going to use traps. We are going to use weapons that violate the Geneva Convention of this world. We are going to do things that will make the history books call us monsters."
He paused. "But we will be the monsters that ate the Devils."