Episode-805
Chapter : 1609
Ken looked at Lloyd. He saw the darkness in his master's soul. He saw the void where the light used to be. It terrified him. But then he remembered Jasmin. He remembered the silver hairpin. He remembered the pile of diamond dust.
Ken’s face hardened. The grief locked away behind a wall of cold steel.
"I am your sword, Master," Ken said. "Point me at the Target."
Lloyd nodded. It was the answer he expected.
"Good," Lloyd said. "First order of business. The AURA network. It's a spy network now. I want every merchant, every bathhouse owner, every beggar on our payroll to stop looking for profit and start looking for signs of corruption. I want a map of every suspected cultist cell in the continent."
"Done," Ken said.
"Second," Lloyd said. "I'm shutting down the public face of the business. Mei Jing can handle the money. I don't care about the soap anymore. I don't care about the salt. Those are just fuel lines now. Every copper coin we make goes into R&D."
"R&D?"
"Research and Destruction," Lloyd corrected. "I'm going to the manufactory. I'm going to lock myself in the lab. And I'm not coming out until I have built something that can kill a god."
Lloyd stood up. He walked to the door. He paused with his hand on the latch.
"Ken?"
"Yes, Master?"
"If I start to hesitate..." Lloyd said softly. "If I start to talk about mercy... or about the 'greater good'... or if I start to look like I'm forgetting why we are doing this..."
Lloyd turned to look at Ken. His eyes were dead.
"Remind me of the diamond dust," Lloyd said. "Remind me of the sound it made when she broke."
Ken swallowed hard. "I will, Master."
"Good."
Lloyd opened the door and walked out into the light. But he didn't bring any light with him. He moved through the corridors like a black hole, absorbing the joy and the warmth of the house, leaving only a wake of cold, terrifying purpose.
The Lord of the Manor was gone. The Major General was gone.
The Exterminator had arrived.
________________________________________
Lloyd walked into the manufactory lab. The air smelled of oil, ozone, and stale coffee. It was quiet. Alaric, Borin, and Lyra were there, huddled around a workbench, speaking in hushed tones. They looked up when he entered, expecting to offer condolences, expecting to see a broken man.
They saw Lloyd. But it wasn't the Lloyd they knew. He walked past them without a word, his stride eating up the distance to his private drafting table. He didn't look at them. He didn't acknowledge their existence. He was a man possessed.
He reached his desk. It was covered in blueprints. The "Aegis Project."
He looked down at the drawings. He saw his old notes.
Objective: Enhanced strength. Mobility. Protection for a human pilot.
He scoffed. A harsh, ugly sound.
"Trash," he muttered.
He swept his arm across the desk. The blueprints, the carefully drawn schematics, the notes—they went flying. Ink pots shattered on the floor. The paper scattered like dead leaves.
"Master Lloyd?" Alaric asked, stepping forward tentatively. "What are you—"
"It's wrong," Lloyd said, staring at the empty table. "It's all wrong. The premise is flawed."
He grabbed a fresh sheet of drafting paper and slammed it down. He grabbed a piece of charcoal.
"I was trying to build a suit," Lloyd said, his voice rising. He began to draw, slashing lines across the paper. "I was trying to build armor. I was trying to take a human and make him stronger. But that's the problem. The human is the weak link."
He drew a stick figure inside a suit of armor. He drew an arrow pointing to the human.
"Flesh," Lloyd spat. "Bone. Blood. Fear. You can put a man in the strongest steel in the world, but if you hit him with enough gravity, he turns to jelly inside the can. If you hit him with a despair aura, he freezes. If you use a Lodestone..."
He stopped drawing. The charcoal snapped in his hand.
"The Lodestone," he whispered. "That's how Roy lost. Lucifer didn't beat him with strength. He beat him by changing the rules. He turned off the magic. He turned off the connection."
Lloyd looked up at his terrified team. His eyes were wide, manic.
Chapter : 1610
"We rely on magic too much," Lloyd said. "We rely on Spirits. We rely on Void Power. We rely on the System. But what happens when the enemy turns the switch off? What happens when they invoke an anti-magic field? We die. Like Roy died. Like Jasmin died."
He grabbed another piece of charcoal.
"I need to build something that doesn't care about magic," Lloyd said, drawing furiously. "I need to build a machine that runs on physics. Pure, cold, hard physics. Hydraulics. Gears. Combustion. If Lucifer turns off the magic, I want this thing to punch him in the face with ten tons of hydraulic pressure. I want it to be an atheist in a world of gods."
He looked at the Golem Heart sitting on a shelf nearby. The ancient artifact pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light.
"And it needs to be faster than a human," Lloyd said. "Stronger than a human. It can't just be a suit. It has to be... a god of steel."
He reached into his pocket. His hand came out holding a small, silver object.
It was the hairpin. Jasmin’s hairpin. It was bent. There was a tiny speck of dried blood on the clasp.
The alchemists gasped. They recognized it.
Lloyd placed the hairpin gently on the corner of the drafting table. He didn't treat it like a trinket. He treated it like a holy relic. He pinned the corner of the fresh paper down with it.
"This is the core," Lloyd whispered. "This is the mandate. We are not building a tool for defense. We are building an instrument of vengeance."
He looked at Borin. "You like explosions? Good. I want propulsion systems. I want rockets. I want this thing to move so fast it breaks the sound barrier."
He looked at Lyra. "You like efficiency? I want a sealed environment. Air tight. Void tight. If the outside world is burning with hellfire, I want the inside to be room temperature. I want it immune to toxins, curses, and vacuum."
He looked at Alaric. "You like chemistry? I need a fuel source. The Golem Heart is the battery, but I need burst energy. I need liquid fury."
He turned back to the drawing. His hand moved with the speed of a madman.
"We are starting over," Lloyd said. "Project Aegis is dead. This is Project... Retribution."
The next week was a blur of manic activity. Lloyd didn't leave the lab. He slept under the drafting table for an hour at a time, then woke up and went back to work.
He was redesigning the fundamental architecture of the machine.
"The Lodestone effect," Lloyd muttered to himself, working on the joint mechanism. "It inverts magnetism. It creates repulsion in ferrous metals. So... we don't use ferrous metals for the internal workings."
He turned to the materials pile. "Titanium alloy. Ceramic composites. Treated leather. We build the skeleton out of non-magnetic materials. If Lucifer tries to rust it, nothing happens. If he tries to crush it with magnetism, it ignores him."
He moved to the control system. This was the hardest part. The Lilith Stones.
Previously, he had tried to program them with logic. If X happens, do Y. It was too slow. Combat wasn't logic; it was instinct.
"I was trying to teach a rock to do math," Lloyd realized. "I need to teach it to kill."
He took the Lilith Stones and the headset. 'I need absolute silence for the calibration,' Lloyd announced. He grabbed the equipment and retreated to his private bunk room, locking the heavy door behind him. Only when he was sure he was unobserved did he open the rift to the Soul Farm. He fought. He fought goblins, boars, everything. He recorded his own muscle memory. He recorded the feeling of a dodge, the snap of a punch, the adrenaline of a kill.
He poured his own combat instincts—the skills of the Major General, the reflexes of the Void Walker—directly into the stones. He wasn't programming them; he was cloning his own reflexes.
"Combat Instinct Copy," he whispered. "When the pilot thinks 'punch,' the machine doesn't calculate the trajectory. It just punches. Faster than thought."
But the biggest breakthrough came from the Golem Heart.
Lloyd stared at the ancient artifact. It was the heart of Anubis's daughter. It had a will.
"You want to destroy them too, don't you?" Lloyd asked the stone heart. "You saw what the world does. You saw the destruction."
The heart pulsed. A slow, deep thrum.