Episode-884
Chapter : 1767
"It's urgent!" the messenger cried, holding up a scroll. "It's Viscount Rubel! Our scouts found him! He's not hiding! He's heading for the Valley of Silence!"
Lloyd froze. The name cut through his rage.
"The Valley?" Lloyd asked, slowly lowering his hand. The metal spikes clattered to the floor.
"Yes, my Lord!" the messenger said. "He has sent a challenge! He calls for the 'Last Ferrum' to meet him there at dawn. He says... he says he will tell you the real story before he kills you."
Lloyd stood in silence for a moment. He looked at Rosa, then at the dark window.
Rubel was the one who had swung the sword. Rubel was the one who had laughed. Rosa might have been the architect, but Rubel was the butcher.
"He's mine," Lloyd growled.
He turned his back on Rosa. He began to walk toward the door, his heavy boots echoing on the stone.
"Lloyd, wait!" Rosa called out. "The Valley of Silence? It's a trap! You know what that place is! It's composed of Null-Stone! Your powers... even your bloodline... will be dampened there! You'll be walking into a grave!"
Lloyd stopped at the door. He didn't turn around.
"Better a grave than this house," he said.
He walked out into the storm, leaving Rosa alone in the hall.
Rosa stared at the empty doorway. She looked down at the forged map in her hand. She crumpled it into a ball.
"He's going to die," she whispered to the empty room. "Rubel will have archers. Without his magnetism, Lloyd is just a man with a sword against an army."
She looked at her staff leaning against the wall. She looked at the reports of the cultist movements. She knew she should stay. She was the Regent. She had a duty to the kingdom.
But then she remembered Lloyd’s face. She remembered the boy who had made medicine for her mother. She remembered the husband she had failed to love properly.
"I can't let him die thinking I betrayed him," Rosa said. Her voice was firm now. The exhaustion was gone, replaced by a desperate resolve.
She grabbed her staff. She grabbed a pouch of mana crystals.
"I have to save him," she said, running toward the door. "Even if he hates me. Even if he kills me for it."
She ran out into the rain, chasing the man who wanted her dead, heading straight for the valley where silence waited to swallow them both.
________________________________________
The Valley of Silence was not named for a lack of noise. The wind still howled through the jagged cracks in the cliffs, and the thunder still rolled overhead like crashing wagons. It was called the Valley of Silence because it was a graveyard for power.
The canyon was a deep, winding scar on the northern edge of the Ferrum territory. The rock here was not ordinary granite or limestone. It was composed entirely of Null-Stone, a rare, dark-grey mineral that acted like a sponge for energy. It didn't just absorb sound; it absorbed mana, spirit power, and even the ambient electricity in the air.
Lloyd Ferrum walked into the mouth of the valley. He was alone.
For the last few weeks, Lloyd had felt like a god of physics. His Ferrum Steel Bloodline had been humming constantly, creating an invisible web of magnetic sensitivity around him. He could feel the iron in the ground, the steel in a bird’s feather, and the blood in a man’s veins from a mile away. He had been the "Ghost Assassin," a creature of perfect awareness.
But the moment his boot touched the grey gravel of the valley floor, the world went dark.
It was a jarring, physical shock, like walking face-first into a glass wall. The hum in his blood vanished instantly. The sensory web collapsed. The connection he had to the metal in his sword and the iron in his own marrow was severed. He tried to reach out with his mind, frantically searching for a magnetic signal, but there was nothing. The Null-Stone swallowed the signal before it could travel an inch.
He was no longer the Kinetic Engineer. He was just a nineteen-year-old boy, soaked to the bone in freezing rain, walking into a trap with nothing but a rusty sword and a heart full of broken glass.
"Inefficient terrain," Lloyd whispered to himself.
Even his voice sounded wrong here. The sound didn't carry. It fell flat, dying the moment it left his lips, absorbed by the hungry stones.
Chapter : 1768
He kept walking. The rain fell straight down in heavy, relentless sheets. It turned the dust of the valley into a thick, grey sludge that clung to his boots, dragging at his ankles with every step. The valley walls rose high on both sides, blocking out the remaining light of the stormy afternoon, creating a tunnel of oppressive shadow.
Lloyd knew this was a trap. Every logical circuit in his brain, every instinct honed by his "Black Box" mentality, was screaming at him to turn around. The strategic analysis was clear: entering a geographic choke point with zero visibility and disabled powers was suicide. It was a tactical error of the highest order.
But logic had lost the war against rage.
Viscount Rubel was here. The man who had swung the sword at his family. The man who had burned the cabin. The man who had taken Mina away from him. Lloyd didn't care if he had to crawl through broken glass; he wasn't leaving this valley until the debt was paid. The anger kept him warm. The hatred kept his legs moving when the mud tried to stop him.
After twenty minutes of trudging through the gloom, the valley opened up. It formed a wide, natural amphitheater, a circular basin surrounded by towering cliffs of jagged Null-Stone.
Standing on a ridge at the far end of the basin, looking down like a king on a balcony, was a solitary figure.
It was Viscount Rubel. He wore a thick fur cloak to ward off the chill, and he looked far too comfortable for a man who was being hunted by a ghost. He stood with his arms crossed, a smug, oily smile plastered on his face.
"I honestly didn't think you would come," Rubel shouted. His voice echoed slightly, amplified by the strange acoustics of the stone bowl. "I thought the great 'Ghost of the North' would be too smart to walk into a Null-Zone. But I guess grief makes people stupid, doesn't it, nephew?"
Lloyd stopped in the center of the basin. The rain plastered his hair to his forehead. He reached deep inside himself, trying to grab onto the feeling of the iron in his blood. He tried to harden his skin, tried to summon the wires that had slaughtered the knights in the forest.
It was difficult. The power was there, deep inside his marrow, but it was sluggish. It felt like trying to run underwater. He could barely reinforce his muscles. Projecting the power outward was impossible. The wires wouldn't form. The magnetic field wouldn't hold.
"Come down here," Lloyd said. His voice was calm, flat, and terrifying. "Come down here and let me show you exactly how stupid I am."
Rubel laughed. It was a harsh, barking sound that grated on Lloyd’s ears. "Oh, I don't think so. You see, Lloyd, I've learned from your little rampage. I watched you dismantle my Shadow Knights. You turn their armor against them. You turn their swords against them. You are a magnet."
Rubel gestured grandly to the cliffs surrounding the basin.
"So, I decided to change the variables. I brought weapons made of wood and stone. And I brought men who don't wear metal."
Movement flickered along the cliff tops. Dozens of figures stood up from behind the rocks. They weren't soldiers in shining plate. They were dressed in the crimson robes of the cultists, their faces hidden by deep hoods. They didn't hold steel swords or iron-tipped arrows.
They held crossbows made of polished bone and dark wood. And loaded in those crossbows were bolts carved from black obsidian, tipped with a glowing, sickly green paste.
"Hex-bolts," Lloyd analyzed instantly, his mind automatically calculating the threat despite the situation. "Material: Volcanic glass. Toxin: Necrotic neurotoxin. Estimated time of death after contact: 45 seconds. Survival probability: 0%."
He tightened his grip on his sword. It was just a piece of sharp steel now. No magnetism to guide it. No wires to protect him. He was a man with a knife fighting a firing squad.
"You really are a disappointment," Rubel sneered, leaning over the edge of the ridge. "My brother, your father, was a fool. But at least he died fighting. You? You're going to die like a rat in a bucket. And the best part? The world will think you went mad with grief and walked into an ambush."
Rubel raised his hand high. "Fire."
The twang of bowstrings echoed through the valley like a collective snap.