Episode-931
Chapter : 1861
He was the Rook. He was the heavy piece on the board that cleared the path. And he would not stop until the path was clear.
With a final, guttural scream, Ben charged the remaining knights, a comet of iron and will, determined to turn the arena into a graveyard for anyone foolish enough to stand in his way.
The transition from the physical world to the trap was not violent. It did not begin with an explosion or a flash of light. It began with a simple, quiet error in geometry.
Lloyd Ferrum had been walking through the polished obsidian corridor of the Inner District, his boots clicking rhythmically against the black stone. Beside him, he could sense the heavy, metallic presence of Ben, the Ironwood Knight. The air was cool and smelled faintly of the ozone generated by his Aegis Suit. Everything felt solid. Everything felt real.
Then, Lloyd blinked.
In the microsecond that his eyes were closed, the world inverted itself. The sensation was immediate and nauseating, like stepping off a staircase and finding that there was no floor beneath your feet. Gravity didn't just disappear; it shifted sideways. The sound of Ben’s footsteps vanished instantly, cut off as if a heavy door had been slammed between them.
Lloyd stopped moving. He didn't panic. He didn't flail his arms or shout for his partner. Instead, he stood perfectly still, letting his senses recalibrate.
He opened his eyes.
He was no longer in the corridor. The black stone walls were gone. The ceiling of the palace was gone. The path ahead and the path behind had dissolved into nothingness.
Lloyd found himself standing on a surface that looked like liquid mercury. It was a silver, mirror-like floor that rippled with every breath he took, yet it felt as hard as concrete beneath his boots. Above him, there was no sky. Instead, there was a swirling, chaotic nebula of bruised violet and angry crimson mist. The clouds moved too fast, twisting and churning as if they were alive and in pain.
"A Mirror Fold," Lloyd whispered to the empty air. His voice didn't echo. It sounded flat, as if the air itself was absorbing the sound waves. "High-level spatial distortion tailored to separate a squad. It isolates the targets and drops them into a pocket dimension constructed from their own subconscious fears."
He looked down at his reflection in the liquid floor. For a moment, he didn't see his current face. He saw the face of the original Lloyd Ferrum—the weak, incompetent boy who had died in the first timeline. Then, the image shifted. He saw his face from Earth—the wrinkled, battle-hardened face of a military commander who had lived for eighty years. Finally, it settled back to his current appearance.
"Clever," Lloyd admitted, his tone dry and unimpressed. "But creating a dimension based on the mind requires a very strong ego to anchor it. You have to believe you are a god to build a world."
As if responding to his challenge, the red mist in front of him began to boil. A low, grinding rumble shook the liquid floor. It sounded like tectonic plates scraping together deep underground. The mist coalesced, darkening and thickening until it formed a massive, towering silhouette.
Viscount Rubel appeared.
But this was not the desperate, fleeing traitor Lloyd had chased through the Sloth Territory. This was not the man who had hidden behind Beelzebub’s skirts. This was Rubel as he saw himself in his own darkest fantasies.
The projection was twenty feet tall, towering over Lloyd like a titan. His skin was armored in black scales that looked like obsidian plate mail. Massive, curved horns scraped the nonexistent sky, wreathed in green fire. Great wings made of bleeding shadows stretched out from his back, spanning the width of the mindscape.
Rubel’s face was a mask of absolute arrogance. His eyes burned like twin suns of green fire, looking down at Lloyd with a mixture of contempt and pity.
"Lloyd," Rubel’s voice boomed. It didn't come from his mouth; it vibrated from every direction at once, shaking Lloyd’s bones. "You little insect. You dare to chase me here? Into the domain of the mind?"
Lloyd crossed his arms over his chest. He looked up at the giant demon, his expression bored. "You have a very high opinion of yourself, Uncle. Do you really need to be twenty feet tall? It seems like overcompensation."
Rubel roared, a sound of pure psychic pressure. A windstorm kicked up, tearing at Lloyd’s coat.
Chapter : 1862
"Silence!" Rubel commanded. "You speak with the arrogance of a child who does not know his place. You think you are a hero? You think you are the savior of the Ferrum line? Look at you. You are small. You are weak. You are a fraud hiding inside a stolen suit of armor."
The giant Rubel took a step forward, the liquid floor rippling violently under his massive weight.
"I see your heart, Lloyd," Rubel hissed, his voice dropping to a whisper that sounded like snakes sliding over dry leaves. "I see the guilt rotting inside you. You act like a soldier, but you are just a failure."
The mist around them began to change. It formed images—flickering, ghostly scenes from the past.
Lloyd saw his father, Arch Duke Roy Ferrum, standing with his back turned, shoulders slumped in defeat.
"Roy was a coward," Rubel taunted, pointing a clawed finger at the image. "He hid behind his duty. He let the family rot because he was too afraid to take power. And you are just like him. You claim to protect the North, but you are just waiting for it to die."
The scene shifted. Lloyd saw the faces of the Ferrum family members who had died in the first timeline. He saw Mina, bleeding in the rain. He saw Rosa, frozen in a block of ice, looking at him with betrayal in her eyes.
"You failed them," Rubel whispered. The giant leaned down, his face inches from Lloyd’s. The heat from his green eyes was palpable. "In the first life, you were trash. A useless waste of space. Do you think a few tricks and some future knowledge change that? Deep down, you are still that incompetent boy. You couldn't save your wife. You couldn't save your sister. You can't even save yourself."
Lloyd stood firm, his boots planted on the shifting floor. His mental shields were like steel walls, forged over two lifetimes of discipline. He watched the images flicker, but he didn't flinch. He analyzed them. He saw the flaws in the projection. The "Mina" in the vision wasn't the real Mina; it was Rubel’s twisted memory of her.
"Is that all you have?" Lloyd asked calmly. "Old family photos and insults? I expected better psychological warfare from a man who sold his soul to the Devil of Gluttony."
Rubel’s eyes narrowed. "You think this is just a show? No, nephew. This is a merger."
The giant raised his hands. The shadows of his wings expanded, blotting out the violet light. The air pressure in the mindscape spiked. Lloyd felt a sudden, sharp pain in the center of his forehead, as if a drill was slowly boring into his skull.
"I am not just showing you your fears," Rubel thundered. "I am entering you. This is the Soul Merge. I will crack open your mind like an egg. I will pour my consciousness into yours. I will overwrite your ego with my own."
Dark tendrils of energy shot out from Rubel’s chest. They were like black veins, seeking connection. They lashed out, wrapping around Lloyd’s body. They didn't squeeze his physical form; they squeezed his sense of self.
Lloyd felt a wave of nausea. He felt foreign thoughts trying to invade his brain. He felt Rubel’s greed, his hunger for power, his hatred for the main branch—it all tried to wash over Lloyd, to drown his personality in a flood of toxic ambition.
"Submit!" Rubel screamed. "Let me in! I will take your body! I will take your secrets! I will become the true Lloyd Ferrum, and you will fade away into a bad memory!"
The pressure was immense. It was a psychic weight that would have crushed a normal man instantly. It was designed to shatter the fragile identity of a young noble.
But Lloyd Ferrum was not a normal man. And he was certainly not fragile.
He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath in the suffocating air. He thought about his eighty years on Earth. He thought about the wars he had led, the machines he had built, the students he had taught. He thought about the discipline required to design a microchip, the patience needed to lead an army, the stoicism needed to accept death.
His mind wasn't a small, empty room waiting to be filled. It was a fortress. It was a library filled with decades of knowledge, logic, and cold, hard facts. Rubel was trying to flood a fortress with a bucket of water.