Episode-1003
Chapter : 2005
As the steel door hissed open, Lloyd’s mind was already shifting gears. He wasn't thinking about politics or treaties. He was thinking about physics, magic, and the precise amount of force needed to kill a man without making a sound.
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Lloyd walked out of the palace service entrance and into the cool night air of the capital. The city was quiet, unaware that it was sitting on the edge of a knife. He climbed into his waiting carriage where Ken Park sat in the driver’s seat, silent and vigilant as always.
"Home," Lloyd said. "Fast."
As the carriage rattled over the cobblestones, Lloyd closed his eyes and sank into his own mind. He needed to review his arsenal. If the strategy was surgical precision, he needed to know exactly what tools he had in his kit.
He pulled up the interface of the Farming System. The blue text scrolled across his vision, crisp and clear.
[Current Status: Active]
[Farming Coins (FC): 750]
[System Coins (SC): 120]
The rules of the System were harsh but fair. He knew them by heart, but he reviewed them again, looking for any loophole, any advantage.
Rule 1: The Quota.
He gained coins only when a quota was met. Killing 100 slimes got him nothing. Killing 999 slimes got him nothing. Only killing 1000 slimes triggered the reward. The same applied to Goblins, Orcs, and now, Fire Fly soldiers.
"Efficiency," Lloyd muttered to the empty carriage. "I can't just kill random patrols. It’s a waste of energy. I need to find the main clusters. I need to wipe out entire units to trigger the payout."
He needed those coins. Coins meant upgrades. Coins meant buying new logic gates for his suit, new materials for his weapons. To fight a corporation with unlimited resources, he needed to turn the war into a business. He needed to harvest the enemy.
He shifted his focus to his internal power structure.
The Echo of Will.
This was his secret weapon for processing speed. The Echo wasn't just a clone he used for farming in his pocket dimension. It was a second brain.
Thanks to the "Soul-Circuitry" knowledge gifted to him by Eun-ha—the Devil Queen Leviathan—Lloyd had upgraded his Echo. It now acted as a tactical processor. It lived inside the operating system of the Aegis suit.
When Lloyd fought, there was usually a delay. His eye saw the target, his brain processed it, his nerve sent a signal, and his hand moved. It took milliseconds, but against a laser or a hyper-sonic missile, milliseconds were fatal. That was the "Time Lag" that Anthony, the Sirius pilot, had used against him.
But now, the Echo bridged that gap. The Echo lived in the suit’s mana-frame. It read Lloyd’s intent before his brain even sent the signal to his muscles. It moved the suit at the speed of thought.
"Zero latency," Lloyd thought. "I think it, and the suit does it. No lag. No hesitation."
That was how he would match their technology. They had computers; he had a ghost in the machine.
The Ultimate Move.
But even with a fast suit, he needed a finisher. He needed a way to delete a Commander-class enemy without causing the massive, seismic explosion that would alert the orbital station.
He thought about his spirits. Iffrit was too messy; fire spread. Fang Fairy was fast, but lightning was loud. Atlas was strong, but earth tremors were exactly what he was trying to avoid.
He needed containment.
He focused on the bond with Spirit Jasmin. The Diamond Queen.
Her body was made of conceptually unbreakable diamond. She was the ultimate shield. But Lloyd had realized she could also be the ultimate prison.
"Nova Infinite Refraction," Lloyd whispered.
It was a technique he had improvised in the desert, but now he had refined it into a science.
Step 1: Trap the enemy. Use Atlas’s gravity water or Void Wood roots to hold them still for one second.
Step 2: The Coffin. Spirit Jasmin expands her form, encasing the enemy inside a sphere of diamond. This sphere is mirrored on the inside.
Step 3: The Injection. Lloyd punches a small hole in the sphere and inserts the barrel of the Nova Cannon.
Step 4: The Loop. He fires a beam of high-velocity plasma into the sphere.
Because the inside is a perfect mirror, the beam doesn't hit once. It bounces. It reflects millions of times in a nanosecond. The interior of the sphere becomes a reactor of infinite heat and light. The enemy is vaporized instantly.
Chapter : 2006
But the key—the reason this worked for the "Solar Extinction" strategy—was that the diamond shell contained the explosion. There was no shockwave outside. No thermal bloom that a satellite could see. All the energy was trapped inside the coffin until the enemy was nothing but sub-atomic particles. Then, Lloyd would simply open a small vent and let the harmless gas escape.
It was a silent, clean assassination. It was "un-making" an enemy in a box.
"That's the doctrine," Lloyd decided. "Trap. Contain. Erase. No mess."
The carriage slowed down. They were approaching the gates of the Ferrum Estate.
Lloyd opened his eyes. He felt a strange sense of calm. The fear he had felt in the bunker with Liam was gone. It had been replaced by the cold clarity of the engineer.
He knew the constraints. He knew the variables. He had his tools.
The Fire Fly Corporation thought they were fighting a primitive culture. They thought they were fighting wizards who threw fireballs and knights who swung swords. They thought they could bully this world with physics.
They didn't know they were walking into a trap set by a man who had mastered their physics and then broken it.
"Ken," Lloyd said as the carriage stopped.
The stoic bodyguard opened the door. "Sir?"
"Cancel all my appointments for tomorrow," Lloyd said, stepping out onto the gravel. "And tell the Titan Squad to report to the hangar at 0400 hours. Full gear."
"We are moving out?" Ken asked.
"We are going hunting," Lloyd said. He looked up at the night sky, imagining the invisible ship hanging in orbit, the needle waiting to drop. "We have a quota to fill."
He walked into his home, the metal of his prosthetic arm humming softly. He wasn't going to let them burn his world. He was going to dismantle them, piece by piece, until there was nothing left to send a signal home.
The harvest had begun.
The Island of Aethelgard was supposed to be a place of peace, but today, the air felt heavy enough to crush a man’s lungs.
Lloyd Ferrum stood near the edge of the Pavilion of Winds. He wasn't sitting at the table. He preferred to stand. From his position, he could see everyone, check every exit, and keep an eye on the horizon. He adjusted the cuff of his uniform, his face a mask of boredom, but inside, his mind was running a hundred calculations a second.
This wasn't just a meeting. This was the impossible happening right in front of him.
In the center of the open-air pavilion sat a large, round table made of white stone. The sea breeze blew through the pillars, fluttering the flags of three human nations and the dark, tattered banners of the Abyss. It looked like a scene from a history book, the kind of picture students would study a hundred years from now—if they survived the next few months.
On the left side of the table sat the Human Alliance.
King Liam—or James Khan, as Lloyd knew him—looked relaxed. He was leaning back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, tapping a finger on the stone table. To anyone else, he looked like a bored monarch waiting for dinner. But Lloyd knew better. James was checking the sightlines. He was counting how many seconds it would take to draw the pistol hidden in his jacket. He was the "Joker," and he never walked into a room without knowing how to kill everyone inside it.
Next to him sat Queen Seraphina of Altamira. She looked regal and composed, wearing the white and gold of her station, but her hands were clasped tightly in her lap. She was sitting across from monsters that parents used to scare their children. She was brave, but she was human.
Beside her was the Sultan of Zakaria, Princess Amina’s father. He stroked his beard, his dark eyes darting back and forth between the devils. He was a man of commerce and strategy, calculating the risk and return of sitting at this table.
On the right side of the table sat the "Satan Faction."
They didn't look like monsters from a fairy tale. They looked like royalty from a darker, older world.