Chapter : 1073

  He followed the direction of the scream, his boots pounding on the hard-packed earth. He arrived at the western perimeter to find a scene of chilling, supernatural horror that seemed ripped from the pages of a madman’s nightmare.

  One of the ducal guards, a young, terrified soldier, was scrambling backward on the ground, his sword forgotten, his face a mask of pure, gibbering terror. And stalking toward him, moving with a slow, unnatural, and jerky gait, was a thing of shadow and bone.

  It was a skeletal figure, no more than 2.5 feet tall, the size of a human child. It was clad in a mockery of armor, plates of blackened, corroded metal that seemed fused to its very bones. Its head was a bare, grinning skull, its empty eye sockets burning with a faint, malevolent red light. In one skeletal hand, it clutched a rusty, jagged dagger that dripped a dark, viscous fluid. A faint, swirling aura of shadow and cold despair wreathed its diminutive form.

  It was a Curse Knight. But it was a pathetic, infantile version of the one he had fought at the Royal Academy. This was not a warrior; this was a hatchling, a newborn monster taking its first steps into the world.

  The sight sent a jolt of ice-cold confirmation through Lloyd’s soul. His grim theory was no longer a theory. It was a walking, stalking, and horrifying reality. The plague wasn’t just killing the villagers; it was harvesting them.

  The other soldiers were frozen, paralyzed by the sheer, superstitious horror of the apparition. But Lloyd did not hesitate. There was no time for shock, no room for fear. This was an enemy asset, and it had to be neutralized.

  He didn't draw on his own power. He didn't activate his Black Ring Eyes or manifest his chains. That would be too slow, too subtle. He needed a statement. He needed overwhelming, absolute, and terrifying force.

  He reached into the unified core of his being, into the raging, volcanic heart of his second spirit. “Iffrit,” he whispered, the name a silent command in his soul.

  The air in front of him did not shimmer or tear. It simply… ignited. In a silent, instantaneous eruption of pure, incandescent crimson energy, the nine-foot-tall demon king of annihilation materialized. One moment, there was nothing. The next, a god of fire stood between Lloyd and the skeletal horror.

  The newborn Curse Knight froze, the faint red light in its eye sockets flickering as its rudimentary intelligence tried to process the impossible, overwhelming presence before it.

  Iffrit, the embodiment of absolute, cosmic-level destruction, looked down at the pathetic, 2.5-foot-tall creature of bone and shadow. A low, rumbling sound, like the grinding of tectonic plates, echoed from deep within the fire demon’s core. It was a sound of pure, divine, and utter contempt.

  Then, with a movement that was almost lazy, a gesture of casual, cosmic annoyance, Iffrit swung his colossal, twelve-foot-long, flame-wreathed zanbatō. He didn't even use the edge of the blade. He simply swatted the creature with a contemptuous backhand.

  The impact was not a clash of steel on bone. It was an act of erasure. The flaming greatsword connected with the Curse Knight, and in a silent, brilliant flash of crimson light, the creature was simply… gone. Vaporized. Unmade. Not a single shard of bone, not a wisp of shadow, remained.

  The entire, terrifying encounter, from the scream to the final, silent annihilation, had taken less than five seconds.

  A profound, shocked silence fell over the perimeter. The soldiers, who had been scrambling in terror, now stood as still as statues, their eyes wide, their mouths agape, staring at the nine-foot-tall god of fire that had just appeared from nowhere and erased a nightmare with the casual air of a man swatting a fly.

  Into this shocked silence, a new figure stepped from the shadows. Captain Graph. His face was a mask of profound, and in Lloyd’s opinion, slightly-too-perfect shock. He stared at the spot where the Curse Knight had been, then at the magnificent, terrifying form of Iffrit, and then, finally, his gaze settled on Lloyd.

  “My Lord,” Graph said, his voice a low, grave rumble. “It seems… it seems the village is haunted.”

  Lloyd said nothing. He simply met the captain’s gaze over the shimmering, heat-hazy form of his demonic spirit. Haunted, Lloyd thought, a cold, bitter amusement touching his mind. No, Captain. Not haunted. Harvested.

  This was no ghost. This was the first horrifying symptom of the true, unholy nature of the plague. The dead were rising. And the harvest had begun.

  Chapter : 1074

  Lloyd allowed the magnificent, terrifying spectacle to hang in the air for a few heartbeats longer. Iffrit stood as a silent, nine-foot-tall testament to a power that defied all mortal comprehension, his magma-plate armor pulsing with a deep, internal fire, his flaming zanbatō resting on his shoulder. The ducal soldiers, brave men who had faced down charging cavalry and enemy mages, were utterly broken by the sight. They were staring at a god, and their faces were a mixture of awe and pure, existential terror. This was a necessary lesson. Fear was a more effective tool for maintaining discipline than any command.

  He gave a silent, mental command, and Iffrit dissolved as instantly and as silently as he had appeared, folding back into the void of Lloyd’s soul. The sudden absence of the immense, oppressive heat and the crimson light was as jarring as his arrival. The night air felt impossibly cold in its wake.

  Lloyd turned to the still-frozen soldiers, his voice cutting through their shock like a whip. “Report,” he snapped at the young guard who had been the target of the attack.

  The soldier, shaking, scrambled to his feet and stammered out his account. He had been on patrol, had heard a sound from the darkness beyond the firelight, a sound like scraping bone. He had challenged it, and the “little skeleton demon” had emerged from the trees, moving with an unnatural speed. It hadn’t made a sound, just came at him with the dagger.

  Lloyd’s mind processed the information. Small. Fast. Silent. A perfect stealth-and-terror weapon. It wasn’t designed to fight an army; it was designed to pick off sentries, to sow panic and break morale. Another piece of brilliant, asymmetrical design from his unknown enemy.

  He dismissed the terrified soldier and turned his attention to Captain Graph. The man was still staring at the spot where Iffrit had been, his face a perfect mask of bewildered shock. But his eyes, Lloyd noted, were sharp, analytical. He was not a terrified soldier; he was an intelligence officer gathering data on a new, unexpected weapon system.

  “A ‘haunting’ is one theory, Captain,” Lloyd said, his voice cool and dismissive. “My own assessment is that we are dealing with a form of dark magic, a lingering effect of the plague that is… animating the dead. A grotesque but ultimately manageable side effect.” He was deliberately downplaying the significance of the event, framing it as a bizarre anomaly rather than the horrifying new phase of the crisis it truly was. He needed to control the narrative.

  Graph nodded slowly, his gaze finally meeting Lloyd’s. “A formidable side effect, my lord. That was… a formidable spirit. I have never seen its like.” The compliment was delivered with the flat, professional tone of a man assessing a piece of equipment.

  “It is a family secret,” Lloyd replied, the lie easy and practiced. “Reserved for… special pest control.” He then gave Graph his orders. “Double the perimeter guards. I want them in pairs, back-to-back. No one patrols alone. Issue blessed silver amulets from the supply wagon to all your men. They may be useless, but they will be good for morale. Any further… apparitions… are to be reported immediately. Do not engage. Contain and report. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly, my lord,” Graph said, giving another of his short, correct bows before striding off into the darkness to carry out his orders, his form swallowed by the night.

  Lloyd watched him go, a cold certainty solidifying in his gut. Graph’s performance had been flawless. The shock, the awe, the fawning respect—it was all perfectly calibrated. Too perfect. A real soldier, even a veteran like Graph, would have had a more visceral reaction to the sudden appearance of a Transcended-level fire demon. There would have been a flicker of genuine fear, a moment of instinctual retreat. Graph had shown none. He had been a spectator at a play, and a very interested one at that.

  Amina appeared at his side, a silent shadow. She had witnessed the entire event from the edge of the firelight. Her face was pale, but her eyes were blazing with a thousand questions.

  “That was Iffrit,” she stated, her voice a low, stunned whisper. “Your second Transcended spirit. The one from the Jahl Challenge.”

  “It was,” Lloyd confirmed, his gaze still fixed on the dark perimeter where Graph had vanished.

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  “And you have another three spirit with same power. You have been holding back, Lloyd,” she said, not as an accusation, but as a dawning, horrified realization. “The sheer, absolute scale of your power… you have been deliberately sandbagging, even with me.”

  Chapter : 1075

  “Some cards are best kept in your hand until the final round, Princess,” he replied, his voice grim. He then turned to her, the general taking command once more. “The situation has changed. My initial theory was wrong. The plague is not just a biological agent. It has a necromantic component. The Abyssal Corruption I detected is not just killing them; it’s preparing them. The bodies of the dead are becoming incubators for these… things.”

  He had given her a part of the truth, the part she needed to understand the immediate tactical reality. The dead were now enemy combatants.

  “We need to accelerate the cleansing protocol,” Amina said, her mind instantly grasping the strategic implication. “We need to burn the bodies. All of them. Now.”

  “No,” Lloyd countered, his voice absolute. “Not yet. We still don’t know the full mechanism of the transformation. We don’t know the trigger. We don’t know the numbers. To go in blind now would be suicide. We would be walking into a trap.”

  A new, terrible, and utterly insane plan began to form in his mind, a plan born of cold, hard, military necessity. He had to see it for himself. He had to witness the birth of one of these monsters.

  He looked at Amina, his eyes hard. “You and the soldiers will remain here. Maintain the quarantine. At dawn, you will begin preparing the firebreak. But tonight… tonight, I am going back in. Alone.”

  He was no longer just a doctor or a general. He was a hunter, and he was going to spend the night in a graveyard, waiting for the ghosts to rise. He needed to see the harvest with his own eyes.

  Amina’s reaction was instantaneous and explosive. The strategist, the princess, the coolly analytical partner—all of it vanished, replaced by a woman staring at a man she cared for who was calmly announcing his intention to commit suicide.

  “Absolutely not,” she hissed, her voice a low, furious tremor. “Lloyd, that is not a strategic decision; it is an act of insanity. You just confirmed that the dead are rising as monsters, and your solution is to go and have a sleepover with them? You are the single most valuable asset in this entire operation. Your life is not yours to gamble with on a whim.”

  Her logic was flawless. Her reasoning was unassailable. And it was all completely, utterly irrelevant.

  “This is not a whim, Amina,” Lloyd replied, his voice calm, patient, the voice of a professor explaining a complex but fundamental theorem to a brilliant but struggling student. “It is a calculated risk, and it is a necessary one. We are fighting an enemy whose tactics we do not understand. Last night, we were lucky. We faced a single, newborn scout. What happens when we face ten? Or fifty? What happens when an entire village of two hundred corpses reanimates at once?”

  He let the horrifying image hang in the air between them. “I need to know how they are made. I need to witness the transformation process firsthand. Is it a gradual reanimation? Is it a sudden, explosive metamorphosis? What is the trigger? Is it proximity to the living? Is it a specific time of night? Is it tied to the lunar cycle? Is it a command from a remote master?”

  He ticked off the questions, each one a critical, unanswered variable in a life-or-death equation. “Every one of those questions is a tactical vulnerability we can exploit, or a fatal trap we will blunder into. To send a cleansing team in there now, armed with nothing but torches and ignorance, would not be a mission; it would be a massacre. I will not send men to their deaths because I was too cautious to gather the necessary intelligence myself.”

  His argument was a wall of cold, brutal, and undeniable military logic. He was not being reckless; he was being responsible. He was the only one with the power and the perception to survive such a mission, to be the observer in the heart of the storm.

  Amina stared at him, her face a battlefield of conflicting emotions. Her mind, the part of her that was a ruler and a strategist, knew he was right. The risk was immense, but the potential intelligence gain was incalculable. But the other part of her, the part that had watched him bleed in a jungle and had come to see him as a partner, a friend, was screaming in silent, terrified protest.

  “There has to be another way,” she whispered, the words a last, desperate plea.

  “There isn’t,” Lloyd said, his voice gentle but absolute. The debate was over.

  Chapter : 1076

  He spent the morning making his preparations, not for a battle, but for a long, cold, and dangerous vigil. He checked his equipment, packed rations, and briefed the ducal guard captain on the new protocols, giving him strict orders to maintain the perimeter and to trust Princess Amina’s command in his absence.

  As he was about to depart, he saw a small group of village watchmen, survivors who had been outside Oakhaven when the plague hit, huddled near the edge of the camp. They were speaking in hushed, terrified tones to one of the ducal soldiers. Lloyd, his senses preternaturally sharp, caught fragments of their conversation. He walked over, his presence immediately silencing them.

  He addressed the oldest of the group, a grizzled man with the haunted eyes of a survivor. “You have news from the village?”

  The man, terrified of the imposing ducal lord, flinched but found his voice. He recounted a chilling story. His cousin, who lived on a farm just outside the village proper, had sent a runner. The cousin had been watching the village from a distance with a spyglass. Last night, in the twilight, he had seen something impossible. He had seen one of the recently deceased, a man named Fendrel who had died two days ago, walking through the empty streets. The body was… different. Jerky. Unnatural. A vengeful ghost, the watchman stammered, had possessed the corpse, seeking retribution on the living for its unholy death. He claimed it was this ghost that had attacked the camp.

  Lloyd listened to the superstitious tale with a patient, professional calm. A ghost. A vengeful spirit. It was the only way their pre-modern minds could process the horrifying reality of a reanimated corpse. He publicly dismissed the “ghost” theory as a product of fear and shadow, a classic piece of battlefield folklore. He reassured the men that the ducal forces had the situation under control and that there were no such things as ghosts.

  But internally, his mind filed the information away with cold, analytical precision. The report, stripped of its superstitious hysteria, contained a critical piece of intelligence. The reanimation was not immediate. There was a latency period of at least two days between death and… rebirth. Another crucial variable slotted into place.

  He made his final decision. The risk was now an absolute necessity. He had to confirm the timeline. He had to see it for himself.

  He gave Amina a final, reassuring nod, a silent promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. “I will be back by dawn,” he said.

  Then, for the second time, he turned his back on the world of the living and walked alone into the silent, waiting graveyard that had once been the village of Oakhaven. He was no longer a doctor or a general. He was a hunter, and he was setting himself as bait, waiting for the ghosts to rise from their graves. The vigil had begun.

  Lloyd moved through the empty, silent streets of Oakhaven like a ghost himself. The sun was high, but its light seemed thin and weak here, unable to penetrate the oppressive atmosphere of grief and decay that hung over the village like a shroud. The only sound was the wind, a low, mournful sigh that whispered through the empty cottages and rustled the red cloths of the plague-marked doors. It sounded like the world itself was weeping.

  He was a lone hunter in a graveyard, and his first objective was reconnaissance. He needed to find the perfect observation post, a location that offered a clear, defensible view of the village square, where he knew the dead would be brought, while keeping him hidden from both terrestrial and potentially aerial observation.

  His [All-Seeing Eye] became his surveyor’s tool. He scanned the architecture of the village, analyzing structural integrity, lines of sight, and potential points of entry and egress. He dismissed the bell tower of the small wooden chapel—too exposed. He considered the upper floor of the village longhouse, but its large windows offered insufficient cover. Finally, his gaze settled on a two-story building at the corner of the square: the lumber mill’s administrative office. It was a sturdy, stone-and-timber structure with a slate roof and small, shuttered windows on the second floor that provided perfect, discreet firing positions. It was a sniper’s nest. It was perfect.